With this week, the book comes to an end and I can’t help but feel disappointed by the ending.  At some point a few years ago I realized that endings are often the worst part of a book.  Endings can’t ever do what the reader really hopes will happen, especially if the reader has a different idea of what the book is doing.  I must have had a very different idea of what this book was a bout because I left that last page with so many questions–questions that Levin clearly had no intention of answering.

Like what if the entire book from after Belt gets his cure until the very end is all in his head.  He is just crazy and none of these things happened.  There are no cures.  Everything that seems off about his world is because his perception is skewed.  He has the wrong date and perpetrator of 9/11.  He misunderstands The Matrix, he believes he was given hundreds of thousands of dollars from the creator of The Matrix.  His father is dating the mother of the wife of an author that he likes.  But really he’s just in Costello house imagining he’ll meet up with Lisette someday.

I don’t really think that’s what happened, but there’s so much left out after the ending, that I have to fill it in somehow.

I was particularly interested in this first section being called AOL.  There has been no real explicit nudge from the author that there is no internet in the book, but this title was clearly a wink at us.  Particularly since Belt doesn’t know what it stands for either.

But before we find out, Belt explains that it’s November 5, 2013.  He’s finished up the transcript, he has 350 pages of his memoir written and he wants to celebrate with someone.  He thought of all the people he could celebrate with.  Fon? (not a chance in hell); Denise? (he didn’t have her number); Lotta Hogg? (she was with Valentine);, his father? (at work); Burroughs? (it seemed wrong, somehow), Herb? (he didn’t want to seem like he was badgering Herb about Lisette); Eli Khong, his older editor at Darger? (in a 12-step program).  There was no one left.  He considered going to Arcades and buying (is that the verb?) a good prostitute.  But rather, he decided to buy a really good bottle of Scotch.

Last week everyone said how much they loved the names of the Scotch he buys: MacGuffin 12 and Glenfibbly 21.  This time the liquor store owner suggests a MacGuffin 18-Year-Old Sherry Cask (I have no idea what that means) which cost $293.  Its flavors: “honey and leather, then butter and apricots, and then, at last–and this was the best part–deep Robitussin cherry.”

He had also been spending more time with Blank lately.  But Blank was still off.  Belt was worried that he was boring his cure.  So he thought he’d buy a present for Blank.  He went to the new A(cute)rements Warehouse (formerly A(cute)rements PerFormulae/CureWear/ EmergeRig-vendor), a supermarket sized warehouse.

The place is abuzz with hostility because they don;t have enough Independence in.  When Belt tells the clerk that’s not what he;s there for, the clerk relaxes.  But they have no toys for cures, of course.  They mostly have things to hurt your cure with and lots of Formulae.  When he tells the clerk he wants to buy a present for his cure, the clerk says “That’s adorab–” but he is cut off because someone is furious hat they don;t have any Independence.  Belt says he didn’t see a sign saying so, and the clerk says its’ because his manager thought that people would come in an anger-shop.

Belt is surprised so many people want their cures to not need them.

But then the clerk mentions AOL.  Which, he explains, stands for Auto Over Load.  You give the Cure Independence and NeedyBuddy, put it in front of a mirror and it commits suicide.  The clerk is so excited for Belt to watch this–they have homemade clips of cures AOLing on a loop in the store.

Belt purchases a six month supply of pellets and a new PillowNest.  He has to watch some of the clips while he is online, although he can’t handle it (after all of that Fistful) and neither can I.  I did enjoy the young kids in the store arguing about what happens in the clips (and also the color coding of the items in the 75 cent bin).

When Belt gets home there is a package from Gus (whose full name is Gus Aronov-Katz [hey, maybe there is a connection to the bubblegum music after all]. It contains three handkerchiefs and a letter about his book.  I feel like Gus sums up my reaction to Bubblegum.

The most confused I got was at the end.  The end made me sad, and I do not know why, don’t know was I even supposed to be sad. Maybe it was just a personal reaction I had, specific to myself.

Belt put aside the letter and presented Blank and presented with the new PillowNest, which Blank was very excited about.  Until her sneezed green mucus and said merf.  Belt takes Blank to a vet (very few vets know how to tend to cures, obviously) and is convinced he has a Cure disease but that he can be fixed.  Even in this very sad scene there some amusement.  Like the cat magazine (Cats’n’Jamming Monthly), and the fact that Belt’s “T” looks like an “A” and the vet tech calls him “Bela.”

There’s also the woman with her exotic cats Cadman and Uk (I don’t get this joke).  She believes she should go before Belt to see Dr Kleinstadt (small town) who deals with exotic pets.  Her cats are, you see, Savannah, as in from Africa.  But nope, they are still just cats after all and she will be seeing Dr. Mills.

In the vet’s room, Belt stares at a poster of an Axolotl (which is neotonic).  The doctor had one a a patient named Ghostheim. Gave him the creeps.

The doctor says that few people know how to treat cures anymore, but he studied them.  And after a cursory exam, the doctor determines that Blank has cancer–probably from second hand smoke.  Ouch.

He also tells belt that pain singing is a misnomer.  They don’t sing when they are in pain, they sing when they are afraid.  Yikes!  Is it worse to get off on someone’s pain or someone’s fear?  Is there a difference?

And then the unthinkable and to me wholly unexpected event occurs: Kablankey dies.

The next section is called “Settlement” and it is mostly about Clyde.   First we learn that Grandmother Magnet has also died.  “(DUI, maple)” is simultaneously hilarious and insanely callous. Speaking of hilariously callous, it’s on page 695 in a footnote that we learn that Belt’s mother’s name was Annie.

Then we learn that Clyde had gotten into a terrible accident at work.  I can’t quite determine what an impeller does, but essentially a machine tossed off a heavy bitch block when it wasn’t supposed to.  And if Clyde hadn’t tried to stop it, it would have crushed Leif’s foot and killed Mikey.  Clyde is basically a hero, saving these two, but something bad happened to his body.  He assumed he’d had a heart attack and as he was dying. He imagined haunting Billy.  But then he came to and found out he’d been in a coma because he was allergic to morphine.  “They specified mild coma to get me to think twice about to causing major legal trouble.”

He had what’s called sudden-onset impeller’s twist.  The doctor says he should be fine as long as he never impels again, “which, why the fuck would I ever impel again, anyway?”  So basically, Clyde is retiring five years earlier than he planned with a huge financial settlement.

After rehab, he told Belt that he was going to take a trip to St. Wolfgang, in Austria, the village from which his parental grandfather had emerged.  Between the two of them we learn that Austria is known for coffee, mountains, Mozart, opera, delicate pastries:  “All of that stuff. Everything you’ve always lived for, plus Hitler.”

Clyde asks if Belt wants to go to.  He doesn’t.  Has no interest in it.  And then he tells his dad that he has to “get back to the bricks.”

“Get back to the bricks–that’s not what that means.  That doesn’t mean anything  What you wanted to say was get back on the horse.”
“You sure about that?”
“What you really wanted to say, though,” he said, “was hit the bricks which means hit the road which is what I’m proposing.”

Later, Belt says that he was drinking and thinking beside Blank’s grave  because it “might somehow help me hit back on the brickhorse” (hilarious).

Belt complains that Clyde is only going their because his father wanted to go there and he, Belt, “wasn’t raised to care about that kind of stuff–origins–and it was you who raised me. I think you probably care even less than I do, truth be told.”

Clyde asks Belt why he sounds so angry.  What happened to him?  Belt snaps:

Oh, right, sure.  Belt.  You called me Belt.  You called me by my name.  I’m melting. Little boy blue and the man in the moon.  Come on.  Enough big ropes.  We’re not having a moment here, and I’m not going to Austria.

Belt is standing up for himself now, too.

Belt then reveals to us that he is on his second recent dry spell of writing.

This includes an outstanding footnote about The Matrix.  I think it’s awesome that he uses this film because his re-writing of the film is great, but also because The Wachowski Sisters are trans women (and were The Wachowski Brothers when they made the film).  In Belt’s version of The Matrix, Neo (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) is a talented cuddlefarmer/formulae designer.  He realizes that cures are actually part of a larger hive mind bent on taking over the world (after destroying all of the cats).

Holy cow that must have been fun to come up with.

There’s a hugely (to me) surprising payoff to this section when sometime later he sells all of his footage of Blank to Lilly Wachowski for a future Matrix film.

[If, in reality, the Wachowski Sisters make a film out of this novel, the self-referentialism will be out of this world].

The dry spell led to him re-reading his memoir and he found he no longer had any empathy for himself.  He bought and read other recently released memoirs to bolster his spirits about writing memoirs.   And his take on memoirs pretty much mirrors my own:

the author overcame adversity with virtue.  As a reader, you’d either 1) spent your life being complicit in the systemic injustice that had caused the adversity, but now that you’d read the book, you’d been awakened to the role you played and are thus made virtuous (perhaps even brave) or 2) you’d spent your life being a victim of the same systemic injustice as the author while being equally virtuous, but it wasn’t until you read the memoir that you were able to realize just how virtuous you’d always been, just how much adversity you’d already overcome.  Congratulations either way.

Belt gave up on writing and thought maybe he needed a new Curio.  So he cloned Blank, but it did nothing for him.  He brought it to Lotta’s mom who tried to cold shoulder him.  He explained what he was giving her and when she said he wasn’t very nice to her daughter, he said:

“I just gave you something you value. And Valentine seems like a really good guy.  I don’t need your fucken guiltmouth, Catrina.”

Clyde left for Austria and then sent a postcard.  The upshot is the Austria is boring so he’s going to Paris.  It was signed “Clyde, the Dad.”  In the next postcard, he is in Paris which he loves.  The people are bitchy but deservedly so.  He’s especially enamored of the bread–is there a conspiracy against Stateside bread eaters?

Then there’s another letter from Paris.  Essentially he went to a bookstore where an American author was reading. It turned out to be Adam Levin (ha) reading his book Self-Titled.  Clyde didn’t think much of the title and the book looked really short.

[That would be the most hilarious advanced promotion for a new book if he actually released such a book (it sounds great)].

So as Clyde was looking for a book to buy Belt he happened upon a book called Estrangement Effect by Camille Bordas.

[I have read four stories by her and loved every one of them].  I was really surprised to see her name in this book.  And then to find out that in the book Levin is married to her.  He is in real life, as well.  She does not have a book with such a title, but again, that would be a hilarious promotion for an upcoming book if she is indeed writing one called that (and judging by Clyde’s reaction, she certainly should).

Long story short, Clyde hits it off with Camille’s mother Sandrine (no idea if that’s Camille’s mother;s real name) and the four of them go out together.

Levin tells Clyde he was always upset he never got to see a swingset murder in person–he’d lived so close but never went to one.

Clyde writes that day after tomorrow Sandrine was flying to the South of Spain to ______________ and Clyde is going with her. He also sent Belt an open-ended ticket to go there.  Signing this one, “Love, Clyde.”  He had recently told Belt that he felt they were better as friends rather than father and son, and that sounds about right.

Belt realized that he was a few days late on handing in his transcript.  So he called Burroughs who came over.  Belt and Burroughs have some MacGuffin 15 (confit plums, custard and pine) and Burroughs explains that Triple J had cancelled the screening of A Fistful of Fists.

Belt guesses that the museum couldn’t handle the content of Fistful, but that’s not it at all.  In fact, they loved it.  But once people started showing films of their cures AOLing, he felt his film was redundant.  Burroughs says:

One of the Yachts–the less bright Chaz–I think it was Jr. but can never keep them straight–so Chaz or Chaz Jr whichever, just a few days after the initial airing of the second AOL clip, he brought over his Executioner Set along with a cure he’d previously taught to perform executions on other cures … [after seeing all of this and realizing everyone would be doing it] …Trip has a major crisis is the point.  Artistic, moral. Crisis, Deep.  Feels almost attacked… [by] everything. The universe.

And then it feels like the book is talking to all of us who weren’t sure what we thought about Trip:

He’s barley fifteen years old, and he’s smart, this kid.  Whatever you or anyone else might think of him, he is sharp as a tack, highly introspective.  But yeah, barley fifteen years old. Ideological in that way younger people tend to be.

Technology has done what he was planing to do with art.  Technology–at which he failed–has beaten him at what he worked so hard for.  He feels like moral shitbag.

So anyway, Trip replaced it with Colorized War Crimes, which sounds ten times worse than Fistful.  Trip gave Belt a copy of this horrorshow of a film on DVD and Burroughs explains that if he shows “this DVD to anyone else, now or later, we’d thoroughly destroy your life and so forth.”  Belt doesn’t really want it but Burroughs really hopes he’ll take it,

That way I can tell Trip you took it, if he asks.  And not for nothing, he’s really proud of this and I think right to be.

Again, I love Burroughs.

Finally Burroughs tell Belt that he’d given Trip some Panacea and he felt a lot better–clear headed and clever.  Belt says he would love a panacea not realizing it is an actual thing.

“Right, sure. Please do that, Burroughs.  Bring me my panacea posthaste.”
“I don’t get the tone, he said, lowering the phone.

Once again, Belt has no idea what anyone is talking about.  Panacea is not a drug (according to the FDA) it is a food.  Burroughs offers to send him a several month supply (they have tons).

And as the conversation ends, Belt offers money for Panacea and Burroughs gets annoyed

“Wait.  What?  What do you take me for Belt?  You just fed me fine Scotch and listened to me spill my guts for…” he said and looked at his watch “Oh dear, no time to take umbrage, I have to get back.”  He stood, I stood, we shook hands and shoulder-clapped “I’ll have some Panacea sent over.”

And that’s the last we’ll see of Burroughs.

The final section is The Only Wrong Person.

It starts out with yet another very funny sequence in which we learn that Grandmother Magnet used to take them out to see a terrible movie every Christmas. Belt wanted to see Clue the first year he was “sure it would be one of the all-time great comedies, an instant classic that nothing else playing could possibly compete with–a movie about characters from a board game, ingenious!”  This year he’d guessed it would be The Three Amigos which he was “sure would be one of the all-time great comedies, an instant classic that nothing else playing could possibly compete with–a movie about characters mistaken for characters those characters played in movies; ingenuous.”  The punchline that she got them tickets to see Platoon on Christmas is hilarious.

But Belt’s mom didn’t want him to see Platoon so they went to see The Golden Child.  Belt’s mom also didn’t like like Eddie Murphy’s stand up “every other punch line is faggot.”  [She’s not wrong–he was incredibly homophobic].  But they saw it and Belt misheard a punchline that made him laugh and laugh.  I couldn’t imagine what his had to do with anything.  Eddie Murphy asks the golden child, who is very chill in a moment of panic. “Did someone give you a Valium or what?”  Belt heard it as “did someone give you a volume or what?” and believed it was Eddie Murphy signalling to the world that other people heard voices and that he could use this volume knob to turn them down.

When the Panacea arrives it warns of Temporary Paradoxical Effects–sleepiness, lucid dreaming, anxiety loss of appetite and or loss of sex drive.  Belt slept for a half a day and then woke up feeling that everything was awesome.

He reread his memoir and loved it.  Loved th opening and then, once again, showing that everyone here was on to something, he praises the genius that is “thats.”  And I’ll let those of you who latched onto this usage gloat and explain it.

The Panacea lets Belt imagine that he can open and close his gates and can see them opening and closing allowing him to communicate with inans.  The desk he’s sitting at starts to complain and Belt closes his gates on it.  Unfortunately, he can never do it again.

Because later when he picks up a copy of No Please Don’t (which he hadn’t read it since it was published) the book itself yells at him.  Because a book waits all its life to be picked up and have its pages slowly turned, but not by the author of the book–the exact wrong person.

Poor Belt.

Since Belt can’t write anything, he thinks about Adam Levin raving about how great the swingset murders were.  he decides that’s what his real calling is.  But he promised his mother he would never destroy other people’s property again.  So he decides to buy the rusty swingsets.  However, the first one he tries to buy, the woman assumes he;s a junk removal truck and pays him–could this be his new source of income?

He hits the swingset with a bat and immediately thinks he’s having a heart attack (like father, like son).  He realizes he hadn’t really cared about swingsets for years and gives up on that idea pretty quickly.

When he decides to get writing done, Herb contacts him.  He has the number of Dr Abed Patel who remembers Belt, of course.

Belt calls Abed and Abed’s tone to Belt is fascinating.  He asks if the voices stopped, and what kind of drugs he took to get better (no they haven’t, and none).  Abed read No Please Don’t and was very impressed by it–especially since he thought Belt was crazy.

Finally we learn her full name: Lisette Banks.  Lisette has been in touch with Abed many times over the years looking for Belt.  Abed could never give out her information.  She sounds unwell–but Belt thinks her reactions are “funny unwell” like she was back in the study.  She lives at the Costello House Intermediate Care Facility. There had been a real murder there back in 2002.

At the Costello House there are several people with Tardive dyskinesia causes repetitive, involuntary movements, such as grimacing and eye blinking which is caused by long-term use of neuroleptic drugs used to treat psychiatric conditions.

There’s also a person who ask:

“You want to know who it is?  Who it really is, buddy?  Who you’re saying those things to?  That’s Judah Maccabee, buddy. That’s who you’re hurting.”

If you haven’t read Levin’s The Instructions, Judah Maccabee is the father of the main character, Judah is a famous defense attorney and is especially known for defending horribly racist people (and women).  He is currently defending a neo Nazi–not because he is a self-hating Jew but because he believes in justice.

Belt calls Lisette–who assumes it is him calling.  And they agree to meet off site.

When he sees her he is dismayed at her appearance (is it shallowness or because she is clearly crazy)?  She doesn’t recognize Belt and introduces herself as Hulga. He says his name is Clyde and she make a Pac Man joke, which went over my head until she explained it (duh, I might have made the same joke–how did I miss it?)

Then she starts talking about something… aliens?  When he asks what she’s talking about, she says “The black gum.  The old marks.”  And you can’t believe there is only one page left in the book

She says they are circles but they are not really circles and they are clustered and your eyes are always making triangle out of them.  But they are always just awkward triangles.  She calls them pavement melanoma.

And then she goes to wait for Belt.  And how can that be the end?

 ♦
♦          ♦

Was this really just a story of lost romance?

What of Trip and the Yachts?

What of the memoir (I guess he wrote it if we are reading it).

What of Clyde and Sandrine?  Did they get married?  Is Belt going to hang out with his step brother in law Adam Levin?

What of Burroughs?

And what about the hundreds of questions we had about Cures and how we are supposed to think about them?

I feel like this book was part one of something even bigger.

The more I think about the ending the more questions I raise.  So I’m just going to see what other people wrote before I go crazy.

♦
♦          ♦

Incidentally, I co-posted this on my own site which includes a “Soundtrack” for each post.  All of the posts for Bubblegum have “featured” bubblegum pop songs.  This week’s final song is The Rock And Roll Dubble Bubble Trading Card Co. Of Philadelphia – 19141 -“Bubble Gum Music” (1968).  A great band name and a wonderfully self-referential song.

Well, we’ve made it to the end, and I now feel the lift of having finished a rewarding book and the burden of feeling as if I should have something profound or tidy to say about it. Reader, I do not. There is simply too much to work with. I have a million questions, many of them inane (e.g.: what should I make of the conflicting information we get from sources each credible in their own way about the existence of Cure bone marrow?). Of course I have my conspiracy-ish theories about how various things in the book might connect to one another and to the rest of the canon and so on. But a pat summation of the themes and aesthetic pleasures of the book offered within a couple of thousand words is not something I think I’m up for.

There is a thread I’ll unravel a little bit, though. It’s not a profound find. In fact, it’s pretty glaringly obvious: Suffering.

First, a brief and not exhaustive catalog of suffering or suffering-adjacent things represented in the book:

• Cures barbecued, popsicled, AOLed, dacted in various creatively sadistic other ways, and so on, documented in (but not only in) a transcript that composes some 12% of the book.
• Various people losing parents, especially when young, and any fallout from that.
• Belt’s mom’s pain and her father’s pain. (Another unrelated and likely inane question I haven’t sorted out an answer to: What are we to make of the fact that we learn her name only very late and in a footnote? This is clearly by design.)
• The kids in the Friends study and their various ailments.
• Presumably fisting itself for some, though to categorize that in a blanket way as a sort of suffering is surely simplistic and possibly a sort of straightwashing (I’m not sure).
• The horrors depicted in Trip’s film Colorized War Crimes.
• The suffering of many of the inans Belt encounters.
• Even the joke about Jesus and Peter (page 565) seems to fit.
• Fondajane’s given name is Dolores, which means “sorrow” or “pain.”
• Blank’s apparent years-long suffering from second-hand smoke and the awful realization that Belt, by being so protective of Blank and prolonging its life, was in fact prolonging its suffering (and: the Woody Allen coughing thing turns out, if I’m not making a bad inference, to be not a cute and at times annoying tic but a sign of Blank’s discomfort amid Belt’s constant smoking).
• “A Hunger Artist” and the panther that was probably not in fact all right.
• Potentially Mouth the bird, kept perpetually hungry so that it could be made to learn to say things.
• Various and sundry people in the referenced “The Hat Act” suffer various indignities and pains.
• A panacea is a cure-all.

So, as I said, the thread here seems pretty ready for tugging, even if a couple of the things in my little catalog may require a bit of a reach.

But that’s not so uncommon, really, is it? Suffering is the human condition. Go back to Gilgamesh and you’ll read about suffering. Conflict — a key ingredient in the vast bulk of fiction — implies some measure of suffering. So again, there’s nothing profound in what I’ve pointed out. More surprising would be a nearly-800-page novel devoid of suffering.

I don’t know how well-known the word “theodicy” is, so I’ll quote Milton by way of brief definition: theodicy is “to justify the ways of God to man” (though Belt by the end, in his cups, perhaps identifies more with Housman’s suggestion that “malt does more than Milton can/To justify God’s ways to man”). Theodicy doesn’t quite do for my purposes, as (I understand) it’s explicitly concerned with questions of theology that don’t much come up in Bubblegum. Still, the general concept is useful and seems relevant: How can we extract meaning from suffering so that it seems like maybe it’s not all for nothing? Peter’s suffering in the joke Trip tells was meaningless, and what makes the joke funny is the realization of that meaningless in the face of Peter’s travails and how it (the meaninglessness) runs counter to our expectation of what divine truths we imagine Peter is suffering to hear Jesus whisper to him.

In a few places, Levin confronts the relationship between suffering and meaning pretty directly. From page 681:

According to my guilt, my cure was ill because I’d been careless, and to sit around panicking was a way to avoid accepting responsibility for my carelessness. According to my panic, my cure was ill because the world was random and randomly brutal, and thinking in terms of responsibility was just a way to avoid facing the fearsome truth: that, as always, and like everyone else, I lacked control over just about everything, my death was encroaching, as was the death of anyone else I cared about, the death of everyone I didn’t care about, eventually the death of all living things, thus the death of memory, and so the end of meaning, of the illusion of meaning.

And then again a few pages later on page 690:

And though a part of me (obviously) wanted to cry — for Blank, in front of Blank, and perhaps toward the cause of “making my peace” or “saying my goodbyes” — I hadn’t cried in Blank’s presence in a great many years, and I feared that if I cried I would make Blank afraid, that it would suffer dread along with its meaningless pain, perhaps even connect the two, the dread and the pain, and thus grant the pain meaning, and so make the pain worse, which I understand, reader, might sound a little off to you, for people like to think they prefer their pain meaningful, readers in particular, especially those readers not currently in pain, but people are people, and people are mistaken, readers are mistaken, misguided by empathy, spun around, confused. They believe they’d like to be more like the characters they love, yet they love only those characters they’re already like; they love those characters only for being like them. And despite what they may think when they aren’t in pain, people always prefer their own pain to be meaningless; they prefer only others’ pain to be meaningful. They think they want machines that behave as though alive, but what they want are living beings that behave like machines.

And then a little later on 705:

Blank had begun to seem like an appendage that had just been cut from me, and more like a long-lost friend; like someone I’d cared for a great deal at one point, but wouldn’t have expected to be in contact with, and so someone whose absence from my life didn’t create much impossible longing. And maybe that was shitty of me? Maybe I wasn’t honoring Blank’s memory? What did that mean, though? To honor Blank’s memory? Maybe, I thought, I needed to try a little harder to suffer more thoroughly.

And then toward the very end of the book, on page 751, after all this pretty heavy stuff about suffering and meaning, Belt gives us this:

By the time I’d gotten my first driver’s license — in fact, well before that — I’d all but completely ceased to care about the suffering of rusting swingsets, or, for that matter, about the suffering of inans in general. I’d known the rusting swingsets were suffering — I’d seen it nearly every day — and I would have liked it if they weren’t suffering, but I hadn’t cared enough to put in even a fraction of the effort that would have been required to end even a fraction of their suffering. Their suffering might as well have been AIDS or the Taliban or animal cruelty or homelessness or African famine or Indian famine or opioid addiction or nuclear proliferation or rising sea levels or California droughts or Lotta Hogg’s hurt feelings. Had I cared enough about the suffering of rusting swingsets, I would have started a rusting swingset-hauling business, but I’d cared so little about the suffering of rusting swingsets, I hadn’t even thought to start such a business. I’d had other things to do: reading, writing, smoking, pining for and seeking out the girl who talked to inans…

This takes me back to Belt’s conversation with Dr. Manx starting on about page 225. I’ll spare you another long quote, but Belt and Manx (another inane question: A Dr. Manx appears in some of Levin’s short stories; is it just a name he likes or is he, with these connections and the crossover between Bubblegum and The Instructions building sort of a cross-referential universe here?) talk about helping swingsets vs. helping homeless people and what it means to really help someone. This is the conversation that reminded me of some recent reading in Singer and that Jeff pointed to as sort of Biblical. Young Belt goes on to itemize a few things (including homelessness and AIDS) that he thinks it’s overwhelming to try to imagine fixing and the tradeoffs of trying to fix all those things. He ends his spiel with “so what would be the point of anything, you know? I mean…” (the ellipsis here is Levin’s and not mine).

Belt’s catalog above makes me think too of Auden’s poem that Jeff brought up and from which I’ve borrowed a line for the title of this ramble. As those who might have seen the fall of Icarus carry on with their work-a-day lives, Belt had other things to do than continue caring overmuch about the suffering of swingsets.

These are just the instances of meaning and suffering together that I happened to note during a first read. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are more that I missed. There’s one more little piece I’ll try to click into place here: Memory.

Interestingly, we see very little of Belt suffering in the book. What we do see comes mostly through the filter of his memory. This is a memoir, after all, which comes from the French word for “memory.” A few weeks ago, I made some connections (quite possibly specious) between Levin’s book and Proust’s magnum opus with respect to their treatment of memory. And in two of the passages I quote above, memory comes up with respect to suffering. These associations began to crystallize for me a bit when I read of Belt’s arrival at the compound, where we learned that the three dots provide a visual representation of the blobs of bubblegum that, seen years later, sent Belt careering back through time to a memory not only of his childhood but of his mother (about whose suffering we have only recently read when we get to this part of the book).

The blobs return at the end of the book too, in a strange conversation between Belt and Lisette, each linked to the other by distant memory. I haven’t really worked out yet what to make of this closing interaction. But again these people who both have suffered — who were brought together by a study of those suffering psychological trauma and were torn asunder by the the onset of Belt’s mother’s suffering (and, presumably, his own subsequent mourning) — ponder these blobs together. Lisette puts a pretty negative spin on the blobs. They’re pavement melanomas. Or they come from gross or wounded mouths and are generally gross. And we can’t help making triangles out of them when we see them, which to me is a sort of making of meaning where there is none. And then after making much more of the gumstains than they really merit, she concedes that the gum is just plain old gum: “Of course it’s just old gum. It’s completely meaningless. Doesn’t stop me, when I see it, from thinking [of them as pavement melanomas], though.”

As I said at the top, I don’t offer here a coherent theory of what the book means. I do see a set of loose associations between suffering, meaning, and memory, and it’s tempting to me to try to tie those somehow to the title and to whatever the gum blobs signify, though whether that significance pertains to memory or the grotesque, or indeed whether there’s any thread still left here to pull I’m really not sure.

Here’s the penultimate week of this book and there’s no clear ending or answers in sight.

I was really looking forward to seeing Jonboat again.  He has been this looking figure–billionaire, astronaut, husband of the most beautiful woman in the world, father of Triple J.  And we know very little about him besides that.  And WOW does he make an impression.  Sort of.  Actually, he doesn’t make any impression except on Belt’s psyche.

This section begins with a bit of a misdirection: Belt picking up a magazine at the White Hen because astronaut Jonboat was on the cover. Flipping through, he couldn’t find the article (typical of big glossy magazines) and wound up looking at an article about the famous chef Clem.

Clem (I’m guessing inspired by Emeril?) was eggplant shaped with arms like noodles–he looked like a combination of Ringo Starr and Yasser Arafat–he seemed all wrong and yet he looked fantastic.  This was because everything in the room was custom made just for him.  He was measured for an oven, molds were made of his hands for his knives etc.  Somehow the objectively handsome assistant looked unfit in the room because everything fit Clem.

I love the librarian joke that Pang shouts at him: You think my name is Marian? (and a wonderful discursive joke about this not being a library).  But Belt didn’t buy the magazine because he needed money for Quills.

This is all a set up to say that Jonboat looked in his office as if every inch of it was measured to fit him.

As Belt walks in, Jonboat says “Hey, you,” and holds out his arms for a hug.  It take a second before Belt realizes he’s talking to Fondajane who is next to him.

There’s some playful banter between Jonboat and Fon.  And yet I can’t decide how to read this.  Is Jonboat a pedantic jerk or is he fun and good at teasing? Continue reading →

There are two things I want to touch on for this week’s reading. The first is asswipery. Clyde repeatedly and affectionately calls his friend Herb an asswipe, but it’s not Clyde or Herb I’ve got in mind. It’s Belt and Jonboat.

Many years ago, I wrote a thing about basically insecurity and envy in which through comic hyperbole I characterized this imaginary person who was good at everything, likable, ambitious, kind and generous and even actually heroic, and so on. They could do no wrong. Thinking about myself next to this fictive person — who I suppose must have had some elements stolen from personalities of people I did truly admire — made me feel pretty cruddy, as I felt when thinking of myself next to these purloined personalities. And the point of the exercise was to think through this feeling very positive about successful, good people and simultaneously feeling like I was warmed-over sewage by comparison, which led to a little paradox of both admiring and — well, the word “hating” is rather strong for it, but I’ll say hating or feeling a sort of misanthropic envy of them.

This is sort of how I feel about Jonboat. He was an entitled teenager, sure, but it’s not so uncommon for teenagers to be kind of shitty. So I went into this week’s reading not really prepared to like him very much out of envy if nothing else, with his ridiculous compound, his sirenesque wife and their ridiculous banter, his goddamn obnoxious leather loafers and flower-print board shorts and rolled linen sleeves, his immense wealth and disturbing (if in some ways also sort of likable) son, his career as a record-setting astronaut, his jet-setting. Everything leading up to the meeting with him really telegraphs that he’s probably an entitled jerk. And, well, there is a bit of that — the name-dropping and insufferable telling of tales about King Hussein and Chuck Yeager, his showing off of the helmet. But then, these are noteworthy achievements and engagements and souvenirs. The human body is a horrifying biological hellscape sloughing off skin and filth, so I wouldn’t want to wear his helmet as Jonboat invites so many other people to do, but it’d be neat to see it, maybe to heft it. And he does seem genuinely to feel affection for Trip and Fondajane. He regrets things like his childhood use of the term gaylord. Maybe he’s not such a bad guy. Maybe my instinct to dislike him is just projected envy of a basically good person.

But then he really goes off on Belt about the incomprehensibility to Belt of their income disparity. For ten pages he spews vitriol in one of the most condescending rants I can recall ever having read. Dickishness confirmed.

Only then it turns out that this is what Belt took away from an arched eyebrow, the signing of a check, and a simple question. And maybe Belt’s not so terribly wrong about Jonboat’s sentiment toward him. Jonboat does a couple of times try to run him off, for example. And Jonboat did uncharitably misread Belt’s book and didn’t respond to his letters. But boy, the viciousness of Belt’s interpretation here, the lengths to which Belt went to make me think Jonboat a colossal asswipe makes me begin to rethink how I feel about Belt.

I’ve liked Belt so far. He’s kind of a dud who as Jeff points out can be tough to live inside the head of. But he’s also thoughtful, generally not on the cruelty-to-cures bandwagon, and goodness knows he’s trying here. But now here suddenly I don’t know if I like Belt so much after all. Maybe he was writing about Jonboat in No Please Don’t. Maybe what have seemed mostly like petty aggressions (e.g. Pang) signify a greater pathology of personality. Maybe, that is, Belt is the asswipe.

In any case, we see this sort of symmetry of toxic assumption on the part of both Jonboat and Belt. Jonboat read Belt’s book in the worst possible way. Belt received Jonboat’s gesture somehow in worse than the worst possible way. Maybe everybody is an asswipe.

The second thing I wanted to touch on is that Belt seems maybe at last to be growing up. I wrote a few weeks ago about Belt’s mom’s sadness at Belt’s optimism about having kids next to her probable assumption that he would never be self-sufficient enough to function as an autonomous adult capable of having children.

In this section, Belt begins to grow up after sort of reckoning with his own childhood friend (after having had sort of a play date with that friend’s child and that child’s surrogate mother, complete with snacks, games, and TV). He earns an income. He does taxes, makes much more adultish banking transactions than the one early in the book, gets his driver’s license, buys a car, and starts seeing a woman. He hangs out with grown-ups and buys fancy (and hilariously named) booze. And he seems pretty capable of doing all of this without, apparently, much assistance.

While undergoing some of this development, he begins to leave behind his relationship to Blank. Whose name is Kablankey. Which sounds a lot like blankie. Which is a thing little kids hang onto and finally let go of as they begin to be big kids. Maybe I’m leaning too much on a word game here. Still, whether the blankie thing holds water or not, there is in this section what seems to me to be a very rapid growing up of a heretofore stunted (if eloquent and complicated) character, which makes me wonder whether it might be fruitful to begin thinking of Bubblegum as essentially a stalled bildungsroman.