Mason & Dixon - Thomas Pynchon

I’ve owned a copy of Mason & Dixon for a very long time but never had a strong urge to pick it up, in large part because I had intended to tackle Gravity’s Rainbow as my first major Pynchon work (I read The Crying of Lot 49 a while ago, but it is, in its slight hundred or so pages, scarcely Pynchonian in breadth, if comparable in density). But, for whatever reason, I was looking for something meaty and Mason & Dixon seemed the more attractive option.

The story is ostensibly a fictionalized account of Charles Mason and Jeremiah' Dixon’s journey to chart their eponymous line to resolve a border dispute between Pennsylvania in Maryland. But simply calling it “a fictionalized account” is misleading, as it suggests at most some narrative tidying and invention of secondary characters to make a more cohesive and rounded story. A better description would be to say it takes the story of Mason and Dixon and some of the founding myths of pre-Revolutionary America and tosses them in a blender with about 20 blotters of LSD. The “fictionalized” elements aren’t simply things that didn’t happen (chance meetings with Washington and Benjamin Franklin, for instance), but things that are outright supernatural. There’s an invisible robot duck that’s in love with a Frenchman, a conversation between two clocks, a field of gigantic vegetables (think James and the Giant Peach big), and a talking dog, among other things.

These elements are jumbled together by a frame narrator named Reverend Cherrycoke, who interjects regularly with his own supposition and is interrupted by his niece and nephew. The story veers regularly off course, and there are few signposts to guide you through dialogue or indicate when one scene blends into another, which they do regularly and with hedge maze circuity. The whole book feels like it was deliberately written to be as hard to follow as possible without descending into outright gibberish. Pynchon toes that line deftly, though to call it a pleasurable read would be a stretch. This is a book that wants to be a workout, and while certain passages and images are rewarding, I’d be lying if I said I knew exactly what had happened in any given chapter.

Pynchon is a noted stylist, and his writing in this book deftly apes the sound and texture of 18th century prose, complete with esoteric Capitalization and antique verbosity. His humor is pleasantly modern, though its occasional crudity is actually in line with the period it is trying to evoke (recall that the Western Canon’s proto-novel, Don Quixote, includes a scene where Sancho Ponza takes a sneaky dump off the side of his horse, and another where he and Quixote vomit into each others’ faces). I wouldn’t say I enjoyed reading this book, at least not all the time, but I’m glad I read it.

And one day, I really will tackle Gravity’s Rainbow.

Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer

I’d read a couple of Jon Krakauer’s books already, most notably the excellent Into the Wild, but I didn’t feel much interest in reading Into Thin Air, I guess because mountain climbing doesn’t strike me as terribly interesting. My wife raved about the book, though, and when she brought it back from a neighbourhood Little Free Library I decided to give it a shot.

I’m glad I did. The story is well-written and compelling, as it chronicles a disastrous expedition to summit Mount Everest in the spring of 1996. Krakauer frames the story expertly, beginning with the momentary triumph and a brief portent of things to come, before backing up on the circumstances that led to his joining the expedition, the preparation, and the multi-stage ascent. He weaves in background to give the story greater context, giving the history of the mountain’s discovery by western surveyors (locals knew it long before, of course), the early aborted attempts at the summit, and Edmund Hillary’s 1953 triumph.

With the groundwork laid, the story builds towards the seemingly inevitable tragedy, as Krakauer chronicles with clinical efficiency the dozens of tiny failings (including his own), missteps, and unfortunate circumstances that cuminated in one of the worst single-day disasters in the mountain’s bloody history. A post-script discusses the controversy that emerged in the book’s aftermath, and dismantles some of the claims made against its accuracy. I haven’t read the counterpoint, but Krakauer’s rebuttals are convincing, and it certainly seems that his breadth of after the fact interviews was much greater than those of his detractor.

Krakauer’s prose is elevated but visceral, painting a clear picture of the prolonged misery of trying to climb the world’s highest mountain. I obviously never thought it would be easy, but wha tsurprised me was the time committment involved. I didn’t know that simply reaching the summit required nearly a month of acclimatization efforts simply to ensure you didn’t drop dead once you passed 28,000 feet. Doesn’t seem worth it to me, frankly, but I guess it takes all kinds. I’ll stick to reading about it afterwards.

Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) - Jean-Dominique Bauby

Le Scaphandre et le Papillon est une livre autobiographique de Jean-Dominique Bauby, un auteur et journaliste Parisien qui était le rédacteur en chef du magazine féminin Elle. La livre s’agit son expérience avec Locked-In Syndrome, dont il a devenu une victime après un attaque cérébrale. L’histoire de comment la livre était écrit, c’est presque plus fascinant que la livre soi-même. Complètement paralysé sauf pour sa paupière gauche, qui il a cligné pour signaler chaque lettre. Une autre personne reciterait chaque lettre de l’alphabet, qui étaient arrangé dans l’ordre de fréquence descendant en la langue Français.

Par ce système tellement fatiguant, Bauby a écrit une livre lyrique est fascinant. Il flotte entre le présent et le passé, discutant un moment le process de son bain, un autre moment un souvenir d’un jour en vacances. C’était une livre plus difficile à comprendre que j’avait pensé, mais néanmoins je m’amusais en lisant. Sa détermination est formidable, et c’est poignant le fait qu’il s’a mort seulement deux jours après la livre était publié.

A History of Psychiatry - Edward Shorter

The premise of Edward Shorter’s A History of Psychiatry is interesting. The brain remains the one piece of human anatomy whose inner workings we have not yet fully understood, and so an overview of our efforts to treat neurological illnesses seems like it would lead down some dark and intriguing alleyways. And so it does. Shorter provides a thorough chronicle of the different stages of psychiatric medicine, from the first efforts to house the mentally ill in asylums to the wonders of modern pharmaceuticals. The description of these phases was interesting, but strangely the least engaging aspect of Shorter’s chronicle was the human element. Shorter treats the book like a Who’s Who of psychiatric history, and the litany of names drone out paragraph after paragraph, each tagged with a brief description of the individual’s accomplishments before stepping aside to make room for the next shout out. Some names reappear pages later, vaguely attributed, leaving you scratching your head and wondering which of the 50 people you’ve just learned about this one is. I can’t fault Shorter for wanting to cite those responsible for psychiatry’s various accomplishments, but a more in-depth study of fewer players would have gone down a lot easier.

The cluttered prose is an inconvenience, but my biggest issue with the book was its editorializing. Shorter admits early on that he has a certain slant, which is admirable, but a history should strive for some level of objectivity. By contrast, Shorter’s preference for some schools of thought over others is apparent throughout the text—every figure associated with biological psychiatry, however slight their contribution, gets a solid 300 words, while major figures of psychotherapy are glossed over. Carl Jung is mentioned perhaps twice, both times in passing, and without any regard to his work or theories.

This editorializing by omission descends into something almost resembling a rant once it reaches the modern day. His dismisses patients with PTSD, anorexia, and moderate forms of depression, anxiety and OCD as little more than whiners who foisted their diagnoses on a hapless DSM committee through political strong-arming. There remains some validity to his criticisms of how the DSM was and is put together, but his cavalier dismissal of serious illnesses—some of which I’ve witnessed firsthand—was pretty gross. He walks this dismissal back in later pages, making it difficult to discern his exact stance on them, but either way the entire final chapter felt far too editorial in tone.