The smell of secession

The Oregon Experiment, by Keith Scribner, has a couple really interesting things going for it. Namely:

1. A nose. One of the main characters works as a nose.
2. A secessionist movement.

But it turns out that this is a novel with a breast fixation. This book is all about the breasts. Large, or too small, fleshy, pillowy, ample, lactating, infected, hard, soft, sharp, droopy, pointy. We know all about the characters' breasts, and the characters' mothers' breasts, and the characters' lovers' breasts.

On the other gendered hand, we know very little about what the men look like. Apart from one male "milky torso," there is little indication whether the men are fleshy, flabby, sinewy, sculpted.

A little imbalance doesn't usually faze me. But this book is top-heavy to the point of tipping over. It's too much.

And breastfeeding. The pressure to breastfeed. The romance of breastfeeding. The bond that results from breastfeeding. And such issues. Is it OK to be breastfeeding 4-year-old girls? (Boys?) How about grown men?

Not that I'm a prude or anything. But there's a lot in this novel that made me uncomfortable. Maybe that's the point. But I don't have a good (constructive?) feeling about it.

The characters are all pretty messed up, and none of them particularly likable. They're all pretty selfish actually.

There's Scanlon, a poli sci prof specializing in mass movements and radicalism. His wife Naomi is a former professional "nose" (perfuming and such), but she posttraumatically lost her sense of smell some years ago. Baby on the way, they're moving from New York to Oregon for Scanlon's work.

Naomi's sense of smell comes back, and along with it a hormonal flood — resentments and memories and worries about (in)dependence and career fulfillment and striking a family balance and reclaiming one's body, one's self — issues not uncommon to new mothers.

They befriend a local anarchist. Angry young man. And this relationship I don't see as credible. I just don't see what Clay gets out of it, why he would stick around. Whatever. It's kind of essential to the plot that there be an anarchist, and that he be entwined within this family. So there he is.

And the leader of the secessionist movement, Sequoia, is a near-ideal, free-loving, all-giving vegan earth mother goddess. But I can't really like a character who's chosen to call herself Sequoia. Plus, in complete contrast to her usual policy of openness, she lets her past drive a wedge between her and her daughter.

Scanlon needs both these locals for his work. He tries to convince himself that he's not a bourgeois slumming it for the sake of his research, he tries to walk the talk, but really, who's he kidding?

And it all ends very badly, making me think much the worse of all the characters.

Somewhere in its heart this book is about leaving a life behind, running away from your past, it catching you up even while you yearn for it, ambling toward a life you think you're supposed to be living. Maybe outrunning your past, or just forgetting it.

Somewhere toward the end, the book purports to be about love, the bonds of family, and betrayals thereof. But there's very little real love here. Maybe that's the point. But I can't shake the feeling that this book was written by a man with a superficial grasp of what love is, who just plain doesn't understand women. It makes me angry, and sad. Maybe that's the point.

I'm reminded a little of Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist, for the street-level view of a movement, the day-to-day practicalities that weigh the lofty ideals back down to earth. Also, Annette Gilson's New Light, for it's Americanness, for putting the commune back in community.

It's also a very olfactory book, though it's neither Proust nor Süskind; only when the smells of fear and danger crop up, I'm afraid the nose has some rehabilitation to go before her alleged genius specificity fully returns.

So, there's some pretty heady stuff in here, but it didn't come together for me. I may or may not pick up Keith Scribner's next novel, depending on its subject matter. I'm sure he'll be fine; his wife must have quite the rack.

Possibility

So I found a book in the bargain stacks the other week and immediately snapped it up, without, unusually for me, giving it a second thought.

I've been reading Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island on my daily commute, and it makes me feel a bit conspicuous — a bit dirty actually. What do others make of the woman so flagrantly reading Houellebecq on public transportation?

Michel Houellebecq is widely considered to be a racist and a misogynist, and it's disputed whether his work has any literary merit. According to Wikipedia, "a recurrent theme in Houellebecq's novels is the intrusion of free-market economics into human relationships and sexuality."

So what am I doing reading this book?

Well, for starters, it's about clones. Who doesn't love a book about clones?!

The book cover beseeches readers to consider, "Who, among you, deserves eternal life?" (Do I?)

Another reason: I read Elementary Particles and I liked it. Evidently I don't hold to the same standards as the New York Times ("a deeply repugnant read"), because I found something appreciable in it. It was — that cop-out of all adjectives — interesting, on many levels, not least because it tested my own limits and sensibilities.

It's the problem of utopia (that book and this one), to which I'm compelled to return over and over and over again, ever since I discovered that there was such a word, that others also dreamed an ideal and tried to design a foolproof blueprint. Now, in Houellebecq's case that ideal seems to be based in sexual freedom and sexual liberation. The problem of utopia lies somewhere in the disconnect between theory and practice. The problem with a sexual utopia is that that disconnect is (for me) felt much more strongly, emotionally.

I'm reading this book openly on the metro, and the vulgarities make me cringe, whether they're directed at Arabs, Jews, or women. Do other commuters know what's inside these covers and judge me? As open-minded as I may be and always eager to hear all sides, this just feels wrong.

Women are valued for sex, and only so long as they are sexually desirable, often traded in for younger models. As if to validate the narrator's (author's?) attitude, the women are fully complicit, knowing their worth to be exactly that and doing everything in their power to increase and preserve it (thus powering the beauty industry).

So why am I reading this book? I guess it's a kind of test. There are some valid points. (Where exactly are my limits?) And it's interesting besides. (And there seems to be a cultish religious angle developing.)

It's boiling down to this: Is the human experience necessarily a sexual one? How do relationships work? How do men really think? (Who didn't try to figure this all out as a teenager, at the first whiff of romance, and why am I bent on trying all over again to figure it out?)

And on this last point, I'd love to know: Is Houellebecq at all representative of the male population? Outlier or straight shooter?

The story? Thus far: Daniel1, from whom the other narrators were generated, is a stand-up comedian, who dabbles in film-making. The world is cultivating indifference, sounding the death knell for morality.

Beyond the hackneyed subject of paedophilia, this film strove to be a vigorous plea against friendship, and more generally against all non-sexual relationships. What in fact could two men talk about, beyond a certain age? What reason could two men find for being together, except, of course, in the case of a conflict of interests, or of some common project (overthrowing a government, building a motorway, writing a script for a cartoon, exterminating the Jews)? After a certain age (I am talking about men of a certain level of intelligence, not aged brutes), it's quite obvious that everything has been said and done. How could a project as intrinsically empty as boredom, annoyance and, at the end of the day, outright hostility? Whilst between a man and woman there still remained, despite everything, something: a little bit of attraction, a little bit of hope, a little bit of a dream. Speech, which was basically designed for controversy and disagreement, was still scarred by its warlike origins. Speech destroys, separates, and when it is all that remains between a man and a woman then you can consider the relationship over. When, however, it is accompanied, softened and some way sanctified by caresses, speech itself can take on a completely different meaning, one that is less dramatic but more profound, that of a detached intellectual counterpoint, free and uninvolved in immediate issues.

Hmmm.

They say (you know, "they") that when sex is gone, at least there is conversation. At the end of the day you want to come home and have someone to talk to. Or just to be with? Are they different things?

What happens when there is nothing left to talk about? Do we repeat ourselves, smile and nod. And what of the notion of a shared, companionable silence — is this, then, as mythical as postcoital cuddling? An empty commentary on a nonexistent main event.

I don't know the answers to any of these and many related questions, and the fact is they're very relevant, as currently I feel (experiencing inside) and see (standing outside) both myself and my relationship aging. I can't wait to figure out where Houellebecq stands.

The thing is: it's really hard to critically dismiss a book when it has me thinking so many intense things when I'm only on page 75 (of 345).