Abbott/Cockburn/TheFollowing

Today I read the first 50 pages of Megan Abbott’s debut novel, Die A Little, published in 2005. http://www.meganabbott.com/diealittle.html Abbott is one of the fastest-rising stars in the field of crime fiction, and her backstory is particularly interesting. Abbott originally started out as an academic and after completing her PhD in English at NYU, Macmillan published her book on crime fiction, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled fiction and Film Noir in 2002. http://us.macmillan.com/thestreetwasmine/MeganAbbott. I would imagine that her spectacularly successful transition from academic writing to crime fiction makes Abbott an object of envy to many academics with similar career aspirations! The focus of The Street Was Mine on masculinity is, in retrospect, somewhat ironic, for what really distinguishes Abbott’s work in the genre of crime fiction is her creative and thought-provoking use of the conventions of hardboiled/noir crime fiction from a female perspective. One expression of this reworking can be found in the anthology edited by Abbott and titled A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir http://www.bustedflushpress.com/anthologies.php. This is a wonderful collection of original stories that showcases female protagonists who are something other than gun molls, femme fatales, or victims, while sometimes retaining traits of all of those types. In other words, Abbott does not reject the history of how crime fiction has represented women tout court; rather, she reworks that history for her own fiendish purposes! In tomorrow’s post, I’ll discuss how she achieves this goal in Die a Little.

I also read the next fifty pages of Alexander Cockburn’s A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption, and American Culture. Cockburn is usually so dyspeptic that those rare moments in which he finds something about which he is unabashedly positive really stand out. One example of this would be his comments on the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999: “In the annals of popular protest in America, these were shining hours, achieved entirely outside the conventional arena of orderly protest and white paper activism and the timid bleats of professional leadership of big labor and environmentalists. This truly was an insurgency from below in which all those who strove to moderate and deflect the turbulent flood of popular outrage managed to humiliate themselves.” Interestingly, Cockburn’s words could also be applied to the Occupy protests of 2011-2012. Note, however, that Cockburn’s pleasure is not derived solely from the spectacle of resistance; it also comes from the embarrassment of those who normally portray themselves as the organizers of resistance. Schadenfreude is never far away for Cockburn, even when he is at his happiest. There are occasional equivalent moments in A Colossal Wreck, and they usually come when Cockburn recounts his road trips through rural America. At such times, he’s given to a romanticization of what we might call (with apologies to Flann O’Brien, one of Cockburn’s favorite writers) “the plain people of America.”

I also watched the last three episodes of ‘The Following,’ not out of any excess of enthusiasm for the show, I hasten to add, but simply to get it over with! The ‘climax’ of the show had all the weaknesses that I’ve grown so fond of over the past few days. I’ve lost count, for example, of the number of buildings that law enforcement (and not just the local police, mind you, but also the FBI and/or SWAT) have apparently secured but in and out of which cult members (sometimes with captives in tow) can apparently still move with impunity. But there’s something more at stake here than shooting fish in a barrel (even though that’s a lot of fun); over the course of the series, it’s striking how vulnerable and inefficient an organization the FBI seems to be. Far from being a hymn of praise to federal law enforcement, in other words, ‘The Following’ instead emphasizes its limitations, albeit in a very particular way. This is why it’s so important to understand that Ryan Harding is a personification of the organization for which he works: honorable, yet flawed; committed, but usually a little too late; occasionally given to torturing people, but only for the best possible reasons. The humanization of the FBI, in other words, comes at the cost of encouraging uncritical audience identification with their personnel and methods. This is why, I think, the final episode ends not with Joe Carroll’s death but with yet another attack on Hardy. It reminds us who the real protagonist of the show is, namely, the-FBI-Ryan-Hardy, and with whom we’re meant to sympathize.