This man also told us that the only religious Greek people were uneducated, and of the lower class. Combined with the, as a friend so aptly put it, "cake-faces" that sit in front of me (so called for their liberal application of what they must consider to be blemish-concealing make-up) who delight in making fun of another student that isn't able to control a small nodding tic (I'm barely able to refrain from taking both of these bullies by the throat and smashing their skulls together -- see fifth grade), I'm already just trying to survive the class. Reading Sedaris's work today was comforting, for he too fluctuates neurotically between feelings of inadequacy and imagining that he is surrounded by idiots and/or jerks.
Dress Your Family was both satisfying and disappointing. I enjoyed Me Talk Pretty One Day more, as it was funnier, but I suppose you only have so many hilarious stories about your family. It has been my experience that when you tell funny stories about your family there is a subsequent feeling of guilt, a feeling that lingers; it becomes apparent that you shared this story out of a sense of shame, a sense of wanting to convince someone else that you aren't like this group of people that looks like you, and raised you. I think Dress Your Family expresses itself with this feeling at its heart, but it has none of the real tragedy and hopeful humanity of Dave Eggers' work, and even then I didn't fall head over heels for Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, although I liked it. Sometimes Sedaris work is so funny, but I found this time around his usually clever tone had been replaced by a sort of quiet desperation to relay his perceived misfortunes, all the while attempting to convince you that his collection of memories is actually his fortune. It didn't work for me this time, and I was left feeling a little empty as he ended the book with the birth of "baby Sedaris." I think regret has somehow crept into his work, and I sort of miss the unflinching and deprecating humor he wielded against his family and himself. Still, I enjoy reading him, and I'm not sure if this is a compliment or not, but his work tends to give me hope that I can make it as a writer.
Reading Fizgerald, however, I get the impression that I should go back to the salon where I belong. Nick struggles so much with his identity that I'm afraid at every moment he's going to give up and commit suicide. But he is probably not courageous enough for such an act -- in fact, Nick seems to be afraid of everything, most of all the prospect of being alone. The fear of intimacy is clear enough in his rigid defense of what I've come to think of as his "withholding pattern," or his tendency to sum up others in his mind while withholding his true feelings from those who apparently trust him.
There is also the problem of the ambiguous ending of chapter two. I was so confused by it that I have gone over it several times. Here Fitzgerald has the narrator chronologically enduring a relentlessly obnoxious party which started off with Tom wanting Nick to hang around the apartment while he and his mistress have sex in another room and then have some people over. In fact, this whole chapter is rife with sexuality -- Nick describes the day in New York as "almost pastoral," which conjures up scenes of sexuality and fertility. Nick attributes his presence in this scene to the overbearing insistence from Tom that he stay as well as being drunk, there is no real evidence that he is out of his mind until the end of the chapter, when he is going down the elevator with McKee, who he has already described as "a pale, feminine man" and who is often dominated by his shrill wife. They flee the violent scene where man strikes woman, and after agreeing to a random lunch date with McKee, Nick breaks into fragments of text stared by and separated from one another by ellipses
...I was standing up beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.
"Beauty and the Beast...Lonelieness...Old Grocery Horse...Brook'n Bridge..."
Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the Morning Tribune, and waiting for the four o'clock train.
A very provocative scene. If this were a scene with a woman, it would be clearly understood that a tryst had occurred. But a quick Spark Notes scan alludes to nothing of the sort -- I haven't done any research yet, but I keep getting caught on this passage. I mean, if they left the apartment and got drunk, or got more drunk, and wanted to look at McKee's photographs, what is point of the presence of the bedroom? The bed? The underwear? Being between the sheets? There's no clear meaning, but the fact that the usually deductive Nick has nothing subjective or analytic to add to this scene tells me that it is important.
I suppose Gatsby's grand parties are supposed to represent the roaring twenties, the age where you wiped your nose with elusive thousand-dollar bills and tipped the rat who foraged through your trash. I don't know though -- however fascinated with money Fitzgerald was, and Nick is, this novel doesn't read as an excuse to discuss luxury or wealth -- it's Nick's creepy voyeuristic quality -- the fact that he can't look away from this scene of decadence, that he gobbles it up and feels insecure in the presence of it. The only time in the novel, so far, that it seems like Nick has a moment's peace, is when he admires Gatsby's smile
...It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, as assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
Aside from the obvious narcissism oozing from such a summation, there is the suggestion in this statement that hiding the true self is necessary to happiness -- or at least necessary to being happy with others, not that this is a new concept. But just what Nick is hiding remains debatable. This novel is supposed to be Nick's confession of sorts -- and it is supposed to be painfully honest. We are supposed to get the impression that we are reading something very truthful, the very experience of Nick's soul, but he blows this off when he tells in the middle of chapter three, after telling us all about the party
Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me.
Here we get a deeper version of the truth: Nick wants us to get a particular impression of him, apparently one of self-importance, but, in a rather uncomfortable way he then goes on to tell us that he had a short affair with a woman but ended it after, get this, "her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction" -- mean looks? In your direction? It doesn't appear that it takes much to defer Nick's affections. He also tells us that in his meaningful life away from his cousin, Tom, Jordan, and Gatsby he sometimes goes to Fifth Avenue to "pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove." Disapprove of what? His income? That's makes some sense, but what about this business of no one ever knowing? I don't really understand completely yet, but I do get this sense of shame that seems to emanate from Nick wherever he goes. Then there's this line:
...most affections conceal something eventually...
This reminds me of the "repression" quote from chapter one.
Then there is his observation that Jordan Baker is "incurably dishonest." That line about reached out of the book and smacked me in the face. And what about this, "dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply"! The way he likes her -- first because she's famous, then because she's mysterious; he goes on to say that she never attaches herself to clever or shrewd men, curiously accusing himself of lacking these qualities in the process! He appreciates it when she degrades and manipulates him -- in fact after a particularly back-handed remark he goes so far as to say, "for a moment I thought I loved her," and proceeds to end the chapter by announcing his plans to formally end a relationship back home in order to pursue her. What? Didn't he say that this relationship was a rumor? He asserted his singleness back in chapter one -- "I'm not even vaguely engaged" and now he rushes through the reality of a "vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free." This, immediately followed by a declaration that his "chief virtue" is honesty. Honesty! I was on the right track, after all.
This is indeed a good book -- but I don't understand what all the fuss over Gatsby is about - yet maybe he plays a role like Sartoris, or like Supten from Absalom, Absalom!, creating a reference point. I can't wait to research this book -- maybe I'll have enough evidence to support a theory that I can send in to USC for my graduate school application. (Shhhh.)
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