Finely Polished Regret: Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day

Our country invented the road trip. And a road trip in post-war American literature looks a lot like what we ourselves imagine / insist / dream of our own road trips, when we pile into the car. Open road, adventure, sun, stereo, strange turns, youth, sex. A quick account: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Travels with Charley, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The American roadtripper might not have a destination or even an atlas, but who gives a fuck? The road is it's own reward; even detours prove themselves adventures. In On the Road, as he embarks on the archetype of all road trips, we're talking major Route 66 Kicks here, Sal Moriarty salivates: "Somewhere along the line I knew there would be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.” The pearl. Handed almost effortlessly; notice how the sentence's passive construction eliminates any kind of agent: there's no pearl keeper. The jewel is simply handed over. Keep the window open and the volume up, and the pearl will come. Thanks, road.

Mr. Farraday has something like this in mind, when he suggests his recently acquired British butler, Stevens, take road trip. I'm switching now to the book that currently concerns our gang: Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day. Farraday is an American of the nouveau riche variety, his slick new Ford itself a pearl, he wholly subscribes to his native Road Trip = Pearl Theory: "Why don't you take the car and drive off somewhere for a few days?" he asks Stevens. "You look like you could make good use of a break." What better cure for a bummed out butler? This is 1957, not quite ten years since Moriarty took his own trip west. But the roads just aren't quite the same, on this side of the Atlantic. This is a subtle move by Ishiguro, but it sets up the wider scope of the book. America is a country in the ascendant; meanwhile, the Great Britain's role in the wold has diminished; even more prescient in this book: it's class system is collapsing, and ruins reveal the structural rot.

As Stevens pours carefully over his road atlas, driving gently through the countryside, he isn't so much driving into a future as he is facing his own repressed and misspent past. His journey is not about getting the pearl; it's an account of how the pearl was disallowed a person of his status, how it was stolen from him, denied to him, and in some cases, dropped by him. The British system that Stevens grew up in was no open road: it was more like jail cell (in fact, his room in Darlington Hall is described as a cell twice in the novel). As Stevens drives into the countryside, his insistence that his life was well spent on serving the noble Lord Darlington is belied by the overwhelming evidence that Lord Darlington was a fascist prick. But what makes Stevens interesting is that you can't excuse him, not for ignoring his father as the man lay dying, or spurning Miss Kenton, the one and only person who understands (and is somehow sexually interested in) him. His roadtrip is the inverse of the American version: the trip occurs at the end of his life; the girl he's chasing let's him know he blew it a long time ago, and the vision he's left with rings as an indictment of both the class system of the British Empire and Stevens' very soul:

"I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished? The hard reality is, surely that for the likes of you and I, there is little choice other than to leave our fate, ultimately, in the hands of the great gentlemen at the hub of this world who employ our services."

So, he's lost the girl, spent his life serving a man more evil than good... How should he restart his own engine? What to do with the rest of his day? He decides to to learn how to banter, to better please Mr. Farraday. Oh, Stevens. You missed the sign: Wrong Way.
-Jason

Next Up: A Visit from the Goon Squad

You won't want to miss this bookgang meeting at the Drink this Sunday, March 18th 2012 at 1:30pm. There's music, New York, and adventures in kleptomania. What's not to love! Plenty. But let's get there when we get there. How you gonna get there? MTA says the L train is running. But who really knows?

I'll be flying in, quite literally, to be there. So come. Just come.

Don't forget to bring next book suggestions for the vote-or-death showdown.


This is where the Drink is:

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Jane Jacobs talks NYC like it was

Hi all. Been so long since I saw the gang, but found these photos from the Jane Jacobs book gang meeting back in August and wanted to post them. I still have picts from the Little Birds meeting as well, but it was so long ago that I don't have my notes from our talk.

Anyway, here's the goodness from Jane Jacobs at Caitlin's place. Hope the city warms up soon, and you're all staying out of jail. Many hugs. -Jenna

A Dark n' Stormy Day w/ Shakespeare & Virgil Suarez

As I was digging up background on Shakespeare's biography and criticism of "The Tempest," I became fixated on the question of what drink to serve to the gangsters. Dark n' Stormy, duh. I started digging up recipes, learned that Gosling's Brothers have actually a trademark on the drink, which they require to be served with 1.5 oz of their Black Seal rum (ginger beer to taste, lime optional). The island of Bermuda is involved in this somehow. On BookGang island, though, trademark violations are encouraged. We drank Meyer's and Bicardi, and we talked about the play and the Caliban poems from Virgil Suarez's Guide to the Blue Tongue. Poetry and drama! Bookgang firsts.

In the last book we discussed, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Lord Henry remarks that interesting people make poor artists, while uninteresting people make for geniuses. As an interesting person, I hope this isn't true. But this may be true in Shakespeare's case. That is, whether or not he was interesting is lost to the past. He wasn't brawler like Ben Johnson or a political double agent, like Christopher Marlowe. We're never going to know much about Shakespeare as a man, besides what we know already: he had a wife, a few kids, he acted, he ran a successful theater. He wrote memorable poetry and 38 genius, immortal plays. "The Tempest" is generally regarded as the last play the Bard wrote by himself, and so it's almost easy to read Prospero's final address to the audience almost seems to be Shakespeare's valediction to the theater, to his own art: release me from my bands / With the help of your good hands... / Let your indulgence set me free.


We clapped and set to work on our own dark arts.


-J

Wilde Bookgang Survives Sixth Best Margarita

After three neglectful months, Momma's come back to heal our book spines and correct our calendars. We are back on track and look forward to another year of reading cool books, hanging out with gangsters, and discovering enlightenment through our discussions. Of course, Leslie always looks forward to the "jumping in" of new recruits to the gang.

It took two attempts, this last Saturday in February, to find a West Village bar suitable to our liking. After Vol de Nuit was too crowded and noisy, and Esperanto Cafe "Always Open" was conveniently closed, we settled on Panchito's: home to one of the six best margaritas in town! If quesadillas and tequila weren't the best way to loosen our tongues to discuss Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey, I don't know what was.

It was a lively discussion for all despite that some were reading it for the first time, some were coming back to Wilde's only novel after several years, and some had just finished it right then and there before the discussion!

In the end, our inaugural 2010 discussion was a sweet success. Thanks to Panchito's, even though no one tried the margarita, and thanks to Wilde for quenching our thirst anyway.

Your thoughts and comments on the discussion or the novel are always welcome.

Gangster's present: Leslie, Beth, Jason, Wolfer, Shomijah B, Sebastian, and Jenna


Up next: Shakespeare's The Tempest, paired with a collection of poems by Virgil Suarez, Guide to the Blue Tongue.

Meeting: March 27/28th, location tbd.

The Vice President

Thomas Pynchon, oh you wily old bastard. Always hiding out, never showing your face in public. Lurking in dark corners and leering at the pretty girls in cut-off tops and bikini bottoms that pass you by on the beach. Your imagination drags us by the hair into dark subterranean spaces, sparse suburban housing development sites, like, zomes?, dirty-mattressed surf rock band houses, 1960s Vegas dive casinos and cultish reprogramming spas for Yup-dogs. Your characters have cute & sometimes brain-tickling names, like Doc Sportello (who could also be called The Dude in another dimension or storyline), Japonica, Puck, Trillium, El Drano, Coy and Shasta.

And, dang, dude--can you write a sex scene!

We tittered at your made-up song lyrics, rode shotgun with Doc those times he nearly burned a hole in the front seat of his Datsun dropping doobies while speeding away from bad-guys, we shook our little rebel fists at the likes of Bigfoot Bjornsen when he scolded Doc, then we had to admit we liked the guy and that they were kinda in the same business all along.

Overall, most found Inherent Vice to be a righteous, sandal-trippy, Gordita Beach flippy, hippie-dippy good time. There were plenty of highlights including when neighbor buddy Denis dropping his cosmonaut musings on us ("Dude, Drug? Store?"), hot random sex in a dark closet on a bare mattress with the maid, the reunion of MIA characters with their loving families and of course, a good old-fashion shoot-out at the end. Raymond Chandler would've been proud.

There were some things we weren't 100 percent AOK with. Namely that every lead wraps up pretty nice and tidy, most endings come up happy and all roads lead to Golden Fang (even probably-madeup words like Chryskylodon).

But in the end, you left us with a very nice, love your neighbor, Catcher in the Rye message. As Doc Sportello drives away into the fog, we know that where ever his road leads, he's going to be doing good for others, piecing together puzzles and figuring it all out, man. Thanks for the jokes, the tokes, and the memories... --Jenna

P.S. JW -- thanks for the link to the trailer: http://www.thomaspynchon.com

Nothing Salvaged, Nothing Doused

(a review of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower)

I went to see Wells Tower read in Bryant Park one afternoon. It turned out to be just a moderated Q&A session with two other authors. As he responded to the queries, what immediately became clear was that Wells thinks a lot. He spends a great deal of time in his brain, choosing his words carefully. He has a big forehead, and in response to each question, he’d tilt it down, further intensifying the glare, a scribe looking up from his dusty tome, over the glint of his glasses. Wells wears no glasses.

How does a guy in button-down plaid, Chuck Taylors and jeans come across with such an air of authority? He must read a lot. Not just short stories and the classics, but dictionaries, manuals and encyclopedias. It’s apparent in his work, rife with obscure terms and jargon privy only to the experienced. He possesses acute, technical knowledge, and his readers instinctively trust his grasp of internal workings.

But this is the work of a fledgling sage. His stories have an unpolished feel, an unrefined edge that suggests an apprentice albeit, a precocious one. His stories hinge on obvious literary devices and conceits. The mechanisms are without guile, thinly veiled like a clear-faced watch, and any reader can plainly see how a Wells Tower story tick. The strategies could be taught with diagrams in a writing class to exemplify the tools needed to shape a story.

The collection is varied and eclectic: a man caught cheating on his wife sorts things out in a remote shack, finds kinship with a sea slug; a divorced man somehow gets roped into chauffeuring around his ex’s new husband; a newcomer to carnie life becomes suspect of raping a young boy; a Viking reluctantly leaves his woman home to pillage a distant town and save face in his community. These tales, despite their differences, share a common thread by following disenfranchised characters as they seek passage through misfortune and alienation. Wells writes of people who've lost their footing. They try to regain balance, but they are tired and listless, and receive little respite from the tedium of daily existence. Time grinds on. So it goes. C’est la vie. Disenchanting and honest, Wells does, however, allow them at least that tiny, unsatisfying enlightenment: his characters learn to accept (or at least, to acknowledge) that this weariness is the human condition, and they are granted the strength to continue, for now.

At the Q&A, when asked about inspiration and his writing process, the author likened it to defeat, of being forced to abandon something. At the end of the day, when faced with the world, Wells caves in. He must crawl out of the mire to begrudgingly take up the pen. “It’s like I have to give up,” he says, “before I begin to write.”

The literati have gobbled Wells up. The critics rave, and any story off his desk is pretty much guaranteed publication. He is hot, buttered shit, as they say. But what struck me most when I read his collection was that not a single one of his stories was solid gold. I am not compelled to say that any one of them was thoroughly amazing. There are, however, stunning moments, gold flecks scattered here and there—so refreshing to be reminded that perfection is not easily stumbled upon. In his debut collection, Wells Tower is an author openly humbled by his limitations, sharing the harsh reality that the work before us will always remain difficult.

-s