The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe

   1987; 690 pages.  New Author? : No, but it’s been decades since I read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.  Genres: Contemporary American Fiction; Lawyers and Criminals; Racism.  Overall Rating: 8½*/10.

 

    By any objective assessment, Sherman McCoy has made it bigtime.

 

    He lives in a posh $3-million apartment on Park Avenue in New York City, and by “apartment” we mean a multi-room affair with 12-foot-high ceilings and a separate wing for the servants.

 

    He’s got a 6-year-old daughter who adores him, and a 40-year-old wife, Judy, who fancies herself an interior decorator and is still fairly good-looking for her age, in Sherman's opinion.  He’s the top-performing bond trader for the prestigious firm of Pierce-&-Pierce, drives a big, black, fancy Mercedes-Benz, and thinks of himself as the “Master of the Universe”.

 

    Oh, and he has one more status symbol that many upper crust males of society acquire sooner or later: a mistress.  Maria Ruskin sports a Southern accent, and is sleek, sexy, and dark.  And married.

 

    Sherman’s got it made.  At least, as long as Judy doesn’t find out about Maria.

 

What’s To Like...

    There are three major protagonists in The Bonfire of the Vanities, all of them white, and all of them flawed.  Besides Sherman McCoy and his severe case of white privilege, we follow Larry Kramer, a lowly Assistant District Attorney, Jewish, and scared that he will never amount to anything in his law career.  Rounding out the trio is Peter Fallow, a journalist and alcoholic who works for a NYC-based tabloid newspaper called The City Light.

 

    Tom Wolfe uses these three men to present a view of New York City in the 1980s, when it's suffering from a de facto case of segregation: the minority white “haves”, and the numerically superior “have nots” consisting mostly of blacks and Puerto Ricans. This disparity manifests itself in various ways, and here the author uses racism, anti-Semitism, the almighty dollar, social status, and hatred towards gays to cast a spotlight on the division.

 

    The book’s title refers to a historical event that took place in 1497 Italy, where religious zealots burned objects that they felt contributed to the sin of vanity such as cosmetics, art, and books.  There’s no direct tie-in of that event to the book’s storyline, although I suspect it refers to Sherman being stripped of his  white privilege “vanities”, as he tries in vain to avoid the consequences of an unfortunate event that suddenly threatens his well-to-do lifestyle.

 

    I was impressed that none of the characters here—black or white, Jew or Italian, rich or poor—are entirely good or evil.  Sherman initially wants to do the right thing, but gets talked out if it.  Reverend Bacon commendably wants seeks equal justice for all races, but is not above manipulating events to further that cause.  Bronx District Attorney Abe Weiss might desire to give Sherman preferential treatment, but there’s an election coming up and he needs all the black votes he can get.

 

    The ending is exciting, surprising, and logical.  The epilogue raises more questions than it answers, but that’s not a criticism.  I think Tom Wolfe intended it as a “the fight goes on” message.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Logorrhea (n.) : excessive and often incoherent talkativeness or wordiness.

Others: Empyrean (n.); Orotund (adj.), Paradiddle (n.); Malapert (adj.).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.4*/5, based on 4,288 ratings and 531 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.89*/5, based on 77,877 ratings and 3,335 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “Hey, Sherm! Howya doin’?”

    That was what Sherman really detested.  It was bad enough that this man insisted on calling him by his first name.  But to shorten it to Sherm, which no one had ever called him—that was escalating presumptuousness into obnoxiousness.  Sherman could think of nothing he had ever said, no gesture he had ever made, that had given him the invitation or even the opening to become familiar.  Gratuitous familiarity was not the sort of thing you were supposed to mind these days, but Sherman minded it.  It was a form of aggression.  You think that I am your inferior, you Wall Street Wasp with the Yale chin, but I will show you.  (pg. 100)

 

    “Welcome to the legion of the damned . . . now that you’ve been properly devoured by the fruit flies.”

    “The fruit flies?”

    “The press.  I’m amused by all the soul-searching . . . insects do.  ‘Are we too aggressive, too cold-blooded, too heartless?’—as if the press were a rapacious beast, a tiger.  I think they’d like to be thought of as bloodthirsty.  That’s what I call praise by faint damnation.  They’ve got the wrong animal.  In fact, they’re fruit flies.  Once they get the scent, they hover, they swarm.  If you swing your hand at them, they don’t bite it, they dart for cover, and as soon as your head is turned, they’re back again.”  (pg. 578)

 

There was no turning back! Once you had lived in a $2.6 million apartment on Park Avenue—it was impossible to live in a $1 million apartment!  (pg. 143)

    The Bonfire of the Vanities was an instant major bestseller when it came out, but I found a couple of nits to pick.

 

    There’s a lot of cussing, with a definite bias for the f-bomb.  There were 41 instances in the first 50 pages, which extrapolates out to 565 over the entire book.  In fairness, however, Harlem was a gritty neighborhood in the 1980s, and probably still is.  So we can tolerate the swearing for the sake of realism.

 

    The pacing is slow.  The key incident that leads to all of Sherman’s woes doesn’t happen until page 90, so the reader is forced to endure quite a bit of scene-setting at the start.  Several reviewers have pointed out the wordiness of the book, and that it could’ve been shortened substantially.  Sadly, I have to agree.

 

    But I quibble.  The book’s message of white privilege and lip service to civil rights is just as important today as it was 30+ years ago when The Bonfire of the Vanities came out.  The story may be long-winded, but so is the saga of the struggle for equal rights.  Tom Wolfe’s writing skills were sufficient to keep me interested in how it all was going to turn out for Sherman and I’m sure those present-day book-burners (via the banning of select books in schools and public libraries) will seek to have this opus removed from the shelves.

 

    8½ Stars.  The Bonfire of the Vanities was made into a 1990 movie of the same title, starring, among others, Tom Hanks, Morgan Freeman, and Bruce Willis.  The film was a commercial flop, Wikipedia notes it cost $47 million to make, and grossed just over $15 million.  Curiously, I’m presently reading another book that was later made into a film also featuring Bruce Willis, and which garnered him a Golden Raspberry Award for “Worst Actor”.  Stay tuned.

Skinny Legs And All - Tom Robbins

   1990; 422 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Satire; Contemporary Fiction; Humorous American Literature.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    Everybody’s either on the move or about to be.

    The newlyweds Boomer Petway and Ellen Cherry Charles, are traveling from Seattle to New York City, because the art scene is better in NYC, and Ellen is an aspiring painter.  The Airstream motor home they’re driving is a turkey.  Really.  Well, a mechanical one, welded together by Boomer, but nevertheless looking like something from a giant’s Thanksgiving dinner table.

    The mystically enchanted duo of Painted Stick and Conch Shell have lain dormant for centuries, but they’re about to be revived by the utterance of the magic word.  No, not abracadabra, but “Jezebel!” They’re stuck in a cave in the Pacific Northwest right now, but their ultimate goal will be Phoenicia, in what is present-day Lebanon.  Good luck, you two.  Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

    Can o’ Beans, Spoon, and Dirty Sock are about to be awakened alongside Painted Stick and Conch Shell, and will use their newfound mobility to tag along with their benefactors.  The lack of innate enchantment may prove to be a handicap.

    Spike Cohen and Roland Abu Hadee (aka “Isaac and Ishmael”) are about to open a restaurant across the street from the United Nations. They intend to prove that a business partnership between a Jew and an Arab can not only survive, but even flourish.  Good luck, guys.  You’re gonna need it.

    The televangelist, Reverend Buddy Winkler, is tired of God fiddle-farting around when it comes to Armageddon and building the Third Temple in Jerusalem.  He intends to help the Almighty by kick-starting the End of Days.

    Their paths will all converge near St. Paul’s Cathedral, but it should be noted: none of them has “skinny legs and all”.

What’s To Like...

    Tom Robbins uses Skinny Legs and All to present his theory that our views of the world are shrouded by illusions stemming from various sources.  He focuses on seven areas – Race, Politics (the desire to have power over others), Marriage, Art (its inherent pretentiousness), Religion (dogma and tradition overwhelm brotherhood), Money (the false security of it), and Lust.  Since these are blinding our eyes to what is real, the author likens them to Salome’s “Dance of the Seven Veils”.  Straightforward expounding on this would probably be tedious to most readers, so Robbins wraps them up in a tale where our protagonist, Ellen Cherry, gradually starts seeing through these veils.

    As with any Tom Robbins novel, the writing is sublimely superb.  Every sentence, no matter how unimportant, seems to be a work of literary art.  There are similes aplenty, and Robbins has always been a wizard at using them.  One random example: “Looking at you in your kimono, it felt like some backyard chef was sprinkling meat tenderizer on my heart.”  Wowza.  The storyline is divided into seven sections, each addressing one of the seven veils.  The character development is also fantastic; any writer can build a personality for some person in his novel, but try doing that for a can of baked beans.

    Religion gets a extended analysis here, especially the three  major Western ones – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.  The Old Testament is common to all three, and Tom Robbins gives a new take on their collective origins, suggesting that it “borrows” much from (earlier) pagan religions featuring Astarte/Ishtar and other deities.  The Crusades is seen from the Moslem point-of-view, and modern-day televangelism is viewed in all its hypocritical zeal.

    I very much enjoyed the "animate inanimate" objects.  In addition to the five already mentioned, you’ll also be privy to the thoughts from a glob of goo, a drawer of panties, and a vibrator that spouts off inane-sounding Zen aphorisms.

    Skinny Legs And All is awash in fascinating trivia references.  I had to look up David Hockney and Pouilly-Fumé.  Donald Trump gets cited twice, which is a bit eerie since the book was written in 1990.  Bonnie Raitt makes a cameo appearance, so do Monet’s water lilies.  And the recorded voice of the operator cutting in on Ellen Cherry’s pay phone conversation, to request that she deposit more coins to continue talking, brought back nostalgic memories for me.

    The ending is a mixed affair.  On one hand, the Boomer/Ellen relationship thread is resolved, at least for the moment.  OTOH, the fate of a lot of the other characters seemed to be left in limbo.  A street performer named Turn Around Norman just fades into oblivion, after having played a prominent role in the tale.  And the god/gods/goddesses “Pale” (Wiki he/she/them) must surely still have plans for Conch Shell and Painted Stick.  Yet I don't believe Tom Robbins ever penned a sequel to this.

Kewlest New Word ...

Odalisque (n.) : a female slave or concubine in a harem.

Others: Pouf (n., slang)

Excerpts...

    What was a can of beans but a pawn in the game of consumption?  From field to factory, from market to household, from cook pot to lunch plate, the destiny of a can of beans was as sealed as it was simple.  Ultimate destination: rust heap and sewage pond.  Yet, he/she had managed to escape the norm, to taste a freedom unimagined by others of his/her “lowly” station.  Moreover, were the lives of most humans any better?  When humans were young, they were pushed around in strollers.  When they were old, they were pushed around in wheelchairs.  In between, they were just pushed around.  (pg. 110

    Spike Cohen alone seemed to remember how dangerous the I-&-I could be.  From his post behind the cash register, he kept one eye on the street, as if the street were a crocodile-skin shoe that might at any moment revert to its original state of being.  When, around the corner of First Avenue, a truck backfired, thin electrical noises came out of his windpipe.

    Spike’s jitters were for naught.  Except for the fact that they ran out of chick-peas, the evening produced scant catastrophe.  The next evening was positively humdrum.  And the one after that was as bereft of disorder as a Heidelburg symposium on anal retention.  In truth, the entire winter passed as peacefully and leisurely as a python digesting a Valium addict.  (pg. 261)

Back around Seattle (…) trees were so thick, so robust and tall, that they oozed green gas, sported mossy mustaches, and yelled “Timber, yourself!” at lumberjacks.  (pg. 11)

     There's a lot of cussing, a couple of rolls in the hay, and a slew of sexual references, but this is true of any Tom Robbins novel.   For me, the storyline started rather slowly, but things picked once the inanimate objects started speaking.  Still, there were times when the plot progression seemed to slow to a crawl.

    I think one’s enjoyment of Skinny Legs And All depends on whether you want the story to be plotline-driven or thought-provoking.  If you want the former, you may be disappointed; if you want the latter, you’ll be blown away.  I wanted both, naturally, and Tom Robbins’ writing mastery trumps any quibbles I may have had about the storytelling.

    8 Stars.  Skinny Legs And All was almost as good as my favorite Tom Robbins book, Still Life With Woodpecker (reviewed here).  It gave me a lot to think about concerning the illusions of our world, and …HEY!!  Did that can of beans sitting on the kitchen counter just say something?!

Slabs of the Sunburnt West - Carl Sandburg

   1922; 75 pages.  New Author? : Yes.    Genre : American Poetry; ; 20^th Century Poetry; Highbrow Literature.  Overall Rating : 6*/10.

    2019 is drawing to a close, and it’s time to read my once-a-year poetry book.  This year, I've decided to go with something from a 20^th-century American poet.  Somebody serious, highbrow, and whom I’ve never read/reviewed before.

    That eliminates Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, which I read decades ago.  And Dr. Seuss.  Neither of those qualify as “serious.  Ditto for Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski, the latter known as “The Poet of the Proletariat”.  They’re both fantastic, but calling them “highbrow” is a bit of a stretch.  and I’ve used them for my poetry goals in previous years.

    Off the top of my head, I can only think of two poets for this undertaking – Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg.  We were forced to read some of Robert Frost’s stuff in high school – “two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both…” - and all that.  Sheesh, that stuff stays etched in my brain.

    That leaves Mr. Sandburg, and I can’t quote any of his poetry by heart.  So let’s find something short and sweet, and see if I can broaden my poetic horizons.  Like his 75-page-long book, Slabs of the Sunburnt West.

What’s To Like...

    Slabs of the Sunburnt West consists of 32 poems covering a scant 75 pages, and published in 1922, a couple of years after Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) won his first (of three) Pulitzer Prizes for his book of poems “Cornhuskers”.  Sandburg is noted for his stark portrayals of America in his day, particularly the Midwest which was his stomping ground for most of his life.

    I didn’t see any overarching theme in Slabs of the Sunburnt West.  The poems vary in both length and tone, and literary devices such as rhyming and meter are not used.  The longest entry was 15 pages,  quite a few of them were a half-page in length.  The book can be an incredibly fast read, so if you have a book report due tomorrow and you haven’t even started to read one, you can impress your English teacher by choosing this one.

    My favorite poems in the bunch, in order of appearance, are:

And So Today (pg. 20)

Moon Riders (pg. 34)

At The Gates of Tombs (pg. 37)

Gypsy Mother (pg. 41)

Improved Farm Land (pg. 63)

Slabs of the Sunburnt West (pg. 67)

    “And So Today” chronicles Carl Sandburg’s thoughts on the dedication of the (first) Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and I found it particularly powerful.  “Improved Farm Land” laments the deforestation of the Midwest to make room for acres upon acres of cornfields.  And I learned to origin of the city name “Chicago” by reading the first poem, "The Windy City".

    In general, I preferred the longer poems, and the few that had a whimsical air to them.  The poem that resonated the most with me was the titular “Slabs of the Sunburnt West”, reading as if Sandburg was observing the far west for the first time, from the window of a train.  It would’ve been a lot more brown and less green than his native Illinois, similar to how I felt when my family moved from Pennsylvania to Arizona when I finished high school.

 Kewlest New Word ...

Teameoes (n., plural) : Who knows?  Googling didn’t give any definition for this word.  Methinks Mr. Sandburg made it up.

Excerpts...

And so today – they lay him away

The boy nobody knows the name of-

The buck private – the unknown soldier –

The doughboy who dug under and died

When they told him to – that’s him.

If he picked himself and said, “I am ready to die,”

If he gave his name and said, “My country, take me,”

Then the baskets of roses to-day are for the Boy,

The flowers, the songs, the steamboat whistles,

The proclamations of the honorable orators,

They are all for the Boy – that’s him.

(pg. 21, from “And So Today”)

Brancusi, you will not put a want ad in the papers telling

God it will be to his advantage to come around and see

You; you will not grow gabby and spill God earfuls of

Prayer; you will not get fresh and familiar as if God

Is a next-door neighbor and you have counted His shirts

On a clothes line; you will go stammering, stuttering, and

Mumbling or you will be silent as a mouse in a church

Garret when the pipe organ is pouring ocean waves on

The sunlit rocks of ocean shores; if God is saving a corner

For any battling bag of bones, there will be one for you,

There will be one for you, Brancusi.

(pg. 53; from “Brancusi”)

Civilizations are set up and knocked down

The same as pins in a bowling alley.
(pg. 37, from “At The Gates of Tombs”)

    Poetry is not my favorite reading genre and when I do tackle it, I greatly prefer for the lines to rhyme and have meter.  Therefore Slabs of the Sunburnt West was a bit of a slog for me.  A couple of the entries, such as “Hell on the Wabash” (pg. 64) didn’t even seem like they qualified to be called poetic.  I employed my usual strategy for books of poems: reading only a couple of them at any given sitting.

    Overall, for me there were a half-dozen fantastic poems interspersed among a lot of ones that didn’t do much for me.  Still, if I have to read high-falutin’ poetry by an upstanding 20^th-century American poet, I’d choose Sandburg over Frost any day.

    6 Stars.  Carl Sandburg lived till the ripe old age of 89, garnering three Pulitzers (two for Poetry, one for History), before passing away in 1967, when I was 17.  If you look up this book at Amazon, you’ll find zero reviews for it.  At Goodreads, it has 14 ratings and one review.  It seems as if America has pretty much forgotten one of its foremost writers.  And I find that kind of sad.

The Congo, and Other Poems - Vachel Lindsay

   1914 (original) & 2008 (this compilation); 102 pages.  New Author? : Yes.    Genre : American Literature; Poetry.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

    “Hey, let’s sing a poem together!”

    “Say what?  You read poems; you don’t sing poems.”

    “Sure you do.  The ancient Greeks did it all the time.  But if you don’t feel like singing one, we could chant it together instead.”

    “That’s just as crazy.  Besides, I don’t speak a word of ancient Greek.”

    “No problem.  There’s this American poet who has written poems to be sung or chanted, not read to oneself.  He even writes directions on exactly how loud you’re supposed to do it, and what tone of voice you should use.”

    “Hmm.  Sounds like some sort of 1960’s beatnik.  Or maybe a rap artist.”

    “Nope.  He wrote these poems more than a hundred years ago, in and around 1914.  Back before anybody else was doing this sort of thing.  Except for the ancient Greeks, of course.”

    “Really?!  Well, okay then.  I’m out of excuses.  Let’s give it a try.  What’s this guy’s name, anyway?”

    “Vachel Lindsay.”

What’s To Like...

    The Congo, and Other Poems is a set of 66 of Vachel Lindsay’s poems, although it's not his complete works.  Wikipedia calls Lindsay the “founder of modern singing poetry” but he also wrote a lot of poems in the standard, metered format.

    The book is divided into five sections, namely:

Section 1 : “Poems intended to be read aloud, or chanted.” (14%; 10 poems)

    The “singing/chanting” section.  The poems he’s most famous for.

Section 2 : “Incense” (43%; 17 poems)

    Lindsay reflecting on various themes, including love and all kinds of religions.

Section 3 : “A Miscellany called the Christmas Tree” (59%; 12 poems)

    Light-hearted poems; often short, and with children as the target audience.

Section 4 : “20 Poems in which the Moon is the principle figure of speech” (70%; 20 poems)

    Lindsay apparently had a thing about the moon.

Section 5 : "War – September 1, 1914, Intended to be read aloud” (81%; 7 poems)

    Dark in tone, somber, brooding.  Written about the horrors of The Great War.

    I can’t really say I have a favorite section.  I liked the broad spectrum of moods he could conjure up: – whimsical when writing humorous verse, serious when musing about Death or Heaven, outraged when contemplating war or child prostitution; star-struck when idolizing some of his matinee idols.  Vachel Lindsay is  most famous for his singing/chanting works, but he also wrote poems in the usual meter, and a few with no meter at all.  I was especially impressed by his use of ABAB and ABBA rhyme schemes; most poets use the lazier ABCB format.

    His most famous poem by far is The Congo, which Wikipedia describes as exemplifying “his revolutionary aesthetic of sound for sound's sake. It imitates the pounding of the drums in the rhythms and in onomatopoeic nonsense words. At parts, the poem ceases to use conventional words when representing the chants of Congo's indigenous people, relying just on sound alone.”  It is also his most controversial poem, with him being frequently accused of being racist, or at least patronizing, even by 1914 standards.  Personally, I don’t think he was racist, just blithely naïve.

    A lot of his poems have catchy titles, such as: The Black Hawk War of the Artists; A Rhyme About an Electric Advertising Sign; The Alchemist’s Petition; Popcorn, Glass Balls, and Cranberries; An Apology for the Bottle Volcanic; When Gassy Thompson Struck It Rich; and Abraham Lincoln Walks At Midnight.  I chortled at his mention of hashish.  In this book, along with the recently-read Babbitt, it is evident that the American drug problem was around long before the 60's.

    I read a couple of these poems each night, which is my usual strategy when reading a book of poetry.  But if you have a book report due tomorrow, this is a good choice; you can finish it easily in a single sitting (1-2 hours).  I have to admit, I enjoyed making myself “mentally” chant the poems in the first section according to their instructions.  I did not attempt to sing any of them.

    I had never heard of Vachel Lindsay before reading The Congo, and Other Poems.  My impression now is that he was a 1920’s “Poet of the Proletariat”, the mantle for which would later pass to Charles Bukowski.  No one will ever mistake Vachel Lindsay’s verses with that of Shakespeare, but I found this book to be an enjoyable and thoughtful read, and beamed at the slight broadening of my narrow poetry tastes.

Kewlest New Word ...

Hecatombs (n., plural) : (In ancient Greece or Rome) great public sacrifices, originally consisting of one hundred oxen.

Others : Pennons (n., plural).

Excerpts...

    Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,

    Pounded on the table,

    Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,

    Hard as they were able,

    Boom, boom, BOOM,

    With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,

    Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.

    THEN I had religion, THEN I had a vision.

     I could not turn from their revel in derision.  (loc. 162, from “The Congo”)

    This is the sin against the Holy Ghost:

    To speak of bloody power as right divine,

    And call on God to guard each vile chief’s house,

    And for such chiefs, turn men to wolves and swine.

    (…)

    In any Church’s name, to sack fair towns,

    And turn each home into a screaming sty,

    To make little children fugitive,

    And have their mothers for a quick death cry.

    (loc. 974; from “The Unpardonable Sin”)

Kindle Details...

    The Congo, and Other Poems sells for $0.99 at Amazon.  There are several other collections of Vachel Lindsay’s poems, most of which include The Congo.  They range from free to $3.39.  I went with the 99-cents version because it seemed like the freebie might just be scanned images of the paperback, in which case, Kindle-highlighting might not have been available.  A dollar for a book isn’t going to break me.

We find your soft Utopias as white

As new-cut bread, and dull as life in cells.  (loc. 500, from “An Argument”)

    A few words about Vachel Lindsay…

    He was born November 10, 1879; and died December 05, 1931.  “The Congo” was written in 1914,  and his most productive period seems to have been the World War One years.

    He was an energetic poet, at one point traveling by foot through several western states for inspiration.  His aim was to restore “poetry as a song art, appealing to the ear rather than the eye.”

    Alas, he was also a  “starving artist” poet.  In 1931, plagued by financial worries and failing health, he committed suicide by drinking a bottle of Lysol.  Ouch.

    7 Stars.  YouTube has a decent number of videos showing people singing Vachel Lindsay’s works.  I’m not sure if they wrote their own music or if Lindsay composed it.  One thing that made me laugh was the various ways that the video-narrators guessed as to how to pronounce “Vachel”.  According to this book, it rhymes with “Rachel”.

Babbitt - Sinclair Lewis

   1922; 370 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Laurels : None listed, but Wikipedia notes that the controversy that Babbitt sparked was influential in the decision to award the 1930 Nobel Prize in Literature to Sinclair Lewis.  Genre : Satire; Highbrow Lit; Americana.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

    Any way you look at it, George F. Babbitt is living the good life.  He’s got a loving wife and three darling kids: two daughters, Verona and Tinka; and a son, the eldest, Ted, in high school, and who George plans to send to Law School when he graduates, something that wasn’t an option for him when he was growing up.

    George does all the correct things he’s supposed to do as a fine, upstanding citizen of the Midwest city of Zenith.  He’s a diehard Republican and very much anti-union.  He’s a dues-paying member of the Elks, the Boosters Club, the Zenith Athletic Club, and the Chamber of Commerce.  He attends the Chatham Road Presbyterian Church, pastored by the Reverend Dr. John Jennison Drew, who enlightens George as to what he should think about things like disarmament, tariffs, and Germany.

    He plays golf, albeit not very well.  He hobnobs only with other fine, upstanding men, and scratches their backs, if you know what I’m saying, in exchange for them scratching his.  His best friend is Paul Riesling, an old college chum, whom George admires very much.

    If George F. Babbitt isn’t the richest or most influential man in Zenith, it’s not from a lack of effort.  He’s comfortably middle-class, and he’s sure all the rich, upstanding men in Zenith hold him in high regard.

    But every once in a while lately, a vague feeling of discontent tries to nudge its way into George’s thoughts.  He dreams about getting away from it all by going camping with his friend Paul up in the rustic woods of Maine.  Just to escape for a bit from the stress and hubbub of making money and raising a family in Zenith.

    Thank goodness such rebellious thoughts never stay long.  Failure to strictly abide by the set-in-stone middle-class standards could impact his fine, upstanding status in the community.

What’s To Like...

    Babbitt was published in 1922.  The Great War was over, so was the post-war recession, and optimism ran rampant in the United States, particularly if you were a white middle-class businessman.   The story is set in the fictional city of Zenith, somewhere in the Midwest.

    I was impressed with Sinclair Lewis’s depiction of life in the early 1920’s.  Prohibition was in full-swing, but home-brewed beer and alcohol was easy to come by if you had connections.  Air-conditioning was non-existent, so a lot of houses had a “sleeping porch” (I slept in one once!) to cope with the summer heat.  There are milk trucks, paper-carriers, and a furnace man.  The trolley was the main way to get around the city, and you took the train to go to another city or state.  Cars were certainly common, but you had to “crank the Ford” to get it started.

    Paradoxically, I was amazed at how much society back then resembles today’s social/political climate.  George is vexed because his kids don’t seem to listen to him.  The churches feel it’s their place to influence elections, and evangelists are mostly interested in making money.  Cocaine-use is a problem and business executives perpetrate shady deals.  Anti-immigrant sentiment runs high and “fake news” is cited when one doesn’t like what’s written in the newspapers (see the second excerpt below).  Science is viewed as being in opposition to religion, and leftist “long-hairs” are leading kids astray.  Despite Prohibition, morals are loosening, probably due to fads such as Feminism and New Ageism leading people astray.

    The main theme of Babbitt concerns the consequences of “going against the flow”, in terms of marital fidelity, politics, and religion.  The Status Quo may be corrupt, but it’s also extremely powerful.  The “rebels” of Society might offer tempting alternatives, but in the end, they’re just as shallow and phony as The Establishment.  You step out of line at your own risk.

    There were a fair number of typos in the book, which is not uncommon for a “Public Domain” edition.  Most of them were word splits: motor-cycle, basket-ball, high lights, week-end, to-night, etc.  and they might be just scanning inaccuracies.  It’s also possible that English grammar was slightly different a century ago.  Languages evolve.

    I liked the “lingo” that Sinclair Lewis uses - slangy idioms like “snoway talkcher father”, “pleasmeech”, “Jever”, and “frinstance”.  It sets the down-home tone of the novel quite effectively.  I enjoyed the séance, and chuckled at the mention of Theosophy and Pentecostals.  I learned a new Latin phrase, “hinc illae lacrimae”, which roughly means “that is what those tears were for”, and I felt that comparing the Babbitts/McKelveys dinner date with that of the Babbitts/Overbrooks encapsulates the whole message of the book.

    There is a small amount of cussing, mostly in the dialogue, and about what you’d expect from fine, upstanding middle-aged men.  There’s one roll in the hay, and it’s done off-screen.  The pacing is somewhat slow, but that’s the norm for a typical highbrow book, and it’s balanced by Sinclair Lewis's excellent writing.  The ending is both hopeful and cynical.  Giving more details about that would entail spoilers.

Kewlest New Word ...

Zob (n., slang) : a good-for-nothing; a fool.  (a Yankeeism).

Others: En brosse (adj.; phrase); Picaresque (adj.); Supercilious (adj.); Credulous (adj.).

Kindle Details...

    The “public domain” version of Babbitt is always free at Amazon.  There are various other e-book editions available, each of them has assorted extras.  The most expensive of these was $5.38.  I went with the freebie.   

Excerpts...

    He stood before the covered saucer of raspberry jelly, and grumbling over a clammy cold boiled potato.  He was thinking.  It was coming to him that perhaps all life as he knew it and vigorously practiced it was futile; that heaven as portrayed by the Reverend Dr. John Jennison Drew was neither probable nor very interesting; that he hadn’t much pleasure out of making money; that it was of doubtful worth to rear children merely that they might rear children who would rear children.  What was it all about?  What did he want?  (loc. 3489)

    He belonged to the sound, sane, right-thinking wing, and at first he agreed that the Crooked Agitators ought to be shot.  He was sorry when his friend, Seneca Doane, defended arrested strikers, and he thought of going to Doane and explaining about these agitators, but when he read a broadside alleging that even on their former wages the telephone girls had been hungry, he was troubled.  “All lies and fake figures,” he said, but in a doubtful croak.  (loc. 3958)

 “Say! I know what was the trouble!  Somebody went and put alcohol in my booze last night.”  (loc. 2281)

    I don’t have anything significant to quibble about.  There were a poopload of characters to meet and keep track of.  The book is heavy on character studies and light on action and adventure.  But those are things I expect from a highbrow novel, and let’s face it, it is unlikely that a middle-class, middle-aged white suburbanite would have many thrills and spills in his life.

    What impresses me is the immediate and significant impact that Babbitt had on the American public.  It is unsurprising that his caustic and poignant depiction of the average businessman of the time sparked heated debate between his fans and detractors, which of course resulted in it becoming an instantly bestseller.

    Indeed, because of it, “Babbitt” is now an official word in our language (Really.  It’s in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.  Google it), meaning “a materialistic and complacent businessman conforming to the standards of his social set”.   Ditto for the milquetoast practice thereof, which are called “Babbittry”.

    8½ Stars.  One last tidbit about Babbitt.  J.R.R. Tolkien was so influenced by the book that he called his newly-imagined Halfling creatures “hobbits” as a tribute to it.  The Bilbo Baggins character we meet at the beginning of The Hobbit, before he gets corrupted by going on an adventure with the dwarves, is a perfect and deliberate example of a Babbitt.

    So says Wikipedia in its post on the novel.  Curiously, this is totally absent from their post on the word "Hobbit".

Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon

    1973; 776 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Highbrow Lit; Satire; Contemporary Fiction; American Literature.  Laurels : Co-Winner, 1974 U.S. National Book Award (Fiction); Nominee, 1973 Nebula Award (Best Novel); one of Time Magazine’s “All-Time 100 Greatest Novels for the period 1923-2005; #5 on Buzzfeed’s 25 Most Challenging Books You Will Ever Read”.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    It’s a most extraordinary gift that the young American intelligence officer, Tyrone Slothrop has.  He’s stationed in London, during the closing weeks of World War 2, when the Germans are trying one last, desperate tactic – blitzing London with as many V-2 rockets as they can launch.

    Women find Slothrop disarmingly attractive, and he has no trouble finding plenty willing to go to bed with him.  Anytime, anyplace; it doesn’t matter.  He’s even tacked a map of London above his desk, and pasted colored stars on it, showing where his “conquests” have taken place.  Does the man ever sleep?

    But his British intelligence agents have detected a pattern in those stars.  Whenever Slothrop adds a another one (along with the girl’s name) to the map, within a day or two, a V-2 rocket hits that very spot.  Curiously, Slothrop seems unaware of his “gift”.  So the prudent thing to do is send out a team of shrinks to tail him, to find out exactly how his "talent" works.

    But be very careful, shrinks.  After all, Slothrop is an intelligence officer, and if he catches you following him, it may trigger an outbreak of paranoia.

    Of course, you aren't paranoid if they really are out to get you, are you?

What’s To Like...

    Gravity’s Rainbow is divvied up into 4 unequal parts and covers the time period from December 1944 through September 1945.  The settings are late- and post-war Europe.  There are no chapters, but Thomas Pynchon inserts “breaks” (in my edition, a row of squares) to indicate breaks in scene or time.  These vary in length from 1 to about 25 pages, and provide timely places to stop to give your brain a rest.

    You’ll need these because there are 400+ characters introduced by name (per Wikipedia), a slew of run-on sentences, uncountable plot tangents, and flashbacks galore (plus one flash-forward) with no warning whatsoever.  FWIW, I found it very helpful to read the Wikipedia article on it first, to know which characters are important, and to distinguish between the main plotline(s) and the tangents.

    This may sound like I’m bashing the book, but Pynchon’s writing style, like Kurt Vonnegut’s, is superb enough where he can break all the literary rules and get away with it.  Gravity’s Rainbow is a vocabularian’s delight (I’ll let you look up “smegma” for yourself; it appears multiple times), and I am in total awe of the magic worked by the punctuation used to make those run-on sentences coherent.

    This is not a book for the kiddies; R-rated topics and passages abound.  Wikipedia claims Gravity's Rainbow lost the 1974 Pulitzer Prize because of a couple pages dealing with coprophilia.  There’s lots of sex and drugs, and rockets roll; and metaphysics (séances, tarot cards, etc.) gets a fair amount of ink too.  It helps if you have some command of the German language.  Pynchon inserts lots of songs which, while I didn’t find them impressive, did provide refreshing breaks in the narrative.

    The tangents can be distracting: I still don’t see any relevance about killing dodo birds, a trip down a toilet, lightbulb babies, and some choreography by lab rats.  But they are also well thought-out and interesting, and I enjoyed things like the Rossini-Beethoven debate (pgs. 447-8), and the cameo appearance by Mickey Rooney (pg. 388).   Moreover, there is a tinge of absurdism that runs throughout the story, such as a trained octopus assailant, and hashish-laced hollandaise.

    The book builds to a dramatic ending, wherein a number of threads/characters get resolved, although it would be silly to think that everything in an 800-page epic would be completely tied up.  It goes without saying that this is a standalone novel, with no sequel, and I pity any poor fool who tries to make a movie out of it.

Excerpts...

    Her name was Amy Sprue, a family renegade turned Antinomian at age 23 and running mad over the Berkshire countryside, ahead of Crazy Sue Dunham by 200 years, stealing babies, riding cows in the twilight, sacrificing chickens up on Snodd’s Mountain.  Lots of ill will about those chickens, as you can imagine.  The cows and babies always, somehow, came back all right.  Amy Sprue was not, like young skipping Dorothy’s antagonist, a mean witch.  (pg. 334)

    “Beethoven was one of the architects of musical freedom – he submitted to the demands of history, despite his deafness.  While Rossini was retiring at the age of 36, womanizing and getting fat, Beethoven was living a life filled with tragedy and grandeur.”

    “So?” is Saure’s customary answer to that one.  “Which would you rather do?  The point is,” cutting off Gustav’s usually indignant scream, “a person feels good listening to Rossini.  All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland.  Ode to Joy indeed.  The man didn’t even have a sense of humor.”  (pg. 447)

Kewlest New Word…

Fairing (v.) : (of the weather) becoming fair.  (logical, but I’ve never seen ‘fair’ used as a verb before)

Others : too many to list.

Death has come in the pantry door: stands watching them, iron and patient, with a look that says try to tickle me.  (pg. 61)

    I read Gravity’s Rainbow as a result of a Christmastime-initiated reading challenge, and it took me 42 days to get through it.  I read several “light” e-books as well during that time (you’re crazy if you try to slog straight through the 776 pages), and it helped that my wife is taking an online class on Sunday afternoons, which provided me 3-4 hours of quality reading time every weekend.

    Yes, it is a difficult read, and I had to fight the urge to “skim” through major parts of it.  Yes, there are lots of paragraphs that I still have no comprehension of.  Yes, I’m sure I’d have a better understanding of those passages if I were to reread it, but that’s not going to happen.

    No, I don’t think, as some propose, that Gravity’s Rainbow is the greatest American novel ever.  My vote in that regard would be Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, but you’re allowed to disagree.  Yes, my main feeling upon completing it was a sense of accomplishment.

    But to be clear, I did enjoy reading this book, I do think Thomas Pynchon is a gifted writer, and I will recommend it to anyone who wants to be both challenged and entertained by an epic piece of contemporary fiction.

    Stylistically, I found Gravity’s Rainbow very similar to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which I read for an earlier reading challenge, and which is reviewed here.  They are both monumentally challenging, but well worth the effort.

    8 Stars.  Subtract 1 star if you have a book report due tomorrow, and have chosen this book as your assignment.  You’re screwed, dude.