The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

Written By: Douglas Adams
Published By: Ballantine Books (5-Volume Ultimate set)
ISBN: 0-345-45374-3

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a zany whacky sci-fi satire about a perfectly average in every way with the exception of being English guy whose home planet of Earth is destroyed to make way for a galactic hyperspace bypass. He is serendipitously, if not a tad reluctantly, transported by his intergalactic hitchhiker buddy at the very last second to the destroyer’s ship. What follows is a zany whacky series of sci-fi adventures of four companions and one paranoid android as they pave their way across the galaxy in search of the answer to life, the universe, and everything, and maybe throw back a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster or two.

On its face, grasping bizarre and pointed observations about our world and its people is what satire does best, and Douglas Adams is aggressive in taking the reader up on this task. He presents this quirky and colorful universe of ours with remarkable cynicism, drawing nifty little parallels between the humdrum primitivity of our Earthen station and worlds beyond worlds beyond worlds, all while pushing the boundaries of the absurdities of human behavior to their absolute limits.

Personally, I like my humor to be simple. Science Fiction is not very simple at all, what with its myriad of whose-its and whats-its galore. Mr. Adams does a fine job in bringing everything down to a primitive everyman level that even a primitive everyman like Arthur Dent could understand. His writing is easy to follow, easy to imagine, and easy to experience. Whether there are intergalactic demolition ships “hanging in the sky the same way that bricks don’t” or that a ship’s improbability drive might make a hitchhiker turn into a penguin for no reason at all, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is simply a joy to read as it quests to skewer everything that the human species holds near and dear to its dubious heart, especially itself.

B+

Choice Passages

“Arthur prodded the mattress nervously and then sat on it himself: in fact he had very little to be nervous about, because all mattresses grown in the swamps of Sqornshellous Zeta are very thoroughly killed and dried before being put into service. Very few have ever come to life again.”

“‘Hey, have you any idea what these strange symbols are?’ ‘I think they’re just strange symbols of some kind,’ said Zaphod, hardly glancing back.”

“‘It would be sacrilege to go skiing on high art!’”

The Great Gatsby (1925)

Written by: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Published by: Scribner

The Great Gatsby tells the story of super wealthy Jay Gatsby during the “most expensive orgy in history” and his obsession with winning the hand of the ravishing Daisy Buchanan.  It is told primarily through the eyes of Daisy’s distant cousin, Nick Carraway, who is brought into the Jazz Age’s celebration of excess from a life of relatively abject poverty to draw the two long lost star-crossed lovers together and make a happy ending betwixt sheets woven of pure gold.  The novel is considered one of the perennial works of American literature and has been studied by countless classrooms and scholars across the world, ostensibly laying much of the groundwork for generations of literary novelists to come.

Yeah, it’s kind of a big deal.  You have probably seen it on a shelf somewhere or heard that they made a movie about it that stars Leonardo DaVinci.  As such, it is pretty much impossible to review this work without bias, either because of the work itself or the author himself.  You’ve probably heard that it was a studious exercise in the furthest abstracts of human language, with punctuations purposely placed that caused a certain rhythm and flow to emerge within Fitzgerald’s elegant prose.  You’ve probably heard that it was revisioned and revisioned and revisioned; you might have also heard that it didn’t make its deadline ultimately because of all of this obsessive revisionism.  You’ve probably also heard Mr. F. was a raging alcoholic, and of all the true things I’ve said so far, this last point is the untruest.

The Great Gatsby is a work that arguably lives up to the greatness to which its author first envisioned.  Every word, every passage, every action is carefully crafted to drive the story forward and no syllable is wasted on even the excessive celebrities in which it remarks.  The weight of the narrator’s words, of Fitzgerald’s words, is calibrated precisely to draw you, the reader, into the magnificent world of 1920’s New York, to gape in wonder at the lavish exuberance, but also packs some pretty insightful knowledge re: the dangers of nostalgia; this idea that with the right amount of money and patience, even the most futile of lost destinies can be recovered and restored.  After all, it’s easy to think that those we love are not simply stuck in some kind of bubble, preserved within the silence of time.  That’s probably why getting back with your ex is a bad idea, so you should quit thinking about it.  Read The Great Gatsby instead, and take some time to reflect on some of the stupid things you’ve done for love, and maybe put those stupid things behind you for good.

A

Choice Passages:

“he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward–and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.”

“Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York–every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.”

“Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”

The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003)

Written By: Audrey Niffenegger
Published By: Harcourt Books

The Time Traveler’s Wife is a love story about a woman who is perfectly normal in every way and her husband who is not so normal.  He happens to be a time traveler, but not in the traditional mad scientist sense.  Instead, he time travels to places he’s been before when beset with any amount of stress.  This means that any trip he makes to the past or future is strictly involuntary and unpredictable.  The novel focuses on how the husband’s time traveling is both the cause of their relationship the source of all its problems.  And it’s brilliant.

So when two people get married, the general consensus is that the relationship will have a bunch of ups and downs.  There is a lot of sex, a lot of fighting, and a lot of compromise, sometimes kids.  Countless generations of families have beat around this bush for so long that there isn’t a whole lot of intrigue, a whole lot of “newness” in it.  Sure, you got your basic questions: “How did you two little lovebirds meet?” being one such question.  And, with perhaps starstruck eyes, one of the askees will tell you, “well this one time we met at a Holiday Inn Express, s/he was going that way and I was going that way…” and then they would keep running their mouth about how awesome or how horrible things turned out.  Yawn.

The Time Traveler’s Wife is pretty similar, but features way more interesting people at its core.  The characters of Henry and Clare DeTamble are both charming, cultured, and overall very pleasant in the way one would hope a young married couple would be.  They aren’t superheroes or supergeniuses in spite of one’s ability to move through the ether of time.  Actually, Henry is very humble about (if not totally resentful of) his condition in spite of knowing that it is the source of all the happiness he would ever know.  Clare is a pistol, well-off but not obnoxious, maybe a little naive at times, surprisingly gutteral at others, but makes for a sound pairing with her chrono-impaired soulmate.  Their personalities are distinct and compelling as they make their confessions over the course of the whole lifespans together, and their stories come through at the hands of some really terrific, careful, and inspired writing.

The time traveling aspect is also treated with great care, having evolved a personality unto itself.  There is some self-awareness carefully weaved into the narrative that aims to keep your eyesockets from rolling out of your skull, lest you are used to stupid heroes not capable of selfishly applying their powers for the betterment of their station.  This novel has plenty of that, even boldly addressing certain issues that would be unique only to time travelers in some rather surprising ways.  But it also adds some restrictions to Henry’s ability to move around time, even adding some danger in the mix to offer yet another facet to his already carefully manicured personality.

But what really makes this novel work is how it meticulously sets up and pays off even the smallest little character quirks or traits, harnessing the power of time to open and close the loose ends of what is ostensibly a closed loop of a story.  You are given just enough information to presume you know how it will all turn out, but even as more things are revealed, you are never quite sure if that’s really going to happen.  Or, more frequently, some time traveling thing will happen and you’ll keep that filed away to see if it ever gets resolved, no doubt to write an angry email to the author once it never comes.  And so, you keep turning and turning the pages, wondering if what you are expecting will come to pass, whether this future that this book reluctantly shares is actually going to be real.

One of the big questions of The Time Traveler’s Wife revolves around this idea of fate.  Think about it, if some guy or girl entered your life from another dimension and told you that you were married to them in the distant future, how would you feel about that?  Both characters more or less grapple with that, and the joy from reading this novel is grappling with that concept ourselves.  Are our futures already written for us?  Do we have a chance to change them?  Or is changing them part of the plan?  Should we ever know our future? And if we do know the future, should we at any point share that information with anyone?

In a good work of literature, there are underlying themes that challenge us to explore the world in a different way, to become people that we are not and possibly could never be.  To ask the important questions and to get us to think about the differences of our lives and how our unwritten futures toddle ahead, forming endless possibilities just as endless possibilities are snuffed out every waking second of every day as we decide a yes or a no or a maybe.  The Time Traveler’s Wife asks these questions by giving us the ability to see the world unfold through the eyes of two charming and lovely individuals who may carry the answer within themselves, who might offer some reassurance that defying fate might be possible, even for them.  It is nearly perfect.

A

Choice Passages:

     “Clare takes the Thermos cup away from me. She pours herself half an inch of coffee and takes a cautious sip. ‘Ugh,’ she says. ‘This is disgusting. Is it supposed to taste like this?’
     ‘Well it usually tastes less ferocious. You like yours with lots of cream and sugar.’
     Clare pours the rest of the coffee into the Meadow and takes a doughnut. Then she says, ‘You’re making me into a freak.'”

     “I’m stomping the living shit out of a large drunk suburban guy who had the effrontery to call me a faggot and then tried to beat me up to prove his point. We are in the alley next to the Vic Theater. I can hear the Smoking Popes’ bass leaking out of the theater’s side exits as I systematically smash this idiot’s nose and go to work on his ribs. I’m having a rotten evening, and this fool is taking the brunt of my frustration.”

     “I’m standing in the bathroom, shivering in my slip and brushing my teeth. In the mirror I can see Henry lying on the bed. He’s snoring. I spit out the toothpaste and rinse my mouth. Suddenly it comes over me: happiness. And the realization: we’re married. Well, I’m married, anyway.”