Colin Marshall

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: The Bathroom

Jean-Philippe Toussaint sometimes gets called a novelist fascinated by structure, and here, his first book, you can see that impulse at its least masked. The first and last sections are both called “Paris”. The middle, longer, section, is “The Hypotenuse”. Each of those sections comprises a string of numbered — not quite paragraphs, but — chunks of text. The first “Paris” has 40 chunks; “The Hypotenuse” has 80; the second “Paris” has 50. I’m not sure that makes a triangle.

Some describe Toussaint as a novelist fascinated by goofy situations, so fascinated that he writes them as if they’re the most normal in the world. “When I began to spend my afternoons in the bathroom I had no intention of moving into it,” begins this novel’s nameless narrator. Naturally, he’s moved into the bathroom. A bit of activity swirls around him as he settles into his lavatorial routines, though he’d rather it didn’t. He receives a letter of invitation from the Austrian embassy; though certain it came by mistake, he nonetheless fantasizes about the Soirée it announces. His girlfriend Edmondsson, an art gallery employee, hires a couple of Polish painters exhibited by her workplace to paint the apartment. The painters don’t seem to do much painting, spending most of their energy instead on struggling to skin a pile of octopuses.

If life has driven you into bathroom exile, suddenly taking off for Venice presumably doesn’t seem so bad an option. The entirety of “The Hypotenuse” takes place there, where the narrator goes “abruptly, without telling anybody.” One obvious interpretation says that, fed up with the Polish painters and their squids by the end of the first section, the protagonist flees for the Continent and then returns toward the end of the third. But is that really the chronology? Reflecting on the book, I do wonder. The Venice segment could, in the chronology of the story, actually be the earliest. In other words, the Venice trip comes first, then he moves into the bathroom, then — and this would be the text of the first section — he reflects on the events of his bathroom days before the painters show up.

We won’t settle this here. Hell, since I’ve never heard anyone else bring up this issue of multiple interpretations, I might well be wrong about it even being an issue in the first place. What’s not in doubt is the protagonist’s action in the 75th chunk of the middle section, when the visiting Edmondsson has been spending her days at various Venetian cultural attractions and the isolated protagonist has been spending his running imaginary international darts tournaments:

Edmondsson found me a bore. I let her talk and went on with my darts game. She asked me to stop and I didn’t answer. I was sending darts into the target, stepping up to pull them out again. Standing in from of the window, Edmondsson stared at me. Again, she asked me to stop. I hurled a dart at her with all my strength, and it stuck straight in her forehead.

This reads as somewhat less horrific moment than it sounds, but, if we’re going to bring up Camus again, it does have a certain Meursault-shooting-the-Arab flavor. Both characters commit their acts of violence suddenly, out of what appears to be nothing more than irritation. (“When The Bathroom’s narrator throws a dart at Edmondson’s forehead,” Toussaint said in one interview, “I understand his gesture and I find it unforgivable, all at once.”) Yet whereas Meursault’s shot lands him on the 1940s Algerian equivalent of death row, The Bathroom dude’s stray dart seems to bring no discernible major consequences at all. You can call this bad storytelling — maybe it is — or you can call this a crock of Frenchy bullshit — maybe it is — but the dart incident goes on less as a driver of the plot than as a sort of spill that seeps into the very fabric of the story. It potentially has many effects on the text before and after, and if it does, they’re near-invisibly subtle.

David L. Ulin: The Lost Art of Reading

David L. Ulin, former book editor of the L.A. Times and one of my favorite guests from The Marketplace of Ideas’ first year (here’s that conversation), comes back on the program this week to talk about his new book, The Lost Art of Reading. That’s one dramatic title, and I couldn’t help but feel a sharp pang of irony given the book’s context in my life: it was, I believe, the fourth I’d read that week. If the art got lost, I didn’t get the memo.

(I should really stop taking all my communications by memo.)

But Ulin’s argument turns out to be much subtler than its banner. It’s something more interesting, in fact, than an argument. He’s got three threads going. The first began as an L.A. Times article about the increasing difficulty of concentrating on long-form text for those inclined to get hooked on tweets, Google Alerts, Huffington Post dispatches, etc. Laboring under the crusty belief that I am what I read, I’ve practiced just enough strategic abstinence — posting to Twitter but never “checking” it, harshly regulate my inbox-peering, going on Facebook only under certain phases of the moon — not to worry much about this.

The second thread discusses the dynamic between Ulin and his non-reading son when the son is assigned The Great Gatsby and sent, I suspect, on one those pointless high school English symbolism hunts. Ulin comes off as more agnostic about this, but I wild-eyedly cultivate a number of theories about how, for every kid high school English shoots up with Dead Poets Society, it turns a thousand others away from reading forever. I don’t blame anybody for this; it strikes me as systemic a problem as they come. If you try to make the pleasures of literature teachable by mandatory public education’s definition of “teachable,” it’s easiest to part them out in this plodding, alienating way, the terrible scope of which only becomes clear when you step back.

In third thread — my favorite — Ulin writes a short biography of his reading life. Boldly, he devotes a not insubstantial chunk of this small book to describing his abiding love of the work of the Scottish barge driver/heroin addict/novelist Alexander Trocchi, his favorite in a constellation of writers who both lived vigorously and, to some extent, wasted their skill. I never latched on to the Jack Kerouacs or Ayn Rands of the world, the unconventional novelists of extreme views you’re supposed to get into in adolescence, but now that I read up on Trocchi, I wonder if I haven’t found a potential equivalent for my mid-twenties. I wonder if I haven’t found a candidate for a future Millions contemporary novelist primer.

Ulin highlights the moment in his reading life when, in his late twenties, he geared up to move from New York to Los Angeles. We talked about this a bit in our 2007 conversation, where he mentioned making use of the most time-honored New Yorker’s adaptation strategy: hating Los Angeles. The Lost Art of Reading has details his other, to my mind much more useful technique: placing himself in Los Angeles through literature.

Madelaine and I recently showed the visiting Chris/cobalt999 around Los Angeles. Despite his confirmed Man of the World status, he’d never actually spent much time in L.A., so we seized the opportunity to take him through the geography and/or psychogeography of “our” version of the city. This meant Amoeba Music. This meant LACMA. This meant Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles. This meant Koreatown. This meant following John Rabe’s suggestion to “get high on L.A.” by taking a position above the city — Griffith Observatory, in this case —and looking around us. (This would have meant Tokyo 7-7, had it not been for history’s greatest tragedy.) Chris being Chris, it also meant a lot of staring at Los Angeles in Google Earth. We’re talking about a guy who’s been to Africa once yet knows the name and location of each and every one of its countries.

I enjoy maps as much as the next guy — okay, substantially, geekily more than the next guy — but Ulin’s literary self-placement also strikes me as necessary. Since I myself am preparing to move to L.A. at the end of the year — albeit only from Santa Barbara — I need all the self-placement I can get. Me being me, I’ve accomplished some of this with the cinema of L.A., of which there is helluva, and, via Podthoughts with the radio and podcasts of L.A. But I think I could do with much more literature. Ulin’s own two anthologies, Writing Los Angeles and Another City, have proven invaluable. The literary journal Slake, which I actually learned about through John Rabe’s show Off-Ramp when I wrote it up in Podthoughts, will come in handy indeed should it continue to publish issues. Certainly it’s about damn time I caught up on Raymond Chandler. Still, as someone with aspirations of getting a handle on Los Angeles and, even more impudently, aspirations of carving out a place in the city’s book culture, let’s just say I could use some more suggestions.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Monsieur

At this point in my Jean-Phillipe Toussaint readership, I couldn’t help but be struck by one element of this novel above all its others: it’s written in the third person! He writes all other books in the narrative voices of the usually nameless protagonists, but in Monsieur, he omnisciently observes the day-to-day of an ontologically distinct character with an actual name, albeit the name Monsieur. Employed in some executive position at Fiat’s commercial department, he displays “in all things a listless drive.”

Those two words, “listless drive,” get at most of the actions Monsieur takes in the book. Maybe hanging a couple scare quotes around the word “action” renders the word more appropriate: motivating all his acts is a desire not to have to do more of them. His carefully cultivated idleness at work somehow convinces his boss of his pure dedication. He injures his writs playing soccer and either does or does not have it x-rayed. He finds a fiancée and moves into her family home; when the relationship disintegrates, he simply remains there, finding it easier than moving out. When his ex’s mother finally points Monsieur toward a new place to live, a geologist neighbor has him take dictation for the book he’s writing. Monsieur dislikes this, and comes to perceive only one way out: moving again.

I struggled even to summon that short list of events to mind, partly because I’ve been reading so much Toussaint lately and because his books are so similar — “I think a real writer always writes the same book,” he’s said — but partly because his work feels engineered to allow you to forget the plot. Whether Toussaint’s central character is Monsieur, the standard nameless protagonist, or Jean-Philippe Toussaint, I come away thinking not about what they’ve done but how they’ve thought, how they’ve perceived. I imagine this seems terribly Gallic, but remember, Toussaint is Belgian. World of difference.

Certainly, he resolutely inertial Monsieur has little going on for him but his thoughts and his perception. Nevertheless, I find something to admire in him, something almost Taoist. Ginger Danto wrote that “things that profoundly disturb others, from losing apartments to losing a would-be wife, affect Monsieur rather like mild indigestion.” I aspire to that. I mean, I aspire to a great deal more proactivity, not to mention productivity, than Monsieur displays, but who wouldn’t kill to float on so even a keel? Then again, I fear his utter peace and utter indolence may be two sides of one coin.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Camera

Rather than making the usual Jarmusch and Tati comparisons, Dalkey Archive’s back-cover copy on my edition of Camera calls Toussaint “a comic Camus for the twenty-first century.” I wasn’t going to say anything, but yeah, the Meursault-ish detachment, observance, and sometimes kinda violent semi-reactivity of Toussaint’s oft-nameless protagonists screams the comparison, never mind that the guy writes in French. Yet whereas The Stranger still instantaneously wins over hundreds of thousands of high school literature students over the world each and every year, nothing in the Toussaint oeuvre seems to do the same. What gives?

I can only say that I’m reacting to Toussaint’s novels in the way I was supposed to react, back in junior year, to The Stranger. (As for how I was supposed to react to Catcher in the Rye, I’m still waiting for a proper literary surrogate to come along. Maybe something by J.G. Ballard?) I never quite understood what so many American sixteen-year-olds of the early 2000s found to identify with in that Frenchman in 1940s Algeria, though I suppose one’s surroundings do feel just as bleak after so many years of mandatory public schooling. But does it make much more sense for me to clench my fist in solidarity at books like these?

Whatever the answer, I have to admire an opening paragraph like this:

It was at about the same time in my life, a calm life in which ordinarily nothing happened, that two events coincided, events that, taken separately, were of hardly and interest, and that, considered together, were unfortunately not connected in any way. As it happens I had just decided to learn how to drive, and I had barely begun to get used to this idea when some news reached me by mail: a long-lost friend, in a letter composed with a type writer, a rather old type writer, had informed me he was getting married. Now, personally, if there’s one thing that terrifies me, it’s long-lost friends.

Over the remaining 109 pages, Unnamed Toussaint Dude hangs around the licensing office drinking tea and reading the paper, falls in with a single mother working the desk there, gets driven around by her mildly eccentric Eastern European dad, eats olives, gets a pedicure, crosses the Channel, goes around Europe, finds a camera on a boat, and throws the camera off a boat. Among other things — I think. But is there any point plot summary here? Toussaint’s books practically exist to make the argument that plot doesn’t really matter. You might call his characters’ lives dull but well-observed — his characters might call his characters’ lives dull but well-observed — but are they really even all that dull?

Maybe I’m wrong, but if any of us fell in love with a driver’s ed office attendant by repeatedly showing up yet never quite bothering to get the necessary paperwork together, we’d dine out on the anecdote for the rest of our lives. If, visiting Milan, any of us were asked by our host (of the name Il Signore Gambini, no less) if we needed anything else, clutched his arm and incongruously demanded a pedicure, then got one at the most opulent place in the city, we’d never forget it. Hell, if we visited Milan at all — or London, or any of the places to which the other Toussaint protagonists jet at a moment’s notice — we’d think we were doing pretty well for ourselves.

So I might read about a life like this even if Toussaint’s consciousness wasn’t interpreting it. Fortunately, it is. He’s mentioned in a few interviews his opinion that novels should be “infinitesimal,” that they ought to put the infinitely small right alongside the infinitely huge. Hence Camera’s celebrated passage (among Toussaint fans) analogizing the eating of an olive with a fork to nothing less than a strategy for taking on reality:

I vaguely felt that the reality with which I was grappling was beginning to show some signs of fatigue; it was beginning to soften and slacken, oh yes it was, and I had no doubt that my repeated assaults, in their tranquil persistence, would end up exhausting reality little by little, as one wears out an olive with a fork, if you will, by pushing down on it lightly from time to time, and then when, weary, reality finally offers no more resistance, I knew that nothing could then stop my impetus, a furious surge that had always been in me, strengthened by everything I had accomplished. But, for the time being, I had all the time in the world: in the battle between oneself and reality, don’t try to be courageous.

I myself can’t get enough of the mundane shoved up against the cosmic, but if that’s not your bag, you could just take Camera as a love story between the protagonist and Pascale, the woman who, in a different reality, would have issued him a driver’s license. But on this inferior approach I can comment no better than did Tom McCarthy, a huge Toussaint fanboy and another of my favorite novelist working today:

For all their narrative refusal and machine-like logic, Toussaint’s first three novels also involved emotional encounters between men and women. They could even be seen as playful renditions of quite conventional romantic situations, but only if re-engineered through a certain kind of reading, much as some student guides to Ulysses try to persuade us that what’s ‘really’ going on in such and such a scene is Bloom pining for Molly, for example (‘No,’ I always want to shout out when I read accounts like these, ‘what’s really going on is tramlines vibrating, soap singing and language rioting, just like it says!’).

Darren Aronofsky: Black Swan

I’ve kept an eye on Darren Aronofsky’s career for over a decade, out of persistent interest if not strong enthusiasm. I’ve lumped him in with nineties U.S. indie auteurs like Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, and honorary American Christopher Nolan, and sometimes I’ve thought of him as the figurehead of that movement’s failure to deliver on its early promise. That’s unfair; if anything, I like Aronofsky’s movies better than the increasingly defensive adult juvenilia the Rodriguez/Tarantino/Smith/Nolan axis puts out. Maybe I give him a hard time because he seems to possess greater potential than his peers, and thus leaving it unrealized is a greater crime.

Aronofsky’s remained a sort of black sheep in his crowd: brooding, insistently high-minded (though clearly by his own definition of “high-minded”), overserious to the point of sourness. This has left him bare to the temptations of simple morality play, to which his second film, Requiem for a Dream, represented complete surrender. I’ve never seen but am intrigued by his third, The Fountain, a project reportedly heavy on the visual effects (that’s bad!) yet nearly free of CGI (that’s good!) yet utterly humorless (that’s bad!). I worried when I heard of a looming Robocop remake, more so when I heard Aronofsky might direct. A man needs a sense of humor to pull that off, and Aronofsky’s lack of one has dogged his art since the beginning.

Black Swan shows signs that Aronofsky may now be growing that sense of humor. Green shoots and nothing more, but still. This owes something to the subject matter: if there’s one creative entity less inclined to laughter than Aronofsky, it’s a ballet company. You could call the film a satire of the dance world’s grueling perfectionism: the protagonist, a dancer who’s won the ultra-coveted lead in Swan Lake, enters a paranoid psychological breakdown almost immediately, hounded — so she believes — by a controlling, vicariously-living mother, sabotage-inclined colleagues, a bad scratching habit, and feathers that seem to be sprouting from her skin like Kobo Abe’s cabbage leaves.

It’s hard not to feel dicked around by a premise like this, which grants Aronofsky license to put all kinds of wild stuff onscreen — some brief but energetic lovin’ between lead Natalie Portman and compatriot/rival Mila Kunis has surely long since gone viral — and then be all, “No, wait, that didn’t really happen. It was all in her tortured imagination. Or was it?” But I suppose this tiring, thankless process reflects the lives of dancers like these: they push themselves to the physical breaking point, they vainly hope for a few years of prominence, and even at the absolute top of the heap they’re still fighting, with the utmost bitterness, for crumbs.

The film seems to understand this. The company’s audience looks to be about 110% idle rich, stiff in their seats unless applauding at precisely the appropriate moments. In a rich (and some say cruel) bit of stunt casting, Aronofsky has Winona Ryder play a menacingly spiteful ballerina on retirement’s cusp of whom I would’ve liked to have seen more — and of whom I suspect a great deal lays on the cutting room floor. But these gestures toward the Sisyphean struggle of dance remain just that; once the picture steps into its heroine’s mind, where dance is all, it doesn’t step out.

I don’t know what to read into the fact that the company’s director (played, I feel I must say, by Vincent Cassel) in the first act announces his plans for a fresh, daring, rebellious Swan Lake which, by the third act, turns out to be exactly what I would expect a standard Swan Lake to look like. This is either an intentional commentary on ballet’s ossification or an unintentional commentary on ballet’s ossification. If this is what passes for radical in ballet, no wonder they have to loudly and repeatedly bemoan the supposed rise of philistinism. I kept thinking of Principal Skinner: “Am I so out of touch? No, no — it’s the children who are wrong.”

In this setting, Aronofsky officiates a strange marriage between the refined and the tacky. The film delivers not only the aforementioned ballerina-on-ballerina action but a wide array of strikingly threadbare horror and suspense devices, including but not limited to Barbara Hershey’s unvarnished cosmetic surgery. I seem to recall many a dark shadow darting through the frame. But here’s the weird part: something about all this actually works. As a horror movie, it’s just committed enough to its nonsense — the positive side of Aronofsky’s severe earnestness, perhaps? — to work effectively; as a drama, it’s just complicated enough by that nonsense to be unusual. It uses a heap of genre elements to wriggle most of the way out of genre, and in the mess it makes along the way avoids teaching any lessons. That’s why I suspect it may be Aronofsky’s most fascinating work to date.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Self-Portrait Abroad

If we’re drawn to the books we ourselves would like to have written, then it’s no wonder I couldn’t wait to read this one. After all 84 pages of vignettes from the protagonist’s travels in Japan, Germany, the Czech Republic, Vietnam, and Tunisia — internationalism and textual brevity being two of my recent “things” as well — you’re tempted to ask the same question Dan Visel did: “What, precisely, is this book?”

Despite the many resemblances, physical and stylistic, to Toussaint’s other books, one factor complicates everything: this one’s protagonist has a name. What’s more, his name is Jean-Philippe, and his wife’s name is Madeleine. (“I will call Madeleine Madeleine in these pages to help me get my bearings.”) Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s wife’s name is Madeleine! (My own lady, by way of comparison, is named, with similar non-Anglo-standardness, Madelaine. One more on the pile of commonalities even now suggesting I can become as cool as him.) Both Jean-Philippe and Jean-Philippe Toussaint are globetrotting authors forever trying to make their various speaking engagements. I’d be tempted to call this straight-up nonfiction if Jean-Philippe the protagonist wasn’t written as quite so buffoonish and Dalkey Archive wasn’t selling it, seemingly, as fiction. I realize novelists often self-deprecatingly repurpose elements of their own lives up to and including their names, but damn.

On top of all this, I’ve heard rumors that the pieces Self-Portrait Abroad comprises are all or mostly previously-published travel journalism. (“Journalism” in the loosest sense, that is.) So jeez, I don’t really know what to say about the nature of this book, other than that it delivered to me an unpindownable sense of literary pleasure. Whether you’ll feel the same depends on how you like your stories told, and as I’ve written here many times before, I like my stories to barely be stories. So, apparently, does Toussaint; keeping the plot running in the lowest possible gear allows him the time and space to make his usual fascinatingly detached observations before his characters reach their miniscule victories or, more likely, their wet-fuse fizzles.

One of the Kyoto sections begins with “I didn’t get much chance to improve my German in Kyoto” and ends with Jean-Philippe arriving at a friend’s house (in an ambulance on which he had hitched a ride) only to find him not at home. A chapter in either France or Corsica describes a game of boules (which I’ve always known as the old Italian guy-friendly bocce or the nudist colony favorite pétanque David Sedaris wrote about) that Jean-Philippe wins with a particularly lucky move. “The best day of my life,” he declares it.

“Narratives of futility,” I could grandly call these but won’t. But if it’s not futility, what is it? These events seem thin, but this book teaches more sharply the lesson I’ve drawn from everything else I’ve read of Toussaint’s: no matter what happens or doesn’t happen, who it happens or doesn’t happen to, and where it does or doesn’t happen, a skilled writer can approach the material with the right mindset to crank out a thin volume that appeals highly to Colin Marshall. It helps if you include the following, which Toussaint does:

• A flower-arranging publishing house liaison desribed as “a thug from a film by Godard”
• A battle of wills with a German butcher shop attendant
• A beerishly hazy on-train meal in Prague of “sausages and pork embellished with an unavoidable side of potatoes”
• A Japanese girl who speaks only in Spanish
• A fish-slicing class under an impossibly stern master
• Surely the lease erotic strip-club visit ever taken
• A motorcycle ride through Hanoi
• An academic conference that forces Jane Birkin to sing a song
• A hilariously prolonged and futile effort of trying, and failing, to will oneself to tears of wistfulness

That last one’s familiar. Life gets a lot easier when you give up being outwardly sad about anything, in my opinion.

Kazuo Hara: Goodbye CP

This was Hara’s first film, released in 1972. Alongside Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974, it exemplifies what I call the Early Hara style: 16mm; black and white; chiaroscuro contrast; sound never, ever synchronized with image. Hara builts the movie, like any of his Early or Late, around an eccentric. Extreme Private Eros, etc., starred his nutty ex-girlfriend; The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On had bitter, unpredictable World War II veteran Kenzo Okuzaki. Hiroshi Yokota would at first seem like a contrast; he’s just a guy with cerebral palsy. But here’s the thing: he goes outdoors.

Much of this documentary’s non-stylistic impact depends on its historical and cultural context. In 1970s Japan, so far as I can gather, you didn’t let disabled people leave the house. Yokota seems to hardly ever be in the house, so packed is his schedule with handing out leaflets, giving street poetry readings, crossing intersections on his knees with agonizing slowness and shouting laboriously into megaphones. He’s something of a proto-disability activist, alongside a small, ragtag coterie of other CP sufferers. (One member, an enthusiastic photographer, comes off as potentially more interesting than Yokota, though perhaps only because he gets less face time.)

Yokota’s exhibitionistic tendencies dovetail well with Hara’s inclination to spark the drama by hand before capturing it with the camera. This intersection culminates in a shot where Yokota sits naked in the middle of a road. Hara has a history of art-based promotion of the marginal — he called his early photo exhibition on the disabled “Don’t Make Fun of Them” — but if Goodbye CP delivers a message, it’s, “Look upon this! Look upon this!” Throughout the film, Yokota has a big problem keeping his oversized glasses on his face — he could really use one of those foam rubber arm-connecting straps that were popular in the nineties — and it ends with a shot of least five minutes where repeatedly drops them and struggles to pick them up again. His voiceover expresses a newfound utter hopelessness for his own cause.

I’m sure people have labeled the movie “hard to watch” for any number of reasons: the subject matter, the unceasing air of tension, the harsh lighting contrasts, the lips that don’t match the words. I’d say it draws its power from its simplicity. Hara mostly just follows Yokota around in his day-to-day and, like any documentarian worth his salt, lets things develop as they may. In the sequence everybody talks about, Hara shoots a domestic argument between Yokota and his also somehow disabled wife — an argument about whether Hara’s presence is welcome at all — as their non-disabled kid darts to and fro, laughing. I can confidently name few other filmmakers who would have the nerve to get it all on film without flinching. If one skill in particular defines Hara, it’s that, once he finds one fascinating person, he never. Turns. The. Camera. Off.