Atwood's The Heart Goes Last and Falling In

My family has camped together for every year of my life. They may have been doing it before I was born but honestly I’m pretty iffy about whether that period really existed or is actually just elaborate back story to the universe that began on July 23, 1979. I am not fully convinced that any time before isn't basically a series of ret-conned prequels that didn't quite live up to the main event.

Anyway, whether or not said camping took place before that date aside, it has certainly happened since. I’ve missed but three of these outings. Two because I was off in Mexico eating fish heads and one because I was on a wildfire fighting crew and was duty-bound to be within one hour of my station.

Oh guys, don’t think I’m cool because I was a wildfire fighter, because I was not. That year there were no fires. Zero. I spent the summer installing sprinkler systems while waiting for a phone call to ring that would promise adventure and some measure of financial security that never came. Also I missed out on the family camping trip.

When I was young, a major part of these trips was hunting for minnows with my cousin in whatever stream was closest to camp. We would catch said minnows in Dixie cups and we got pretty good at it. We figured out where they hung out, one of us would sweep our cup under an overhang while the other waited on the other side. Some fish, scared by the one cup, would swim in to the other and vice versa. I’m told that coyotes and badgers hunt prairie dogs and burrowing rodents in a similar manner.

In my memories I feel like we left in the morning and came back at dinnertime, which is something that if my kids were doing the same thing would terrify me. If my kids were just gone in nature for more than an hour I think there would be helicopters looking for them. Maybe we were gone for just a couple of hours. I was drinking a lot of heroin back then so my memories are fragile.

Here’s what I’m getting at, though, and it only took four paragraphs to find the point. The point is that I became somewhat legendary for my inability to stay dry on these ventures. While my older cousin hopped nimbly from rock to rock, I always found the slick one, or the wobbly one, or just missed the one altogether. I always fell in.

If you were to track my movements, Billy from Family Circus style, across the various streams in which we adventured, you’d see lots of splashes. And I often returned to camp a muddy mess. If asked, I imagine I shrugged my shoulders and said, “I fell in a lot.”

Now, if you could track the progression of my life as if it were a mountain stream in the high uintas, you might see the same thing. A dotted line traveling in a not-so-straight line through a variety of obstacles, with plenty of splashes. Hey Howie, you ask, how did you travel through this life and come out such a muddy mess? Answer? I fell in a lot.

In my mind, at least, I don’t compare favorably with my peers. When it comes to things like career progression, home ownership, level of karate mastery, cleanliness of household, cleanliness of clothing, and hair ownership and placement, I constantly feel like I’m behind. While I look around and see people who have figured things out I still have no idea what I’m doing. I look back on my life and see lots of spots where I missed the rock, or it budged under my foot, or it was slippery and I didn’t have the balance.

And listen, you guys, I’m good. I know that when I fell in I got wet, maybe skinned my knee, got some mud on me that’s hard to scrub off, but I was not swept downstream. There’s something to be said for getting back up and catching more minnows, and I get that. This is not Howie’s pity party. I have a life that is enviable to the vast majority of humans both living now and who have lived all of the way up until this point. I have a wonderful wife and three great kids and we’re warm and comfortable and rarely hungry. We’re safe and have access to high-quality health care and a steady paycheck. All I’m saying that when I read a book about someone who seems to make as many poor decisions as good ones I see a little of myself in there.

The good stories, to me, are the ones where the main character isn’t a hero or a villain, though they could be easily painted as either depending on their narrator. The Heart Goes Last, by Margaret Atwood, is not one of those good stories. It may be the worst book I've read since starting this venture. Not that I read all of it. Oh no. I stopped when one of the main characters was being smuggled out of a totalitarian prison community while dressed as an Elvis impersonator, his companion a beautiful brain-washed woman who was supposed to be a slave but instead fell in love with a teddy bear that she carried in her purse.

I didn't make any of that up.

I know that not two posts ago I was praising Atwood, though I have had trouble with her books in the past. I've found that her speculative future universes tend to fall apart upon later reflection. Like the old-west towns in amusement parks. They look great if you stroll right down the middle, but you start to poke in the corners and you see through the slats of old-timey wood a bunch of roller coasters and children vomiting funnel cake. In the past, though, the stories have been compelling enough that I have at least a pretty good time, and sometimes a great one.

The Heart Goes Last starts well. It's about a married couple living in their car after a major financial collapse has left their city in near ruins. The reasons are vague, but it all sounds familiar. Housing crises, unregulated banking, a run on Beanie Boo brand plush toys (this blog is sponsored today by Beanie Boo. Beanie Boo, their eyes are big what do you want me to do), whatever. The point is things are bad and looking worse. Stan is tempted to join in to his brother's apparently criminal enterprise, and Charmaine works at a bar and is increasingly tempted by the local prostitutes' invitation for her to join the practice.

Then they see an ad on the TV for a new kind of community. Where there are jobs and food and safety. Like suckers, and because Atwood needs an excuse to get them there and we're supposed to think that in such a crisis the TV set wouldn't be constantly flooded with easy fixes and that our protagonists would be numb to it by now, they join.

It seems great at first, but there are hidden secrets, blah, blah, blah. Fine. I've been on board with flimsy future worlds as an excuse to deal with day-to-day domestic situations before. I mean I wrote one. But give me the benefit of the doubt here. To further the old-west town metaphor, this is less like the professional shootout-at-noon Main Street and more like some cardboard boxes my 7-year-old arranged and labeled in sharpie "Jel" and "Sharif" and "Horehous." It's like a J.J. Abrams Star Trek universe.

And even, after all of this, if the story between Charmaine and Stan were interesting against this flimsy backdrop, even then I would be fine. And yet it's not. Charmaine is supposed to be sweet and innocent with a dark side, but instead comes across as dumb and easily manipulated. Stan, I guess, is supposed to be resourceful, but instead we're forced to read his childish fantasies about rescuing women and having them show their gratitude in a way a 13-year old may expect. There is almost an interesting part where gender roles seem sort of reversed, but then it's abandoned. Neither character is, at any point, an agent in their own story. Instead they are constantly manipulated and moved around by others like little pegs in the Game of Life.

To return to my original point, these two fall in a lot, and I'm not sure I was rooting for them to get back up.

In the past I've felt conflicted in criticizing someone else's art. I know it's hard to write and publish a book. It's awful hard to make it work, and be entertaining, and tell us something. But man, you guys. I hated this book so bad.

No, we can't live at that pitch.

The music was more than music- at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Things we'd lived through and didn't want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprisingly pleasures. No, we can't live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music, somehow, or in the way Shamengwa played it. 

-Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves 

Who is Elena Ferrante and Why Have I Just Now Found Out About Her?

I feel no nostalgia for my childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don’t recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that’s all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.
-Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

In my last post I talked a lot about nostalgia. And I keep thinking about it. We often look back on our childhoods with fondness, but we express it by focusing on the goods that were available to purchase and consume at the time. There must be some deep chemical response to desiring and getting toys, games, books, and tapes that creates brain pathways. Listen, I’m not a brain surgeon, and while I certainly have a firmer grasp on foreign policy than one, I don’t know why we are how we are.

What I can say is that one need only to post a picture of a toy that existed when we were young and it will spread across the internet like the one time in Junior High when the rumor spread that I hadn’t hit puberty yet: inexplicable and kind of creepy.

What strikes me as particularly weird is how we seem to be so nostalgic for terrible things. I remember riding around in the back of my friend’s pickup truck when we would leave the high school campus for lunch. We’d lie down in the back to avoid police, essentially one wrong turn or drunk driver away from being a tragic memory for our graduating class when those three kids who nobody really knew but seemed nice enough I guess were thrown across four lanes of traffic. Our parents recount going on long car trips while being stacked in the back of the station wagon like sardines. Their only comfort being a solitary lick of a horehound lollypop and the soothing sounds of FDR on the wireless, declaring war.

Those were the good old days, I guess. Things were simpler. More moms grieved the death of their babies, but that’s a small price to pay for the fond memories we have of riding on the hoods of cars while our irresponsible older friend who should know better took tight turns and sent us rolling across a parking lot and then subsequently passing out at the sight of our own blood. I mean, we were fine, and that’s the thing that matters.

But now it’s nanny nation, you guys. We’re being told by big government that we should put our children in car seats as soon as they are born. They won’t even let us take our new baby home from the hospital without one! It’s almost like they see that brand new infant not as a cute little pet that we can’t wait to start posting on the social medias, but as a potential emergency room case and drain on resources within minutes, maybe even seconds, of letting it into our care.

Why, I remember when a man could punch his wife and the neighbors knew to mind their own business! When football players were actually allowed to play football, instead of all this namby-pamby oh-dear-you’re-going-to-be-senile-at-age-36-boo-hoo talk we hear now. If you didn’t want your life to be shortened on a football field you shouldn’t have let your dad try to live all of his spoiled dreams through you, is all I have to say about that. I mean nowadays in Obama’s America if a young girl is raped, she’s actually encouraged to report her rapist, even if it means he won’t be able to go on a mission! It’s like we’re telling young women that their lives are as important as a man’s. Can you imagine how dangerous that is?

Why, people are saying now that being sad is a disease! Can you even? I can not even. I know that “scientists” in “lab coats” are telling us that there’s “evidence” that there are “chemicals” in our “brains” that regulate “mood,” but I know from the bottom of my heart that people would be happy if they just stopped sinning. Why, look at Jesus! Just pulling out a random scripture we’ll see that “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” Well. Obviously that’s a mistranslation because I believe every word of the Bible except for the parts I don’t agree with politically.

Anyway this concludes the broad straw-man satire of this post.

The reason I loved, loved, loved My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante is because, like in that first line, she is brutally honest about childhood. Nobody knows anything about Ferrante. She’s considered the most important contemporary author in Italy and as far as I know nobody has even met her. But my goodness is her writing interesting.

They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.

Ferrante’s tiny, poor community outside of Naples feels completely authentic. The way Ferrante tells the story of two girls, Elena and Lila, growing up is frankly astonishing. When they’re young, there is only their neighborhood, and there are dangers. A local man who is despised by the community is thought by the girls to turn into a shadow at night and steal their dolls. As they grow older, you feel the community enlarging along with their awareness of it. Imaginary dangers are replaced with the more concrete. As they develop into young women, every interaction takes on a sinister tone and can be frightening and loaded with implications.

Elena and Lila learn the history of the people in the neighborhood, tracing back the sources of old feuds and tragedy. They witness new ones. There is no point when Ferrante sugar-coats the experience, she never talks down to her characters as children. Never tries to paint an idyllic childhood. It’s just so impressive. Ferrante must have some kind of memory of childhood the rest of us can’t tap into, to view an entire life so clearly.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve been affected by a book like this.

Here’s where I try to put a button on this whole thing. I started with some personal observations and ended with a brief book review. It’s nice to have a format.

Look, I don’t want to make people feel bad. I get it. I get why we pine for earlier days that seem simpler but in fact were just as complicated. It’s crappy that kids look at iPads instead of out the window on long drives and we think we’re blowing it. We want our kids to have our childhood but what I’m saying is that we’re lucky we got through it, just like every generation of children is lucky they got through the meat grinder of human existence throughout history.

Here’s my take on today: it’s a good time to be a kid if you’re weird. You can draw dragons and play Magic or Pokemon during recess and you won’t get punched probably. That’s different from even when I was a kid. It’s a good time to be a kid if you have behavior disorders, or autism, or a wheelchair. There are people there for you that weren’t there 50 years ago. It’s a good time for kids with diseases that are now curable. If you’re black, or fresh from Mexico, or a little girl who likes science, or a little boy who likes ballet, or you don’t think you fit in the body you were given for whatever reason, there has never been a better time to be a kid.

It’s scary but it’s always scary. Today my kids have drills to deal with a shooter in the school; it makes me sick to think about it. When I was young I think I developed an ulcer fearing an earthquake because I’d been told all of the ways in which our school was not earthquake safe. There were bomb shelters at my school from when my parents went there and were under the constant perceived shadow of nuclear attack. Before then children had friends die of polio and tuberculosis. Before then maybe there were cave bear attacks at school, I don’t know.

Wikipedia

Outlaw cave bears!
"Yeah, but if we make cave bears criminal only criminals will have cave bears."

I'm just saying give your kids a break. Give yourselves a break. Give a delicious Kit Kat a break (this post has been sponsored by Kit Kat.)