Pneumoniacal Literature

I am just now emerging from a miasmic cloud of suffocating ague. Or, put less baroquely, I am a couple days into recovering from a two-week bout of pneumonia. I’ve had pneumonia more times than I’m able to count—or perhaps it’s more a case of not wanting to remember—due to a rare esophageal disease I have, and… do you really want to hear this? The tl;dr is that I get aspiration (as opposed to bacterial) pneumonia, which occurs when particulate matter—in this case, undigested food: yum—is inhaled into my lungs. It’s disgusting and painful.
But, and this is a “but” that doesn’t make the illness worth it yet can be a sort of salve, I was able to read a lot over the past fortnight. Most of it was via the public library-app Libby, then via the Kindle app on my iPad¹. Libby lets one download up to 30 books at a time. I am currently at 27. Some of them I’ve read in their entirety. Some I’m partway through. Others I abandoned after a matter of pages. What I remember of the peak of this bout of illness, though, when things were particularly gauzy and bewildering, is shuffling through these various books—various worlds, really—while I drifted in and out of ZzzQuil-assisted sleep. The characters and settings of what I’d been reading entered my dreams in frightening ways (I know this because I often woke up with a start and a gasp) but not in any memorable images or narratives. I just know that I was dreaming inside these books that I was reading, and that generally the dreams were… not cool.

Anyway, the book that most impacted me during this interlude was, I think, this one:

The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard

I consider myself deficient in Ballard, and that brings me shame because each time I have read him (Crash, High-Rise, The Drowned World, Atrocity Exhibition, and Kingdom Come—which I reviewed for The Comics Journal in 2012), I have been entranced, moved, and inspired. This was my first look at his short stories, which has only increased my admiration for him—and that’s after reading just a small fraction of the collection. I count 98 stories spanning more than 1,000 pages here. I have read nine of them. I’ve enjoyed them so much that I bought a physical copy of the book. For a book I really love, digital won’t cut it. Two stories that stood out to me and which feel related are “Prima Belladonna,” the first piece in the collection and so, I am assuming, his first published story, and “The Sound-Sweep.” Both are concerned with sound and its capability to overwhelm us, especially in contemporary life.
“Prima Belladonna” is pure magic. It sets up and maintains a world filled with strange details by treating those details as simple facts. No explanations, really, for plants that sing, for example. In this story, the narrator, who operates a store (Parker’s Choro-Flora) that sells, yes, singing plants, meets a singer named Jane Ciracylides. This all takes place during a thing called the “Recess,” which is referred to a couple times in passing but which seems to be a worldwide pause on effort and events. Ballard calls it a “slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years… ”
I want to see and hear the plants in this story. There’s the Khan-Arachnid orchid, which has a range of twenty-four octaves. There’s the Sumatra Samphie, a mezzo-soprano. There’s the Louisiana Lute Lily, which performs madrigals. You get the idea. Jane, we are told, is a sublime, otherworldly singer not unlike the aforementioned flowers. The plants and Jane have an instinctual, musical connection; at the same time, the narrator and Jane form a less ethereal, fleshier connection. The story plays out beautifully, both melancholy and uplifting.

There isn’t anything uplifting about “The Sound-Sweep.” A mute named Mangon (“man gone”?) works for the Metropolitan Sonic Disposal Service as a sound-sweep (“an outcast group of illiterates… and social cripples who lived in a chain of isolated shacks on the edge of an old explosives plant in the sand dunes to the north of the city which served as the sonic dump”), a Ballardian occupation if ever there was one), who is tasked with using a “sonovac” to clear the residue of sounds from public and private spaces alike. This is a world in which ultrasonic music has become dominant, its “frequencies so high they left no resonating residues.” This advance, coupled with the invention of short-playing records, which “condensed the 45 minutes of a Beethoven symphony to 20 seconds of playing time,” has rendered entire creative industries moot—most prominently, in this story, the performing arts, which are personified by Madame Gioconda, a former opera diva on the same level as Maria Callas; now a broken woman living in a derelict theater surrounded by the trappings of her former life as a star of the stage.
“The Sound-Sweep” admits that sound can be violence—which we know today, as anything from a stranger’s phone blasting TikTok videos on a city bus to a particularly shocking clap of thunder heard from the safety of bed can feel like an assault—but it also asks us what happens to a culture in the absence of sound, a world in which sound is treated as refuse or, as one character puts it: “Noise, noise, noise—the greatest single disease-vector of civilization.” This is one of the longer of Ballard’s early stories, broken up as it is into multiple parts, and it builds to a shattering, quiet climax.

I’ve got hundreds of pages to go in this book. I’m only up to 1960, and the final story was published in 1992. The law of averages dictates that there must be some stinkers—or at least snoozers—in here. Remains to be seen. As of right now, though, I’m optimistic.

A few of the other books I read, at least in part, while wallowing in pulmonary purgatory:

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm

In which Malcolm, with her usual surgical precision, almost scientific curiosity, and elegant language, looks at the myths and realities surrounding Plath, Hughes, and their marriage.

Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve: Self-Help Exercises for Anxiety, Depression, Trauma, and Autism by Stanley Rosenberg

Yes, I read things like this. I mean, I read The Body Keeps the Score, for Christ’s sake. This book was recommended to me at a party by a woman who seemed equal parts New Age-y and practical. A fellow rare disease sufferer, once we started commiserating over our memberships in this hidden society, she insisted I learn about the all-powerful vagus nerve. It’s a cranial nerve that travels from the brainstem to the chest and abdomen, and it regulates lots of visceral organs, and it’s named for the Latin vagus, which means “vagrant” or “wanderer,” which is kind of cool. So here I am, two chapters in, absentmindedly yearning for a miracle. Which I will not receive.

You Were Never Really Here by Jonathan Ames

The 2017 Lynne Ramsay movie starring Joaquin Phoenix as a hammer wielding, vengeance-seeking assassin was based on this very, very short novel. It’s dark. Pitch-black, really. The violence is compact and effective, and the psychological roots of the hero’s trauma are economically and believably cataloged. I read this in maybe two hours; I could have been held captive for two more.

A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames

After You Were Never Really Here, I turned to this one, which was recommended by my friend Nate. It’s the first in a growing series of detective novels based in today’s Los Angeles. When I saw that the male protagonist is named Happy Doll, I almost called it a day. I’m generally intolerant of cute names in literature, which is something that blocks my way into Thomas Pynchon (yet which, for some reason, doesn’t drive me away from Infinite Jest). So the nomenclature issue, plus a few clumsily rendered noir-ish gumshoe-isms in the first few paragraphs, turned me off. But I stuck it out, and within one more chapter I was good to go. A solid crime novel with shocking bits of action and genuine laughs. Also, as a transplant to L.A., something excites me about a writer tracing a character’s progress from this freeway to that freeway and me knowing exactly where he’s talking about. I don’t know why that gets me jazzed.

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

Written during the waning days of his life, which esophageal cancer, something I’ve convinced myself is in my future, ended in 2011, Mortality is not a book I’d recommend reading while wheezily wading through an internal pool of your own sputum, which is just what I was doing while getting through it. But Hitchens’s bravery—and admissions of the moments he felt fear—were ultimately bolstering and even encouraging. Especially moving were the scattered thoughts, almost epigrammatic in nature, that end the book once we’re past the point to which Hitchens had structured things while he was able. Still, give me a quick death—an aneurysm sounds alright—as opposed to a protracted case of trench warfare.

City of Dreams: A Novel by Don Winslow

First off, don’t include “A Novel” in the title of your novel. Anyway, this was cliché-ridden pap, the second part of a crime saga that manages to stereotype Irish, Italians, Mexicans, and even Rhode Island in unsurprising ways. Its twists and turns were not hard to forecast (“she’s going to die,” I thought, the moment a certain character was introduced) and its dialogue felt like a placeholder draft (the Italian characters, especially, speak as if written by someone who just discovered The Sopranos). All the foregoing having been said? I devoured this fucking thing like a starving paisan handed a greasy pile of gabagool.

Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Lethem

Lethem’s forthcoming book is a kaleidoscopic (I predict that word will get used a lot in the reviews) collection of vignettes that jump around in time, but remain in Brooklyn. I won’t say much here because he’s an upcoming guest on my podcast and because I think there still might be an embargo in place, but I will say it’s an impressive feat and an experiment that pays off. This one, of course, was not read via the Libby app; I gratefully received an advance copy from the publicist. Also, don’t accuse me of being okay with Lethem using “novel” in his novel’s title but not with Don Winslow doing it. If you can’t see the difference, spend a little time considering it.²

A closing note: Welcome back to the Apology Reviews Substack. It was a long break, and I apologize for that. Blame life, addiction, break-ups, poverty, illness both physical and mental, lassitude, and writer’s block. But I feel confident that a weekly missive is possible now. Mostly I’ll review some of what I’ve read in the previous week, though there will also be themed reviews and reviews of things that aren’t just books. Also, there will be guest contributors. Thank you for your patience. It means the world.

1. Though I am firmly a member of Generation X, this tech-confession feels hopelessly Boomer to me.

2. I’m sorry, really, for being stroppy. The steroids they have me on for the pneumonia are making me enraged.