Elementary, my dear Borges

Over the holidays, my dad and I went to see Sherlock Holmes--we have kind of a tradition of going to blockbuster movies together, generally because I am more persuadable/tractable than my mother is. Sometimes these movies are lots of fun (Iron Man); sometimes they're dreadful (Star Wars: Phantom Menace).

Sherlock Holmes falls somewhere in the middle. Robert Downey Jr. is always fun to watch, and none of it is on a Phantom Menace level of awfulness, but I still wouldn't really call it a good movie. For one thing, the plot is needlessly convoluted, and seems even more hokum-y than the typical Hollywood action film. The story has Holmes trying to prevent the evil Lord Blackwood and his mystical secret society from taking over the world--so basically, it's a Dan Brown ripoff.

But it also seems to have ripped off Jorge Luis Borges...

Spoilers ahead for Sherlock Holmes and Borges' story "Death and the Compass."

Sherlock Holmes has a Connect the Deaths plot: Holmes cracks the case when he realizes that three crimes committed by Blackwood follow a pattern, related to the occult symbols of the secret society. And because this society reveres the number 4, Holmes realizes that a fourth crime must take place and complete the pattern. He plots the locations of the three crimes on a map of London and sees that they form a nicely shaped triangle, which enables him to deduce the location of the fourth crime--English Parliament! Armed with this knowledge, Holmes races over to Parliament and save the day.

But as soon as I saw Holmes and his marked-up map, I couldn't help but think of Borges' short story "Death and the Compass," which revolves around the same kind of map. A famous detective named Lonnröt investigates a series of murders that seem to follow a mystical/occult pattern: in this case, they revolve around the four letters of the Jewish name of God, YHWH. When three murders have taken place, Lonnröt plots their locations on a map and deduces where the fourth murder is due to occur.

There's an extra twist to "Death and the Compass," though, which Sherlock Holmes lacks. At the end of the story, we learn that the villain had staged these murders specifically in order to trap Lonnröt, and that he will be the fourth victim. It's a cautionary tale, in other words: Lonnröt thinks he has it all figured out, but really he's been set up. His intelligence, his arrogance, will be what kills him.

Sherlock Holmes lacks this twist, and because of that, the story makes no sense when you stop to think about it. We learn at the end of the movie that Blackwood didn't even believe in the occult at all--he just knew that he could exploit people's fear of it in order to seem more powerful and terrifying. So, if he knew that his crimes had nothing to do with supernatural forces, why did he feel compelled to commit them according to an occult pattern? After all, because he followed a pattern, Holmes was able to figure him out and foil his plans! But if he had just committed crimes randomly, Holmes would have been stymied and Blackwood would have easily triumphed!

Furthermore, Holmes appears to be the only person in the entire movie who figures out that the crimes were based on occult symbols. So if Blackwood was trying to terrorize the citizens of London by making them think that supernatural forces were at work, he's failed at that, too... And, while Blackwood wants to get rid of Holmes, he doesn't seem to have figured out that he can use Borges' method and trap the detective in his own logic.

This made me realize that Borges' twist isn't a cheap trick: it's really the only logical way to resolve the plot. But as it stands, Blackwood is just a sorry excuse for a villain!

The Real Mystery of "The Maltese Falcon"

(Note: this post contains spoilers about the novel The Maltese Falcon as well as oversimplification of its complex plot.)

Last night I finished rereading The Maltese Falcon, my "welcome to San Francisco" book. I first read it in high school, for a course about detective fiction through the ages. I remember coming into class where everyone was buzzing about the twist ending: "The falcon was a fake all along!"

"Yeah," I said, "but didn't you notice the other twist?"

"What?"

"Rhea and Wilmer are the same person!"

But no one else had picked up on what I thought was the most subtle and fascinating element of The Maltese Falcon. I wrote an essay about it, and ended up submitting it with a few college applications that wanted to see one of my academic papers. (My teacher explained that everyone thinks they know The Maltese Falcon from seeing the movie, so they'll be blown away by a paper that tells them they have it all wrong. Also, a student who writes about a pulp detective novel will stand out from the multitudes who write about Of Mice and Men or The Great Gatsby.) Sometimes, I credit this paper with getting me into Vassar.

Let me explain my theory. OK, the basic plot of The Maltese Falcon has detective Sam Spade agreeing to help some shady characters get their hands on a valuable statuette, in exchange for a cut of the profits. The criminals are:

• Gutman, a jovial fat man, ringleader of the gang
  
• Joel Cairo, an effeminate homosexual Greek man
• Brigid O'Shaughnessy, beautiful femme fatale
• Wilmer Cook, surly boy (18-20 years old?), handy with a gun

At one point, these characters send Spade on a wild-goose-chase: they tell him that Brigid is in Gutman's hotel room, but when Spade gets there, all he finds is Gutman's daughter Rhea, who has been drugged with knock-out drops, and has been poking herself in the stomach with a pin to keep herself awake so she can tell Spade where the others have gone. This is a really bizarre scene: Rhea never appears elsewhere in the novel, so it's hard to know what to think of her. Why is she living with her criminal father? What does she do while he chases treasure around the world? Why does Gutman never mention her? Even more bizarre, after Spade puts Rhea to bed, he phones a hospital and lets them know that there's a drugged girl in Gutman's suite. Later, he learns that when the doctors arrived, "there was nobody there." Weird!

Indeed, the character of Rhea raises so many problematic questions that the movie version tinkered with the plot and eliminated her entirely.

When Spade catches up with the criminals, he tells Gutman "That daughter of yours has a nice belly...too nice to be scratched up with pins." Gutman says nothing. But Wilmer steps forward and raises his gun: "Everyone in the room looked at him. In the dissimilar eyes with which Brigid O'Shaughnessy and Joel Cairo looked at him there was, oddly, something identically reproving. The boy blushed, drew back his advanced foot, straightened his legs, lowered the pistol and stood as he had stood before, looking under lashes that hid his eyes at Spade's chest. The blush was pale enough, and lasted for only an instant, but it was startling on his face that habitually was so cold and composed."

As soon as I read that passage, I felt certain that Wilmer was Rhea in disguise. Why else would he/she react so violently? Why else would there be such an odd look of reproach from Brigid and Joel? Why else would Wilmer blush? I started looking for other clues that supported my theory.

The physical appearance of the two characters is similar. Wilmer is "an undersized youth," Rhea is "a small girl." There are many references to Wilmer's cold white complexion, and Rhea has a "face that was white and dim." Wilmer has hazel eyes, Rhea has golden-brown eyes. Also, though Wilmer talks tough and packs heat, his "long curling eyelashes" are feminine. And he is always described as having a "composed," "low," "flat" voice--the voice that a girl would need to adopt if she was disguising herself as a man. (This is why I assume it's Rhea in disguise as Wilmer and not the other way around. It's easier for a girl to look like a young man in coat and cap, than for a boy to look convincingly like a beautiful young woman in satin pajamas.)

Then there is the odd doubling where Spade easily lifts and carries both Rhea and Wilmer at different moments. When Rhea falls asleep after being drugged, "Spade caught her up in his arms—scooped her up as she sank—and [held] her easily against his chest." Later, after Spade knocks Wilmer out in a fight, "He put his right arm under the boy’s arm and around his back, lifted him without apparent effort, and carried him to the sofa."

Furthermore, when Spade tries to carry Rhea to her bedroom, he first opens the door of a room where "the clothing...and the things on the chiffonier said it was a man’s room”--so he turns around and finds a "room that was feminine in its accessories." Now, this does sound like Rhea and Wilmer are two different people with two separate bedrooms. But the very fact that Dashiell Hammett included this detail--if Spade had found Rhea's bedroom on the first try, the plot would not be affected--makes me think that something else is going on. Maybe Gutman planned ahead and put the two sets of clothing/toiletries in two different rooms on purpose. If a detective broke in and searched the hotel suite, for instance, he would be very confused to see one bedroom with both female and male clothing in it--but not if there were two separate bedrooms. Also, because Spade first carries Rhea into the male room, it seems to symbolize that she truly belongs there.

Now, the traditional interpretation of the character of Wilmer is that he is gay and possibly involved with Gutman. Spade contemptuously calls Wilmer a "gunsel," which sounds like it means "guy with a gun," but is actually an old term for the passive partner in a homosexual relationship. There's a long scene where Spade tries to persuade the criminals that they need "a fall-guy" and Wilmer is just the person for the job. Gutman protests--maybe it's because Wilmer is his young lover, but wouldn't it be even more powerful if Spade is threatening to send Gutman's own daughter, Rhea, to jail?

Gutman eventually gives in, but twice says he loves Wilmer like a son: "I'm sorry indeed to lose you, and I want you to know that I couldn't be any fonder of you if you were my own son; but--well, by Gad!--if you lose a son it's possible to get another--and there's only one Maltese falcon." Mightn't this be an attempt to say some final paternal words to Rhea, without revealing the true situation to Spade? The final chapters of The Maltese Falcon are tense and twisty without thinking that Rhea and Wilmer are the same person--but if you go back and reread them from this angle, they become even more interesting.

However, Spade's plan falls through, and we learn at the end that Wilmer has shot Gutman to death (presumably for trying to sell him out). So if you think that this is a disguised girl shooting her own father--why, it's positively Oedipal! (And as my teacher would be quick to remind me, Oedipus Rex is one of the first detective stories of Western literature.)

I enjoy thinking that Rhea, Gutman's pretty blonde daughter, dresses up like a tough boy and goes around cursing at people and threatening to shoot them. It gives the novel an ironic twist and adds to the theme of gender confusion (cf. Cairo's homosexuality, Spade's "boyish" but attractive secretary, etc.) Still, after rereading the novel, I'm not sure if this is "really" what Hammett intended--not sure if the time frames all work out correctly. For instance, in order to wake Rhea up in time to disguise herself as Wilmer, Gutman would need an antidote to the knock-out drops, and does that even exist?

So maybe there's no elaborate subterfuge of Rhea disguising herself as Wilmer. But you can't deny that Hammett sets up a doubling between the two characters--the daughter that Gutman ignores and the young man that he "loves like a son." Still, when Gutman says those words to Wilmer, there's an ominous chill to them. He may love the boy like a son, but we know that he has no compunctions about slipping his own daughter a Mickey Finn...

Image: Humphrey Bogart as Spade and Elisha Cook Jr. as Wilmer from the 1941 movie. Photo from filmsquish.com

"Yiddish Policemen's Union": No Kvetching Here

I've written before about my love for classy detective novels, so when The Yiddish Policemen's Union came out last year, I thought "I should check this out." And then a couple of months ago I read Kavalier & Clay and realized that Michael Chabon is awesome in general, making Yiddish Policemen's a must-read.


The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a classic hardboiled mystery in an inspired alternate-history setting. We learn on Page 1 that a man using the alias Emanuel Lasker has been shot dead in a fleabag hotel--but this hotel is in the Yiddish-speaking metropolis of Sitka, Alaska, which was granted to the Jews for 60 years following the failure of the state of Israel in 1948. Now it is 2007 and Sitka is about to return to American control, throwing its residents into a muddle. And when detective Meyer Landsman, already down-on-his-luck, tries to solve Lasker's murder, he runs up against a complex conspiracy involving some obscure corners of Jewish lore.

My half-Jewish mom informs me that landsman is the Yiddish word for "countryman, comrade," and Meyer Landsman is kind of an Everyman figure...at least, an Every-detective. Chabon has fun drawing parallels between secular Jews and noir detectives, both trying to do right in a world that lacks a Messiah or a moral compass. Though cynical and faithless, they persevere. They both use self-deprecating wisecracks as a kind of armor. And not only does Landsman have personal angst (a failed marriage), he also carries the angst of his entire race. When an Indian doctor criticizes his alcohol habit, Landsman retorts: "Tell me, please, if the country of India were being canceled, and in two months, along with everyone you loved, you were going to be tossed into the jaws of the wolf with nowhere to go and no one to give a fuck, and half the world had just spent the past thousand years trying to kill Hindus, don't you think you might take up drinking?"

As shown by its willingness to play with Jewish stereotypes, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is refreshingly irreverent. Everyone calls one another "yid," and the murdered man was a heroin addict who tied off with the cord from his tefillin. Yet at the same time, the novel explores issues of contemporary Jewish identity--ones that resonate in our own world and not just in alternate history. For instance: is Judaism religious, ethnic, or something else? Can secular Jews and orthodox Jews get along? What does it mean to belong to a group that defines itself by its exile? Can the Jews ever find a place to accept them? (In the novel, the colonizing Jews of Sitka end up in a rather Israel-and-Palestine situation with the native Alaskan tribes.)

But The Yiddish Policemen's Union is also a real page-turner, told in present tense so the events come even more vividly to life. Sitka and its residents are wonderfully imagined--in fact, I wanted to see more of some characters. For instance, the American reporter Dennis Brennan, who speaks a hilariously mangled version of Yiddish, appears in only one scene. Yiddish slang peppers the book; my copy (Harper Perennial, paperback) had a helpful mini-glossary at the end.

What I love most about Chabon's writing is what I'd call his thematically appropriate similes. Many writers fill their pages with flashy similes, but if anything can be compared to any other random thing, where is the resonance, where is the weight? (E.g., this bugged me about Marisha Pessl's writing in Special Topics in Calamity Physics. A simile like "Houses slumped against the smooth lawns like dozing elephants on ice rinks" feels forced and unnecessary.) Chabon, however, usually draws comparisons that enhance his novel's themes and concerns. Similes that could only fit The Yiddish Policemen's Union and would seem inappropriate in any other book. For instance, during a funeral sequence, the fir trees in the cemetery "sway like grieving Chassids," and the voice of blues singer Robert Johnson "sounds as broken and reedy as a Jew saying kaddish in the rain." Because in this scene, along with the fir trees and the blues music, there are also grieving Chassids saying kaddish in the rain. The similes add detail and emotional resonance--they are not merely flashy.

Or see this dazzling passage, describing Landsman's sister Naomi, a bush pilot:

The wings of an airplane are engaged in a constant battle with the air that envelops them, denting and baffling and warping it, bending and staving it off. Fighting it the way a salmon fights against the current of the river in which it's going to die. Like a salmon--that aquatic Zionist, forever dreaming of its fatal home--Naomi used up her strength and energy in every struggle.

So in three sentences, Chabon draws an intricate web of connections between Naomi's personality, what she does for a living (fly airplanes), the wildlife of the area where she lives (Alaskan salmon), and her religion (Judaism). Startlingly clever and illuminating.

The Coen Brothers are going to adapt Yiddish Policemen's Union as a movie, and I could not be happier. Is it a contradiction to say that the world of this book is sui generis and totally original; yet at the same time, it cries out to be a Coen film? It's noirish, it uses weird slang, it delights in language, it takes place in an odd corner of America, most of its roles are for "character actors," there's plenty of violence and dark humor and some seriously evil characters... all the typical Coen Brothers motifs. (And the brothers are Jewish, of course.) A Berkeley bookstore is having a "cast the Yiddish Policemen's movie contest" (scroll down)--I just might put together an entry!

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is now sitting comfortably on my shelf next to Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. It's just a coincidence due to alphabetical order. But it feels right.

Summer Reading: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Blue Van Meer's "self-portrait"--she's the "apologetically owl-like" girl with glasses. Image: USA Today

If not for the fact that the only books I read in hardcover are Harry Potter, I would have devoured Special Topics in Calamity Physics as soon as it came out last summer. My mom, after reading the back cover and the blurbs, said "This is the book you should have written," and I see what she meant (though I have no interest in writing novels). Calamity Physics got promoted as a brainy, erudite, mystery/coming-of-age novel narrated by a verbally dexterous teenage girl, and there are few things I like better than that. As I read the novel this month, I got a kick out of coincidental parallels between its heroine, Blue Van Meer, and myself. Blue's birthday, 6/18/87, is less than a month away from mine. And she, precocious thing, is 16 years old throughout her senior year of high school, just as I was. It's weird--it even makes me feel a little old--to read a book where the main character is from my generation, born the same year as me, her life overlapping mine in a way. (Then again, it also makes me feel old to realize I'm six years older than Juliet, two years older than Jane Eyre, and the same age as Elizabeth Bennet.) Also, author Marisha Pessl's first name is just one letter away from mine--and "Marissa" (or "Marisha"?) comes from Latin for "of the sea," and "Van Meer" means "of the sea" in German. Coincidence? I think not.

Most importantly, Blue is a girl after my own heart. As the sexy Latino gardener Andreo Verduga might say behind Blue's back, she is one hell of a marisabidilla. A sixteen-year-old who's read the whole Western Canon, plus innumerable detective novels, self-help books, and Hollywood memoirs, she has a citation for every situation and a simile for every smile. She's an outsider, more an observer than a participant (like all great detective characters), her little-brown-mouse social awkwardness mixed with a feeling of superiority toward most of the people she encounters. I'll admit that her voice can get tiresome--too keen to show off her smarts, and too scornful of the everyday middle-Americans she meets traveling around the country with her brilliant Dad. Sentences like "The restaurant with its shines and clinks, its fanned napkins and resplendent forks (in which you could identify microscopic things lodged in your teeth), its dowager duchess hanging there, desperate to be let down to go dance a quadrille with an eligible man of society-it all felt indifferent and damned, hopeless as a Hemingway short story teeming with mean conversations, hopes lost between their bullet point words, voices voluptuous as rulers" (183) are a little dense, don't you agree?

Indeed, Special Topics in Calamity Physics takes a bit long to get going, as Blue tells how she got inducted into the exclusive clique the Bluebloods--five high school seniors and their charismatic Film teacher, Hannah Schneider. This is standard prep-school stuff, even if vividly described, and the Bluebloods' characterizations are not deepened enough. Fortunately, Weird Stuff starts happening a bit later. Page 1 offers the instant hook that Blue discovered Hannah dead, hanged by an electrical cord deep in the woods. There's also a mysterious drowning, Hannah's bizarre one-night stands, etc. A Gothic tone takes hold, and after Hannah's death, the book becomes a real page-turner. I actually dreamed about it last night because it excited me so much--that never happens to me! Its most delightful surprise is that beneath the incredibly clever, verbose language lies an incredibly clever, well-formed plot.

Marisha Pessl has stated in interviews that her favorite author is Nabokov, and reviews have compared Calamity Physics to Lolita or Ada, but I think that's a little hyped up. Lolita (the only Nabokov novel I've read) is full of wordplay and allusion, but less showoffy, less interrupted by its own cleverness. I also wouldn't count Calamity Physics as a book that truly, deeply reveals the joy of reading and learning--Pessl's allusions act as a kind of shorthand, rather than offering new insights into her sources. It's not like Arcadia or Possession, where two characters can have a brilliant literary/intellectual discussion that also is loaded with subtextual emotions. No, for me Calamity Physics is more like The Shadow of the Wind--another classy, page-turning mystery novel that gets promoted as more intellectual than it is.

Am I quibbling too much? Really, I genuinely loved most of Calamity Physics, enjoying the similes and literary references that weren't too far-fetched, as well as Blue's attempts to fit in and her amateur sleuthing. And the twist is so good that it virtually requires a re-reading! If you're wondering whether to read this book, check out pages 56 and 57, which is what completely won me over: a scene where Hannah introduces herself to Blue and her dad by announcing, "Humphrey Bogart wore platform shoes throughout the filming of Casablanca." If this appeals at all to your sense of humor and style, buy it!

I'll admit, I love detective and mystery novels--thanks to a course at my own eccentric private high school. (Our schools are another similarity between me and Blue. At mine, after sophomore year, English classes were not general survey courses, but focused "electives," like in college. One topic was even Film--the same class that Hannah Schneider teaches. I've never heard of Film being taught at any other high school.) Before I took "The Detective in Literature," I had a snobbery toward detective novels, "genre" fiction. But this class turned me on to the prose stylings of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Inspired me to read Borges. Made me laugh, then made me think, about the thesis that Oedipus Rex is just a detective story. Most importantly, I was taught that I could be a snob about detective fiction as well--by touting "metaphysical" detective stories over "epistemological" ones. Basically, an epistemological detective story = a whodunit, animated by the question of who committed a crime, and why. Think Conan Doyle, Christie, the noir detectives--you're never in doubt that a crime has taken place and that the detective will solve it by the end. The metaphysical detective story twists this formula, leaves the plot open-ended, pokes fun at the idea that life ties up neatly and all mysteries get solved. Maybe the detective completely misreads the evidence (The Name of the Rose). Maybe a crime wasn't actually committed (In the Lake of the Woods). The theme becomes we can never really know anyone or anything.

And Calamity Physics is a metaphysical detective novel par excellence. For me, it was most reminiscent of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, which I read in my high school class. *SPOILERS* Both novels feature a woman finding more and more evidence for a huge, shadowy conspiracy, but in the end, not knowing whether her conclusions are true, whether someone is playing an elaborate joke on her, or whether she's imagined the whole thing. (And stylistically, both novels employ lots of extended metaphors that can be exhausting to decipher.) Special Topics in Calamity Physics derives its literary excellence not from its incessant allusion-making, but from its plot that simultaneously ties everything up, pulls the rug out from under you, and leaves everything open. That's the thing about a marisabidilla. She can think she knows it all, then learn that she doesn't know a thing. Or, she can really know the truth, but not be able to tell or convince anyone of it. Either way, it's a lonely world.