Thud, thud, thud

There is a school of art - be it books, music or film - that I find excruciating beyond belief. It's a genre I like to call "patronising highbrow," and I would rather read/listen to/watch a million terrible "lowbrow" items before having to deal with this stuff.

It's the type of prose that tells you that it is meaningful; that this observation is very important indeed and that it is telling you something about the profundity of the human experience - so listen up, buster, because this author is highly important. My real problem with this is that the creators of such work are so pleased with themselves for such astuteness that they are incapable of believing that you, little reader/observer/listener could possibly understand such greatness. So, just in case a) you didn't get profundity of the observation and b) therefore, you have failed to accredit the author of the observation with sufficient praise/awe, the author will point. it. out. to. you. In bold letters.

The first work that provoked my observation (portentous and extremely profound, obviously) of this style was the unbelievably over-rated American Beauty. Apart from the pretty hackneyed and cliched treatment of suburbia and sexuality--did you know that teenage girls can appear sexually provocative and yet be inexperienced and/or virgins? And that men who hate gays are, of course, gay themselves and repressing their feelings? I'm pretty sure you didn't before this movie--we have that utterly annoying montage with the black plastic bag, that floats and floats. With the voice from beyond the grave. Who tells you repeatedly how beautiful this is, because there is beauty in small things and this is the true beauty - but you couldn't have worked that out for yourself.

I was reminded of this after just finishing The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. This is a book published in 1940 that screams its profundity at you. This passage particularly irked me. It's about the owner of a cafe in the small southern town, who has strongly lustful and tender feelings for a girl of about 13:

Always he wanted to set her up to something, to give to her. And not only a sundae or some sweet to eat--but something real. That was all he wanted for himself--to give to her. Biff's mouth hardened. He had done nothing wrong but in him he felt a strange guilt.

Now, you see, why not leave it at that? Why not leave it there, hanging, so that you wonder about the guilt, about how much he realises that his feelings are wrong, cannot be acted on, and how common this is? No, McCullers doesn't finish the paragraph there, but with this:

Why? The dark guilt in all men, unreckoned and without a name.

We get it, Carson. We get it. Then the next passage is about a small meaningful thing where he picks up a penny. Wow.

This book is frustrating because there's a lot of beautiful prose and it gives you a sense of the despair of the post-Depression South, of how it never financially recovered from the Civil War, and the anger inside people, black and white. Yet it can't let you observe for yourself: it constantly points out the seething anger inside the protagonists, because you can't realise that without her pointing it out to you. You're just not as smart as she is.

Americana

I have just finished what is a fairly extraordinary book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It is my second Ken Kesey, and I have to say, I am now an enormous fan.

This brings to mind the discussions Cerebus and friends have had about the "great" authors of the twentienth century, and how, as with visual art, this has shifted to the United States. For example, there is Kesey, Faulkner, Roth, DeLillo, Dos Passos, Updike, Auster (although the friends loathe him, but I love him, so tough), Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Bellow... anyone else missing? However, I feel that unlike the art world, what differentiates literature is the shift to post-colonial writers, with some of the most influential and beautiful writers in English not being either British or American, but someone like Coetzee, Rushdie, Naipaul, Achebe, Carey et al.

Kesey I love; I think Sometimes a Great Notion is one of the most wonderful books I have ever read. His description of the inability of two men to ever understand each other was beautiful and stays with me. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was simply terrifying: the combination of authoritarian humanity combined with the gradual grinding down of the "rabbits" by wider society... I think one of the starkest moments is when Mack realises that the patients there are there voluntarily; that his mission to gather other patients to buck the system with him simply won't work. His bewilderment, his thrashing struggle to avoid being brought down, was haunting. So obviously there may be more Kesey and his Canadian goose obsession.

Nonetheless, I feel my next "series," if I ever really have one, is to be U.S. authors in general. So, folks, I need recommendations, soon. I have to get through my new bookclubbook first, and then I'm there. So what's it to be? What, or more importantly, who should I read?