The Dish

 

On a visit to the Gemeentemuseum in his home country of the Netherlands, Joseph O’Neill paused before a work by Piet Mondrian:

There was one painting which triggered no déjà vu: Mondrian’s final work, the unfinished “Victory Boogie-Woogie”. The museum acquired it in 1998. Here was something I could inspect with critical purity. I was looking at a large, lozenge-shaped surface occupied by hundreds of quadrilaterals of varying sizes distributed in an irregular gridiron. I was looking at blue and yellow and white and black and grey. I was looking at a canvas marked with oil and rectangles of painted paper tape. I couldn’t help it:

I went from seeing to sensing, which is to say I detected a strong painterly gladness and vibrancy in what I saw, as if a mark, before it is anything else, is a feeling. And then, by a further reflex of subjectivity, I transgressed into the realm of interpretation Mondrian so strenuously resisted: this was a jazzy and urban painting, surely, a homage to the city in which the artist lived as a war exile from 1940 to 1944—New York, where I live. How else to explain the taxi-yellow squares? How else to account for this humming and tooting gridlock? …

Mondrian always worked to music, and in his New York years he loved to paint to jazz. With “Victory Boogie-Woogie”, he never tired of applying and re-applying provisional squares of painted paper tape to the canvas. Either the painting never achieved a satisfactory stasis, or Mondrian joyfully lost faith in the idea of the static. The latter seems more likely. What is seen cannot be reconciled with what is remembered.

(Animated GIF of Mondrian’s Victory Boogie Woogie by Rosa Menkman)

At the age of 71, David Cronenberg has stepped away from filmmaking to pen his first novel, Consumed. Karina Longworth offers an overview of the story:

Consumed begins as the story of a journalist couple, Nathan and Naomi, who travel the world separately with their laptops and high-tech portable camera packages looking for stories. They move quickly, self-styled mercenaries who rarely make time for introspection. It’s a rare moment when these two are not interfacing with another human in person, via technology, or both. Nathan and Naomi are a new spin on the old trope of the lone wolf: They work alone, but no one with an iPhone is ever truly alone. …

As a couple, and as journalists, Nathan and Naomi seem to be mostly post-moral: Their work is intentionally exploitative, and they draw little if any line between the professional and personal. Certainly, neither has a compunction about sleeping with a subject, and infidelity as such only becomes an issue when Naomi becomes frustrated that, during the one scene in the novel in which the pair are actually in the same room, Nathan manages to pass her an obscure STD. Cut from the same cloth in some sense, Nathan and Naomi call one another “Than” and “Omi”—as if to embrace the parts of the other that don’t overlap. In fact, this evocative baby talk is the primary continuing indicator that Nathan and Naomi do have a shared history that they care to hold on to. Otherwise, their alienation from one another expands, even as the stories they’re separately tracking start to converge and become open for, as Naomi puts it in what could be a quintessential Cronenberg phrasing, “cross-fertilization.”

Steven Poole finds Cronenberg in familiar form:

The novel is driven by a fascination for the interplay between technology and sex: there is an extended episode of close-up iPhone cock photography, an artwork using 3D-printed body parts, and a set of hi-tech hearing aids specially tuned so that a man can hear the insects allegedly living inside his wife’s breast. (Fans of Cronenberg’s The Fly will enjoy the entomological interludes.) A man says to a woman: “Let me unbox you” – alluding to the video genre in which geeks delicately open the packaging of new gadgets. A woman muses playfully about “the sexuality of camera apertures”, deciding that “stopping down the fixed 35mmm lens’s diaphragm … to a tight f/16 would be the equivalent of executing a Kegel pelvic floor exercise”. It reads somewhat like a mashup of William Gibson, the king of near-future SF cool, and 1970s horror maestro James Herbert.

Jason Sheehan is impressed that the novel is “skillfully executed in the way that few first-time novels from crossover artists ever are and, more than that, absolutely fearless in its handling of subject matter that most writers wouldn’t touch with sterile gloves and a long stick”:

Get far enough into Consumed and all notions of “reality” without quote marks around it become highly fluid. Everyone lies. Everyone has secrets. Everyone is bonkers. Every photo Naomi and Nathan take is edited and doctored until it shows the reality they want, if not the reality that is.

Consumed has weaknesses. Beyond the fact that not everyone is as into bondage, medical oddities, acrotomophilia, insect infestation and gear porn as Cronenberg is, there are bits that drag … and some leaps of coincidence and interconnectedness that strain even Consumed‘s flexible credulity. But still, if you’re a dedicated connoisseur of weird, looking to shock your book club, or just to take a walk on the literary freak side, Consumed is your book. It’s admirable in its unflinching gaze and beautiful in the depiction of its consensually twisted reality. And if you’re going in as a Cronenberg fan? Then Consumed will not disappoint because the whole thing — with all its artfulness and all its flaws — rolls out like a long-lost film from the man’s wilder days, expansive and strange and pulled, wet, dripping and whole, out of Cronenberg’s own head.

So is Cronenberg dying to adapt Consumed for the screen? He addressed the question in a recent interview:

At first I thought, of course I’m going to want to make a movie of my own novel, because how many directors get a chance to do that, or how many novelists get a chance to do that? And I have like five producers who I’ve worked with before who all tell me, “We’d like to make a movie of this with you.” But then I realized it was the last thing in the world I wanted to do, actually, because it feels complete. I feel like I’ve done it [already], and I think it would be actually kind of boring for me to do it again. And that surprised me. I didn’t expect that reaction on my own part. And it didn’t feel to me that the novel needed a movie to be validated or to be fulfilled or completed or whatever. And so I’m in the position where — though, I honestly doubt this will happen — but if some other director wanted to do it, I would sell them the the rights.

In another interview, Cronenberg emphasized that he found novel-writing a liberating experience compared to screenwriting:

One of the reasons I wanted to write a novel was: Do I have a literary voice? Do I have a prose voice? And if so, what is that voice? The only way you can discover that is to write and to let it flow in a natural way without a preconception of what you should be writing or what people expect you to write based on your movies. You have to forget all that stuff and just relate directly to your own head, which is part of the intriguing wonderfulness of writing for days and days and days. You can play that sort of game with yourself. It just arises organically out of the desire to create a narrative and to have characters who come alive, who feel physically and intellectually as though they exist to the reader.

Benjamin Hale suggests someone has to stand up for pleasurable reading:

Some part of me is afraid of the reason why the college kids who want to be writers are still anxiously forcing themselves to slog through The Recognitions: because the accepted knowledge that this is a “smart” book has been handed down to them by their literature professors, who in their time were told this is a “smart” book. And how do the “smart” books become the “smart” books that get handed down to you?

Could it be that the books that become the “smart” books are the ones that are fun to teach? The ones that give the English professor something to do? You can’t say much about a fairly straightforward narrative, but one that requires a lot of critical unpacking is one that will get a lot of play in the classroom, and probably survive in the classrooms of the future. There are some ponderously overrated, heaps of pretentious gobbledygook that have been kept alive for decades this way. I’m not saying smart is bad.

Smart is good … but what about pleasurable? [John] Gardner shouted and banged on the table trying to remind everyone not to forget about morality and the “true purpose” of art, but all I want to do is something much more humble: please do not forget to please. Something about your book must on some level give pleasure. This is not a low virtue.

Similarly, Nick Hornby recently argued that readers should ditch difficult books if they’re not captivated:

Battling through them, he said, would only condition people to believe reading is a chore, leaving a “sense of duty” about something you “should do”. Instead, Hornby argued, reading should be seen more like television or the cinema, and only undertaken as something people “want to do.” Speaking at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, about his new novel Funny Girl, Hornby argued even children should not be compelled to read books they do not want to, saying setting targets of books they “should” read is counterproductive.

Laura Thompson is ambivalent:

My instant reaction to this was a sense of laughing relief, that somebody had not only admitted to doing such a thing, but had portrayed it as a positive act. Why on earth should anybody read a book if it is not fulfilling its most basic requirement, which is to entertain? Then doubt crept in. Advising people to cast aside a book, simply because they are not “loving” it? Comparing the sacred act of reading with that of box-setting one’s way through Lewis? Is this not a certain way to render the classics obsolete?

Who, taking on such a mindset, would grind their way through the opening chapters of Bleak House or The Return of the Native, or refrain from skipping to the more obviously attention-holding passages in D. H. Lawrence? As for books such as Clarissa, To The Lighthouse or Ulysses: surely their continued life depends upon a touch of masochism in the reader? Nick Hornby knows this quite as well as anybody, of course. What he is actually saying is serious and sensible. There is absolutely no point, no long-term gain, in turning reading into a duty, when it can be one of life’s greatest pleasures.

At the same time, I am extremely glad that I read “difficult” books when I was young. They form part of my internal furniture, as it were. I am glad that I was obliged to think about Jane Austen rigorously, and therefore do not subscribe to the idea that Pride and Prejudice is simply Bridget Jones’s Diary in bonnets. … In other words, I think that there does need to be a degree of benign compulsion when it comes to young people’s reading.