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On my mom's advice, I read Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and did a term paper on Ken Kesey and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. When I was in 11th grade. I'm not really sure I was ready for the Merry Pranksters. But I really enjoyed it. And I got a big kick out of Tom Wolfe's style.And The Right Stuff became one of my favorite books of all time. Despite being more "masculine" in style than most things I like, it was just so powerful and evocative - and history! - and I loved it.But Wolfe's social commentary fiction? Not so much. Which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy Bonfire of the Vanities or A Man in Full. Because I did. But man, Wolfe can come off as so judgmental. It can be a little much.Which brings me to I am Charlotte Simmons. I was afraid of this book, b/c Wolfe spent a semester at Stanford while I was there, walking around in his white suit and clearly researching such important terms as "hooking up" and "dormcest." And even though talking heads kept comparing his fictional Dupont College to Duke, I knew that it had a whole lot of Stanford in there. And I wasn't in the mood to be judged. Not on my alma mater.And speaking of my alma mater, I felt as though Wolfe laid me totally bare within 10 pages, when a drunken frat boy expounds on the "exaltation" of being recognized as a Dupont student:Everyone, male or female, who was right now, as he was, in the undergraduate division, Dupont College, or had ever graduated from Dupont College knew that feeling, treasured that feeling, sought one way or another to enjoy that feeling daily if at all possible, now and for the rest of his life - yet nobody had ever captured that feeling in words, and God knows no Dupont man, or Dupont woman, for that matter, had ever tried to describe it out loud to a living soul, not even to others within this charming aristocracy. They weren't fools, after all.
And that's it exactly.I was able to forgive the plot implausibilities and fixation on the word "rutting" and annoying self-pity throughout the rest of the novel (which is a fun read btw, in a very longguilty pleasure sort of way) because Wolfe had captured that feeling so completely.
I've read two books in the last little while. One is Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes, a collection of short stories that mostly fits into his general vein, so I won't say too much about that. The other is Keys to Happiness, a Russian Silver Age novel by Anastasya Verbitskaya, which is book two for the Russian Reading Challenge. This book was a serendipitous $1 find at Dutton's some time ago, and I bought it mainly because its title was the genesis for Laura Engelstein's The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia. The latter book was an extremely useful source for my undergraduate thesis, so when I saw the original, I grabbed it.Fortunately, this translation is abridged, and at just under 300 pages is somewhere around 1/3 of the original serialized novel. The translators, both academics, felt that the novel could be a little repetitive, and so chopped it down to the essence. To which I say thank god, because I know I couldn't have made it through an extra 800 pages of the same. KTH was a sensation, full of free love and revolutionary ideals and art and anti-semitism, and I don't even know what else. It's quite a product of its time.Manya, our heroine, has "eyes like stars" and more dancing ability than Isadora Duncan, and captivates a series of archetypal men. She is capricious as all get out, and never has one emotion when she can have five instead. Keeping up with her is exhausting. I'm not going to even try to recount the plot, but suffice it to say it is quite the early 20th-century telenovela.So while the book itself isn't all that fantastic, it's got a lot of historical value. Its huge popularity is a reflection of the changing values of the period, where some men and women threw off the social mores regarding love and sex. Most did not, but they lived vicariously through such vibrant characters as Manya.cross-posted at Russian Reading Challenge
