Six Novellas

The other day I bought Seven Contemporary Short Novels, a collection of seven well-known mid-twentieth-century American novellas, at a local used bookstore. The novellas come complete with essay questions for the college English students who would presumably be the book's main readers.

Unfortunately, at some point in the book's existence somebody took a sharp implement and excised Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Fortunately, the structural integrity of the book is still holding together pretty well. So I got six novels for the price of seven, but the price was only about two US dollars so I can't complain too much.

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers

Although the story made enough of an impact to inspire a play by Edward Albee and a movie starring Vanessa Redgrave, I found it artificial. It exists solely as a Work of Literature to be discussed and written about. McCullers infuses her characters with Meaning and Symbolism, but I never felt Miss Amelia and Cousin Lymon and Marvin Macy to be real, living, flesh-and-blood people. But McCullers' writing is engaging and it drew me in, and I had no trouble finishing the story in one sitting.

Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth

Sometimes I wonder what I missed by growing up in America as a lily-white Western European with no discernible "ethnic" background. The thoroughly Yiddish Aunt Gladys strikes me as the epitome of the Jewish mother stereotype, but I have no doubt that there are many real women just like her, and Roth grew up surrounded by them.

Mid-twentieth-century American literature was much franker about sexual issues than movies or TV from that time. I found this novel (published in 1959) to be an interesting time capsule. Neil and Brenda become lovers almost casually. If either of them is having sex for the first time, it wasn't indicated overtly enough for me to notice. Brenda's mother's over-the-top reaction when she realizes her daughter has been having sex seems like it's from a wholly different culture. Goodbye, Columbus was written before the years we think of as comprising the "Sexual Revolution", but if the novel is any indication the generational shift in values was already well underway before Eisenhower ever left office.

I was also intrigued by the issue of birth control. There is one method of protection mentioned in the novel - the all-important DIAPHRAGM. I realize there were great strides in contraception yet to be made when the novel was written, but the world of Goodbye, Columbus is apparently a world without condoms. I thought that was odd.

Noon Wine by Katherine Anne Porter

A Southern farmer hires a taciturn, hard-working foreigner to help out on the farm. He becomes an accepted if enigmatic member of the household, but years later a stranger's arrival triggers a scene of violence that leaves two dead and the farmer's mental stability in tatters. A haunting little story.

Seize the Day by Saul Bellows

I must admit I never felt drawn in by this story of a middle-aged man with an estranged wife and children, an acquaintance who may have just swindled him out of money, and a general train wreck of a life. Maybe if I manage to re-read it all in one sitting it will cast its spell on me, but I read it in bits and pieces and that just didn't do the trick.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

By far the best-known piece in the anthology, Of Mice and Men probably holds the dubious distinction of being the work of serious American literature that gets made fun of most frequently. I suppose it was inevitable. For some reason we're wired to laugh when we a short, clever guy teamed with a big, stupid guy.

I'm intrigued by how Of Mice and Men is written. As Wikipedia explains:

Of Mice and Men was Steinbeck's first attempt at writing in the form of novel-play termed a "play-novelette" by one critic. Structured in three acts of two chapters each, it is intended to be both a novella and a script for a play. He wanted to write a novel that could be played from its lines, or a play that could be read like a novel.

I was halfway through when I realized I was reading a stage play in novel form. It's easy to see how the novel can be divided into scenes, and everything is communicated either through dialogue or action. There's hardly any introspection. Change the formatting, and you've got a script without having to alter a word.

The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor was not a prolific author and she did not write big bloated novels. If you add up every bit of fiction she ever published, it probably won't come to one thousand pages. But think of the respect her works receive in American literature.

I find her fiction extremely compelling. Part of it is just her ability to tell a story, but there's also the impact of her religious beliefs. O'Connor was devoutly Catholic, and the Catholic perspective with which she viewed the world permeates every aspect of her fiction.

I grew up in a nonreligious family. I've got a thoroughly secular outlook on life. Reading Flannery O'Connor's work gives me a look at the universe and human beings through eyes that are very different from my own. And I think that's one of the most valuable benefits that reading fiction can give a person.

Texas and Ghost Cats and Cubicles

I just read James Hynes' Kings of Infinite Space. An office satire. With undead creatures. And sex. (Not in the same scenes.)

My official Thoughts While Reading It:

- I never, ever, ever, ever again want to find myself earning $8/hr to pay for the food I eat and the apartment I sleep in. I've been there and it sucks. IT SUCKS. Have I mentioned that IT SUCKS?

- This Paul Trilby guy, he's not supposed to be an Everyman character, is he? If he is, he's not a very good one. He's borderline psychotic. He drowned his ex-wife's cat in the bathtub. His condescension towards Texas suburbia is a bit overdone even for my tastes, and I'm a snobby Blue Stater who prefers Belgian beer to American beer, foreign films to NASCAR, and who plans to vote for Obama this November. (I'm relieved to see I was right. Apparently Hynes considers Paul Trilby to be his "evil stunt double".) If there's a true moral center to this novel, it's Callie the Oklahoma Girl.

- I hated Olivia more than I have hated any fictional character I've come across in months. I wanted to see her cut up into little pieces and then I wanted to see the pieces eaten by goats. In other words: Olivia is a very effective character. I wish I'd seen more of her.

- (Not that this will make any sense if you haven't read the book, but...) Just for the record, I didn't know what synecdoche meant either. But now I'll never forget it.

Written Science Fiction

I've finished a 1950s-era collection of science fiction novellas called Strange Tomorrows.

In John D. MacDonald's Shadow on the Sand, the planet Strada is home to an ancient civilization which encompasses hundreds of inhabited planets. In their millenia of recorded history, Stradans have developed impressive telepathic abilities. Their society is divided into two factions which despise each other. But because the two factions occupy the same space, and each relies on the other for materials and logistics, any armed conflict would quickly bring about the Mutual Assured Destruction of civilization. One last, crucial detail: Strada is a parallel-universe Earth. And one Stradan faction figures out how to open a dimensional gateway, giving it a decisive edge over the other faction once and for all...

In Theodore Sturgeon's The Comedian's Children, a popular television comedian is beloved by millions for setting up a foundation to treat children afflicted with a terrible, disfiguring disease. So one can imagine that he's mighty pissed off when a scientist comes close to finding a cure...

In William Tenn's Firewater!, enigmatic aliens came to Earth years ago, and since then have done... basically nothing. Humans who manage to communicate with the aliens gain psychic powers, but also go batshit crazy. As an anti-alien "Humanity First!" movement gains power, one CEO makes millions by figuring out bits of alien science from the crazy ones and turning it to marketable goods...

In Jack Williamson's The Greatest Invention, the Galaxy contains a highly rational, scientific human civilization, but many planets are gripped by intense religous fundamentalism. One academic type is convinced that all humans are originally descended from a culture on ancient Earth (really ancient Earth - the novella takes place in the 20th Century and Earth people are considered by other humans to be uncivilized savages not even worth contacting), but he has trouble winning over the dogmatic, conservative bureaucrats whom he must deal with...

In Hal Clement's Planetfall, an alien made of some kind of rock or crystal lands his starship on Earth and tries to deal with the curious locals, but is severely handicapped by his inability to conceive of organic life. He can't shake the idea that human beings are just robots remote-controlled by a real life form somewhere else. And his senses are not really attuned to dealing with events on a planet's surface... This story ought to be required reading for anyone who can't conceive of an extraterrestrial character more alien than Chewbacca or Lieutenant Worf. (I wonder if Planetfall inspired Terry Bisson's famous short story They're Made Out of Meat.)

Each of these novellas bears a copyright date between 1950 and 1958. And yet, as a whole these stories are far more inventive than most science fiction you see on TV or at the movies nowadays. I'm not here to bash all SF film and TV - there's a lot of it I like, and my brain is a repository for more useless Star Trek trivia than I'd care to admit - but it seems there's an inventiveness, a vitality, in written SF that you don't see as much in TV and movies.

Of course, a huge amount - maybe a majority - of SF on TV and in the movies is really just fantasy or action in a science-fictiony setting. That's not necessarily bad - I've liked Star Wars since I was a kid, and Star Wars is obviously a fantasy/action film series with starships.

But it seems that when interesting ideas do pop up on televised SF, very often the screenwriters don't follow them to an interesting payoff, or present them in such a way that the audience loses its suspension of disbelief. Or both.

One of Star Trek: Voyager's best episodes (it's up to you to decide whether or not that's exceedingly faint praise) dealt with an alien race descended from dinosaurs that developed space flight and left Earth way back in the distant past. That's a potentially interesting setup. But I flat-out don't accept the idea that, even though these guys have obviously been living among the stars for millions upon millions of years, they have a technological level and society comparable to our 24th-century human protagonists.

I realize that a TV series is a different medium, and is going to have a different goal than a short story or a novel. But it seems like SF movies and TV shows could probably muster a bit more of the inventiveness of written SF.