I learned of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter from the year-end episode of Mapping the Zone. In the podcast, four friends discuss the works of Thomas Pynchon. They took a break in the final episode of 2025 to champion their favorite reads of the year. And here we are.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a Native American vampire novel. It’s not the sort of book that I would usually read, but I enjoyed the historical undercurrent and admired the research that went into making it feel authentic to Native American culture.
Stephen Graham Jones ultimately wrote a revenge story. A good quote sets the stage for the story early in the book: The depravity of man’s heart knows no floor, and everyone in this hard country has a sordid chapter in the story of their life, that they’re trying either to atone for, or stay ahead of. It’s what binds us one to the other.
In this case, the pastor Arthur Beaucarne (aka Three Persons) is bound to Good Stab (the Native American vampire) through atrocities committed in the past. For that, he must pay.
I love the irony of that pastor who feels guilty for eating too much bread but has erased from his mind the role he played in massacring Native Americans. It’s also interesting that Good Stab seeks absolution—and revenge—in the “napikwan’s” house of prayer. Where else could he go?
While the book didn’t deliver a long list of memorable quotes—I didn’t expect it to—I appreciate this line for how close it cuts to the wisdom of James Hollis: We don’t choose the shape or meter of our struggles, however. uOur duty, insofar as this aging pastor can tell, is to simply endure them, and, when and if opportunity arises, overcome them.
I laughed out loud towards the end of the book when Good Stab referred to a sturgeon as a boss fish. It definitely seemed out of character, but why not?
Now, this narrative could go in several directions from here, a few of which I’ve already expired, or will soon, in other stories, Kit Schluter writes in The Rooster Man, a short in his 2024 collection titled Cartoons. I think the way I’d like for it to end, however, is for something completely absurd and unexpected to interrupt the continuity of the story.
Shortened from the original, this passage captures Schluter’s approach to storytelling. Absurdism defines each story in the collection, some which are complemented by Schluter’s bizarre illustrations.
In The Little Children of Heaven, a nurse gives the protagonist a plate of lightly salted children after he wakes in a hospital in the afterlife. In Imaginary Children, the protagonist converses with a heartbroken piece of bacteria that’s the father of everyone on earth. In The Little Pencil That Could, a pencil who fears paper convinces a boy to visit his mom instead of writing her a letter. In An Umbrella, an umbrella navigates criticism and insecurity before the story becomes something else entirely.
Cartoons isn’t a book of ideas, it’s a book of imagination. You press on to see just how absurd the stories get. You wonder what’s going on in Schluter’s mind. And when you reach the end, you discover a silent invitation. Schluter provides several lined pages where you can write your own absurd story and boxes for your own absurd drawings. There aren’t instructions, yet the message is clear: You’ve explored my imagination, now it’s time to explore your own.
Speak to a veteran and they’ll verify a maxim of war: You might make it home, but the battle never ends. Tim O’Brien has been fighting the Vietnam War since completing his service in 1970. He traded the rat tat tat of gunfire for the clickity clack of the typewriter, chasing the ghosts of memory across the page.
O’Brien first wrote of the war in his memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. In Going After Cacciato, he flips from fact to fiction. O’Brien wrote the memoir to remember and the novel to reimagine. The novel is a tale of escape. A fantasy, really. Exactly what every soldier dreams about.
Let’s get this out of the way O’Brien’s short story collection The Things They Carried is much better than Going After Cacciato. It’s one of the best short story collections of all time. The stories are raw and real and rereadable. Few collections hit so hard.
Released 11 years earlier, Going After Cacciato stands out for many of the same reasons. The absence of flare sets O’Brien apart. He uses simple words and short sentences. In isolation, any line feels basic. Knit together, the simple elements engender sophisticated storytelling. O’Brien’s mastery likely has roots in the war, where quick, clear communication can make the difference between life and death. That restraint gives him room to attempt something stranger than realism.
Told from the perspective of American soldier Paul Berlin, the novel follows his squad as they search for Cacciato—a squadmate who has gone AWOL. Where? To Paris, of course! Cacciato abandoned the squad to walk to Paris.
It’s unclear whether anything in the story actually happens. Did Cacciato really exist? Did he abandon the squad? And did they pursue him? Or did Paul Berlin imagine it all from the observation post?
When Paul Berlin watches two people debate in Delhi, for instance, this throwaway passage keeps both possibilities alive: Briefly Paul Berlin slipped back to his observation tower along the South China Sea. Partly here, partly there. Hard to tell which was real.
While both possibilities hold weight, the further I get from the novel, the more I think Paul Berlin imagined it all. The way Paul Berlin describes Cacciato, for instance, makes him sound like someone imagined without the mind of a creator: There was something curiously unfinished about Cacciato. Open-faced and naive and plump, Cacciato lacked the fine detail, the refinements and final touches that maturity ordinarily marks on a boy of seventeen years old. The result was blurred and uncolored and bland. You could look at him then look away and not remember what you’d seen.
And then there are all of the close encounters. Paul Berlin nearly catches Cacciato in the jungle. Paul Berlin spots Cacciato amongst a group of monks in Mandalay. Paul Berlin finds Cacciato’s address in Paris. The result is always the same: he’s never there.
While Cacciato may not be memorable, several parts of the story are unforgettable. Three stand out for me. The first is a debate between Doc and Captain Fahyi Rhallon about whether soldiers operate with purpose. Doc says they don’t. The Captain disagrees. They debate in an underground dancehall as people swing and sway around them.
In another standout passage, O’Brien sends a clear message: We sent a bunch of kids to war without a sense of purpose. The passage includes a brief comparison to World War II, where the objectives were clear in a way that was never true for those fighting in the Vietnam war.
They did not know even the simple things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice. They did not know the feeling of taking a place and keeping it, securing a village and then raising the flag and calling it a victory. No sense of order or momentum. No front, no rear, no trenches laid out in neat parallels. No Patton rushing for the Rhine, no beachheads to storm and win and hold for the duration. They did not have targets. They did not have a cause. They did not know if it was a war of ideology or economics or hegemony or spite. On a given day, they did not know where they were in Quang Ngai, or how being there might influence the larger outcomes. They did not know the names of most villages. They did not know which villages were critical. They did not know strategies. They did not know the terms of the war, its architecture, the rules of fair play. When they took prisoners, which was rare, they did not know the questions to ask, whether to release a suspect or beat on him. They did not know how to feel. Whether, when seeing a dead Vietnamese, to be happy or sad or relieved; whether, in times of quiet, to be apprehensive or content; whether to engage the enemy or elude him. They did not know how to feel when they saw villages burning. Revenge? Loss? Peace of mind or anguish? They did not know. They knew the old myths about Quang Ngai—tales passed down from old-timer to newcomer—but they did not know which stories to believe. Magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark, strange tongues and strange smells, uncertainties never articulated in war stories, emotion squandered on ignorance. They did not know good from evil.
My favorite scene plays out at The Majestic Hotel near the end of the book. Written like a stage play, Paul Berlin and his Vietnamese love interest, Sarkin Aung Wan, each state their case. She appeals to love, he appeals to duty.
Sarkin Aung Wan’s statement includes the following passage: It is easy, of course, to fear happiness. There is often complacency in the acceptance of misery. We fear parting from our familiar roles. We fear the consequences of such a parting. We fear happiness because we fear failure. But we must overcome these fears. We must be brave. It is one thing to speculate about what might be. It is quite another to act on behalf of our dreams, to treat them as objects that are achievable and worth achieving. It is one thing to run from unhappiness; it is another to take action to realize those qualities of dignity and well-being that are the true standards of the human spirit.
Spec Four Paul Berlin: I am asking for a break from violence. But I am also asking for a positive commitment. You yearn for normality—an average house in an average town, a garden, perhaps a wife, the chance to grow old. Realize these things. Give up this fruitless pursuit of Cacciato. Forget him. Live now the dream you have dreamed. See Paris and enjoy it. Be happy. It is possible. It is within reach of a single decision.
Yet it’s a decision that Paul Berlin cannot make. In his words:
Perhaps now you can see why I stress the importance of viewing obligations as a relationship between people, not between one person and some impersonal idea or principle. An idea, when violated, cannot make reprisals. A principle cannot refuse to shake my hand. Only people can do that. And it is this social power, the threat of social consequences, that stops me from making a full and complete break. Peace of mind is not a simple matter of pursuing one’s own pleasure; rather, it is inextricably linked to the attitudes of other human beings, to what they want, to what they expect. The real issue is how to find felicity within limits. Within the context of our obligations to other people. We all want peace. We all want dignity and domestic tranquility. But we want these to be honorable and lasting. We want a peace that endures. We want a peace we can be proud of. Even in imagination we must obey the logic of what we started. Even in imagination we must be true to our obligations, for, even in imagination, obligations cannot be outrun. Imagination, like reality, has its limits.
Paul Berlin’s purpose is his obligation. And his obligation is to the soldiers in his squad. While they cannot find purpose in the war, they have found it in the obligations they have to one another.
You will die and be forgotten. Unless you’re famous, the forgetting takes no more than two generations. You live on in the memories and stories that people share when you’re gone. That’s ultimately what you leave behind: A story.
In Yours Truly: An Obituary Writer’s Guide to Telling Your Story, James R. Hagerty argues that your friends and family members don’t know your story, at least not the way you might expect. Time after time, Hagerty interviewed friends and family members of the deceased only to find that they knew very little about the dearly departed. It is for this reason that Hagerty suggests that you should tell your own story. It’s best to do it now.
A year ago, I came up with a similar idea. In the end, I told people, your life will be reduced to 600 words or less in the back of a newspaper. That will be the story of your life. If you want to understand your life story, write your obituary as though you were to die tomorrow. In 600 words or less, what’s your story? What did you achieve? What were the highlights? Where did you overcome adversity? Who did you love? And what impact did you have on other people?
With that to hand, I suggested writing a second version as though you lived a full life, dying of old age. What do you want that story to be, I asked. Looking at both obituaries side by side, what are the biggest differences? Importantly, what do you have to do differently to make the obituary of your full life into your story?
The idea is that you should take these two obituaries out on your birthday every year. In the case that you die tomorrow, how has the story of your life changed? Are you happy with it? And does the story of your full life hold up? Have you made progress towards realizing that story? Or have your ambitions and values changed in a way that warrants rewriting the story?
I call this The Obituary Project. The trouble is this: I’ve talked to several people about the value of this project but I’ve never actually done it. Writing your obituary is hard. It’s one of the projects I’ve committed myself to in 2026.
I turned to Yours Truly for guidance. Hagerty offers practical advice. First and foremost, just start. If you try to perfect your story, you’ll never get through it. Secondly your obituary should answer three core questions: What were you trying to do with your life? Why? And how did it work out?
Hagerty puts forward a list of questions to ask when writing an obituary—yours or someone else’s. The questions span everything from What are your earliest memories? And who were your first friends? To What was it like the first time you fell in love? And what advice are you most eager to give to young people? There are over 30 questions in total.
While Hagerty’s advice will take obit-writers a long way, I feel Dan P. McAdams offers better advice in The Stories We Live By. McAdams’s approach to the life story interview seems more thorough and, removed from the context of death, less grim. The biggest difference comes down to meaning. Hagerty writes about people he didn’t know after they were gone. In that case, you can only ever shape a story. McAdams writes to surface meaning in people’s lives. The aim is to help people understand why their life matters and reshape the narrative when necessary. I wrote more about that here.
The two approaches can work together. I will incorporate both when writing my obituary lest someone else do it for me.
People die in the name of democracy. Some go to war. Others fight in smaller conflicts. And others still do little more than speak out against authoritarianism and pay the price.
While it’s debatable whether a two-party system with elected officials constitutes a true democracy, most people prefer the illusion of majority rule rooted in “people power” over rule by an iron fist. Those who grew up in democracies might take it for granted. Those who did not may romanticize it.
In May 1980, scores of South Korean students died for the cause. Military dictator Chun Doo-hwan had come to power following a coup six months earlier. True to form, Chun arrested opposition leaders, closed all universities, banned political activities and suppressed the press. The foundations of a better future felt further out of reach, especially for younger generations.
The student-led Gwangju Democratization Movement sought to counter Chun’s oppressive rule. They demanded liberty in its various forms: democratization, freedom of the press, freedom of speech and freedom of association. You might consider these “the basics.”
Pro-democracy protests quickly escalated into the ten-day Gwangju Uprising. Chun deployed the military to suppress demonstrations through force. The uprising began when the military shot at, killed, beat and tortured Chonnam National University students demonstrating against martial law. A week and a half later, the uprising came to an end.
The government put the official death toll at 165. Anyone who disputed these figures was liable for arrest. Decades later, historians estimate as many as 2,300 victims.
In Human Acts, Han Kang explores the Gwangju Uprising and its impact on society. The book takes shape as a series of short stories that provide different perspectives on the uprising. In the first story, we follow as the protagonist searches for his friend’s body in the wake of the massacre. In the second, we get the friend’s perspective in the immediate aftermath of his death, as his corpse is piled among others and his soul leaves his body.
The remaining stories move forward in time. In the third, we meet an editor who, five years after the uprising, struggles with trauma and censorship in her work. In the fourth and fifth we get perspectives from those who were tortured, both struggling many years later. We meet a mother in the sixth story; three decades after the uprising she still struggles with the loss of her son.
The final story comes from Han Kang herself. Written in 2013, she writes of how researching the novel put her into a nightmare-driven depression. Han tells of having left a wedding shortly after the ceremony because she couldn’t endure the presence of other people, their smiles, the cheerful mood, all while she was knee deep in tragedy.
Initially, I considered abandoning the book. Han wrote the first story from the second-person perspective, which rarely works. With the exception of Bright Lights, Big City, which I haven’t read, I cannot think of any celebrated work of fiction written in the second person. There’s a reason for that: It rarely works. I’m glad that I pressed on. Only the first story takes on the second-person perspective. The rest come from the first- and third-person perspectives. On their own, each story is strong. Together, they send a powerful message about the long-lasting impact of tragic historical events.
Human Acts is a personal book written on behalf of a nation. On a personal level, Han was born and raised in Gwangju. On a national level, it was a dark story long overdue for exploration. Han’s fiction made the horror of the past approachable though no less painful. It’s not surprising she won the Nobel Prize.
While I have no connection to South Korea, the book resonated because it’s now very easy to imagine something like the Gwangju Uprising happening in the U.S. As I write, the media is on fire with headlines about ICE killing a second protestor. Once again, the narratives clash. Protestors are being labeled “domestic terrorists.” Right-wing aggression is pressure testing American liberties like freedom of speech and freedom of association. It’s not to imagine a third shooting in the near future and many more afterward. What sad, strange times.
Why do we weep once we know that everything will be alright? We weep because the only way everything could ever be alright is in fiction. We weep because what we've seen can't be true, no matter how badly we wish it were. We weep at the truth.
The truth is that I’ll never reclaim the time that I wasted reading The Instructions. I chose not to stop; that’s on me. Perhaps I put too much stock in the 4.1 rating on goodreads. Why do I put so much credence into the opinions of strangers? Why should I care whether someone I don’t know and will never meet likes a book? My tendency to care about what people think of me worries me more. Maybe there’s a larger issue at play…
The Instructions follows Gurion Maccabee across 1,030 pages as he grapples with a messiah complex and fights as frequently as possible. The book would have been much better at half its current length. Instead, we waste time wading through Gurion’s thought process in passages like this:
If you know your mom is a great killer, and you think of your mom as a great killer, and you know she would kill for you, not just metaphorically, but really end lives for you, without hesitation, you don't want to make her sad and worried because how can you repay her for all the things she's willing to do? You can't.
And this:
Being humiliated only makes it easier to restrain you. And being restrained makes it possible to torture you, for the unrestrained cannot be tortured; the unrestrained can only be fought. So to be restrained is to be unable to fight, and to be humiliated is to be readied for torture. To know you have been readied for torture is to await torture. And to await torture is, itself, torture.
And then there are bizarre passages like this, which make more sense in context but still don’t make the book any more enjoyable:
Don't you feel as though you could love everything starting tomorrow, and everything could love you, if only you took an action to set into motion the coming of our new tomorrow and its tomorrow and that one's tomorrow? Shotgun loaded hand on the pump and no matter who you damage you're still a false prophet, but we drink chocolate milk and then we get muscles and smash down the droves with fists like hammers and then we pump the fists in the air for victory. I be the prophet of the doom that is you. You are the mess in messiah.
Look, you can’t publish a 1,000+ page book unless people see something in it. I’m sure The Instructions has its merits, but they were lost on me. My experience put me off reading any of Adam Levin’s other work.
Thomas Pynchon defies narrative. He explores ideas through dozens of characters and sprawling plotlines, shifting from the Riemann Hypothesis to cartoon characters in the same paragraph. Each Pynchon novel tests the reader in a different way. Sometimes you’ll understand what’s happening. Other times you won’t. But you’ll find something beautiful, entertaining or thought provoking on every page.
Pynchon published Vineland 17 years after his award-winning masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow. The book polarized critics. Some welcomed what they called “Pynchon lite.” Others were less generous. In a letter to a friend, David Foster Wallace said Vineland made it seem like Pynchon did nothing but smoke pot and watch cartoons for nearly two decades.
Filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson ranks among Pynchon’s biggest fans. PTA turned Inherent Vice into a feature-length film and cited Vineland as the inspiration for One Battle After Another. He did that with Pynchon’s blessing, making him one of the very few people to have met the famously reclusive author.
With the exception of V, I’ve read all of Pynchon’s other work. I like Against the Day most of all followed by Mason and Dixon. While Vineland doesn’t cut close, I still enjoyed it and feel it’s a good entry point into Pynchon for the uninitiated. Instead of writing about the plot, I’ve highlighted a few of my favorite passages from the book. Like I said: Some are beautiful, others are entertaining and others still are thought provoking. I’ve categorized them accordingly.
Entertaining
Working in a corporate environment, the sentiment of this sentence feels all too familiar: It was bickering raised to the level of ceremony. (9)
A funny way to characterize and convey a character’s feelings: He looked old enough to’ve been through it before, but who knew, maybe this was his maiden voyage into the green seas of jealousy. (59)
Before joining The Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives, the character DL learned martial arts from a character called Inoshiro Sensei. Oh, the things she learned:
She learned how to give people heart attacks without even touching them, how to get them to fall from high places, how through the Clouds of Guilt technique to make them commit seppuku and think it was their idea — plus a grab bag of strategies excluded from the kumi-Uchi, or official ninja combat system, such as the Enraged Sparrow, the Hidden Foot, the Nosepicking of Death, and the truly unspeakable Gojira no Chumpira. Despite the accelerated schedule, some of the moves Inoshiro Sensei taught FL would only make sense ten years or more from now — requiring that much rigorous practice every day for her even to begin to understand — and until she did understand, she was forbidden to use any of them out in the world. (127)
In Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, Cal argues that feelings are too complex for single-word labels like "sadness" or "joy." He describes emotions as blended states, such as "the happiness that attends disaster." This line in Vineland made me think back to that idea from Middlesex: Ralph never thought of the look on his face as the helpless stare of an older man through a schoolyard fence, but as more the alert beaming of a micromanager. (132)
The increasingly relatable thought of an old man watching kids play through a schoolyard fence, reflecting on how quickly life passed and how far away youth seems, crushed me.
Animals and inanimate objects sometimes express themselves in Pynchon’s works. The episode of Byron the Bulb in Gravity’s Rainbow has been widely celebrated. Byron is an anthropomorphic eternal lightbulb who fights against the Phoebus cartel. The cartel controlled the manufacture and sale of incandescent light bulbs in much of Europe and North America between 1925 and 1939. It took over market territories and lowered the useful life of such bulbs, which is commonly cited as an example of planned obsolescence.
There’s nothing nearly as complex in Vineland, though this passage made me laugh out loud. DL gets kidnapped. Her car gets left behind, wondering where she went: They took her with a matter-of-factness that made her feel like an amateur. Her little car was left alone in its space, sometimes, across miles and years, to call out to her in a puzzled voice, asking why she hadn’t come back. (135)
Here Pynchon writes of a couple who fell in love under the influence and fell out back in reality: They’d been married, as a matter of fact, during a classical sixties acid trip, in which it became beyond clear to them both that in some other world they had been well acquainted. In this one, however, they only seemed programmed for unhappiness. One would find the other across a room and both would gaze awhile, sick with betrayal, remembering the deep and beautiful certainty beyond words, wondering why they should only have had a glimpse and where it might be now. (159)
The characters Frensi and DL were once part of a revolutionary guerilla film unit called 24fps. It makes me think of citizen journalists who capture some of what’s happening on the streets: They went looking for trouble, they found it, they filmed it, and then quickly got the record of their witness someplace safe. They particularly believed in the ability of close-ups to reveal and devastated. When power corrupts, it keeps a log of progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. Who could withstand the light? What viewer could believe in the war, the system, the countless lies about American freedom, looking into these mug shots of the bought and sold? (195)
Several passages in the book speak to the destruction that man has wrought on the environment. In this case, we get a fantastical story about parrots that adapted, especially amid the coming of humans and disappearing of trees:
They saw these birds, kept drunk and quiet on tequila for days, ranked out in front of the great ghostly eighteen-wheeler, bundles of primary color with hangovers, their reflections stretching and blooming along the side of the trailer. Soon there was scarcely a house in Vineland that didn’t have one of these birds, who all spoke English with the same peculiar accent, one nobody could identify, as if a single unknown bird wrangler somewhere had processed them through in batches — “All right, you parrots, listen up!” Instead of the traditional repertoire of short, often unrelated phrases, the parrots could tell full-length stories — of humorless jaguars and mischief-seeking monkeys, mating competitions and displays, the coming of humans and the disappearance of the trees — so becoming necessary members of households, telling bedtime stories to years of children, sending them off to alternative worlds in a replaced and upbeat set of mind, through after a while the kids were dreaming in landscapes that might have astonished even the parrots. (222)
Beautiful
You’ll find Pynchon’s most beautiful writing in his longer works, flashes of brilliance amid the chaos. While there are several in Vineland, I’ll call out just three short passages that were beautiful in different ways.
Here, I love the ideas that hidden structures or forces guide us through cities after sunset: He bounced from one Honolulu bar to another, allowing himself to trust to the hidden structure of night in a city, to a gift he sometimes thought he had for drifting, if not into intersections of high drama and significant fortune, at least away, most of the time, from danger. (61)
Inoshiro Sensei reflects on what he taught DL: This is what he felt he had to pass on — not the brave hard-won grace of any warrior, but the cheaper brutality of an assassin. (127)
And here, a comment on the irresponsibility and irrationality that overcomes peoplewho fall for one another: It was right at the steepest part of his curve of descent into irresponsibility, or, as he defined it at the time, love, with Frenesi Gates. (226)
Thought Provoking
One of the central tenets of narrative psychology is that we are the stories that we tell about ourselves. A passive stance would be to give into what the past has made of us. An active approach focuses instead of what we make of the past. I sometimes struggle to rewrite my own narrative. This passage resonated.
Sure, she knew folks who had no problem at all with the past. A lot of it they just didn’t remember. Many told her, one way and another, that it was enough for them to get by in real time without diverting precious energy to what, face it, was fifteen or twenty years dead and gone. But for Frenesi the past was on her case forever, the zombie at her back, the enemy no one wanted to see, a mouth wide and dark as the grave. (71)
Coming back to work—and everything else, really—this landed like a reminder that it’s hard to do anything if you don’t delude yourself into thinking it’s meaningful in some way: You’re supposed to allow yourself the illusion that what you do matters. (93)
Pynchonian paranoia in the computer age underpinned by commentary on God’s indifference to our existence:
If patterns of ones and zeros were “like” patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least — an angel, a minor god, something in an UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being’s name — its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world. We are digits in God’s computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself for, to be dead or living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God. (91)
At the The Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives, the Head Ninjette tells DL’s partner a story about the Garden of Eden. I confess that I used AI to analyze this passage. The key takeaway here is that the Ninjette’s story reframes part of Genesis as a powergrab. Eden isn’t “fallen” by women; it’s rewritten by men. Power enters history by rewriting origins. Control begins by naming, sorting, and moralizing. And once a system creates damage, it assigns a caretaker. It’s an interesting analysis that brings to mind the rewriting of history in America right now.
This is important, so listen up. It takes place in the Garden of Eden. Back then, long ago, there were no men at all. Paradise was female. Eve and her sister, Lilith, were alone in the Garden. A character named Adam was put into the story later, to help make men look more legitimate, but in fact the first man was not Adam — it was the Serpent.
I like this story, said Takeshi, snuggling into his pillow.
It was sleazy, slippering man, Rochelle continued, who invented good and evil, where before women had been content to just be. In among the other confidence games they were running on women at the time, men also convinced us that we were the natural administrators of this thing “mortality” they’d just invented. They dragged us all down into this wreck they’d made of the Creation, all subdivided and labeled, handed us the keys to the church, and headed off toward the dance halls and the honky-tonk saloons. (166)
One of my favorite passages of the books comes when Vato and Blood — characters who sing a parody version of the Chip n’ Dale theme song using their own names — pass through a sacred area where the Yurok Native American tribe once lived. The Yuroks were different from other Native American tribes in interesting ways. For instance, Yurok doctors were almost exclusively women; in other tribes, men tended to hold such positions.
Here, we learn about the woge — prehuman, immortal spirits who created the world, established culture, and invented medicine, but left for the high country or ocean when humans arrived:
They took the North Spooner exit and got on River Drive. Once past the lights of Vineland, the river took back its older form, became what for the Yuroks it had always been, a river of ghosts. Everything had a name — fishing and snaring places, acorn grounds, rocks in the river, boulders on the banks, grooves and single trees with their own names, springs, pools, meadows, all alive, each with its own spirit. Many of these were what the Yurok people called woge, creatures like humans but smaller, who had been living here when the first humans came. Before the influx, the woge withdrew. Some went away physically, forever, eastward, over the mountains, or nestled all together in giant redwood boats, singing unison chants of dispossession and exile, fading as they were taken further out to sea, desolate even to the ears of the newcomers, lost. Other woge who found it impossible to leave withdrew instead into the features of the landscape, remaining conscious, remembering better times, capable of sorrow and as seasons went on other emotions as well, as the generations of Yuroks sat on them, fished from them, rested in their shade, as they learned to love and grow deeper into the nuances of wind and light as well as the earthquakes and eclipses and massive winter storms that roared in, one after another, from the Gulf of Alaska.
For the Yuroks, who had always held this river exceptional, to follow it up from the ocean was also to journey through the realm behind the immediate. Fog presences glided in coves, dripping ferns thickened audibly in the gulches, semivisible birds called in nearly human speech, trails without warning would begin to descend into the earth, toward Tsorrek, the would of the dead. Vato and Blood, who as city guys you would think my get creeped out by all of this, instead took to it as if returning from some exile of their own. (186) Speculation about which book(s) on Yurok mythology Pynchon has on his shelf often points to the work of Erik Erikson who studied the Yurok people in Northern California alongside anthropologist Alfred Kroeber to link cultural settings with childhood training patterns. I cannot access Erikson’s work, but I do have Kroeber’s book, Yurok Myths, which likely provides the basis for the story of the woge told while Vato and Blood are driving. From Kroeber:
The woge are small humanoid beings who reluctantly yielded the earth to mankind. There is an eerie sense of nostalgic sadness and loss whenever the woge are mentioned in Yurok myths. Inevitably, the woge withdrew into the mountains or across the sea or turned into landmarks, birds, or animals in order to escape close contact with newly created man. Yet the woge are still present in some sense, and they are depicted as being glad to be called upon (in ritual formulas and the like).
Near the end of the book, there’s another reference to Yurok mythology. A bit of desk research yields the following details on how the Yuroks thought of the dead: The dead were thought to go "below" where the dead Yurok had to cross a river on a boat. If the boat tipped over, the corpse was revived on earth. Once the river had been crossed, however, return was impossible. The dead were ascribed to three types of afterlife: those killed by weapons went to "the willows," forever dancing and shouting in a war dance; thieves and "contentious" persons went to an "inferior place"; and a rich, peaceable man went to "the sky."
In Vineland, Pynchon blends Yurok mythology with his own imagination, inviting us to imagine what happens if the boat were smashed: As he drove, Vato told an old Yurok story about a man from Turip, about five miles up Klamath from the sea, who lost the young woman he loved and pursued her into the country of death. When he found the boat of Illa’a, the one who ferried the dead across the last river, he pulled it out of the water and smashed out the bottom with a stone. And for ten years no one in the world died, because there was no boat to take them across. (379)
Critics hail Of Human Bondage as a masterpiece. It’s Maugham’s opus, they say. While it certainly ranks among the influential 20th century Bildungsromans, I say it sucks. Much of my ire comes down to the insufferable protagonist, Philip Carey.
Philip rejects the religion his surrogate parents push upon him. Good! Philip aspires to be an artist in Paris and fails. Great! Philip pursues a relationship with Mildred. Game over! Mildred whips this spineless little weasel around for two-thirds of the novel. Philip’s inability to stand up for himself made me cringe. Perhaps Maugham imagined Philip as a masochist.
Mildred is insufferable, and Philip in turn for his unwillingness to get rid of her. If only he treated her with the disdain that he laid out on the lovely Ms. Carey: But her tears were partly tears of happiness, for she felt that the strangeness between them was gone. She loved him now with a new love because he had made her suffer.
The movie poster says it all.
I much prefer William Boyd’s approach to the Bildungsroman in Any Human Heart and The New Confessions, both rare examples of pop fiction that stay with you after the final page. On the literary side, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is hard to beat. You might place John Irving’s The World According to Garp in the middleground between them.
Now, Of Human Bondage isn’t devoid of substance. Several passages offer the reader something to reflect upon. One in particular stands out for the way it captures what a Bildungsroman is all about: He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded.
Here, too, Philip’s realization conveys what we might expect the protagonist to pursue in a Bildungsroman: It seemed to Philip that there were three things to find out: man’s relation to the world he lives in, man’s relation with the men among whom he lives, and finally man’s relation to himself.
When Philip observes an elderly couple approaching the end of their story, it lands like a warning to the rest of us who are at various stages of our real-life Bildungsroman: Two quiet little people: they belonged to a past generation, and they were waiting there patiently, rather stupidly, for death; and he, in his vigour and his youth, thirsting for excitement and adventure, was appalled at the waste. They had done nothing, and when they went it would be just as if they had never been.
While I didn’t like the book overall, I most enjoyed Philip’s time in Paris, struggling to be an artist. He ultimately realizes and accepts that he will be nothing other than a second-rate artist and thus gives up his dream. Still, that section yielded three of my favorite quotes:
First on what a painter paints: A good painter had two chief objects to paint, namely, man and the intention of his soul.
Next on how a painter paints: We paint from within outwards—if we force our vision on the world it calls us great painters; if we don’t it ignores us; but we are the same. We don’t attach any meaning to greatness or to smallness. What happens to our work afterwards is unimportant; we have got all we could out of it while we were doing it.
And finally on what a painter captures: In Paris he had learned that there was neither ugliness nor beauty, but only truth; the search after beauty was sentimental. Had he not painted an advertisement of chocolat Menier in a landscape in order to escape from the tyranny of prettiness?
One passage stood up above all else. Several searches indicate that Maugham came up with this parable himself. Good work, old boy. The parable ultimately suggests that meaning changes over time and, really, that life is meaningless. But we must live on.
Philip remembered the story of the Eastern King who, desiring to know the history of man, was brought by a sage five hundred volumes; busy with affairs of state, he bade him go and condense it; in twenty years the sage returned and his history now was in no more than fifty volumes.
But the King, too old then to read so many ponderous tomes, bade him go and shorten it once more; twenty years passed again and the sage, old and grey, brought a single book in which was the knowledge the King had sought; but the King lay on his death-bed and he had no time to read even that, and then the sage gave him the history of man in a single line: it was meaningless whether he was born or not born, whether he lived or ceased to live. Life was insignificant and death without consequence.
I swear Jonathan Safran Foer referred to Here I Am as his first adult novel in an interview, but for the life of me I cannot find it. Whether he said it or not, the divorce-driven narrative played out by identity-seeking characters yields his most mature novel yet, but not necessarily his best. I prefer Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
The writing shines in Here I Am. Foer excels as crafting beautiful sentences and creative insults. Across this novel and all the rest, his writing speaks to the human condition. Here, for instance:
All happy mornings resemble one another, as do all unhappy mornings, and that’s at the bottom of what makes them so deeply unhappy; the feeling that this unhappiness has happened before, that efforts to avoid it will at best reinforce it, and probably even exacerbate it, that the universe is, for whatever inconceivable, unnecessary, and unjust reason, conspiring against the innocent sequence of clothes, breakfast, teeth and egregious cowlicks, backpacks, shoes, jackets.
Who among us hasn’t wondered whether some invisible karmic ledger governs the long string of repetitive, predictable days that amount to a lifetime? Sometimes the universe is with us, other times it’s against us. Whether the counterforces are within our control or not, Foer reminds us that only we can do something about it.
Nothing goes away. Not on its own. You deal with it, or it deals with you.
Which brings us to the core problem: All too often, we blame our problems on people around us or the world at large. Pinning our problems on others doesn’t solve them. And we’ll never win against the world. When we cannot solve our problems—when they really are outside of our control—the solution requires a shift in perspective in the vein of Viktor Frankl.
The problem was the world. It was the world that didn’t fit. But how much happiness has ever resulted from correcting the record on the culpability of the world?
Spread across the novel, these thematically consistent insights cut to the heart of what it’s like to be human. As does this passage in which Jacob reflects on his wife’s hobby:
Her homes were just stupid little exercises, a hobby. She and Jacob would never have the money, nor the time and energy, and she’d done enough residential architecture to know that the desire to wring out a few more drips of happiness almost always destroyed the happiness you were so lucky to have, and so foolish never to acknowledge.
We always want more and we’re fast to overlook what we have. This, too, is part of human nature. More often than not it’s desire itself that we want, not the object that we claim to covet. How often do we stop, look around and tell ourselves, yeah, I have everything I need?
What the protagonists in Here I Am needed was space. So they divorced. Wellness by Nathan Hill is a more exacting divorce novel. Here I Am aspires to do too much by tying divorce together with themes of Jewish identity. Yet, Here I Am is more fun to read. While it’s more mature than Foer’s earlier works, he retains the playful ness that made his earlier works so enjoyable.
A famous author once said he wished that he had written Gilead. It struck me as the highest form of flattery that one writer can bestow upon another. For the life of me, I cannot remember who made the comment, but it persuaded me to buy the book.
Gilead takes the form of a letter. Nearing the end of his life, 76-year-old Congregationalist minister John Ames writes a letter to his seven-year-old son. Ames reflects on his past, faith, and the history of his family. While the book didn’t do much for me, Marilynne Robinson’s prose and storytelling are praiseworthy.
I’m writing this long after completing the book. I cannot recall the details. Instead of a review, I’ll call out a few of my favorite lines.
Less than 10 pages into the book, Ames delivers a truth that’s lost on us all from time to time: A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy much more than you would ever imagine. Above all, mind what you say. ‘Behold how much wood is kindled by how small a fire, and the tongue is a fire’ — that’s the truth. (7)
Still within the first 10 pages, a sad truth about human relationships: You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension. (8)
Further along, something relatable: I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. (45)
On the same page, Ames makes reference to Proverbs 27:7. I love the way the proverb is worded: “The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.” There are pleasures to be found where you would never look for them. (45)
Not exactly comforting this one: There are three parties… even to the most private thoughts — the self that yields the thought, the self that acknowledges and in some way responds to the thought, and the Lord. (51)
Here, Ames writes of guilt. While this feels about right, I believe shame is worse than guilt. You can atone for guilt, but shame is a weight on the soul: It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and dankness, just as native as water. (93)
Another zinger: People who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice. (112)
Here, What Ames says reminds of Mark Twain’s line on how the worst things in his life never happened to him: Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. (118)
On communication: This morning you came to me with a picture you had made that you wanted me to admire. I was just at the end of a magazine article, just finishing the last paragraph, so I didn’t look up right away. Your mother said, in this kindest, saddest voice, ‘He doesn’t hear you.’ Not ‘He didn’t’ but ‘He doesn’t.’ (162)
Jung argues that we should embrace our fears and anxieties. We’ll come out better for processing them. Ames is more poetic: The worst eventualities can have great value as experience. And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer. (176)
Light in the darkness: What is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble? (267)
On fear: He was expounding the wonders of the larger world, and I was resolving my heart never to risk the experience of them. (268)
