Thoughts on 10:01

I enjoyed Lance Olsen's 10:01. I enjoyed it for the book it wants to be - let's just say it had me at hello - and I enjoyed it for it's well crafted glimpse into Americana and American lives.

Olsen's use of the mall/movie theater isn't particularly radical, but it didn't necessarily come off as just an exercise or too gimmicky in my view. Subtlety wasn't what this book was after. Just like the bad Hollywood blockbuster in the book, which no one in the theater seemed to be interested in, 10:01 is a big screen (or mirror) in your face book - take it at that and you will enjoy it.

What I liked

I liked the way Olsen flitted back and forth between characters, all with separate lives in close proximity, yet oblivious to one another in all but the most superficial ways. Through the lens of these people we get some sort of representation of modern life in America with malls, bleakly at the center of our communities.

The voyeur in me enjoyed the deviant stories of some of these normal Americans - although I guess there really is no normal - and many of them had some sort of secret to unfold. Even though many were outrageous, like the serial killer or the scam artist dwarf woman, the less strange ones were more interesting, like the movie star desperate for attention, the little blind girl, the man who was being stalked, perhaps from his own affairs, or the old war criminal.

The following is one of my favorite passages. It's the kind of thing some young geeky guy might come up with and be overly amazed by, but I like it because it's a metaphor of a metaphor of a metaphor of sorts:

"For him the dominant metaphor for good film derives from the idea of the Persistence of Vision, where the human brain retains images the eye receives for a fraction of a second longer than the eye actually records them. If it didn't, we would all go crazy with the jump-cut awareness of blinking. What we see in blinking's place is an unending optical illusion: a coherent, continuous version of reality. To record a single fixed photograph on a frame, the camera's shutter remains open about one-thirtieth of a second. The shutter exposes sixteen of those images every second in silent film, twenty-four in film with sound. Once second of exposed silent film therefore contains only sixteen-thirtieths of a second of exposed action and fourteen-thirtieths of nothingness between frames. Which is to say, Celan continually delights in reminding himself, when we watch a movie in a theater we spend as much as half our time in the dark without knowing it...and yet we make complete sense of the shattered light-blips we perceive."

With that quote in mind, I liked the use of a movie theater in a mall to tell this story because the two together are at the heart of this numb culture of ours - so Olsen is telling us - and what do we do but retreat into the darkness of a movie theater or the darkness of our weird little lives, "eyes wide shut" to borrow a phrase. Reading Olsen's book is like watching a few episodes of "Cops" or "Jerry Springer," and saying in the end, 'gee, I'm glad that's not my life,' as you troop off to the mall.

What I didn't like

This is a small thing, but I was bothered by the references to Kafka. It felt like too much of a contrivance that a girl related to but ignorant of Kafka would dream one of his stories (and Homer's to boot). I didn't find the book particularly Kafkaesque, so having such blatant references seemed out of place.

This might sound a little off, but I think I would have enjoyed the book more if some of the characters were more mundane, like I would expect the average audience in attendance at a movie to be. I don't mean that like it sounds, but among this group there were all sorts of criminals and such, and even though I enjoyed some of the stories individually, taken as a whole, I thought there was more strangeness than a day at the mall could handle. I think the conceit of the mall/movie would have worked as well without some of them.

Comments

[Kassia]

As I mentioned previously, I felt like I was part of a writing exercise. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I stopped looking for a story and learned to appreciate the exploration of character. While this wasn't always successful, there was one moment that gave me pause:
There is no one on the other end of Lakeesha Johnson's cell-phone conversation. There never has been. She is talking to a dead plastic mouthpiece because she wants her friends to believe she has friends. The reason possessing friends is so important to Lakeesha is that possessing friends isn't very important to her.

While the segment went off on a tangent that didn't feel like it fit with this great opening, I found myself considering this commentary on our world again and again. So much of being alive is playing the game, even though for many of us, the game is contrary to our natural state. You have to say hello every time you pass a co-worker in the hallway even though, really, what is the point? You said hello once (channeling Jeff Kent here). Someone is winning in these constant encounters, but when you watch it on a micro level, it's not clear who gains.

Yeah, guess who spent too much time locked in an office today...

[Bud Parr]

" I stopped looking for a story and learned to appreciate the exploration of character. "

It's as though Olsen was building a composite character, with all these frenetic snapshots of individuals as a whole complete mister average american.

[Kassia]

The composite character is a notion I played with -- but didn't really explore much further. I can see that as angle. Of course this raises the question of just how many sexual perversions lurk in the hearts of the average American.

I loaned my copy of the book to a friend who really digs this type of writing, but think your comment puts the character (something like Esmerelda the Eternally Bountiful -- you know who I mean) in a different perspective. Less so the mouse, but one does need a vehicle for the eternal soul.

[Inversiones en petroleo]

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