“The thing that sucks about trying to live in the moment is that you end up broke and hungover when you wake up tomorrow.”
Direct and down to earth, Colin Clancy’s “Ski Bum” follows ski enthusiast Jimmy as he drops out of college in Michigan to head out west to chase the big slopes of Colorado. Aimless and romantic in an understated, blue-collar kind of way, Jimmy is looking for more than fresh powder. He wants to live life, to chase new experiences, even as he discovers how tough that can be on a part-time ski instuctor’s budget.
Living in workers’ quarters, Jimmy falls in with a crew of friends and quickly settles into a service-job routine: shots at night, the monotony of teaching rich kids to ski in the mornings, and stealing moments on the slopes whenever he can. Uncomplicated without being simple (just like Clancy’s writing style), Jimmy seeks basic pleasures alongside the more difficult work of determining who exactly he wants to be.
That’s when he’s sober. When he’s partying, Jimmy can turn into someone else entirely–throwing his phone into a snowbank after a screaming match with his girlfriend or wading into a bar fight for the thrill of it. But he’s not the worst drunk in a party scene full of them, and Clancy does his strongest work capturing several hellish bacchanalias, the kinds of bleary binges that render the next morning into slush under your boots.
The group’s excursion to New Orleans is a particular lowlight, taking what’s supposed to be a fun party weekend and transforming it into something hateful and queasy, half-riot, half-purge. The characters are still young enough that it’s fun for them to tie one on and get out of control; I’m much older than they are now, and reading Clancy’s book, I couldn’t help but worry for them, seeing the trouble on the horizon.
But the book reminds us they’re still young enough to make mistakes, to flounder, and to bounce back. “Ski Bum” does a memorable job capturing a slice of youth in a special place. The characters aren’t sure what they’re doing, but they don’t have to be quite yet–they still have time to bum around a while before shifting back to conventional lives, finishing school, getting real jobs.
It’s unclear how things will turn out for these characters, but the easy read rewards us for the time we spend with them.
McGrath is a thoughtful guide. He’s open enough to enjoy the pleasures of Elvis impersonators and church-basement wrestling matches, but he’s mindful of the depths beneath: a friend stabbed by his own brother in Lesotho, a homeless client embarking on one last bender as he fades out of life.
The author is open with his sympathies. He calls out a racist mine manager who invites him to watch a rugby match and chews out hospital workers who judge his client for turning back to cocaine on a terminal diagnosis. It’s easy to agree with McGrath, but while it’s understandable he doesn’t extend the same graciousness to his foes as his friends, it also feels like a missed opportunity in essays of this caliber. As he notes, he drank the mine manager’s beer, ate his food…and waited until they’d parted ways to write an essay calling out the man’s racism.
That said, the stories here are warm and memorable. Perhaps the standout is “Keyhole to Sana’a,” which shares how a sister-in-law’s lost iPhone made its way to Yemen, where it offered a window into a different world via photos uploaded by a teenage boy into a shared iCloud account. McGarth turns a personal connection into a geopolitical one, delicately linking the threads between this boy’s life and the civil war that may have consumed him. It’s a sensitive story carefully told, one that’s well at home in this excellent collection.
Quotes
“Elvis is a stocky First National man with a thick watermelon gut, thick gold sunglasses, thick black pomp. Very quickly he is sweating hard, aiming for verisimilitude that would make the King proud. His pipes are rich baritone and listening to him is an experience not unlike being rubbed in butter.”
“Come Friday night, the two of us stormed into the Legion, hot for combat. We swept past the horseshoe bar and into the packed community hall, the crowd adorned in flannel, camo, blaze orange, plaid, and Carhartt, all the shades of Minnesota’s rainbow.”
“Professional wrestling occupies a sui generis space in the culture, a strange nexus where “Star Wars”-quoting nerds and juiced-up gym rats might share space together and may in fact be the same person. It is one of the unique American artforms, like jazz, or comic books, or endowing corporations with the legal rights of people.”
“I think you have to have language to have craziness…you have to understand what the advent of language was like. The brain had done pretty well without it for quite a few million years. The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.”
Those words, spoken in psychiatric care by Alicia Western, seem to be a key point Cormac McCarthy is getting at with “Stella Maris.” A smaller companion novel to “The Passenger,” the book takes place entirely in dialogue, offering transcriptions of talk-therapy sessions between Alicia and her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen.
Alicia is not well. Just twenty, she has visions. She barely eats. She’s just fled the bedside of her brother, a race-car driver who’s suffered an accident in Europe that has left him in a coma, one that has doctors pleading with her to pull the plug. She’s also a math genius, someone who seems barely tethered to this world. The daughter of a Manhattan Project scientist, Alicia is the possessor of an intellect so vast that the problems she pictures when she closes her eyes–topography and systems–feel more real than the painful detritus of our everyday world.
Mentally ill, Alicia remains intelligent, dark and funny. She has checked herself into care at Stella Maris, the facility that gives the book its name, but she doesn’t seem optimistic about getting better. She likes to talk, though, about mathematicians and growing up in Wartburg, Tennessee and the illusions and delusions we sell ourselves. McCarty does a masterful job of weaving the dialogue between doctor and patient into something engrossing, an illumination of her particular world, even if Alicia suspects it may just be a shoddy projection.
“Stella Maris” engages several of McCarthy’s abiding themes: the problem of evil, a lurking sense of malign intent in the universe, a hermitage of the soul–a leave-taking of mores–for those shaken by these deeper truths. “My guess is you can only be so happy,” Alicia says at one point. “While there seems to be no floor to sorrow. Each deeper misery being a state heretofore unimagined. Each suggestive of worse to come.”
What’s new in this latest pair of novels is a focus on mathematics. Where McCarthy’s books once covered the terrain of horses and killers, here we get Godel and Gauss, topology and gauge theory. It never makes much sense to me, but it sounds credible in Alicia’s voice. McCarthy succeeds in building her up as an untethered genius.
That brings us to Alicia’s other issue, a secret she doesn’t want to talk about at first but one that seems to compel her to keep participating in these sessions. She’s in love with her brother, Bobby. Romantically. She told him as much, threw herself at him. But even while he seemed to feel the same–in her eyes, at least–he rejected the possibility of a future together, one she would have been happy to embrace.
Why does McCarthy introduce this element, both here and in “The Passenger”? In part, it may be to underscore that Alicia is genuinely detached. It would be easy to view her as “the real sane one,” a troubled truthteller, but the element of incest only underscores how bereft and alien she is.
McCarthy also invests much of his work with a Biblical heft and cadence, and incest is an element there as well, something bizarre and otherworldly, conjuring the mysteries of Abraham and Lot. McCarthy has introduced the topic in other works, notably “Outer Dark” but also “Child of God.” It’s certainly unnerving.
There’s a compact most of us live with, McCarty seems to say, but there are those who step outside it. That applies to math, and that applies to other things as well.
“I just thought we would always be together,” Alicia says near the end of the novel. “I know you think I should have seen that as more aberrant than I did, but my life is not like yours.”
Quotes
“…I knew what my brother did not. That there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been. That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium. All religions understand this. And it wasn’t going away. And that to imagine that the grim eruptions of this century were in any way either singular or exhaustive was simply a folly.”
“I don’t have any politics. And I’m pacifist to the bone. Only a nation can make war–in the modern sense–and I don’t like nations. I believe in running away. Much as you’d step out of the path of an oncoming bus. If we’d had a child, I would take it to where war seemed least probable. Although it’s hard to outguess history.”
“We’ve been a long time without a nuclear war.”
“Yes. Well, it’s probably like bankruptcy. The longer you’re able to put it off the worse it’s going to be. The next great war won’t arrive until everyone who remembers the last one is dead.”
“Psychiatrists have trouble dealing with the unconscious in a straightforward way. But the unconscious is a purely biological system, not a magical one. It’s a biological system because that’s all there is for it to be. People aren’t happy talking about the unconscious unless there’s a certain amount of hokum involved. But there isn’t. The unconscious is simply a machine for operating an animal. What else could it be?”
In a book that seems tailor-made for me, nature writer Joel Greenberg has compiled a scrapbook of sorts, a collection of nature writing sharing impressions of nature in the Chicago landscape from the 1700s to early 1900s. “Of Prairie, Woods and Water: Two Centuries of Chicago Nature Writing” is a diverse compilation; it includes scientific articles and settler’s diaries, old newspaper articles and yellowed journal pieces hauled out of the archives.
Most of the reminiscences conjure landscapes now lost: the Kankakee Marsh, the great old-growth forests of Michigan, the once-unbroken sweep of the Illinois prairie. The writers seem to alternate between knowing these places are in danger–some stories end with a postscript saying that the habitat described is already lost, even back in the 1800s–while others seem to take this bounty for granted, assuming it will subsist and sustain forever.
There’s a callousness toward nature here that’s disturbing. Some of the articles from shooters and trappers convey wholesale slaughter, as old-time sportsmen aim shotguns to the sky and fill their bags with dozens of birds. There’s even an entry from an old target shooter who remembers when they used to compete with live birds, fifty at a time, right out of the trap.
But Greenberg does a good job balancing the perspectives on display. Some writers point out that pioneer families relied on the protein of the field and were vulnerable to the predations of wolves…not that it makes the tales of wolf hunts easier to read. Others lament the loss of habitat and indiscriminate killing; they work to stop the shoots or collection of birds for ladies’ hats.
As Benjamin T. Gault writes in the Audubon Bulletin in 1937, “the encouragement of ‘Crow Shoots’ and dynamiting them at their winter roosts, is all wrong as it has been practiced in our state and by the Conservation Department. It is wrong, I think, for the harm it does psychologically to our growing youth by encouraging murderous instinct.”
Like any historic compilation, some of the writing is wonderful and some is old, weird, baroque. But on the whole it’s a wondrous collection, an evocation of a world now lost. As Donald Culross Peattie writes in “A Prairie Grove” (1938), “There is no other land in the world with autumns like ours. We pile the treasure of the year into a great burial fire. Tongues of flame go up to the sky, the garnet of black and red oaks, the leaping maples and the flickering aspens and out of the midst of it all one exulting spire of light where a cottonwood shakes primal yellow at the primal blue of the American sky.”
“But the real question is are we few the last of a lineage? Will children yet to come harbor a longing for a thing they cannot even name? The legacy of the world is a fragile thing for all its power, but I know where you stand, Squire. I know that there are words spoken by men ages dead that will never leave your heart.”
A late novel, Cormac McCarthy’s “The Passenger” reads almost like a retrospective. The book compiles themes the author has addressed throughout his career, striving to offer some summation. The barfly bohemians of “Suttree” recur. We also find the isolation of “The Crossing,” the trapping and skinning of “The Orchard Keeper,” “The Road”‘s keening sense of a world lost, all compiled into a single elegy.
The plot of the book involves a deep-sea diver mourning his lost sister, who was a genius, a schizophrenic, a suicide. But the plot is just the framework. Sure, the early sections of the book offer a sense that something sinister may be going on. We open with a mysterious plane crash, and our protagonist, Bobby Western, feels hunted in the sections that follow, from his favorite haunt in New Orleans to drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
But the bulk of the book explores Bobby’s relationship with his sister. Because he’s a physicist, and she was a brilliant mathematician (their dad helped develop the atom bomb), their relationship also serves as a framework to explore the nature of time and causality.
As it develops, the book elaborates on the power of observation. Things are changed by being observed, physics tells us. But the modern world has also placed us all under observation, McCarthy seems to argue.
When Bobby runs into legal trouble–tax issues–he observes the difficulty of leaving the grid, even back in the book’s setting of 1980. Her sister is constantly observed by a circus of monstrous phantoms, foul-mouthed characters that represent her madness in alternating sections of the book. The biggest question, though, is what their relationship might have been without anyone else to observe and judge. She loved him, romantically, the book states, and he remains haunted by her, how things were, how they might have been.
“The Passenger” is a beautiful read, and often challenging, particularly in the sections where Bobby’s sister is visited by her madness. (McCarthy indulges his propensity for extravagant formulations here. The sentences are thick, and the obscure words–penetralium, heresiarch–pile up.)
Also challenging is McCarthy’s partiality for “outlaw” types, a soft spot I don’t share. Large portions of the novel are dedicated to conversations with erudite, outrageous men, the kind of dudes who steal pharmaceuticals and sleep with underage girls, all while elaborating on their philosophy and pointing out how wine should be properly chilled.
Their observations can be entertaining, but they become tiresome as well, interjecting the almost libertarian tone you could find in old Christopher Hitchens columns. (At their worst, these sections read like second-rate Ignatius J Reilly, another famous New Orleans denizen, although McCarthy’s writing rarely falls to that level.)
The book veers away from plot as it moves to its conclusion, occupying us instead with moments of solitude and asceticism that are also present in McCarthy’s previous work–I remembered the sojourn in the Smokies in “Suttree.” There are also a few sections that seem constructed to let him get some ideas off his chest…what’s up with the Kennedy assassination digression, for instance?
Like any McCarthy book, though, “The Passenger” alternates gritty plotting and shop-savvy men with long passages that build toward transcendence. He’s always searching, it seems, for how the world can be both cruel and beautiful. This book adds to that legacy, summing it up in many ways, even if it falls short of the height of his masterworks.
Quotes
“I always had a feelin the money didn’t mean all that much to you. Maybe that’s the problem.”
“I don’t know. A lot of money would probably move me. I could do some things I wanted. But you’ll never get rich selling your time. Not even doing hyperbaric welding.”
“Probably right. There’s more brain surgeons than there are hyperbaric welders, but you’re probably right.”
“I know that you think we’re very different, me and thee. My father was a country storekeeper and yours a fabricator of expensive devices that make a loud noise and vaporize people. But our common history transcends so much. I know you. I know certain days of your childhood. All but weeping with loneliness. Coming upon a certain book in the library and clutching it to you. Carrying it home. Some perfect place to read it. Under a tree perhaps. Beside a stream. Flawed youths of course. To prefer a world of paper. Rejects. But we know another truth, don’t we Squire? And of course it’s true that any number of these books were penned in lieu of burning down the world—which was their author’s true desire. But the real question is are we few the last of a lineage? Will children yet to come harbor a longing for a thing they cannot even name? The legacy of the world is a fragile thing for all its power, but I know where you stand, Squire. I know that there are words spoken by men ages dead that will never leave your heart.”
“But of course what really threatens the scofflaw is not the just society but the decaying one. It is here that he finds himself becoming slowly indistinguishable from the citizenry.”
“But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.”
“Friends are always telling you to watch out. To take care. But it could be that the more you do so the more exposed you become. Maybe you just have to turn yourself over to your angel.”
“You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.”
“What is the purpose of human charity wasn’t to protect the weak—which seems pretty anti-Darwinian anyway—but to preserve the mad? Don’t they get special treatment in most primitive societies?…You have to be careful about who you do away with. It could be that some part of our understanding comes in vessels incapable of sustaining themselves.”
