Mazes and Monsters

Mazes and Monsters by Rona Jaffe, 329 pages

They are four very different people.  Jay Jay is an eccentric child prodigy with wealthy parents who dreams of becoming an actor.  Daniel is a computer genius who is, contrary to stereotype, exceedingly handsome and successful with women.  Kate is an aspiring writer whose father traded in her mother for a younger model.  Robbie should be so lucky - his parents never stop fighting, and the older brother he idolized ran away from home years ago and hasn't been heard from since.  They all have a couple of things in common - they are all undergraduates at Grant University, and they all share a passion for the role-playing game Mazes and Monsters.  In the game, they can be whatever they want to be: popular, a hero, a fighter, a savior.  For one of them, however, the game will slowly take over his life, and what he thought was an innocent escape will turn into a nightmare he cannot escape.

When it is remembered at all, Mazes and Monsters is remembered today as part of the '80s Satanic panic and for its TV movie adaptation starring a young Tom Hanks (as well as Wendy Crewson, who went straight from it to Skullduggery), making it the equivalent of Reefer Madness for gamers.  Not that there's any Satanism in Mazes and Monsters - Jaffe is far too sophisticated to worry about such things.  Her focus is on the psychodramatic dimension, connecting the players' invention of their characters to their self-invention in college, their confrontations with fictional monsters to their struggles with the burdens of social and parental expectations.  

The book would be more interesting if it was a lurid tale about a diabolical game that seduces players and drives them mad - as it is, Jaffe ultimately blames no one and nothing for what happens.  The kind of irony and insight Judith Rossner used to examine the New York singles scene and connect it to larger social trends in Looking for Mr Goodbar is entirely absent here - not that Jaffe falls short, but that she doesn't even try.  Young people will go to college, it seems, and some will be exceptional but most of them will be ordinary, there they will study, party, and fall in and out of love, most of them will move on to dull futures, others will have bright futures, and some will simply fall apart entirely, more frequently into drugs and sex than into fantasy role-playing games, but that's just the way it is.  Not only does the book avoid both social commentary and exploitative chills and thrills, it also avoids any kind of subtlety.  Jaffe continually drops large paragraphs of exposition detailing personal histories and explaining precisely how a character feels, the dialogue often serving merely to link one expository paragraph to another.  Mazes and Monsters may be "a far-out game," as one character famously puts it, but Mazes and Monsters is a bland, pointless waste of time.

Against the Grain

A Rebours (Against the Grain) by JK Huysmans, 339 pages

Against the Grain is not the story as much as the description of the retreat of the misanthrope Jean des Esseintes into aesthetic seclusion, to live in a world entirely of his own imagination.  The exquisite taste of des Esseintes scorns the vulgarity of fin-de-siecle Paris, "the Caliphate of the counting-house", demanding that everything be custom-tailored to his exacting specifications, his rooms decorated in carefully selected shades of blue and yellow so as to appear their best in candlelight, mechanisms installed with which he is able to precisely reproduce any taste or scent he desires, books collected combining the late antique Latin authors with the best poets and novelists of his own era, the detritus of a lost world spiced with a hint of degeneracy and decay.  Ultimately, inevitably, his self-indulgent solitude collapses into illness and madness. 

A Rebours is the greatest Decadent novel, although it is not Huysman's best - En Route and even La Bas are superior.  It stands at the limits of nineteenth century French realism, and at the threshold of something ever ancient, ever new.

Mosquito Coast

The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux, 374 pages

It is the early '80s, and America is falling apart, drowning in the garbage of its consumerist excess, splitting apart along racial and class lines, sweating in terror of an implacable enemy.  Allie Fox sees this, even if no one else does, and transplants his family from rural Massachusetts to the Honduran jungle, seeking a fresh start and a better way.  Brilliant and fiercely determined, nothing will stop Allie from building his version of heaven or hell.

Teenaged Charlie Fox suffers being the focus of his father's attempts to force human nature to conform to his will.  As the narrator, he shares with us his struggle to find sanity in a world ruled by madness.

An uncomfortable, haunting tale.

Madness, Rack, & Honey

Madness, rack, and honey : collected lectures. Mary Ruefle. 326 pages.

 

 

      The title of this book caught my eye when I was looking up lists of poetry books on Goodreads. The book turned out to be something I want to have in my own personal library at home.  Mary Ruefle is an accomplished American poet who teaches and is sometimes required to give lectures although she dislikes public speaking.  Her solution to this problem is to read these lectures straight off the page. 

       The most surprising thing about this book is that while it concerns itself with poetry, it isn't always about poetry. It is a book that is about the creative mind of ideas, notions, ways to think about poetry, writing, living.  It is not another dry instructional book about how to write poetry, which is a gift to a world over saturated with such things.  Read it. Lovely in ways I have a hard time trying to describe.