Yearly Archives: 2018

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The BFS Recommends Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami

Book Reviews Recommended Reads The BFS Recommends

**Seriously, look at that guy. How can he not make you smile?**

Dance, Dance, Dance is the rare book that makes you completely, thoroughly happy. Not stupid happy, ignoring the sadness and pain life can throw your way, but happily aware: fully cognizant of all the flaws in this world, but still finding it improbably beautiful.

Why does Dance Dance Dance make me so joyful? Well, first, there’s that book cover, which is the edition my local library had, If that doesn’t make you smile a bit, well, umm, what’s wrong with you? It’s a sheep wearing a collared shirt, tie, and plaid sweater vest, for crying out loud.

But in all honesty the thing that makes the book so happy-making is what happens for its unnamed narrator. This is the fourth book he’s been in by Murakami, and in all of them he’s been emotionally withdrawn (something you can immediately feel and appreciate in his character, even if this book is your first encounter with him). In the first book the narrator appears in, Hear the Wind Sing, another character notes that he’s “Very zen.”

It serves him well, in a way, to float along and not be completely overwhelmed by the waves that come his way: he certainly is put through a lot. But it also keeps him emotionally distant, incapable of reaching his potential or really even feeling love. In the third book to feature the narrator, A Wild Sheep Chase, his wife leaves him at the start, most likely because of his emotional unavailability. But here, finally, in Dance Dance Dance, he is able to awaken: winter has fallen away, spring has sprung. You can see it stirring in the narrator as he reaches out and makes new friendships and even goes through the starts and stops of a new relationship with a hotel clerk.

If I could make a comparison, it’s like seeing a sad friend or relative suddenly grow, changing and reaching out, becoming that thing you always knew they could be. Even now it brings an almost inexplicable smile to my face, and that’s something to note in and of itself. Good literature, good art, should help us understand our fellow humans and appreciate their growths and triumphs.

This is made all the more palpable due to the darkness to be found in Dance Dance Dance. Just like its preceding three books, sadness lurks, as does death, Maybe even more than in the previous novels, and they were hardly carefree affairs.

Despite this, however, the book’s title is always at its center. Early on in the book, the narrator finds and has a discussion with the Sheep Man. Yes, there is a character called the Sheep Man (and despite the book cover above, he probably is only a guy in a sheep suit). But in that improbably Murakami way, he is very much real and very much not ridiculous. His otherworldliness is suggested in how all of his sentences consist of no spaces between the words: strange, but understandable.

In this early conversation, the narrator and the Sheep Man are tired. Withdrawn. The Sheep Man himself is feeling old. But he tells the narrator he can make his way back to life. “Yougottadance,” he says (86).

The narrator takes the advice to heart, and so does the book. Weird stuff keeps happening to the narrator, he keeps making friends (or renewing friendships), but then depression and loss also come along, threatening to derail it all. But he’s justgottakeepdancing, His finding a way to do this and encourage others to do so is part of the book’s magic.

An additional piece of magic happened for me with my library book, however. A former reader had co-opted the old checkout tag to leave a note for future readers, in a manner that feels almost trademark Murakami. His narrators are always getting odd messages or stories told to them, and this one is no different. The weird energy of that note is wonderfully sublime and needs sharing with the world.

“This is an incredible book. Don’t read the blurbs, don’t read the publisher’s description, just read the book. It blew me away. Of course you must read “A Wild Sheep Chase,” first. Then this. Both books are compelling as hell. Right on, brothers and sisters. Knock yourselves out.”

As my fellow reader notes, it’s probably worth checking out A Wild Sheep Chase first, if not Wind/Pinball as well. You can appreciate this one without reading them, but it hits all the harder if you have the experience of all the narrator’s previous trials and tribulations.

Wherever you might be, however good or bad life might be going for you now in the moment, you need this book. You need it like a friend you just discovered and really should have known for your entire life.

Right on, my internet brothers and sisters, right on. Whether you do a little shuffle like this big, awkward Swede or something more graceful, we just gotta dance.

Wejustgottadance.

On Likeable Unlikeability in Fiction

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Book Reviews Literary Criticism

More than a few actors and writers are on record saying that villains are “more fun” or “easier to do” than heroes. And sure, on one level, this holds water: there’s something vastly entertaining about Iago’s machinations that leave Othello seeming like a square. But is it really that simple, even there? You have to care about Othello to be invested in Iago’s scheming, after all, and he’s hardly a one-dimensional, “like me because I’m the good guy” type of character.

Looking to the multitudes of other fictional examples out there, you can easily find villains that aren’t more fun or interesting. They’re just kind of there fulfilling the role, doing the jerkface-y thing they need to do for the story to have any movement forward (and not every doer of bad things in Mr. Shakespeare’s legendary array is as fascinating as Iago).

The more stories I’ve read, the more movies I’ve watched, and the more characters I’ve written myself, the more similarities I’ve found between protagonists and antagonists, heroes and anti-heroes. If heroes and heroines need flaws to be interesting and believable, there has to be something likeable in the unlikeability of antagonists and anti-heroes if we’re going to want to keep following them as readers.

Three great books I’ve read recently demonstrate this in spades, so let’s explore likeable unlikeability in action.

Unforgivable Love by Sophfronia Scott

Sophfronia Scott’s Unforgivable Love is a fantastic place to begin. A re-imagining of Les Liaisons dangereuses/Dangerous Liasons, it’s very much in that Iago-and-Shakespearen-villain tradition of “I’m about to do something totally evil—check out how awesome I am while I do it.” In the past, I’ve admittedly avoided Dangerous Liasons for this very reason: “Yay, a devious pair of people use their skills at seduction to control and manipulate those around them. Just what I want to read after a long day in a world filled with ever more depressing news.”

Yet Scott makes this work by inserting a little likeability (or at least a little understandability) into Mae Malveaux and Valiant Jackson, the equivalents to the Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont of the original. Not too much, mind—they still get their kicks out of what they can do and what they can get away with.

Some of that comes from the lives they are handed, however. The novel is set in Harlem and upstate New York in 1947, and it leverages this time and setting to let its two anti-heroes have a grounded reason for being: you can take what you want from the world, or it will take what it wants from you.

It goes further than that, however. We see enough into Mae that we can see the wounded person—how she has been twisted into what she is. We’re given this insight in a passage early on in the novel, with her messed up appreciation and desiring of love.

“Mae did want love. She didn’t care that it didn’t last, didn’t care how easily it could be broken. What she cared about was how every human being seemed to walk the earth clutching at love, but she couldn’t do the same. She knew that shouldn’t matter—she didn’t want to be so ridiculous and weak—yet she did desire love if only to have it in her hands, a rare bauble she could enjoy as she studied its strange hold on the world. But for Mae some entity always held love, ripe and shining, just out of her reach, letting her know with soul-slicing certainty that she wasn’t good enough to have it.” (pg. 32)

Now that is a distorted longing. You can relate to that while still being dismayed at the same time, like seeing a vicious predator caught in a trap. You’d like to help it, but it snaps and claws whenever you come close. And then there is that small, almost hidden bit at the very end: she doesn’t think she’s good enough to be loved. That still gets me, even though I know how Mae uses and manipulates those around her for the rest of the book.

Val Jackson’s likeability is also introduced early on in the novel, but in a different form. Val is a baseball fanatic, going to as many games as he can, and he watches as Jackie Robinson breaks Major League Baseball’s color barrier. This hits Val powerfully, some of it affecting him in ways he can’t quite make himself appreciate.

Until now, his focus has been on money and moving up in Harlem society—and getting pretty much any woman he wants. But what Jackie Robinson is doing is… meaningful. “There was something about this man and the way he was that would matter more for his people—and it would matter long after he died” (pg. 44). It puts everything Val finds worthwhile in a light he isn’t comfortable looking at directly.

This glimmer of possibility in Val comes up again and again in the novel, and it’s a major part of what made me keep reading. It’s an invaluable counterpoint as Val does some truly terrible things: he basically pulls the “Turkish ambassador with Lady Mary from Downton Abbey” at one point, but unlike the one-dimensional Kemal Pamuk of that TV show, some part of me kept caring about Val, hoping he would actually become the person he could be.

Bury What We Cannot Take by Kirstin Chen

Mostly set on Drum Wave Islet off the Chinese coast, Kirstin Chen’s novel centers on a family in crisis during the early years of Maoist China. The father Ah Zai lives in Hong Kong and can no longer come back to his home, lest he be taken away by the authorities: he owns a factory in Hong Kong and used to run more in China, and he is suspect for his capitalistic ways. His wife, Seok Koon, is desperate to get her family out of the country and reunited with her husband.

The book hinges on the actions of Ah Liam, their twelve-year old son, who does what I think most of us would find unthinkable: informs the authorities that his grandmother has smashed a portrait of Chairman Mao with a hammer. Stated like that, you would think a reader could absolutely hate Ah Liam, yet his actions are rendered in an entirely understandable way. The propaganda espoused by the communist party in school and all around him has begun to take hold, and his motivations are further confused by an adolescent crush on another girl in his class (who very much toes the party line). And then there is his relationship with his grandmother—they seem close and you feel that he does love her, but he is frustrated that she banned him from playing with the servant’s children. It strikes of a detestable snobbery, besides triggering the anger a young adolescent can have at an elder’s denial of a thing they want.

His reporting of his grandmother is also less than decisive. This is something he should do, isn’t it? He’s torn before making the decision, and he grows even more guilty as the repercussions of his actions are felt: the family was going to go to Hong Kong under the pretext of visiting Ah Zai, who is “on his death bed” (a doctor in Hong Kong provides the falsified documentation to prove this), but the authorities will now only grant three visas. Seok Koon is assured that another will probably be released “in time,” but she is left with a terrible choice. Either they lose this chance at escape, or she leaves behind her mother-in-law, her son, or her daughter, San San. Her mother-in-law is not healthy and can’t make the trip without her, nor can she be left behind, so the decision is made to leave San San, as a friend of the family will help her make the trip once she receives the promised visa.

You can see how masterfully Chen sets up her characters’ choices. Many would also find the leaving behind of a child to be repugnant, but you understand Seok Koon’s choice because of how it is cast. Her guilt and the difficulties of her situation make it entirely relatable. As we get to know Ah Zai later in the book, he too grows understandable, even as he becomes increasingly caught in the web of his own toxic masculinity (he has a mistress in Hong Kong and he has gone staggeringly into debt trying to get his family out of China). I still wanted to smack him over the head as he refused to admit his money troubles to both his wife and his mistress, but you still get why he’s doing what he is doing—he’s not one dimensional or a stereotype (something Chen said she worried about as she wrote the novel).

The premise of Bury What We Cannot Take alone is enough to hook you, but it’s the precise, detailed rendering of Chen’s characters as they make good and bad decisions that keeps you reading. Likeable and yet unlikeable at the same time.

The Concrete by Daniel Abbott

Set in the impoverished southeast side of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and often as hard, harsh, and gritty as the material evoked by its title, there were times where I felt as ground down as this book’s characters did. They struggle mightily under the weight of some terrible decision-making, too: infidelity, substance abuse, drug dealing, stripping, and even murder are all contemplated or committed in its pages.

But this book is so lived in. Even under the weight of that depressing list of choices there is a glimmering of life—the glint of a yellow dandelion pushing its way out between cracks in a sidewalk, the little longings and dreams of the characters that keep them going.

Though there are no classic villains in this novel, Cesar Bolden is probably the closest. A drug-dealer with a magic touch, Cesar somehow evades notice by the authorities even as his hold over the southeast side of Grand Rapids seems complete. When a venture into the music business with a former music star goes south, he simply diversifies by making her the star of a porno. Nothing seems to go wrong for this man, even as you deeply despise him for who he is.

Yet part of this despising is created from how you come to understand him. I never liked him, but his life made me sad and angry at the same time because I so completely got who he was. His mother struggled with depression and committed suicide in the bathtub. Cesar is the one who finds her, so you get why he reacts as he does when the former music star he has a child with says she can’t handle being a mother:

‘You don’t know if you can do this?” he asks. Cesar takes a long pause before speaking again. ‘Bitch, you don’t have a choice.'” (pg. 107)

It’s true on some levels. She’s a parent and should not abandon her own kid. But his hostility in the confrontation? It’s the last thing the former music star needs to hear in the midst of her own struggles with substance abuse—it’s no surprise when she leaves Cesar and her son behind not long after.

This is Cesar at his core. While he treated the mother of his child terribly, he loves his son completely and totally. Enough so that he knows he shouldn’t be the one to raise him, giving him up for adoption. This complication of caring so much for someone yet letting them go to give them a better future is one you can’t forget—even as you remember that Cesar Bolden is rarely up to any other good, selling drugs to others and making sure he always comes out ahead.

A Character Is a Character…

Is it safe to say that regardless of their type, interesting characters are well-rounded ones? Or at the very least, something beyond the surface of a knight in shining armor or a plotting murderer twisting their mustache? Even classically villainous characters from literature like Iago or Rigaud from Little Dorritt (who was played with terrifying aplomb by Andy Serkis in a 2009 BBC adaptation) end up having more nuance than the mere glee they seem to take in their misadventures. Whether it’s likeability or a bit of understandability, those on the darker side of the moral scale require a bit of one or the other (or both) if they’re going to linger beyond the pages they are contained in.

On Slowing Down Time…

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Creative Nonfiction Musings Slice of BFS's Life (memoir)

Photo by sinkdd on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

A shot from The Descendants has really stuck with me. The movie was filmed in Hawaii and is filled with gorgeous images, yet the particular shot that stood out to me is in no way one of the most spectacular or important: it’s not a rise of green mountains or a sweep of verdant countryside falling gently towards a far-off beach. It’s just a small, roadside creek, with occasional drops of rain hitting its gray surface. The water’s surroundings are rough and non-descript enough that you could almost wonder why the director, Alex Payne, kept it in.

But of course, it’s there for a reason. The short segment, inserted between more hefty moments of character interaction, is the kind of pause a movie needs to create its mood, to get its viewer to think what they need to. It’s also what the characters of the movie need to do, in order to cope. If a story is going to center around a family dealing with a loved one (a wife, a mother, a daughter) being taken off life support, you can’t rush it around like some frenzied action picture. You need space.

That idea kept coming back to me. Sure, we all know the “stop and smell the roses” line, but I keep returning to that phrase from new angles. Seeing it as the concept of giving yourself space, I am more strongly confronted by the idea behind the cliché. Or maybe even more so when I consider it as an image: of sitting and watching rain drops ripple outward in a small creek. Not running to the next thing like we always do or staring at some screen (only half present), but just sitting. Witnessing.

Those times on the beach at camp, when I looked overhead and saw the Milky Way spilling its way across the heavens. That time I was driving by a lake on my way from high school, a lake I had seen many times before and that was so repetitiously calm and blue that I hardly glanced at it most days, but on that fall day it was somehow transformed into large waves and a surprising, pewter gray—we never think of gray as being beautiful, but it was alive under a glowing, cloudy sky, somehow its own source of light—and I found somewhere to park nearby so I could stand by its edge and just take it in.

I’m twice the age I was at those moments and they still feed me now.

They’re not my only moments I come back to—I have many of those—but I’m never going to have so many of them that I could never use more. It’s making me wonder why I don’t sit and witness more often, even as I struggle through the end of a busy semester, which has made it increasingly hard to stop, cope, and give myself space.

Maybe the most annoying thing about clichéd wisdom like “stop and smell the roses” is how hard it often is to follow.

On Knowing Yourself and How Men Can Be

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Creative Nonfiction Musings

It was a hard line to swallow back in my college years. ‘This isn’t true,’ I thought. I was reading The World According to Garp for a Contemporary Literature course and reacting to this line: “Rape, Garp thought, made men feel guilt by association” (p. 209).

‘Why would I feel guilt about that?’ I said to myself. Rape was anathema, an abomination. Some men out there might do it, but they were not me, and I would most certainly condemn anyone for doing such a thing. To my mind, it was like feeling guilt about someone murdering someone else.

In the eighteen years since that reading, I’m agreeing less and less with my initial reaction. On the one hand, I still agree with my earlier feeling on personal responsibility. You are responsible for the things you choose to do, and the buck stops there. This is a good and important way to think about how the world works: what are you personally doing about an issue, within your ability to do something about it?

As the years passed, it was increasingly impossible not to acknowledge another troubling part of the equation—how men, as a group, can be. Of course I knew about the stereotypes and had even witnessed it, but I tended to avoid situations where such talk happened, and the type of men (or boys) that engaged in such talk. I didn’t care for their behavior. Still, though, I had encountered this attitude when I was with other men—the actions or words that were seen as okay because I was a fellow man. And I had to think about what that meant.

Like the time on the bus in late junior high, when a guy was talking loudly about how he would ask a well-endowed female student what her shirt said, so he could get an easy look. He was technically talking to the guys circled close to him (I was a few rows up and not a part of the conversation), but we were all on a sports team and there were no girls on the bus. I heard more than a few knowing laughs in response. For my part, I felt ill. I understood why the guy would want to look, but also felt terrible for the girl. It was like we were all leering at her collectively.

Or the time in high school when I was walking next to another guy I hardly even knew. We were part of a group headed to a concert, and directly in front of us were two of the girls in our group, one of which he was kind of sort of starting a dating relationship with (one of those hard to follow high school relationships). For reasons still unfathomable to me, he gave a nod at the girl he was dating, waggled his eyebrows at me, and mimed grabbing her rear end.

I was horrified and startled, and this clearly showed in my raised eyebrows and facial expression, since he quickly started talking about something else. Much of my time at the concert that night was spent wondering how to tell the girl what this guy was really like. I kind of knew her, since we were in the church youth group together, but I didn’t know her that well. I settled on telling a friend of hers that I was much closer to so she could pass it on, but I’m still not sure if that was the best thing to do or if it even did any good (I didn’t see much of this guy or the girl he was kind of sort of dating after that point).

I’ve heard far too many stories that are similar, and many that are much, much worse. About eight years ago, I was reduced to a pulse-pounding rage when I read a blog talking about the things often suggested by male college students to women in their classes (either verbally or via text). It would have ticked me off regardless, but I’m a college teacher: no student should have to put up with sexually harassing comments from anyone. I often think of my students as my kids, my family, and if there is one thing you do not want to do around me, it’s mess with my family.

Given these, the stories we’ve all been hearing since the Harvey Weinstein revelations confirm what I already knew—we’ve all been sitting on this iceberg. Men in groups and men alone can feel entitled to say and do things that reduce women to objects, making it easier to harass or rape them.

I think men can be better than this and I know so many men that are better, but it doesn’t change that I am part of a group that has this tendency. When I’m walking alone in a parking lot at night, any woman I meet doesn’t know my background or feelings about all this, they can just tell I’m male, and therefore, a part of that group with that inclination. I hope I don’t cause fear like that, but I am forced to accept that it is a possibility. That guy I hardly knew in high school only needed to know that I was male to think I would agree with his actions.

That’s really what that John Irving quote (which is a similar realization for Garp) is all about—that if you are a man, you are a part of this group that has demonstrated this leaning, time and again. It’s a call to self-awareness and knowing what you are, warts and all. This kind of thinking is not a comfortable one for anyone, as is made far too clear by the many men pushing back wholesale against the #metoo movement, or tweeting utterly baffling things like “Can I even smile at a woman anymore?”

Of course you can smile at women if you’re a man. The issue is when you start expecting more than that—when the woman crossing your path in the dark parking lot should have reason to fear. When the woman sitting next to you in class has to wonder if you’re going to talk to her about the homework assignment or make a suggestion about how she can sexually gratify you. When your co-worker has to wonder if you appreciate what she brings as an employee to the workplace, or if you’re wondering if you could get a little something more from her, be that a date or just someone to take care of the office party because “that’s what women are good at.”

The crux of all this is knowing what expectations you are putting on yourself and others. If you’ve never examined those and their repercussions, you’re probably in for some discomfort (you probably are even if you have put some time examining those… I know I can still feel it). The danger of not asking these questions is losing out on your potential, at being mastered by the expectations you never stopped to consider.

Mastery. It’s the focus of a book I just finished, and very much relevant here. In Ursula K, Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, the main character is a man as powerful as many men want to be. Magic comes to him easily, and he learns far more quickly than his fellows. Yet the central thing this mighty protagonist must face is not some external power (a dragon, another wizard, etc.), but his own shadow, his own darkness. A thing of his own creation that threatens to subsume him.

The wizard perseveres not by winning, but by naming the shadow and acknowledging it as himself. It takes him some time to recover from the encounter, but once he does, he laughs, because at last he is free and healed. As the book notes, he has become, “A man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life is therefore lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark” (p. 143).

Now that is something worth being. That is something worth striving for. It’s not a path easy to begin or continue, but it’s the one worth pursuing—for all of us.

On School Shootings and Stories That Never End

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Musings Slice of BFS's Life (memoir)

Columbine happened not long after I graduated from high school, and it disturbed me to the core. While it wasn’t the first such mass shooting, it was the one that slapped me awake. Nor did it seem outside the realm of possibility for it to have happened in the school I had just graduated from. After all, there weren’t (and aren’t) all that many dissimilarities between a suburb in Minneapolis and a suburb in Denver.

The following year, I began working through my confusion in the way I knew best, by writing. I didn’t really know what I was going to say, just that something needed to be said. What can lead someone to go to a school full of people they know and try to kill them? What does this say about us, the society where this is possible? I was horrified by these questions and not particularly sure if (or what) my answers would be, but I was determined to try.

It took a long time to write my book. A long time. Part of this was needing to figure out my writer self, but part of it was finding what needed to be said. Community was a part of it, some wise part of me seemed to know (I knew it before I even realized how true it was). These things don’t just affect one or two people, but everyone: the school and its local area, the state, the country, even the world.

So I had to discover my fictional community and write stories about it. From one character and his relationships, I found another and another, until I found I was slowly uncovering an entire tapestry of stories, one that I could never completely reveal (or could be written about in just one book). But I had, at last, a book that suggested at that larger collection of untold tales.

In all these years since I began writing, things have only gotten worse. As the New York Times noted, the shooting in Benton, Kentucky, on January 23rd was the eleventh of this year. The eleventh, just twenty-three days in.

And we’re past that count now in February, aren’t we?

For all that regularity, however, we’re no better at dealing with these things. We may make our schools—those who work there and study there—undergo active shooter drills, but as far as actual prevention, or coping goes? If anything, we’re regressing. We are so inured to the fact of these things that we almost have our responses down pat. The battle lines are drawn, and it’s World War I trench warfare at its worst.

In all the tumult of one side denouncing the other, however, I don’t see as much discussion of the most important aspect of the problem. Gun control certainly is a part of it (and there is a possible bridge between responsible gun ownership and better regulation of these potentially lethal weapons), and mental health may be as well, though the connection between that and mass shootings is debated.

The thing we so often miss is what I uncovered in trying to write about these tragedies: community. And while I do see people tweeting and writing about the heroics of those trying to save others, and about the lives of those involved, those narratives tend to be buried (or used for further ends). Particularly the day-to-day lives of those affected, before and after the event everyone is so focused on. Because those stories never end.

Are these stories ever connected, too. We all live in communities, surrounded by other people, and each of us has a propensity for good or bad, love or hate. And try as we might, we cannot legislate love. We cannot dictate how people interact with each other, lest we become dictators ourselves. Boundaries or guidelines may be suggested by laws or constitutional amendments (or under some other organizational name), but how each of us relates to those others in our community is what really decides the outcomes of our stories.

I know, I’m tired too. I’m weary of the sudden spike in my chest whenever I hear of another shooting, knowing that we’re undergoing yet another trauma so common that it has become difficult to register.

Even as we hear about them, though, think on how you relate to those in your community, be it locally, nationally, or internationally. As you argue your point of view (goodness knows we all have them), think long on how you are arguing for it, and the implications of arguing for it. Because the root, the very root of these tragedies is anger and lack of empathy, no matter how one arrives there.

If you’re going to pull the trigger and kill another human, let alone many other humans, you must see them not like you, but as a problem worthy of hating and eradicating. That the only solution is their removal, as quickly and dramatically as possible.

The first step in response for all of us then, no matter how foolish, no matter how rose-tinted glasses it might seem, is to love. To reach out. Anything else is a step back into the abyss.