Marcy Dermansky's HOT AIR

Nobody I can think of can write such absolutely despicable characters and make me want to spend hours in their heads like Marcy Dermansky. And her hour may yet be approaching.

I have to confess, though, that she's kind of a low-dose author for me. I enjoyed the hell out of her debut novel, Bad Marie, many years ago, but it left me feeling just icky enough not to want especially to indulge in that very specific kind of pleasure again for a long time. Which is to say that I haven't read any of Dermansky's work since Bad Marie. And her newest, Hot Air, hasn't changed my view of her work one bit -- even though I really liked it. 

Dermansky's subject is, at bottom, class envy, and it's a subject about which she is wickedly funny. The titular character of her first novel is a delightfully trashy person with whom to spend a few hours, watching her unhinged schemes go awry as she goes on a one-woman/one-child crime spree. Well, more of a misdeeds spree, although she happens to commit a few petty and one decidedly un-petty in the process. She has been badly used by her upscale friend who made the mistake of hiring her as a nanny, and feels perfectly justified, she tells us over hundreds of pages, in committing whatever malefaction she likes against that friend. We are happy to be persuaded, over and over again, even if she never really convinces us.

For Hot Air Dermansky has expanded the perspective she gives us to that of several characters, though pretty tightly focused on her signature distressed bourgeois heroine, Joannie. Joannie is somewhat recently divorced and rents an unsatisfactory-to-her apartment* in a neighborhood dominated by what sounds like a lot of McMansions. She has a daughter, Lucie, a tween who is well on her way toward becoming even less tolerable than her mommy is and for whom Joannie is about to set a whole lot of bad examples in one disastrous weekend-and-change.

Joannie lives next door to Johnny, a decent looking divorced guy with a son, Tyson, who is Lucie's approximate age. Johnny owns a very nice house with a very nice swimming pool, more or less next door to Joannie's apartment complex. Johnny is so nicely set up that he even gets along well enough with his ex-wife to have her living in the very nice house across the street from him, so he even has an easy time sharing custody of Tyson. Are you humming the Brady Bunch theme right now? I was. And so are Joannie and Johnny, as we quickly learn when the novel opens with Joannie on a pseudo-date with Johnny. To save on childcare expenses, Joannie has manipulated Johnny into having the date over at his house, with Tyson and Lucie banished to the basement with their various screen-equipped devices. So far, so good.

Except, as Joannie informs us pretty much right away, she is not feeling like their boy-girl Lego is ever going to click (I love that phrase, which I stole from William Gibson, because of course I did), and while it's mostly because their names will sound dumb together, Joannie and Johnny, it's also because she's just not feeling it with him, especially after he rather inexpertly kisses her. And kisses her. Oh noes! She forgot to make arrangements with someone to send a fake emergency text to get her out of this!

Fortunately, the plot happens. In the form of a hot air balloon that a rich, brash techbro type rented to celebrate his wedding anniversary after only having had a few lessons. As in not enough lessons to responsibly be allowed to pilot a balloon unsupervised, but when has that ever stopped a rich and famous and handsome billionaire?

As you already would know from a glance at the jacket copy, the billionaire's balloon comes crashing into Johnny's swimming pool and hijinks and sexcapades and a whole bunch of other bad decisions ensue. We're barely acquainted well enough to dislike Joannie and Johnny and here's Marcy Dermansky, serving us up an even more annoyingly privileged couple to dislike even more. One can never accuse Dermansky of being stingy with us; Jonathan (yes, there is a Johnny and a Jonathan in this awkward little bottle-book) and Julia have fallen out of love with each other, believe the world has done them dirty despite being billionaires, feel entitled to absolutely everything including Jonathan's personal assistant, Vivian (whom Julia wants to adopt as their own Vietnamese orphan despite Vivian being an adult with perfectly good parents of her own, and Jonathan just wants to bone, basically) and, once they get a load of Joannie and Lucie, to Lucie. They stop short of offering to buy Lucie, but only just.

BUT, lest we start feeling much in the way of sympathy or empathy for Joannie, who has barely gotten over her sick envy of Johnny's swimming pool and ridiculously over-equipped kitchen before being given people to really envy (and it turns out Jonathan just happens to have been Joannie's first kiss, at a summer camp when they were kids, who then ghosted her the day after Joannie's first kiss), she kind of seems like she'd maybe be down for selling Lucie, or at least renting her out for a little while? In exchange for a chance to share, just a little bit, in Johnny and Julia's fabulous lifestyle? But no, that would probably be too icky.

We have only this slight and kind of token assurance that Joannie has a firm line on what is and is not too icky, by the way. Because there are so many other icky things that she doesn't really even need to be pushed into doing. So many. So icky. But at least she is somewhat redeemed, as Bad Marie was in her novel, by her deep and true love for her little girl. Even though the little girl is a whiny brat.**

And all we can do is point and laugh and wait for consequences. Which, since this is fiction and not the actual world, do happen somewhat, at some points. See why I'm saying Dermansky's big moment may only just now be arriving? Despite what looks like has been a pretty decent literary career?

Just, you know, life sure do like to imitate art, don't it?

Anyway, I'll read some more of her back catalog someday, probably. If nothing else, it might soon be my only safe outlet.

*That, I dunno, sounds pretty nice to me, but I guess I must grudgingly admit that after living a nice, somewhat prosperous married life in a nice house, it's the kind of come-down that would sting some. Still, if we want to talk about class envy, this woman is living in a nice and safe area with good access to schools and shopping and is able to support herself and her daughter in pretty decent style off a literary career. Um. Where's my micro-violin?

**Really, the only character with even a pretense of likeability is Johnny's son, Tyson, but he doesn't get a lot of ink and would probably show obnoxious true colors if he got much more. Dermansky isn't about winning you over with loveable characters, you guys.

Robert Silverberg's THE BOOK OF SKULLS #OneBookAtATime

Elevator pitch time: Robert Silverberg's "Sci Fi Masterwork" The Book of Skulls is In the Company of Men meets The Holy Mountain* but in, you know, prose. Only I'm pretty sure I'm expected to forgive all of the scorchingly misogynist** elements of the former because it's a product of its time. Only I'm kind of failing at the forgiving thing. But it has enough remarkable qualities to make me really want to find a way to forgive it, but forgiving it feels like a bit more gender treachery than I'm comfortable with nursing in my heart and so I'm having a real David Foster Wallace-style internal conundrum about this damnable book.

It was about 1/3 of my way into The Book of Skulls that I realized I was eyeball deep in the first genuine hate read of my life. But also that I could not stop admiring what Silverberg was pulling off here, even as I seethed with hatred and ill wishes for all four of his protagonists.

The Book of Skulls tells the story of four Harvard boys who have decided to make a spring break road trip to Arizona, following up on some esoteric research they've done that has led them to the cautious but fervent conclusion that the secret to eternal life/youth/vigor is to be found at a secret desert monastery there. Said Harvard boys being, in their four different ways, exactly the kind of nasty, bullying know-it-all jerks that I chose to attend a fraternity-free liberal arts hippie college in the forest to avoid. As in it's not just their misogyny that makes them unpleasant. Super-rich, carelessly arrogant Timothy; driven, ruthless, tightly-wound Oliver; bitter, cynical, sneering Ned (who is also a bit of an awful caricature of a gay/bisexual man); and scrawny, scholiastic, intelectually domineering Eli (a bit of a caricature of the Manhattan Jew) redeem themselves only in odd moments of conversation, mostly in the book's second act in Arizona, when they start really wrestling with the fascinating questions of if this quest of theirs could possibly see fulfillment, what it would really mean to live forever (in a strong and healthy young body), belief, faith, and each other. Lots of tasty talk about metaphysics, for those of you who enjoy that sort of thing, which I do.

And we get to know them really, really well, because the duties of first person narrator are shared equally among them, chapter by chapter, the narrating stick tossed around the circle like a skittle. Which, yes, is one of this novel's many stunning technical achievements, because The Book of Skulls could definitely pass Robert Anson Heinlein's Godbody test.***

This all comes to the fore with stunning rapidity, long before Arizona, though, because the immortality they seek has some mighty interesting strings attached: for anyone to succeed, four must apply together, and of those four, only two may receive the boon. Of the other two, one must willingly sacrifice himself (as in suicide) and one must be murdered by the other applicants. That's a hell of a scenario to play out and spend a whole novel entertaining, and Silverberg gets enough mileage out of it to make an infinite number of trips from Massachusetts to Arizona.

Before they're even out of Manhattan, the boys are all making their cases for what the outcome is going to be -- if the claim/offer doesn't turn out to be bunk. Interestingly, they all seem to agree, and to make a very persuasive case for it, each with his own arguments as to how and why the predicted outcome would be so. And, but here's the thing, this happens many, many times through the novel. Every few passes 'round of the narrative skittle, the reader is persuaded of a different outcome, while simultaneously unable to dismiss the previous versions thereof. This is utterly, jaw-droppingly masterful.

And there's more masterful where that came from.  We're not just dealing with the present Timothy, Oliver, Ned and Eli here. We're dealing with their past selves, and their projections of themselves, imaginally, into an infinite future (of these, only Eli really bothers to plan out what he might do with all that time, and his plans are wonderfully grandiose; of the four he's the least loathesome by kind of a lot. Of the four). And that's not all, either, because, like I saw happening in Dostoevsky's Poor Folk,in addition to the different versions of the characters in the voyage through time, we're also dealing with each character's projections, his internal emulators, of the other three. I'm too lazy to do the math right now, as usual, but it's somewhere upwards of seven versions of at least of the four characters being juggled around in Silverberg's and our heads at pretty much every given moment in the narrative, and it never gets confusing or annoying or anything but stunningly brilliant.

But still, as I believe I've mentioned already, I hated these characters and I wished them ill. So even as I was riveted watching their fascinatingly ugly (and yet weirdly also tender, because there are real emotional bonds there) group dynamics, what really kept me reading was my ill-wishing hope that they were all heading for doom, or at least disappointment.****

Yes, I read this book fervently hoping for an Alejandro Jodorowsky "zoom back camera" moment for this quartet, so I could point and laugh and say it served them right -- but as story got into its second act, at the mysterious monastary, and I realized how much I was thinking of The Holy Mountain as I read, and I further recalled that this novel and this film are almost exact contemporaries of one another (The Book of Skulls was first published in 1972; The Holy Mountain was first released in 1973), and I managed to dial back the hate for a while. This was because, awful as these Silverberg boys are, they are not a patch on the assembly of asshats that Jodorowsky paraded on pretty much the same quest.

So perhaps the point both Silverberg and Jodorwosky had in mind at the time, a time of turmoil, ugliness and let-down -- Vietnam, Watergate, violent protests and overreactions to protest, the sexual revolution (which, I just read yesterday, may well have had as much to do with penicillin and its power to cure syphilis as it did with the birth control pill -- maybe even more so) in its wild and heady pre-AIDS days, etc. -- was the idea that we have to go through  an ugly, frightening, appalling stage (in other words, an adolescence) in order to develop into something finer? Most people think caterpillars are ugly, and even the ones that grow into the prettiest butterflies often cause a LOT of economic/aesthetic/ecological damage by eating like hogs while they're caterpillars (though the ecological and economic damage they cause is abetted by our agricultural practices, of course, just like arrogance and misogyny and other horrible character traits can also be laid at a society's door, if no one is bothering to take corrective/preventative action before the kids are turned loose on the world "young, dumb and full of cum").

Regardless of whether this attempt-to-forgive has any merit, I'm still stonked with admiration at this book. This is very different from loving it. I just recognize it as a wildly successful work of art. And hey, it did something that many say art should: it made me uncomfortable.

And hey, I did have fun hoping that the monastic order waiting for the boys in Arizona would be those magnificent bastard hoaxters, Casaubon, Diotallevi and Jacopo Belbo from Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum.

Now I think I'm going to read that, since it's thematically related to this one I've just finished and all. Plus, it's very likely my favorite book of all time, it's been many years since I've indulged, it always makes me smile, and after mind-vomiting my way through this, I need to smile for a bit.

*And they really, really, did not need to meet ever.

**And homophobic, and anti-Semetic, and anti-Catholic elements, too, but those fade into the background in the light of the casual awfulness with which women are treated, described or portrayed here. Even in a moment we are perhaps supposed to read as laudably sympathetic/empathetic, when one of the protagonists is observing to himself that the waitress serving them at a greasy spoon has had a long day, he has to throw in a remark like "there was an acrid, cunty smell coming off her." Really? Really? REALLY? And then there's the moment when one character confesses a rape to another, and that other is only actually interested in the incest angle of said rape. This is not a plot spoiler, by the way, more of a trigger warning. The detail of the confession has absolutely nothing to do with the plot except it needed to be something shocking. Well, uh, congratulations, Captain Asshat Silverberg. But so seriously, I would rather read a book with no women in it at all than one in which they are always and only treated as objects, and objects of contempt to boot. I would gladly read a fan-edit of The Book of Skulls in which all the appearances of my gender had been excised. Gladly.

***Godbody also being a novel told in multiple first person accounts, to a degree of perfection that is truly astonishing, Heinlein said of Ted Sturgeon's last and finest novel that a person could, if he or she had a friend choose passages at random from the text to read aloud (preferably without the guesser seeing where the passage is physically in the book), unerringly identify who the narrator is just from a sentence or two. I have done this several times; have even tried it with both people who have and haven't read the book making the selections, and it didn't matter which of those my reader of the moment was; I could always tell.

****So this is a very different enjoyment from that I gained from watching the antics and machinations of the Bastards In Space of Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space novels.