2025-01-11
I rarely read one book, start to finish, at a time. Is it emblematic of my perpetual bout with focus? A lazy solution to an optimization problem where I cannot greedily commit to a single item and instead choose all? By reflex, I always tend to consider my time something to be optimized, but it's reductive to refer to reading as a "problem" because, obviously, it encapsulates so much more. Reading being such an intimate, lonesome activity makes it delicate and difficult to demarcate and ponder; ultimately, I enjoy what I read, regardless of how I actually go about it, or else I wouldn't read. The very quality of its existence is reassuring.
As a brief aside, the only novel I vividly, and fondly, recall reading from start to finish (in one day) is Taylor Jenkins Reid's The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. My friend lent me her copy and I couldn't put it down.
This week(ish) I have been bouncing between two books -- Joyce Carol Oates' Beautiful Days and Sheldon Natenberg's Option Volatility and Pricing: Advanced Trading Strategies and Techniques. That's another nuance, I suppose, I usually bounce between books very disparate in some quality or another, the indulgence in one a reprieve from the other.
I came across Joyce Carol Oates (whose history is apparently inextricably linked to Princeton, unbeknownst to me, even having taught courses that I later took) as I messed around with an idea I intend to write about. I read Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" in one of my classes and found it interesting to consider how it plays with some other short stories. I'll keep this area spoiler-free but one of my comparisons of interest was J.D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish". I proceeded to first pull it up here (interesting how this is the first result for me) but abhorred the typeface and attempted to look elsewhere (an ultimately fruitless endeavor). Another site (the typeface was not much better) situated the story next to Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" which caught my eye, being "dedicated to Bob Dylan" and all. Although not the focus of my reflection here, I enjoyed it and wanted to explore her works more, so when I was visiting New York City with a friend to see the Met's Siena and Tibetan Buddhist exhibits, we stopped at a bookstore and I settled on Beautiful Days.
Each story, all tragic, visceral, and gut-wrenching in turn, seemed to stand in stark defiance to the poem that reverberated back and forth in my skull, incessantly: "No Man Is an Island". Although I (regretfully) haven't reach much else from Donne, knowing this poem foremost as the namesake to For Whom The Bell Tolls, it has stuck with me for many years now, choosing to poignantly reemerge in comparison to Oates' writing. Where Donne proclaims that "Every man is a piece of the continent, \ A part of the main", Oates' characters seem to defy such universal unity, uniquely and irrevocably islanded from one another.
I read a review [1] that describes the characters in the collection (at least in Part I) as "flat, with flimsy motivations". While this perceived "blandness" leads to a critique of the stories as "crav[ing] a lively, or principled, or chaotic character", I found my reaction to be the opposite. It is the 'blandness' of the characters that allocate attention to the depth embodied in their relationships. A character deprived of personal qualities is unable to be understood by what they are, instead, their amorphous being necessitates their definition by what they are not, or how others perceive them.
I would not go as far to say that the lack of "concrete characteristics" lead me to believe that, although fictional, they don't inhabit life. I would concede, however, that the way they 'become alive' is not traditional; a conception deprived of the breath of life would not be able to have such captivating, pain-staking relationships. So, I found attention to be shifted from how the characters exist in-identity with themselves to how they exist in-relation to others. This emphasis on relationships, their onset, nurturing, and unraveling, is what I found so terrifyingly interesting about Beautiful Days. Where Donne writes on the interconnected quality of mankind, Oates explores its pocketed isolation. However, perhaps I'm misconstruing Donne's message as opposite of Oates'. He writes that, "Any man's death diminishes me", and this concept of reduction can be easily commuted. As mentioned, the characters that inhabit Beautiful Days can be perceived as vacuums of self, devoid of characteristics that might assert their quality of being alive, but perhaps the deconstruction of their relationships is, in part, responsible. Maybe they are diminished as individuals by their isolation. If true, there would be some odd circular dependency, chicken-egg, but it seems reasonable to extend their shortcomings beyond the delineations of the glimpse we are afforded.
My writing here is not particularly pointed, so I want to reflect on some of the stories that disproportionally caught my attention. I thought "Fleuve Bleu" an extremely strong opening piece, and among my favorites of the collection. He, she - the characters are certainly apt examples of the previous discussion, but there is something so beautifully tragic in how the two come together, and then fall apart.
I don't think I liked a single character in the entire collection. They all carried their own perverse idiosyncrasies-- palatable people from the uninitiated eye, but remarkably repulsive under further scrutiny. Most emblematic of this scathing opinion is "Except You Bless Me". An account of a white teacher inner monologue concerning a young, black student, Larrisa, I found this story among the hardest to read through. After thinking she has encountered Larissa again--self-assured she is not "one of those [crazy] individuals"-- she finds herself on the cusp of paranoid-incited manic collapse, staring into the bathroom mirror, recognizing that she is "forty one years old" and at a "midpoint" wherein she should consider relinquishing racist prejudices, but recalls with finality how "after that session in [her] office in Starret Hall, [she] never again received another hate-note shoved beneath [her] door". Now met with deafening silence, the reader is forced to reconcile the lucidly irredeemable woman as a reality lifted from life onto the page.
The descriptions of the body are also grotesque (but only innocuous curiosities of the narrator, of course). Larrisa has "young, heavy flesh" and, simultaneously, a "mature-woman's body with heavy hips and breasts [that] make her appear older than her age". Of course, the narrator only "think[s]" this. I had somewhat of a visceral reaction when reading this story (and the forthcoming one), imagining being observed with such malevolent scrutiny. The next story I want to mention is "The Bereaved", where what should be mundane observations become repulsive obsessions from an irredeemable person.[2] Maybe the story begins with 'the bereaved', but it quickly becomes apparent that Becca is detached from Max's grief over the loss of his daughter and more preoccupied with her own position. On a cruise, she becomes obsessed with a "freak-family", of whom she follows, feeling indignant "rage" at them, "obese clowns" who should be "imprisoned in a penal colony... hidden away from sight". I was excited for this story from title alone, eager to read about an understanding of living in an 'after', death or otherwise. Instead, I found myself confronted with the indigestible truth (?) that such a mundane individual (as most the characters in the collection are) could possess such limitless hate and utter detachment. At the end of the story, she convinces herself that one of the objects of her obssession, the family's daughter Nathalie, needs to be saved but is rejected and disdained by the same family she has debased internally. Finally, she runs to Max suggesting that they can "separate" because she "thinks that's what [he] wants". But Max just winces in surprise: "Jesus, Becca! What are you saying?" It was a difficult ending to read. It's natural to want redemption for characters, for anyone, but it seems as if Oates' omnipotent hand has forsaken all of her characters, perhaps not a streak of malevolence but, as opposed to benevolence, indifference.
Before discussing perhaps my favorite story, and the last one I'll contemplate, "Fractal", I wanted to mention "Les beaux jours". It caught me wildly off guard, to say the least. I read it shortly after going to the Met and it remained on my mind, even more so than some of the other stories because of the striking subject matter, when I visited the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. There was one particular section in the latter that, although I cannot provide detail to differentiate exactly where, spatially, it is, had an array of young, ethereal, female subjects that made me think of this story. It was only later, however, when I decided to look up the titular painting by Balthus where the story's context became more apparent. I read Carolyn Gage's post about Thérèse Blanchard, listened to Maya Hawke's song (thanks Chloe in the comments), and learned from some discourse surrounding Sally Mann's photography, particularly "Immediate Family". It's a decisive, uncomfortable subject to engage with and I don't think I'm prepared (or particularly compelled) to write about it at greater length. I think my takeaway is to approach it with context, being as willing to understand as I am to condemn. Oates' story shocked me maybe in part due to its novelty; now that I've learned more about the context, I'm not sure if I'd want to read a similar story-- but maybe that's the point and, like many of the other stories in the collection, it is supposed to make you uncomfortable, to make you squirm.
But "Fractal". I think reading this later story was my favorite experience of the bunch. While I don't find myself sticking to it for a particular reason like some of the others I've discussed--for the depiction of the relationships, or grotesque imagery--I found it to have one of the most unexpecting and interesting stories. The dreamlike narrative, what Oates refers to as "psychological realism", seemed to distort my sense of time as a reader, its slowed, irregular procession of time diffusing my own perception. The last few pages of the story, wherein the branches between the emergent fractal blur and collide, only to separate once again with heartbreaking finality.
He is gone gone gone. You have lost lost lost him. You are damned damned damned and this is hell hell hell.
I started this reflection having acknowledged two books but quickly clung to an obvious favorite. The difficult part about writing is, as I see it, stopping when you don't have anything interesting to say (and if you made it this far, you can clearly tell that this is a perpetual bout). So, I'll let my thoughts accumulate for now. I think what's remarkable about literature is how easy it is to engage in discourse and connect with other people. I don't believe more technical subjects to be completely unapproachable but certainly more difficult to engage with. But I love both!
I use this review to develop my own ideas, not to assert their primacy. I really enjoy reading about conflicting viewpoints, as it gives me a chance to flesh out my own convictions. ↩
My language is a bit heavy here, maybe symptomatic of my fluid disposition (it's late) when writing this, or, more aptly, to convey my strong reactions when reading the collection. While I found the book fascinating (my first entry into Oates' work), it was also difficult as a reader. ↩