Saturday, January 29, 2005
Hiaasen and Pavic
What do Milorad Pavic and Carl Hiaasen have in common?
Precious little, as it turns out, except that I finished novels by each of them a few days ago, and I found both rather disappointing. I came to both with high expectations -- The Dictionary of the Khazars got terrific reviews when it first came out, regarding both its interesting structure (about which more below) and its language and story. I don't recall reviews of Stormy Weather (the Hiaasen novel I read) in particular, but I've seen good mentions of his work all over, not least in Frazz, one of the comic strips I read.
And there was nothing particularly wrong with Stormy Weather, other than excessive expectations. It's a nice sort-of thriller, with a pleasantly complicated plot and some interesting (mostly quirky, but I can live with that) characters and reasonable twists and interesting language.
So what was there to be disappointed with? Well, the language kept reminding me of a sort of low-key Elmore Leonard, and one thing Leonard does fairly consistently is to challenge our ideas of what is good behavior. This is one of my bugs about fiction -- it is always about what constitutes good behavior or morality. And Leonard makes us think about it. Hiaasen, on the other hand, is pretty straight mainstream moralism. The farthest out he gets is having a major character who is opposed to the overdevelopment of Florida real estate and tourism. There's a touch of vigilantism, too, but the guy to whom it is applied is so ludicrously evil that it's hard to object to his demise (and it's only indirectly the responsibility of the good guys).
The Pavic was more of a disappointment, since I was led to expect a first-rate work of art. It's entirely possible that the book was beyond me, but I'm a fairly smart guy, and I've read a lot, even a fair amount of poetry. The poetry is relevant because Pavic is primarily a poet, and this was his first novel.
If you don't remember the reviews, The Dictionary of the Khazars is presented as not one but three encyclopedias, with entries arranges alphabetically. The conceit is that there is a mystery over the history of the Khazar people and whether they converted to Judaism, Islam, or Christianity. (Historically, there seems no real controversy; they adopted Judaism overwhelmingly but not unanimously, and adopted religious tolerance around the same time.) The three encyclopedias represent the fragmentary knowledge, and the search for further knowledge, among Christians, Muslims, and Jews, in particular about the participants in the supposed Khazar Polemic, where all three faiths were represented. The structure, in fact, is fascinating, and works reasonably well. All the information is there, and we can organize it however we like into whichever story we prefer. I did read the book straight through, but you could also start at any point and browse forward and back, much like hypertext, following associative connections. You might well come away with a different sense of what the story was and what it was about than I did.
So far, so good. But Pavic wants more from this book than amusing structure. He wants to talk about the nature of time and language, and he wants to talk about them in poetic terms. That is, he wants us to perceive them not through direct description but through metaphors. Many of the metaphors, perhaps nearly all of them, are lovely and evocative. But I got overwhelmed by them. Enough was enough, and eventually I was ploughing through them rather than savoring them. There was no solid ground where I could rest my feet while swimming through the poetry, and it lost its meaning for me. I'm glad I read it, but I won't read it again.
Now, on to The Worst Journey in the World and Agape Agape (William Gaddis).
dmh
Precious little, as it turns out, except that I finished novels by each of them a few days ago, and I found both rather disappointing. I came to both with high expectations -- The Dictionary of the Khazars got terrific reviews when it first came out, regarding both its interesting structure (about which more below) and its language and story. I don't recall reviews of Stormy Weather (the Hiaasen novel I read) in particular, but I've seen good mentions of his work all over, not least in Frazz, one of the comic strips I read.
And there was nothing particularly wrong with Stormy Weather, other than excessive expectations. It's a nice sort-of thriller, with a pleasantly complicated plot and some interesting (mostly quirky, but I can live with that) characters and reasonable twists and interesting language.
So what was there to be disappointed with? Well, the language kept reminding me of a sort of low-key Elmore Leonard, and one thing Leonard does fairly consistently is to challenge our ideas of what is good behavior. This is one of my bugs about fiction -- it is always about what constitutes good behavior or morality. And Leonard makes us think about it. Hiaasen, on the other hand, is pretty straight mainstream moralism. The farthest out he gets is having a major character who is opposed to the overdevelopment of Florida real estate and tourism. There's a touch of vigilantism, too, but the guy to whom it is applied is so ludicrously evil that it's hard to object to his demise (and it's only indirectly the responsibility of the good guys).
The Pavic was more of a disappointment, since I was led to expect a first-rate work of art. It's entirely possible that the book was beyond me, but I'm a fairly smart guy, and I've read a lot, even a fair amount of poetry. The poetry is relevant because Pavic is primarily a poet, and this was his first novel.
If you don't remember the reviews, The Dictionary of the Khazars is presented as not one but three encyclopedias, with entries arranges alphabetically. The conceit is that there is a mystery over the history of the Khazar people and whether they converted to Judaism, Islam, or Christianity. (Historically, there seems no real controversy; they adopted Judaism overwhelmingly but not unanimously, and adopted religious tolerance around the same time.) The three encyclopedias represent the fragmentary knowledge, and the search for further knowledge, among Christians, Muslims, and Jews, in particular about the participants in the supposed Khazar Polemic, where all three faiths were represented. The structure, in fact, is fascinating, and works reasonably well. All the information is there, and we can organize it however we like into whichever story we prefer. I did read the book straight through, but you could also start at any point and browse forward and back, much like hypertext, following associative connections. You might well come away with a different sense of what the story was and what it was about than I did.
So far, so good. But Pavic wants more from this book than amusing structure. He wants to talk about the nature of time and language, and he wants to talk about them in poetic terms. That is, he wants us to perceive them not through direct description but through metaphors. Many of the metaphors, perhaps nearly all of them, are lovely and evocative. But I got overwhelmed by them. Enough was enough, and eventually I was ploughing through them rather than savoring them. There was no solid ground where I could rest my feet while swimming through the poetry, and it lost its meaning for me. I'm glad I read it, but I won't read it again.
Now, on to The Worst Journey in the World and Agape Agape (William Gaddis).
dmh
