What did you just finish reading?
I was disappointed in Nixonland for two reasons: since it was called, well, Nixonland, I thought it would be about the Nixon years, 1969-1974. The book goes into a fairly detailed account of how Nixon got to be Nixon, as well as anyone can attempt to chart that kind of pathology (lots of quotes from high school teachers and descriptions of high school photos). OK, fine. But then I realized I was 30% done (argh, Kindle) with the book, and Nixon wasn't even in the White House yet. Hell, Nixon wasn't even the Republican candidate yet. 40%.....50%.....since it's an ebook there was no way to flip forward and see when the book was actually about his Presidency. I think that finally happened at around 60%, but before that, there was a month-by-month, day-by-day and frequently an hour-by-hour breakdown of events in 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969....The book became half-potted Nixon biography, half-potted sixties travelogue. I was born in 1970, so I've heard a lot about the sixties; people talk about hyper-nostalgia now, but my adolescence was spent nearly drowning in the backwash of Boomer memories. For all of 1988 Time went on a year-long orgy about 1968. And every single cultural-hero-turned-pop-cliche shows up here: Bobby Kennedy. Abbie Hoffman. Tom Hayden. Jane Fonda. You know what, I have seen this movie before.
Then the book ends on the eve of the 1972 election (if you don't count the half-dozen pages of author bloviation about "I wrote this book because...." that follow). I can understand how a writer (or more likely, editor) might feel that Watergate would consume the book, since it's now the media lens we see Nixon through, or that even Watergate might require a second book all on its own, but this is just ridiculous. (And according to the good old Kindle substitute for pages, 'Loc 16102,' where the Notes begin, is 83% of the way through the book. So this is a book about the sixties, really. Yet another one. Just in case we didn't have enough of those.)
But really the truly dismaying thing about this book was how very poorly it was written. So poorly I wanted to seize Packer and Will by their lapels and shake them while demanding, "But why didn't you TELL me it was this hard just to READ?" Call it Dwight Garner syndrome. -- And yes, everyone thinks I'm always too hard on authors about this, but one example: Nixon goes on a "stature-enhancing trip to Asia." Clunky, but all right, fine. Then Spiro Agnew has "a stature-enhancing state visit to Asia." Nixon takes "stature-enhancing trips to Europe, South America, and Asia." At least it's equal-opportunity clunkiness: "And on Muskie's stature-building trip to the Middle East...." Frequently reversed sentence structure, poor word choices, dreadful pacing....all spells New York Times best-seller, I guess. (If there is ever an absolutely meaningless blurb in the shamelessly shallow world of publishing blurbs, "New York Times best-seller" is now it.) (Other heavily used phrases: "slow, soiling humiliation." Words like "oleaginous." And a sentence to chill the thickest blood at the beginning of the Notes: "Historians have produced outstanding Web sites devoted to individual events....")
In a way I guess reading this book wasn't unlike the reaction of someone who voted for Nixon back in 1972: seduced by slick packaging and oh-so-earnest recommendations, promising rationality and even-handedness, and then you realize the candy you've just popped in your mouth is actually a chocolate-covered spider.
As a break from the horror show of the Nixon Presidency, and because it's the most wonderful time of the year, then I got into some Poe. Frankly, I find The Dante Club hard to distinguish from The Dante Code, but Matthew Pearl's The Poe Shadow was quite entertaining: rather sluggish pacing (the book could easily have been cut by a third), and he couldn't keep up the first-person Victorian pastiche, but there were a lot of Poe references and in-jokes, and if you're a Poe fan, it's fun. It's certainly better than Patricia Cornwell's ravings about Jack the Ripper, or any of the endless Jane-Austen-and-Agatha-Christie-become-girl-detective series paperbacks. The book has almost none of the hallucinatory power of Poe's writing that seems to pin you in your chair like some kind of terrifying psychic centrifugal force.
Which might be a good thing, because then I decided to read "the Dupin tales," edited into "a self-complete novella" by, guess who, Matthew Pearl, who provides an adequate if slightly fawning introduction. And oh Jesus I forgot how these very stories scared me shitless as a kid (my parents, for some reason, gave me the complete, illustrated works of Poe when I was about eight years old. I read all of it, twice, and then was plagued by horrible nightmares for months. I asked my mother if we could bury the book in the backyard. She said no, and gave it to Goodwill instead). Poe doesn't show us the actual animal (literally) slaughtering of the mother and daughter, but lingers over the details of the corpses, the girl savagely throttled and then stuffed up the chimney, her mother nearly decapitated with a razor....This is exactly why I don't much like horror: everyone else is going on about the costumes and the settings and style while I'm over in the corner gagging at what's been done to the inevitably female victims. And for some reason, in the trippy-ass story of Marie Roget/Mary Rogers (talk about contaminating fact with fiction, and vice versa) what's always haunted me is the way her own petticoats and slip were torn and shredded to bind her brutalized, violated body: A piece of lace was found tied so tightly
around the neck as to be hidden from sight; it was completely buried
in the flesh, and was fastened by a knot which lay just under the left
ear. This alone would have sufficed to produce death....I slept with the light on. No, really. Christ almighty.
What are you reading now?
In a Strange City, by Laura Lippman, because it's about the famous "Poe Toaster" and I've always loved that figure. It's pretty good so far -- lots of local colour, amusing one-liners, and Tess Monaghan is a refreshing heroine, tough without being either feisty or kick-ass, weary, sexy and believable.
What do you expect to read next?
Same as last week (somewhat depressingly), Peter Ackroyd's Poe: A Life Cut Short, to ring in All Saints'/All Soul's days. Then I might read Little Women before bed every night or something, the way Shirley Jackson had to when she was writing The Haunting of Hill House. (And if you think I'm going to read THAT book anywhere near Halloween, you're nuttier than I am, and I take three medications so I can get out of bed in the morning.)
descensus Averno facilis est