It’s Saturday, and everybody pretends that they don’t use the Internet on weekends for some reason, so I’ll bash out one of those posts about books and things, since nobody cares much about those. This is part of the ongoing project of recording all of the books I’ve read this year, so everyone can know how fucking smart I am. Or something. Mostly because I’d been telling myself for years that I would track these things, and never did.
Anyway, two down this week- end zone by Don DeLillo and the gonzo way by Anita Thompson.
the gonzo way is a slim book, less than a hundred pages, by Hunter S Thompson’s widow about the lessons she learned from her husband. They married when she was in her late twenties and he was 66. The book collects a lot of anecdotes about Thompson that were in his previous books, but it provides a context for them that had always been missing, to some extent- because he was a teacher in a lot of ways, but his audience was never exactly his student. So his wife’s perspective on these things is fascinating, because she writes as both a student of the man’s life, which only makes sense given the age difference, but also as someone who understood him better than most. Couple that with a pervasive sense of loss and grief that connect the book to a broader set of circumstances, and you get about as complete a reading experience in ninety pages as you can hope for.
end zone, though, is wacky. Most early DeLillo is kinda wacky. The characters don’t have any real internal motivation, and their external actions and choices are therefore sorta random. The novel is about the nuclear war-obsessed fullback for a small West Texas college football team, but all of the players are ciphers, more or less interchangeable. Even the narrator could easily be substituted for any of the other characters in the book, even the teachers or coaches or girlfriends (this is DeLillo, mind you, so girlfriends are never going to be particularly well-considered characters). They all talk in these absurd speeches about things that are the opposite of naturalistic or even logical- it can be really tedious to read until, at some point, you cross a threshold and then it isn’t. I don’t know how he does it, and it makes me want to go back and re-read all of his other early books to figure it out. Because there’s a point at which all of these characters talking relative gibberish suddenly takes on a flow and carries you throughout the book. It has no ending- it just stops- and no plot, either. No conflict, no arc, no protagonist or antagonist of any sort- all of the things that you know a story needs to be a story is missing, and when the babble suddenly becomes coherent, it doesn’t matter even a little bit.
Throughout the book, DeLillo drops lines like this out of nowhere-
‘anatole, i think you should forget your diet. you’d be a better football player at two seventy-five. but a greater man at three hundred plus.’
‘i don’t know squat about football. i’m an indoors man. but i know the whys and wherefores of the entertainment dollar. people want spectacle plus personality. i’ve handled country rock freaks. i’ve handled midget wrestlers. once i handled a song stylist named mary boots weldon who had her goddamn throat removed because of cancer and kept right on singing out of the little voice box they put in their, croaking out these tearful ballads and drawing bigger crowds than ever. mary boots weldon. jesus, what an act.’
‘i don’t know how people can chew just one stick of gum,’ george dole said. ‘i chew all five.’
in my room later i became depressed. no american acepts the deputy’s badge without misgivings; centuries of heroic lawlessness have captured our blood. i felt responsible for a vague betrayal of some local code or lore. i was now part of the apparatus. no longer did i circle and watch, content enough to be outside the center and even sufficiently cunning to plan a minor raid or two. now i was the law’s small tin glitter. suck in that gut, i thought.
‘i’ve never punched or slapped a woman,’ he said. ‘i like to body-check them instead, like a hockey player.’
It’s like a dadaist episode of the office where every character is played by Creed. But then at some point it isn’t, and it becomes powerful and sad.
DeLillo is an interesting writer. I had thought I was done with him, but I saw this book at the Islington North library, where it caught my eye- it’s an import, as books that focus on American football, even by writers with as much international acclaim as Don DeLillo, don’t tend to get published in the UK. There’s a lot to learn from him, and I may have to sit down with great jones street and americana and try to break them apart and see what exactly makes them work. It’s something I can’t quite put my finger on.
Huh- a quick look at the book at Wikipedia informs me that there’s a film version in development now. The plot summary section at IMDB makes it seem like an entirely different monster than the book. Maybe they just really like the title and the character names?
Speaking of terrible film adaptations, here’s something- you know that movie wanted that just came out? Boy, does it suck.
wanted is based on a graphic novel by Mark Millar and JG Jones. The comic is weird and creepy and really mean-spirited; it’s kind of generally unlikable, but in a way that has such a sense of wild fun to it that you can forgive the fact that you’re reading about horrible people and see where it takes you. You’re never asked to directly sign-on to all of the terrible shit that happens- you’re expected to be horrified when the ostensible hero of the piece starts killing and raping indiscriminately because he’s learned he can get away with it. But what the book pulls off well is that it never offers redemption, or even consequences for these things- it’s not a moral story, and it succeeds because it avoids ever trying to be one. There’s no pretense that maybe they’re doing the right thing by killing people for no good reason at all, just the steady awareness that it’s all a comic book and we’ve spent decades reading stories about the good guys, and maybe it was time to see one where the bad guys win. Not only win, but do so easily, without anyone else even putting up a fight. When Wesley, the protagonist, successfully stops the worse guys in the end, he learns no lessons about himself or the world in which he lives, and he never gives a shit about anyone other than himself. It’s all kind of unpleasant and immature, but it’s no worse than fight club. It’s just a story of bad people- think of it as what might happen if Celine wrote superhero comics. It ends with Wesley directly addressing the reader, telling you how much he hates you. The closing words are this is my face while i’m fucking you in the ass.
So you know what you’re in for when you open the book. That’s kind of the whole point.
The movie’s got none of that weird, creepy, mean-spirited fun to it. In fact, it’s got nothing in common with the book at all, except the title, a couple of character names, and Wesley’s backstory. The result is a super-confused picture in which bad guys who aren’t really bad go off and do bad things for vague reasons, and then Wesley becomes kind of a good guy for no reason, and there are big, dumb speeches throughout. I honestly have no idea why they bought the rights. It’s not like wesley gibson and the fox are such spectacular character names that they couldn’t have given them different ones and not bothered with an adaptation, and it’s not like based on a graphic novel by mark millar published by top cow studios ensures box office gold or anything.
But I suppose it comes from the same place as adapting a thirty-five year old novel about the fear of nuclear war and turning it into a romantic comedy. What the hell?
