I really cannot believe I read this.

The Hopeless Romantic's Handbook - Gemma Townley
New York: Ballantine, 2007

I am really enjoying Infinite Jest. A lot. But it is hard work. (Lots of testimonials to this fact over at the Infinite Summer site.) Instead of giving up, I am taking brain breaks. I have also been fighting off a cold.

All of which led to reading this. Believe me people, I KNOW. And I'm not even going to go into the story of how I came across it. What has been fun - and more fun than reading the book, which was fine, I guess - has been casting the actors in the film version. I've gotten as far as NOT Keira Knightley thankyouverymuch for Kate (maybe Natalie Dormer? or Jacinda Barrett?), Martin Freeman for Tom. I'm having more trouble with Joe, perhaps b/c I can totally picture him but can't think of the actor who is most "him." Leaning toward someone like Teddy Dunn. Anyway, I am back to the tome and on track to finish before my semester starts.

Characters I Love

Memories are slippery, so I can't be sure exactly how dramatic this moment actually was, but I remember sitting, at 17, in a waiting room at Kaiser. I was there with my grandmother for some appointment or other, and I was reading War and Peace. (Isn't this how everyone spends the summer after their high school graduation?) Anyway, I had a thing for Prince Andrei. In fact, I'm looking forward to re-reading the book just so I can see how he holds up over a dozen years. And so there came a moment where another character acts in a way that will hurt him, and I exclaimed, to the whole room, "You whore!" Um, that was embarrassing.

Anyway, he's not the only character I have gotten too close to. And if you add in tv shows and movies, I am over-empathizing with characters all the time. But he's still the one that matters the most.

And now, reading Infinite Summer, I find myself (like Avery Edison) liking Hal Incandenza just a little too much. And fearing for him. Avery says anxious, and since I have such a close personal relationship with anxiety, it goes without saying that that's the best word for it. I just... I want it to be okay. But I don't think it will be.

I've always liked to root for the bad guy and tried to create antiheroes where they didn't exist. And I was down with my ex who, we joked, only liked movies where people died at the end. And yet.... A co-worker was telling me something he heard about ways in which women conceive of fairness differently than men. And really, when it comes down to it, as much as I don't want to be like everyone else, man do I crave the happy ending. I want things to be the way they are supposed to be. Which isn't always happy per se. But is the way I feel like it should be. It's unoriginal perhaps, and quite possibly is pretty unhealthy, but it's me.

All that said, I can't imagine DFW giving me what I want. And probably I'd respect him less if he did.

A descent into...?

Atmospheric Disturbances - Rivka Galchen
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

This book had been on my To Read list since sometime last year, but it got bumped to the library request list when it appeared as a Slate audio book club selection in May. (Then I had to wait to actually get and read the book, so finally just listened to the podcast last week.)

This is one of those books that's so clever that I sort of feel like I won't be able to say anything sufficiently clever about it. But not in an annoying way, just in a "it is what it is" sort of way. Leo is a psychiatrist, which somehow gives him enough mental credibility that you want to believe him when one day an impostor comes home instead of his wife. Despite being right to almost the slightest detail, he knows she's not his Rema. So he goes off looking for here, and gets caught up with the Royal Academy of Meteorologists, with which one of his clients (also missing, like Rema) claims to be a secret agent. Long story short, the line between what is real and what is in Leo's head is constantly shifting as the simulacrum tries to persuade Leo to come home to her.

I expected this to be mostly a meditation on the ways in which we fall out of love, or love changes, and the person you loved is suddenly gone and replaced by someone else. It's a great metaphor. But it's that, and more and less than that too. It's about perception and love and loss and the lies we tell ourselves and those around us, and the impossibility of ever perfectly knowing another person. And it's about the ache you feel for Leo (and his wife) when you see how he almost loves this replacement Rema, and wants to love her, and yet there is this block that prevents him from seeing her for who she is.

Some points:

• I noted some similarities - in title mostly, but also in style - with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and was annoyed with the book club for pointing out the same thing and making me feel less original.
• Completion error: "with any incomplete perception - and needless to say all perceptions are incomplete - the observer 'fills in' by extrapolating from experience. Or from desire. Or from desire's other face, aversion. So basically, we focus fuzzy images by transforming them into what we expect to see, or what we wish we could see, or what we most dread to see." I love this quote in its own right, but I love it even more for Leo's further statement of being reassured that he knew right away that the impostress wasn't Rema instead of falling into completion error, without having considering that he is just committing the opposite completion error.
• Too lazy to check whether Leo's attribution to Freud is accurate, but he credits Freud with the belief that "there's always a thicket of past people between any two lovers." Leo then goes on to disagree, but really, isn't love about sorting one's way through the thicket in order to truly find each other?
• The book gets surprisingly and randomly funny toward the end, perhaps to mitigate how tragic everything is starting to feel, with a set of mistranslated drinks on a menu: Bloody Girl & Bloody Great. Also "I crash." (The first two seem to be sangria, the last maybe cocoa?)

And so that's it. Clever to be sure. But also quite touching. And disturbing too. But it was melancholy and yearning that stuck with me.

Did I mention I am doing this?

Infinite Summer

Which is not quite what it sounds like, the long lazy summers of my youth. Or at least, the ways we choose to remember the summers of our youth.

Anyway, I am reading DFW's Infinite Jest, alongside a cast of thousands. And as could be expected, I started late, then got ahead, and now have stopped to read another book. But it's fantastic. I don't think I know how to talk about it. I tried, a little, yesterday, and ended up mostly speechless. All I could really say was that his mind worked in a way that we, as mere mortals, can't really understand. Which is what made him a genius. And also what must have been such pure torture.

It's not really about cricket at all

Netherland - Joseph O'Neill
New York: Pantheon Books, 2008

Right before I started reading it, I found this Wonkette description of Netherland:

Recall last summer: it was the summer of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, the most important book liked by people wearing the most important-looking glasses. It seems O’Neill has journeyed from that wire-rimmed menagerie of the psyche to Politics & Prose, where all such odysseys of the soul must, and do, eventually terminate.

And I thought to myself, that sounds about how I remember the talk about this book. And while I generally don't wear glasses (current facebook profile pic aside), I figure that since I like the sort of books those people like, it's a good thing I've finally checked this out from the library. Oh, plus, it's a 9/11 book, and I'm kinda fascinated by those. (Like this one and this one.)

But just like it's not really about cricket, it's not really about 9/11. Except it's not not about them either. It's about love and loss and rediscovering oneself. And - and this is what makes it most about 9/11, for me - it is a love story about America, and NYC specifically. What is it about America that keeps pulling people toward it? Why are we a nation of immigrants?

I found Hans a lovely and thoughtful - albeit lost - narrator. It's as though he serves almost entirely as a mirror to hold up the world and the other characters he sees. But anyway, a few of the lovelier observations from Hans:

• Even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I'd placed under my life's leaking ceiling, had become too small to contain my misery.
  
• Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?
• I was possibly the only person contained by the apparent world who was unable to see through it.

And, finally, "my secret, almost shameful feeling is that I am out of New York - that New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin." Which reminded me of nothing so much as E.M. Cioran:

All that is not Paris being equal in my eyes, I often regret that wars have spared it. [...] I shall never forgive Paris for having bound me to space, for making me from somewhere.

Which is a lot for a city to shoulder. But if any cities can, they are NYC and Paris. And what of my City of Angels? In what ways is it so much like and unlike the others? Could a different Netherland be set here?