Against the Blog

We've seen plenty of non-realist elements in the book so far, but I must give this chapter credit: it's really a bravura display. It has some real chutzpah to it. Here we have the Zombini family, Dally included, on a Translatlantic liner. Also on board is Kit Traverse, on his way to Germany (hanging out with another mathematician, Root Tubsmith). We start with a lengthy discussion between Dally and Erlys about, naturally, their relationship and Merle. Flashback segment showing how she first met Merle. Erlys is trying to set her daughter up with Kit, who's been looking at her. You will remember that they already know each other at one degree of separation, since Dally briefly knew Frank out west. We get some idea of Kit's mindset here: "I love those two knuckleheads," his whisper growing passionate, "they're my brothers, they think they're trying to protect me, but they don't know I'm deep in it, up to my ears, all this--" his gesture ...

Here we are, back in England, which has been Lew's milieu, but although he's present in the background, this chapter isn't about him. The most important thing is that it introduces an important character, Cyprian Latewood, the "feckless scion" of Latewood's Patent Wallpapers. This chapter also gets into the difficulties with the idea of a coherent sexual identity. There's the idea, which you'll be familiar with if you've read Judith Butler, that one's gender isn't a stable, coherent thing but rather a series of acts, which are subject to destabilization. We will see A LOT more of that later on. I remember the first time I read this, I found it very confusing, but now I have a clearer idea of what's going on. Or so I think. So the thing about Cyprian is: he's very, very gay. BUT. At the same time: he has a serious crush on Yashmeen, who, I don't want to alarm you but, is a woman. And a woman who, at this time, seems to be a lesbi...

We're back with Lake and Deuce; whee. Although this chapter I suppose gives us our best opportunity yet and probably ever to answer, not the book's central question (if there is one), but definitely it's most baffling to me: WHY DOES LAKE STAY WITH DEUCE? I mean, I get why she married him in the first place. That's easy enough; an effort to push away from her family and defy her father? But what good is he now? WHAT, I ask you? And this is something that I just don't know if the novel adequately addresses. I'll save my final judgment 'til the end of the book, but to me, now, it sure doesn't look that way. The context of this chapter is that they've been moving around, and now they're living in the same area as Deuce's sister Hope and her husband Levi. What are they doing, workwise? It is extremely unclear. But the focus is on their relationship and its, ah, vicissitudes. So let us catalogue those. "For a day or two after they got married...

We are now back with Frank, who has crossed the border back into the States and is feeling disoriented, thinking about Stray, his nephew's mother. He runs into Linnet Dawes, whom I see I didn't even consider a significant enough character to mention last time. She's a schoolteacher whom Frank had met when he was there to kind of help Reef with his romantic difficulties; they had a little chat. She doesn't particularly like Stray: "that young lady . . . created more damned drama around here. Who needed an opera house when she  was performing?" (462). Anyway, she tells him where she is, and that Reef has apparently fucked off to Europe somewhere. He finds a room in "the Hotel Noctámbulo, where insomnia prevailed." Everyone staying awake working on "some impossible midnight project." There are a bunch of bikers in town, including a Hungarian named Zoltan who, it's implied, is a vampire: he freaks out when presented with X shapes and he doe...

Does that chapter heading make you want to read on? We've gotta put asses in seats here. We're back with Merle again, who's feeling something like empty nest syndrome in Dally's absence. He quits his job at Little Hellkite and heads east. He's not going after Dally, per se. Where he IS going--you will find out in due course. First, there's a little vignette in a town called Audacity, Iowa. There's one of them newfangled movie theaters there, but there are technical difficulties and the people are restive. Fortunately, Merle is good with gadgets, so he's able to fix it. Movies...photographs...light...you know the drill. A maybe-suggestive line from the movie operator: "Frankly," Fisk admitted later over a friendly glass of beer, "it has always scared the hell out of me, too much energy loose in that little room, too much heat, nitro in the film, feel like it's all going to explode any minute, the stories you hear, if it was only the lig...

Let's try to kick it up a notch with the titles, eh? I don't want anyone, god forbid, getting bored reading this. We begin the chapter with Lindsay: he was left behind when the other Chums left for Central Asia because he was found to have a very serious condition: Incipient Gamomania, "that is, the abnormal desire to be married" (432). That's probably something you'd expect from Lindsay, and it shows--maybe?--a contradiction in the Chums organization: getting married is a kind of conventional, bourgeois thing that supports the status quo, and you'd think that a sort of squeaky-clean, all-American organization like the Chums would support it--but...no. You can't do that. You're not allowed to grow up and exist in time and things like that; you have to stay young and innocent forever (and really, that "innocent" is starting to look like a cudgel designed to prevent actual growth than real innocence  innocence). Regardless, this passage is ...