Seattlest Book Club: "In My Beginning Is My End..."

9/11: was it a tornado or an earthquake? I think that fight is still going on in some circles. In the end, the 9/11 commission report seems to have said it was a something like a tornado in which nobody heard the warnings. In effect, an earthquake, as you say Jonathan. And I think the reason we live in such a queasy state, in part, is that we believe that there will once again be these warnings available if we could just hear them. If we were convinced that the next terrorist attack is completely unpredictable, we'd forget about it, just as most of us don't fret too much about the next big earthquake.

Part of what makes Short Cuts so great is that, although it's faithful to Carver, it is also its own creation. In Carver's stories, these big catastrophes are always under the surface; they are metaphorical. The death of the young boy in A Good, Small Thing is a metaphor for something terrible happening in the entire town, and I think Altmann, like Raban, just takes this metaphor a little farther, into the global arena of internet politics and writing.

I'm fascinated by David F's comment above. I haven't seen Short Cuts, but I cheer every word of Altman's response to Gallagher.

I don't know how (or if) this applies to the movie, but in "Surveillance" the earthquake is only going to work for the reader if it's seen in metaphorical as well as literal terms. If it were just a random geological event, suddenly intervening in the lives of the characters, then I'd be with the Amazonians. But it's not.

All through the book, people have been living with a fear of imminent, unforecastable calamity. Tad and Augie, who agree on nothing else, are agreed that the whole fabric of American democracy is in danger of collapse. Augie sees that a major terrorist attack could easily lead the administration, Congress, and the American people into demolishing their own political system out of panic (and I'm with Augie on this one.)

That sense of imminence is brought to a head in the final chapter, where America at large (if you read the book as I tried, at least, to write it) is trembling on the brink of a much larger disaster than that of a mere localized temblor.

The repetition of details from the beginning (falling glass and masonry, burst water main, sirens, panic, etc, etc) serve to equate the quake with a terrorist attack, at least I hope it does. Earthquakes, like al-Qaeda strikes, come out of the blue without warning--unlike Seth's Omaha tornados, which usually, though not always, arrive preceded by tornado watches. 9/11 was the great American earthquake of our time, shaking the political system to its roots and beyond: the ending of Surveillance is meant as both a literal and metaphorical statement of where we now stand--precariously, on the brink...

Back to Altman. If you read the last chapter of the book on its own, out of context, it's just a slap in the reader's face, but if you read the book as a whole, with an ear for its metaphoric resonance, then I hope you'll see that it is as necessary and conclusive an ending as the novel could reasonably have.

Now I have to get the DVD of Short Cuts.

I find Surveillance cinematic in many ways (I'd love to see it as a film--have the rights been sold?). Because of this, I'm reminded of the negative reaction that the earthquake at the end Altman's film of Ray Carver's stories, Short Cuts, received when it came out.

There was a fascinating discussion with Carver's widow, Tess Gallagher, and Robert Altman in the Times back then. She didn't like the earthquake at the end. hE SAID:

"I immediately went back and recut the picture, the ending of it. I felt I was doing the right thing. Then I had another screening, and it went flat, and I said it's got to go back. When I took it out, it didn't give the audience an out, a way out of the picture somehow. If you just looked at that one moment, Tess was right. I should have taken it out. But if you looked at the picture as a whole, I needed it."

I think Surveillance needs its earthquake as well. That, or a rain of frogs a la Magnolia. Heh.

Let me repost a paragraph that I wrote last Friday (below), which goes some way to answering the point raised by James via the Amazonians and the Newsday reviewer. These characters are not "run over by a truck". Rather, the situation in which they've been living through the book--a state of chronic jumpiness, mistrust, and apprehension--is made manifest in the ending. In Alida's words, "It seemed like...the whole country must be like this, caught in the grip of a delirious rippling and shuddering that wouldn't stop."

Here's the repost from last week:

I do, by the way, think some readers/reviewers have exaggerated the catastrophic element in the ending. Sure, the city's getting a good shaking (which is what it deserves), but it still stands, shivering on the brink, with everyone in the book alive and (so far as we know) well. 11-year-old Alida is in control, riding the quake, frightened (at the very end of that passage) but holding on. I sort of wanted to leave this shaking, troubled world in her competent hands. I trust her capacity to manage it, as I would not, for instance, trust either Augie or Tad.

Dunno how you can argue with an author for choosing to end his book a certain way. (Well, maybe an exception can be made for Huck Finn.)

The ending was very resonant for me, but then I grew up in and live in Seattle. *I* die at the end of that book. Hits home, you know?

If the book was about Omaha and the ending was a giant tornado, I can imagine being blase about it.

I don't buy at all the claim that Raban doesn't wrap things up; the earthquake is anticlimactic, so far as I can see. But the theme of surveillance -- as it's played out in various lives -- reaches a fever pitch about 2/3 of the way through, and then people start coming out of it, a bit (or more than a bit) disillusioned. Which is a perfectly good way of closing up shop. My sense is that people are complaining because their faith in authorial surveillance failed them -- it failed to deliver the tidy factual expose. Raban doesn't reveal himself as the person who knows "really" what happened/is going to happen. I personally liked the reminder of having that bit of cheese yanked away.