Too Long; Didn't Read; Except I Did: And Now I'm Fucking Cranky About It

Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings won the Booker Prize and got good reviews, or at least the type of review that explains what the book is about without really critically addressing it, which is obviously a type of "review," but is more like an abstention.

That kind of thing is some fuckery: those readers unlucky enough to read things for pleasure are shortchanged the knowledge they need to decide whether to read the thing in the first place. But no matter.

Here's what I would say you need to know: Killings is audacious, rich, wide-ranging and a complete fucking chore to read. And then there's this — which is a complete spoiler but no one is going to finish the thing so what would it matter? — which is that after 686 some-odd-bombocloth pages there's no fucking goddamn ending, and then the acknowledgements talk about how a lot of the great research one of James' four (!) researchers did will appear in the next book. Next book? Call me old fashioned, but I like to see A STORY RESOLVE IN SOME WAY, SHAPE OR FORM AFTER 686 MOTHERFUCKING PAGES. This ending is truly an elliptical "to be continued"; it's clear in the final part that the main female character is going to intersect in some way with the main male character BUT THE GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING BOOK ENDS BEFORE THAT HAPPENS. Seriously. Seriously. Seriously, what the fuck?

Add to that that the book is written in a first-person active voice from the perspective of like 15 or 20 people — think As I Lay Dying times three or four (literally) — and you see why IT'S SUCH A FATIGUING SLOG.

So you know what? The best way to combat an overlong book is to not allow it to invade your mental space any more than it has to. So, the end.

And Through The Morning Air The Sun Poured Yellow Surprise Into The Eye Sockets Of The Stony Skull

I remember having some very undiplomatic feelings recently about epigraphs in general — about which had something, in general, to do with frustration at never fully understanding the references, not wanting to spend too much time divining the possible deep meaning behind the epigraphs and basically generally impugning the general worth of those writers who indulge in epigraphs. I suppose it's a nice way to pay homage to those writers who came before but as a reader I feel it sets the reader on an unnecessary abstract tangent before having even read a single word of the book they're supposed to be reading. All of which is to say, I don't know that I've ever fully comprehended an epigraph, and most of the time I think I generally skip them.

The title of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me is a quote from a Richard Wright poem, which is the epigraph to the book.

Every once in a while I've come across a piece of writing that is unassailable, and when something is unassailable you can often feel the writer show a freedom and ease in his or her prose that is wonderful to read. When it happens, writers air things out, feel comfortable in their voices, experiment with ideas, and often do it really successfully. They add epigraphs, and those epigraphs sound tight and organic.

The conceit of Between is that it's sort of a letter from Coates to his son. That conceit serves to make Between doubly unassailable: you're not supposed to critique but rather eavesdrop.

The idea that you're eavesdropping is part of what makes Between so conceptually masterful: merely "listening" is an aggressive move; it's like when you're sitting next to a couple at an adjacent table at a restaurant where you can't help but get sucked into a private conversation — no one's going to say anything, not even those buttinskys that that scoundrel Quiñones entraps.

That said, the conceit only goes so far. Frequently you forget this is a message to his son, mostly because it hardly ever reads like that, except when Coates circles back around and brings it up again. Also, I'm not sure why you go on cable or publish a wildly successful book if you don't want people to discuss it. It's an interesting conundrum, and in 50 years when Between is in the canon of novels about the African American experience, I don't think any reader will think twice about.

Part of what makes Between a little frustrating is the no-man's land between cultural criticism and poetry. Coates self-deprecatingly writes that he first tried to be a poet, and was bad at it. But I have the feeling that every poet probably started out as a bad one, and eventually transcended their youth and inartfulness. The poetry Between is subtle, but I'll take it at face value; so in this sense the "Dreamers" (who believe in the American Dream and benefit from being generally white enough to benefit from it) are blind to the advantages they have enjoyed via their whiteness. It all makes me wonder how much is a reaction to the narrative versus the words on the paper.

And the thing is, you don't have to construct a labored metaphor when the facts at hand are already so powerful. The salient details about his upbringing in violent neighborhoods in Baltimore are compelling enough: if it really is about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then Thomas Jefferson has a lot to answer for, because this environment fails on all counts: life is often denied, people are not free to walk certain streets or be out during certain times and the pursuit of happiness seems pretty impaired.

For me, the disconnect between the poetry and metaphor of the Dream versus I guess what some who deign to respond to it as a concrete thing (and open themselves up to seeming universal scorn, ahem) is maybe the crux of the matter. What if the US isn't a Mount Rushmore of democratic brilliance but rather a country like any other on the planet that evolves and makes new policies and continues to work toward the promise of a just society? Coates uses France as a foil — and he's not unaware of France's fucked up colonial transgressions — but I was thinking of Germany, which obviously has a pretty fucked up past but which doesn't carry the baggage of the Declaration of Fucking Independence, or at least the narrative of chopped cherry trees and whatever else. Point being, do "we" — meaning those not on cable news or writing in the Atlantic — in our day-to-day lives really perceive the United States of America as the greatest nation that ever existed or just a place where we live and work and raise families and whatever else. Not to sound unpatriotic, but most of us live in a country and not a narrative.

There's a passage — and you've got to hand it to Coates for including it (and which is also an example of the unvarnished freedom he's hitting) — where he poops in the 9/11 punch bowl by admitting that his heart was cold. This wasn't that upsetting to me — I remember talking to someone in the months after 9/11 who, when reflecting on how things had shifted, noted his own impression of firefighters, who in the years before 9/11 he associated more with a particularly offensive float in a Labor Day Parade than everyday valor.

People experienced 9/11 in concentric waves; those closest were hit mightily and then so was everyone else in a nationally tragic sort of way. Coates writes he was cold on 9/11 because his classmate at Howard was still dead at the hands of police brutality. The story is as horrible and tragic as can be, and even though he and his mother became visceral symbols of the debased dream in the book, Coates honestly portrays the awkwardness when he visits her. It's good and true, though I don't think it was necessarily written for his son — which is part of the back-and-forth you feel about the book: sometimes it seems unassailable and other times it strays elsewhere.

And then there are moments like on page 125, which has nothing to do with 9/11 or metaphors or broken bodies but rather this devastating admission: "Your mother had to teach me how to love you — how to kiss you and tell you I love you every night. Even now it does not feel a wholly natural act so much as it feel like ritual. And that is because I am wounded." On the one hand, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" seems to cover it all. On the other hand, it can come off as pretty transactional; something's missing there and I'm not quite sure what it is. It's deeper than love; I don't know what, but it's got some other important attributes in there: commitment, security, loyalty, belief and a lot of other nouns I can't possibly scare up a the moment but which I'm pretty sure kids should have a lot of. Neighborhoods, schools, the justice system — all of that seems like it can be ameliorated (eventually, somehow) — but no society can put in place policies or programs or national conversations to show love to your children.

My Mother Is A Fucking Fish, For Chrissakes

I tried coming up with a 140-character-max hot take for William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and didn't get too far — it was something along the lines of "Multiple viewpoint modernism doubling down on dumb fucking Southerners" — it's one of those pieces of culture that at some point became unassailable, or at least hexproof to a point where only James Franco believes he can interpret the vastness to future audiences.

I was led to believe that Faulkner's whole deal is portraying the postbellum deep South as a bunch of tragic inbreds. As I Lay certainly succeeds in this: every goddamn person in the book can't do a goddamn thing right, from the patriarch who allows his wife's body to decompose to the point of nasty on an eight-day trip to the burying ground to the ignorant teenager who can't get get a proper back-alley abortion to the fool eldest son who allows a broken leg to be set with cement to the fool youngest son who thinks his mother is a fucking fish; this is a dumb fucking lot of fucking morons. You thought Martin McDonagh was over the top?

And really, in the end it's too much. We get it; the South has a lot to answer for. This just twists the knife. You're just like, "Let these fool motherfuckers twist in the wind, topple the coffin, I don't give a fuck, just make it end." And in the end, you're left with the cubistic, multi-angle storytelling, which is I guess what makes Lay Dying modern. It's obviously hard to sit here almost 100 years later and contextualize this approach, but if you're contemplating the craft, it seems a little lacking: it seems like notes a writer would take while constructing a third-person narrative. And Darl — the literate one — is a bit of a narrative deus ex machina, no? You just can't write a "book" without some smart piece of shit narrator serving as the divine intermediary to the creator's brilliance.

James Franco, I read — or thought I read — was cowed by the challenge of portraying I Lay cinematically; I don't know why because it actually seems really well suited for that. A film version takes a clunky first-person narrative — with like 15 different first-person perspectives — and seamlessly integrates them all in a (presumably) cohesive visual. I mean, right? Faulkner would have been a pretty rockin' auteur, right? Franco, man up.