Hello and welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review! It’s been a fine week here. I am slowly but surely getting my reading speed back up. I finished a fat novel I had been pecking at for a while, as you’ll see in the review section. I am reading one other work for a project and then will go back to my accustomed practice of having three books (one serious nonfiction, one literature, one “entertainment”) at all times. This might or might not result in more reviews per newsletter- we’ll see. This week we have a review of a popular fantasy novel and the return of Ed’s Corner, where he discusses the holidays and nostalgia. Please enjoy, and share with friends!
CONTENTS
REVIEWS
Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: I’m Glad You Lived Through Christmas & When Is Nostalgia?
REVIEWS
Patrick Rothfuss, “The Name of the Wind” (2007) - A lot of people like this book. There was huge hype and lasting affection around it when it came out in the late 2000s, that magical time when we thought we had seen how bad it would get. It came highly praised by the likes of Ursula Le Guin. I have a lot of friends who like it. The friends I have who like it (when I posted about it on my social media, other friends with other opinions emerged, but that’s neither here nor there) use words like “poetic.” And Patrick Rothfuss himself seems like a decent sort, a harmless, fun-loving nerd who doesn’t appear to be using that performance of self as a guise to exploit others, as we see done (:cough: Joss Whedon :cough:) elsewhere in the nerd-o-sphere. His blog is all raising money for charities and pictures of his nice family.
So you can see why I might want to go easy on this book. Respected writers like it. More importantly, friends like it, and use language for it I feel weird challenging- am I really going to just diss my friends’ sense of aesthetic? Most pertinent of all, most of the time, when I really gun for a book, the author sucks in some way, like Mike Ma being a fascist or Sheila Heti contributing to tweeness and pretense in literature, to cite two recent examples. I can’t really say that about Rothfuss, who, I reiterate, seems like a decent, blameless guy.
But I will not go easy. I will reflect my experience. This book baffled me with its utter mediocrity. It bored and frustrated me. A lot of the time, when millennial critics say something bored them, they mean it offended them. This is not the case here- I would have taken some offense if I could’ve gotten it, just to spice things up. Similarly, when they say a piece of writing frustrated them, they imply there was something else they wanted the piece to be, or in non-fiction, wanted the author to acknowledge some hobby horse of theirs. I guess I wanted this to be good fantasy, but I’ll damned if I can say specifically how other than “be more exciting and interesting, and maybe shorter.”
“The Name of the Wind” is, mostly, the tale of one Kvothe. Kvothe lives in what we could see as a generic post-George-RR-Martin fantasy land- roughly medieval European technology level and social arrangements (though with post-Columbian-Exchange crops, like chocolate- I will admit that took me out of things a little early on), magic and monsters largely in the background… for now. Because this was supposed to be a big deal trilogy, there is an extended framing device, a good seventy-five pages or so dealing with demon spiders emerging in this little rural town, before we get to the meat of the story. The owner of the inn in this little town isn’t all he appears. A Chronicler shows up who knows who he is- Kvothe, big time badass wizard warrior. Chronicler wants his story and Kvothe, after some back and forth, agrees to give it, and that provides the action for much of the rest of the book. The demon spiders don’t come back- presumably they do in the second book or in the third book that Rothfuss probably at this point won’t write.
The biggest problem, if I had to pick one, with this book is that Kvothe is, as pointed out to me by a fan of the book, an utter Marty-Stu, a wish-fulfillment of the most banal fantasies of badassery that the first decade of the twenty-first century could conjure up. Kvothe relates his upbringing amongst traveling performers. From the beginning, he’s whip smart and savvy. He also talks like a twenty-first century adult, but we’ll get into that issue later. He meets an old wizard who teaches him some magical basics and of course, he picks it up faster than anyone. His lows are heroic lows- his family slaughtered by mysterious wights from ancient lore, first he survives in the woods all on his own, then makes his way by his wits on the streets of the big fantasy city of Tarbean. He then makes his way to the University to learn magic (and about the wights) and impresses the masters so much they pay HIM for his first term! He makes enemies — a mean professor, Snap- I mean, Hemme, and a snooty aristocratic boy Malf- I mean, Ambrose — and shows them up magnificently with his magic chops and street smarts. He’s a musical genius, too, and girls totally want his fifteen year old self. Above all, he’s collected and self-contained.
“Well, it’s HEROIC fantasy,” I can hear some of you say. Sure. And there’s a number of ways to make such a character interesting. One would be to make him a less reliable narrator, like maybe he has to dial back some of his stories (there is an interlocutor character along with Kvothe and Chronicler). Even if you want to keep him that heroic, you can make the challenges he faces interesting, or ones to which he isn’t suited. You can also set him in an interesting world, worthy of the hero’s talents.
Rothfuss fails to deliver on any of those options. Kvothe is understood to be reliable throughout. The lack of interesting challenges and the failure of worldbuilding reenforce each other. Magic and science aren’t separate in this world, so Kvothe learns a lot of both, seemingly more of the latter, but he does so so effortlessly it’s basically uninteresting. The details of the magic system, laid out in pseudo-scientific trappings, were left underexplored but were also so dull I didn’t really want to know any more.
Rothfuss seems to have been going for “gritty,” which led to one of his more interesting decisions- making young Kvothe constantly worry about money. He’s poor and the University costs, at least after first term. This is something of a departure for fantasy, but it isn’t handled well. It’s sort of a low-grade irritant throughout the book, worrying about Kvothe’s finances and doing exchange rates on the various units of currency he uses.
Most of the action takes place in generic medieval city-space and while several cultures are mentioned and attributes ascribed to them, none of them are particularly distinct. There’s lore, intimations of old, deep mysteries (like the murderous wights), but none of it is anything fantasy readers haven’t seen many times before, interspersed with similarly anodyne action. There’s numerous songs and poems but I’ll be damned if I remember any of them, and I finished the book the day I’m writing this.
Then there’s the writing. He didn’t want to do exalted high-fantasy diction. I get that. He doesn’t make even as many concessions to it as does George RR Martin- fine, I guess, you want to stake your own territory. But god help me if Kvothe and basically everyone else in the book (except some yokels done in painful yokel-speak) don’t just talk like anodyne twenty-first century people, with the occasional lapse into flowery language of the kind a marketing intern would make up for a renaissance faire. If your magic is (mostly) science and your cultures aren’t any different from ours except for having lords and ladies (which we might as well have, given where inequality is going), and everyone is going to talk more or less like the people at your friendly local gaming store — a little more verbal and descriptive than at the other stores in the mall, but basically the same dialect — why the fuck did you bother writing fantasy? What was the point?
What this most forcefully reminded me of was less another given piece of literature and more a moment in my life. That’s the moment in college — around the time this book was probably being written, in fact — that it dawned me that most nerds are boring as shit. They might be good or bad, smart or dumb, but nerd culture as a whole did not represent what I wanted out of culture. Cruelly, one of the better things about nerd culture, the participatory element found in role-playing games, fan fiction, etc., bore this out the most. Given the vast scope of possibilities laid out before them, most nerds will ineptly reproduce what came before, the ones who won’t just turn the creative possibilities before them into their personal toilet, that is. Rothfuss presents himself as an every-nerd, and, god love him, after reading “The Name of the Wind” I can’t disagree. I feel about as good about this as I would about roasting some of the decent nerds I knew, but wasn’t friends with, in college- but the hell with it, he made his pile and is doing fine. I’ll give him the extra half star for being a decent dude and deserving more honor, for at least trying fantasy, than shitty litfic gets, not that he or anyone really cares. **
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: I’m Glad You Lived Through Christmas & When Is Nostalgia?
As I write this, it is the holiday season, a time of saccharine sentiment when we one and all set about distracting ourselves with petty amusements so as to make it seem like the year we just lived through was worth it all the trouble in the end. The winter holidays generally, and Christmas especially, have a nostalgic veneer to them. We’re to remember happier times throughout the year to distract us from the long cold winter ahead. Ordinarily I vacillate between Scroogedom and Grinchitude during the winter holidays. It’s not because I don’t enjoy the season, in fact I quite enjoy when the killing frosts of winter finally put an end to the pesky ragweed pollen of late autumn and I can finally breathe again, but generally I feel that the obvious excuse for peaceful isolation the cold and inclement weather the season brings is somewhat wasted by the cultural mandate for merry-making.
The nostalgia of it all is the worst for me. As someone with a painfully good memory it’s more than a little frustrating to have to listen to reminisces of activities that people had unreasonably high expectations of going in, then complained bitterly about those activities not living up to those expectations immediately afterward, and then finally coming back around to being their fondest memory of the year through the tinsel strewn haze of holiday nostalgia. Never seeming to enjoy anything in the moment, but always in anticipation and then in retrospect. But that’s just how I feel personally. I’m never especially vocal with my Christmas-time curmudgeoning, because it’s pretty clear that there are some people who need the distraction of nostalgia, folks for whom the isolation of winter make up the worst days of their years, people who have a hard time being alone with themselves, who need rose tinted glasses to see through the gloom until the sun comes out again in the spring.
Honestly, whenever I did advance my humbuggery it was always strangely performative. While I might loudly express my exasperation with any given winter solstice activity, and my criticisms might be well founded as to the crass commercialization of the holiday, or how all ingenuine the holiday cheer n display might be, it was more of a role I was playing. I did this so that those who were really into the spirit of the season could “convince” me otherwise, and then I’d play along and pretend to be convinced so as to banish their own doubts about the reason for the season. In many ways, the career-focused city-living stick-in-the-mud who gets held over in a quaint little rural town during the holidays, wherein they learn the true meaning of the holidays, is a martyr figure. They’re an effigy of the doubts we all harbor in ourselves about the authenticity of the holiday magic, and by softening their hearts with hometown charm our own hearts are in turn ritually softened as well. Not that I see the holiday play acting I take on as particularly noble. It’s just a set of habits I happened to have fell into as a mopey teenager, and then never really shook off because it’s hard enough to think of something to talk about during holiday parties, so it helps to play to the ready made script that everyone can enjoy.
This year especially, editing out the disappointments from your family Christmas card is understandable. It’s been a rough year for one and all, and while I think nostalgia is one of the more pernicious vices someone can develop, this year I’m going to give it a pass. The stresses of the Covid pandemic, and the attendant economic and social anxieties associated with that are difficult prospects to bear up under. I’ve said earlier in these articles that you should do whatever you have to just keep going, even if it’s not necessarily the healthiest of coping mechanisms. In a sense the adversity presented by the pandemic finally justifies the usually forced sense of nostalgia of the season. Any joy you were able to wring out of this blighted year, or even the mere fact you were able to live through it, is worth being treasured, and its memory is necessary to face the hard months that still lie ahead. In a more placid year I’d say forget all the sentiment and just enjoy the season on its own merits, but this year go ahead and treat yourself, the season only comes but once a year after all.
It is interesting, however, in putting aside my antipathy for nostalgia, however temporarily, I’ve been able to glean some insight into its form and function. To me it is still something to be wary of, as one of its functions is sort of a way to rewrite the past. The Christopher Nolan Batman films and the Michael Bay Transformers properties have the effect of altering the perception of the past by introducing plots which allude to the “War on Terror” into properties associated with childhood media that never had those themes originally, in a way that purposefully creates false associations between the present and the past. You remember this nostalgic property from the past. The nostalgic property is a reproduction of the property as it was in the past. It deals with ideas of the security state, so therefore the concerns of the security state have existed throughout your life, because the nostalgic property has been with you throughout your life. You now associate that property with the War on Terror, so the War on Terror has existed throughout your life, even though that’s provably not actually the case.
But the above example is a mere parlour trick that can be played with nostalgia. While I don’t doubt that cultural forces have used these backdating associations throughout the history of mass media as a means of manufacturing narratives and consent within a population, such tricks are not the main purpose of nostalgia. No, the real “use” for nostalgia is to alleviate anxiety, and not as is often portrayed by escaping from a stressful present by mentally fleeing into the past. It’s at this point a trite observation to point out that nostalgia is a longing for a past that never really existed. But the atemporality of nostalgia is not an imperfect or idealized remembrance of the past, in fact the past actually has very little to do with the function of nostalgia. Nostalgia principally concerns the present and future more than it concerns the past. The anxiety that compels people to seek out nostalgia is anxiety for the future rather than the present, that the nostalgic object existence in the past is at best a coincidence, or rather a necessary component for the anxious parties desires about the future.
Nostalgia, at least within American culture, arises in response to great challenges to our collective cultural future. One of the easiest cultural moments of nostalgia that we can point back to is the 1980’s. After the great cultural upheavals of the 60’s and 70’s, the nation wondered if it was still the same great cultural force that existed during the “consensus society” of the post-war 40’s and 50’s, and called back to an American mythology of prosperity and cultural values that never really existed. We saw another wave of nostalgia take root in the 2000’s after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, where we as a culture wondered if we still had the same cultural dominance after the wound to national pride we had just suffered in the attacks. In both cases it didn’t really matter what past we were reaching back to, in fact in the 2000’s we were throwing back to the culture of an 80’s that never was, which in reality was a throwback to a 50’s that never was. Any cultural artifact that could be brought forth into the current period is good enough, the point wasn’t that the past was necessarily comforting, it’s that it had endured.
That is the appeal of nostalgia, by bringing back elements of culture from the past we “prove” that these things can endure the passage of time. If this or that cultural artifact can be relevant to modern times after however many years it was brought forward in time, then we too can endure and be relevant in the future. Unfortunately that’s not true, elements of culture fall by the historical wayside all the time, and as noted earlier the nostalgic versions of the past brought into the present era are always somewhat altered or incomplete. The best way to address the anxiety for the future that nostalgia attempts to placate is to just accept our fate as potentially being swept away by the tides of history. I can’t speak for you, but I’d rather be forgotten than have all of my edges sanded off as an updated reboot of myself. In the end nostalgia is a series of mental gymnastics to trick ourselves into denying our relationship with history. Eventually everyone who is experiencing this present moment will be dead and forgotten, so you might as well enjoy it now while it’s in front of you rather than conjuring an idea of history where things exist beyond their time.
I suspect part of the reason we still haven't seen Book 3 of the Kingkiller Chronicles is because Rothfuss sets up in the first book that Kvothe's story will take 3 days to tell, and yet by the end of Book 2 our hero has neither met nor killed any kings. I'd be hard pressed to squeeze all that into one novel myself, no matter how dense.