July 27, 2007

• Going Somewhere, Limbo

  

  George Grant’s book Going Somewhere makes a cameo appearance within itself (!), explaining its purpose .  Dan (Dante Alighieri Gylberd) is working on four manuscripts while he is traveling.

  The third manuscript was a contemplative novel.  Because it contained
  only two characters, a very limited frame of reference, and a strict linear
  plot, it was essentially a novel of ideas. There was hardly any dialogue,
  virtually no sensory descriptions, no significant character conflicts, and
  no mystery or intrigue.  More than anything, it was an anthology of
  cultural critiques set upon a modern stage after the pattern of Dante’s
  Inferno or Thoreau’s Walden. If Seinfeld had been a television show
  about nothing, this was a book about everything.  (p.26)         

  Anthology of cultural critiques.  That’s it!

  So the story is simply the platform for the stuff Grant wants to write about.  And it is great stuff!  Books (50 are cited), bookstores (specific stores in different cities), newspapers, ethnic food (real restaurants still doing business), kitsch, architecture, work, worship, culture and brief local history of twelve American cities.

  If you know nothing about Dante’s Inferno you need to begin by learning the famous opening line:

  Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,    
  

  I woke to find myself in a dark wood,            
  Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

  During a stint of jury duty, Bea reflects on how lost and fumbling many of us are:

  Bea was struck by how many of these jurors seemed to benefit
  little more than materially from their jobs. (snip) They were
  mercenaries, working merely for money with little or no
  sense of destiny, vision, or calling. (p.41)

  The emphasis on mercenaries is mine, but that popped out and bit me when I read it.  Oh, it is a sad commentary of our impoverished culture that for far too many people, life consists of dragging the body out of bed, numbly performing a task, guiding their cars through a snarl of traffic and the maze of drive-through windows, clicking the remote, falling asleep, cycling through the routine in a coma.

  Maybe that was why even she had taken to fantasizing
  about getting away from it all more and more lately–
  pondering what it might be life to actually do what
  Dan had always dreamed of doing: selling everything
  and heading off toward the blue horizon.  She read the
  wonderful bestsellers of Frances Mayes and Peter Mayle–
  Mayes and her husband left their promising careers
  and moved to Italy, recounting their adventures
  in Under the Tuscan Sun, while Mayle and his wife
  had dropped out and moved to France, telling
  their tale in A Year in Provence.  She discovered
  that rather than inspiring her, they left her
  with a profound sense of yearning as well as
  a bit of melancholy over her maniac lifestyle. (p.60)

  Dan and his wife Bea (get it? Beatrice?!) decide to leave Limbo
  (humorously enough, Wheaton, IL) in their VW named Virgil and travel
  across the country on pilgrimage.  

  • 12:21 pm
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