Girl with Curious Hair (an in-depth review)
This isn’t a new review, though it is making its Substack debut. It was originally posted to my old Goodreads profile November 11, 2014. I hope you enjoy it.
**
Expressionless Little Animals
"It's 1976. The sky is low and full of clouds. The gray clouds are bulbous and wrinkled and shiny. The sky looks cerebral. Under the sky is a field, in the wind. A pale highway runs beside the field. Lots of cars go by. One of the cars stops by the side of the highway. Two small children are brought out of the car by a young woman with a loose face. A man at the wheel of the car stares straight ahead. The children are silent and have very white skin. The woman carries a grocery bag full of something heavy. Her face hangs loose over the bag. She brings the bag and the white children to a wooden fencepost, by the field, by the highway. The children's hands, which are small, are placed on the wooden post. The woman tells the children to touch the post until the car returns. She gets in the car and the car leaves. There is a cow in the field near the fence. The children touch the post. The wind blows. Lots of cars go by. They stay that way all day."
A haunting story as life-partners, Faye Goddard and Julie Smith, struggle with one'e identity, the pursuit/importance of knowledge, growing up in less than pleasant circumstances, and addiction.
Wallace seems to be saying a lot about knowledge. Particularly in light of his straight A student status throughout high school.
"I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today," he once said, "of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it."
5 stars
Luckily The Account Representative Knew CPR
I thought I had a pretty clear sense of his style. Alas, I was pleasantly mistaken, as evidenced below:
"Each received, to the varying degrees their respective pains allowed, an intuition of the askew as, in the neatly stacked slices of lit space between the executive and the distant lament of a custodian's vacuum, the Building's very silence took on expression: they sensed, almost spinally, the slow release of great breath, a spatial sigh, a slightly sly movement of huge lids cracked in wakened affinity with the emptiness that was, after all, the reasonable executive realizes, half the Building's total day..
The prose is unnecessarily verbose, it's practically painful to read in fact, but at the same time it's genius in its beauty and scope. It's also quite succinct. The parallels drawn here, and in Little Expressionless Animals, fascinates me. But I digress.. There are elements here that are vague, while at others (sometimes simultaneously) incredibly lucid. Clever, imaginative, thought provoking and creative. To put it simply, it's everything that the former isn't.
4.25 stars
Girl With Curious Hair
I'd heard about the humor that's often staple of DFW's work, but in every sense of the word, I truly couldn't have prepared myself for his unparalleled sense of humor, which borders on hilarious and absurd. Beneath the comic relief, however, are glimpses of mind-numbing horror and violence. The subject matter is frankly, disturbing, sadistic and ultimately "entertaining." Which brings me to my next point: said violence and escalating nihilism of the world was obviously a concern of Wallace's when he wrote this, and I think it's more relevant than ever before. In many ways, the title story reminds me of the 1990's cult classic, Natural Born Killers.
Ahh, the addictiveness of violence..
There is much more to this rare gem that I simply won't go into, its execution phenomenal, that I can give it nothing less than 5 stars!
Lyndon
"Right and wrong ain't words...They're feelings. In your guts and intestines and such. Not words. Not songs with guitars. They're what make you feel like you do. They're inside you. Your heart and digestion. Like the folks you personally love."
This is a complex story about sacrifice, the meaning of right and wrong (it's all relative, isn't it?,) politics and the Vietnam War. Wallace also explores hetero/homosexuality, and it's done in such a way as to be completely unbiased. There's a certain dignity to both lifestyles which suggests an equality there. Like Little Expressionless Animals, I'm taken aback by its beauty. And this is coming from someone that doesn't really believe in homosexuality, mind you. I think that highly of these stories!
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Between the Words to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.