#279 Flytopia- Will Self

#279 Flytopia- Will Self

We are following Jonathan in the small Suffolk town of Inwardleigh:

-“…a town which had been marooned by the vagaries of human geography, left washed up in an oxbow of demography, run aground on the shingle of a failing economy, and land-locked by the shifting dunes of social trends…”

-“…some places achieve character, Inwardleigh had been visited only with anonymity.”

-“But then no one much wanted to live in Inwardleigh and its environs, where self-abuse was rife and the vet shot up his own horse tranquilizer.”

-“It was a landscape of ingress and repose: a tired body lying down on an old, horsehair mattress.”

So the town itself is not that exciting. Then there is the heat, the boring food, the smells, and the bugs of course, bugs, bugs, bugs, everywhere. Bugs of all sorts, doing bug like things on bug like ways.

The story almost lost me when Jonathan was thinking of earwigs during sex. The misery and disdain wasn’t as humorous as it was supposed to be. However, then the story took a fun turn. Jonathan found a way to survive his entomophobia, and his imagination turns his dull boring surrounding into something a whole lot more interesting to read about.

Rating: 7-7-8-7 Total= 29

#231 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature- David Foster Wallace

#231 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature- David Foster Wallace

This is among the shorter pieces that David Foster Wallace published, but no less brilliant. Simple concepts and plot buried in a spider-web (literally in this case) of context and character layering.

“Mother won a small product liability settlement and used the money to promptly go get cosmetic surgery on the crow’s feet around her eyes. However the cosmetic surgeon botched it and did something to the musculature of her face which caused her to look insanely frightened at all times.”

The rest of the piece are the son’s thoughts while riding the bus with his mother on their way to the lawyers office; the attempts to obscure her face to oncoming riders are particularly funny, as is the DFW-esque macro lens on the miserable life of the drivers:

“I have evolved the theory that the driver peruses his newspaper and reluctantly refolds it and replaces it in the hutch on green to signal the paralyzed dislike he feels about his paid job and a court-appointed psychologist might diagnose the newspaper as a cry for help.”

The son has just been released from jail due to an incident caused by an accidental release of his poisonous spider collection, a collection he now carries with him on the bus as a weapon to fend off potential attackers.

Fun Stuff!

Rating: 10-9-10-9 Total= 38

#212 King Bee-T.C. Boyle

#212 King Bee-T.C. Boyle

Wow, what a nightmare! A couple has trouble conceiving a child. They look to adopt but do not want to wait the many years it would take to adopt a new-born of their choosing. They get duped into adopting a 9 year-old boy named Anthony. He appears at first to be the Norman Rockwell archetype of the American male child, but things turn quickly.

“The smile was a regular feature of those first few months—He stopped smiling when the trial period was over, as if he’d suddenly lost control of his facial muscles. It was uncanny. Almost to the day the adoption became formal—the day that he was theirs and they were his—Anthony’s smile vanished.”

His calm demeanor turns to erratic behavior, foul language and an obsession with bees. He likes bees because they have no mercy, “You fit in or you die.” Nothing seems to rid him of his psychotic behavior and he goes in and out of institutions and youth prisons until he becomes an adult, scarier and even more bee-like.

There are obvious literary links here, from the Kafka-esque alienation insect references, or a twilight zone story arc. Personally, I see a lot of Stephen King in this story, which is something I wouldn’t have expected from Boyle. This is a fun outlier so far in this collection.

Rating: 7-8-8-7 Total= 30