“She’s less than sure if her heart has come to stay in San Jose
 and her neverborn child haunts her now as she speeds down the freeway
 she tries her luck with the traffic police out of boredom more than spite
 . . .
 she says a girl needs a gun these days on account of the rattlesnakes.”
 -Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, “Rattlesnakes”

The first few chapters of “Play It As It Lays,” an unrelentingly bleak novel by Joan Didion set among jaded Hollywood insiders in the late 1960s, had me worried the book would be a bad influence on me. For whatever reason (or no reason), I’ve always been susceptible to nihilism’s undertow. During my morning walks around the time I started the book, I found myself thinking things along the lines of: “There are no universal rules when it comes to relationships. There is only what people like and don’t like; what they’ll put up with and what they won’t.” Night after night, reading a few of the short, sparely written chapters before going to sleep, I would think that surely the book was going to start going easy on the protagonist, Maria (Mar-EYE-ah) Wyeth, a young has-been actress trapped in a dead relationship with her mildly sadistic director husband.

When I say the book is bleak, here’s what I mean. Maria is riding in a taxi cab in New York City and receives a letter from her father in rural Nevada, telling Maria that her mother has driven off the highway and been killed and coyotes have eaten her face. There’s a glib abortionist who, as he’s operating on Maria illegally in a motel room in Encino, says, “You hear that scraping sound? That should be music to your ears.” Nearly every snippet of dialogue is mean; nearly every character talks to Maria as if she’s stupid.

I didn’t get what the book was getting at until somewhere toward the middle, after the  pivotal event of Maria’s abortion, in which she longs to talk to her mother, who has been dead for years now. There’s a thread of motherhood running through the book – Maria and her husband have a toddler child, Kate, who has some sort of severe cognitive and behavioral disorder and is institutionalized (the nurses and Maria’s husband scold Maria for visiting there too often), and Kate seems to be the one thing in life Maria is sticking around for. There’s the connection Maria still feels to her mother, and to Silver Wells, Nevada, the town she grew up in that is – tellingly – now just a barren place where the U.S. military tests rockets. There’s the leaden sense of regret Maria dwells in after the abortion, every day, with every heartbeat  – or to put it Maria’s way, “the point” of doing anything ended “in a motel room in Encino.” For Maria, motherhood is connection – to one’s roots, to something real, to “the point” of living.

I usually try to skip the Introduction to novels and avoid reading reviews when I’m pretty sure I’m going to write my own, to keep me from thinking about a book what I’m “supposed” to think. But I happened to read on Wikipedia that snakes are a metaphor that slink up again and again here, in that way that spurs English teachers to tell their students to get out their hi-liter pens. So I was conscious of this as I read, although the motif makes itself obvious and I’m sure I would’ve picked up on it anyway. When it comes to all the bad things that can happen in life, the “rattlesnake in the playpen” is what causes Maria anxiety – not apocalypse, not “general devastation” – because death by snake bite is “particular,” and “punitive,” she says.

In her empty days, Maria drives on the freeway, never going anywhere. At one point, she goes to Vegas – not for any particular reason, just because she does. Her hours, days, and weeks are filled with moments that amount to nothing, that are not the sum of their parts: “When she finally lay down nights in the purple room she would play back the day’s tape, a girl singing into a microphone and a fat man dropping a glass, cards fanned on a table and a dealer’s rake in closeup and a woman in slacks crying and the opaque blue eyes of the guard at some baccarat table. A child in the harsh light of a crosswalk on the Strip. A sign on Fremont Street. A light blinking. In her half sleep the point was ten, the jackpot was on eighteen, the only man that could ever reach her was the son of a preacher man, someone was down sixty, someone was up. Daddy wants a popper and she rode a painted pony let the spinning wheel spin.”

And this fragment is typical of Maria’s thought patterns; here she is remembering her parents and life in rural Nevada before leaving for New York City to become an actress (at her gambler dad’s behest, it seems, because in one scene he asks how can she win if she’s not at the table?) : “…the three of us driving down to Vegas in the pickup and then driving home again in the clear night, a hundred miles down and a hundred miles back and nobody on the highway either way, just the snakes stretched on the warm asphalt and my mother with a wilted gardenia in her dark hair and my father keeping a fifth of Jim Beam on the floorboard and talking about his plans, he always had a lot of plans, I never in my life had any plans, none of it makes any sense, none of it adds up.”

The genius of creating this emotionally desolate landscape is that when there’s a moment with heart, it’s all the more powerful for being something rare. Acts of kindness in the book feel like nothing less than miracles; as a reader, you feel grateful for the reprieve from so much callousness among the characters in Maria’s world. And when the book’s story picks up the pace near the end – it’s breathtaking, and I simply could not put the book down until I had read the astonishing and perfect final words.

The Sum Up: This book might have cured me of my nihilism. If you drive for long enough through the desert, you’ll make it to where there’s life. I recommend this novel for fans of sparely written, minimalist fiction.

I was having one of those evenings. For the knots in my shoulders and back, I contemplated getting a massage from the Chinese folks who used to be next to the Dollar Store in Springfield Mall. (Because… well, they’re within my budget.) I quickly nixed the idea of goin’ boozin’, although that one was darkly alluring. I thought I’d maybe eat a cupcake. Or just sleep until morning, my ears plugged with conical wads of foam and the white noise of a fan drowning out the world. You know, one of those evenings.

But instead, I went out and picked up the latest issue of the New Yorker. It was more just something to look at while I, okay, ate a freakin’ cupcake. I idly skimmed the table of contents to see what this week’s short fiction was. It was a piece by someone named Allegra Goodman [she has a new novel, "The Cookbook Collector," coming out in July 2010]. Somewhere in my brain there was a flicker of recognition, but I’d never read anything by her. I gave her story a chance. I’m so glad I did.

Her story, “La Vita Nuova,” was exactly what I needed. Here was a beautiful story about someone who was sad but who lived her dismal little life with perceptiveness, occasional bursts of imaginative magic, and her own private brand of black humor. Here was a story that was spare, uncluttered, cleaned to the bone, with only what’s necessary remaining. Every sentence seemed to shimmer with poignancy.

It’s just this small-scale, short, slice-of-life, almost mundane piece, but it reminded me why I get so evangelical about short fiction. In the space of an hour, in one evening, in just a few pages–just the right words took me away from my life and into someone else’s. After I read it, it left a sort of emotional echo, melancholy but lovely.

Insomnia and stress have lately scattered my concentration; it sometimes feels as if I can only give something my rapt attention for a moment, then I’m gone. I blink, and I’m off to something else. A heartbeat, and I’m off to something else. It feels as if there’s little coherence. Reading a novel feels out of the question. That’s only one reason I’m grateful for writers who create worlds in these brilliant flashes. I could go on about short stories, but I’m off to something else–I want to share the beginning of “La Vita Nuova,” and a part from the middle:

“The day her fiance left, Amanda went walking in the Colonial cemetery off Garden Street. The gravestones were so worn that she could hardly read them. They were melting away into the weedy grass. You are a very dark person, her fiance had said.

She walked home and sat in her half-empty closet. Her vintage nineteen-fifties wedding dress hung in clear asphyxiating plastic printed ‘NOT A TOY.’

She took the dress to work. She hooked the hanger onto a grab bar on the T and the dress rustled and swayed. When she got out at Harvard Square, the guy who played guitar near the turnstiles called, ‘Congratulations.’

Work was at the Garden School, where Amanda taught art, including theatre, puppets, storytelling, drumming, dance, and now fabric painting. She spread the white satin gown on the art-room floor. Two girls glued pink feathers all along the hem. Others brushed the skirt with green and purple. A boy named Nathaniel dipped his hand in red paint and left his little handprint on the bodice as though the dress were an Indian pony. At lunchtime, the principal asked Amanda to step into her office.”

(I could pretty much go on quoting the whole story, but here’s another part I liked, from the middle.)

” ‘La Vita Nuova’ explained how to become a great poet. The secret was to fall in love with the perfect girl but never speak to her. You should weep instead. You should pretend that you love someone else. You should write sonnets in three parts. Your perfect girl should die.”

(And another… mostly because I don’t want to end on that note!)

“They went to a store called Little Russia and looked at the lacquered dolls there. ‘See, they come apart,’ Amanda told Nathaniel. ‘You pop open this lady, and inside there’s another, and another, and another.’

‘Do not touch, please,’ the saleslady told them.”

This is the small tidbit describing why he was convicted of Contempt of Court, since his easy, simple diet book was essentially none of the above. I hope he tries to appeal it, as that would only be good for America.

Maybe he could try to pull a James Frey, and say that actually, the books are fiction. Maybe that would save him.

As far as I am concerned, the future has hit, and it is now. And it is weird.

I just listened to a Tuvan throat singer, presumably from siberia, sing “House of the Rising Sun.” And then I watched one of the groups videos. You have to be deeply high to make that kind of stuff. High on Globalization and the future.

And so I look back and say “Scifi authors, you just weren’t weird enough! Rudy Rucker, you’ve got to TRY HARDER.”

I get irked by books where the main character’ guesses, hunches, or impulsive decisions are never wrong. Like Fox Mulder. Man, he’d come up with the wildest guesses ever, and he’d be right every single time. Every single character in this book is like that. “Hey, Mars looks different.” “It’s probably alien probes self-replicating with the aim of destroying America.” Yup, they are!

Also, when faced with a global disaster, I hope that China, Russia, and maybe the rest of the world get to participate. Heck, maybe there could be a summit or something. In this book, the rest of the world does nothing. Well, they bravely nuke themselves so we don’t have to, after losing to the probes. I know we’re awesome and all, but if there is a country on Earth right now that could mount a last ditch defense with minimal use of metal, my votes for the country that doesn’t blow the budget on aircraft carriers. Seriously, the rest of the world may not exist as far as this book is concerned.

I did like the “Ret Ball” device used through the story. It was a good way to break up the otherwise unrelieved earnestness of the main story-lines. Using it more often would have made it irritating, so it was the right thing to do.

More things I thought were crazy:

-Six-plus foot black guy. Huge. Dangerous. Who nicknames him “The Gazelle?”

-Not one, but TWO brilliant research students working at Hooters. Their role is to serve beer and bounce, and sometimes think. Not as much as men though. That wouldn’t be right.

-Forgetting the rest or the world, what is America doing when the economy is nationalized and state of global emergency declared? I mean, aside from the armed forces and the rocket scientists? Everyone seems pretty calm about the destruction of the planet. No riots. No looting. No complaining.

The fight scenes are good, as they should be, since they comprise most of the book. Ringo’s global politics are terrible. His small unit tactics are pretty good.  The climactic fire-fight is exciting, full of lasers, experimental machine guns, and infinite waves of alien probes. It would be a good movie ending. Very “Independence Day”.

I would have liked a bit more closure. So we fought off some of the infinite probes on Earth. They still own Mars, and a bunch of Jupiter’s Moons. What are we gonna do about that? Also, where did they come from? What are they doing? Do we have any future plans? Perhaps this will be addressed in a future book.

The Sum up:

The plot is ludicrous, but the action scenes make up for it. It would be a decent movie or videogame plot. Not bad.

They are totally unorganized except for a shelve dedicated solely to mass market paperbacks. It is a double stacked corner unit, good luck locating anything on it. Some other books have been arranged by my wife to suit her purposes. She has cherry picked some of the titles to put on shelves and those are the books she likes. Another few shelves have been arranged by color, which actually looks quite nice.

I have been using the Readerware program to organize my collection. It is a database program with the most notable feature of being pretty good at auto-cataloging from an ISBN. I have an old Cuecat scanner, and that makes short work of many of the recent titles. 

Unfortunately, most books before the 80′s don’t have bar codes, and they don’t even have ISBNs before the 70′s. I have a number of books before the 40′s and they don’t have LCCN’s.  That means that I have to manually enter those in the database, which can be pretty time consuming. 

I chose Readerware because it seemed tolerable enough, and it worked on Macs, Windows and Linux. I’ve bounced between the platforms and something that was cross platform seemed like the way to go. If I was to make a fresh choice now, I would probably lean towards delicious library, as it seems to be very polished looking.

My chief problem with Readerware is that it won’t let me just haul off with a SQL statement when I want to. I know that I would probably just end up trashing the database doing something ill-advised, but that’s what backups are for, right? Also, it’s pretty ugly. I’ve gotten used to a certain level of glamour from applications on the mac, and Readerware is just not a pretty program.

It’s not bad, though, and I hope to continue with the cataloging on a regular basis. I figure a few weeks of dedicated scanning and data entry ought to do it.