ELIMINATE DOWN - APRIL 2024

The Mezzanine/The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea/Running Dog/The Bingo Palace

Kicking this one out the door at the last minute. At the beginning of the month, I truly thought I had five or six in me. I had four which I think is respectable. Not impressive but respectable. Will May be better?

The Mezzanine - Nicholson Baker (1988)

I've always wanted to write in full detail about minutiae. It's one of my more favored preoccupations, really diving into the smallest, most granular details on functions and details the average person takes for granted. There's something in particular about American modernity that makes the impulse so compelling. We live in an attention economy, most marketing is put there to muscle its way into our senses. Even if we dislike the Progressive ads that play anywhere there’s empty space, the point is that we have witnessed them even if just for a second. We are sold an idea that we are to see as much as we can, experience as much as we can and consume conspicuously. That's the way the rich and fabulous Americans do it. In pursuing that ideal, we wage earners are asked to live big and drive wide. As we speed down the highway of daily living, a calculation is made that we have to ignore the small things and focus on our mission. Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine rejects that, instead using a dull moment in the mid-day commute as a means to ponder the rituals and signifiers that compose our daily routines.

As our narrator stands on the escalator, his mind wanders to the new shoelaces he purchased from CVS, and from here his observations cascade into deeper wells, leaking into crevices that freeze and crack like melted snow under asphalt. You get a sense of Baker as sensibly neurotic. His neuroses stem from his constant observations, his meticulous filing away of information, the more information he's given, the more stimulated he is. There's a developing crisis of modernity tucked away in Baker's observations though he does not put too fine a point on it. Despite his worries, he projects a sense of confidence, that this story, told in flashback, is about a man a world away from his present self. It seems to me that this distancing technique is too convenient for a book this formally ambitious.

His recounting of bathrooms struck a specific chord with me, as I think it would with any AMAB reader.

"The problem for me, a familiar problem, was that in this relative silence Don Vanci would hear the exact moment I began to urinate. More important, the fact that I had not yet begun to urinate was known to him as well. I had been standing at the urinal when he walked into the bathroom - I should be fully in progress by now. What was my problem?"

There's an intimacy with which he recounts the experience of using a urinal side-by-side with more senior members of his office and records their grunts, polite exchanges and how long they spend at their urinal. Given how often I'll seek out the most secluded bathroom just so I don't have to dance the dance, I appreciated Baker's hand-wringing concern. The night I finished the book, I even found myself in a bathroom peeing next to another man. The shyness struck. I tried Baker's method and pictured myself peeing on the other man's head - it did not work. My usual method of staring at my crumpled reflection in the metal of the urinal handle proved faithful. I'll save the aggressive peeing for more tortured men.

The most striking thing about The Mezzanine is its love of footnotes. Footnotes dot every chapter, some of them extending nearly the length of the chapter. As the book is concerned primarily with the little details, emphasis is placed on the parallel importance of both text and footnote. Both are amusing in similar fashions and trying to parse why Baker sanctioned some information for main text and others for footnotes remains a fun game. This writing strategy, which could strike a more hostile reader as too cute a gimmick, causes your eye to wander around the page. This is intentional and Baker is sure to tell you this. He writes at significant length about his love of footnotes, his distaste for style manuals advocating that writers not use them, and his frustration with the grade school way of Z-pattern reading. If the book’s form isn’t clear enough, the author leaves no doubt - reject tradition and embrace modernity.

More than other books I've read, The Mezzanine feels like it may lose its easy casualness soon. Its entire premise and Baker's casual tone relies on familiarity with many of the objects, places and spaces he writes about; Midtown Records, cigarette vending machines, powder dishwasher detergent. Some of these things are already gone, others are on their way out. For future readers, readers younger than me, the small appeal that Baker wove¹ into the premise is missing. The Mezzanine is not intended to require thorough research and while I don't turn my nose at doing a little digging while reading, it was obviously not the author's intent to pile on obscurity after obscurity like Pynchon recounting the late night run for Z Channel. I think specifically of one object that I could not place, a Brasilia espresso machine, then chic and state of the art and now, an afterthought.

What's funny is that the entire reason I bought this book was because of its retro appeal. The artwork for the Vintage Contemporaries label received a glowing retrospective from Dan Kois last year and I so recognized and fell in love with the abstract, geometric designs of Lorraine Louie that I had to have some for myself. The first title Kois discussed was The Mezzanine and its cover fascinated me, the premise only magnified that interest. When I went looking, I found it immediately. And then I was Baader-Meinhof'd, I saw Nicholson Baker everywhere. Podcasts mentioned, scathingly, his 1993 book The Fermata about a pervert who can stop time. Every bookstore in Philadelphia seemingly has a copy of Vox. Authors I follow bandy his name as a sort of "in the know" name, a cult hero for modernist male writers. Bookforum just rolled out an article about Baker. My own brother sent me a list of books he was intending to read and lo and behold, The Mezzanine sat atop the list.

I think that The Mezzanine and Baker will enjoy a bump in popularity both because of its simple premise and because in its then-modernism, it is now retro. Baker may have assumed something like this might happen to his own writing which is why The Mezzanine regales its reader with anecdotes about obsolescence that Baker observed himself, like the milkman. It's a book about the inevitable passage of time, a band that keeps running and running. Like the escalator that its protagonist rides on, we have to get off eventually but it keeps going on & on & on.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea - Yukio Mishima (1963)

Editor: John Nathan (1966)

Sometimes knowing more about an author before going into a story can be a detriment. I agonized over my prior knowledge about Yukio Mishima before reading Sailor. I worried that the mythmaking around him would inform my interpretation of the book too much for me to derive unique or valuable insights from it. Mishima lived one of the most dynamic lives of any majorly popularly 20th century author. Emerging out of World War II with detailed, poetic explorations of death, masculinity, sexuality, and the materialistic culture developing in post-war Japan, his writing was a crossover hit seeing acclaim worldwide. At the peak of his powers, he was considered for the 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature. Before his death at age 45, he had over thirty published works, writing novels, poems, and plays, nine of which saw publication in the United States. He was a wunderkind, an undeniable talent.

As his cultural purchase grew, so did his bellicose nationalist rhetoric. As Japanese politics moved further left as the 1960s progressed, Mishima shifted ever more rightward. After a brief flirtation with public office, he instead joined up with the JSDF and started recruiting right-wing college students into a splinter militia unit. In 1970, he and several members of this militia attempted a coup. The stated goal of this coup was to restore Japan's military and to return the JSDF to the Emperor. The result of the coup was Mishima's suicide, committing seppuku. It is more likely that Mishima understood the coup as an elaborate suicide than a serious attempt at a military coup. He may have thought his death could radicalize others into action but there are more existing sources on the matter that put forth the idea that Mishima just wanted to die dramatically.

And that sort of despondent, fatalistic thinking is all over The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea. Returning again to a translated book, this one by a twenty-four year old John Nathan, I had some worries about the accuracy of the translation though given this book's popularity - it was adapted into a 1976 film with Kris Kristofferson, I have to assume that it's quite fine. This is a book that is fully despairing, one that is threatened by humanist pleasure and softer notions of existence. For Mishima, its hard emotions and severity that matter and he's frightened by that notion about as much as the alternative. It's an incredible insight into a man whose interpersonal conflicts code so much of his writing. In near all his works, you get a sense that Mishima uses writing as a form of therapy whether he’s writing about the intractable pull of death, the sensuality of the male body or the binary purity of the Edo period - most of what Mishima writes can be transferred over into his personal life as well.

The conflict at the center of The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea is that Ryuji, a sailor who has sought a life of temperance and occasional sublimity aboard merchant marine vessels, wants to settle down. As he nears thirty, doubts form about his course in life and during a humid summer, he meets the widowed Fusako and her twelve year old son Noboru. Ryuji sees a promise of tranquility in Fusako's love and gradually begins to acquiesce to the idea of domestic bliss over the course of his next voyage. Fusako's son Noboru initially idolizes Ryuji, seeing the sailor like how young children see firefighters, but begins to conflate that idolization with a confused fetishization gained by watching his mother and the sailor have sex through a peephole.

“Assembled there were the moon and a feverish wind, the incited, naked flesh of a man and a woman, sweat, perfume, the scars of a life at sea, the dim memory of ports around the world, a cramped breathless peephole, a young boy’s iron heart - but these cards from a gypsy deck were scattered, prophesying nothing. The universal order at last achieved, thanks to the sudden, screaming horn, had revealed an ineluctable circle of life - the cards had paired: Noboru and mother - mother and man - man and sea - sea and Noboru…”

Noboru's voyeurism is introduced in the first chapter and gives readers the lowdown on how distressed this current crowd of Japanese youth are. Noboru's friends are no better, five smart boys led by a rich child known only by the moniker The Chief. The neighborhood parents dislike The Chief, believing that he's leading the boys down a bad path but the children defy their parents and hang out at various abandoned piers, construction sites and other sites formerly occupied either by Americans or bombed-away industry. The shadows of World War II and American occupation loom large over the book. The peep hole that Noboru uses to watch his mother at night was installed by the previous tenets of the house, American soldiers. Signs dot the Yokohama piers and hills denoting current and former sites of American ownership, parcels of land where the Japanese are forbidden entry regardless of its being used or not. Noboru's Yokohama is cold and hostile to its residents. Even during the summer, the parks are dirty and unclean, places for the homeless to congregate. In the ruins of the wartime, these children practice cruelty, trying to steel themselves into religious states of "absolute dispassion." Only by achieving this state can they observe the world objectively, only through this can they reject the humanist culture imposed on them by western cultures. Through these children, we begin to see Mishima's nationalist tendencies, specifically his anti-humanist philosophies, creak through.

Yet, this book catches Mishima at an interesting moment in his philosophical journey where he seems profusely uncomfortable with his epiphanies. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace crystalizes a period in his thinking where he was conflicted by the irresistible, analytic, simple perfection of reactionary thinking while also seeing the romance and consuming joy of love and purpose. The Fusako and Ryuji chapters are written with such ardor and provide an incredible contrast to Noboru's bleak, violent chapters that Mishima makes a cogent argument for rejecting Noboru's destructive, Oedipal compulsions. The Yokohama that Ryuji finds upon returning to shore feels safe, a welcoming reprieve from the dull realities of sea life. He has seen more of the world than Noboru, he knows the dangers that lurk outside of port. Noboru’s possessive nationalistic view is depicted as adolescent, romantic and impossible. The Ryuji sections feel like Mishima attempting to purge anxieties about his own descent into radicalization with his neighbors, most of whom did not share his politics. Was there a brighter side in passivity, in domesticity? Mishima wrestles with this idea as much as he wrestles with his idolization of decisive, severe action. Each of its primary characters feel like different lobes of Mishima's brain and they are each given space to mark out their own fates, leading to the book’s inevitable conclusion.

Running Dog - Don DeLillo (1978)

Although he’s a titan of modern literature, DeLillo's early works are often passed over. The big dogs; White Noise, Libra, and Underworld still curry the most favor among readers, academics and critics. DeLillo's 70s career, although his most prolific, is also his most uneven. DeLillo was not a major writer in the 1970s, not like he would become after White Noise, and his early works feel much more journeyman in form and style. Running Dog, allegedly written in four months feels like DeLillo rolling out the blueprint for his conspiratorial juggernaut Libra. Of his 70s work, I've read his first book, Americana, and now Running Dog. I like digging into his earlier work. As one of the defining American authors of the late 20th century, it is refreshing to see him work up to that reputation, to that level of quality.

Running Dog is decidedly minor - the premise, fun. Journalists, spies, art dealers, and politicians all scrambling to get their hands on a film reel - allegedly a pornographic film shot in the Führerbunker in the final days of the Third Reich. Such a salacious pitch was what drew me to this book over my other option at the time; The Body Artist. It exists past the paranoid Nixon milieu, instead it's more pragmatic in its paranoia. The spy games in this are worlds removed from even Graham Greene, more arch and comical than ever. That men are being killed over a supposed Hitler hardcore reel is a constant source of dry amusement for the book, if not for the reader. DeLillo is sharp enough that the proceedings don’t devolve into subterfuge slapstick, he let Prohías handle that, but as the book marched forth, it did feel like he was trying to hit a publisher’s requested page count. Much of what works in the book, especially its depictions of the aimless, violent professionals that staff our most “beloved” federal agencies is better worked out in his later books.

Running Dog’s reveal of what is on the film is effective and is worth the book’s circuitous chase. The film reel does have Hitler on it but there is no sex. Instead, it is a film of Hitler entertaining children in the bunker while dressed like The Tramp. The reveal is written in the comic cadence of the rest of the book but DeLillo weaponizes the drop from expectations to reality. He writes this out as uncomfortable gag, an experience so eerie and unpleasant that its viewers can feel oxygen leaving the room. If it were Hitler getting his holes filled, that’d have been more preferable, salable even! - but the dictator playing human? There’s just no market for that. It’s a great close to a novel that positions it away from being just another Gravity’s Rainbow hanger-on and helps it function as a stone in the greater DeLillo writing project.

The Bingo Palace - Louise Erdrich (1994)

I picked this up about a year ago in an effort to make a break into Native American literature, eyeing up classics of the category like N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn or James Welch's Winter in the Blood. Outside of the now disgraced Sherman Alexie, the most popular Native fiction author is Louise Erdrich. I was presented many options with her bibliography. I could start at the beginning with her 1984 novel Love Medicine, I could start with her most acclaimed novel 2011's The Round House or I could choose my own start point. I took door number three and chose to pick my own start; The Bingo Palace. And what a fool I was to do so! The Bingo Palace is book number four in the Love Medicine series - a continuing narrative of several Ojibwe families living on a reservation in North Dakota. While the books' narratives are self-contained, jumping in at book number four was a fool's errand and severely hampered my enjoyment of the book.

And let me tell you, I was coming in hot off of those past three books and The Bingo Palace stopped me dead in my tracks. After the first fifty pages I just did not want to pick up the damn thing. Part of it was the content of the book, I had felt totally disconnected from it - like I had been dropped into the middle of a conflict that I knew nothing about. The book opens with several pages going into the tangled ancestry of its lead character Lipsha Morrissey and with each successive chapter, more characters are introduced with less lead time. Had I done, I don't know, the bare minimum of research maybe I could have avoided this but I'll chalk it down as a learning experience. If there is something of value to be mined out of this situation, it is a renewed appreciation of the function of serialized narratives. I fully believe that if I had entered into The Bingo Palace as intended, the momentum would have carried me through the sections that I found banal and swept away the knots of confusion on the floor of my brain.

The pitch of the book is a classic love triangle; Lipsha loves Shawnee who is with Lyman, his uncle and half-brother. This wrinkle of relation kicks up some dust between Lipsha and Lyman. Lyman can never fully act as paternal substitute to the fatherless Lipsha nor can he act as brother. He becomes a hybrid figure of the two and a distant one at that. The circumstances of their birth insist that they must exist at arm’s length, united only by business and the woman between them. I found their relationship the most compelling since it was the one most directly tied to the gambling narrative that initially drew me to the book over Erdrich’s others. Although the two circle each other for a while, their relationship is kept at a low, respectable simmer throughout.

More explosive is the romance between Lipsha and Shawnee. It’s young, fraught with tension with Lipsha’s fiery, adolescent passion cooled by Shawnee’s realism. In the moments where the book is really moving along, when its emotions are really running hot are those when they’re together or freshly apart. Erdrich writes both characters with true sympathy, allowing Lipsha to lick his own emotional wounds and presenting Shawnee’s cold practicality as something in service of a better, richer life than the one she has currently. All of its characters are battling through some sort of despair and the result is a book that feels one-note until it concludes. There’s a good chance that the rest of the Love Medicine series gives these characters a richer texture and that The Bingo Palace is meant as a more somber installment but these are the hazards of doing no research and pulling books from the shelf. These are also the hazards of deciding to put all your books in a randomizer and reading them in that arbitrary order.

1. Originally wrote “baked” here and both loved and hated it too much to keep it.