Jeremy

When the pot boils, the scum comes to the surface.

That is my main takeaway from The Winds of War. I've read a few of Herman Wouk's novels now and, like the rest, this one is another incredibly compelling drama detailing the conflicts and relationships between a well-drawn cast of characters. In this case it's a military family, the Henry's, and how they orbit the days of World War II.

While the characters and the situations they found themselves in kept me turning the pages, it was the setting and cultural attitudes which left me thinking about the book long after I closed the cover. Wouk's exploration of the larger social attitudes which allowed Nazism to flourish in Germany, as well as the indifference displayed by many Americans, made this book feel almost vital in this moment.

It is all too easy to draw parallels between the mass unrest which allowed facism to take hold in the early 20th century and the modern shift in the West towards ideaologies of bigotry. When speaking on the duology as a whole, Wouk noted that Winds of War was the prologue, setting the stage for the story he really wanted to tell in War and Remembrance, which covers America's experience upon entering the Second World War. Reading today, this first volume isn't prologue but prophecy, and a damning condemnation of how American exceptionalism has made many blind to the mainstream fascism which has taken root in the West today.

Here's how the stories in this collection broke down for me:

Little Heir Friedman: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Joker: ⭐⭐⭐

The Road to the Churchyard: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (really 3.5 but I'm being generous)

Gladius Dei: ⭐⭐⭐

Tristan: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Tonio Kroger: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Death in Venice: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I don’t typically read essay collections, but this was worth the hype. Didion weaves an affecting tapestry of an America that had only just begun to realize its capacity for decline.

The titular essay reminded me a lot of Inherent Vice by Pynchon, although it was written contemporary to the period it covers, as opposed to Pynchon’s retroactive examination. It makes Didion’s ability to tinge it with irony and nostalgia all the more impressive.

Today, the day after I finished Americana, it being my first novel by postmodern legend Don DeLillo, I walked past a cardboard box of books left out on my street. Sitting on the top of the pile, free for the taking, was another of his works, a novella called The Body Artist. I snatched it up without a second thought, feeling an incredible sense of luck and synchronicity. Really, that's all you need to know about what I thought of Americana. Unfortunately, that hardly constitutes a review.

The difficulty in writing about this book is in finding how to begin. The plot? Yes, I can assure you, in Americana you will find a beginning, middle, and end, and they are even presented in that order (mostly). However, despite the potent-sounding mix of American Psycho and Easy Rider, it is not from the plot where Americana derives its central momentum. The characters, then? Well, yes, they're there too. Although, in actuality, I would be so bold as to suggest this book really has one character, one who finds himself surrounded by a cast of fables and punchlines. Even him, David Bell, the novel's protagonist, is more a philosophical concept than an entirely fleshed-out person. He's a symptom of the mass existential malaise, or the flickering spirit of the American soul. The only times David feels tangible are the brief insights we get into his life before the novel begins.

What Americana really is, is a series of impressions. There are books that you can read somewhat passively, and books where you get what you put in, where a little bit of elbow grease and close reading is necessary to truly enjoy the experience. With Americana, you get what it takes out of you. From the desiccated husk where the heart of Corporate America should be, to the suffocating silence of small town life, this novel will pull pieces of you into its environments. And as it hurtles forward, increasingly fractured and listless, the sense that this is less of a book and more of a mirror grows stronger. Not a mirror to society, or to a moment in time, but to you.

Americana is a reflection of its reader, the desperate artist, the office drone, the mind shackled by freedoms. The entire book is an exercise in decay, in stripping away everything in the desperate bid to find a soul somewhere deep down. That hole that exists in David, the gap he is so desperately trying to fill with his cross country escapades, lives in you too. After all, it is that void the book reaches into, filling its pages with the emptiness inside every reader.

(Minus half a star because the first third of the book is quite dull and cynical, a necessary evil for the rest of it to pack a punch, but one that makes the experience a lot less enjoyable)

The Moon and Sixpence is a beautifully written novel about the personal cost of being an artist. W. Somerset Maugham has a very clear focus for this slim volume, intent on exploring what feels like an age old question - should we seperate the art from the personal life of the artist? It's a topic that has become increasingly relevant in the current era of online activism, accountability, and cancellation. Maugham makes his feelings clear from the novel's first chapter, suggesting that not only are the artist's personal failings a worthwhile sacrifice to make for their art, but indeed it's those failings that allow an artist to ascend from merely great to infamous.

I enjoyed a lot of the drama to be found in the novel, especially in the first 60% or so. The characters posed interesting dilemmas. There was tragedy, and comedy, and an unnamed narrator watching to relay each of painter Charles Strickland's sordid affairs to readers. However, just past the midpoint, I began to struggle with a dilemma of my own. Not as worthy of an entire novel like Maugham's, maybe, but a prickly one which, nonetheless, began to actively diminish the novel's hold on me. Am I capable of appreciating this novel, despite the language and ideas contained within that have aged horifically? Now, I'm no stranger to disagreeable social attitudes in books from before my time. It goes with the territory. However, for such a short text, Maugham has managed to pack in a lot to make the modern reader cringe.

I don't have a good answer to the question this novel gave me. I can't lie, however, and say the endless stream of misogyny and slurs in the book's back half didn't lower my esteem for it, nor that that fact isn't reflected in my rating. Maybe you will have a better stomach for these facets than me, and I don't begrudge any reader the experience. There's a good story to be had in these pages. However, for me personally, The Moon and Sixpence started out as a palette cleanser and transformed into an excercise in finding the line where a book begins to actively spoil in my hands. Despite that, I have a feeling this won't be my last book by Maugham (the prose really is that good), and it may not even be my final reading of The Moon and Sixpence. In fact, that may be the strongest endorsement of Maugham's thesis - the art above all else - that I can give.