The Lost Boys Never Grow Up

 

Review of What is the What by Dave Eggers.

It's important to read books like this. Let's talk about why. 

What is the What by Dave Eggers tells the story of Valentino Achak Deng, an immigrant from Sudan to the US. According to the novel's introduction, Achak sought out an author through a friend to help tell his story as a novel and Eggers answered the call.

That summary will carry with it a whole host of assumptions, many of which flooded my head while reading the intro; is this going to be an incredibly contrived bootstrap story following a tale of some otherized sense of individually experienced hardships delivered by a white guy's pen?

Spoiler; it wasn't. Assuming so ended up being a massive disservice to Eggers who, whatever one may feel about him, knows how to curate and tell stories.What is the What isn't a story about hardship it is a story of unbelievable horrors. Eggers doesn't revel in the details as though he were there, he crafts Achak's cruel and violent experiences with a simplicity that is haunting and critical to the way they impact the reader. 

Take the horrifying scene in which an airplane bombs the group of "Lost Boys", a group of children displaced and forced to march across Sudan by the civil war;

"But the plane returned a few minutes later, and soon after, there was a whistle. Dut screamed to us that we needed to run but did not tell us where. We ran in a hundred directions and two boys chose the wrong direction. They ran for the shelter of a large tree and this is where the bomb struck."

Achak's childhood story of displacement from his home is a non-stop barrage of atrocities that should sicken the privileged American reader. Watching his family and loved ones butchered or sold into slavery, his village burn, walking for miles and miles with thousands of other Lost Boys, seeing his peers eaten by lions and collapse dead from exhaustion. The violence visited upon little kids, rendered in the simplistic but profound way Eggers chooses to expound in it is heartwrenching and stomach-churning.  

We're also given Achak's life chronicled in two different refugee camps, all told from his current perspective as an immigrant to the US. His life in America is equally as important as his violence-steeped childhood. While it isn't the bulk of the novel, we're told the story of Achak's life as he undergoes some of our favorite and almost uniquely American burdens, made all the more... burdensome by the fact that he is an immigrant. 

The atrocities of war and violence make an interesting juxtaposition to Achak's life in America. Here he is obviously free from many of the ravages of a civil war, a government actively trying to kill him, and can more or less experience the great abundance of things like food and running water in our nation.

However we do see Achak suffer from gun violence (his apartment is broken into by armed burglars and he's severely pistol-whipped by one), systematic indifference (the police do little to nothing when they finally respond hours later), health injustice (the emergency room makes him wait over 24 hours to see a doctor, he has no health insurance with which to pay), discrimination (he's treated poorly because of his race and his status as an immigrant from Africa), domestic violence (the woman he loves is killed by a man she was supposed to be married to), exploitation (he's underpaid and overworked at every job he's had), and more, less categorical shit is heaped on too (he can't seem to get into a university out of his dead end community college because of his age). We also hear of his many cohorts who were also moved from the refugee camp to the states succumbing to gambling addictions, dying in fist fights, falling to drink, etc. 

This is not the typical tale of a striving immigrant bootstrapping his way to greatness in the greatest of all nations after fleeing his "shithole country" (Trump's words not mine). This is the very real story, both in part and on the whole, of what millions of refugees and immigrants experience every day on this planet. War or famine or state violence, usually spurred in some large or small way by the United States, followed by incredible suffering or death. Those that make it to the US are then confronted with the many contradictions of life here; vast wealth and innovation and fame and healthcare and bureaucratic efficiencies and order all on wonderful global display but entirely inaccessible to them. 

So why is this important to read? Because Donald Trump is president again. Because we're about to see migrants being whipped by border patrol on horseback again. Because this country never stopped putting "kids in cages". Because we're going to see more boats sinking in the Red Sea. Because we're bankrolling Israel's genocide. Because it is important to consider the mountain of corpses we wake up on top of every morning to live our precious, normal lives. 

The Hope is Just a Logo

 “Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children” - Sitting Bull

In full authorial disclosure, after I read The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace Wells I was so wracked with fear and anxiety that I had to put the whole Kids Today project on hold. Wells wrote such a believable and horrific future for my children and their children that I could only describe having what I assume is a panic attack (never had one!). I dove into fiction for a bit but remembered I had saved Naomi Klein’s On Fire to hopefully spark some hope for the future.

The point of reading Klein is that she doesn’t just have one of the sharpest visions and world views for a future without suffering in a capitalist-fueled climate nightmare, but also a vision for how we get there. This is something that I have rarely found climate texts reconciling with. I thought Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future depicted one of the best possible outcomes, but his visualization for how to get there was completely unimaginative and mostly nonsensical. I think the key difference is Klein is an activist and therefore can more easily conceptualize the movements she is a part of making meaningful change at scale.

Hence I cracked open On Fire hoping to be given, if not some degree of hope for the future of the planet, at least a blueprint, something I could potentially build on in my local community. I couldn’t have predicted that I would be finishing this book at a confusing time; just one week before the 2024 presidential election, in which Donald “Drill-Baby-Drill” Trump was elected.

I’m not here to hash out the autopsy on the Kamala Harris campaign and how it failed to mount a meaningful rivalry with the Trump campaign. However, one component I was paying attention to in the aftermath was the plethora of young people, described mostly as despondent, who either didn’t vote, didn’t vote for Kamala Harris, or actually voted for Trump. I’m not alone in noticing there are armies of young people who seem to have nothing to believe in.

One of the reasons I’m On-The-Left is I firmly believe in the possibility for a better world; one not dependent on the capital class of owners and their whims, but of true redistributive power and justice. It’s worth considering if Klein and other ambassadors On The Left are winning the battle not just of ideas, but of movements. It’s possible, as I often feel, to be completely convinced and yet utterly lost.

Klein’s On Fire is a series of essays and speeches that “tracks [her] own attempt to probe a different set of barriers - some economic, some ideological, but others related to the deep stories about the right of certain people to dominate land and the people living closest to it”. She collapses her many arguments and movements into “the Green New Deal”, projecting on it a “kind of response that might succeed in toppling those narratives and economic interests, responses that weave seemingly disparate crises into a common story of civilizational transformation.”

Maybe it’s because I was so frantically searching the text for something to pin my hope on, but I seemed to miss the concreteness of what exactly we need to be working towards. And I really hate to make this critique of Klein, she’s one of the best, but exactly because she is one of the best she so exemplifies the problem the left has of acting and inspiring action in turn.

I think because it’s a movement largely buoyed by academics, there is a real problem dealing out an outline of things we can be doing right now. This can best be demonstrated by walking the litany of dos and don’ts that Klein explores in this book.

To Klein, the climate crisis is a larger culmination of the ravages of capitalism, which also means it is tied to other problems with the same roots; things like private healthcare, privatization, imperialism, racism, sexism, exploitation…the list is endless. This means the most obvious solution is the Green New Deal; a set of policy proposals aimed at transforming the very fabric of society to be BOTH greener and more equitable (the caps are important). There is the jobs guarantee program that will be launched to build green infrastructure, single-payer healthcare, and other welfare and government programs that are designed to grow the economy and green the economy for everyone. She is ecstatic to point out the new “bloc of politicians in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere ready to translate the urgency of the climate crisis into policy and connect the dots of the multiple crises of our time”.

So voting and coalescing for political power and advancing policies, that’s something to get behind, right? Not exactly. The heart of many of these essays isn’t an argument for any given policy within the Green New Deal, her blueprint is for a movement focused “not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—this time, embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance and cooperation rather than hierarchy.” Her issues with simply advancing big government policies is “an ecological crisis that has its roots in the overconsumption of natural resources must be addressed not just by improving the efficiency of our economies but by reducing the amount of material stuff we produce and consume”. It can’t just be what she calls climate Keynesianism, because then we run the risk that “the salaries from all the good green jobs it creates [are] immediately poured into high-consumer lifestyles that inadvertently end up increasing emissions—a scenario where everyone has a good job and lots of disposable income and it all gets spent on throwaway crap imported from China destined for the landfill.”

Klein understands that “shifting cultural values is a tall order”, and it certainly can’t be done simply by voting and advancing policies. So then maybe we should first start working to change our culture; producing art and having difficult conversations to move people to consume less. Perhaps that would have a cascading, trickle-up effect where we can then fight for those major policies in the GND.

However, Klein critiques this as well. Saying making changes as consumers and individual activists, even changing those habits and organizing in our “neighborhood or town” is simply “acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small” and abandoning the “structural changes, the policy and legal work, to others.”

This is why being leftist is maddening. I never know what to DO when I read shit like this. The ideas make so much sense but the articulation of getting there; whether it’s labor unions, or electoralism, or dual power, or whatever it all feels already defeated, utterly impossible. When I read Klein’s stand-out line in this book; “It is true that we have to do it all. That we have to change everything. But you personally do not have to do everything.” it’s almost impossible for me not to translate this into “you personally do not have to do anything”.

When Klein speaks of her strong emotions when she thinks about “the tremendous intergenerational theft underway” or the “sheer panic about the extreme weather we have already locked in for these kids” or the “sadness about what they won’t ever know growing up in a mass extinction” I am right there with her.

And this election brings with it another level of despair. Trump is going to visit untold cruelties onto populations this nation has deemed sacrificial. My privilege will protect me and my children for a long time I’m sure, many people with that same privilege made the calculation that their immediate ability to consume; buy cheap gas for their big cars and have cheap things and access to cheaper take-out and the ability to watch their 401k go up infinitely was more important to them than whatever longterm effects will be wrought upon the planet. Because the only thing to believe in is the terrifying and crushing reality of preserving your own comfort and the comfort of your family right now.

So no, there is not a lot of hope in this book. There isn’t really a lot of hope anywhere. The only liferaft of hope is that people will see “the light” and that a great many more people are seeing it than I thought. There is a great refrain in a Malcolm X speech where he implores his audience to “never let them tell you how many of YOU there are”. Even after a disastrous election, I took a lot of hope from my friend Matt’s recent piece where he wrote that “a vote, like a poll, is a snapshot in time and does not represent any sort of commitment, nor is it a particularly meaningful political act.” I cannot simply believe this mass of people who voted for Trump or didn’t vote because they could only believe in the material reality in front of their face are wholly lost to the cause.

As far as what we can all be doing once we have seen the light, this seems to be, as cynical as it sounds, something we need to figure out on our own. But if Klein’s thesis that all the issues of our time are threaded by the climate crises - and I am compelled to believe she is correct - then working toward any issue is as effective as any other. Basically, if you don’t know what to do, just do something.

A Whole Different Self

 

It's easy to feel stuck when you're in your 30s. I think the luster of your career has largely worn off as you realize you're going to spend the majority of your time working and not making meaningful relationships with other people or even the world around you more broadly. It's also the beginning of your "mid-life" and you are likely coming to the realization that all of what you are going to be is the result not only of choices you have already made but of millions of choices that were made even before you were born. 

It's a helpless feeling, I've been there myself and I've seen many of my peers there. This is part of what made the Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami such an interesting book to me. It chronicles a 30-year-old man named Mr. Okada in Japan at an interesting time. He has recently quit his administrative job after feeling the uselessness of it becoming too unbearable, his wife is becoming estranged as she continues engaging in her professional life and eventually disappears altogether (hardly a spoiler it's on the back cover summary), and his cat has gone missing. 

Murakami is writing an existential novel and it's interesting - although I'll be honest it gets a little tedious - to see Okada written like Meursault from The Stranger. He seems listless; barely looking for work, certainly not looking for the cat like his wife asked him, and a good portion of the beginning pages is just detailing what Okada makes for breakfast. 

There is a prevalent theme of water in the novel, both physical manifestations of it like at the bottom of wells (there is quite a bit of time spent in the bottom of wells) as well as meta-physical representations of life flowing all around us, a connecting force to us in the past, a flow of decisions that culminate in your current life and the life taking place before you. Okada knows that the Japanese occupation of Mongolia in WWII has a lot to do with the current blockage his life is undergoing and we are treated to some truly horrific - albeit brilliantly written - vignettes about various characters in that time. 

Clairvoyance is a partner theme throughout the Windup Bird Chronicle, the idea being that life modeling the flow of water means some people are able to look forward and see the immutable future. Those who learn their future like the WWII veteran Mr. Mamiya are unable to change the course of the water and lead meaningless lives as a result, again stuck in middle-aged fear of life's mundanity. We follow Okada as he attempts to make the sort of drastic decisions needed to change the events of his life, a journey that takes him in the past, down possible other futures and the various tributaries, swamps, and rivulets that his path may take him. It's worth noting that the novel's villain is someone who can control the flow very well, rising in his political and academic career; cast as a completely vile and insufferable person. 

World War II makes an interesting generational juxtaposition as well. I'm not very certain about the cultural view 1980s (when the novel is set) Japan has towards World War II, but if it's anything like the US, and there are some things in this novel that imply this is the case, then WWII is the last generation of men who did anything great. In my country, we call this generation the Greatest Generation. Japan obviously committed some striking atrocities during the time, but atrocities were also brought upon them by the Soviets and of course the US. The horrors explored in this novel are among its best-written parts, punctuating reminders through an otherwise pretty languid story of the horrific violence that came before.

These vignettes are something this novel desperately needed. I think the sort of "lost in translation" lost guy in his 30s who meets a manic pixie dreamgirl who prompts him to take control of his life is really overwrought and pretty outdated. I'm sure if I read this 25 years ago I would have thought it was great, but I think we're past that now. Largely because I'd like to think we're past the point of thinking that women - and especially young girls - are not props for the self-discovery journey of very sad men. However the war scenes are vivid enough to cancel out some of the more annoying dream sequences, the tale of Mr. Mamiya is so haunting and reviling that it removes any stain from the Wind Up Bird Chronicle that would mark it as a cute novel. In fact, I would argue this makes the novel worth reading at all.

Learning to Hate Objectively Good Books

 The Human Stain by Phillip Roth

There is this joke comedian Kurt Metsger makes where he references the movie Precious. He notes that Precious as a character is fake, entirely fiction, the character is not a real person, and that the creators just made her that way and did those things to her for no reason. It may be a trashy or distasteful joke, but it has always sort of stuck with me as an interesting way to think about fiction.

Authors often make their characters suffer, sometimes psychologically and sometimes physically, many times both. There is generally a purpose served, especially by the more profound suffering a character may undergo. Characters in Tony Morrison novels suffer as a reminder of the dehumanizing and brutal nature of racism (this is the sense I get from the movie Precious, though if I recall correctly it wasn't done very well). Others may be less concrete, the young boy protagonists in Cormac McCarthy novels suffer as a dark twist on the coming-of-age tradition. 

The question of why any given character is given to suffering was consistently in the back of my mind as I read the Human Stain by Phillip Roth. 

By all accounts, the Human Stain is a good book. Its profile of the last months of Professor Coleman Silk and his lover Fawnia Farley is of course magnificently written and fascinatingly complex in its layered story telling. I did enjoy it as a literary form, as though I could love it from afar, but in the intimacy of actually reading it I found it, many times, to be unnecessarily and nauseatingly cruel. 

There is a lot I could theoretically spoil here, some I already have. You find out relatively early on in the novel that Professor Coleman Silk has retired in scandal from his university over false allegations that he is a racist, that he has taken a lover named Fawnia Farley half his age (her 34, him 70), and that he has died. You also learn that the entire novel is written by Roth's novelist alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, whom he has deployed in other novels; American Pastoral and I Married a Communist. 

Roth, as Nathan, is giving an account of Silk's life, bracketed by its present end, with the sort of beautiful narrative flair that the best literary masters of the universe deploy. Nathan is an impossibly unreliable narrator with the Melville/Ishmail-like oscillation between a fully present character in the narrative doing things like interviewing Silk's family and befriending Silk himself, attending Silk's funeral, and speculating on how Silk died to omniscient third-person narration as well as the first-person perceptive from inside the heads of Fawnia, her former husband Les, Silk's university enemy professor Roux, and Silk himself. 

This latter exercise is different than the way I've seen this method deployed by greats like Faulkner or Melville. It is not so much an embodiment of the perspective but an invasion of the subject, a pure manipulation and an ultimate display of their suffering that left me sort of sick and confused as to why it was needed, artful though it may be. 

The Vietnam trauma and what Les goes through both as a soldier and veteran is heartbreakingly well written. Stomach-churning. Also entirely confusing. Why is he doing this? Is it to justify Les' cruelty and racism? Is it to cast him as a bad man with reason? Maybe I'm too dumb to ascertain it, but if I'm dumb let the record show I was struck so by the inclusion of some of the most gut-wrenching passages of wanton mental suffering I have probably ever read. This is great writing to be sure, but again, in service of what?

Then of course there are the women. I know there is a lot of eye-rolling speculation on the great modern writers like Foster-Wallace and Franzen as it pertains to their depiction of women, some of it valid, some of it a bit wrought. Roth is sometimes added to this list. I'll leave to you to determine how valid it is, but Roth doesn't treat any of the women in the Human Stain kindly. At best, the women in the Human Stain are props; Silk's sister, daughter, or wife for example are all in service of plot progression. Coleman Silk's university rival Professor Roux is lived in breifly only to profess her love and envy for Professor Silk and her self-hatred because of it. Again, why are we doing this? Hopefully it's not to make a point of ambitious women. 

Then there is Fawnia, one of the more tragic characters I have encountered. The 34-year-old illiterate lover of the old-ass Coleman Silk. Roth details with horrible explicitness her sexual abuse as a child at the hands of her step-father, her physical abuse and constant murder attempts by Les, the death of her small children in an apartment fire while she performs fellatio on a boyfriend in a car outside, she is possibly illiterate - Nathan doesn't think she is - although Roth leaves it a mystery for god knows why, because I guess it's fun to chin-stroke over whether Silk was taking advantage of her or not. What fun!  Nathan inhabits her head narrating in and out of relevant drama but sometimes just ruminating on the horrors visited her by the past. It's disturbing and doesn't accomplish the literary heights that Roth wields when he's inside the head of someone like Les (which I have to say again, is always gripping, some truly amazing writing here). 

Maybe this is all Roth's point. This is why he uses the insufferable novelist character to tell the story in a presumptive, misleading, and entirely misogynistic way.  With a title like "the Human Stain" it's fun to speculate what the human stain actually is. Is it a reference, as Fawnia (the only character to mention the title) says, to the disgusting human race that stains our planet? No, too simple. Is it a point about race? Our racial identity and the misfortunate or fortunate that follows is a stain on our skin and our lives? The novel has a core racialized theme in it, so this would be an interesting read. I believe that Roth thinks the novelist is putting the human stain on the page; a stain is gross, it's unwanted, and it's a depiction for anyone to guess the story behind what was once a messy accident. Everything that describes the way that Nathan - who of course is just a stand-in for Roth - writes Silk's story. It's possible that Roth is embodying the very best of the novelist only to communicate his disdain for the craft. 

But who the fuck knows. 

Here is the Metzger joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMMhjtVWpwg 

NOW! That's What I Call Sci-Fi

 There is a long tradition of science fiction/dystopian writers and texts that have "good" politics. A lot come to mind; Ursala LeGuin and Kim Stanley Robinson first and foremost. I also thought the non-simpleton reading of Dune had a very salient, anti-interventionist political point. Phillip K Dick certainly has a politics at the heart of his novels that question foundations of power and authority, as does Orwell. There is a lot of writing about H.G. Wells and H.P. Lovecraft and their subversive body of work as a political statement against the status quo. Go all the way back to something like Gulliver's Travels which had a pretty palatable critique of society, it may even still to today's audience.

By good politics I mean a leftwing, democratic and human-centered politics specifically. There is probably a hefty volume of sci-fi writing devoted to reactionary, right-wing and maybe even fascist politics, but it doesn't seem like that's what breaks into the mainstream.

I'd like to make another entry in the sci-fi writers with solidly good politics category. I recently read Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky and was blown away not just by the fascinating world-building and character crafting needed to make a sci-fi novel, but the way it also manages to be a great and unobvious indictment of a multitude of modern industrial complexes and societal structures. All while being really fun to read.

The world-building that Tchaikovsky does so well is crafting a future civilization literally on top of our current civilization, form equalling content. Cage of Souls is set in the far, far future where the sun is bloated and dying, human civilization has been brought to the brink of extinction several times and the last remaining human civilization exists in a single city by the name of Shadrapar

The majority of the novel however takes place on the Island; a prison island where the inmates - the criminal and dissident element of Shadrapar - are forced to mine the swamps for various chemicals that help the singular city survive. 

Stefan Advani serves as the narrator and fictional author of the book. Advani is an "academy boy" whose crime is discovered later in the story. As a narrator, he's somewhat reliable and very entertaining, as well as intentionally and hilariously annoying. As Advani's journey takes him to the deserts, the underground of Shadrapar, the jungles surrounding the island, and of course the island itself, Cage of Souls becomes many different kinds of novels itself. 

Cage of Souls is a prison abolitionist novel, it is an anarchist novel, it clearly favors engineering and artificers and the power of the human mind as a tool for advancing good, it's a societal indictment, but it's also an ecological novel.

This last emergence surprised me. The entirety of civilization understands that the sun, as the novel is set so far into future, is in its final days. The sense of impending doom hovers over the whole narrative. In fact, much of the conflict arrives from the final vestiges of civilization, still possessing all the obsession with craven growth we hold today, meeting the end of the road, and still attempting to extract, grow, and profit. Did I mention Cage of Souls is Anti-capitalist?

None of this is to imply Cage of Souls is preachy or overt. The plot is such a mesmerizingly good time the theories and concepts at play are an afterthought, but they're there as a solid foundation to hang the genre necessary world-building and characterization on. It's a great and riveting story and it's got me excited to read Tchaikovsky again.