Crooked Timber: “I mean, didn’t you think the roasted baby was just, y’know, a little bit camp?”
China Miéville on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
– January 24, 2007Posted in: Uncategorized
Books To Jump Up and Down Over
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (Bat Segundo interview with Murphy)
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (Bat Segundo interview with McClear)
That’s funny, because as much as I found the book marvelously devastating, when he mentioned the little band with the collared pregnant women and the catamites, I thought “Wow, camp it up buddy.” Nothing’s more camp than catamites.
I found it more theatrical than campy, like the film version of Titus Andronicus, Titus, with Anthony Hopkins. The sentences were amputated. All of it was weird, and closely cropped, like a bad Cesar haircut. I projected the catamites and the roasted baby onto the pages of a quality sci-fi comic book. Yes, they may have been outlined in dark black. But they were also sufficiently staged, set into the story in such a way that they didn’t make me cringe. I don’t usually read post-apocalyptic road stories, or science fiction (although The Road is considered literature), but when I do, I’m often surprised by how much I enjoy them, and that I don’t mind when genre and lit mix.