Today in Charlotte it’s hot out, but cloudy, in this way you see all the time in northeast Ohio, but later in the year, in high summer: the sky filled with clouds, lit from behind by the sun, diffusing that light into an even brightness that makes their edges vanish, so the seams between cloud & cloud can’t be seen, and from edge to edge it’s just a featureless silverwhite sheet, stretched like a canvas over its frame, taut, tremulous, lambent; a faceless, close sky that could threaten rain, or suffocating heat, could be a precursor to some greater storm or lead to nothing at all – the clouds could even break up, like bread in water, and drift, mellow & soft over soft breezes, unspooled into high drifts of cirrus among daubs of blue sky.
I’d rather write about the weather than Shelley’s Heart. I’d rather write about the things I see on my walks or 17th century penal law or the Stalked by My Doctor filmic quintet. I’d rather go walking in a deep humid woods through a haze of alien pollens, & come back with a sore throat, watering eyes, and a regal mantilla’s worth of spider web clinging to my clothes, and sunburn. I really, really don’t want to write about Shelley’s Heart.
Oh Dear
Batshit Book Club has bit me in the ass. Our first sally into the world of bad books and immediately my soul is drained. I envisioned BSBC as an outlet for my fascination with interestingly bad commercial fiction, books that, while a failure by the standard metrics, manage through the unique texture of their badness to offer special things to the reader, singular things, worthwhile things that, while not the rarified artistic treasures of High Literature, still have much intrinsic aesthetic value. Hell, whole subcultures exist to explore this concept in other art forms: MST3K & bad movies, or Japanese kusoge culture, which has been a part of games appreciation since its very early days.
There’s a bewitching vibrancy to bad art, and that vibrancy comes from a place very much connected to the sources from which great art draws its power. Bad Art is still art because, like great Great Art, it reaches for the extremes; deliberately or no, it’s exploring hinterlands, fringes, those regions on the edge where the particular falls off (or rises up) into the universal. Any honest creative endeavor is a wild shot, and the arc & ambition of any shots is bracing even if it ultimately lands in the swamp.
But Bad Art and being bad are two separate things, and it’s the gap between those two concepts in which I find myself stuck with Shelley’s Heart. Shelley’s Heart is not bad art, it’s just bad. On a strictly technical, Strunk & White level, it is actually better-written than much Bad Art, but these mostly-adequate, acceptable sentences articulate only the stupidest shit, with the straightest of faces and an infuriating belief in its own importance. If McCarry was a flamboyantly bad writer this would be a better book.
My advice to anyone curious about starting Shelley’s Heart would be: don’t start it. If you absolutely must, just read the first 100 pages and you’ll have experienced the meager best the book can offer, and had a laugh at its obsessions and tastlessnesses before those things recur to the point that they threaten to drive you insane.
Gourmet Club Stupid Books Course
Last week when Batshit Book Club convened, ostensibly to discuss parts 6 & 7 (the same sections that are nominally the topic of this post), the discussion turned quickly into an all-purpose wild hunt therapy session. Basically, we hung the book on a hook and beat the shit out of it, slinging vitriol at any questionable element that came to mind – and Shelley’s Heart is basically all questionable elements.
“I’m ready to call it now,” I said then. “Y’know I was hoping against hope that there’d be something to justify the bullshit in this thing. But like there’s no way this is going to get better. We’ve got, what? less than 150 pages to go? There’s NO way in hell that ANYTHING in those 150 pages could justify the trouble it took to get to them.”
I said too that I dreaded having to write about the many things in Sections 6 & 7 that are tasteless, stupid, or both – the crown jewel of such things being Zarah Christopher’s insane condemnation of Slim Eve’s, the ecolawyer’s, molestation at the hands of alcoholic Speaker of the House R. Tucker Attenborough, in a scene discussed last time around, the worst dinner scene in all of literature. Early on in Part 6, Sturdi, Slim’s partner, brings it up to Zarah in preparation for a law suit against Attenborough and Zarah, in her role as McCarry mouthpiece no. 2, says some reprehensible shit:
“As a woman, you must have seen how distressed she was,” Sturdi said, moving closer.
Zarah stepped back. “No, that’s not what I saw,” she said. “Your client provoked and flirted with Attenborough from the first moment of the evening. She was wearing a very short dress for a lawyer escorted by the Chief Justice of the United States. She was in a state of almost feverish excitement; at first I thought she might be on drugs. And when suddenly, very suddenly, she leaped to her feet and lifted her skirt to display the damage to her clothing – damage that could not possibly have been done in one single grope by the sharpest fingernail in the world – she was obviously in a state of sexual arousal.”
“ ‘A state of sexual arousal’?” Sturdi could scarcely bring herself to repeat the words. “How could such a thing be obvious?”
Zarah was calm, watchful. She replied, “Sense of smell, Ms. Eve.”
There isn’t any real need to underline how revolting this is, but let’s talk about how fucking weird it is. Deep in the thickets of an overlong book I believed, at some point, would be some kind of thriller about high-level politics, I have to listen to characters say shit like to this each other – and they’re all always saying shit like this to each other, and the narrator says shit like this to you all the time. It’s not always this gross, but it is always this stupid. The characters are all morbid dorks and the author seems to take every absurd thing they say or do with utmost literary seriousness.
As an explorer of worthy trash, it behooves you to expect weird/bad elements; but you do so with the understanding that they will not impede, will actually in some ways enhance, the pleasures of the text as a whole. But the opposite is the case here. A fundamentally good political thriller with tasteless characters could be fun in a schlocky way, but Shelley’s Heart is not a fundamentally good political thriller. I’d argue that, at heart, it’s not even about politics, really; at heart, it’s an espionage drama, a story about spies and conspiracies. Obviously McCarry believes the two can work in tandem, and that makes sense on paper, but in this paper, the paper on which Shelley’s Heart is printed, it does not. Each half operates independent of the other – and while I say ‘half,’ it’s really like a 75-25 split, favoring the spy stuff.
So in short you’ve got this failed chimera, this unliving hybrid, and then on top of all that you’ve got the constant bullshit, stuff like this:
Sturdi smiled. The great nose, the furry unplucked eyebrows that suggested equally furry armpits, the faint shadow on the depilated upper lip, contrasted strangely with the bright Teutonic hair of her wig.
Or how about this:
“How am I doing?” Macalaster asked.
“We’ll begin to see more progress soon.” The trainer, nearly all muscle himself, smiled encouragingly. “Anybody can do it,” he said.
“Except the women,” Macalaster said. “They don’t seem to get muscles. Any reason for that? Do they lift in a different way, or what?”
“Women don’t get muscles unless they take steroids,” the trainer said.
“And if they do take steroids?”
“Then they get biceps, just like us.” He lowered his voice, imparting secrets. “They also get bitchy. Even men get aggressive when they take steroids, so women usually stay from them. Besides their hair can fall out.”
The above excerpt is even more insanity-inducing when you realize, later on in the book, that it is Extremely Plot Relevant. Or this:
She had the air of a woman who had known exactly what to expect before she met him and had not been disappointed in the least by the reality. It was a look he recognized. He recognized the touch of her hand, too: back in the fifties Vassar girls, his wife among them, had cultivated the hand-on-your-hand-holding-the-cigarette-lighter trick, linked with the lifting of meaning-filled eyes, especially during senior spring, and nearly every member of his class had succumbed to this particular old one-two before finding out, to their lifelong cost, exactly what the consequences were.
There’s that classic cool McCarry tone! He really sees through the surface of things, and – uh oh, look out, ladies! – this time he has turned his gimlet eye to Vassar!!
I’ve been on an internet blackout for Shelley’s Heart since beginning it, but I’m dying to know what other people who’ve read this thing think.Like are there any academics out there doing their PhDs on McCarry’s fiction? Anyone composing a monograph about the neglected master McCarry? Is there some possibility that his other books are better?
Next time it’ll be the last time, we’re going through the end of this thing. Can redemption be found in a pile of shit?
Hm. Well, later, having embarked on the last bit of Shelley’s Heart, one Batshit Book Club member messaged me:
“Ben. I will hopefully never turn down the pleasure of reading, but you owe me a pint at this point.”