Stoner Archives - Mostly About Stories

Emperor of Novels – John Williams’ Augustus

John Williams’ (Butcher’s Crossing, Stoner) final completed novel, Augustus, is quite simply the best book I have read all year. At school, an English teacher whose opinion I value highly once said that we know the best books because as soon as we finish them we want to start again. We have gained so much from them, yet we know that so much more lies within, deeper down. What separates these books from your standard ever-interpretable and unfathomably-deep Literary Classics is that these books seem to speak to us. They leave us a feeling of company – it is as if your soul is touched by another’s. If I didn’t have other books to read and exams to think about, I would read Augustus again right now. And then again, and again. It is simply that good. What follows is simply an explanation as to why that is.

Gaius Octavius, later Caesar Augustus, was the first Roman Emperor and is a man widely considered one of the greatest leaders of all time. In Williams’ novel we follow Octavius, as he is usually called here, from his days as a youth, to his battles against his fellow Roman, Marcus Antonius, to his years of undivided power, when on all sides he faced political enemies who were determined to succeed him. Williams does not focus on the battles or on the violence – though both are here. Instead, Augustus’s struggle is to lead Rome and fulfil his duty. More than once is Rome named his daughter, but as the novel progresses it becomes increasingly clear that he feels he is failing her. Forced into violence, time and again, by the necessities of fate, Augustus retains control over Rome, but he watches his friends die, and becomes increasingly alone.

“It is too dark” – The Kaleidoscopic Form of Augustus

The first time I opened Augustus I closed it again immediately. The first thing I saw was a letter. What could be more boring than a novel of letters? I imagined ridiculous, unrealistic, epistolary novels from the 18^th century and gave a shudder. Yet I had the wrong idea entirely. Augustus is closer to those questions we sometimes find on history exams where we are asked to compare and contrast sources. We see an event through many different angles – that of a historian, an eyewitness memoir, perhaps a newspaper report or even a cartoon – and we must evaluate these sources against each other and try to determine what really happened and why. We must check for biases, for concealed information. In short, we must work for our knowledge.

A sculpture of the head of Augustus — A sculpture of the young Augustus. As with the novel itself it tells us something of the man that once was. But filling in the gaps requires our imagination. Aiwok, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Augustus works by the same principle. Williams weaves together truth and fiction, letters and diaries and proclamations and histories from all sorts of eminent Romans, to tell the story of Augustus’ life. As with Conrad’s Nostromo, we never seem to see Augustus himself, except through the eyes of others. We as readers are always having to think about what we read, to work from glimpses, as if through coloured glass, to guess at what the real man is like. Often, all we get is an image:

“I understand that he wants the letter. I hand it to him, and he turns away from us. The ring of officers breaks for him, and he walks down the hill. For a long time we watch him, a slight boyish figure walking on the deserted field, moving slowly, this way and that, as if trying to discover a way to go.”

The effect of this is incomparable. Augustus appears so vitally human precisely because we know him through confusion and uncertainty, just as we know every human being. No narrator will tell us who he is, just as no human being will tell us who they are either, except through their words and their actions. To create him as I read was one of the most exciting things about reading Augustus.

The Roman Touch – Philosophy, Morals and Nobility

I studied Latin at school. While I can’t pretend to have read Cicero, I did stumble through some Seneca and Livy. But anyone who has studied Latin will have a feel for the way that the Romans wrote. That poise, that composure and nobility of style runs through the entirety of Augustus. Not once did I have the impression it was not a Roman’s writing before my eyes. The Roman way of writing in some sense reflects their philosophical outlook. The Romans had something of a disdain for philosophy, compared to their illustrious Greek forbears. Roman philosophy is focused on the practical, the here-and-now questions of ethics much more than anything else. The most famous Roman thinkers, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, were both Stoics. Nobody in Augustus claims to be a Stoic, but all of the characters, whatever their actions, are motivated by high ideals – honour, duty, and patriotism.

It was perhaps a better time. Even Livia, Augustus’ wife, who is determined to secure the succession of her son Tiberius, is far more an antagonist than a villain. Like Cicero, another of Augustus’ opponents, she is a character whose values and hopes go against his. Both of them find value in the older Roman Republic and its ideas of family honour. In part, the tragedy of Augustus is that good people are politically divided because of incompatible values. It is noble – and reasonable – of Livia to write Tiberius such things as “You have a duty to yourself, to your country, to your name”. And there is a more than a hint of heroism in phrases like “Our futures are more important than our selves.” But what she wants necessitates the limiting of Augustus’ power, just as what he wants demands the limiting of her own.

Williams depicts all of his characters with force. They are real people, with their own motivations. Williams, I believe, is speaking when Maecenas writes to Livy against being a moralist. I shall quote it because it gives an idea of the moral tone of the novel:

“it seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world. I implore you, do not become a moralist; you will destroy your art and your mind.”

Just as we need to piece together Augustus’ character from scraps and choice remarks, so too must we piece together judgements for ourselves, instead of relying on the author to tell us what to think. And as a result, it forces us to be active participants in the novel, making our own meaning out of what’s there.

Power and Necessity

No character here is good or evil, least of all Augustus himself. When you rule an empire you are forced, constantly, to act to secure your power against those who would wrest it from you. When those who went against Julius Caesar are finally punished by Marcus Antonius and Augustus, Cicero’s head is brought and placed at the rostrum in the Forum where once he had spoken so eloquently. The son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra is executed also, though he is only seventeen. Even Augustus’ own daughter, Julia, is forced repeatedly into unhappy marriages by her father to secure his political dominance, as are his own friends. All the time, we are faced with the question that Julia asks Augustus as she enters her final marriage:

“”Has it been worth it? Your authority, this Rome that you have saved, this Rome that you have built? Has it been worth all that you have had to do?”
My father looked at me for a long time, and then he looked away. “I must believe that it has,” he said. “We both must believe that it has”.”

One of the novel’s perceptive observers writes that “Octavius Caesar is Rome; and that, perhaps, is the tragedy of his life”. His destiny is Rome, is power, and he does not grow corrupted by that power as so many others do. But in his fulfilment of his destiny, he loses the only things that ever gave him joy – his daughter, and his friends. Forced to choose between his private and his public duties, Augustus always chooses the latter, and eventually he is left all alone. When his old friends have died, he is surrounded by only those who lust after power. That is to say, people he cannot trust. And yet his body will not fail him, and he continues to grow old, all alone.

Julia

The story that, according to my copy’s introduction, was the seed out of which Augustus grew, was not Augustus’ own but that of his daughter, Julia. Augustus had no son, but his daughter was given an education in art and philosophy that at the time was reserved for sons alone. Julia is an extraordinary character, a woman whose existence was scrubbed away by history as best it could. Augustus loved her – and this love is truly touching – but perhaps the greatest tragedy of the novel is how Julia, in spite of her knowledge and intelligence, ends up herself becoming a piece on the chessboard of her father’s Empire. And unlike him, who managed to survive to the end, Augustus was forced to let her be captured.

In the end, Augustus leaves us with a sense of limitations. Julia at one point says to her father the wonderful line “The power you have… cannot legislate against the passions of the human heart”. And it is true. Augustus cannot control the hearts of his people, whether friend or foe. In the same way, try as he might to bring peace to the Romans instead he is forced, time and time again, to spill their blood. “There is no wall that can be built to protect the human heart from its own weakness”. People fail repeatedly here. After all, we cannot know another’s heart, and perhaps we cannot even know our own. Augustus is a man determined to do good, and he does, but at great cost – to his health, to his friends and family. It is up to us as readers can say whether it was worth it.

Conclusion

I could write more but I will not. Augustus is perhaps the closest thing to a perfect novel I have ever read. I love it with a passion I struggle to put into words. Its nobility, its formal ingenuity, its gripping plot with tragedy and farce and all the rest together, its characters with their forceful existence, all this I love. John Williams’ absolutely stunning prose I love too. Augustus is a novel for now and forevermore. In its questions of power and necessity, in its praise of the value of friendship and love, in its exploration of the obscurity of knowledge and the unfathomability of the human heart, it is incomparable. If ever a post on this blog has proved for you a reason to go out and buy a book, let it be this one. It will blow you away.

For more on these themes, see my review of William’s earlier novel, Butcher’s Crossing, and my comments on Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo.

Have you read Augustus, and what did you think of it if you have? What do you make of the final section of the work, where Augustus himself speaks? Does it undermine what comes before, or strengthen it?

Joseph Roth’s Job: The Story of a Simple Man (Hiob) – A Review

There is something about Bible stories, and all ancient storytelling, that gives them great power. We all have our feelings, our moments of joy and despair, but compared to the era of belief what richness of emotion have we lost! The story of Job contains one example of such richness. Our present sufferings can seem to pale in comparison with those of a man who feels betrayed by his God. For, whatever great and terrible increase in scale of suffering we bear witness to (especially these days…), there appears to have been a concomitant loss in depth of pain. Many Bible stories have been modernised in literature and the arts in general, and perhaps first among these is the Book of Job. This tale of good and evil and the mystery of the divine maintains its strength even now, when faith is little more than a puff of smoke.

A photo of Joseph Roth, author of Job — Joseph Roth is most famous for two works – Job: The Story of a Simple Man, and The Radetzky March. After being so impressed by Job I hope to read the latter as soon as I can.

It’s not hard to see why Joseph Roth, a Jew writing in German, might have found Job’s story close to his heart. Born in 1894 in Brody, on the edge of the multinational Habsburg Empire, his life was one of recurrent tragedy. An absent father, battles with antisemitism in the military, the collapse of his country (which, with all its peoples, allowed many Jews like Roth to feel at home), the madness and incarceration into a mental institute of his wife, his own alcoholism, and finally the rise of Hitler – none of these was a recipe for joy.

But his novel of 1930, Job: The Story of a Simple Man, to give it its full title, is in its way a joyous tale. For all its monstrous grief and suffering, Roth’s story of Jewish life is filled with a gentle nostalgia and affection for the minor things of life that bring it value. In some way, it’s similar to John Williams’s novel, Stoner, which also takes a life of misfortune and finds the beauty in it. I’d like to share what I loved about Roth’s Job below.

A Jew in Russia

A Simple, Pious, Life

Job begins by introducing us to Mendel Singer, its hero and our modern-day Job. He is “pious, God-fearing and ordinary”, and he works as a teacher. He is humble; his house is small. His faith and trust in God is simple and true. He teaches children because he does not have the knowledge to teach older children the ways of his faith. Mendel Singer lives in the borderlands of the Russian Empire. He lives there with his family – his wife Deborah, his daughter Miriam, and his three sons – Shemariah, Jonas, and Menuchim. The last son was born unlucky, unable to grow normally or talk. His unlucky birth is the first tragedy that is visited upon the home of Mendel Singer.

But really it is hard to say how far this early part of Job is bleak. Instead, for all the poverty the Singer family live in, there is a remarkable dignity to their world, in part thanks to Roth’s careful attention to his characters and his beautiful language. I don’t know how anyone could read something like this without feeling a sense of nostalgia, a feeling that life is being lived:

“He sat down, sang a little song, then the parents and children slurped the hot soup, smiled at the plates and spoke not a word. Warmth rose in the room. It swarmed from the pots, the bowls, the bodies.”

Mendel’s teaching, too, is given the same treatment:

“The bright choir of children’s voices repeated word after word, sentence after sentence, it was as if the Bible were being tolled by many bells.”

Of course, simply writing beautifully is not enough to cancel out grief. But there is no grief here – not in these passages, at any rate. The feeling that we have as we read Job is instead that we are always too late in counting our blessings, in realising what value there is in what we already have. We are drawn into wisdom by witnessing the absence of it. We can only watch, powerlessly, as Job’s family slip towards abyss after abyss.

Grief Begins

The two healthy boys grow up and are conscripted into the Russian army – which meant a lifetime away from home, and an enforced rejection of Jewish strictures like avoiding pork. By using all of her savings Deborah is able to get Shemeriah smuggled out of the country – and this too, meant that the chance of ever seeing his family again is next to zero. And Miriam, the girl, begins to flirt with the Cossacks, with the Russian soldiers in town. Only Menuchim remains at home, and he is speechless and dumb.

A photo showing a traditional Jewish family outside their house. — A Jewish family in a Schtetl in 1903, around the time Job: The Story of a Simple Man begins. Amusingly and sadly, some of the locations in Job are also featured in Isaac Babel’s tales of (among other things) the destruction of Jewish life in Western Russia and Poland, Red Army Cavalry.

Now beautiful descriptions start moving towards describing torment. “Sorrow blew through their hearts like a constant hot and biting wind”. When Shemeriah, now Sam, writes from America, describing its glory and his prosperity, the father’s grief is laid open – his soul cannot leave the world it has always inhabited. “The sons disappeared: Jonas served the Tsar in Pskov and was no longer Jonas. Shemariah bathed on the shores of the ocean and was no longer called Shemariah. Miriam… wanted to go to America too. Only Menuchim remained what he had been since the day of his birth: a cripple. And Mendel Singer himself remained what he had always been: a teacher.”

I liked the way that the story is so simple. Each of the healthy children has an animal associated with them. Miriam, the coquette, is a gazelle; Jonas the strong is a bear; while Shemariah the cunning and thoughtful is a fox. The simplicity of the piled-up misfortunes makes an equally simple plot diagram. The idea is simple, even if the execution makes use of modern ideas and modern problems. Things like interminable Russian bureaucracy mix easily together with brutal and unfortunately timeless antisemitism. For instance, while walking home one night Mendel thinks – so simply, as to be shocking to a sheltered reader like myself – “A peasant or a soldier would now emerge from the grain, accuse Mendel of theft and beat him to death on the spot – with a stone perhaps”.

A Jew in America

America – the Promised Land?

Mendel Singer, thanks to news and money from Sam and to avoid Miriam’s desire to be with Cossacks, gathers his family for the one-way journey to America. But Menuchim, still underdeveloped, is left behind – the journey would be too much for him. For Deborah in particular this is a moment of crisis. When she went to the rabbi about her deformed son his promise was that he would grow up to be wise and strong, but that for this to come to pass she must not leave him, even if he is a great burden. But still, with no choice, the family leave him entrusted to another family, and depart.

A photo of New York in the 1900s. — New York (pictured) and America more broadly, may have been a land of opportunity, but for Mendel Singer they marked another step towards the loss of his identity, his culture, and his once unshakeable faith in God’s goodness.

In America Mendel Singer finds riches – his son Sam is a clever guy. But he also finds himself and his world further slipping away from the simple, pious, world that he’s truly after. He notices that in America there are no frogs or crickets at night, and the stars above are “miserable” and “mutilated”. He escapes into dreams, hoping that Menuchim will get better. One day he hears from Jonas in the army, and joy returns for a brief moment. And then terrible, dreadful, history shows its hand. War breaks out in Europe.

The book continues its downward descent. “Fear shook him as the wind a weak tree”. Tragedy comes for Mendel Singer, again and again. At first he prays, and then begins to feel that singing psalms is nothing against the might of flames and cannons. It is the first kind of doubt in Job. The sense that God cannot hear you. But things will get worse still. America has yet to join the war.

Rebellion

Mendel talks to the dead. He knows that God has forsaken him. “For me He has no pity. For I’m a dead man and live”. But his passive feeling cannot last. One more tragedy awaits to push him over the edge. The high point of Job is so unbelievably good. Roth takes his source material and makes a real, thundering, blasphemous rebellion out of it. I had to stop reading I was so in awe. Mendel attempts to burn his bible – the one possession still connecting him with his past in Russia. We see, in his mind, the pages burning, but he hesitates. “His heart was angry with God, but in his muscles the fear of God still dwelled”.

Mendel’s neighbours come to try to stop him. They try to speak to him of Job, the story of a man punished by God as a test. Mendel will have none of it. “My presence brings misfortune, and my love draws down the curse as a lone tree in a flat field the lightning”. His final outburst is something awesome:

“The devil is kinder than God. Because he is not as powerful, he cannot be as cruel. I am not afraid, my friends!”

Mendel’s final rebellion can only come from a position of faith, because only faith disappointed can lower you into such depths. It is beautiful and harrowing in equal measure, but also uncanny. As if, for the modern reader, Mendel is a fool for his belief. But a fool we can’t help but admire, and perhaps, one we wish we could emulate.

Conclusion: A Good Job?

Job: The Story of a Simple Man ultimately does not stray too far from its biblical source. However, I found the modernised ending to be one of the weakest parts of the book. Roth, the translator Ross Benjamin writes in my copy’s afterword, once confessed that he could only have written the ending drunk. That’s the impression I got too. The modern world is well suited for tragedy, but modernising miracles, as Roth attempts to do, can come across as fake and kind of desperate. But that’s not to devalue Job. It is a really good, really enjoyable book. Roth’s language is wonderful, and his feeling for the slow declines of modern life – the loss of identity, of culture, of homeland – is sublime. I thoroughly recommend it, and will definitely be reading some more Roth very soon.

Have you read any Joseph Roth? Leave a comment with your thoughts if you have.

Update: for my review of The Radetzky March, go here.

An Aging Stoner’s Advice: Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice

To have something by Thomas Pynchon recommended in any kind of studenty or similar context will likely elicit a groan from anyone who has already encountered him. What is the point, it’s well worth asking, in reading an author who fills his works with arcane knowledge, history, philosophy, poetry, and so on, when we are already steeping ourselves in such information at almost every moment of our waking lives, and at least for all that we might get a few positive words from a teacher at the end of it? Pynchon is known for his big stuff, monsters of novels like Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, often set in a meticulously crafted version of the past but dealing with the concerns of the present in ways both direct and more subtle. More than anyone else this side of 1900, Pynchon’s novels are novels of ideas.

So then, it is something of a surprise to come across Inherent Vice, a book which at 369 pages seems positively anaemic from Pynchon. The setting, California in 1970, is no grand historical gesture but rather straight out his own youth too – Tom was born in 1937. Regular Pynchon tomes aren’t devoid of drugs and danger, but here the cloud of weed smoke and cop-show crime-fighting violence that accompanies private eye hero Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello fits right in as just a sign of the times. The plot – and there is, more or less, a plot – is not too complicated either, at least compared with Gravity’s Rainbow’s. Doc is visited by an old girlfriend, Shasta Fey Hepworth, who tells him her current boyfriend, real estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann, may be about to be kidnapped and brainwashed by his wife and her boyfriend on account of his, Mickey’s, decision that it was time to start giving back to the poor, instead of buying their houses for development. Only, Wolfmann gets kidnapped by someone else early on, dead men turn up alive, Shasta disappears, and Doc goes on a chase that may or may not be of the wild-goose variety, all while discovering clues about a shadowy group/business/drug cartel/boat called the Golden Fang. It is confusing, and I know I could have understood it more, but with Pynchon you know you’ve gone wrong when things start making sense, so it’s best just to focus on the ride.

And what a ride it is. Pynchon mashes genres – this is no stuffy academic prose you’ve got here. Cop shows, Raymond Chandler’s crime novels, the movies and books of the sixties are all at times parodied or played straight, giving the book an easy accessibility and light tone. “She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to” – the book’s opening sentence – drops it in a crime novel mood you just can’t tell whether to take seriously or not right from the get-go. “She” instead of a name suggests a femme fatale, adds mystery; “alley” and “back steps” are all standard locales for your crime scenes; and “always used to” adds history, flavour and colour to a relationship that means our detective won’t only have difficulties on the job. While the book is occasionally serious, at other times it’s more than happy to satirise its own world: one of my favourite descriptions was of a street looking “like a crime scene waiting on its next crime.”

Parody of genres isn’t the only way this book is funny. Pynchon’s humour is refreshingly moronic. One conversation between a black gangster and Doc ends with the former saying: “Sledge was right, you are one crazy white motherfucker.” Doc: “How can you tell?” Him: “I counted”. The characters all have idiotic names, packed with puns and other meanings. Even the pretentious presumption on the part of novels to tell us what to think is mocked by such advice as “Can’t say it often enough – change your hair, change your life” from Doc’s friend Sortilège. After one person is encased in concrete underneath a bridge a character says that it brings new meaning to the phrase “pillar of the community.” Pynchon’s humour is one of the main ways in which the novel consciously tries to avoid being a stuffy highbrow tome, and instead be a part of a relaxed cultural environment where the pleasure of the text doesn’t have to be mingled with the pain of trying to understand.

There is some meaning and thematic heaviness here, though, if that’s your cup of tea. Dealing with California at the beginning of the 70s is to deal with a community that is breaking up, a paradise that is rapidly being lost. The trials of Charles Manson and his followers are constantly referenced with fear and trepidation. Here was someone who had turned the hippie lifestyle and dreams of world peace on their head, with catastrophic results. Inherent Vice follows the music makers and dopers whose community Manson was just on the edge of. Growing police corruption is hinted at, and though Pynchon is more than happy to complain about his usual bogeyman – capitalism and its effect on humankind – he doesn’t just blame money and Henry Kissinger for destroying the dream of weed and wacky hair-dos. At one point Doc walks past a new music shop and sees a bunch of children listening to music, all using different headphones. “Doc was used to outdoor concerts where thousands of people congregated to listen to music for free, and where it all got sort of blended together into a single public self, because everybody was having the same experience. But here, each person was listening in solitude, confinement and mutual silence.” Technology and our relationship to it is as much to blame for the destruction of our community as is money. An “inherent vice”, a fault inside this seeming perfection, is the root of its eventual collapse. At another point, Doc watches a whole load of people sitting and watching TV, and all he feels for it is loneliness. That is the feeling that pervades the book, once the veneer of light humour and mad antics is brushed aside. The fear that the good days are ending, and things are only going to get worse if we’re not careful.

And all of these fears and worries, once we scrape away the satire and the humour, are delivered in a prose that is without a doubt among the most lyrical and beautiful being produced today. Because jokes aren’t serious enough for the honest concern that underlies the work. Listen to this sentence about Shasta, looking out to sea: “It wasn’t headlights – before she turned away, he could swear he saw light falling on her face, the orange light just after sunset that catches a face turned to the west, watching the ocean for someone to come in on the last wave of the day, in to shore and safety”. The connections between people are what Doc, as a private eye, is all about. And it is these connections that are under threat by forces and human error, dragging people away from each other. In another moment of beauty and poignancy Pynchon writes of Doc and Shasta again: “Later they went outside, where a light rain was blowing in, mixed with salt spray feathering off the surf. Shasta wandered slowly down to the beach and through the wet sand, her nape in a curve she had learned, from times when back-turning came into it, the charm of. Doc followed the points of her bare feet already collapsing into rain and shadow, as if in a fool’s attempt to find his way back into a past that despite them both had gone on into the future it did. The surf, only now and then visible, was hammering at his spirit, knocking things loose, some to fall into the dark and be lost forever, some to edge into the fitful light of his attention whether he wanted to see them or not. Shasta had nailed it. Forget who – what was he working for anymore?” The book doesn’t just tell us about the problems that face society, or rail against their causes. For perhaps the first time, Pynchon truly shows the human side of things, the effect of all this chaos and isolation on you and me.

The power of the work lies in the way that its themes – and there are far more than the ones I just mentioned – creep up on us when we least expect it. But that’s not to say the work is perfect – far from it: in fact, it’s one of the weaker novels Pynchon has produced. The jokes do occasionally fall flat, the whole thing is still confusing as ever; but more than anything else the smaller scale of the work means that these little foibles are not coated in the grandeur that a hefty tome rightly or wrongly usually manages to inspire. The writing is beautiful, but it’s hard here to forgive Pynchon’s reluctance to clarify what is going on – not in the sense of explaining the conspiracy, but rather just in reminding us, every so often who is doing what, and why. What makes this book accessible, and a good introduction to his work – its short length; its fewer, relatively well-made characters; and comparative closure at the end – are also the things that hurt it. The short length brings with it a different set of expectations on the part of the reader, and these it struggles to meet.

With all that said, Pynchon and Inherent Vice are still important for us as students and others who have to deal with swathes of knowledge on a day to day basis, and not only because even in Inherent Vice we find a book that is complex and filled with interesting and thought-provoking questions and themes. No, the importance is not in the themes, but in Pynchon’s attitude towards them. Most of the things we are forced to read at Cambridge or other universities are thematically dense by design, and when we write essays we go off with magnifying glasses, searching for key ideas and perfect little quoticles. In a world where every moment has to be useful and every article has to have import upon our next piece of work, Pynchon’s stoner’s voice telling us just to chill out and enjoy the ride could never be more timely. Of course there are things to be found, hidden themes and connections, but the book teaches us that they don’t need to matter, that our own enjoyment, and our own choices, always come first. Enjoy yourselves, smoke some weed if that’s your thing, and relax.