Hello and welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review! It’s a pretty good week. I’ve got two reviews, a discography, and documentation of a trip I took!
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CONTENTS
Reviews
Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
Houellebecq, Serotonin
Discographies
Talking Heads!
Lagniappe
The Observed Life, with Peter: A Trip to Turner Falls
REVIEWS
Stella Gibbons, “Cold Comfort Farm” (1932) - It seems like parody should not be able to outlive its reference point in memory, but clearly that’s not the case. Think of all the stuff Looney Tunes lampooned, stuff kids wouldn’t know about. It’s not just that Looney Tunes was funny even if you didn’t know the reference points (though it was)- it’s that you can tell they’re lampooning something, something from the adult world, maybe something you’ve had some intimation exists, like opera or classic movie stars, or maybe not; either way, that sense makes it funnier.
Stella Gibbons wrote a bunch of books in her time but only one that anyone remembers (this irked her throughout her life, apparently): “Cold Comfort Farm,” a parody of a form that on the surface, doesn’t seem to be a thing anymore. These were the “loam and lovechild” novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where sad salt of the earth types suffer in the English countryside. When people cite examples of this subgenre, some big names like Tom Hardy and D.H. Lawrence come up, but they always had other stuff going on in their books- mostly, Gibbons seemed to be aiming at writers, many of them women, who were highly popular at the time but utterly obscure now.
“Cold Comfort Farm” probably has something to do with that obscurity, because it was a huge hit and still a cult favorite, well after the “loam and lovechild” genre has vanished (I assume it has? Let me know if it hasn’t!). The narrator, Flora Poste, is an interesting, and I thought quite contemporary, in a prophetic way, type: the young woman who is over it all but still in the thick of it, too smart for just about anything, including being too smart for stuff. Her parents die — she’s not too bummed, this takes place in some sort of parody future of late imperial Britain, all her parents and lovers are off managing the empire — and she has to go live with relatives. The most palatable of bad options is Cold Comfort Farm, off in Sussex.
It’s grim! Run down, full of almost Dunwich/Innsmouth-style subhumans, a clan of them kept in place by Great Aunt Ada Doom (who saw something nasty in the woodshed as a child). There’s intimations of deep trauma and doom, boundedness to the lousy East Anglian soil, purple speeches (in the style of the novels Gibbons is lampooning) set off by asterisks, a lot of dialect, etc. As a project, Flora decides to straighten things out around there.
Gibbons makes the book funny despite my not knowing the source material. What she doesn’t manage — what I think she couldn’t even try within the bounds of her project — is to make a compelling plot. Flora just does things. She faces little opposition to her polite optimistic pushiness beyond some caviling. She dresses up the wild girl wandering the moors in the latest London fashion and sets her up with the squire’s son, who just needs a little encouragement to do right by her. She gets rid of evangelical Uncle Amos by telling him about the soul-saving potential of taking his hellfire preaching show on the road in a Ford van, thereby letting cousin Rueben take over the farm, the one thing he wants. She foists vain fuckboy Seth on Hollywood, thereby bringing some money to the farm and keeping him from impregnating all the help. Ada Doom wants to stop everyone from leaving but she can’t. The end.
It has to be this way, because the whole thesis of the novel is that the problems of the “loam and lovechild” tragic novels aren’t real problems. They say you have to love a genre to do a good parody of it. I think that’s an American thing. Brits are meaner. Gibbons, I think, didn’t love these books, and she was out for blood, and she got it. If the local yokels could offer opposition — if their problems were even difficult to manage — that would, backhandedly, pay homage to the subgenre Gibbons was determined to skewer. So! It’s a fun novel. The writing is good. It’s funny. It’s a little boring once you get what’s going on. I bet it would have made a good cartoon! ****
Michel Houellebecq, “Serotonin” (2019) (translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside) - I have a little test I like to subject contemporary literature to; I call it The Hook Test. I take a novel about the muddle of contemporary identity — who are we? what does contemporary society/technology etc mean for our senses of self? Is sincerity and/or happiness possible or even desirable, and under what conditions? on and on — and I read it, and then I ask myself: “did this novel say anything about its subject that noted nineties band Blues Traveler didn’t say better, more succinctly and with more effective imagery in their 1994 hit ‘Hook’? Is there any way in which this novel (usually at least a hundred pages and several hours worth of reading time) is actually superior to the three-minute pop song by a band I can tolerate but do not love? Did the expensively-educated litterateur have anything to offer next to the New School dropout and libertarian who makes irresponsible decisions about crossbows, besides, of course, the class cachet of being seen with a literary novel?”
As you can probably tell, I find most contemporary literary writers fail that test. Jonathan Franzen, Sheila Heti, Lauren Oyler, Karl-Ove Knausgaard, Tao Lin, Jeffrey Eugenides, Otessa Moshfegh, Bret Easton Ellis, Teju Cole- not one of them beats that fat dude from the nineties, as far as I’m concerned, not in substance and frankly not in style, either, though jam bands really aren’t my thing. I am more impressed with what Blues Traveler did than with that list, and you have to figure it includes some future Nobel laureates. I don’t think Blues Traveler said anything really profound in “Hook.” They just illuminated some aspects of contemporary life (and what does it say that we’re still dealing with the same bullshit, in more or less the same frames just with more bandwidth, as a pop song from 1994?) in a reasonably succinct, witty way, and showed some chops in doing so- not anyone could have played that song the same way. People paid a lot of money and given a lot of respect — to say nothing of space, hundreds of pages versus a few minutes — to say something about the same subjects that kind of lame band took on fail to do that.
Interestingly, I can think of one contemporary writer who has both passed and failed The Hook Test: Michel Houellebecq. He passed it with “The Elementary Particles” and “The Possibility of an Island.” From where I sit, he barely cleared the bar with “The Map and the Territory.” But to the extent “Submission” was about contemporary identity and not just a thought experiment/sexual fantasy, it fails the test. And his latest, “Serotonin,” undoubtedly enters into the same space as “Hook” and it fails next to it big time, as ignominiously as Knausgaard or Cole (if not as crashingly bad as Franzen or Oyler).
This sucks, for a few reasons. It sucks because “Serotonin” was not an enjoyable read, obviously. It sucks because Houellebecq can do better, or could, anyway, almost twenty years ago now. It also sucks because Houellebecq was, arguably, the last of the great right-wing writers. There used to be a lot of them- you really can’t appreciate any aspect of modern culture, including both popular and “literary” writing, without at least respecting what artists from the right brought to the table (or, for that matter, artists who cheered on the depredations of any communist tyrant you care to name). I did a whole YouTube video about it! And named Houellebecq as one of three remaining good right-wing fiction writers, and the only one who came from “literary” fiction (though his best work uses a lot of scifi elements). I guess there isn’t really much reason to lament the breed going extinct, except that it’s a bad weather sign for where both literature and the right are going. But I still find it a bummer in and of itself.
That said, it’s worth noting here that the critics are all wrong to say that “Serotonin” is some big deal political novel, a cri de coeur from the euroskeptic right. The book mostly deals with the inner life of Florent-Claude, a sad agriculture bureaucrat. And by inner life, I mostly mean how he’s lonely and horny and nothing makes him happy. Florent-Claude’s love and sex life are considerably more exciting than one would think, from that description- I wonder if that’s down to national differences, no one would write an American sad sack lamenting his life with a sexy younger (Asian, because why not) girlfriend, or the many passionate and highly erotic love affairs he had before then, if they really wanted to get quotidian desperation across. All that’s a problem for rock stars and, I guess, Frenchmen.
Florent-Claude ghosts the sexy Asian lady, tries some antidepressants, and wanders around France trying to find people from his past. He finds an old friend from agricultural college who’s descended from the Norman aristocracy and who’s trying to make a go of it farming his ancestral land. This is where the politics supposedly enters into things. Global competition and EU rules — which Florent-Claude helped implement in his capacity as a bureaucrat — are strangling the traditional agricultural class of France. These same forces created the anodyne world in which Florent-Claude cannot help but feel inauthentic and unhappy. You can’t lead a simple life in a nice rural space with its own peculiar cheeses and stuff anymore!
That’s a big part of it, for the French, and the differences between the French vision of a disappearing good life and the American provided most of the interest that Houellebecq failed to give this book. The big thing with the French is local peculiarity. This mostly comes out in consumables- unique cheeses and wines and stuff for each region or even each town. You need a highly sensitive sensibility to care about that stuff, to be able to tell the difference between “traditionally” made cheeses and ones that cut corners. When Americans talk about “local tradition” they usually mean “will the federal government make us stop treating people like animals.” The good life as understood by Americans accepts — demands — a much greater degree of homogeneity, less sensibility. Arguably, America won the Cold War with the promise of refrigerators and dishwashers, the same in millions of identical, but gleaming clean, kitchens on tv (well, death squads too, can’t forget the death squads). Some people — parts of our own bourgeoisie, too — try to figure out how to have all that nice stuff plus, like, bespoke local dairy products. It’s a balancing act and takes a lot of resources, and it’s no guarantee small producers will win out.
Anyway, Florent-Claude hangs out in rural Normandy, accidentally happens upon a German pedophile, and witnesses his Norman friend and some of their friends do a last stand for protectionism of their dairy products, which culminates in some gun violence. F-C then encounters an ex with a kid, has a big sad, keeps taking antidepressants, throws a rhetorical bone to Jesus who he doesn’t believe in (maybe Houellebecq will pull a Huysmans — we know he’s a fan — and go super-Catholic?), considers suicide, then that’s it, book over. People were like “omfg he predicted the gilles jaunes!” “Serotonin” was written before those started but published after. I don’t know, I was under the impression the French did a lot of protests like that? Some critic somewhere said something like “Steve Bannon could have written this book.” Maybe- you’d figure in speech, at least, Bannon would have gotten to the political juice earlier, not maundered about women and impotence so much, but he’s also dumb and a middle aged man, so who knows?
It increasingly seems like Houellebecq could pass the Hook Test, back when he could, by an old litfic technique- lean on genre. “The Elementary Particles” and “The Possibility of an Island” both had strong scifi elements. There was all the same alienation from contemporary society, the “decline of the west” stuff, the provocations and casual sexism, but there was also more stuff to pay attention to. I didn’t want to believe this would happen, but at this point, Houellebecq really does read like a grayer-toned and smarter version of the authenticity-ponderers that are his anglophone contemporaries. Why shouldn’t he? It’s not like he gives a shit- presumably he just writes for money and/or some little attention-high, that’s the vision of the world he promulgates in his books, anyway. This is less of a waste of time than a lot of other contemporary litfic. Houellebecq is intermittently capable of honesty and close observation, more than the Hetis and Eugenideses of the world. But the fact I’d even put him
in that space is a bad sign. That’s what makes this book hard to read at times, not the same provocations Houellebecq’s been doing since people thought John Edwards might be President someday. **’
DISCOGRAPHIES
Talking Heads! I actually finished listening to the Talking Heads discography weeks ago but kept putting off writing it up, I don’t know why. For whatever reason, I never listened to them much before- I knew “Psycho Killer,” “And She Was,” and “Burning Down the House” from the radio but that was about it. Someone told me “And She Was” was about the love interest from the latter Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, the one who figured out how to fly by “falling and missing,” but that turned out to be a lie. Darn!
The discography was pretty good! I don’t think I have much original to say about it, my understanding of Talking Heads chronology seems pretty standard. The first couple of albums are good, energetic, a little same-same, the same grooves over and over again, but with some standout songs. Then came “Fear of Music” (I’m a sucker for “Life During Wartime,” for reasons), “Remain in Light,” and “Speaking in Tongues,” all great, remarkable albums. My impoverished musical vocabulary doesn’t do well describing them. I have a vague idea of a creative tension between David Byrne’s geeky flamboyance and Tina Weymouth’s no-bullshit grooves and riffs making something better than either could accomplish alone. I also get the idea this collapsed as Byrne, a hard guy to get along with, alienated his bandmates and also decided he’d be a samba singer or something, and so you get the pleasant enough but pretty mediocre back catalog of the band until it broke up just before the dawn of the nineties. It probably seemed like grunge wiped away their like, but we all know who’s had the last laugh.
I also watched “Stop Making Sense,” the concert film Jonathan Demme made about them at the height of their glory. It’s well worth watching. There’s no behind-the-scenes peek, no interviews, few crowd shots. Just musicians getting after it, and get after it they did. You could really feel the passion and the awareness that they were doing something incredible in that room.
What it all made me think of was this: how un-stupid can a rock band be and still be a rock band? Talking Heads is a smart band. It’s not a pedantic band or an informative band- those can both be ways of essentially not being a band but a concept or a propaganda outlet, which isn’t smart. Talking Heads was so smart they could balance intellectuality and fun and make it seem effortless. You could also argue they weren’t really a rock band, that they were doing something else (something better, some readers might say). There’s a decent argument there, but I’d reframe the question- music from the evolutionary tree that starts with the blues should have some allusion to failure somewhere, and to loss of control. The failure is there in Talking Heads- failure to fit in, failure to control their anxiety, the sort of failure that would become the familiar failure-theme of so much rock(ish) music going forward (though “not fitting in” until you hit late seventies New York and finding the guys you start Talking Heads with might be the definition of failing upward). And it’s not like there isn’t passion- you can see it in “Stop Making Sense.” I do have a sense of something missing… maybe a vulnerability- Byrne, especially, knew just how much he could burn the candle of vulnerability before he looked stupid in a way he couldn’t control… but I still liked a lot of what was here, a lot.
Next up, on Discographies: A Genuinely Stupid (but also kind of smart?) rock band!
LAGNIAPPE
The Observed Life, with Peter: A Trip to Turner Falls
Turner Falls is a charming little burg along the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts, one I passed by often when taking Route 2 between my alma mater and home. It’s home to the Montague Book Mill, a used bookstore with a pretty sound marketing game- bumper stickers boasting of “books you don’t need in a place you can’t find!” I thought it would be nice to go out west a little, see the foliage, meet up with some friends, check the place out.
The foliage was nice! It was a beautiful spot. There was a river running by the store. The book selection was decent but not mind-blowing, but it was worth going for the beauty of the space. There was also a pretty good cafe, I would have been happy to hang out there but it was very crowded, being a holiday and all. My friends and o looked around the woods nearby and some attempted physical challenges. We met a nice dog and then went to a nearby park to play Root on a picnic table. Root is a game I’ve been playing a lot lately, and might write about. Some of the boys felt the need to exercise towards the end, then I went home to my nice cat. The end!
I honestly liked Submission, because of how open Houellebecq was about his ambiguous love-hate relationship with both France and Islam. You could see him playing idly with various right-wing ideas, finding all of them slightly distasteful, and being kind of unsure where he wanted things to go and what the point of all of it was. Even though it was undeveloped compared to his 1990s novels, the protagonist's lack of commitment of every social movement available to him seemed so specifically post-68 French compared to e.g. Hawthorne's suspicion of Puritan society, and Submission compared well with Douglas Murray's "The Strange Death of Europe," which said so much less and pretended to say so much more. Sounds like his meandering has become much duller in his latest book, though.