At this point, I should have known better. I've observed, since I first became a reader--a real reader, with a flashlight under my covers far after bedtime--that reading a book isn't as passive an activity as it may seem. It involves imbibing a bit of the book, forcing yourself to be oriented toward the world in the same way that book is. Thus, when you come across a book you can flip through--say, the always excellent Harry Potter--it might feel that you can read for hours, and your heart will be pounding, and you'll be tempted to rip the pages over and over even though you haven't quite done with the last one. And, thus, when you read a book--or more aptly, scale a book--like, say, Jonathan Franzen's Strong Motion, you feel a tired sense of accomplishment at the end of a chapter. And, because, the more engrossed you are, the more your brain has adapted itself to the language game du jour, the more you start to think like the characters, and feel like the novel.
I wish I could say that I love Strong Motion. I respect it; it's a very well-crafted book. But, where The Corrections found dark humor, Motion finds humorless laughs. Where The Corrections found life in idiocies of the world. Motion finds mirthless irony and decidedly grim joy. Make no mistake, Strong Motion has thematic depth, strong characterization, a colorful emotional palate, etc.. But, good God, is it bleak. I haven't felt this down while reading a book since Anna Karenina, and at least that had that wedding scene at the end.
I am, I suppose, 100 pages or so from the end, and as such, there might still be "a wedding scene," though I'm inclined to doubt it. The arc of the book is toward entropy and, in true American form, seems determined to stay that course, come hell or high water, time horizons be damned.
Obviously, it can't be all bleak; God knows I wouldn't still be reading it if it were. It's kept afloat by its buoyant, almost charming irony, and by its increasingly (and to my increasing horror) piercing insights into the desperate lives of the well-educated, pomo, 20somethings. Too, there is that Franzian wit; though, here, it is almost lazy, tired, where in The Corrections it was bombastic and an accelerating.
It's hard, though, not to chuckle, or at least squint a bit at passages like:
[H]e wanted to use her body and was fully prepared to like her, if that was what using it required.
It goes without saying that this book, like--it seems--much of Franzen's work, turns on the importance of sex. The metaphoric imagery is, of course, rather crude here. The plot involves a rather typical corporate malfaiteur. This corporation explored for deep oil deposits in MA (very, very deep, much deeper than what we normally dig for oil), and, upon finding nothing, they began to pump toxic, industrial waste in that hole, causing small earthquakes that shake Boston. The metaphoric imagery is, of course, rather crude: penetration, fluidic release, and the strong motion--the bump and grind of tectonic plates--that ensues.
If you're lucky (or unlucky) you might see a review of it posted when I'm finished. Either that, or I'll be curled up in a ball, cursing the heavens and crying because this book is so goddamn bleak. You know, one or the other.
On a side note. My friend Marc, probably correctly, took me to task for leaving my review of The Big Sleep at "it was good." Well Marc, it was very good.
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