Creativity may be in NP, but theme is O(N^2)

A visit from the goon squad

A Visit from the Goon Squad is an upbeat book that pretends, for most of its 273 pages, to be the just the opposite. The novel opens with kleptomaniac New Yorker Sasha, who is having a difficult time controlling her habit: she steals a woman's wallet, and penitently returns it after swearing the woman to secrecy. Later, we are treated to procession of junkies, of musicians grown fat and cranky, of ex-jailbirds wanting a new start; of adulterers; of mildly untruthful wives, and their capitalistically-minded record-producer husbands; of the suicidally unloved. The profusion of characters, and the rather saturnine turns their lives tend to take, is meant to point at the pathetically fragmented lives that the fin-de-siecle generation are doomed to lead; Goon Squad is thus a postmodern novel as well as a novel that aspires to the condition of postmodernity, a rarity in today's literary climate, in which novels of the former kind feature cheerfully self-conscious narrators with a talent, or at least a taste, for the grotesque, and those of the latter kind exist, if at all, as gleams in the eyes of a few comp.lit senior-years from Stanford.

But Jennifer Egan, the author, is too kind-hearted, or perhaps too content, to follow this oddly plausible vision to its logical end. For Egan, pathos = drama, but also pathos = hope, which is a rather obvious, New-York-Times-Top-20 kind of viewpoint. She would rather be programmatically forgiving than thoughtfully vatic; she cleaves to a certain mentality that the rich New York based author seems to find irresistible, namely that a) New York is the center of the universe and b) New York will heal everything, including poverty, deadbeatness, obscurity, kleptomania, and, paradoxically, narcissism. (She shares this aesthetic with several of her colleagues, among whom number Jonathan Franzen, Colum McCann, and nearly all of the anointed twenty under forty, to name only the ones that immediately come to mind.) For her, New York is to literature what LA is Hollywood, a fact which, if true, should cause more depression than joy.

But it's all good. Goon squad achieves a canny populism---readers are sure to praise its large "palette" of characters, its plotless grandeur, its thematic coherence, and its symmetry---at the expense of... almost everything else worth talking about, but this is a loss that such novels can take very gracefully. Egan is one of a cabal of writers---Franzen is another---who are able to silence detractors at nearly every sentence, every scene, every piece of dialogue that passes between their characters; never mind the crumbling building, look how beautiful its bricks are. The fact that we value such novelists over, say, less obviously brilliant ones, the anti-David-Mitchells of the world, the dogged pencil pushers with high-flown artistic ideas but zero economic nous, is probably more our fault than theirs. They, like Fox News or Fukushima, are just giving us what we want.

Some Heaney to clear the rancorous air...

In the Beech

I was a lookout posted and forgotten.

On one side under me, the concrete road.
On the other, the bullocks’ covert,
the breath and plaster of a drinking place
where the school-leaver found peace to weigh
his chances with the pale thug in his fork.

And the tree itself an old one and a new one,
as much a column as a bole. The very ivy
puzzled its milk-tooth frills and tapers
over the grain: was it bark or masonry?

I watched the red brick chimney rear
its stamen course by course,
and the steeplejacks up there at their antics
like flies against the mountain.

I felt the tanks’ advance beginning
at the cynosure of the growth rings,
then winced at their imperium refreshed
in each powdered bolt-mark on the concrete.
And the pilot with his goggles back came in
so low I could see the cockpit rivets.

My hidebound boundary tree. My tree of knowledge.
My thick-tapped, soft-fledged, airy listening post.

Depression

Far and away the most desolate birthday of the past decade. Reading a cliche-ridden article about Hindutva in Caravan Magazine has *not* helped. Sample soundbites: "The cynosure of all eyes at the convention is not[...]"; "the bubble of my youthful confidence in the party burst, and the dark underbelly of its politics was [...] laid bare"; "the entire top brass of the leadership". Bah! I'm not, as a rule, crotchety about the odd cliche; I recognize that journalistic articles are written under a time constraint, and mannerisms do tend to slip through. But this article (to which I will *not* link) has the reverse problem: too much time on the author's hands, enabling him to draw, Rushdie-like, a parallel between the trajectory of his life and that of the BJP. He meditates on the apparent coincidence that he and the BJP were born on the same month, and follows himself into some 'brilliant' conclusions, conclusions which are supposed to lend a 'form', or 'structure', to an otherwise idea-bereft essay. Well, Mr Chowdhury, not only is your essay bereft of ideas, it is also insincere, strenuous and an utter waste of time.