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Who Cares About Nihilism?

I’ve always said that being the toughest dude in the sphere of letters is like being the best pianist on the oil rig: It isn’t like the competition is especially stiff. I couldn’t help feeling vindicated in this belief when a friend pointed out to me that the pugilist at rest, Norman Mailer, was not only a wife-stabbing lunatic but also a certifiable Lego Maniac:

NOW that Norman Mailer has passed on, the big question is: Who gets his Legos? The incendiary novelist built a 15,000-piece “City of the Future” with two pals in his Brooklyn apartment—but where it will go next, nobody knows. Our source mused, “Imagine what a one-of-a-kind artistic creation by one of last century’s most acclaimed literary figures would be worth at Sotheby’s. But how would you get the damn thing out of his brownstone without breaking it up? You could reassemble it by hand, but that wouldn’t be quite the same thing as something actually assembled by the master, would it?”

Okay, so at least it’s a “City of the Future” and not a “giant house for his American Girl doll collection.” And I’ll grant that while it doesn’t scream “macho man,” it does have the benefit of making my soft spot for Mailer just a touch softer. But I did promise to respond to Abe, so permit me a few words.

Abe writes, “One is far more likely to come up against the idea that Mailer was an overrated buffoon than the notion that he was an unrecognized luminary. . . . The heavy lifting is the lot of the Mailer fan.” It’s a bit confusing, as one is unlikely ever to come up against the idea that Mailer was “unrecognized.” As for the “overrated buffoon” part, even William F. Buckley Jr. allowed that Mailer “was a towering figure in American literary life for sixty years.” Does defending the radical underdog count as heavy lifting if you have a conservative giant spotting you?

I think what Abe means is that it’s easy to trash Mailer, not that many people actually do it. In any case, I’m not out to be a contrarian. I just didn’t enjoy reading Mailer. It’s my instinct that he elicits fascination and respect not in spite of his personal defects but more or less because of them. (I don’t mean that he’s devoid of talent, but that his talents aren’t such that they can be sold without a lot of hype.) One would have to be very naive to think that only great books can salvage the reputation of a man who beats or wounds or kills his wife. It is not by works but by the faith of the fandom that literary bad boys art saved from damnation; if you don’t believe me, try explaining the popularity of William S. Burroughs.

I do, however, have an easier time with Abe’s defense of Mailer than of Cormac McCarthy: “Stefan calls McCarthy’s The Road ‘dreary’ and ‘one-dimensional.’ I’m not trying to be a smartass by pointing out that it’s a novel about post-apocalyptic earth. If it were anything other than one-dimensionally dreary McCarthy would have suffered an insurmountable credibility problem.”

I don’t know about that: Three decades of Mad Max fans can’t be wrong. I mentioned a while back that my negative review of The Road generated a lot of hate mail, and Abe has reiterated some of the major points. My approach is prescriptive. I complain about what the author didn’t write (a Christian allegory) instead of what he did (a scorched-earth nightmare). Well, none of this is exactly true. I wrote that the book lacked a good story and strong characters, which is why I loved the infinitely more nihilistic No Country for Old Men—the movie, at any rate. All the same, I can sympathize with this critic:

Mr. McCarthy has won just about every literary honor while being likened to Ernest Hemingway for his minimalist style, and to Samuel Beckett for his volcanic bleakness of outlook on matters of life and death. I happened to find No Country for Old Men an absorbing read, but it left me all empty inside. I must confess that I couldn’t get very far into Blood Meridian, another of his books that was recommended to me. So, I suppose, I have chosen to live out my life without getting involved with Mr. McCarthy’s literary outlook.

Still, I suspect that his clouded vision of existence is somewhat too grim and dark for even the most noirish movie genre. He makes Elmore Leonard look like a barrel of laughs, and Faulkner a beacon of hope. Nonetheless, some of the pithiest exchanges in the movie were taken almost verbatim from the book. I may be clearly in the minority on this movie. It will almost certainly be number one on my list of movies that other people liked and I didn’t. I will not describe the narrative in any great detail both because I would be perceived as spoiling the “fun” of discovering the many surprises for yourself, and because I cannot look at it and write about it in any other way than as an exercise in cosmic futility. Yet, I’m not sorry I saw it over a running time of 122 minutes, just about the length of time I’d like to spend on a quick in-and-out visit to hell.

The trouble with nihilism and its kid cousin, fatalism, is that they’re so often either boring or disingenuous. Without the plot twists, fantastic acting and cinematography, and Javier Bardem’s hair, No Country for Old Men would be the biggest yawn of the season short of Bee Movie. Its anti-message isn’t even a little compelling. The Road is No Country without the fun stuff, so why is everyone springing to its defense? If nostalgie de la boue accounts for the esteem in which figures like Mailer and Burroughs are held, maybe we owe McCarthy-worship to a misguided belief that there’s something noble or even sort of cool in accepting, not to mention tirelessly stumping for, cosmic defeat. As one reader of the above-quoted review commented: “If you feel discomfort, annoyance, or active resistance to McCarthy’s narrative outlines . . . it is because you are afraid of their veracity. That is the most important use of art, and you should praise it, rather than turn, daintily, away from it.”

There’s the answer, hiding in the word daintily. Everyone’s afraid to look squeamish. Isn’t it possible that we turn away from things—books, movies, even people—because what they do or say is at best pointless and at worst odious? If that’s dainty, then I am proud to be one lace-curtain son of a bitch.

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