Rachael Reads

Spoiler alert: This is quite possibly the most depressing book imaginable. Oedipus Rex has more laughs than this book. If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, then you should turn back now.

Sophie’s Choice by William Styron was published in 1979. It is narrated by Stingo, a Southerner working in publishing in new York City, who befriends an extremely screwed up couple. It takes place in 1947.

The Sophie in question is Sophie Zawistowska, a Polish-Catholic survivor of Auschwitz. Throughout the book, she tells Stingo about her past — both of her parents were professors, and Sophie was married at a young age to a mathematics scholar. One day, the Germans came and took Sophie’s father and husband away to a concentration camp and shot them on New Year’s Day. Sophie was taken to Auschwitz when she smuggled ham to her dying mother. While at Auschwitz, she worked as the stenographer to Rudolf Höss and tried to convince him that her son, Jan, should be taken from the camp and put into the Lebensborn program and be raised as a German orphan because he has blonde hair and blue eyes and speaks fluent German, but Höss refuses.

Sophie (Meryl Streep) living with her Choice.

The final piece of Sophie’s story from Auschwitz is about when she and her two children first arrived at the camp. She has two children, her son Jan and her daughter Eva. On the night they arrived, a doctor makes her choose which of her children will be sent to the gas chamber that night and which one will live.When she is unable to choose, a Nazi officer said both would be sent to die so Sophie chooses Eva to die that night, because she figures that Jan would have a better chance of surviving the camp. However, after she and Jan are separated between the adult and children camps, Sophie never finds out what happened to her son; she gets a letter saying that he’s been moved from the Children’s Camp and she assumes that he was killed. She has been living with overwhelming guilt and mourning ever since the day she arrived at Auschwitz.

You can start crying now. It’s okay. I’ll wait.

Sophie moved to America immediately after the war and met Nathan, who took care of her when she was sick when she first arrived. Nathan is crazy (he’s an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic) and is abusive to Sophie when he has one of his outbreaks; it doesn’t help that he’s self-medicating with cocaine and prescription drugs that he gets from his job at Pfizer.

Unfortunately, Nathan sets his crazy on Stingo and Sophie, who he accuses of having an affair together and he attacks Sophie and tries to kill her. Stingo takes Sophie away to Virginia, where Sophie tells him the story of her children. Stingo tells her that he’s in love with her and Sophie takes Stingo’s virginity. The next morning, Stingo wakes up to find a note from Sophie; she has gone back to Nathan. Telling the story of her children has overwhelmed her with grief and she has gone back to commit suicide with Nathan, who is on his own suicidal crazy-train. Stingo returns to Brooklyn and discovers that Sophie and Nathan have poisoned themselves with cyanide.

DEPRESSING.

There are a lot of nuances to the book — the way that the narration is told in both third and first person, the jumps in time, the comparisons of the Holocaust to the American South, the focus of a Holocaust survivor who isn’t Jewish — but who cares? Not when you compare it to the heart-wrenching choice of knowing that you are responsible for the death of your child. I don’t have, much less want, children and I felt like my heart was being torn out of my chest. I didn’t think anyone could find a way to make the horrors of the Holocaust even worse, but congratulations, William Styron, you did it.

The apocryphal story of the film version of Sophie’s Choice has Meryl Streep as Sophie only being able to do one take of the “choice” scene, as she found it too emotionally draining and painful. Preach, Queen Meryl.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck was published in 1939. Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel Prize for Literature 1962. The title comes from a lyric from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which in turn refers to Revelation 14:19-20 that describes the justice doled out through the Apocalypse.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

The novel takes place in the 1930s during the height of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in the Midwest. It followed the Joad family on their attempt to survive both as individuals and as a family. The Grapes of Wrath was initially not very well-received due to the social and political views that Steinbeck espoused through the novel, mainly by detailing the plight of poor people and the hardships of the migrant workers in California — people labeled it was lies and Communist leaning. However, it has become one of the most widely read books in classrooms and colleges across America.

The novel begins with Tom Joad, the Joad’s second oldest son, getting out of prison after serving four years for manslaughter. He makes his way to his family’s Oklahoma farm and on the way he meets Jim Casy, who is a former preacher who has given up his day job in order to be with the people — he believes that sacredness consists simply in endeavoring to be an equal among the people (Jim Casy is based on/inspired by Steinbeck’s friend Ed Ricketts). Tom and Jim get to the farm to find it completely deserted. A neighbor tells them that the people on the land have all been “tractored” off and that most people, including the Joads, are heading to California to find work. Tom and Jim head to Tom’s Uncle John’s house to find his family finishing packing up all of their belongings into a single car that is affectionately referred to as a “jalopy.” They travel down Route 66 from Oklahoma to California.

The Joads head down Route 66.

Grandpa Joad, who complains the loudest that he doesn’t want to leave his land, dies before they can cross the Oklahoma border. Grandma Joad dies before they reach the California state line and Noah, the oldest brother, and Connie, the husband of the Joad’s pregnant daughter, Rose of Sharon, abandon the family.

Once the family reaches California, they are met with resistance — the work pool is oversaturated by people trying to find work and newcomers, whom are isnultingly referred to as “Okies”, are not appreciated. The family sets up in a Hooverwille (affectionately named for Herbert Hoover, who was the unfortunate president during the onset of the Great Depression and has become a scapegoat for blame for the economic downtown). The Hoovervilles are overcrowded and no one gets enough food; work is difficult to come by and no one can afford a sufficient amount of food for their families.

How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can’t scare him – he has known a fear beyond every other.

The corporate farm landowners fear a worker uprising, so they try to guarantee that the workers remain poor and dependent on them for survival. Tom and several men get into a heated argument with a deputy sheriff over whether workers should organize into a union. When the argument turns violent, Jim Casy knocks the sheriff unconscious and is arrested. Police officers arrive and announce their intention to burn the Hooverville to the ground.

Henry Fonda as Tom Joad in the 1940 movie.

The Joads eventually find work picking peaches at an orchard, until they find out that they’ve been hired as strikebreakers. Tom meets up again with Jim, who has been released from jail and is now hard at work organizing the workers and getting them to understand their power. Police deputies, hired by the landowners who don’t appreciate Jim’s new calling, raid the strike and in the action, Jim is killed; Tom retaliates by killing the police officer who killed Jim and fleeing.

Given Tom’s new fugitive status, the Joads move from the peach orchard to a cotton farm under the hopes that no one will identify Tom. When Ruthie, the youngest Joad daughter, is overheard telling another girl on the farm about her brother the murderer, Ma Joad sends Tom away to hide; Tom takes the opportunity to pick up where Jim left off in organizing the workers. Tom assures his mother that wherever he goes, he will work to help people:

Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry n’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there. See? God, I’m talkin’ like Casy. Comes of thinkin’ about him so much. Seems like I can see him sometimes.

The end of the summer comes, which means the end of the growing season and the end of work. The family realizes that there will be no jobs for three months when the rainy season arrives and there are torrential downpours that turn into floods. Rose of Sharon goes into labor with her baby, and Ma Joad finds a dry barn for them to stay; unfortunately Rose of Sharon’s baby is stillborn. In the barn are another family, a boy and his father. The father is weak and dying from malnourishment because he’s been giving all of the food they find to his son — the irony is that he’s now too sick to eat solid food. The novel ends with Rose of Sharon taking the the dying man in her arms and breast feeding him.

The Grapes of Wrath, while not overtly Christian, has a lot of Christian themes and symbols. Jim Casy is a Christ-like figure all the way down to his “J.C.” initials. He is a man who lives his life for others and sacrifices himself for the cause of the unrepresented workers. The floods at the end of the novel, while damaging, bring forth a sense of renewal and hope with the beginning of spring. Rose of Sharon transforms from a rather self-centered girl to a Pieta figure — she is overcome by maternal instincts and is able to provide comfort and protection for others.

The story of the family is offset by chapters told from the point of view of inanimate objects and creatrues that symbolize different parts of the journey of the people during the Dust Bowl. There is a chapter that is about a turtle crossing the road and the dangers it encounters (an ant gets in its shell, a driver swerves to hit it and then swerves to misses it), several excerpts about the machinery that is taking over agriculture and making farmers obsolete and details about what happens to the land when the farmers leave, and there’s a chapter in the point of view of a used car salesman talking about how he cheats the customers that are obviously poor and desperate. It makes the novel more universal; rather than just following the Joads, the narration is ubiquitous, showcasing the suffering of what seems to be everyone in America.

One of the major themes of the novel is man’s inhumanity towards man and the dangers of forgetting the importance of altruism. Most of the hardships that the migrant workers, and the Joads specifically, face aren’t caused by the weather and the Dust Bowl but by people. Whether it’s from a social, economic, or racial hierarchy, the people in the novel keep themselves up by shoving others down. That’s what makes people consider this one of Steinbeck’s more socially conscious stories, the fact that he focuses so much on the plight of the migrant worker and the injustices suffered to them.

I first read The Grapes of Wrath in my AP English class my junior year of high school. And to be honest, all I remembered was Rose of Sharon breast feeding the dying man and that at one point someone pees in the dirt and makes a poultice for a cut out of the urine soaked mud. I also remember my teacher yelling at us about the machines being personified as monsters and being alive. It’s nice that the integrity of literature lives on in teenagers.

Steinbeck is one of the great American authors, and with good reason. The Grapes of Wrath manages to be a social commentary without seeming too preachy, in my opinion — however, it was banned and people held public burnings of the book because of what were seen as communist and socialist views. It’s nice to know that some things never change.

Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov was published in New York in 1958. It has been controversial and debated ever since.

The book is about a man, Humbert Humbert (a pseudonym he has chosen for himself), who is obsessed with nymphets, or sexually precocious girls. He blames this obsession on the death of his childhood sweetheart, Annabel Leigh. Because he was in love with her and she died at a young age, he subconciously searches for her to love again, and instead finds young girls who remind him of her. Humbert rents a house from Charlotte Haze, who just happens to have a 12 year old daughter named Dolores. Humbert immediately becomes infatuated with Dolores (who is also called also known as Dolly, Lolita, Lola, Lo, and L throughout the novel, try to keep up), and remains in the house to be near her.

Meanwhile, Charlotte, Lolita’s mother, begins to fall in love with Humbert. While Lolita is away at summer camp, she tells him that he has to either marry her or move out of the house. He agrees to marry Charlotte, even though he does not care for her and actually sort of pities her, so that he can remain close to Lolita. Charlotte remains unaware of Humbert’s creeper tendencies until she discovers his diary, in which he waxes poetic about his feelings for Lolita. Needless to say, she is horrified and makes plans to get her and her daughter as far away from Humbert as possible. Unfortunately, before she can do that or tell anyone what she’s discovered about Humbert, she’s hit by a car and killed.

Humbert picks up Lolita at camp; he tells the counselors that Charlotte is ill and is in the hospital. Once he has Lolita, he takes her to a hotel and attempts to give her sleeping pills in order to molest her more easily. The pills fail to work on her, but it’s okay! Because Lolita actually initiates sex with Humbert. It turns out that Lolita is already sexually active, as she had sex with a boy at her summer camp. And she’s still 12, by the way. Just saying.

Ignore the sunglasses and the lollipop. She is still 12.

Humbert finally tells Lolita that her mother is dead, and she realizes that there’s not really much else to do other than to accept her new life with her “stepfather” (EW). While at the hotel, they meet a strange man who seems to know them. Humbert is nervous about this, and decides that they need to take their show on the road.

Humbert and Lolita create a new life as nomads; they travel around from motel to motel with Humbert keeping Lolita disciplined by equally threatening to send her away to reform school and bribing her with sexual favors, even though he knows that she doesn’t love him like she does. Gee, I wonder why. They finally settle down in New England and Lolita is enrolled in school with Humbert assuming the role of the overbearing strict parent; Lolita is not allowed to participate in extracurriculars at school or associate with boys. The neighbors see his rules as the sign of a strict and loving parent. If only they knew how loving.

Lolita convinces Humbert to allow her to be in a school play by granting him more sexual favors. The play is by a man named Clare Quilty, who says that he saw Lolita’s acting and was inspired to write the play. However, on opening night, Humbert and Lolita have a fight and Lolita says that she wants to leave town again. When they leave, Humbert feels like someone is following them; he’s suspicious that Lolita is conspiring against him to leave him. She claims that she’s ill and is taken to a hospital while Humbert stays in a nearby hotel. When he goes to visit her, the hospital staff tells him that Lolita’s uncle has checked her out.

Uh oh.

Years pass, and one day Humbert receives a letter from the now 17 year old Lolita. She writes that she’s married, pregnant, and in desperate need of money. He meets with her, and she tells him that Clare Quilty was an acquaintance of Charlotte’s, and he checked her out of the hospital and attempted to make her star in one of his pornographic films; when she refused, he threw her out. She worked odd jobs before meeting and marrying her husband. She claims that her new husband knows nothing about her past and she intends to keep it that way.

Humbert, always the lecher, asks Lolita to leave her husband and return to him. He promises that it’ll be different this time! We’ll have a good life together! She refuses, because she has at least half a brain. Humbert leaves Lolita and finds and kills Quilty at his mansion. He then is arrested for driving on the wrong side of the road and swerving.

The narrative closes with Humbert’s final words to Lolita in which he wishes her well, and reveals the novel has been the memoirs of his life, only to be published after he and Lolita have both died.

Lolita gets a bad rap. If you can look past the pedophilia (which most people can’t), it is a very good book, at least in a literary sense. Nabokov was fond of wordplay and intricate details, and he uses many double entendres, puns, anagrams, and invents words throughout this book (nymphet is one example). He uses allusions to other authors, specifically Edgar Allan Poe (the name of Humbert’s childhood love, the use of doppleganger that occurs with Humbert and Clare Quilty). Many literary critics and scholars have found deeper meanings in the work, including interpretations that the book represents totalitarianism from Nabokov’s native Russia or the idea that the novel is about discovering your own identity when it has been taken over by someone else.

Nabokov was also a synesthete. That has nothing to do with the book, but it’s interesting anyway.

How this book is not on the Modern Library list, I do not know.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published in the United States in 1885. It was the first “American” novel: it was the first novel to be written using American regional dialect and vernacular. It is set in the South and is meant to take place in the period before the Civil War, around the 1840s. The book is a satire of the culture of the South and the attitudes of the citizens, particularly in regards to race.

The book tells the adventures of a boy named Huck Finn who escapes from the house of the women who have been caring for him, Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, when he overhears that she intends to “sivilize” him, and moves back in with his wayward father. Life with his father is equally unpleasant, so Huck fakes his own death and escapes on a raft down the Mississippi River, where he runs into Miss Watson’s slave, Jim, who has run away after overhearing that Miss Watson planned to sell him downriver, where conditions for slaves were even harsher, because he would bring a price of $800. The two travel along the river together; Jim is trying to make his way up the river into Ohio where he can be free, and Huck has several epiphanies regarding slavery, people, and life in general. The culmination of his change of opinion comes towards the end of the novel, when the two encounter a duo of grifters who attempt to sell Jim as their own and Huck helps Jim escape to freedom, declaring that if it is as wrong as everyone says it is, then he will do what he thinks is right and accept the consequences: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell!”

The 1990s version of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn

The book has come back into public attention lately due to the fervor surrounding a publisher’s wish to remove all of the racially charged language, specifically by changing the word “nigger” to “slave”.

This makes me angry. I don’t like the idea of anyone changing literature without the approval of the author, and Mark Twain has been dead for a century. The publishers who want to change the words are saying that they only have the interest of the children at heart — because The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a book that is studied in high schools across the country, it is irresponsible to be teaching them “that word.”

Guess what, publisher — high school kids already know “that word.” It is in rap songs and movies, not to mention about 85% of the conversations that I’ve overheard my students have with one another. “That word” is part of the history of our country. Is it a proud moment in our national conscience? No. Will the hundreds of years that African Americans were regarded as property and treated as less than human suddenly be forgotten if we close our eyes and pretend that it didn’t happen? No.

Is it important that students read a book about a boy their age who has the opportunity to get to know someone and form his own opinions about what is inside a person and determine what he believes is right even though everyone else thinks something else? Is it important for students, in our post-9/11 society, with adults who talk about the fear of a mosque being constructed too near Ground Zero in NYC and talk about the Muslims trying to influence our children and take over the country, to read about a time in our history when a young person decided that discrimination is wrong because we are all the same inside?

Yes. And that is why this book is important.

Next week, September 25 — October 2, is Banned Books Week. Banned Books Week is a week to celebrate the importance of the First Amendment and to draw attention to the dangers of censorship.

A large majority of the books on the Modern Library’s list of 100 best books, as well as any other list of great books, contains banned books. The ALA has a list of frequently challenged classics. Wikipedia has another list of the most commonly challenged books in the US. If you have some spare time next week, pick up one of these books and enjoy the fact that you can read them. And know that when you read a banned book, you’re being rebellious and sticking it to the man. And that is sexy.

This is my first week back to work after my two and a half month long summer vacation. I spent a majority of those months in the car, visiting friends and having local adventures, which is probably why I gravitated to this book for my next voyage into the book list.

On the Road is a pivotal book from the Beat Generation. There is an apocryphal story of Jack Kerouac’s coffee-and-amphetamine fueled conception of the book, in which he taped together several typewriter scrolls in order to write without the pesky interruption of having to stop to reload. The original scroll manuscript has gone on a tour of college libraries throughout the United States and Europe and was published as On the Road: The Original Scroll in 2007. The stream of consciousness style as employed by Kerouac was used to showcase his semi-autobiographical novel about the adventures that he and his friend, Neal Cassady, had on the road from 1947-1950.

The names of Kerouac’s characters have been analyzed by literary scholars since the book’s publication in 1957. Kerouac based the novel on actual events and subsequently had to change the names of his friends who appeared as characters.

Neal Cassady (left) and Jack Kerouac (right).

The novel begins with Sal Paradise (Kerouac) introducing the concept of Dean Moriarty (Cassady). Sal was obsessed with the idea of the human condition, which included his friends, the jazz scene, the United States outside of New York, and most importantly, women.

They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

Dean arrives in New York and changes everything for Sal. When Dean first arrived, he met Carlo Marx (Allen Ginsberg), and they bond together and feed Sal’s fascination with eclectic and unique personalities.

In July of 1947, Sal decides that it is time for him to venture to the West Coast, and he hits the road with fifty dollars in his pocket. He travels to Chicago, San Fransisco, and Los Angeles, meeting women and different eccentric personalities along the way. Dean spends some time in prison for stealing cars, which cements his transition into an epic hero in Sal’s eyes.

“Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there.”
“Where we going, man?”
“I don’t know but we gotta go.”

As their sojourn around the country continues, Sal becomes more and more disillusioned with what he finds on the road. The people that he encounters are from the more poverty-stricken end of the spectrum, including elderly African-American men and Mexican prostitutes. The sense of Sal and Dean’s heroism begins to falter as their lives and experiences turns into a series of failures.

Sal’s final attempt at finding a solution from the road leads him to Mexico City with Dean; they embark on a marijuana-fueled adventure through bordellos with mambo music and prostitutes. But while in Mexico, Sal develops dysentery and becomes feverish and hallucinates. Dean leaves Sal while he’s ill, which gives Sal the realization that Dean is more pathetic than he let on, and that the attributes that Sal originally admired in him were actually symptoms of his insecurity and existential crises:

When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes.

Sal returns home and ends the novel sitting on a pier facing west, reflecting on his friendship and adventures.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

I love this book. I first read it when I was fresh out of high school and had a lot of grand notions of what my life was going to be and I was convinced that my best friend and I would be Kerouac and Cassady but with less drugs. The stream-of-consciousness style helps to convey the frenetic energy and the passion with which the characters, both fictional and their live counterparts, lived their lives. Reading On the Road or poetry from Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti makes me feel cooler than I actually am, which is what the Beat Generation authors were all about — experiencing their lives through means that allows them to become more than they are. The movement got its name from the religious theory of beatification as well as the slang term of being beaten down. The Beat Generation was beaten down, but they were looking up.

I’m cheating. Again.

It’s getting toward the end of the school year, and quite frankly, I am sick of students at this point. I have spring fever more than they do. And if I hear one more student complain about not wanting to read, I won’t be responsible for my actions.

My junior class has finished reading The Great Gatsby, which is on the curriculum, but because there are three weeks left of school, I’m having them read The Catcher in the Rye, which is not on the curriculum. If they complain about it, they’re going to be sorry. But I figured that since I’m having to read it with them, then I might as well skip ahead and count this as a plus in the read column.

The Catcher in the Rye is the only novel by J.D. Salinger, who wrote mostly short stories, especially those concerning the Glass family. It was published in 1951 and is both lauded and lamented, as it appears equally on lists of the greatest novels of all times and is one of the most frequently challenged and banned books. Teachers have been fired for teaching the book in their classes. Oops.

The narrator is the apathetic Holden Caulfield, who has just been expelled from yet another prep school. The greatest insult Holden bestows on people or things is that they’re phony, and pretty much everyone or everything he encounters is labeled as such. His roommates are phony, the school is phony, his teachers are phony. As he’s expelled from the school, he packs up and leaves for New York City in the middle of the night, but as he doesn’t want to face his family with the news (it’s Christmas vacation), he goes on a lost weekend of sorts as he wanders around New York City.

The title of the book comes from a misinterpretation of a line from a Robert Burns poem, Comin’ Through the Rye — where the poem says “gin a body meet a body/comin’ through the rye,” Holden hears it as “gin a body catch a body/ comin through the rye,” and imagines a scene of children playing in a field of rye with him standing watch, making sure they don’t fall off the cliff. He wants to be the catcher in the rye. The rye field in this case is metaphorical for innocence, especially the innocence of children. There are several accounts throughout the nvoel of Holden trying to protect children; in one case, he rubs the words “fuck you” off of the wall of Phoebe’s school because he worries that someone will explain to the children what it means.

As the novel reaches the end, Holden’s breakdown is becoming more and more apparent. He is overwhelmed by what he perceives as the ugliness and phoniness of the world, including the graffitied profanity on the walls, vulgar Christmas tree delivery men, and visits with his younger sister and his former English teacher that don’t satisfy him and leave him feeling lonely. Holden takes his sister, Phoebe, to the carousel in Central Park and as he watches her, feels deliriously happy:

I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe keptgoing around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around adn around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could’ve been there.

The novel ends abruptly — the last page is Holden revealing that he’s been writing this story from a rest home to recover from his breakdown, and that a psychoanalyist keeps asking him if he’s going to return to school in the fall, which he thinks is a stupid question. His facade of apathy and misanthropy is beginning to crack in the final lines, however:

About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that goddam Maurice. It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everything.

The thing that is the most notable about the novel is the language; not just the liberal use of profanity, but the slang of the time and the stream-of-consciousness form that Holden uses to narrate. Having taught teenagers for two years, this really is how they write, like the pencil and paper are an extension of their thoughts. There is very little planning with my students; they basically sit down, start writing, and turn in whatever comes out, regardless of spelling or grammatical errors or content that should really be saved for Oprah. Reading the book really does seem like you’ve picked up a diary of some emo kid named Holden Caulfield who is annoyed with the world.

J.D. Salinger is known for his writing as well as his publicized recluse status. He gave his last interview in 1980 and refused to let any of his work be adapted into movies after what he considered to be a disasterous movie adaptation of “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.” However, movie studios have been dreaming of turning The Catcher in the Rye into a movie pretty much since its publication. Given that Salinger passed away in January 2010, a movie is probably in the works right now.

This week, the students at my school are taking the state standardized test, so I had three hours stuck in a classroom with seniors who were not testing. Plenty of time to read and tell the kids not to bother me.

The Postman Always Rings Twice is a crime novel (the 1946 film is a film noir starring Lana Turner) that was published in 1934 by James M. Cain. It is rather short, only about 100 pages, but those 100 pages were scandalous enough to get the book banned in Boston, randomly enough.

It starts out rather abruptly. There’s no exposition; in fact, the narrator doesn’t introduce himself until three pages in. Frank Chambers begins the novel by being thrown off a hay truck (he’s a tramp) and wandering into an “auto court” that is half restaurant-half filling station. It’s run by Nick Papadakis, who Frank calls “The Greek” for basically the entire novel and who speaks in stilted English, and his beautiful wife, Cora. The Greek offers Frank a job, since Frank knows a thing or two about automobiles, and Frank repays his generosity by sleeping with Cora, who seems to have a few screws loose herself. When Frank kisses her for the first time, a red flag goes up:

I took her into my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers………”Bite me! Bite me!”
I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.

Um. Ew.

As you’d think, Frank tries to convince Cora to run away with him, but Cora has this aversion to being homeless, I can’t imagine why. So her great idea is to kill the Greek so that they can stay and run the auto court without him. What could go wrong?

The first attempt to kill the Greek involves Cora bashing him in the head with what is described as a twisted beanbag full of metal. She plans to hit him while he’s in the bathtub, to make it appear that he fell in the shower and hit his head, with the added bonus that he’ll drown if the blow to the head doesn’t kill him. But at the exact moment that Cora hits him, a cat steps on the fuse box and blows the fuses in the house, making all the lights go out and Cora panic, for some reason. Frank fishes the Greek out of the water and they call an ambulance to take him to the hospital, telling the cops and the doctors that Nick fell and hit his head. So the Greek survived and doesn’t remember being bludgeoned, so he goes back home with Cora and Frank.

But Frank and Cora! They are so in love! Their love is so true! And Cora reeeally wants the auto court. So they try the same plan in a different venue — this time, they get the Greek sloppily drunk, bash him over the head with a wrench, and then crash the car, leaving themselves with injuries. There is also a very inappropriately timed sex scene after the car crashes into the ravine and Frank has punched Cora in the eye to make it look like she was injured in the crash and it turns them both on. Cora is one twisted sister.

The police and the ambulance report to the scene, and the police are instantly suspicious of what has happened. It turns out, unbeknown to Frank, the Greek had taken out a $10,000 insurance policy two days before the accident. The prosecutor, Sackett, interrogates Frank and gets him to sign a complaint that by crashing the car, Cora attempted to kill him as well. And when Cora finds out, she is PISSED. She writes out a confession that tells everything about her affair with Frank and how he had been involved with attempting to kill Nick.

A lawyer is hired for Frank and Cora, and there is a lot of lawyerly speak involved that I think boiled down to him proving that the Greek had insurance policies before and the accident insurance was just part of the insurance package and that Cora had no idea about it. Or something. But it ended with Cora receiving a suspended sentence and no jail time — her confession was squashed by their lawyer and the prosecution never knew about it. But the fact that Frank signed the complaint and that Cora tried to point the finger at Frank sown some major seeds of discontentment at the auto court.

Frank and Cora return to the auto court, where Cora has major plans for its improvement but Frank just wants to sell it and move on. Then there was something about Cora leaving to visit her mother and Frank met and had a brief fling with a woman who trained and kept wild cats and sends Frank a puma kitten. Okay, then.

They drive to the beach together and Cora tells Frank that she’s pregnant, and they plan a life together, and on their way driving back home, boom, car accident. Cora is killed, and the description is thus:

When I came out of it I was wedged down beside the wheel, with my back to the frontof the car, but I began to moan from the awfulness of what I heard. It was like rain on a tin roof, but that wasn’t it. It was her blood, pouring down on the hood, where she went through the windshield.

UM. EW. Boston, you got this one right.

The cops arrest Frank and pin him with the deaths of both Cora and the Greek, and the end of the book reveals that the story you’ve been reading has been written by Frank in jail as he awaits news of his sentence, whether he gets the death penalty or not. He finds out that there is “no stay,” meaning he will be executed, and asks people to pray for “me, and Cora, and make it that we’re together, wherever it is.”

For as short as the novel is (about 100 pages), it was rather rough to get through. The writing style is very concise and matter-of-fact with very little details. It wasn’t really enough to keep my interest, especially since none of the characters are sympathetic.

And throughout the entire book there is no postman, ringing twice or otherwise.

What to say about The Ginger Man.

Sebastian Dangerfield is the ginger man in question. He is an American living with his British wife, Marion, and their baby, Felicity, in Ireland. But that doesn’t keep Sebastian from drinking his way through their finances and sleeping with any woman who will have him.

The writing, by J.P. Donleavy in the 1950s, is very stream-of-consciousness, to the point where there are places where the narration changes from third to first person without any warning.

Sebastian rolled near, pressing the long, blond body to his, thinking of a world outside beating drums below the window in the rain. All slipping on the cobble stones. And standing aside as a tram full of Bishops rumbles past, who hold up sacred hands in blessing. Marion’s hand tightening and touching in my groin. Ginny Cupper took me in her car out to the spread fields of Indiana.

There is no designation to warn you that the point of view is changing. It makes skimming very difficult, I’ll tell you that much.

Once you get past the shock of Sebastian drinking until his liver gives out and having sex with anything that moves, the book is really rather boring. Because nothing else really happens. And Sebastian is kind of a jerk. As in, he pawns Marion’s things and then spends the money to buy alcohol. Donleavy tries to alleviate Sebastian’s jerkiness by having him realize that he is a jerk, that he’s self-aware and feels bad about the things he does. But that doesn’t make him a lovable rogue. He’s almost amoral in his quest to flee from his responsibilities. There are comedic sections, and Sebastian is indeed charming at times……but he still basically manipulates everyone he knows. It’s frustrating because Sebastian doesn’t change and doesn’t seem to learn any lessons. It really honestly is mainly about a man who likes to drink.

However, I can see how the book came to inspire a chain of pubs. And I look forward to going to the one in Houston.

Cheer up, ginger kid.

A quick Wikipedia search of the next book on the list, The Ginger Man by JP Donleavy, reveals what I have to look forward to when it comes in at the library:

It follows the often racy misadventures of Sebastian Dangerfield, a young American living in Dublin with his English wife and infant daughter and studying law at Trinity College.

and,

A movie adaptation of the book was rumored in development with Johnny Depp playing the protagonist.

A book about someone who resembles Johnny Depp having racy misadventures? Hey-o!

The book, which was published in 1955, was first published in Paris and was originally banned for obscenity by the US and Ireland. However, the US and Ireland warmed up to the book — there are several pubs inspired by The Ginger Man in Dublin and several places in the US, including one in Houston. When bars are inspired by literature, everyone’s a winner.