Today I read the
next fifty pages of Jayne Anne Phillips’ Quiet
Dell. Phillips handles the murders very discreetly. Rather than getting any
direct account of them, we instead stay with the disembodied spirit of one of
the child victims as she observes events while floating above the scene (a
gesture that seems to owe more than a little to Sebald’s The Lovely Bones). In fact, it’s interesting just how small a role
Powers has played in this narrative thus far. The first part of the novel
focused on his future victims, while this part of the novel is preoccupied with
Emily Thornhill, a Chicago Tribune
reporter who travels down to Quiet Dell, WV to cover the case. It’s hard to
know at this point what Phillips wants to do with the Thornhill character, but
her incipient love affair with a Chicago bank manager is less than promising.
There’s a fine line between displacing the murderer from the center of the
narrative and seemingly discarding that character altogether.
I also read the
next fifty pages of Georges Perec’s Species
of Spaces and Other Pieces. This includes the final section of the title
piece (simply titled ‘Space’) and sections from his 1990 book Je suis né, including “I Was Born” and
“The Work of Memory.” If I haven’t already made it clear in previous posts, let
me come right out and say that Species of
Spaces is essential reading for anyone working on literary and cultural
representations of space, broadly defined, a field that seems to be growing
exponentially these days. Given the extent of Perec’s self-consciousness about
being a writer, his work is also extremely suggestive for those writing about
writing, as the closing lines of ‘Space’ make clear: “To write: to try
meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few
precious scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a
trace, a mark, or a few signs.” As the title Je suis né implies, the writings collected under this title all
have a more or less explicit autobiographical connection, but given that Perec’s
life is so complexly interwoven with writing, these selections are useful even
to those with no interest in his life. For example, from ‘The Work of Memory’:
“For me that’s true realism: to reply on a description of reality divested of
all presumptions.”
I also watched
John Hillcoat’s 2009 adaptatation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road. I had put off watching this
for a long time because I doubted that a decent film could be made of
McCarthy’s weakest (most sentimental, most conservative, most mainstream)
novel. I was right, but I take no pleasure in being right (and that’s unusual
for me!). I found the movie to be crudely manipulative and emotionally
restricted; that is, it sounded a single emotional note from that beginning and
then maintained it unrelentingly until the point of utter tedium for the rest
of the film. It’s a bad sign when you want the cannibal gangs to show up in
order to inject a bit of drama into the film. The boy’s reintegration into a
post-apocalyptic nuclear family (complete with dog!) was excruciating. If only
they had been carrying a bit of dilapidated picket fence to make the message
even more clear! When I read the novel in 2006, I wanted the boy to be eaten at
the end of the book, and I felt the same way about the film. Only if you hate Žižek
might you enjoy this film, because Viggo Mortensen’s character resembles Žižek
so strongly as he dies on the beach. Lest you think I’m too harsh on McCarthy
here, I must acknowledge that at least we have The Road to thank for the toe-curlingly awful Oprah/McCarthy
interview. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RmgK0ds2d4
That’s known as being thankful for small mercies.
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