Back to the Classics #16

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Wild Card Classic: At a used book sale I found this novel, first published in 1972. The back cover blurb said it is the second volume of The Deptford Trilogy. It assured me that I didn’t have to read the first, Fifth Business, to appreciate The Manticore as a stand-alone novel. I like to live dangerously so I thought I’d go for it. Unpredictable, unforeseeable, like a wild card should be. And costing only 50 cents, an attraction in our inflation-ridden days.

The Manticore – Robertson Davies

Attorney David Staunton has made a name for himself in late Sixties Toronto. Like Perry Mason, he dazzles courtroom spectators with cunning cross-examinations and flashy flimflam. Like Sydney Carton, he puts away a fifth of whiskey a day. His breakdown upon the sudden mysterious death of his father makes David realize he is facing the choice “Get help, or go mad.” Because he has never met a person cured by never-ending Freudian therapy, David ends up in Zürich with a Jungian therapist.

Davies has three purposes in this novel: to teach, to preach and to entertain. Obviously a hardcore reader and seeker, Davies presents an overview of Jungian psychology. For example, Jungian archetypes are images and symbols that derive from our collective unconscious, the mental predispositions we all share as part of our human nature. David and his therapist discuss events and themes in his life in order to examine his problems in terms of archetypes such the The Friend, The Anima, and The Shadow. This, on The Persona.

We all create an outward self with which to face the world, and some people come to believe that is what they truly are. So they people the world with doctors who are nothing outside of the consulting-room, and judges who are nothing when they are not in court, and business men who wither with boredom when they have to retire from business, and teachers who are forever teaching. That is why they are such poor specimens when they are caught without their masks on. They have lived chiefly through the Persona.

This instructional material was curious and interesting to me, a seeker who’s for anything that gets me to examine my unexamined life, from reading novels to wandering in green spaces. Note to self: Jungian psychology, like Taoism, has too many concepts to be parsimonious enough to study for a simpleton impatient and awkward with highly abstract ideas.

As to preaching, the novel was written in the “God is Dead” era of the late Sixties and early Seventies when lots of people were groping for answers to their social, psychological and spiritual issues. I think a lot of seekers then and now would agree with a character in this novel who says, “Be sure you choose what you believe and know why you believe it, because if you don't choose your beliefs, you may be certain that some belief, and probably not a very credible one, will choose you.”

Yessir, a clear set of values will help resiliency, not to mention fighting illusion and facing reality. And keeping in the mind the attitude of despair has been a mere fashion at times in history, Davies has a priest say,

Now I want you to remember something because I don't think we shall meet again very soon. It is this; however fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and however powerful despair may become in the future, not everybody, or even most people, think and live fashionably; virtue and honour will not be banished from the world, however many popular moralists and panicky journalists say so. Sacrifice will not cease to be because psychiatrists have popularized the idea that there is often some concealed, self-serving element in it; theologians always knew that. Nor do I think love as a high condition of honour will be lost; it is a pattern in the spirit, and people long to make the pattern a reality in their own lives, whatever means they take to do so. In short, Davey, God is not dead. And I can assure you God is not mocked.

From the entertainment angle, Davies calls to mind Wilkie Collins, a writer who keeps things lively with various narrative devices. Davies uses journaling, play-like dialogues, straight narrative, and time jumps back and forth to relate David’s retrospection. And similarly to Charles Dickens, Davies uses a variety of Forsterian flat characters for comic and tragic purposes. I thought David remembering his mother Leola Cruikshank Staunton through a child’s eyes was especially persuasive; the terrible Christmas and other kid memories when he treated people badly were persuasive. 

Davies’ prose reads smoothly, mixing in the occasional funny name like Leola Cruikshank or strange old word like "absolonism" and "merry-begot." Thankfully, Davies does not shy away from what his bourgeois readers would call shocking either. He can do both shockingly distasteful and shockingly funny.

I enjoyed this clever novel, with its odd characters, its survey of a mystical thought, and its moralistic view. Davies seems forbearing with foibles, vices, and abuses but tough-minded about reaping what we sow. Readers that should steer clear are those who don’t like a male author to be too big a fool about women or don’t like educated characters sounding too much the same because they talk too cleverly. Other readers may dislike an author to be too satirically opinionated, learning too proudly displayed, tone too high-minded, or incidents too theatrical.

WWII Spy Thriller w/ Heroine

The Smiler with the Knife – Nicholas Blake

In this 1939 spy thriller, the series hero Nigel Strangeways stays in the background while his wife, Georgia Cavendish, takes on a dangerous assignment from Nigel’s Uncle John of Scotland Yard. A renowned traveler on the order of Rosita Forbes, Georgia is eminently qualified to be an adventure heroine. She’s brave and resourceful. She’s quick-thinking enough to draw mental maps of the lay of the land and to make snap judgements of whether people are trustworthy.

Uncle John Strangeways is the head of domestic counter-intelligence for Scotland Yard. He has grave concerns that a secret group called English Banner has plans to foment economic and civil unrest, undermine the confidence of the people in democracy, and install a strongman who will claim, “I alone can fix it.”

Uncle recruits Georgia to infiltrate the group. "It's somewhere among the rich families that we've got to look for the centre of the movement," Sir John says. "You're a legend yourself: this movement would be glad to make use of you." She is dismayed about self-serving politicians acting in ways that lead the people to be so disgruntled with democracy in the first place, but she loves her country. She agrees to infiltrate the stupid but dangerous right-wing group.

Though she hates pretending to break up with her husband, she hangs out with the land-owning, tax-hating, servant-griping, regulation-detesting, socialism-decrying class and their enabling minions among the cops, mechanics, and contractors.

(I know, I know. It all feels sooooo familiar.) 

Georgia is a great character, fully realized in her ability to keep cool even while tired and hard-pressed. The other finely drawn character is the leader of the fascist group. His narcissism borders on the insane, but egotism doesn’t stop him being cunning and charismatic.

(Just keep telling yourself: It can't happen here.)

Taking a cue from writers of adventure tales like Rider Haggard and John Buchan, Blake effectively propels the story, moving deftly between scenes of action.  The unfolding of the plot is so skillful that we don't mind that the fascists seem to have a supernatural ability to track Georgia as they ruthlessly pursue her across Northern England.

A Great Historical Novel

Claudius the God: And His Wife Messalina – Robert Graves

This is Volume II of Graves’ imagined autobiography by the Roman emperor Claudius (10 BC – 54 AD). In the preface, Graves answers critics who carped that he merely borrowed from Tacitus and Suetonius for Volume I, entitled I, Claudius (1934). Graves then reels off a list of ancient historians that he consulted so that he could question the conventional wisdom that Claudius was a lucky fool, glutton, crapshooter, and cringing social climber. By digging into his subject’s character and motivation, Graves shows that Claudius could not have been simply a lucky fool since he was cunning enough to successfully survive the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula and then maintain his own power for as long as 13 years.

Curiously, the first part of the book does not focus on Claudius’ first days in office. Instead, the beginning is a longish picaresque that tells the ups and downs of Herod Agrippa. In the early 30s, in Galilee and Antioch, Agrippa fell out of favor due to sad misunderstandings involving debts, misuses of public funds and rustling a horse. He then went to Alexandria, where he encountered troubles in the form of communal tension between the Greeks and Jewish people. Worried over debt and warrants and trials and prison time, he decided to return to Rome, where he turned to his friend Caligula, heir to the throne, to solve his financial problems. In the year 36 the ailing Emperor Tiberius, however, had him tossed in the clink for loose treasonous talk. Upon the death of Tiberius, pal Caligula sprung him from the joint. In a happy turn of fortune, Herod Agrippa then became King of Judaea, the first king since his grandfather (the Herod we remember due to his infamous mass slaying of the infants of Bethlehem). Strictly from the viewpoint that stories about scamps and rogues are an attraction, it’s enjoyable for readers who liked Jonathan Wild or Roderick Random or Barry Lyndon.

The book examines Claudius' marriage to teenaged Messalina. That somebody only sixteen-years-old could rise to heights of power in an empire seems to me a powerful argument against monarchy. But let’s give her lack of scruple the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the explanation is that her teenage brain was slow in developing the ability to predict consequences and make moral and ethical decisions that wouldn’t make an ordinarily decent person shudder. So she was always up to something, usually no good and to her own profit.

Though warned by Herod not to trust anybody, in his wily but love-blinded mind Claudius trusts Messalina only to suffer when she betrays him with politically expedient sexual affairs and administrative corruption in the form of bribery, extortion, influence-peddling, fraud, and embezzlement. For instance, Messalina encourages Claudius to exert centralized control of the grain supply of Rome through a system of state monopolies. Claudius is not convinced that’s a good idea, being a market-oriented guy. In the end, her sway over him is too strong for him to remain unpersuaded. Messalina, who has probably reincarnated as a high provincial official in Communist China, finds herself in the happy position to demand bribes in exchange for the right to manage the monopolies. Such stories make one grateful for the social and economic progress that has occurred in the last 2000 years despite the best efforts of thieves and conservatives.

Graves supposedly didn’t like his own fiction, claiming he wrote the novels for the money. However I think as a writer he dares greatly and succeeds in writing a first-person narrative of a Roman emperor and making the text credible and absorbing over the course of 400 pages. 

It’s easy to enter into the spirit of pretending this fiction is an autobiography that wittingly and unwittingly gives insight into the personality and motives of the subject and the gangland hoods that surround him. Though we are pretty sure we should have our bushwah detector set to “sensitive” when Claudius is justifying the invasion of Britain or vindicating why the Republic could not be restored, we readers are convinced by the historical accuracy. For example, we willingly believe it all when Graves/Claudius explains the origins of bull-fighting in Thessalian bull-leaping or the reasons why chariots in warfare gave way to cavalry and infantry. Graves the veteran of WWI is also convincing when it comes to military points like the key importance among officers and enlisted that they have confidence in their generals, that they feel their lives will not be squandered.

Finally, for the reader looking for instruction along with the quivers of literary pleasure, Graves, writing in the middle 1930s, a time when Europe was getting ready to explode, introduces ideas about the paradoxes of power for he who would be the strongman and his idiot devotees, the bad effect of corruption on the allocation of government resources, and the perils of compromise with bad-faith adversaries.

Glossary: Ever one for self-improvement, I present the list of words in this novel that I had to look up. I recommend the Cambridge Dictionary because it gives British and American pronunciations though it will shrug at you for theurgical and gloze over.

auspice - a prophetic sign, especially a favorable sign

corybantic (acting, dancing, music) – wild, frenzied

to stint (pleasures) – supply an ungenerous or inadequate amount of (something)

to gloze over (an awkward conversation) – to explain away; extenuate; gloss over

abstemious – moderate, temperate, self-denying especially when eating and drinking.

mole – a large solid structure on a shore serving as a pier, breakwater, or causeway.

to take one’s self in hand – hold oneself in check, to control one's feelings, not to get angry, to be reserved, to be self-contained

erysipelas – an acute, sometimes recurrent disease caused by a bacterial infection. It is characterized by large, raised red patches on the skin, especially that of the face and legs, with fever and sometimes severe general illness

theurgical – the operation or effect of a supernatural or divine agency in human affairs

recrudescence - the recurrence of an undesirable condition

buckler - a small round shield held by a handle or worn on the forearm.

to debouch - emerge from a narrow or confined space into a wide, open area.

coracle – in Wales & Ireland, a small round boat made of wickerwork covered with a watertight material, propelled with a paddle.

causeway - a raised road or track across low or wet ground.

to frap – (nautical) to bind tightly

sodality  - a confraternity or association

chaplet - a garland or wreath for a person's head.

roundel - a small disk, especially a decorative medallion.

guy-rope - a rope or line fixed to the ground to secure a tent or other structure.

thegn - aristocratic retainer of a king or senior nobleman in ancient Britain

whipstock – the handle of a whip

expiatory – making atonement; ~sacrifice, ~festival, ~rites,

emulous - seeking to imitate someone or something.

My Brother's Killer

My Brother's Killer – D.M. Devine

Though written in 1961, this mystery uses to excellent effect the tried-and-true devices of whodunnits during their Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s. Think of Freeman Wills Crofts and his impregnable alibis, exhaustive time-tables, and meticulous accounting for everybody’s movements. No wonder Agatha Christie highly praised this story.

The mystery is told in first-person by Simon, the brother of the victim Oliver Barnett. Both brothers are solicitors in their family practice. Simon can’t believe that, given his war record, Oliver could have taken his own life, as the crime scene seems to indicate. Both Simon and the Superintendent in charge of the investigation come to the conclusion it was murder. Instead playing the stock character of the plodding flat-foot, Superintendent Garland, the lead detective, is as sharp as Simon.

Simon assembles a team to investigate murder. The narrative features the traditional plot twists and red herrings. As Simon and his mates peel the onion of Oliver’s life, however, it’s enough to make Simon cry to find out how many people would relish seeing Oliver roasting in his Eternal Deserts.

D. M. Devine (1920-1980), the Scottish author of 13 crime novels, was very popular in his time as a master of the classic detective story. This classic was re-released by Arcturus Publishing in 2012 as part of its program of re-issues of forgotten masterpieces.

The Ides of Perry Mason 39

On the 15^th of every month, we deal with a topic related to Our Favorite Lawyer.

Difficult Women: It is better to be hated for who you are, than to be loved for someone you are not.

The Perry Mason show often presented talented actresses playing difficult women, making us consider the perspectives of others - such as the unlikeable and toxic - and improving our emotional intelligence and empathy. 

Katherine Squire

A graduate of Ohio Wesleyan College, Squire practiced her art on stage at the Cleveland Play House and made her Broadway debut in a small role in Much Ado About Nothing in 1927. More successful on stage than on screen, she made her way to television and appeared in three Mason episodes. Probably because of her stage training, Squire had a lot of poise, an impressive presence that compelled the attention. When she puts a ‘don’t mess with me’ look on her face, you don’t have to be an expert in micro-expressions to know you’d better not test her patience. She seems to channel every no-nonsense aunt, demanding teacher and harsh supervisor we’ve ever met.

In her final outing The Case of the Wrongful Writ (1965), she plays the widow of a navy man who died heroically. Unfortunately, her role as Esther Norden has her in only a couple of scenes. Though the acting is fine, the script is not very strong – by season eight, the writers were struggling rather. Besides Squire’s fine performance the other draw of this episode is James Shigeta, a Japanese-American actor when such a demographic was scarce to the point of vanishing at the time.

In her late fifties she made her first appearance in The Case of the Credulous Quarry in 1960. As Clara Thorpe, she plays the victim’s aunt who in search of the missing $15,000 the victim supposedly had on her when she was killed. Seeing as how that amount is worth about $140,000 these days, we understand why she is so relentless in scenes with the accused and Mason where she demands the money. Show me the money. I want the money. She more than a little scary in her fierce persistence. Then on the stand she is pitch perfect in portraying the kind of kiddish adult who finds it strange people don’t know what she knows. Squire, in fact, is a bright spot in an otherwise lame episode, which features people acting in unbelievable ways even for whodunnits.

In The Case of the Nervous Neighbor (1964), Squire put in her best performance on Mason as Vera Hargrave, the caretaker of a woman who has lost her memory in a terrible incident in which she killed her husband. Squire is the menacing center of the Hitchcockian action, in fact. She subtly reveals the inner workings of Vera’s motives for taking care of her charge. She is really frightening but never goes over the top in the great scene where her charge thinks out loud to an unfortunate conclusion about Vera. The other draws in this must-see episode are Paul Winchell and Francis X. Bushman and a fine interrogation scene in which Burger grills the accused in the cells to show the accused he should follow his lawyer’s advice and not take the stand.

Constance Ford

The actress that showed the widest range in the Perryverse was Constance Ford. After Broadway success in the late 1940s, she worked in TV and movies. One of her most notable parts was the abusive mother smacking around poor Sandra Dee in In a Summer Place.

In The Case of the Deadly Double (1958), she plays a Jekyll and Hyde character. Helen Reed is quiet and mousy while Joyce Martel is a boisterous party girl that quiet guys that like to read avoid like the plague. Ford puts in an outstanding performance, even if the viewer is skeptical of stories that utilize soap opera stand-bys like amnesia and split personalities.

In The Case of the Potted Planter (1963) she plays cruel sister Frances who wages war against her sister-in-law so she can run her brother’s household and get at his money. It’s an exceptional episode, with adult themes, plausible motivations and superb acting.  The writers were as down on small-town idiocy and malice as they were on Hollywood greed and philistinism. This episode feels comfortably small since the businesses involved are a greenhouse and tiny local radio station.

In The Case of the Shifty Shoebox (1963) her portrayal of Sylvia Thompson is a change of pace. Instead of the hard-bitten fighter, she plays a defeated woman stuck in a crappy job, in a crappy town, dealing with crappy boyfriend Flick, excellently played by Benny Baker, a jerk or pencil neck in the Perryverse. Sylvia re-purposes her life by taking care of a little boy, well-played by Billy Mumy who I disliked at the time, jealous of him being slightly older than me and already highly successful in his career. Other solid performances are put in by Denver Pyle and Dianne Ladd. The mystery side of things is not strong, but setting, characters and atmosphere make this episode exceptional.

Back to the Classics #15

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Nonfiction Classic. Forster’s dates are 1879 to 1970. He was a novelist for about 20 years but a public intellectual (remember those?) for about 40 years. It seems incredible - how many other well-known Edwardian writers were still in the public eye and ear in 1960? Only Wodehouse maybe?

Aspects of the Novel - E.M. Forster

This is the text of a series of lectures delivered in 1927 at Cambridge by the author of A Room with a View and  Howards End. Forster’s goal is to examine different aspects of the novel: the story; the people; fantasy and prophecy; pattern and rhythm.

Literary theory from giants of criticism like Mikhail Bakhtin or Julian Barnes makes my brain bleed. I dare not go as far as to agree with the hyper-intellectual, hyper-fluent Rebecca West when she dismissed Forster with “a self-indulgent old liberal with hardly a brain in his head.” But I will gently suggest that a more methodical book about how to approach literary fiction would be How to Read Literature like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster.

A problem is Forster’s failure to give examples. Take his famous distinction about the two types of characters. There are flat characters, without capacity for change  and round characters, such as the heroines of Jane Austen's novels. Maybe the lecture format didn’t give him enough time and elbow room to provide lots of examples.

Also inadequately explained are the chapters on Fantasy and Prophecy, two elements that come into play when the story narrated transcends the ho-hum events that will happen to us in the course of daily life. Fantasy implies the supernatural as in pixies and ghosts and monsters.  Prophecy is the theme in which “the mere raising of human love and hatred to such a power that their normal receptacles no longer contain them….”  Forster had great respect for prophet-like D.H. Lawrence. But not a word about Lawrentian insights along prophetic lines. The chapter on Fantasy and Prophecy remains opaque and mysterious to me, though I read it three times.

Nor do I understand what Forster means by the last pair of topics Pattern and Rhythm but at least he does apologize for the vagueness of the concepts. One who gapes when trying to understand an article in The Baffler, I’m not anybody that can throw stones here. But I humbly conclude that Forster is a novelist, but not a novelist like Ford, Woolf, Orwell, West, Burgess, Lodge or Updike who’ve got the intellectual proclivity and power to be an instructive critic.

Julian Barnes writes:

Forster and [Ford Madox] Ford met at a country-house weekend in the summer of 1914, at which Ford seems to have been the only person present to see clearly that war was inevitable. Afterwards Forster snootily noted in his diary that Ford was “rather a fly-blown man of letters”. That was a bad call.

Bad calls abound in this book. Although Forster gives the impression that he thinks the novel as of 1927 needs some shaking up with new techniques, he seems wary of innovation. He is unenthusiastic in his treatment of Henry James (too artificial) and Gide’s The Counterfeiters (too odd). James Joyce’s Ulysses is a “dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud.” He does not even nod in Conrad’s direction. Forster merely quotes a passage from Virginia Woolf with little comment though the two were real-life friends for 30 years and he liked, for instance, To the Lighthouse. Though Forster must have heard of them, he does not cite experiments with time shifts in Ford Madox Ford’s novels such as The Good Solider (1915) or Parade’s End (1924). One shudders to think what he would’ve made of Faulkner.

In The Edwardian Turn of Mind, Samuel Hynes tells the story of Forster leaving an exhibition of Post-impressionists, saying "Some of it is too much for me altogether." He also said in a letter, “My equipment is frightfully limited, but so good in parts that I want to do with it what I can.”  Hiding behind a critic's puzzling jargon or cryptic utterances would not occur to a modest man like Forster ("and a lot to be modest about too" we can hear an Oxbridge man of letters sniffing). Not an intellectual (was Dickens? Tolstoy?), Forster has zero interest in theories or systems or paradigms, and that’s fine, in my amateur’s eyes. But I will quietly if urgently point to How to Read Literature like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster.

Inspector Montalbano #7

Rounding the Mark - Andrea Camilleri

In this 2003 mystery, Sicilian police inspector Salvo Montalbano and his band of dedicated detectives return in this seventh book of the celebrated series.

This story opens with Salvo going through an existential crisis. He’s feeling his years. He’s concerned that his focus and concentration aren’t what they were, that he’s losing the powerful memory a detective needs. He ponders whether he should quit his job on the force.

In the middle of this brooding, he goes for a swim in the sea. Sure enough, what never happened to him before happens - he gets exhausted and has to clutch at a lucky plank to avoid drowning. While he is floating in the water, he collides with an unpleasant something: a body half decomposed. This suspends his desire to resign as he swings his attention to discovering who the “corpse that went swimming” was.

Camilleri's books often have a strong social consciousness, with an eye on inevitable socio-economic changes in Italian society, political upheaval, income inequality, and corruption. Here immigration is touched with a depth and a rawness that had never been done before in the series. Camilleri  shows how xenophobic people can be, especially islanders with a mentality characterized by narrow-mindedness, ignorance of the mainland and the world, and outright hostility towards any outsider, even from a village five miles away.

As usual, Salvo is a sparrow that sprinkles drops of water on a burning forest. These big issues hurt him because he hates injustice and stupidity. That's why this installment in the series is so enjoyable. It’s full of funny moments, which make the unpleasant somethings easier to take.

The Shape of Water	The Dance of the Seagull
The Terra-Cotta Dog	Treasure Hunt
3 The Snack Thief (2003)	17 Angelica's Smile (2013)
Voice of the Violin	Game of Mirrors
5 The Excursion To Tindari (2005)	A Beam of Light
The Smell of the Night	aka Blade of Light
aka The Scent of the Night	20 A Voice in the Night (2016)
Rounding the Mark	A Nest of Vipers
The Patience of the Spider	22 The Pyramid of Mud (2018)
The Paper Moon	23 The Overnight Kidnapper (2019)
August Heat	24 The Other End of the Line (2019)
The Wings of the Sphinx	25 The Safety Net (2020)
The Track of Sand	26 The Sicilian Method (2020)
The Potter's Field	27 The Cook of the Halcyon (2021)
The Age of Doubt	28 Riccardino (2021)

 

The Great American Football Novel

End Zone – Don DeLillo

It’s hard to be beautiful. You have an obligation to people. You almost become public property. You can lose yourself and get almost mentally disturbed on just the public nature of being beautiful. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. You can get completely lost in that whole dumb mess. And anyway who’s to say what’s beautiful and what’s ugly?

In this 1972 novel, our narrator Gary Harkness talks about life, his life, his now in this moment, with an accent on his wacky season carrying the pigskin and blocking for other running backs at Logos College. Gary is a halfback who has been tossed out of three universities due to his free-spirited attitudes. Though football involves physical pain, social awkwardness, and unsatisfiable coaches yelling, Gary concludes that he needs football. He ends up at a college in remote West Texas, a place that accepted him only because of father’s leverage and the desperation for talent that the once-disgraced coach needs to mount a professional comeback.

Gary accepts his life getting reduced to a minimum, where there are no distractions but football. And it's not just our narrator who is looking to nail down his own identity, his own now in this moment.

·         His roommate Anatole Bloomberg ponders finding an ideal body-weight (if he gets close to 275 he feels he’s entering a shaky personal reality). He also wants to shake his Jewish sense of the enormous nagging historical guilt of being innocent victims.

·         Billy Mast is enrolled in course on the unspeakable, whose prerequisite is knowing no German and whose requirement is that students memorize and recite Rilke’s Elegy in the original German.

·         Taft Robinson, black, deeply talented at fullback, self-exiled to all-white West Texas, tries to create different varieties of silence.

·         Gary’s female friend Myna Corbett is a blotchy chubby girl who is the source of the quotation above. But she changes her understanding of who she really is. She deals with the terrifying "responsibilities of beauty" in order to discover if she, as an individual, is something that really exists or if it's just “something that's just been put together as a market for junk mail.” Or by algorithms, these days.

The gridiron however is not sufficient to provide Gary a meaning to his life. Like a budding school shooter doing his own research, Gary looks for a passion to fill the void and finds it not in teenmale obsessions like cars or females or muscle dysmorphia or white supremacy but in information about the various aspects of nuclear war. Gary ponders apocalyptic scenarios that result in devastation of the planet and the death of millions.

Here DeLillo satirizes the techno-jargon of mass destruction and death. But the nuclear war game sequence between Gary and a prof still manages to be chilling, clutching at the throat. Being old enough to be have been totally freaked out by Jonathan Schell in 1982, I assure you back in the day Gary was by no means alone pondering the unthinkable possibility of nuclear Armageddon. But DeLillo also has Taft Robinson personify the cultural obsession that persists still today about Hitler, Nazism, death camps, etc. 

DeLillo makes fun of the ‘football as a metaphor for life’ thing by making football a metaphor everything: linguistics, sociology, anthropology, economics and religion. But also teenager fears, obsessions, aversions and aspirations. DeLillo reminds us old guys how young men talk to each other (for example, their parody of NASA/astronaut exchanges and spontaneous invention of games and traditions are a hoot). We have to agree on a standard language that helps us to predict and control the chaotic swirl of what we also agree is reality. But DeLillo argues that in the US we are far from agreeing that we carry the same dictionary, with the same meanings, through the chaos of the world. Words fail us because words are so often misused and abused by the media and experts and leaders of all stripes to mislead us.