The World is Square

Though this is a somewhat older piece, I always had an affinity for it. Structurally it's rather bizarre, and thematically it's all over the place, but I think I managed to do what I wanted with it.

- - -

The world was square. How or why or just when it had stopped being a circle and become a square, nobody knew for certain. Some of them pointed out that the world was not a "square," was, in fact, a "cube," but all of the people who said things like that were squares anyway. Now, changes in the world were normal parts of life (after all, you couldn't seriously expect it would always rain or always be sunny, nor that the world would be perpetually flooded or in drought), but, even so, this was a rather major change by anybody's calculations.

Despite the revolutionary nature of this particular change, most people took it in stride. So the world was square, so what? Bills continued to be paid and the utilities continued to run. If the world had decided it wanted to be a square, that was an issue for the philosophers to debate or the scientists to study. For most people, it was just another hassle. For instance, the maps had to be slightly redrawn to accommodate what before this would have been geographical absurdities, and all of the spinning globes had to be recalled and spinning cubes issued in their place. Some people even had to cross from one of the six faces of the earth to another one on their way to work. This had to be done very slowly, however, to ensure that you didn't jettison yourself into the exosphere and fall off the face of the earth. Gravity was still in effect, naturally, no matter what shape the earth became. Cube, sphere, pyramid, it really didn't matter. The only problem was that gravity was very weak along the edges, and seemed to only really work on the six faces.

So Jim, having just read about this in the morning papers, sat in the middle of his living room with a blank look and an empty head as though he was either a lobotomy patient or in shock. It wasn't that Jim was a moron or that his face was inexpressive, because both of those things were completely untrue. Jim was actually very intelligent and rather proud of what intellectual powers he possessed, although there was certainly a great deal of people with prettier and more elastic faces than his. Jim had woken up to find that the earth was square, and this was naturally somewhat disconcerting to him (but not earth-shattering as the saying went).

He had gotten up with his hair standing stiff and straight up on the right side of his head from accumulated stress, dirt, and the molding effects of sleep, pulled on a bathrobe that had been a Christmas present from his much richer friend, and staggered outside to grab his paper and the mail, which he had neglected to bring in the previous night. This done, he sat down on the floor with the white envelopes smelling of glue and opened them. It was because of this unforeseeable mistake that he sat on the floor with the empty head and blank look.

The first letter was from Harvard Law School to which he had applied several months earlier, only a little while before completing his undergraduate studies at Stanford and graduating near the top of his class.

To Mr. Jim Finnick,

We regret to inform you that your application to Harvard Law School has been denied.

etc.

Sincerely,
[Illegible photocopied scrawl]
Dean of Admissions

This was a tad bit disappointing. He had higher hopes from the next one on which he set his sights. Perhaps a check.

Dear Mr. Jim Finnick,

You're fired.

Sincerely,
Jackson & Dale

P.S. Please return the fifty dollars you stole from the cash register last week. Don't make us involve the authorities.

They did not include a check. The next one was bound to hold some good news, however, and so he opened it with the hopes of three letters riding on one.

Dear Jimmy,

I've made up my mind. I am not going to marry you. Last night I agreed to marry Sierra, who gives me things you can't even begin to dream of. If you wonder why I left you, it's because you're pudgy and a boring conversationalist. Find a gym and a hobby in that order.

Love,
Mary

P.S. I'm keeping the ring.

Jim set this on top of the others and turned to the fourth one, now absolutely certain that there would be nothing but bad news. What else could go wrong, after all? And yet, the next envelope was from The Late Show inviting him to come work for David Letterman. In his excitement, it took him a moment or so to realize that the letter was not actually addressed to him. So he turned to the last bit of mail, noticing that it was a single piece of paper rather than another envelope of dread news. Probably an advertising flyer, he thought.

Eviction Notice.

Jim let it fall into the pile of all the other opened mail. That was it. Then he read the papers and learned that the US had political infighting, the Middle East had terrorism, China had lead, and, of course, the earth was square. For a long time afterward he couldn't really bring himself to think about any of it, but after a while he could concentrate on the fact that the earth was square. Whether he could only think of the squareness of the earth because it was most distant from him or because he now no longer had the petty problems of everyday life clouding his judgment Jim wasn't sure. What he was certain of was that the earth's nearly-overnight geological upheaval would have to be dealt with. So Jim made up his mind to contact some of his former professors and see what the earth's new shape implied.

Jim took a shower, got dressed, climbed into his car, and drove off. The car broke down three blocks from his house. A quarter of a mile and forty-two minutes later, Jim was on a city transit bus slowly heading to his destination.

It took a while, but at last he was in the office of his old professor of economics. Jim asked the man what the sudden change in the earth's shape portended. His professor replied:

"It's hard to say, you know. Moving across faces of the earth has to be done carefully anymore so you don't fall off the edge of the world. I suppose trade and commerce are going to be more or less confined to each particular side. The world'll probably divide up into six squares of influence, and a major economic power will come to dominate each one. Military expeditions will probably become very difficult affairs between faces, so ultimately we just have to hope each face regulates itself.

"Unfortunately, the southern states are on one square and the northern stares are in another, so it'll be anyone's guess whether or not the United States makes it through this whole thing intact or if we'll be seeing a resurgent Confederacy. At least California's in the same square as D.C. Without them this place would collapse in Roman-style bisexual orgies and our power plants would fail. Of course, both of those are half-true already.

"But if you'll excuse me, this isn't too terribly important at the moment. I have to go birthday shopping for an aunt and then I have to get my daughter a new pacifier. She managed to eat most of the last one. My son suggested we stick balsa wood in her face, but he's the one that let his boa constrictor loose in the house last week. It tried to eat the cat, you know. I think I told you about that. Now his snake is dead, the cat's at the vet getting broken bits of fang removed from its hind leg, and my son wants to have it put to sleep for murdering that grotesque, slithering reptile. So many things to worry about and there just aren't enough hours in the day. Good-bye."

Jim thanked his former instructor, and with that the professor was summarily gone.

His curiosity was not satisfied, however, and so he went to his psychology professor. It took him a while to find the man, however, because the professor had slept late that morning and only recently arrived. Jim asked his professor what the widespread effects of the earth becoming square were likely to be. His professor replied:

"Well, it's hard to say, isn't it? Everybody's different after all. I think it's safe to say the more developed nations will react more calmly and rationally than the rest of the world. Except perhaps for the Germans, but that place is like one giant psych ward anyway, so as long as they don't take out their deep-seated sense of inadequacy on the Jews or some other poor ethnic minority, we'll all be fine.

"Hmmm... As I see it, there will probably be a number of religious interpretations as to the significance of this event, though you know I sincerely doubt that God has anything whatsoever to do with all this mess. There will probably be a lot of grief caused by this geological metamorphosis, so to speak. My, another German reference. Or Czech, rather. It's just that I have a very bright German student in class this semester. Very bright indeed. She's a stunner...

"Anyway, people will be divided from those they know and loved, some on one face of the world, some on another. It's a rather tragic situation. But if you'll excuse me, I have a class to teach and a date to get ready for afterwards. Good luck with Harvard Law, I hope you get in."

With that he was gone. Jim still wasn't satisfied (was, in fact, more dissatisfied than ever), and so he sought out the professor at the school of engineering and put the same questions to him that he had to the other two. The professor replied:

"Obviously we'll be building tunnels now, probably all along the edges of the world, to connect our face with the other faces. That's going to take a while though, and it'll be disorienting for people who end up using it. What are you gonna do, right? But tunnels are exciting."

After this, the engineering professor apologized, but he was about to be late for a meeting. With a hasty good-bye, he made his rapid exit.

Distraught by how everyone was not only unaware of his own problems but blithely ignored what had happened to the world, Jim wandered around campus for a long time trying to think of what to do. It occurred to him that he could write his local congressman, but he was unsure of whether or not the federal government could actually deal with the problems of an entire planet. He was not a history major.

He shook his head and, feeling at once resigned and rebellious in equal measure, went off to Ace Hardware to purchase a shovel.

Bibliophile: Atvar Does Books

A Review of Janet Fitch's Paint it Black.

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I had promised a few people that I would collect my book reviews onto this site, and I've finally decided to begin to make good on that promise. Because symbolism is important, I've put off reviewing just anything until I had something both (relatively) contemporary and worthy to review. I considered reviewing The Kindly Ones, a novel about the Second World War, but as literature it was so fundamentally schizophrenic that I decided I couldn't do it justice in a few pages, nor would it really be suitable for this first posting. Then, about a week or so ago, I finished reading Janet Fitch's Paint it Black. That solved that.

Also, spoiler alerts. Many of them.

First, anyone who has read White Oleander can agree that it really does have a beauty and a power unmatched by much in contemporary American literature. The language is stunningly poetic, the characters are believable, the pacing is superb, the drama infinitely compelling. The only qualm one might have is with the repetitive episodic structure. The progression is from block of time and place to block of time and place with only so much connective structure in between. This in itself isn't really good or bad, it's simply that it is not absolutely perfect. It feels like a holdover from either folklore or from attempts to imitate the structure of music. But then, the book is a pseudo-bildungsroman, and in the contemporary era people aren't so concerned with strict structure anyway. On all the counts that grab and keep people, in any case, White Oleander was a masterwork of craft. I would say it transcends mere craft, but history doesn't often agree with me, so we'll see how well it outweathers the erosion of time.

But the ultimate survival of a work of fiction is arbitrary and prejudicial at best (and I mean the bad kind of arbitrary, not the good, Atvarian form of arbitrary), and it is not predicated solely on the virtues of its creator, or even on the work itself. So the question remains for us, is Janet Fitch a genius or was White Oleander a fluke?

I'm steeply inclined in favor of the former, but I'll get to that as I go on. I can only say that after 16 pages, Paint it Black broke my heart. After 20, I realized it was trying to kill me.

However, I'm forced to admit my bias. After WO, I would be willing to forgive a very great deal from Ms. Fitch before finally relenting and admitting that yes, her first novel was a complete and total accident. (Does it strike anyone as odd that I am more forgiving of inanimate objects and of people I've never met than those I've spent years pestering?...)

The primary difference which exists between White Oleander, Janet Fitch's first major novel (second overall), and her second (third overall), Paint it Black, is reducible to this: White Oleander exhibits more polish and control; Paint it Black is rawer and more brutally emotional. Both are dark novels, and both end on notes that are at least somewhat higher-pitched than what came before, but neither offers what one could call “good cheer” nor do they represent unadulterated nihilism – though whether that's good or not is subject to debate.

I don't know what kind of life Ms. Fitch leads or has led. I don't know if she grew up in the slums or the high rises, but her stories don't seem to be any sort of attempt at deception. This is what life is, they say, accept it. Unlike some great existentialists, the mantra is not “You must change your life” (I thank Walter Kaufmann for that interpretation) and unlike the realists, the mantra is not “change society” either. If it weren't for the urban squalor and the all-too-common suffering, you might almost call Fitch's work romanticist.

Ultimately, I'm not sure which I like more. My own poetics sometimes tend towards preachiness (existentialism) and idealization (romanticism), and, though I've nothing against portraying the possible or conceivable, I profoundly dislike realism for realism's sake. Shouldn't a craftsman or an artist be responsible for more than mere journalism? Mere copying what came before? If they're lying anyway – and to some extent that is unavoidable; literature only comes in degrees of truth-value – then why not lie only to others? Why deceive oneself?

But to the matter at hand. Paint it Black is, in a sense, Romeo & Juliet if Juliet and Romeo had both been more than slightly neurotic and Juliet had also survived Act 5. It's a tragic romance tale, but not a generic one.

The main character, Josie Tyrell, is a young sometime-actress and regular nude model. She has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. She is in love with a man, Michael Faraday, who is in many respects unknowable to us, but what we do know of him leads us to conclude that he is almost entirely pathetic. This man, we learn in the opening, say, 14 pages, has blown his brains out. It takes us to the end of the book to figure out precisely why, but we get a pretty clear idea that this was kindasorta inevitable by about 75-100 pages in even if we didn't learn about the trigger – so to speak – for it all later on.

It's easy for us to get right into the story because the main character makes no demands on us. She's a drunk, a drug-freak, an uneducated, lower-class cockroach who frequents night clubs and other such dens of iniquity. Yet her lover claims that she is “smart” and “original.” I am not entirely sure I can agree with that overestimation. Her one somewhat positive quality is that she has the capacity to appreciate better. When her boyfriend dies, she loses the one bright spot in an otherwise drab, dreary, monotonously oppressive life (totalitarianism is boring, they say, and life is nothing but a totalitarian state writ cosmic). She is alone. She realizes that her friends don't have an ounce of the soul of the man she lost, and her one connection (irony alert here, dear readers, since the connection is to a man she ultimately did not and now cannot know) to someone who could see the “true world” with her, is irrevocably severed. She is adrift.

And the man who destroyed himself and did this to her? A self-loathing, self-deceiving modern-aristocrat genius painter run through with weakness, insecurities, doubts, and a sense of distance between himself and others and between himself and what he wishes he could be. He comes from fabulous wealth and fame. His father is a writer, his mother a concert pianist. He's a Harvard dropout who has a troubled relation with the truth. He wants to be authentic (by rejecting his upper class life in favor of the slums) but he cannot see himself for what he is, nor can he see the truth of what really separates and binds the middle and upper class. And this is the man who introduces Ms. Tyrell to culture and beauty, who is showing her the “true world”...

Tangent: I've noticed an odd kinship between Fitch and Fitzgerald. It is this:

Fitch's prose = sublime
Fitzgerald's prose = sublime

Fitch's characters = contemptible
Fitzgerald's characters = contemptible

Just a minor observation. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

What is the “true world”? You've probably all heard the phrase in some context or another. It is, essentially, a world beyond, above, anterior to, what-have-you, the common or “real” world. According to Fitch's Tyrell:

She thought about the true world, the times they had seen it – it was like light glinting on the surface of the river, that shimmering quality when you saw it. It wasn't the thing itself. It was your own ability to see it. Like the nights they lay in bed listening to the mockingbirds sing. Or the time they knelt by the river, and the blue heron came walking out of the reeds. The feeling when time stopped, and you could stay there forever. "You see the beauty inside everything. It doesn't last long – it's either gone in a minute, you just caught it, or else maybe it's something so big that you normally can't get your head around it. Like the fog in your head clears out. The world stops being a puppet show and you see the real thing. It's probably like that all the time, but you just can't see it, except for those little glimpses."

The thing itself, eh? As opposed to the thing-in-itself? The Kantian thing-in-itself? Nietzsche loathed this idea and hammered it into the dust in Twilight of the Idols (“Reason in Philosophy” section 6). Not that this is particularly relevant, though. It's just odd that there should be such echoes of philosophy here. Oddly enough, the next sentence, a response from a contemptible character named Lola Lola, brings me right back to Nietzsche.

"A beautiful man," Lola said.

Indeed. Or a beautiful soul in any case (the term which N loaded with contempt and used to denote the meek, the frail, the pathologically kindly). Someone so profoundly sick as to be almost infectious. And when he destroys himself, he takes the weakened, cracked-up foundation he had provided from Josie's life, he robs her of her one support. You could blame her for attaching herself to such a weak creature, but that's too cruel a judgment. She had nothing, but she had always wanted better. She grew up in a hick environment but managed to escape. She moved on to California, hoping to have a normal life at the least, and then this man from a world of light and beauty stepped into her life, and she was too blinded by that to really see the darkness inside him. By the time she does, she's already in love. And that is why it's impossible not to sympathize with her. We see a lonely woman put through too much indignity (rape by your own brother, anyone?) who loses the one flawed but beautiful thing she ever really possessed. It's robbed from her, and it can never be regained.

And the sincerity, the passion, with which Fitch presents Josie's obsession with her lover, is naked in its honesty. Even an inveterate cynic like myself can't help but feel something at this:

He set the grinder down then and put his arms around her, tight. Kissed her. “I'll be working. Yo know how I get. Trust me, it's better this way.” She held on to him, her eyes closed, drinking in his smell, pine and moss and some peculiar chemistry of his own, that she craved the way an addict craved freebase. She could lick him like candy. He held her for the longest time, crushing her to him, his scratchy beard.

She missed him like fire.

The trouble is that I'm not sure where that feeling comes from. The emotional power woven into the fabric of the book could be melodrama, or it could be because the wound is unusually deep. When Michael destroys himself (or is destroyed, but I'll leave that to you, the reader, to discover) and inflicts such suffering on Josie, is it the purity and the sheer volume of the despair, or is it the profundity of the pain which is really moving us? Throughout the book, we get a conflicted, sometimes irresolvable portrait of who Michael Faraday was, and even what Josie Tyrell felt for him. Uncertainty pervades everything about the lives of these two wrecks of human beings – What was Michael's relationship with his mother? Did Josie really know this man at all? Who was truly responsible for this, that, or the other? Who was at fault? Could anything have been done to stop it? – except for one thing: the conviction of love.

I do overstate here, but I do it out of a concern for greater thematic relevance. Josie does wonder here and there whether Michael loved her and on what their loved was based, if anything, but the pain she experiences over his death does not diminish, and the fact remains that she did and does feel something for him, despite, of course, being misled about him (often deliberately) on so many counts. In a sense, she never knew him. But isn't that true of us all? And she loved him anyway.

It isn't that simple, though. This isn't a case of taking a platitude about life and dramatizing it. Michael is not the average man with secrets. He is a deceiver, both of others and of himself. The narrator (a pseudo-Josie-consciousness which I'll get to later) points out: “And in the end, she would never know the truth...He could believe something passionately, then later, deny what he had said. Even hand his position to you, while he argued the exact opposite point of view.”

Later, in one of the conversations between Josie and Michael's mother, Meredith, with whom the Oedipal relationship is just a little bit screwed up – pun pun pun – (O, allusions to Greek myth, how I love thee: minotaur, mother, Oedipus, furies) Josie goes off on a rather nasty attack:

“Let me tell you something about your son. You know what he liked?” She took the last drink of Stoli, exhaled the heavy fume. “He liked doing things when he was pretending to be doing something else.” She put the glass down on the table between them, just a tiny table. She leaned over so her face was only inches from Meredith's and lowered her voice to a whisper. “For instance, he liked to fuck me while he was talking on the phone with you.”

What's that Tolstoy line about happy families, again?

Michael has identity issues. He creates personas for himself. In his suicide letter, he says of Josie “We loved each other once... Didn't we?” That's a heartbreaking final word. In his diaries, however, revealed towards the end, we get a more honest picture of what was going on inside him because the diaries are something he never showed the world nor intended to show. They were a mere extension of his own mind. The letter, however, was just another display.

And the German girl at the motel he checked into, with whom he spoke before the end, got yet another version of who and what Michael was. The only constant in Michael (unlike the constant in Josie, which is loving him) is this: “Worth. He made you feel worthwhile. That was his gift.” For all his weaknesses, and perhaps because of them, he does care about people. He spends time with them, listens to them, interacts with them, and even seems to love them.

But that's really not enough, is it? He's angry, self-loathing, testy, emotionally isolated even from the one he loves, doesn't work, isn't assertive, etc. etc. etc. All the qualities necessary for the “real world” are entirely absent in him. And he shows Josie the “true world.”

In spite of all his failings, she loves him. No healthy person would have. That's part of the dark beauty of the novel: these two people are profoundly fucked up.

I would venture to guess that both melodrama and genuine depth go into making up the power of this. Dostoevsky was into melodrama, after all, and it served only to enhance the power of his works. It seems to me that the same happens here. After all, the pure pathos of the pain is what involves you, but it's the finer details of precisely how mutilated the souls of these deformed, unfinished beings, sent before their time scarce half made up truly are. After all, Josie wants better, but she doesn't want “it all.” And Michael's warped attempt to recover some semblance of normalcy stems from...what? Nature? Nurture? Is it wisdom on his part to withhold the entire truth from the one he loves, or is it folly? Was such a love only possible in these sick and unhealthy conditions? Could the predator that is man when healthy have truly committed to this with such sincerity? And was it even sincerity when the man Josie loved could throw it all away in a day, or the woman Michael loved could strike such a cruel blow that would drive him to that point? Should they have loved each other at all, or was that actually the worst thing that could have happened?

Not all original questions, but composed in such a striking manner that it hardly matters if they're not.

Nor is the “love & death” theme a new one, but it doesn't pretend to be. Similarly, the “love that breaks all barriers” idea is ancient. The particular quirks of the characters, the failure of the love to conquer all, the play between the certainty of feeling and the uncertainty of identity and life, and the unresolvable dilemma between what in life has worth and how much (answered somewhat bluntly and inadequately at the end), combine to make this a very unique take on old story ideas. You will hear some echoes of White Oleander in the female characters and the setting, but the situation is entirely different.

For 387 pages, we are treated to a mix of Josie's recollections of her time with Michael, her life as it is in the wake of his self-destruction, and some accounts she gets of him from others who knew him. Her pain and her obsession run like a skipping disk throughout the whole book, but somehow this works. Maybe because the inability to move forward in such a situation is so true, maybe because the bleakness sucks you in, assimilates you to itself, and then refuses to let you go again. True, the material could be condensed if it were entirely necessary – I will admit it runs a little long. That said, were I the editor, I would not have cut a line of it.

The book is a direct refutation (one of many) of the Nietzschean idea that only what is healthy is beautiful.

Very well, the characters are well-drawn and intricate (compelling even when loathesome), the thematic content is overflowing, the emotions are involving, the uncertainty and mystery of life are made palpable, the style remains magnificent, and the notion of beauty and truth pervade the scene. But what about the flaws? Unlike WO, this book has its share of them.

1. The narrative perspective is an imperfect vehicle.

Take this paragraph, for instance, which was a source of profound annoyance to me the first time I read it and remains so now:

She lay on the couch, smoking her Gauloise, the cigarettes he smoked. The smell of Paris. They were going to Paris...But no, they weren't. You goddamn stupid motherfucker. What did he think he was doing? What was on his fucking mind? Here, here's my dark world. You carry it for a change. I'm out.

Why, exactly, are some of these sentences italicized as opposed to the others? The italics are her thoughts, of course, but...so, in essence, is the whole narrative, related through the magical medium of narration. “They were going to Paris...But no, they weren't” – doesn't that belong rightly in italics? And what about “What did he think he was doing? What was on his fucking mind?”? Seems more like thoughts than narration to me, but not as clear-cut. Additionally, “The smell of Paris” strikes me as not in line with her current actual thoughts and more in line with her narrator-thoughts.

In fact, it doesn't become clear what the use of this narrative device is until later. Fitch's first person narration in White Oleander was just fine, and it seemed like this story deserves something similar. At the end, however, Josie's inability to go back over her history and experiences like a record adds to her uncertainty. She cannot know the truth of anything, and being able to review her “notes” would conflict with that. So there's a purpose to it, though the narrative perspective isn't uniformly good throughout. The Crime and Punishment narrator this is not.

2. The structure is loose.

This charge I leveled against WO as well. In that one, however, the episodic experiences led from Point A (the mother's imprisonment, the Sudden Dramatic Upset) to Point B (Astrid's release from the system, her freedom as an adult, the Grand Finale and Resolution). In this case, the Sudden Dramatic Upset (Michael's death) throws everything into chaos – directionless chaos and suffering. There is no obvious way out, no clear path to follow. And, again, this is acceptable to an extent. You can read the book if you are involved in the moment, but if you're looking for tight, dramatized structure where everything follows a fictionalized purpose, then this is not the book for you.

Now, a further note: this would be fine by me if – if and only if – the book ended appropriately to the way it unfolded. The resolution should not have been a true resolution in any sense other than one which fit with the premise (which in this case means suicide).

3. The drug use is obsessive, thematically irrelevant, and pointlessly repetitive.

Anesthesia to the pain was only brought up incidentally as a thematic element. Most of the time she wanted to stop suffering or wanted Michael back, but this was detached entirely from the drugs themselves. The only point seemed to be to show that the main character was fucked up. We got that part after the first couple dozen pills and thirty pints of vodka. My only question is how her liver was still functioning past about chapter ten.

4. The ending is contrived.

This is the worst thing for me. Summarily, Josie goes out to the hotel where Michael killed himself with an intention of following him. She has succumbed to his suicidal form of nihilism. How do you escape nihilism? How do you avoid the big “Zero” (as it is noted to be in the book)? Her answer is...by existing. Not incredibly dramatic. The change is occasioned by essentially nothing, and it seems to cheat us of the inexorable logic of circumstance.

Sure, “this is all there is.” Fine. But that's made bearable only by the sight and warmth of another human being, another person who recognizes the Zero. The trouble here is that she has lost that. She's got nothing left. Her friends have given nothing of substance to her, Meredith is unhinged or otherwise incapable of being hinged in the first place, Michael is dead, she can't escape. Yet without reason, she chooses to go on. Tyrell tenacity is a sort of motif in the book, but it doesn't fit with overcoming the profound despair she's been thrown into by her boyfriend's death. She has, after all, come out here resolved more or less to destroy herself, to follow her lover into oblivion.

The book is almost four hundred pages of crushing despair. Four hundred pages of a dream fading and the tapestry of a shared life coming undone. There is no outside help, no source or support. This woman had a resolve once, true, but that was corroded by her addiction to this weak man. When he blew his brains out, he cut her legs out from under her (what do you think of that image?). And her progression was one of steady worsening, not improvement. Spontaneously embracing life and strength simply doesn't seem to work here.

In truth, there were several options. The book could simply have had a non-ending to fit with its loose structure. Josie could simply have walked off into the desert, come what may (as she nearly did, in fact). She could have taken all the pills and drifted off into her sleep. She could have tried to kill Meredith for being the one somehow “responsible” for Michael's destruction (avoiding the blame which falls to herself, of course). She could even have simply sat on the beach and fallen asleep at sunset or an incoming tide. Suicide, however, would probably have been best. The nihilism here demanded embrace, but that was refused on a whim. The comparison to Raskolnikov's transformation at the end of Crime and Punishment is again apt. The ending is hacked on (yes – hacked). Of course, what did get written has uncertainty in its own right (what does the future hold for Josie Tyrell and this German girl she doesn't know), but the purity of the despair is diluted by a sudden fount of strength, found as if by magic. It doesn't fit, it doesn't make sense, it's wrong.

Now, none of these objections in and of themselves are enough to bring the work down. They're annoying, but they aren't critical flaws. So what's my final opinion of the book? It's a great example of the writing craft in many respects. It doesn't have universal applications as embodied in the drama. Even in modernity, few people are as sick as these characters. However, the thematic uncertainties do have genuine relevance to human relationships. Fitch's talent for writing contemptible, trivial, or wrecked characters who nonetheless compel our attention and even our emotional involvement is a rare and welcome gift. And the prose, if nothing else, is nothing less than gorgeous.

Ultimately, I'm left with my subjective assessment. I won't speak to absolutes. I loved the book, in all its beautiful and heart-rending prose and pathos, and there are things in it that I as a writer can learn from. In the end, that's all I need.