Book Review: Readings
Jonathan Carroll
Reviewed by Shannon McCormick, Fri., April 13, 2001
The Land of Laughs
by Jonathan CarrollTor, 253 pp., $13.95 (paper)
The Wooden Sea
by Jonathan CarrollTor, 302 pp., $23.95
What do we mean when we praise a writer's imagination? Is praise a roundabout way of taking a stance against the drab, workshopped realism that constitutes so much of today's literary fiction? Or is it a backhanded compliment, hailing the writer's powers of fantasy while neglecting to mention whether the work has any heart or brains? Or might we just be responding earnestly to something we think is, well, cool, as in "Boy, I thought it was nifty when that woman's face turned into a kite. This writer sure does have a keen imagination." When thinking about the work of Jonathan Carroll, it's important to keep these differing possibilities in mind. Depending on your feelings about realism, you'll probably fall into one of these three stances. And if you're like me, you'll shift among them over the course of a given chapter, or even a page.
So, Carroll's work isn't for you if you dislike books not hidebound by the laws of physics and the natural world. Like another Jonathan a generation younger, Jonathan Lethem, Carroll has created a devoted readership by smashing and reassembling genres usually frowned upon -- science fiction, fantasy, detective fiction, and children's stories -- by the literary powers that be. If you were going to tag a freshly minted label on him, you might say he writes magical realist pulp fiction. As in Kafka's Metamorphosis and other classic books of the non-naturalistic, Carroll's writing emerges from a place where metaphors cease being figurative and become literal. In the case of The Land of Laughs, Carroll deals with the writer's power to breathe "life" into his characters; with The Wooden Sea, he tackles how all our prior selves and personas interact with one another. So why is it that I can't give either of these books a truly ringing endorsement?
For one thing, Carroll lacks the mind-expanding intellect of fellow non-realists like Calvino and Borges. Nor does he possess the sensual descriptive powers of García Márquez. Instead what we get is small-town America, which on closer inspection reveals not a seedy underbelly but a magical one. The effect is akin to David Lynch remaking It's a Wonderful Life, or the screenplay for American Beauty as written by Kurt Vonnegut, neither of which sound that bad, really. And in fact, The Land of Laughs and The Wooden Sea are truly riveting and marvelous at times, but they're also frustrating and at moments merely clever and cute.
Perhaps the problem, though, lies with me. I've wanted to read The Land of Laughs, Carroll's first novel, for the past seven or eight years, ever since friends of mine raved about it. It had gone out of print almost instantly after its initial publication in 1980 and I could never find it in libraries. Searches on various Internet used-book services inevitably turned up a few copies of the first edition going for at least $100 and often significantly more -- fitting for a book whose plot is put in motion by the main character's quest to assemble the collected out-of-print works of his favorite children's author. Surely a book this rare and valued must be pretty fantastic. Actually, it's pretty good, but hardly the life-changing tome I was expecting.
Laughs follows Thomas Abbey's attempt to write the biography of the legendary children's author Marshall France. Abbey and his new girlfriend Saxony Gardner (another France lover who's outbid by Abbey at the beginning of the novel for a copy of one of France's books) travel to France's hometown of Galen, Mo., where they must court France's daughter Anna for permission to write their book. Everything seems wonderful and bucolic, but as you might expect, things in Galen aren't quite what they seem. Without giving too much of the plot away (yes, it's one of those kinds of books), we come to realize that the fate of Galen and its citizens relies on Abbey's successful completion of the biography. This is all fine and fun, but there are a couple of things that make the book frustrating. For one, until the secret of the book is revealed two-thirds of the way through (it involves the kite-faced woman mentioned earlier), it's a book about a man writing a biography of a writer, which is about as fun as going to a small town in Missouri to do the research yourself. Also, I couldn't help feeling that I would so much rather have read the children's books of Marshall France, of which we glimpse only incomplete snatches.
The Wooden Sea is the work of a more mature sensibility, and though it's filled with even more otherworldly material than The Land of Laughs (time travel, a magical feather, a 400-year-old pit bull that refuses to stay buried), there's some genuinely poignant writing in it. In addition to his fervid imagination, Carroll has mastered the art of the elegiac list; his description of the incongruously banal images from crime scenes haunting the mind of the main character, Frannie McCabe, wouldn't be out of place in The New Yorker, nor would his evocation of a small town aging 30 years in the span of a few minutes. And the ending strives for an admirable metaphysical world-view as all of Frannie McCabe's former selves gather together, literally, to usher their fellow-McCabe into his next life. Ultimately, however, the book is filled with too many unanswered questions to be saved by a handful of masterful passages. Jonathan Carroll certainly has a vivid imagination. But is that enough? Depending on how you answer that question will determine how much you appreciate his work.