The House of Blue Lights:Voices in the Wind Book

The book jacket quotations claim this to be "a work of outstanding originality and ambition…An avant-garde epic, the first I can think of since Ulysses" and "The remix the novel has been crying out for."

Among the many questions this book has left me with, perhaps the most pressing is this: What the hell were those reviewers thinking? This is a fairly straightforward narrative about the life, albeit a life that takes some unusual twists, of a rather dull protagonist. Serge is dull in the sense that modern man is dull: he is, to paraphrase Thoreau, never "quite awake." There is no "originality" anywhere near akin to Ulysses, nor is McCarthy's prose a "remix" of any class. Apparently McCarthy did a wealth of research into WWI , deaf education, radio, Egyptian myth, and chemical compounds. However, I don't see how this makes for a groundbreaking, or even compelling, read. All it does is provide his dull character with a more historically accurate milieu. There is nothing "avant-garde" about it!

Because of the above-noted praise, I expected this to be more like reading Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. (Note: there is an author whose wealth of research actually tied into the plot/theme/essence of his book.) Perhaps it is due to that presupposition that I could find some similarities between Serge Carrefax and Tyrone Slothrop. Both bumble through a World War; both have meaningless sexual liaisons; both indulge in narcotics; both end up on a ship in some way connected to Egyptian mythology; both characters' minds completely and terminally dissipate; and Slothrop embodies his namesake-anagram "sloth or entropy" while Serge constantly battles with a "restlessness, [which] he comes to realize, is in truth an attempt to achieve its opposite: stasis" (194). Is any of this intentional? I suppose there's no real way to tell, but I highly doubt it. Is any of this meaningful? Also very doubtful, yet it does bring light to the fact that if you are looking for something, you are bound to find some traces of it.

That brings me to my next point: the confusing yet captivating, curt yet compelling title. So many of the recurrent motifs of the novel start with or contain the letter "C": communication, chemicals, crypts, codes, copper, contraptions, eleCtricity, inseCts, meChaniCs, and, of course "Carbon: the basic element of life" (292). However, title the book ANY other single letter (except maybe "x"), and I'm sure my mind would be focused on identifying words/motifs that begin with that letter. Again, then, we have an example of the reader having complete control of how to gather meaning from the book. Is this the "avant-garde" nature of the novel? The book itself deals repeatedly with how perception shapes reality and the caul through which we see the world; however, I still think this is a complete stretch! While so much of literary criticism IS based on "bolstered support" (b.s.), there has to be a more concrete, tangible well of evidence within the novel. It is the writer's job to fill this well and, through his work, develop the salient pools of interpretation. Blah! I'm thinking too much about how this damn book doesn't provide enough direction for any coherent, meaningful thought. Under-developed theme=lazy writing.

Much of my CritiCism has so far been hurled at the message and style of the book. On a strictly plot basis, the first 75 pages were abysmally boring. This revulsion is even more poignant when you realize that this was not even endured because it was necessary groundwork that would be important later. Nope. The next four sections each jump to a completely new chapter of Serge's life and can stand, for the most part, independent of one another. At least, though, the rest of the book was an interesting enough story, especially when you read it just for what it is: a creative story about the life of 20th century character, NOT a literary feat that stylistically approaches Ulysses or thematically contains the depth and number of levels of Gravity's Rainbow.

It's a deCent book.