WASHINGTON POST 2005

Web of Wonders; A modern myth master blends the real and the unreal, gods and tricksters.

09/25/2005

ANANSI BOYS

By Neil Gaiman

Morrow. 336 pp. $26.95

With Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman's delightful, funny and affecting new novel, the bestselling author has scored the literary equivalent of a hole in one, employing the kind of self-assured storytelling that makes it all look so easy. One can imagine Gaiman's legion of fans putting down the book and rushing en masse to pen their own riffs on traditional folklore and contemporary pop culture. But it's hard to imagine anyone topping Anansi Boys, if only because it's a tall tale to end all tall tales, inspired by the trickiest of all trickster gods, Anansi the Spider, whose origins lie in Ghana.

Tales of the West African deity traveled with slaves to North America, where the clever spider became the anthropomorphic figure known as Aunt Nancy, Anancy, or Bre'r Ananse (a counterpart to Bre'r Rabbit, another African American trickster). In Gaiman's last full-length novel, American Gods, Anansi made an appearance as the (mostly) human Mr. Nancy. In Anansi Boys, Mr. Nancy cedes center stage to his sons, Fat Charlie and Spider. As the novel's catchphrase puts it, "God is dead. Meet the kids."

Only Anansi isn't exactly God; he's a god, sort of the god next door: "In the old stories, Anansi lives just like you do or I do, in his house. He is greedy, of course, and lustful, and tricky, and full of lies. And he is good-hearted, and lucky, and sometimes even honest. Sometimes he is good, sometimes he is bad. He is never evil. Mostly, you are on Anansi's side. This is because Anansi owns all the stories." Anansi isn't exactly dead, either, though it's true that Fat Charlie's troubles begin when he attends his estranged father's burial. Fat Charlie "was only ever fat for a handful of years. . . . But the name Fat Charlie clung to him, like chewing gum to the sole of a tennis shoe." He grew up in Florida but now lives in London, where he is engaged to a nice girl named Rosie, who won't sleep with him until after they're married. He works for the loathsome, weaselly Grahame Coats, a talent agent who for years has been fleecing his clients, including the delectable Maeve Livingstone, widow of Morris Livingstone, "once the most famous short Yorkshire comedian in Britain."

Fat Charlie's pre-marital and career woes work in tandem with his chronic insecurity and a constant, slow-burning sense of embarrassment, guaranteeing that nothing very exciting will ever happen to him -- until, that is, he goes to Florida for Mr. Nancy's funeral.

Afterwards, Charlie visits some family friends, four little old ladies who just happen to be witches. The most formidable of these is Mrs. Dunwiddy: "As a boy, Fat Charlie had imagined Mrs. Dunwiddy in Equatorial Africa, peering disapprovingly through her thick spectacles at the newly-erect hominids. 'Keep out of my front yard,' she would tell a recently evolved and rather nervous specimen of Homo habilis, 'or I going to belt you around your ear-hole, I tell you.' "

There's also Mrs. Higgler, who tells Fat Charlie that his father was a god.

" 'He was not a god. He was my dad.'

" 'You can be both,' she said. 'It happens.' "

And Mrs. Higgler informs Fat Charlie that, if he wants to see the brother he never knew he had, all he has to do is tell a spider. Charlie, who obviously never learned that it is extremely unwise to scoff at witchy old ladies, returns to London and rescues a spider from his bathtub. Perhaps it was the devil in him. Probably it was the alcohol. " 'If you see my brother,' said Fat Charlie to the spider, 'tell him he ought to come by and say hello.' " And of course, his brother -- nicknamed Spider -- does just that.

Spider is everything Charlie is not: lucky, debonair, smoothly confident, possessed of their father's silver tongue and gift for wooing women. Before you can say ouch, Spider has stolen his brother's job, his fiancee, the best room in Fat Charlie's house. Rosie doesn't just tumble into Spider's arms: She tumbles into bed with him and shows few signs of ever getting out again. Worse, the awful Grahame Coats frames Fat Charlie for embezzlement and has him thrown in jail.

Now, you might think that none of this could possibly be Fat Charlie's fault. But you would be wrong. He summoned Spider; now he realizes he has to get rid of him. Fat Charlie returns to Florida and the four old ladies, who concoct a ritual that gains him entry to the spirit world where totemic animal-gods dwell.

And that's when things get really interesting.

Gaiman first came to prominence in the late 1980s with The Sandman, the brilliant series that helped reinvent comics and put graphic novels on the map as Literature with a capital L. His previous full-length books, while wildly popular, are hit-or-miss, hobbled by epic ambitions that can occasionally seem pretentious and clever conceits that overpower other concerns such as characterization and pacing.

In Anansi Boys, he gets it all right: Here, Gaiman's storytelling instincts are as remarkable and assured as Anansi's own. As Fat Charlie frantically attempts to undo the damage he's caused and save his brother Spider, and the world, from the forces he's unwittingly loosed, Anansi Boys becomes darker, richer, wiser than any of Gaiman's earlier works.

Here's old Mr. Nancy, in his ghostly guise: " 'Now, Anansi stories, they have wit and trickery and wisdom. Now, all over the world, all of the people they aren't just thinking of hunting and being hunted any more. Now they're starting to think their way out of problems -- sometimes thinking their way into worse problems. They still need to keep their bellies full, but now they're trying to figure out how to do it without working -- and that's the point where people start using their heads. . . . That's when they start to make the world.' "

Lewis Hyde titled his noted study of the trickster mythos Trickster Makes This World. With Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman has made it his own world, too, and given readers a first-class ticket for the journey there. *

Elizabeth Hand recently completed her eighth novel, "Generation Loss."

House of Horrors; Bret Easton Ellis, the author of "American Psycho," rips into his most frightening subject yet -- himself.

08/21/2005

LUNAR PARK

By Bret Easton Ellis

Knopf. 308 pp. $24.95

As autumn approaches, it's open season on Big New Books, and here is one of the biggest, in terms of hype if not heft. Killer toys and slavering monsters outside the bedroom door; imperiled children, eldritch ghosts and a psycho-killer on the loose; a drug-addled writer haunted by his own literary creation: Yep, it's Stephen King's newest novel. But surely there were legal issues in naming his protagonist Bret Easton Ellis?

My mistake: This is Bret Easton Ellis's own new novel, featuring a protagonist named for himself. Bret is the narrator of Ellis's ambitious, entertaining, shambolic Lunar Park, which begins by quoting the opening sentences of Less Than Zero, The Rules Of Attraction, American Psycho and Glamorama, the author's previous novels. It's an amusing conceit, if not an original one -- a Philip Roth character appears in several of Roth's novels, including Zuckerman Unbound -- and the remainder of the book purports to record Bret's descent into Hell as he confronts various ghosts from his past, real and imagined.

There's an undeniable, prurient pleasure in Lunar Park's first few chapters, which mock Ellis's drug binges and priapic, bisexual escapades while teasing readers with literary namedropping: Binky Urban! Jay McInerney! Tama Janowitz! Paul Bogaards! Gary Fisketjon! Sonny Mehta! (The last three form the crack publicity/editorial team at Alfred A. Knopf, Ellis's publisher; Lunar Park is the novel as product placement.) The evocation of 1980s and '90s names and reference points goes on and on -- Cerruti suits, ICM, David Duchovny, Balthazar -- but it all has a slightly musty, lavender-scented cumulative effect, like perusing the guest list from one of Noel Coward's parties at Firefly Hill. Who were these people, future readers will wonder, and why did they wear those silly clothes?

So it takes a while for Lunar Park's story to begin, as we dutifully trail Bret on his late-century Rake's Progress through bars, bookstores, bedrooms and rehab, until we finally find ourselves in the suburb where he has retreated, hoping to claim some semblance of a normal life. In Bret's case, this involves taking a job as a creative-writing instructor at a prestigious college and marrying a former girlfriend, a model turned actress named Jayne Dennis. Jayne is the mother of Robby, the 11-year-old son Bret has never really acknowledged, and of Sarah, Robby's younger half-sister. Unlike much of the supporting cast of Lunar Park, they are fictional characters. The latter part of the novel, despite its metafictional trappings and ambitions, is pretty much a generic horror story, a kind of literary-celebrity smackdown with Bret holed up in his McMansion, attempting to defend his new family against the forces of darkness.

Ellis has an obvious familiarity with and a real affection for the standard tropes of supernatural fiction. He's admitted that as a boy he read Stephen King's Salem's Lot at least a dozen times. No shame there, and if Ellis had stuck to a single supernatural trope, he might have written a genuinely scary book. Instead, he tosses together so many hoary genre elements that the novel begins to resemble a middle-aged yuppie rehash of a Hammer Horror film, less The Turn of the Screw than "Heart of Dorkness." There's the ghost of Bret's monstrous, violent father, whom Ellis claimed was the inspiration for the serial-killer protagonist of American Psycho. There are little Sarah's evil toy (the Yerby), a post-Halloween haunting of Bret and Jayne's house at 307 Elsinore Lane, croaking ravens, disemboweled pets, mysterious computer messages, things clawing at the bedroom door, child abductions, a hardboiled detective and even a psychic investigator.

One of the novel's more promising strands involves the appearance of fictional characters from Ellis's previous work, but this haunting of an author by his own creations was handled more elegantly by Peter Straub in his recent In The Night Room and more frighteningly by Stephen King in The Dark Half. More successful is Bret's awkward, sad attempt to connect with Robby, whose cohort of glaze-eyed, Ritalin-addled boys is disappearing, one by one.

Lunar Park is often very funny, particularly when detailing Bret's latest self-referential, misogynist writing project, the title of which I can't quote in a family newspaper. "Our hero, who calls himself the Sexpert, dates only models," Ellis writes. "Women keep pleading with him to be more open and emotional, and they indignantly throw out lines like 'I am not a slut!' and 'You never want to talk about anything!' and 'We should have gotten a room!' and 'That was rude!' and 'No -- I will not have sex with that homeless man while you watch!' as well as my own two favorites: 'You tricked me!' and 'I'm calling the police!' "

Ellis also evokes with nightmarish clarity a certain kind of upper-middle-class life, where all the children are Ritalin-dependent and even the family golden retriever is on Prozac. These scenes, the book's strongest, suggest the chilly horror of J.G. Ballard's best work. But the abrupt shifts in tone -- from satire to supernatural to sentimental to scary to schlock -- are jarring and ultimately exhausting. Still, that probably won't deter buyers. Lunar Park has a big promotional budget -- surely Yerby dolls are already in production -- as well a slick Web site where you can look at images of Jayne Dennis and Keanu Reaves, if that's your idea of spooky fun. If not, there's always Salem's Lot. *

Elizabeth Hand's eighth novel, "Generation Loss," is forthcoming.

The Madwoman in the Attic

03/20/2005

PINKERTON'S SISTER

By Peter Rushforth. MacAdam/Cage. 729 pp. $26

Elvis Costello once remarked, more or less, that you get 19 years to make your first album and 12 months to make your second. The same holds true for publishing, where successful first-time novelists are expected to crank out sophomore efforts within a year. (If Book No. 2 tanks, you generally can take the rest of your life writing No. 3.) Pinkerton's Sister, the second novel by the English writer Peter Rushforth, arrives a cool 25 years after his acclaimed debut, Kindergarten. That first book was a slender volume -- less than 200 pages -- a controlled, harrowing take on "Hansel and Gretel," filtered through an account of Holocaust survivors and late-20th-century terrorism.

At first glance, Pinkerton's Sister, which clocks in at 729 pages, 235,000 words and 2.4 pounds, seems to have little in common with its trim older sibling. But like Kindergarten -- whose protagonist is an illustrator of children's books, and which is filled with references to children's literature and fairy tales -- the new work is a book filled with other books.

Rushforth's novel, the first of a projected quartet, has a clever conceit -- the Pinkerton of the title is Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, called Ben, who grows up to be "Madame Butterfly's" callow young Lt. B.F. Pinkerton. Ben is recalled as a child for most of Rushforth's novel, which takes place in 1903, during the course of a single day in the life of Pinkerton's 34-year-old sister Alice, who is contemplating a return visit to the Webster Nervine Asylum in Poughkeepsie, upriver from the childhood home in New York City in which she still lives.

Alice is "the madwoman in the attic" -- though she wryly notes, "It should rightly have been called the nursery . . . but she had started to call it the schoolroom when she was a girl, after reading . . . about lonely governesses and grand houses . . . . it was the image that remained: the picture of a young woman going out into the world to make her way alone, sitting in a chair made for someone the size of a child, surrounded by the possessions of others, writing letters home." Like Jane Eyre's, Alice's "home was memory and imagination, her search for someone to love, and these she carried about within her." But Alice has never set out into the world to make her way alone. Her life has been circumscribed by her house and the surrounding (fictional) neighborhood of Longfellow Park. Mostly, however, Alice's life has been defined by reading, and books are what shape the baggy, often brilliant but overlong and overwritten Pinkerton's Sister -- I counted 17 literary references in the first eight pages alone, ranging from Jane Eyre to The Princess and the Goblin.

Alice is one of three daughters named for the sisters in Longfellow's "The Children's Hour," but her own childhood was anything but idyllic. She is the victim of abuses that may or may not have been precisely sexual in nature but were certainly fetishistic, and the unhappy witness to her father's sexual exploitation of the household's servant, Annie, whom she adores. Not surprisingly, Alice is haunted by notions of revenge, obsessive, brooding, impelled by violent impulses that she (mostly) doesn't act upon. Enamored of things both Grimm and grim, she is a bibliophile in the same way that the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" is an oenophile. She imagines violent acts involving cutlery, hammers nails into her dolls' heads until they splinter, and pictures herself as "the guest denied access to all homes, a woman beyond the pale of decent society, and everyone shrank from her defiling presence."

Fortunately, she is not completely denied access to the outside world. One of the book's best set pieces involves Alice's experience as a model for a statue illustrating "The Children's Hour," wherein she is slowly, eerily encased in plaster -- a masterful evocation of the entombment of an intelligent woman's mind and body. There are also hilarious accounts of the loopily philistine culture-vulture manquee Mrs. Albert Comstock, and the awful alienist Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, who subjects Alice to every form of medical torment at his disposal, from hydrotherapy to hypnotism to crude treatments involving the interpretation of clouds and dreams.

Yet even these are digressions in a maddeningly digressive narrative.

The fictional consciousness that streams through Pinkerton's Sister is compelling but often tedious and not very likable -- less the madwoman in the attic than the smarty-pants in the classroom. Amiability, of course, is not the best measure of a memorable fictional character: More than anyone else, the young Alice is reminiscent of another prickly, precocious know-it-all girl -- Louie, the protagonist of Christina Stead's masterpiece The Man Who Loved Children.

Still, the narrative heart of Pinkerton's Sister is what befalls Alice and Annie at the hands of Alice's father and the frightening figure known only as "Papa's 'friend.' " This story, with its sinister echoes of the gothic tales that Alice loves, and a nightmarish, beautifully written denouement set during a blizzard, should have been freed from some of the wads of paper that surround it. Pinkerton's Sister is a very fine novel, at once sprawling and intimate, and blessed with long gorgeous passages worthy of Henry James; but one senses always the greater book imprisoned inside it, like poor mad Alice trapped within her plaster shroud. *

Elizabeth Hand's most recent novel is "Mortal Love.

The Hunger Artists

05/29/2005

HAUNTED: A Novel of Stories

By Chuck Palahniuk. Doubleday. 404 pp. $24.95

This guy Chuck Palahniuk, he wrote Fight Club and Choke and Lullaby and some other good books. Fight Club, that was really good, and it was a great movie, too. It was dark, that kind of dark you get when you have a really clever idea, a surprising plot twist, some scary disturbed characters. But this writer, Palahniuk, he makes them feel real to you, like you might not want to sit next to these people on a bus but if you met them in another situation -- like a 12-step meeting or summer camp or the fight club in Fight Club -- under those circumstances, you might think, "These are people I could relate to, these are people I'd like to know more about, maybe, as long as I could get away from them if I had to."

Just so you understand, this guy Palahniuk, he's written some good books. But not this one.

You might pick this one up and read the premise on the back of the dust jacket: "WRITER'S RETREAT: ABANDON YOUR LIFE FOR THREE MONTHS. Just disappear. Leave behind everything that keeps you from creating your masterpiece. Your job and family and home, all those obligations and distractions -- put them on hold for three months. Live with like-minded people in a setting that supports total immersion in your work. Food and lodging free for those who qualify. . . . Before it's too late, live the life you dream about. Spaces very limited."

You'd think that sounds like an ideal scenario for Palahniuk -- a chance to skewer our notions of fiction, of reality, of our culture's obsession with fame and the notion that writing is just another route to celebrity; that anybody, just anybody, can write a book. Because he gets this group of people together, people with silly cartoony made-up names, and they all want to be writers, or at least they all want to be famous. And they all get on a bus and go to this place that they think is going to be great.

Only it's not. It turns out to be an old movie theater, and once they're inside, they can't get out, like they're locked in for three months; and the food is all freeze-dried, not gourmet at all, and everything is pretty disgusting and shabby and meaningless and depressing and disgusting. Did I say that twice? I forget, because this book, it's kind of repetitive, and it's also really, really gross.

Each character in the book tells a short story. Each also tells a poem, which is not such a good idea, as the poems aren't very good. In Lullaby, Palahniuk's really creepy novel from 2003, there's a poem that kills people who hear it, but I don't think anyone's going to die reading stuff like this: "The film: a shadow of a reflection of an image of an illusion."

In between the stories, there's a narrative about the people locked up in the movie theater. This isn't a very good idea either, as the people mostly complain about each other, and the freeze-dried food. They also talk a lot about celebrity and reality shows, without really saying anything new about them. After a while they start cutting off their fingers and toes, I guess because they're hungry. Some of them die. They start eating each other. Which isn't in itself a terrible idea, because some people like to read about stuff like that, as in the Hannibal Lecter books, and Marianne Wiggins's John Dollar, and even stories about the Donner Party. But in Haunted, even the cannibalism is kind of boring.

But some of the stories are good. Maybe you've heard about this story, "Guts," which is the one story everyone's heard about, because Palahniuk, when he read it at bookstores and readings and places, people who heard him read it, they threw up, or fainted, or something.

But that story, "Guts," it's pretty funny, in a totally gross-out way, and I laughed at it, and I didn't throw up. But only a few of the other stories are as good as that first one. "Foot Work," the hippie Mother Nature's story, is funny in a satirical way; it's about foot reflexologists and people like that who become assassins. And "Obsolete," the last story in the book, is excellent; kind of like a George Saunders story, or an episode of the old "Twilight Zone" TV series gone berserk. But that's only two stories out of 23. And don't forget the poems, and the linking narrative. So not a lot of bang for your book.

The stories in Haunted reminded me a little bit of stuff by Roald Dahl; not his kids' books, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or The Witches, but his stories for adults, the ones in Someone Like You and Switch Bitch and Kiss Kiss. Only the stories in Haunted have a lot more explicit sex in them. But it's not much like real sex. It's more like the kind of sex you imagine if maybe you're a 13-year-old boy who doesn't really know anything about it and likes jokes about bodily fluids and really bad smells. Sort of Garbage Pail Kids sex. Only, like I said, kind of boring.

"To become a household word," says Chef Assassin, "all you need is a rifle." Or maybe just a movie and a big book contract.

Because, by the end of this book, I was wondering if maybe Chuck Palahniuk got his idea from real life. Like, I was wondering if maybe his publishers locked him in a room for three months and told him he had to write a book really fast, and they'd pay him a lot of money if he did. That happens to writers when they become celebrities. They think maybe it's a good idea, because it's a lot of money, and their fans -- the people who buy their books no matter what -- well, they're going to buy this one too.

But you know, if something like that happened, not in a story I mean, but in real life, to a cult writer as talented and cutting-edge and interesting and popular as Chuck Palahniuk -- well, that would be really scary. *

Elizabeth Hand's eighth novel (now in progress) is titled "Generation Loss."