Ape Mind Transcripts

I tried to read Jonathan Franzen’s latest story in the New Yorker, “Agreeable,” and I had to abandon it on the first page. I usually try to soldier through with the fiction, but he’s shameless in loading the deck for his protagonists, employing characterization that’s about as nuanced as a Snidely Whiplash appearance on the Rocky and Bullwinkle show.

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John Crowley’s “Little, Big” is a sprawling, lyrical fantasy epic. It is a work of high style, one Crowley executes with skill rare for the genre. He teases his sentences into precise, beautiful forms, situating them the page like typeface origami. Even if his phrases are occasionally overdone, they often succeed in shaping fresh metaphors, new views onto a created world.

Crowley’s fantasy setting strays far from common touchstones of elves and named swords. It is fixed in myths and prophecies, a fairy world at the edge of sight. The story revolves around Edgewood, a mysterious house designed by an older architect as a beacon for his younger wife—and perhaps the fairies she communes with. It is isolated, anchoring a pastoral community at some distance from a big city.

A family—a tribe, really—has grown there. They stand in uncertain commune with the spirits surrounding them, unsure, it seems, whether they exist at all. Some can see these visitors better than others—the women and children, mostly—but no one can explain their visions. It’s all part of a larger Tale, they assure the bewildered outsiders who come to follow love and father children. No one will know the deeper meaning until it’s over.

Crowley succeeds in building a familiar, but unknowable, society, especially at the outset. His family feels organic; his house, lived in. He sketches a mystery, leaving you eager to find a solution.

But the book falters later. Like its characters, it ends up re-treading beautiful, circular paths of the imagination. The characters’ confidence in what is written—the larger Tale—grounds them in a frustrating passivity. They are acted upon, by human and unknown forces, but they rarely seem to act themselves. Crowley’s male protagonists are especially inert, hapless wonderers content to lapdog along. Toward the end, when the characters arrange themselves on their pre-set paths, it’s increasingly uncertain why they choose to acquiesce. Rationalizations are offered, touching upon passion and duty, but these are spoken rather than felt.

Crowley is at his best with beginnings, notably the piercing passion of early love. He writes with a sure eroticism, luxuriating in reckless idleness, time spent unheeded in beds and bars. His willingness to leave “the Tale” here is energizing, and some of the book’s biggest disappointments come when we’re forced back into the larger narrative.

“Little, Big” is suffused with blunt mysticism, the heavy strivings of Crowley’s attempts to establish an unknowable world. The book is dense and beautiful, offering the delights of realized ambition. But it is also a chore, losing its way at times as it meanders within itself. If you accept it as a journey, you’ll find many rewards. As a destination, its value is less certain.

Lapham’s Quarterly has a fun infographic showing the day jobs of writers including Faulkner, Kafka and T.S. Eliot.

James Patterson’s “Witch and Wizard” could be summed up as Harry Potter meets 1984, except without any vision, effort or grace. The plot revolves around two teens dragged from their parents by the totalitarian “New World Order.” Prison, terror, ham-handed magic, and kewl “if teenagers ran the world” mythmaking follow before the book reverts to its opening cliffhanger, setting the way for the obligatory—and unnecessary—sequel.

What makes the book so objectionable? The first strike is the obvious lack of effort that went into its creation. Most chapters expire after two–four pages of rote plot progression. None of the characters are fleshed out; the lead voices narrate away in a kind of dashed-off “teen speak.”

Their powers are applied arbitrarily, without any notion of struggle or growth. The villains are single-note enough to be deemed unworthy of “24” fan fiction. The plot leans on tired “chosen one” tropes, the rules of this “New World” are never established, and the betrayals and retreats read like so much plot padding.

Most offensive, though, is the book’s cheap borrowing of totalitarian/eliminationist themes. The New World Order and its prisons knowingly evoke gulags and concentration camps, complete with torture and executions. But the book constantly undermines the weight of its references by failing to consistently apply their menace. The narrators shrug off torture and murder as another total bummer. Quislings are redeemed without the satisfaction of guilt, and the monstrous laws of the New World Order are equipped with a few booming loopholes to enable lazy writing.

“Witch and Wizard” plays out like a cash grab that was written and conceived in the same three-day weekend. The plot summary on Wikipedia offers as much style as the novel itself and is much less insulting to the reader’s intelligence.

My Wild Kingdom is the autobiography of former Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom host (and Lincoln Park Zoo director) Marlin Perkins. The narrative is linear, starting with his Missouri boyhood and moving on to far-flung expeditions scuba diving with sharks and snowmobiling alongside reindeer migrations.

The early parts are compelling, as Perkins remembers a pre-Depression childhood, conjuring an era and setting that still carry a whiff of the frontier. He works his way across the country, starting his career with animals by dropping out of college to take a job at the St. Louis Zoo.

As a narrator, Perkins is confident and straightforward, offering recollection without much reflection. His lifelong love of animals–particularly snakes–is tempered with a blunt collector’s approach that can seem exploitative today. While the book bogs down a bit at the close with details of filming Wild Kingdom, he remains intriguing and approachable throughout, particularly for fans of animals.

“Ghost in the Shell” is regarded, I believe, as a landmark work in manga, and there are some definite strengths here. Shirow creates a compelling futuristic world, peopled with androids, cyber communicators and other augmented humans.

For his story, he presents an anti-terrorism squad on a series of loosely linked jobs. The tension is real, as is the “realpolitik” of their barely sanctioned work. The art is excellent, with branching circuits and beautifully detailed cityscapes. “Ghost in the Shell” is an easy work to immerse yourself in.

At the same time, the storytelling can be disjointed and difficult to follow. While Shirow states that he doesn’t like exposition, it’s easy to become lost in the stories, losing track of identity of characters or the relationships between larger political entities.

It’s admirable that he wants to use his story to explore the ramifications of artificial intelligence. (Is a sufficiently advanced robot different from a human? He doesn’t seem to think so.) However, the last chapters stray from the strength of the shadowy world he’s created in favor of armchair metaphysics, with large sections that prove to be skippable. The story ends very far from where it began, and this transition is to the detriment of the book.

Even people who haven’t read the play can recite lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “Et tu, Brute;” “I come not to praise Caesar but to bury him.” But the well-worn quotations produce a simplified sense of the plot, evoking an atmosphere of tyranny and retribution instead of the quickly shifting political landscape that makes up the drama’s core.

Shakespeare’s presentation of the political backstory is a model of economy, as he skillfully sums up the players, their alliances and their differing motivations. The nobility of Brutus is well-captured, as is the jealousy of Cassius and the fluid adaptability of Mark Antony.

But even as these iconic characters drive the action, they are also driven by the fickleness and easily kindled rage of the Roman mob. Citizens throng the streets, burn buildings and commit murder. Their allegiances flit back and forth on the basis of the latest soliloquy. To Shakespeare’s credit that these shifting loyalties never descend into deus ex machina. Instead, they seem to reflect the bloodsport of Roman politics, where leaders attempt to direct the mob even as they’re surrounded by it.

Shakespeare also adds his trademark psychological torment to the mix. As Brutus plans to strike down Caesar, he reflects:

“Between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma, or a hideous dream: The genius and the mortal instruments are then in council; and the state of man, like to a little kingdom, suffers then the nature of an insurrection.”

The language throughout is choice and fluid, and it’s funny that Shakespeare’s phrasings have come to define our view of Roman culture. (See how many period films have characters speaking in English accents; the HBO miniseries Rome, which we just began watching, is one of them.) Even as Shakespeare evokes the era, he remains faithful to the larger movements of history, making Julius Caesar a fine summation of its time as well as an excellent work of drama.

In Shaman’s Crossing, an excellent light-fantasy novel, Robin Hobb succeeds in not only creating a compelling world but also establishing a rich, branching worldview to anchor it.

The book revolves around Nevare Burvelle, a solider son, as all second sons of nobility are destined to be. Nevare’s father is a member of the new nobility, granted his title for valor as an officer in the king’s cavalry, and Nevare is raised to fill his heredity role as soldier.

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Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is a bizarre, ranging comedy. The play jumps so lightly between slapstick and cruelty that it’s unclear whether it’s a dark farce, a bloody satire exposing the dangers of absolute power, or a moldy amalgam of cuckoldry, class, and misogyny.

The premise has a king baselessly charge his queen with infidelity. He believes she’s slept with his brother, who wisely flees a plot to murder him. Suspected adultery is a common hook for Shakespearean comedy, with misunderstanding harmlessly giving way to reconciliation, but this story doesn’t skip to a happy ending. People die—one lord is famously eaten by a bear—and their quick, brutal ends remain unredeemed, the senseless spinoffs of a king’s jealousy.

While the king eventually claims guilt, he keeps his throne and privilege, with no consequences for his actions. It is clear that he lives by his whim, above laws, his station ensuring his status.

Similarly, his brother rages in his own kingdom, threatening murder and torture, in great detail, to peasants who have unwittingly displeased him. Lovers flee, false identities are discovered, and the play pushes itself to a magical ending. By the final scenes, the medium itself has been strained and exposed. The most momentous events take place offstage; the final scene unfolds as an inside joke, poking fun at the staged setting to work the miracle.

What did Shakespeare intend as he wrote The Winter’s Tale? Is the casual cruelty a nod to cynicism as he reached the end of his career? Was it meant to highlight life’s unevenness, the capriciousness of kings? Would the audience have laughed at the king’s jealousy or his brother’s rage? Would the kings have been viewed as “bad” kings, or would their failings have been standard for the lot? Did the play seek to evoke the sword that dangles above a nation of subjects? Or was it just a bundle of jokes, summing up man’s eternal folly?

It’s a strange, mixed bag, but there seems to be some subversiveness in it, along with a great deal of sadness and resignation. Terrible things happen for no good reason, it tells us. Sure, sometimes all ends well. But more often, in the end, you’re just food for the bears.

Pox Americana follows the smallpox epidemic that spread through North America from 1775-1782, tracing its impact on the Revolutionary War and Native American and Colonial society. Historian Elizabeth Fenn is meticulous in chronicling the devastation, using firsthand accounts and surviving records to sketch out the death and fear that followed the disease.

The impact of smallpox on the Revolutionary War occupies much of the book. Epidemiologically, the Americans were at a disadvantage. Smallpox was endemic in Europe, and British soldiers were much more likely to have been exposed to the disease, gaining immunity. This vulnerability led to serious losses during the revolutionary army’s invasion of Canada, as smallpox weakened and killed susceptible soldiers.

George Washington struggled with the decision of whether to inoculate his soldiers. Under the imperfect technique of the time, inoculation was a draining affair, confining inoculees to sickbeds. The process also potentially increased the risks of transmission, as inoculees were contagious during the dormant period that followed inoculation. Fenn skillfully uses this dilemma to build tension in a historic account.

In the post-Revolutionary period, Fenn focuses on the impact of smallpox on Native American populations throughout the continent, offering repeated accounts of decimated villages and devastated cultures. Native peoples were more vulnerable to the disease, and the successive accounts of loss are heart-rending.

The book is thorough and engaging but can be technical in its presentation of history. The larger themes of the Revolutionary War aren’t fleshed out. The author, it seems, is confident that readers will remember battles and developments they may not have encountered since elementary school. But the book is compelling in advancing its central theme: the outsized impact of this continent-wide epidemic.