L’alpha Mal

Page turner...but that’s about it

Revisado: 07-30-19

It’s an addictive, page-turner-type book, in that MFA style—but with several caveats. First, as the novel is in that MFA style, it displays many of the hallmarks of that machinery. Like many almost every book from the mill, there’s this terrible tension between an author who wants to write about the down-and-outs of society, but also wants to be the smartest guy in the room (its almost exclusively male writers who do this). This means that characters with little or no education give way to speaking like middle-class, white, well-educated men (much like the authors of these works). You can’t have it both ways. The interstitial sections featuring the Rachel-dialogues are the worst for this. They are so overwritten and you can really see an author chafing at the bit that he put in his own mouth.

Second, I can’t seem to get past the fact that the racism and anti-Semitism in the book is so footnoted. The character carving swastikas and the most trite, cliched anti-Semitic tropes into coins comes off as—at best—a sympathetic character—at worst—the hero of the novel. I’m all for novels containing unsavory characters and I am not asking for some bow-tie ending where he gets his comeuppance or (worse) a character I “relate” to, but the fact that this aspect of the character is all but forgotten as the novel winds down leaves a questionable taste in one’s mouth. The only Jewish character in the novel is a “combative Jewish reporter” from New York who arrives and leaves in a single sentence after brick is thrown through his window. Again, I get that that is the tenor of the characters of the novel, but this sole appearance peddles one too many stereotypes for my liking—and this character resides in the mouth of the narrator, not the mouths of the racist characters. I would give the benefit of the doubt to the writer here, but then there’s the Native Americans in the novel that are drunken caricatures in all instances. Again, I would give benefit of the doubt in most cases, as (having lived in Montana for many years) this is largely the stereotype many hold. However, most of these caricatures come by way of the third person narrator. The metaphors, in particular, that trod out fairly questionable stereotypes of Native Americans almost always come from the narrator and not the characters. Cumulatively this all left a pretty rough taste.

Finally, there are just beguiling historical and contextual inaccuracies and improbabilities everywhere. For one, I found the crusade against money to be the most interesting part of the book. Not the anti-Semitic roots that the characters ground it in, but the idea is compelling. However, the character that pushes these crusades, a “genius” the narrator tells us, nevertheless gets key dates and facts wrong about the history of money. To take one example, the gold standard was rescinded in 1971, not in 1933 as the character says. Again, I get that Pearl can be wrong and that he’s nominally “crazy,” but he’s right on the rest of the history, so this oversight seems to be on the author’s part. Furthermore, the character is a fundamentalist Christian who nevertheless quotes Nietzsche (“I am dynamite”) Anyone who has read Nietzsche (a bombastic atheist) and met a Christian understands that this combo doesn’t work. The character of Pearl is so clearly modeled on Zarathustra—the man who came down from the mountains to proclaim, in the market no less, that God is dead. This inspiration for Pearl’s character (and his direct quotes from Nietzsche) just doesn’t work. This goes back to my initial problem regarding the desire of a certain type of author to want to be the smartest man in the room. So you’ve read Nietzsche, great. But to shoehorn him into the novel is such a careless manner suggests a lack of understanding of both Nietzsche and fundamentalist Christians.

This is all to say nothing of the women in the novel who are all drunks, addicts, sex workers, and cheaters. While having a semblance of agency (in a forced woke way), that agency is only acted upon to sleep with the male characters or betray them. It’s just lazy and old fashioned.

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