Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller (A Noise Within 2026)

Trivia question for today: What is the best-selling modern play? 

 

Well, if you go by printed copies rather than tickets, the answer is Death of a Salesman, believe it or not, with over 11 million copies sold. 

 

Oh, and the play won a Pulitzer too. 

 

My wife and I decided on short notice to grab tickets for the opening preview of this play at a smallish professional theater in Pasadena. We had never heard of A Noise Within before, but not only does it have a cool name (presumably drawn from one of Shakespeare’s common stage directions), it has a great setup that puts around 300ish people close to the action. 

 

Back when I was in high school, the local kids all read this play in 11th grade. I was homeschooled, and our curriculum mostly tried to pretend that the 20th Century didn’t happen, at least as far as literature was concerned. It was dismissed as “pessimistic” and “devoid of Christian values.” So I don’t even remember if we read a full play for American Literature or not. Perhaps not. 

I have spent some time reading modern plays, including American ones from what now appears to be a golden age of theater - Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Lillian Hellman, Thornton Wilder, and Arthur Miller. 

 

Also, my wife and I have enjoyed live theater together since our first date so many years ago. 

 

The Death of a Salesman is, in my opinion, one of the best plays not only of its era, but of any era. It has held up remarkably well. Even if traveling salesmen are not as common as they were, everything else feels fresh and relevant. Substitute a modern occupation for the sales - maybe an Uber driver? - and it could happen today. 

 

Having only previously seen The Crucible, which is a pretty conventional linear narrative, I was surprised at the avant garde elements of this play. It must have seemed fairly daring in 1949. 

 

The story is told through flashbacks, dream sequences, and episodes that take place only in the protagonist’s head. It is easy enough to follow, and every line in the play is necessary and integral to the plot, so it isn’t exactly Godot or Six Characters in Search of an Author. But it does feel modern. 

 

At 77 years old, I figure it is pretty hard to spoil this play. The salesman, Willy Loman, dies at the end. That’s, um, literally in the title. But yes, spoilers ahead. 

 

Willy Loman is an old salesman, in the twilight of his career. Which has never been as successful as he claims or hoped. Rather, it has been a grind, with his family mostly scraping by in a dollar-store version of the American Dream. 

 

Recently, though, he has been under stress - his company terminated his salary and made him commission only, and he is struggling to make sales at his age. (Most of his contacts are dead or retired now.) 

 

Whether due to the stress, or other factors, he is showing significant signs of dementia. He loses track of blocks of time, has been in serious car accidents that he can’t understand how they happened. He talks to himself constantly, and seems to be confused about both the present and the past. 

 

Honestly, as an attorney who works in elder law, he could be any number of my clients or their parents over the years. 

 

He is stuck in his old stories, his old dreams, and most of all, his own misguided self-conception as a “popular” man. 

 

In reality, he is barely on speaking terms with his two sons, he has exactly one friend, and even that friendship is under strain due to his increasingly erratic behavior. He is one misstep away from being fired, and he isn’t making ends meet at all. 

 

We learn as the play unfolds about the generational dysfunction in the family. His father abandoned them to go seek his fortune in Alaska. Later, his older brother Ben also set out, ending up making a fortune in diamonds in Africa. Willy, not a risk taker and loyal to his job, misses a chance to join him. 

 

Denied the success he dreamed of, Willy lives vicariously through his older son, Biff, who is a star quarterback in high school.

 

But Biff flunks math and thus fails to graduate, losing his college scholarship, and finds himself drifting from low-wage job to low-wage job for the next decade and a half. 

 

Something happened after high school that seems to have killed his initiative - something we only find out near the end of the play. 

 

Younger brother Happ grows up invisible, a sidekick to his golden-child brother at most. Ironically, he grows up to be a corporate grinder like his father - more successful than Biff at least. But he also has become a player, having a series of women, none of them serious. Settling down isn’t for him, it appears. 

 

Willy does have a devoted wife, Linda, who has stood by him all his life, and by the end is the only thing keeping him functional. She is getting old and tired, though, and it is clear she is running out of options as his mental state deteriorates. 

 

I guess that is enough to give an idea about the play. There is conflict between Biff (who has returned for a visit) and Willy over Biff’s future. But also, Willy clearly feels guilt which he deals with in an unhealthy manner by projecting it onto Biff, claiming Biff blames him for everything. (Which is the opposite of what Biff is doing.) 

 

Things go from bad to worse, as things do in tragedies, until the final catastrophe. 

 

It is interesting to me that Arthur Miller claimed that the play wasn’t a classic tragedy. Because it really does fit the definition in spirit, if not in the letter.

 

Aristotle essentially set the template we use today to define “tragedy” in the surviving portion of Poetics, although he was describing more than prescribing. 

 

Miller’s play actually meets most of the requirements. The action takes place in a single day (although there are the flashbacks - kind of like the Chorus explaining the history in a Greek tragedy), it occurs essentially in the same place, and it has a single plotline. So, score one for the Three Unities. 

 

It has the essential character arc of a tragedy. A basically decent man has catastrophe come upon him due to a fatal flaw - the Tragic Flaw. In this case, one could describe the flaw as denialism - Willy’s inability to see himself as what he is and his insistence on living in denial and projection. 

 

There is a turning point - as we learn near the end, it is when Biff catches his father with another woman that Biff loses faith not only in his father, but in himself. 

 

The action is mostly driven by relentless fate, the fundamental unfairness of the universe that seems to have it in for the protagonist, no matter what he does.

 

Really, the only missing element of a classical tragedy is that Willy isn’t a “Great Man™” - the king or prince who is brought low. Instead, Willy is the kind of ordinary man that would typically populate a comedy, not a tragedy. 

 

In that sense, it is a tragedy for the American mythology, right? The celebration of the ordinary man, who not only gets his “rags to riches” narrative, but can experience the same tragedy in drama as the powerful. That’s actually a good thing, in my opinion, and part of a longer shift from the centering of the aristocracy to a focus on ordinary people that has been occurring for the last 250 or so years. 

 

It is interesting how Miller found his inspiration for the story. It was definitely grounded in his own family. He had an uncle who was a salesman, who eventually committed suicide. There was the weird competitiveness between Miller and his cousin, which became in the play the relationship of Biff (the cousin) and Bernard (Miller), the jock and the nerd, respectively. The plot may not precisely follow any family narrative, but Miller seems to have drawn much of the characterization from real life. This may be why the characters seem so believable. 

 

Willy Loman really is one of the most fascinating characters in literature. For a deeply flawed man, he is strikingly sympathetic. It is all too easy to imagine inhabiting his psyche. Just like it is all too easy to see family relationships that resemble the Loman family mess. This is a truly personal play, and thus very different from The Crucible with its political focus. 

 

That isn’t to say that politics don’t come into Death of a Salesman. After all, it is unregulated capitalism of the pre-Depression era that has led to the post-war corporatism that grinds Willy down. But all of this is just context for what is mostly a family and personal breakdown. 

 

My wife had an interesting observation that I decided to include here. 

 

Willy’s mental state and behavior at the end of his life very much resembles where we are with Trump right now. The dementia is manifesting in very similar ways. 

 

Now, to be clear, Willy Loman is not much like Trump. Loman is flawed, of course, but he is no sociopath or narcissist. He’s just a guy. Much like many other guys of his era and other eras, who lacked the ability to process his trauma or acknowledge his emotions. But he’s not a bad man. 

 

Trump, of course, is a narcissist and a sociopath, and a rich fuck with a shit-ton of power to harm people and destroy the world. He is one of the most evil men of my lifetime, a person not merely capable of doing evil himself, but of inspiring others to do evil as well. 

 

But there are a lot of similarities right now. 

 

Trump too is stuck in his imaginary past of being “popular” - he seems to think most people love him even as his ratings tank. He lashes out, seeing persecution everywhere, and blaming everyone else for the consequences of his own behavior. He seems to be unable to understand reality. He keeps telling the same old stories, full of delusions of grandeur but also repetitive and increasingly simplified. He forgets where he is, falls asleep, and cannot process new information.

 

It is dementia. And he has it bad. 

 

As I said, Trump isn’t Willy Loman. By any measure, the death of Loman is a true tragedy, as complicated and flawed as he is. The death of Trump will be a sigh of relief, as he will eventually be unable to perpetrate further evil in this world. Few care about the death of the Willy Lomans of the world - they are mourned by family, unknown by most others. Trump will have a huge queue to piss on his grave. Ding dong the witch is dead. 

 

Perhaps the greatest tragedy in the story is that Willy comes to see himself as worth more dead than alive. Even though his one remaining friend, Charley, pleads with him that nobody is worth anything dead, the problem is that Willy is somewhat right. Circumstances - the fates, the flawed systems of capitalism, his own stubbornness - make him worth more in economic terms if he is dead. And that is the tragedy not just for the Willy Lomans of the world, but for all of us as society. 

 

I’m sure there are things I wanted to say about this that I forgot to put in, but this should give an idea. It’s a great play that everyone should see. 

 

I should say a few things about the production itself, which was truly top-notch. These are professional actors, but without the huge budgets of the biggest shows. 

 

I loved the theater itself, in which even the cheap seats felt right up on the action. It felt almost as intimate as a theater one-tenth the size. 

 

The sets were fairly minimalist, with the furnishings becoming less and less as the play went on, a metaphor for the diminishment of Willy’s life, until there is essentially nothing left at the end, just the walls of the neighboring apartments closing in on him. 

 

I cannot say enough good about the acting. You expect this from professionals, of course, but this show was a clinic in inhabiting characters. 

 

In particular, Geoff Elliott as Willy was Willy. It was honestly difficult to feel he was performing the part rather than literally being Willy Loman. Apparently Elliott is one of the people running the theater, along with Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, who directed this play. A man of many talents, it appears. It was a command performance, one of the finest I have seen on any stage. 

 

I’ll also mention Deborah Strang (Linda), Ian Littleworth (Happ), David Kepner (Biff), David Nevell (Uncle Ben), Bert Emmett (Charley) and Michael Uribes (Howard) as standouts in bringing characters to life. (And no shade on the others who filled out the cast in smaller roles.) 

 

Overall, it was just a brilliant production, and well worth the reasonable price for tickets. This is one of the advantages of living not too far from the Los Angeles area. If you are a local, I’d definitely consider seeing this. 

Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Diiie by Maya Angelou

Source of book: I own this

 

I would say that in pop culture, the American poet of the 1990s was Maya Angelou. She read a poem at Clinton’s first inauguration, her books were everywhere, and her face was on television as a pop icon. 

 

This contributed to her reputation as a “pop” poet rather than a serious one. Which, in my opinion, would be a mistake. Plenty of poets of the past were wildly popular, and also met high artistic and cultural standards. Which is why we still read them today. 

 

I also believe that we will be reading Maya Angelou in the future. 

 

As I noted in other posts that I feel in some ways, Angelou’s celebrity detracted from other worthy poets of her time, particularly other black women. This isn’t her fault, of course. Rather, it is an example of the phenomenon sharply satirized by R. F. Kuang: white-dominated publishing and culture tends to consider one person of color enough for diversity, and lets that one person monopolize budgets and publicity and attention. 

 

The cure for this isn’t to throw shade at people like Angelou, but to actively seek out and promote other authors whose works tend to be unjustly neglected. For other black authors, I recommend checking out my Black History Month list. 

 

I own her complete poetry, but hadn’t read that much systematically. I did feature her longer poem, published as a separate work, Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem in one of my Christmas poetry posts about a decade ago. 

 

I decided to start at the beginning and read her first collection. I suppose this could qualify both as a Black History Month and Women’s History Month selection as well. 

 

I haven’t read any of Angelou’s non-fiction yet, so I am not going to give a mini-biography here. I do hope to read her prose in the future.

 

This first collection, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Diiie, was published in 1971, a couple years after her autobiography. 

 

The poems in this collection range from modern to traditional, from really short to at least medium length, and cover topics from nature to politics. I selected my five favorites to feature in this post. 

 

I will start with a nature poem, because I have always loved that topic, and enjoy how each poet treats it. Nature is part of us, just as we are part of nature, and to sever ourselves from nature, as too many humans do, is to do a moral injury to our psyches, which also tends to result in harm to others and our ecosystem as well. 

 

Late October

 

Carefully

the leaves of autumn

sprinkle down the tinny

sound of little dyings

and skies sated 

of ruddy sunsets

of roseate dawns

roil ceaselessly in

cobweb greys and turn

to black 

for comfort.

 

Only lovers

see the fall

a signal end to endings

a gruffish gesture alerting

those who will not be alarmed

that we begin to stop

in order simply

to begin

again.  

 

The end is also the beginning. Death leads to life. The cycle continues. And honestly, I love fall, almost as much as spring. 

 

This next one is such a gem, I get chills every time I re-read it. And when I read poetry, I read it out loud and multiple times, because the music is part of the beauty, and the secrets reveal themselves over time and repetition. 

 

Remembering

 

Soft grey ghosts crawl up my sleeve

to peer into my eyes

while I within deny their threats

and answer them with lies.

 

Mushlike memories perform

a ritual on my lips

I lie in stolid hopelessness

and they lay my soul in strips.

 

This poem is in a simple traditional form, but, like Emily Dickinson, Angelou turns simplicity into profundity. We all have memories like this, ones we tend to not want to remember, ones we cannot escape. Our souls feel these deeply enough that we tend to resort to denial and lies to counteract them. Healing requires acknowledging them and coming to peace in some way with our pasts. 

 

Here is another one I love. 

 

In A Time

 

In a time of secret wooing

Today prepares tomorrow’s ruin

Left knows not what right is doing

My heart is torn asunder.

 

In a time of furtive sighs

Sweet hellos and sad goodbyes

Half-truths told and entire lies

My conscience echoes thunder.

 

In a time when kingdoms come

Joy is brief as summer’s fun

Happiness its race has run

Then pain stalks in to plunder.

 

It’s a bitter little poem, but speaks truth, and finds emotional resonance. It may not be the entire truth, but it is a truth, held in tension with others. 

 

There are a lot of political poems in this collection. I picked this one to feature. 

 

To a Freedom Fighter

 

You drink a bitter draught.

I sip the tears your eyes fight to hold,

A cup of lees, of henbane steeped in chaff.

Your breast is hot,

Your anger black and cold,

Through evening’s rest, you dream,

I hear the moans, you die a thousands’ death.

When cane straps flog the body

dark and lean, you feel the blow,

I hear it in your breath. 

 

I particularly love the use of “thousands’” rather than “thousand.” The death isn’t a thousand singular deaths, but a single death died by thousands. The many sacrificed to white supremacy over the centuries. It’s a compelling word picture, and a great capture of the scope of the struggle. 

 

I’ll end with this one, which strikes a bit close to home. As a white “liberal,” I know I have my blind spots. This is a pretty pointed criticism. 

 

On Working White Liberals

 

I don’t ask the Foreign Legion

Or anyone to win my freedom

Or to fight my battle better than I can.

 

Though there’s one thing that I cry for

I believe enough to die for

That is every man’s responsibility to man.

 

I’m afraid they’ll have to prove first

That they’ll watch the Black man move first

Then follow him with faith to kingdom come.

This rocky road is not paid for us,

So I’ll believe in Liberals’ aid for us

When I see a white man load a Black man’s gun. 

 

*liberal. I find myself unexpectedly being considered a liberal these days, despite being conservative by temperament, simply because I strive for basic human decency. Apparently, seeking racial equality makes one a “liberal.” Indeed, it appears these days that believing that we all have responsibility to other humans is a “liberal” thing, and that the right wing believes empathy is a sin, rather than literally the foundation of Christ-following. What times we live in. 

 

And yes, Angelou is right. We white liberals need to follow, rather than insist on leading. And we need to arm our black brothers and sisters (whether literally or figuratively) by providing them with the resources to fight for their freedom. 

 

I am looking forward to reading more of Angelou’s poems, and encourage everyone to do so. 

 

Space Oddity by Catherynne Valente

Source of book: I own this

 

Space Oddity is the sequel to Space Opera, which our book club read and discussed during the pandemic. The first book grew out of the author’s live-tweeting of the Eurovision contest. A fan told her she should write a science fiction story about Eurovision. So she did. 

 

The original book imagined a galactic version of a song contest, but with far higher stakes. Not only would resources and money flow in the direction of the winner, but if a new species was discovered, they had to prove their sentience by participating in the contest. If they came in last, well, tough luck. They would be annihilated and allowed to re-evolve and hope for better results next time. 

 

If the species at least came in something other than last, then they were added to the galactic group of sentient civilizations and allowed to live. 

 

So, in that first book, the has-been glitterpunk rocker Decibel Jones (formerly Danesh Jalo) is drafted to represent Earth. 

 

The problems are many, from the fact that one-third of his band (The Absolute Zeros) is dead in a tragic accident, and the band hasn’t actually played anything in many years, to the fact that Earth kind of lacks the knowledge and resources to compete in this sort of glam competition. 

 

At this point, if you haven’t read the first book, I recommend you do so before continuing this post. In order for the second book to make sense, you have to know how the prior book ended. 

 

I also have to recommend reading all five books in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams. There are far too many sly references to those books if you know where to look. 

 

So anyway, having prevented the destruction of humanity, the Absolute Zeros now have to do the obligatory - and tedious - galactic tour: playing concerts, giving master classes, signing albums, pressing the flesh. You know the drill.

 

Somehow, though, Oort St. Ultraviolet manages to beg off, although he does reappear later in the book in an interesting role. 

 

That means the tour is left to Decibel Jones and the improbably resurrected Mira Wonderful Star. Oh, and she is confined to a peculiar spacecraft, because her existence is already a spacetime anomaly and she cannot simply exist outside of this support system.

 

The spacecraft is a nod to the Bistromath (a Douglas Adams creation): it resembles a kitchy 1950s diner, complete with overrated food and angsty wait staff. 

 

The first third of the book is filled with a lot of digressions and the plot itself takes a while to get going. Fair warning there. Philosophy and backstory first, plot second. Which, well, that sounds like Adams too. 

 

One other reference is that we are introduced to Goguenar Gorecannon’s Unkillable Facts, which is an analogue to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Both are fascinating, witty, and pretty much useless as what they claim to be. 

 

Once we get through all of this, we find out what the actual plot is going to be about. 

 

Decibel Jones is bored, so he asks the ship to take him “somewhere interesting.” That place turns out to be Eta Carinae - a real place in our galaxy that is indeed (mostly) as it is portrayed in this book. The chapter (yes a whole chapter!) describing it is so much fun, both scientifically accurate and zany as hell. 

 

In the book, however, there is, improbably, a planet with sentient life on it. Which nobody knew about except its inhabitants. 

 

And, well, you know what that means! 

 

Time for the song contest yet again, and a chance for the new life form to sing for its survival. 

 

But there is a problem. This life form doesn’t seem to actually care about anything. It’s singing is karaoke, apparently, and the existential ennui overwhelms everything else. Heck, it can’t even feel emotions without weather dictating them. 

 

So what is to be done? 

 

Well, that is the problem that Decibel Jones and Mira Wonderful Star have to solve. Is inter-species empathy enough? 

 

Overall, I thought this book was a bit less coherent than the previous one. A few too many digressions, a plot that took too long to start and then had to hurry at the end. And perhaps a bit more philosophizing than necessary. 

 

But that said, it was enjoyable, and the best parts were indeed very good. 

 

I find that I took a lot of notes, perhaps because there are so many pithy quotes and fun observations. 

 

Let’s start with one of Gorecannon’s Unkillable Facts:

 

Peace is civilization’s problematic follow-up album that never quite works…because all it takes to prevent us from having nice things, over and over, is one single person. One single person who doesn’t want to play the same game everyone else is doing pretty bloody well at, so they won’t give over the ball even though everyone is yelling at them to get over themselves, because eventually that person will figure out that setting the ball on fire works a treat.

 

Hmm, can we think of anyone like that? Or perhaps an entire political movement that is throwing a bloody tantrum because other people want them to share? 

 

Related is another observation:

 

Whole hemispheres insisted that white things were categorically good, and good for you, despite the obvious existence of arsenic, rum raisin ice cream, and European expansion. And despite how distressingly often those purely and nobly devoted white swans (and/or ever-expanding Europeans) tried to bite the entire faces off various unsuspecting bystanders who had not in any way bothered them. 

 

And this one:

 

People really will do the most frightful things to feel special, you’ve no idea. Marvelous things too, but the frightful ones are a lot easier to pull off. The most dangerous being in the universe is somebody who’s never felt special in all their lives. If you encounter one in a dark alley, run. 

 

Man, I could practically do a whole series on that stupid stuff my parents inflicted on me in their desperate quest to feel special. Sigh. 

 

Also fun is the description of how every species has its meltdown after discovering they aren’t alone and are definitely not the center of the universe. Much like humans do at an early stage of development. 

 

Historians, emergency medical staff, and serious debris collectors call it First Contact Syndrome. 

Everyone else calls it the Blowout.

This term of art began with the famously understatement-prone Smaragdi, ten-foot-tall non-Euclidean bone sculptures who never met a sacred rite they did not yearn to flick in the forehead. It was quickly embraced, due to the near-universal experience of witnessing tiny, shrieking infants, regardless of species, helplessly eliminate their waste with almost unbelievable force and volume into a nappy far too small to contain the sheer tonnage of poo. Eventually the deuce in question burst its bounds, jetting into places all laws of fluid dynamics should forbid: between toes, fins, tails, and antennae, spattering eyelashes, hair, scales, and any relevant forehead protuberances, contaminating parent, child, floor, ceiling, and somehow, the front doorstep. 

Of a neighbor.

Several doors down.

 

As a parent, if you know, you know. 

 

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this description of Mira, in the opening scene of the actual plot (after that epic first chapter of philosophy…), which might best be described as an epic hangover. 

 

Once upon a time (a phrase that’s going to be doing quite a bit more work in this sentence than it’s used to) in a very large, very elegant, shockingly normal human hotel room, there snoozed a hardheaded, glamdrunk, exquisitely eyebrowed, emotionally available (for a limited time only), tinsel-hearted, assigned fabulous at birth, technically impossible and existentially toxic biped about whose precise medical status, legal identity, and, most importantly, temporal coordinates, no one could quite agree, except to exasperatedly admit, at the conclusion of a number of private think-tank brainstorming sessions, that her name was Mira Wonderful Star, nee Myra Strauss, and she was supposed to be dead. 

…ish. 

 

Decibel Jones, of course, is equally hung over, plus he has more of an existential crisis going on than Mira, who is surprised to be alive again. A Keshet assign to keep an eye on him notices he needs help. 

 

“It looks like you’re trying to cope with the sudden catastrophic breakdown of your entire self-conception. Would you like help with that?” 

 

We also get introduced to another Unkillable Fact, one that I think is in a lot of ways, the core idea of the book, and also of life itself. 

 

Life is beautiful and life is stupid. 

 

Valente goes on to note another truth about the forces of stupid.

 

And the forces of stupid are bound and determined to unbalance that immortal equation forever, if they can possibly manage it. That is their highest goal. No more beauty. All stupid all the time, as far as the eye can see.

 

That’s MAGA and every other authoritarian, fundamentalist movement in history. Beauty is different, and must therefore be suppressed. The existence of beauty is offensive to those who embrace stupid. 

 

There is another fun discussion (digression…) on the problems of teleportation. Namely that it will eventually be used to teleport weapons. Just sent bombs via the ultimate delivery system. But this like is also good:

 

Not because it’s not possible to disassemble an organic being to his, her, or otherwise, constituent atoms, fax them across the inky void, and reassemble them on the other side.

It very much is possible.

And not because doing so technically kills the original person and reassembles a clone, or a golem, depending on how you like your metaphysical toast buttered. 

It absolutely does that. But it’s still better than flying economy. 

 

The first third has a lot of anti-war philosophizing, as I mentioned. There are some good parts. Another one from Gorecannon:

 

The most dangerous phrase in the universe is this time will be different. Those five words are a nasty little trap. This time is never different. It can’t be. It’s only possible to say that foolishness after you’ve royally fucked something straight up to the gills and are plainly standing right there in the middle of the blastmark fixing to do the same damned thing again. 

 

While Gorecannon also notes that the opposite is true - hope that you will get it right next time is a good thing. But still, too much bad comes from repeating the same thing, hoping for a better result. 

 

There are many variations of this next line, but Valente certainly makes it fun. 

 

English is not a very complicated language. But what English lacks in sophistication, it more than makes up for in pure belligerent criminality. 

That English robs other languages blind, saws off their best vocabularies, and wears them stapled, still dripping, to its own face, is both well-known and not much of a problem for man, mushroom, or Meleg. But English, inasmuch as it has rules, is so constitutionally incapable of obeying even itself that virtually every possible sentence contains some exception, some rude gesture of pug-nosed defiance toward the concept of order itself, some precious bit of spelling or syntax that thinks it’s so special it doesn’t have to behave like all the other children. You can hardly turn a phrase without being accosted by silent letters lying in wait for innocent spellers-by, half-dressed homonyms beckoning with come-hither stares, red-light district infinitives doing the splits, some dubious fellow in a trench coat lined with irregular verbs, delinquent subclauses loitering in the night, delusional plurals insisting they’re perfectly normal, broken sentence fragments desperate for the love of a good subject, unhinged apostrophes clinging to your clothes, and roving gangs of wildly disparate diphthongs all pronounced eh.

 

There are so many terrible (or great) puns in this book. And so many cultural references. For example, a travelogue written by a norovirus entitled “Eat, Pray, Irrecoverable Symptom Cascade.” Or TGIF: “Thankfully Gamma Irradiation has Faded.” 

 

Part of the drama is in the friction between Decibel and Mira. As we learn in the first book, just before her untimely death, she had proposed to Decibel, who turned her down. Now, she is back, a decade younger than the aging Decibel, but somehow still more emotionally mature. I love Mira’s quip at Decibel during one argument. 

 

“If one of us is a baby, I’m reasonably certain it’s the one who can’t even get up in the morning without a full team of therapists, a hostage negotiator, and an emotional support cocktail.” 

 

Speaking of people with issues, how about another Unkillable Fact?

 

The most important things only ever happen at the worst possible times. I don’t know why, it’s not my fault, and it’s not very nice of you to imply that it is. It’s just tangled up in the spaghetti code of the universe with centripetal force and atomic decay and desperately wanting your father’s approval even though he thinks seat belts are a government plot to oppress him specifically. The spaghetti code of the universe is just drowning in store-bought jar sauce, I’ll tell you what.

 

This caught my eye in part because back in the day, my father really did resist wearing a seat belt. Until he was in an accident that put his head into the windshield and damaged his neck muscles in a way that still bothers him. Notably, I am alive because I took my mother’s advice to heart, and walked away from a serious accident - we left paint six feet up on a light pole - without injury. I do find the part about desperately wanting one’s dad’s approval even when you realize he is pretty bat-shit about a lot of important things. Sigh. 

 

Once the new life form is discovered, it turns out that galactic rules task the discovering species to make first contact and “chaperone” the new species as it prepares for the contest. There is a hilarious list of rules for this role, starting with “Two Drink Minimum.”

 

No one should have to answer questions as egregiously stupid and egregiously numerous as you are about to without a healthy support system, namely gin. And/or its vast family of quirky cousins.

…

If you test clean, you will be terminated in favor of someone who more fully understands the gravity of this sacred duty. 

 

And, under #7, “Do Not Tell the Truth”:

 

Throughout the infinite variety of cultures, morals, and entertainment options, there is only universally unforgivable hurt. 

If you make a person feel small, and stupid, and embarrassingly unloveable, if you make them feel like they’re not worth seeing, if you do it on purpose, if you do it with intent, that person will, sooner or later, rip your and/or your whole society’s face off and eat it with ice cream. 

Or write children’s books and cry a lot. Could go either way. 

 

It is time for yet another Unkillable Fact:

 

The more alike people are, the more they’d rather staple their thumbs together than get along. You’d think it’d go the other way, I know, but have you met siblings?

 

The author also makes an amusing observation about human nature:

 

The galaxy was slowly waking up to the horrifying truth about humanity: no matter how hideous, dangerous, pustulant, inanimate, awkward, oozing, or wholly indifferent to and incompatible with the continuation of life, in specific or in general, there was a human who would not only love it, but cuddle it, build it an elaborate play structure, dress it up in a hand-knit sweater, call it their pwecious sweetbaby cutiebutt, spend far too much money on accessories for it, maintain a webpage in its honor long after its death and/or recycling, even let it sleep on the bed against all hygiene recommendations. 

And if their human life partner objected, it was never once the xenomorph who had to sleep on the couch. 

 

That’s comedy gold. As is this one, about what “la, la, la” in music stands for, as explained by Decibel to the new life form, who just doesn’t get it. 

 

“Sorry? Oh, la, la, la.” Dess laughed a little. “Well, in songs on Earth, almost all the songs, going back to before electricity and plumbing and the intro-verse-chorus-bridge-verse structure, the la, la, las were sneaky little bits you could sing when you meant something naughty and the Church or the lord in the manor or your dad wouldn’t know what you were on about.”

 

And also this exchange with Mira, which is fascinating. 

 

“We are sentient,” Brief Experience of Being Tavallinen said simply. “I am not a philosopher. But it is clear sentient beings frequently do things for no reason.”

“Animals do plenty of things for no reason. By definition, they don’t understand the reason for anything they do. Why they migrate or molt or chase this gazelle rather than that zebra. Why they choose one mate and not another.”

“Animals do those things for no reason they understand. Sentient beings do things for no reason at all.” 

 

This one is good too:

 

“You can hate yourself almost to death for hating most of all the fact that you can’t stop being the kind of insufferable beast who hates that they hate themselves for hating themselves. Or you can package it with some liner notes and a beat and sell a million copies.”

 

I should mention that there is a character in the book seems directly related to the kind of non-living characters that Adams writes. There is a “Protagony Mine” named Gadramadur the All-Knowing. Now this requires a bit of an explanation. Basically, if it explodes, it creates in everyone with a certain radius the belief that they are the protagonist.

 

First of all, my manufacturer’s suggested use case is to drop me into a crowded public space so that I set off hundreds of protagonists all at once. Usually, they all kill each other in a quarter of an hour flat because fate told them there could only be one or some faff. I interact with specific deep-gene sequences to gin up a culturally appropriate narrative for each target. Even a single serving of me can be totally devastating to local wildlife and economies!”

 

And, like in the case with someone who wants to matter, if you see one, run…

 

However, given the problem of arms treaties and stuff, this particular mine is now reduced to the duty of showing people around the vast office building that houses the committee that runs the song contest. 

 

And that leads me to the Board Meeting From Hell chapter. Which is hilarious and terrifying and all too real. I’m not even going to try to describe it. It must be experienced. 

 

Of course the book has to contain a plethora of imaginary but hilarious song titles. Two of my favorites are “Anarchy in the Modqueue” and “Smells Like Teen Disaffection with a System in which Extrinsic Factors Beyond Their Control Are the Sole Determinants of Their Worth.” 

 

Another good anti-war line seems particularly apropos to our endless meddling in the Middle East over the last 25 years. (And really, a lot longer, but particularly the last 25 years.) This one too is from Gorecannon.

 

Dead eyes, broken hearts, can lose. Terribly glad I killed a bunch of strangers and then not one single thing got better.

 

Preach.

 

Anyway, that’s the book, and it is a good read, even if not quite as great as the first one. 

 

***

 

Unusually, in both of these books, the “liner notes” at the end are well worth reading. In this case, I noted four things I wanted to highlight. 

 

First, Valente talks a good bit about Douglas Adams and the influence he had, not only on these books, but on her life as a whole.

 

There is a great story in there about how she and some friends, when they heard that Adams died, bought a bowl of geraniums and tossed it off the library roof. Even if they were a bit to sad to remember to say “oh no not again” as it fell. And that is just one of so many sly references in the book - you really have to pay attention. 

 

The next is a section in which she acknowledges her kid, who is a character. She notes that it feels weird to “give birth to your own protagonist.”

 

In another acknowledgement to a writer who passed before he could see the book, she talks about “loving advice wrapped in f-bombs wrapped in deep cynicism that is always a mask for a soul that longs to be an optimist, and is always looking for an excuse to try out hope.” I think I can relate to that. 

 

Finally, I’ll end with this thought:

 

Sentience, in the end, is only a little about being clever. It’s about how we handle each other. How we see one another. How we help. How we share. Howe we protect and how we love. How we catch someone when they stumble, and whether we can believe we will be caught when we fall. 

 

That’s a perfect way to end it. 

 

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

I will confess, I mostly know Alison Bechdel from the litmus test that bears her name. 

 

If you aren’t familiar with the Bechdel Test, it was created by Bechdel to analyze movies. In order to pass, a movie has to have (1) at least two named women in it, who (2) talk to each other (3) about something other than a man. 

 

This is, obviously, a bare minimum, and yet somehow hundreds of movies fail to pass. Even really good movies. 

 

One can apply this to books or other art forms too, of course. 

 

I probably read an article or two written by Bechdel over the years, but wasn’t really all that familiar with her writing or art. 

 

So, I decided to grab a copy of Fun Home for a quick read on my most recent camping trip. 

 

The book is a graphic work, not a novel, but non-fiction. It is all about the author’s childhood, with a particular focus on her father. 

 

It is safe to say that the book isn’t nearly as “fun” as the title - it is very much sarcastic. 

 

In addition to the fact that quite possibly everyone in her family is on the autism spectrum, there was a lot of dysfunction. 

 

Her father could be violent and abusive, but mostly he was just emotionally absent. He was obsessed with the renovation and decorating of the old decrepit mansion he bought in his hometown, and intolerant of kids being kids. 

 

But there was more than that, as Alison eventually found out as an adult. Her dad was a closeted homosexual, who had a series of relationships with teen boys, nearly ending up in prison for one of the liaisons. During family visits to New York City, he would go out cruising, leaving the family behind. 

 

Alison didn’t have any idea about any of this as a child. It was well hidden, for the most part, and wasn’t talked about. 

 

What triggered everything happened when Alison went off to college. There, she realized she was a lesbian, and eventually came out to her parents. They weren’t horrible, but they weren’t entirely supportive either. 

 

Weirdly, her father wrote her letters that seemed to assume she knew his secrets, but since she didn’t they were just puzzling. At the same time, her mother decided she was going to file for divorce - again, something that Alison didn’t know. 

 

A few months later, her father was dead, hit by a semitruck. In Alison’s opinion, it was a suicide, but having read the book, there is plenty of grey. It could have been an accident. It could have been a spontaneous suicide. Or it could have been carefully planned. 

 

After this, all the secrets came out. 

 

I am skipping over a lot here, though. There is quite a bit more to the story. Alison and her father weren’t exactly close, but they did have the shared bond of literature. So many of the literary references were to books I have read and enjoyed - it would be a long task to list them all. 

Her mother was an amateur actor, in addition to teaching, and the scenes where she practices being Lady Bracknell are rather amusing. 

 

Oh, and I should mention that her father taught high school English, but also managed the family mortuary business part time. So, yeah, it was a weird upbringing even without the secrets. 

 

It is no wonder that Bechdel ended up with OCD and a few other tics. 

 

The incidents of childhood are told in such a recognizable way - any of us who remember being kids can see themselves in this family at least a little. 

 

The book is full of delightful illustrations - Bechdel is really good at portraying human emotion in simple drawing. The stories are fun, heartbreaking, and deeply human. 

 

 

The book has also been the target of bans, in significant part because of the gay themes, and the semi-graphic depictions of lesbian sex and masturbation. I say semi because there are naked breasts and butts and pubic hair, but no visible genitals.  

 

While I wouldn’t say the book is a light read, exactly, it is fast paced, and can be read in a single sitting if you wish. 

 

I was kind of surprised that the book was made into a musical, but at this point, what hasn’t? 

 

Anyway, I didn’t write any lines down, because it isn’t really that kind of a book. It needs to be experienced, not quoted, if that makes sense. I’d definitely give this one a read. 

 

And yes, it does in fact pass the Bechdel Test.

Couples by John Updike

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

Couples was my first experience of John Updike, who is generally considered one of the literary giants of the second half of the 20th Century. He is one of those authors that you vaguely feel you should read, but in my case had never gotten around to doing so. 

 

Interestingly, he was one of only four authors to have won the Pulitzer for fiction twice. I have read the other three: William Faulkner, Booth Tarkington, and Colson Whitehead. Thornton Wilder actually won three Pulitzers, but two of those were for drama, not fiction. 

 

I’m not entirely sure where to start with this post. Couples is a pretty long book and has a lot of detail in it. It is also a great snapshot of middle-class New England culture of the early 1960s. 

 

It is mostly about sex - specifically adultery - but while it is explicit enough, it isn’t particularly titillating. In a lot of ways, I found the people in the book to be tedious and even unpleasant. Which is different from finding the book to be tedious. Updike is a really good writer, and although the book did feel like it dragged at times, his descriptions and characterizations tend to draw you in. 

 

So perhaps I will start with this: I would consider being in this book as a character to be a peculiar form of hell. I would not like to hang out with these people. I would definitely not want to have sex with any of these people. I’d prefer to live a very different kind of life. 

 

But don’t think that Updike approved of his characters either. 

 

If anything, he makes a profoundly conservative argument: that the loss of a religious basis for sexual morality leads to a lack of meaning and direction to life. The hole that used to be filled with a certain culture and the religion it was connected to instead becomes filled with empty television, vapid dinner parties, and bored adultery. 

 

I looked it up after reading the book, and apparently Updike did go through a crisis of faith, before eventually landing on a kind of undefined “Christianity” that certainly wasn’t Evangelical or fundamentalist, but was complicated and inconsistent. 

 

On the one hand, I admire that his favorite Christian thinkers were Kirkegaard and Karl Barth - you could do a lot worse than that. He generally supported progressive politics, including strong support for diversity as an American value. On the other, like his characters, he was a serial adulterer throughout his life and left his first wife to be with one of his mistresses. His writing is also somewhat sexist, like most white males of his - or perhaps any - era. So, maybe someone you might like more at a distance than in person. 

 

Couples is about exactly what the name implies: a bunch of couples. And the ways they screw around. 

 

There are a total of ten couples, and they can be a bit difficult to keep track of. Some are more at the center of the story than others. 

 

All live in the fictional Massachusetts town of Tarbox (perhaps patterned after Ipswich.) They range from lower middle class - a construction contractor and an airline pilot - to upper middle class - scientists, a dentist, bankers. This class distinction, particularly who has a degree and who doesn’t, is part of the drama in the book. 

 

The age range is mostly in the mid-30s, with a few older and one couple - the new one - a bit younger. All have somehow entered that stage of life where boredom enters in, with or without kids. 

 

Their homes have fancy books they haven’t read, records with music from 10 years ago that they can dance to, and they get together for dinner parties with lots of drinking, impromptu sports games, and the usual civic activities. It’s very bourgeois, and very of an era. 

 

Honestly, I didn’t feel like I would have enjoyed these people, even though they are, more or less, my social class. I hang out with people, have dinner, enjoy adult beverages, etc., so I guess I am probably as boring as they are. 

 

It really is the stultifying conversations, the games, the small talk, that isn’t my cup of tea, I guess. 

 

And also, I really don’t find myself drawn to all the flirting and fucking. It seems like too much drama, too much intensity, too much risk-in-order-to-forget-the-ennui for my taste. 

 

The sex ranges quite a bit - it’s not all “cheating” as we tend to think of it. 

 

For example, we find out that the Saltz’s and Constantines have fallen into a foursome. And also that the women prefer each other to the men. 

 

The Applebys and the “little” Smiths start off with an affair initiated by Marcia Smith, then a retaliatory affair between Janet Appleby and Harold. But by the end of the episode, it has turned more into a spouse swap with everyone knowing about it. 

 

Then, there are some intentional affairs with consent, and plenty of old-fashioned sneaking. 

 

Perhaps Leonard Cohen was thinking of this book with his song:

 

Everybody knows that you love me baby

Everybody knows that you really do

Everybody knows that you've been faithful

Oh, give or take a night or two

Everybody knows you've been discreet

But there were so many people you just had to meet

Without your clothes

Everybody knows

 

There isn’t the usual protagonist in this book, with a more omniscient point of view, and switching perspectives, but the central character is probably Piet Hanema, the builder. I think he may be a bit of a stand-in for Updike, and he, um…gets around. 

 

The book starts with him fucking the dentist’s wife, Georgene. Until an accidental panty flash by “Foxy” Whitman, the pregnant wife of Ken, a probably autistic scientist. So they begin an affair while Piet remodels their new house. Oh, but later in the book, after he has tried to break up with Foxy, he has a fling with Bea Guerin. It gets complicated. 

 

I find Piet to be annoying and tedious, mostly because I dislike horndogs and guys who are always trying to find themselves in women’s beds. 

 

But Freddy, the dentist, is also one of the least likeable people in any book ever. He is acid, sexist, racist, cutting, amoral, offensive just for the effect. He also understands the others best, though, which makes him necessary to the story in addition to the requirements of the plot. 

 

I probably don’t have to say that things go sidewise by the end of the book, for pretty much everyone. 

 

There is no happy ending, although the ending isn’t exactly either a tragedy or a catastrophe. It just IS. The group of couples breaks up, as well as a few marriages, but there are other factors outside of the sex. Loss of jobs, geographical moves, a new set of “it” couples that take over the social scene. Life moves on. 

 

I will also note that in addition to the religious question - which Updike raises but doesn’t answer - there is also the profound social change brought on by female-controlled contraceptives. The pill. Which certainly changed the calculation for sex outside of marriage, whether before or during. 

 

I find it fascinating that, statistically speaking, the most promiscuous generation on record is the Baby Boomer generation, followed closely by the generation in this book: the Silent Generation. Those generations had first intercourse the earliest, had the most sexual partners, and the most teen pregnancies. Later generations have seen all of those decline. Each generation waits longer, has fewer partners, delays childbearing, and generally sleeps around less. So much for “the kids are all hooking up in ways we never did.” The opposite is true. 

 

For this book, the first flush of the feeling that all sex is possible affects all the characters. Suddenly, the risk of pregnancy need not be taken. Religion no longer binds those who do not believe - and even those who do seem to feel less guilt with less social pressure. What should one do? Is everything permissible now? 

 

Related, of course, is what a reasonable expectation is for a spouse. Prior to the sexual revolution, men could, naturally, sleep around as much as they liked, just not with other men’s wives. For wives, no such option was acceptable. So the real change here was the question of whether a man could rightfully complain if his wife fucked like he did. 

 

It’s all mixed up, and there are lots of emotions. That said, Updike dwells much more on the physical, and on the sexual desires of his male characters. Although the women aren’t left out exactly - and their drives are the cause of many of the hookups. I would say that it is more a male-centric perspective rather than an erasure of the women and their humanity. I certainly have read far worse, even in 21st Century literature. 

 

I’m not even going to try to link my favorite lines with the plot in this case. Rather, I think they stand alone as interesting. 

 

Piet, ironically, is one of the more religious characters - he and Foxy - which is why their affair is perhaps more fraught. He lost his parents all too early to a car accident, and this has driven him back to religion. 

 

Piet wondered what barred him from the ranks of those blessed who believed nothing. Courage, he supposed. His nerve had cracked when his parents died. To break with a faith requires a moment of courage, and courage is a kind of margin within us, and after his parents’ swift death Piet had no margin. 

 

Roger’s description of Tarbox:

 

“There’s nothing romantic or eccentric about Tarbox. The Puritans tried to make it a port but they got silted in. Like everything in New England, it’s passe, only more so.” 

 

The conversation between Harold and Janet regarding their spouses’ affair is pretty funny. 

 

“Well it’s the others I’m trying to talk about, Marcia and Frank. You keep talking about you and me going to bed. They are going to bed. What are you going to do about it, Harold?”

“Bring me some evidence, and I’ll confront her with it.”

“What kind of evidence do you expect? Dirty pictures? A notarized diaphragm?” 

 

Harold also has one of the most beautiful lines in the book, and one that I really find true of myself. 

 

Harold believed that beauty was what happened between people, was in a sense the trace of what had happened, so he in truth found her, though minutely creased and puckered and sagging, more beautiful than the unused girl whose ruins she thought of herself as inhabiting. 

 

If you know, you know. 

 

Another line really gets to the heart of the question at the core of the book. How much of “morality” is an internal sense of right and wrong, and how much is just a fear of what other people think?

 

For much of what they took to be morality proved to be merely consciousness of the other couples watching them.

 

This is true in other contexts too. What Trump has done to destroy the “morality” of white Evangelicals is to remove this fear of what other people think. He has blessed the evil that already existed, but was kept in check by fear of reputation loss. 

 

Related is what Piet asks Foxy after one of their trysts. 

 

“Piet. What will the world do to us?”

“Is it God or the world you care about?”

“You think of them as different. I think of them as the same.”

 

So often, in older books, I run across something I thought of as “modern” but turns out to have been done before. For example, remember the running of celebrity names together? “Bennifer.” “Brangelina.” 

 

Well, in this book, the quadrangle that is the Applebys and the Smiths become, in the parlance of the other couples, the “Applesmiths.” And the ménage à quatre between the Saltzes and Constantines becomes “the Saltines.” Yeah, terrible. But terrible long before I was born. 

 

Another question that factors in to the different affairs is the question of younger marriage. Ken and Foxy marry for the wrong reasons, as Foxy well knows. She was on the rebound from a Jewish man her anti-semitic parents disapproved of, and Ken checked all the boxes. This is from a conversation Foxy has with her mother, after confessing her affair. (Mom is divorced, and also complicated…) 

 

“You ask me about Ken. I think what’s wrong with him is that I didn’t choose him. You chose him. Daddy chose him. Radcliffe and Harvard chose him. All the world agreed he was right for me, and that’s why he’s not. Nobody knew me. Nobody cared. I was just something to be bundled up and got out of the way so you and Daddy could have your wonderful divorce.” 

 

It’s more complicated than that, and Foxy knows what she said about her parents isn’t the whole truth. But it also isn’t an untruth. 

 

For the final line, I have to give a spoiler. If you don’t want the spoiler, don’t read the next part. 

 

After giving birth, Foxy accidentally gets pregnant by Piet. They decide to procure an (illegal - this is 1963) abortion, and know Freddy has connections. But Freddy, if he is going to risk being an accessory to a crime, wants payment. What he wants is a chance to sleep with Piet’s wife Angela as a revenge fuck for Piet having fucked Georgene. 

 

This is where it gets a bit weird. Piet never explains why Angela should fuck Freddy, and she doesn’t demand the whole story. (Although she suspects.) But she also has something to add to the conversation. (Honestly, of all the women in the book. I think I’d take Angela.) 

 

The conversation goes a weird direction. Piet hints that he is in some form of trouble. Angela initially thinks he wants a divorce, but he tells her that what he needs from her would only take a night. 

 

“Sleep with Freddy Thorne,” she said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Isn’t it right?” 

Finally he repeated, “Why do you say that?”

“Because he’s always told me he would get into bed with me some day. For years he’s been wanting to get a hold over you. Now does he have it?”

Piet answered, “Yes.” 

“And is that what he wants?”

His silent nodding made the bed slightly shudder.

“Don’t be shocked,” Angela went on, in a voice soft as the dark, “he’s been working on it for years, and would tell me, and I imagined I should laugh. What I always thought strange, was that he never just asked me, on his own merits, but assumed it had to be worked by bullying you. I don’t love him, of course, but he can be appealing sometimes, and I’ve been unhappy enough with you so that it might have happened by itself, if he’d just been direct.” 

 

It’s a really weird scene, but actually compelling and realistic. It is one of the glimpses we have into Angela, who feels she isn’t attractive to men - particularly to Piet at this point, but the others as well. Seeing her emotions, her dreams and desires, is fascinating, and she turns out to be someone very different from the boring housewife and mother the others think she is. As I said, she’s the woman in this book I would prefer. 

 

Having read this book, I don’t know if I will be reading more Updike. It was good, but also of its time in a way. I suppose I should probably read at least one of the Rabbit books. The writing made the book a good read, but the subject matter didn’t particularly speak to me. Your mileage may vary.