In which the proprietors of Rake’s Progress and Tingle Alley show no signs of shutting up about Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper. To read the previous installments, click here (first entry is at the bottom, then scroll up).

Giveaway: It’s been brought to my attention that the early posting of the book giveaway has been discriminating against West Coast readers, who wake up and find the contest already over. So today we’re posting a little later. Same drill as before: First person to email caafrye at tinglealleydotcom from the time this post goes up with “People of Paper” in the subject line gets a copy of the book mailed to them. Also include your mailing address in the email. (Please note: If you email between times, your entry won’t be counted.) Update: The copy goes to Lindsay R. of Denver.

SEZ CAAF:

Alas, my friend, this is going to be a pell-mell disquisition. I’m on the run today and so present you with a spattering of thoughts with very little fact-checking or straightening of cushions and corners. You will be the victim of a drive-by analysis. My apologies.

Your last note got me thinking about the mountains of scholarship surrounding Nabokov’s Pale Fire. I am, as I think you are, a passionate admirer of the novel. It’s a tricksy book – and it’s enjoyable to find out how other people interpret its puzzles. For the record, I’m an adherent of the school that sees Kinbote as a death figure (that is, close to Michael Wood’s view laid out in The Magician’s Doubts) — this is what most affects me in rereading the novel, this presence lurking around and shadowing the poet in his last months (you can see this through Sybil’s reactions to Kinbote, which read — if you look — like a woman who is seeing her husband looking pale and weakened, and who gives death a warning to back off). And for the artist, the book seems to say, there is a second death of sorts (or more accurately, an extension of death) that happens to your reputation, as the madman comes and paws over your work, distorting its meaning, and ascribing motives not your own for posterity. (And as one accrues a perverse sympathy for Kinbote and his chronic halitosis, that is, for death, that madman, the novel becomes that much more devastating and hurtfully beautiful.) This is a flatfooted accounting of an emotional arc so moving yet controlled that it pretty much blows the top of my head off — but there it is.

And then I read Brian Boyd’s worthwhile Nabokov’s Pale Fire and he has a completely different interpretation. And if you go online there are hundreds more opinions. Shade = Kinbote. Kinbote = Shade = the dead daughter = a martian. It goes on like this, with everyone ferreting out clues and applying meanings of their own to the novel, providing such an unintentionally hilarious mirror of the novel’s own depiction of the foolishness of over-interpretation that you know good old Vlad is going “Ha! Ha! Ha!” from the butterfly-littered Elysian fields where I picture him tall and tanned and standing in kneesocks.

All of which is to say: I look forward to the many papers and scholarly talks that will one day be devoted to ascribing meaning to: • | | | • • • (with the inevitable later revelation that the writer chose this configuration because “it looked cool”).

Let us be in the first wave. I saw the symbols as basically translating this way:
• = Saturn (that is the authorial eye)
| | | = The layers of lead that the residents of El Monte shelter under to shield their lives and thoughts from Saturn, i.e., a barrier
• • • = The people of El Monte

I have no f• • •ing idea what the dominos mean, though.

On the persistent presence of • • •
Speaking of • • •, it’s interesting to me that there are three dots, which can also stand in as a sort of love triangle that the author is observing. And it strikes me how many love triangles are portrayed in this book, even among the minor characters, and how these are used to enlarge and echo the emotional reverbations from the emotional epicenter of the book, which is the central triangle of Salvador, Liz and her new lover. So that • • • comes to be some trinity of heartbreak?

The most direct parallel, of course, to the central triangle is the departure of Federico de la Fe’s wife and her taking of a new husband — and it is because Federico de la Fe sickens of having his heartbreak watched and determined that he decides to wage a war on Saturn, who is, in effect, the author of his sadness.

Then there are Froggy and his girlfrend Sandra who fight and she moves out, and he takes a new girlfriend. Theirs is a little bit of the larger story of what’s going on in El Monte, but it led to what was for me one of the more powerful passages of the novel (page 85), Sandra is out walking and says:

I passed by Froggy’s house, the house where I used to live. His doors and windows were shut. I wanted to at lease see his silhouette moving behind the curtains, but I saw nothing, and heard only a faint chirping coming from the house.

Froggy’s truck was parked in the driveway, washed and waxed, the white walls of its tires slightly muddy. I felt as if I could walk into the house and lay on the bed, and everything would be as it had before. And Froggy would be happy and I would be happy too. But there are forces that don’t let you turn back and undo things, because to do so would be to deny what is already in motion, to unwrite and erase passages, to shorten the arc of a story you don’t own.

If I could walk into the house and say, “Froggy, I’m sorry I left.” If I could hug him and unbutton his shirt and pick the petals from his hair. If I could do that, there would be no reason for me to fight this war.”

Where Lunar Park fits in
You asked me about what I meant about that the book “subverts some of the most tired clichés about writing.” It could very well be that “subvert” is one of those words, like “transgress,” that I love to overuse. We will have to ask DFW to “unpack” that, and Michiko to “limn” the whole.

But but but I would also argue that there is a pro forma thing where authors talk about their characters “getting out of control” and “taking over,” and to the extent that their expressions of this phenom are presented in an earnest (and at times, fatuous) way, and insofar as Plascencia is not playing it completely straight (that there is humor in his construct, in the extreme that the story goes in presenting characters who “take over”), he is subverting the cliché.

Something else: I have just about read Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park as I know you have too. There are some striking similarities to TpoP: The author enters the novel as “Bret Easton Ellis,” and a couple characters from his previous novels, most notably Patrick Bateman, the serial killer from American Psycho, are loose in the novel and clearly out of the control of their creator.

What do you make of this: Coincidence? Or are these authorial intrusions and character rebellions expressing anxieties about the meaning and use of the modern novel? (I feel like you could probably get a lecture or article out of the last, if you didn’t mind the occasional spray of bullshit.) Or are we all just getting too meta by half?

I have now read the offending Zadie Smith interview of Ian McEwan in The Believer and look forward to hearing what irritated you. Then I can tell you what annoyed me about the James Wood realism piece — and we can generally carry on like Statler and Waldorf .