Philip Roth+Tom Wolfe + The Burning Maze + Mannequin + The Pulp Magazine Archive
Just as I was about to hit send, I saw the news that Philip Roth has died. He was 85. It really is the end of a generation with people like Roth and Tom Wolfe leaving us. You can read his last interview here. If you're never read anything by Roth, try The Plot Against America, which is an alternative history of America in which the 1940 elections are won by an "America First" candidate who implements a pro-Nazi agenda. Sound familiar? The best of Roth's work — like Sabbath's Theatre, Portnoy's Complaint and American Pastoral — evoke extreme reactions because Roth really knows how to get under your skin. Of writing novels, he said in an interview to Paris Review, "There has to be some pleasure in this job, and that’s it. To go around in disguise. To act a character. To pass oneself off as what one is not. To pretend. The sly and cunning masquerade
In another lovely Art of Fiction interview, this one with Tom Wolfe, the interviewer asks Wolfe about a book that inspired him to become a writer. Wolfe says, “Emil Ludwig’s biography of Napoleon…It impressed me so enormously that I began to write the biography of Napoleon myself, though heavily cribbed from Emil Ludwig. I was eight at the time.”
It’s a good thing there is no chance of Paris Review wanting to do an Art of Fiction interview with me because boss, my intellectual range at age eight stretched barely as far as Roald Dahl’s kiddie fiction. In fact, more than 30 years later, kiddie fiction is still a significant chunk of what I read and re-read. It’s my happy place – let’s not get into what it says about me that I used the phrase “happy place” to describe fiction in which monsters prowl, children are fighting battles because grown-ups are useless and the dark holds many terrors.
The thing about good kiddie fiction is that you zoom through it when it’s written well. Like I did through the new Rick Riordan book, The Burning Maze. This is the third book in the Apollo/ Lester story cycle, which happens to be my least favourite one from Riordan. (My favourite is Magnus Chase with Percy Jackson as a close second.) Zeus has cursed Apollo and next thing he knows, the once-glorious and gorgeous god is now a pimply 16-year-old Lester who must do anything and everything Meg tells him to. Meg is 12, a daughter of Demeter and has been twisted a little out of shape by her adoptive father who just happens to be Nero (yup, the last Roman emperor).
One of the problems I had with Apollo in the first two books was that he didn’t seem to be coming together as a character. Lester doesn’t seem to have any backstory, which doesn’t help and Apollo was whiny in a way that felt weirdly artificial. Part of the problem was that Riordan didn’t really make clear how much of Lester had stayed when Apollo entered his body. Plus, it’s hard to feel bad for a whiny god.
The Burning Maze turned out to be good read and it’s the best of the Apollo series so far despite Riordan killing a major hero off. The grief jolts both the reader as well as the characters and for the first time in three books, I found myself feeling for Apollo/ Lester.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. In The Burning Maze, Apollo and Meg meet the third partner in Triumvirate Holdings, a company made up of three evil caesars who want to become gods. Having encountered Nero and Commodus in the first two Trials of Apollo, it’s time to meet the third: Caligula. Helping Meg and Apollo on this adventure are daughter of Venus, Piper; son of Jupiter, Jason (who has his own cycle of stories); and Grover the satyr. The two villains are Medea and Caligula, and both of them are quite fantastically evil.
A lot of The Burning Maze is about nature, the importance nurturing seeds, generally appreciating the greenery around us and also how fierce nature can be. The way we personify nature in literature, particularly popular literature, says a lot about our understanding of it and how we see it. At one point, nature was benign and romantic – bobbing flowers, picturesque scenes etc – and generally doing its own thing. Occasionally, it thundered or growled, but that was an exception to the idyllic rule. Today, in an age of global warming and the natural disasters it has fostered, nature is anything but benign. It’s angry and powerful. I was thinking of the way Meg uses nature while watching One Strange Rock, a documentary series by National Geographic that is produced by Darren Arronofsky and hosted by Will Smith. In it, the sun is described as a killer rather than a nurturer. In The Burning Maze, you get a glimpse of both aspects of the sun – the nurturer and the killer.
Bottom line: best in Apollo cycle, but not as good as Magnus Chase (yet).
While The Burning Maze took about two nights to finish, I spent the better part of two weeks reading Mannequin: Working Women in India’s Glamour Industry by Manjima Bhattacharjya.
Full disclosure: I know Manjima a little bit because we have some common friends. In fact, I think I met her when she’d started work on her PhD thesis, which would eventually become this book, which, incidentally, has a stunning cover by Sukruti Anah Staneley. Staneley has managed to make hot pink look creepy and beautiful at the same time. Brava!
Mannequin is about how India’s fashion industry sees and treats models. Manjima has spoken to Indian models from different decades and through their recollections, she shows you how the industry has changed along with the demands made of models. A chunk of the book is about what Manjima saw when she attended two fashion weeks in the mid-2000s.
I have no idea why fashion is considered bimbo territory. Indian fashion magazines have some strikingly sharp people working as editors, writers and stylists. Yet there's practically no smart writing about the fashion industry. Everything is kept “light”, as though being intelligent is a burden that the fashion magazine (and its advertisers) simply cannot carry.
So in this scenario, Mannequin is a superb and necessary addition to the Indian non-fiction shelf. Manjima treats fashion and modelling as a subject of serious study, and I can only say, it's about bloody time. Particularly in the first section, when she interviews models from different eras and different demographics, Mannequin is an excellent read. It shows you what lies behind the masks of make-up and the placid expressions. Ripping the veil of carefree leisure from modelling, Bhattacharjya shows models for what they are: working women.
From the conversations, you get a sense of how complex ideas like empowerment and beauty are for the women who enter modelling. For many, this job gives them a sense of identity that they didn’t have before. There’s an awareness that develops in them of their bodies, social status and even personalities. At the same time, the industry also reduces them to objects and breeds insecurity.
The weakest link in Mannequin is the section in which inexplicably, Manjima dons the disguise of an agony aunt for models. I’m guessing it was meant to ‘lighten’ the book, but it doesn’t do anything of the sort. Instead, she comes across as a cut-price Carrie Bradshaw, and it’s a shame because she’s in her groove when she sticks to regular prose and chronicles her conversations with fascinating characters like the woman called Pushpa who is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator. (That woman deserves a book of her own. Seriously.)
Mannequin started off really strong, but from the Agony Aunt section onwards, it became a drearier read. I wish she'd included images of magazine covers and perhaps analysed them and the fashion spreads inside to see how the fashion industry has either followed leads or established notions that have helped build ideals of contemporary Indian femininity. I also wish her editor had encouraged her to stay on the analysis track, instead of upping the first person element. I have a feeling the first person narrator is meant to make the book less formal and more approachable, but the way it's done in Mannequin, it just diverts attention from the subject to the author. And the subject is usually more fascinating than the author.
Someone who really knew how to use the distinctive, individualistic and personal perspective in a way that enlivens an article -- Tom Wolfe. In case you were wondering why anyone gives a damn that he died on May 14, here are a few links to articles on him and by him. When you're reading Wolfe, the politics that lace his writing may make your blood pressure rise. Try to focus, instead, on how perfectly he paints scenes, the tight structure and how good he is at conveying a mood.
How Tom Wolfe changed the writing in magazines
Excerpt from The Electric Kool-Aid Test.
Louis Menand on Tom Wolfe: "It was a little odd that after claiming, in the introduction to his 1973 anthology, “The New Journalism,” that reporters were destined to make novelists obsolete, Wolfe turned to novel writing."
Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's
'The true enemy of the assimilation of substantive ideas, Wolfe argues, isn’t the middlebrow person but the pseudo-intellectual or, even, the “intellectual” — for anyone who describes himself as an “intellectual” (to say nothing of a “public intellectual”) already implies the “pseudo” by the very act of such self-description.'
The Birth of 'The New Journalism'
Why They Aren't Writing The Great American Novel Anymore
* And not that this really has much to do with reading, but if you're looking for a rabbit hole, check out the The Pulp Magazine Archive. It's got thousands of vintage covers, many of which are thoroughly unsafe for work, by the way. The collections make you realise how much of the imagery that we see in today's cinema is inherited from these commercial, pop artists' imaginations. Take this one, for instance. Does it remind you of a famous shot from The Shape of Water?
What's really speaking to me, though, is Captain Billy's Whiz Bang with its phenomenal tagline.
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Dear Reader will be back in a couple of weeks. Thank you for reading.