Babel-17, by Samuel Delaney

Samuel Delaney in Babel-17 (1965) portrays an intergalactic culture of the distant future where gender and relationship norms have fundamentally changed, where people surgically alter the appearance of their bodies—to get wings for example, or whatever else one might imagine as a body alteration--where dead souls can be revived.  Women command star ships and occupy the same roles as men.  But the main character, Rydra Wong, a famous and beautiful woman poet, seems a throwback to the Veronica Lakes of the 1940s.  She is exotic, immediately attractive to every man who sees her, a brilliant linguist, a mind reader, and Asian.  In other words, she is a stereotype. Delaney portrays the future as diversely multicultural, yet various ethnic groups still retain stereotypical characteristics associated with them today.  Economic and social class issues remain as well.  The crew of the starship commanded by Ryla includes a group of middle and lower-class individuals who talk as if they are secondary characters from a World War II platoon film.

Babel 17 is the language of a group of aliens who are invading the world.  Ryla is tasked with interpreting it.  As she comes to understand it, she finds her thoughts and abilities changing.  As it turns out, the invaders developed the language to be able to control the thoughts and actions of those who learn it. Delaney dramatizes in the novel a theory of linguistics, the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” which holds that language and the structures of the brain are related, and that learning to speak a new language affects how one thinks.  This idea was later applied in the film Arrival and the story on which it was based, “The Story of Your Life,” by Ted Chiang.

Much about this novel that would have seemed revolutionary at the time of its publication now comes across as anachronistically outmoded (computer programming cards, for instance).  Its vision of a world in which gender and social codes and behaviors have evolved beyond recognition is compelling.  But the anachronistic elements detract, and a degree of tabloid pulpiness does not help either.

In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote

Reading In Cold Blood (1965) for the second time, after first reading it more than fifty years ago, was an exploration in memory.  What did I recognize of the book as I originally read it? What kind of book was it for me then, and what kind of book does it seem now?

In 1965 the book was a crime story, and its interest for me lay in the murders, who committed them, how they were committed, the hunt for the suspects, the trial, and the executions.  Now it seems much more.  What I discovered on the second reading was the dysfunctionality of the Clutter family.  On the surface, they seem a paragon of Americana perfection.  Successful, wealthy, vital.  The 16-year-old daughter Nancy is president of her high school class, an academic achiever, a friend to everyone.  Her brother seems headed towards being an engineer, though his father hopes he will take over the farm.  The father is a paragon of civic virtues—pious, respected, a leader.  But cracks in the family reputation are evident.  The mother suffers from an emotional disorder that keeps her either hospitalized or cowering in her bedroom.  She and her husband sleep apart.  The man himself rules the house with a subtly iron fist.  The son is quiet and reticent.  Nancy’s future is so socially preordained that the idea of choosing to do anything other than marry and become a housewife and mother doesn’t even occur to her, or to anyone else. The Clutters are both admired and resented in the town.  The town itself, Holcomb, Kansas, is an enclave (like most of the state) of conservative Republican Protestantism.  As soon as news of the Clutter murders comes out, carping, quibbling, suspicions spread.

Capote makes the Clutters, and their town of Holcomb, a kind of American ideal by describing them more as types than as distinctive places.  The town is like every other small Midwestern town.  Sometimes his characterizations seem on the verge of becoming sneers, but rarely does he cross the line.  One suspects the sneer mainly because we know that the celebrity Capote was noted for sneers and sarcasms.  Here his observations are more earnest and deadpan. He has an eye for precise detail, for the visual nuances, that turn Holcomb into an American microcosm.  He is great at replicating human character through speech, and at rendering minor characters as vividly as he does the principals.  Yet much of the speech, the dialogue, he presents he could not have heard firsthand—some of it is based on interviews and courtroom testimony.  Some of it may have been speech he invented, imaginatively recreating the realities he was not present to witness for himself. Harper Lee assisted him in research for the book. She gave him (according to some accounts) an entrée into the town and was probably a more social person whom the townspeople felt comfortable with, whom they were willing to talk to.  The book gives little evidence of her presence or contribution.

Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin

The prose in James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953) is like crystal. It works with force, clarity, and evocativeness. Baldwin writes with control and authority.  His prose serves the narrative without calling attention to itself. It’s the story he’s after.

For Baldwin, family, religion, race, and place make a human being, and that process of making is always in motion, from childhood to maturity.  Every child rebels against his parents, his abusive father, his overbearing or overly affectionate mother, the sisters who resent him or urge him on, the children who disappoint or rebuke him.

The narrative moves back and forth in time, tracing the development of characters and relationships, spanning the early years of the 20^th century up through what I would guess are the 1940s.  At the novel’s center are Gabriel, a preacher, and his adopted son John.  The relationship between these two is replete with tension.  Gabriel resents his son for not being of his own blood, for being the product of what he regards as his wife’s sinful relationship with an unmarried man. His own son Roy died from a knife wound.  John does not understand his father’s hostility. The struggle between father and son, Baldwin suggests, is a powerful factor in character development.  The dominance of men, often brutal or violent, is a major factor in the development of women, who have their own ways of dealing with, navigating through, the men who oppress them. Although Gabriel and John are the main focus, the novel devotes significant attention to Elizabeth (John’s mother and Gabriel’s second wife), Florence (Gabriel’s sister, and John’s aunt), and Deborah (John’s first wife).  A confrontation between Gabriel and Florence helps bring the novel to its end.

Baldwin portrays religion as a sustaining and oppressive force.  It’s inescapable.  Being born again is the central moment in both Gabriel and John’s lives.  In both cases redemption is more a means to an end than the end itself. For Gabriel, it becomes a camouflage that hides his own sins and failures.  For John, though it provides a certain immediate relief, it does not solve his problems with his father.  Of all his family members, his father is the one person who does not rejoice when Gabriel is redeemed. Religion provides the underlying definitions and framework of human life, even while it is something to resist and break free from. In James Wright’s stories and in Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), religion is an oppressive force to be rebelled against and cast off. In this early Baldwin novel, it is a powerful social expectation, a sustaining and oppressing medium through which one must struggle.

I listened to an audio recording of this novel.  Audio recordings work for many books, but not this one.  The reader’s voice brimmed with fatalism, seriousness, and doom.  The tone of voice defined the novel for me as much as the events and words of the novel itself. The voice of the narrator became an obstacle.