Water and History Everywhere!

There have been exactly two books I’ve read in my life that have made me decide to stop writing for good, knowing full well I could never achieve the mastery of their respective novelists. Before you go and ostracize me for indolence or lack of perseverance, know that the feeling of discomfiture is always temporary. In fact, on both occasions after a few hours wallowing in my self-pity and doubt, I was determined to get back on the warhorse and ride that Equus ferus into the combat that is writing.

The first novel that elicited defeat within me was Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. I was eighteen when I first came across the little book, so you could possibly blame youth on my resolve to give up. But the second time I felt the sense of vanquishment was no longer than a few months ago, when I finished Graham Swift’s brilliant novel, Waterland.

Set in the bleak, drab, musty, and aqueous Fen land of East Anglia, Waterland is the profound story of a family marked by tragedy, incest, madness, torment, 240 years of ale-making, and generations of excruciating, pumping manual labor of land reclamation. It’s a big, beautiful endeavor and Swift delivers brilliantly.

This novel screams with energy, fertility, violence, madness, and a profound knowledge of history and drama. Graham Swift slowly unravels the plot of this masterful work much in the vein of Thomas Hardy, but with a wonderful, contemporary verbal felicity and ardor.

There are unbearable scenes in this book — unendurable both for their honest, horrific imagery, but also for the complete mastery with which they’re unfurled for us readers by Swift — little bits at a time, not too slowly, not too quickly. But oh so goddamn eloquently! In particular, there is a long scene dealing with an illegal home abortion performed on one of the characters, which will leave you breathless for the consummate language with which it’s written. The intensity and dynamic of this particular scene is reminiscent of the tableau Hemingway gives us in For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which Fascists and fascist sympathizers are being run through a gauntlet of armed Republicans, and thrown over a cliff. To say it’s acute and agonizing would be watering down the tension. I found myself reading Swift’s passage with jaw fully clenched, at times grinding my teeth. Yeah, this book will make you get that much into it.

If you’re a writer, you’ll think about giving up your craft after reading Swift’s Waterland. But only briefly. This kind of book will ultimately energize you, and fill you with the hunger to continue weaving your own stories. If you’re a reader, a lover of history, humanity, and getting lost in earthy, realistic narratives, you’ll not want to finish this book. You’ll want to dole it out to yourself in increments, maybe daily . . . maybe weekly.

Graham Swift went on to win the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1996 for his novel Last Orders. It is a wonderful book, worthy of the prize indeed, and a great little film as well with Michael Caine, Helen Mirren, and Bob Hoskins among others. It’s recommended at the bottom of this page. But Swift’s career-defining work (at least so far) is his stellar Waterland. Please read this amazing novel and rejoice at the beauty of storytelling; and at the beauty of our language.

If you would like a peek into the dreary future of social networking, you should read this book.

We live in a bizarre generation. That is a fact. The awe and confusion that older generations have in the face of our quick-adapting, technologically saturated youth is immeasurable. It is also something well noted; nobody denies the reality that we grow up now immersed in technology or that information is increasing at an insanely exponential rate. Something that is perhaps less seriously mulled over is the effect of this culture on the personalities of today’s youth. The desocializing effect that Facebook and Twitter have, the dichotomy created between online and “IRL,” and the nurturing of the self-absorbed ego that now occupies the center of attention in your own social network are all usually jokes; the kind made about your friend who spends too much time online. But those jokes take on a real value in Michael J. Seidlinger’s new work In Great Company.

In Great Company is a bizarre book. It wavers between being the personal journal of a guy obsessed with his various internet handles  and the battle log of a commander at war, self-indulgent and intent on destroying everyone around him. It is easy to hate the narrator of the text. He, himself, comments on that often. But what he is demonstrating is important and the hatred perhaps comes from a minor degree of self-recognition (and latent self-loathing). Seidlinger has created a character that takes all of the qualities that I suggested earlier (effects of the Internet) and develops them to extreme levels. The disgust provoked by this character, in my case, is really a fear of becoming him.

Early on the narrator professes: “I can only / Quantify moments here, online.” The absorption of the self into an identity on a social network is the only real “event” in the text. Nothing is happening externally. The action is all within the narrator. He speaks to this transformation from human to handle frequently and alludes to an inability to reintegrate into life outside the web with satisfaction: “I am counting / On the unpredictability of the / Digital surf to give me the / Experiences I can no longer get / On my own.” The easily felt repulsion for this character turns into sympathy when you start to look upon him as a social eunuch, removed from the joy of engaging in real-world, fruitful interaction. You can further poke holes in this self-absorbed identity via the errors in the text (mostly, typographical; likely, unintentional), a further reminder that the intimidating voice that speaks is human after all, and like many college-degree bearing students who majored in English or creative writing, he makes typos.

As the text progresses, the confusion between cyber identity and real life intensifies, particularly with the introduction of the “virus.” A trifold interpretation of “virus” as a literal ailment that is contracted and spread, a digital corruption that likewise infects, and as a social disease of cyber obsession (the undoing of the normal functioning personality) makes the narrator’s (and most young readers’) condition very real. The hyper formation of a constructed identity eventually culminates in the loss of identity: “I / Can see my skeletal features, / Looking back at me, when I / Look, I look fearlessly. Go / Ahead, do the same . . . You see the outline of your / Skull?”  This skull-like face graces the cover of the book, a sort of dark, apocalyptic version of that blue, outlined head on Facebook.

The risk of defacement, self-absorption, and losing touch with reality has given way to many of the greatest texts in literature. Noah Cicero related In Great Company to Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground. It also reminds me a bit of Augusto Roa Bastos’ novel I The Supreme. But where these novels demonstrate a certain personality type and condition that are universal, the circumstances surrounding them don’t hit close to home for most contemporary readers. That is why In Great Company is so disconcerting. Its circumstances are those that surround the majority of us in this day and age. Its suggestions are possibilities perhaps too real for people aged thirty or younger.

If you would like a peek into the dreary future of social networking, you should read this book. The warning is that you may come out of it feeling a little “disembodied” or “skeletal.” If you don’t, then you are probably in severe self-denial.

"If I could only read one book again for the rest of my life, it would be this, Crime and Punishment, always and forever."

I believe I was sixteen when I read Crime and Punishment for the first [four] time[s]. I held the book in my hands, all too many pages of it, wholly unaware that it'd shape everything that came after.

It's a book that scares and intimidates me now because maybe my whole life will be turned over again. Afraid it'll throw me into another existential crises, make me afraid of mirrors and the night again, and so I try, rather unsuccessfully, to avoid it. But I can't, never could: Raskolnikov's as much a part of me as any real world memory or friend or experience I've ever had.

It was the first book to make me really cry, and I wept into it, dropping the tears onto the page as I turned page after blurred page, unable to even look away until the book was finished, just two days after it was given to me. I stared at what I held in my hands and knew nothing would ever feel like this again, that the world outside this cover was changed irreparably, unequivocally. And so the only option was to turn back to page one and so I burned through it once more before the week was finished.

If words can save a life [they can], Dostoevsky's saved mine, even when I wasn't quite aware how much I needed him, needed someone to. It completely destroyed me, dismantled the entire world, the limits of existence, and it spent the next six months or six years reconstructing me, making me hopefully better than yesterday.

If I could only read one book again for the rest of my life, it would be this, Crime and Punishment, always and forever. It may not be as magnificent or perfect as The Brothers Karamazov, but it matters to me more than I can even express. It's so much more than a book or a story: it's my whole life, before and after.