All posts by James

About James

James Seidler is a writer living in Chicago. The editor for the now-defunct humor publication FLYMF, he has now decided to maintain his web presence and smart remarks through this blog.

What To Occupy Next?

Politics, Well Worth Reading

When dozens of these compressed life stories are read in a row, they amass the moral force of a Steinbeck novel. They explain why Occupy Wall Street became an instant brand across the country.

George Packer has a poignant article in the New Yorker describing the mixed experience of one man who traveled from Seattle to New York to join the Occupy protest. The movement he joins gives him life but ends up possibly being just another institution that fails him.

The quote above refers to the “We Are the 99 Percent” Tumblr feed, which has featured a steady stream of heartbreaking stories.

Review: The Marriage Plot

Books

Jeffrey Eugenides’ new book, The Marriage Plot, feels more like an exercise than a novel. At heart, it’s an updating of the classic marriage plots of Victorian literature, the “will they or won’t they” pairings that fill novels of longing, calculation and need.

Eugenides’ setting is Brown University of the early 80s, where a love triangle spins out of graduation. It focuses on Madeleine Hanna, a privileged daughter of prototypical East Coast WASPs. A fan of traditional marriage plots, she’s trying to navigate a new world of semiotics and the attention of two of her classmates. Mitchell Grammaticus, prickly and uncompromising, looks for meaning in the mysteries of faith. Leonard Bankhead, exuberant and hedonistic, hopes for a trailblazing career in biology—if he can overcome a tough childhood and misfiring brain chemistry.

We follow these characters through the first year after graduation. Alternating among the three narrators, the author captures the nastiness of self-discovery. Mitchell and Leonard are ambitious, intelligent and young enough to want to prove it to everyone they meet. Their insecurities feel true-to-live, but they can be tiresome, even if the pages turn quickly. The Marriage Plot may not have the narrative drive of Middlesex and the Virgin Suicides—it lacks the “put down your book” moments and big truths. But at the line level it’s fluid and engaging.

In the end, though, it falls short of Eugenides’ standard. He seems to pair semiotics with the marriage plot to indicate how young people are forced to find their own paths to proper living in a world without universal standards or expectations. I can only speak from ignorance on Derrida, but his presence seems to suggest that sure new ways of living may soon age into fads and fancies.

But Eugenides’ characters are an empty bunch to illustrate the point. It’s never believable that their three lines intersect. Leonard’s charm is only told to us secondhand; we get whiffs of mint chewing tobacco and a frat-boy philosophy that stands in for free living.

Mitchell, on the other hand, is a naked blade, believing he deserves things because he’s smarter than everyone else. One of the best sections of the novel is his post-graduate interlude in India. There, while playing at service—and achieving some—at Mother Theresa’s charity, he shaves his head, a rejection of frivolity, he thinks. But another seeker has a cutting response:

“I know the person you are…You think you are not a vain person. You are maybe not so much into your body. But you are probably more vain about how intelligent you are. Or how good you are. So maybe, in your case, cutting off your hair only made your vanity heavier.”

“It’s possible,” Mitchell acknowledges. His character is rounded out by his awareness of his own failings. He suffers for them. But at this point in his life, he seems too nasty for Maddy to want to spend much time with.

Maddy herself is defined mostly by the people around her. Level-headed, capable and a bit bland, her problems are other people’s problems. But she even admits she would be more likely to run away from Leonard and Mitchell’s problems than embrace them. So Eugenides is forced to snare her with love, which ends up feeling more like a plotmaker’s trick than a natural development. That may be part of the point—that we shape our own feelings toward what we’ve been conditioned to expect love to be. But it stills feels weak.

Class issues are periodically brought to the stage and shuffled off. On his first night in Paris, Mitchell goes through a believable crisis of the pocketbook, but he soon turns to his parents’ American Express card. Leonard is broke too, a development that stirs up insecurities with Madeleine, but we never see him live it. The novel would be more engrossing if Eugenides let these themes live at the surface. That he doesn’t is especially surprising given his success evoking modern struggles to get by in short stories like the excellent Great Experiment.

With The Marriage Plot, Eugenides has written a gripping book about some very young—and flawed—people. It’s compelling and thorough; it rewards the time you spend with them. But it still seems a strange choice for a novel. Why do these characters deserve our attention, beyond the clear work he’s put into them? Why take the struggles to shape a meaningful way of living up to the early 1980s instead of present day?

In the end, it feels like Eugenides wanted to revisit some unfinished issues from his college days. He does the best he can with it, but it seems he could have done better elsewhere.

Review: Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths

Books, Comics

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths features a battalion-scale look at the lot of Japanese infantrymen in World War II. It centers on a group of soldiers stationed on a remote island in New Guinea—although “abandoned” might be more accurate, given their lack of supplies and suffering at the hands of their superiors.

Their lot is a grim one. Even at best, the grunts are subject to constant beatings from their officers. They’re sent to scavenge in unfamiliar jungle, falling prey to crocodiles, tropical diseases and random bombing forays by Americans, who seem as distant and unknowable as the landscape itself.

The afterword shares that “90 percent” of the story is taken directly from the real-life experiences of author Shigeru Mizuki. This eminent manga creator served on a Pacific island in the Second World War. He barely survived a skirmish that wiped out the rest of his detachment; upon returning, he was berated for it. Only wounds from a bombing raid spared him from deployment in a suicide charge. He eventually lost his left arm and gained a healthy disgust for the treatment he and his peers endured. This scorn is evident in every page of this work.

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths is filled with wrenching details. One man is shot in a rain-drenched firefight. His comrades abandon him, still living, but not before cutting off his little finger with a shovel to prove he died in battle. Later, the starving troops capture an American outpost only to fight over the boxes and boxes of food inside. “These bastards are living like kings fighting this war,”  one observes bitterly.

Mizuki generally draws his characters in an exaggerated, cartoony style while turning to a more realistic treatment for backgrounds, landscape, jungle and camp. Photorealistic splashes periodically appear, typically depicting Americans or the bloody aftermath of battle. For the latter, Mizuki borrows the grainy realism of Robert Capa’s combat photographs. This visual treatment of the American troops—their tanks, planes, transports and lean silhouettes—emphasizes the philosophical differences between the armies. The very solidity of the Americans represents their pragmatic approach to war.

There’s little pragmatism on the Japanese side. Their commanding officer is eager to order a banzai charge against the Americans on their beachhead. Afterward, the few survivors are forced back to oblivion when a general’s dispatch shows up to argue their duty to suicide. One soldier is berated with the words, “Is your little worm’s life so precious?” The phrase could be the epithet for the rotted military culture that’s placed such a man in power.

The book is a powerful document, capturing the horrors of war. As fiction, it has problems, though. Mizuki populates his war story with too many characters. They’re hard to distinguish, and their ultimate fate—while harrowing—is less impactful than it would have been with a smaller cast.

He also relies too much on bodily humor to characterize his troops. Farts, shit, potatoes and prostitutes seem to be the extent of their inner lives. Mizuki may be casting them as average joes, men who would care little about the oft-referenced suicidal example set by Masashige Kusunoki in the 14th century. But he also diminishes them with this reliance on bodily humor.

Still, the book is compelling, full of moments that would seem unbelievable without the corroborating hand of history. It’s a good read—and an important one as well.

Opting Out

Politics

Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It’s about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one’s own culture, this is it.

Matt Taibbi has a moving article in Rolling Stone detailing his slow understanding that the Occupy movement, more than anything else, reflects a desire to opt out…or “drop out,” if you look back to older forebears.

Left to Rot

Comics

LifeHealthPro has a heartbreaking story about comics writer Bill Mantlo. Mantlo, who’s probably best known for his off-the-wall scripts on Micronauts and Rom: Spaceknight, was run down by a hit-and-run driver in 1992 and left with traumatic brain injury. Long story short, rehabilitation efforts were basically dropped by his insurer, and he’s now warehoused in a facility in Queens. What a waste.

On a sidenote, the article is written by Bill Coffin, whose name I recognized from old bylines for the Palladium roleplaying line. Much of my teenage paper route money was blown on their products. And Marvel’s as well.