Category: Writing

Nabokov’s book is a cruel one: a love story without love, and a mystery with the ending announced in the opening lines. It lacks everything that saves Lolita from being a hopelessly ugly story, notably the sense that there is something of value in what transpires, if only for the descriptions it evokes. When the characters in Laughter in the Dark are aware at all, it is generally only for the shallowest of self-serving purposes. The only character with any force of understanding – Paul – is nonetheless unable to effectively protect anyone of importance to him. He just ends up carrying the grief that is beyond the capabilities of everyone else in the book.

As with Nabokov’s other work, allusions to other literature are fairly frequent. While Lolita calls most loudly to Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry, Laughter in the Dark spends a fair bit of time whispering to Anna Karenina, though Margot and Rex acutely lack the depth of character that partially redeem Anna and Vronsky. The German setting creates an alien and alienating feeling quite different from Lolita – the book with which this one must inevitably be compared. The characters all seem better suited to vindictiveness than joy, as demonstrated by everything from the shallowness and hypocrisy of Albinus’ interest in Margot (abandoning his family, but immediately inclined to kill her for straying from him) to the uncalculated malice underlying the triumph of her confidence trick.

Nabokov has a talent for irony and devastating understatement. At several points, I was moved to mark the margin with a hasty exclamation point. The clarity of his work is well displayed in this novel, though his talent mostly evokes an appreciation for how trivial, manipulative, and unredemptive human relations can be at their worst. The straightforwardness of the language is extreme even for Nabokov, who does not generally play games with opaque and experimental prose. Laughter in the Dark is intensely cinematic. Particularly during the last portion – in which Albinus has lost his vision – you can imagine how the shots would be framed, how his willful blindness and the callousness of his tormentors would be displayed on celluloid.

Having read this book, I think I will need to go back and read Lolita and Anna Karenina again – though that was inevitable before I ever picked up this volume.

The five best books I read in 2007:

• Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake.
• Collier, Paul. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.
• Michaels, Anne. Fugitive Pieces.
• Vaillant, John. The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed.
• Weisman, Alan . The World Without Us.

I unreservedly recommend them all. The links go to my reviews.

I have a new theory about why I do so much better with non-fiction than with fiction. It has to do with the way I read and the relationship between reading and kinds of memory. There has probably been no point in the last decade in which I was reading only one book at a time. At present, I am reading thirteen. It is routine for me to leave a partially completed book for weeks or months, while engaging with something more immediately interesting or urgent.

With non-fiction, every sentence and chapter you read gets integrated into your general schema of knowledge on the topic in question. You can read one chapter on cryptography or ice core sampling or the life of Voltaire and it will henceforth be stored along with related thoughts and memories in a general databank of knowledge. Admittedly, the databank is full of rats that chew their way through ideas long left uncontemplated. The point is that there is a single and relatively well ordered web of knowledge in one’s general library.

Fiction, by contrast, demands the recollection of a lot of specific facts in an organized way. You need to remember the world of that book or story: a world potentially very distinct from the ‘general world’ about which non-fiction knowledge is collected. Remembering characters, world characteristics, relationships, and plot points all calls upon us to treat a fictional universe with a similar kind of importance to the real universe. While this is simple enough when reading a single book at a time, it does not fit very well into a reading pattern based on reading many books in parallel, sometimes abandoning any particular one of them for months at a time.

The twenty-two stories in Jim Shepard’s Love and Hydrogen cover a lot of ground: from gay love aboard the Hindenburg to Dutch soccer to a first-person narrative written by the Creature from the Black Lagoon. While a common style and repeated themes connect the collection, a great deal of effort is demonstrated in creating a rich scenario for each. I appreciated the degree to which each story felt like an initiation into a new area of knowledge, while also feeling united by a kind of unfathomable emotional edge – intentionally vague and melancholic.

Shepard clearly likes disasters, dysfunctional families, aviation, and monster-style early science fiction. The prevalence of the latter theme makes the book feel older than it is: as though it was written in the age of drive-in movies rather than as a response to it, about five decades later. The whole collection has strong overtones of post-war America, though with violence as a near-constant theme.

The sports stories elicited much the same reaction in me as the sports themselves: soccer interesting, football brutal, and baseball hokey with an American twang. Among the aviation stories, the one describing the experience of German trainee pilots with the infamous Messerschmitt Me 163 “Komet” was perhaps the most compelling. I can see why the vehicle appealed to Shepard; as the first rocket-powered manned fighter, with corrosive fuel and no landing gear, it was an incredibly perilous thing to fly. That particular story resonated nicely with the recently completed Why the Allies Won, both touching upon the theme of Germany pushing technology forward, but often doing so in ways that were not tactically or strategically useful.

Shepard has a talent for simple yet powerful statements. In a story about the first bathysphere, the narrator notes calmly that he “passed the point below which only dead men had sunk.” In a story written from the perspective of John Entwistle, the bass player in The Who, the narrator remarks that: “Rage in the service of self-pity was what we’d always been about. It was what rock had always been about.” Similar elegant tidbits are sprinkled through the volume – counterpointing descriptive passages that sometimes come off as an evocative but elusive tangle of words. I found myself getting particularly lost in some of the dysfunctional family narratives – most of my mind warning that “this isn’t something we want to wander into.”

Having the daring to write the supposed thoughts of contemporary figures is an impressive if somewhat off-putting characteristic. “John Ashcroft: More Important Things than Me” is probably the most elusive story in the collection. It is written as a collection of aphorisms, focusing on Ashcroft’s personal convictions and life experiences. I don’t know to what extent it faithfully reproduces the life or views of the controversial figure, but – as a story – it remains quite opaque in its motivations. In a sense, it is a humanizing text, seemingly contributing to a more balanced understanding of the public figure. At the same time, it leaves the reader suspicious: both the supposed author (Ashcroft himself) and the actual author are presumably trying to forward a political agenda or perpetuate some sort of satire or criticism. As it stands, it remains unclear what either message is meant to be.

Overall, the collection is the kind of literary work where you are constantly thinking “I will understand this better the second time around.” Given the quality of the stories, it is plausible that this will be one of the few books that actually earns a second reading.

Emily has finished her first book for our reading project and posted an interesting and comprehensive review on her blog.

My review of Love and Hydrogen will appear as tomorrow’s 7:00am EST post.