I Am Legend/The Whole

My reading weekend was interesting -- I polished off John Reed's The Whole and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend in less than forty eight hours, in addition to cleaning, seeing friends and immersing myself (temporarily) in cable television while cat-sitting for a friend. (My rule about cable -- 24 hours once a year, and I'm over it and don't need to watch it again for another year.)


I Am Legend was a fast and interesting read. Originally published in 1954 and set in a fictional, nightmarish version of the 1970s, it tells the story of Robert Neville, last survivor of a bacterial plague that has rendered all of humanity into a vampiric, parasite-plagued species. Neville survives by boarding up his house, constantly working to replenish his supplies and his independent generator, and never going outside after sundown. The book is interesting, not because of the horror of his situation, but because of the small details Matheson bothers to elaborate -- the psychology of being the sole human left, the boredom, the use of alcohol as a crutch, and the monotony of working constantly at a bare-bones level of survival. That level of detail draws you into the story -- a simple fighting-vampires story would not be enough here, and Matheson knows that.


This is also a more philosophical horror novel. There is a wonderful twist here, which is less about vampires and more about questioning the idea of what we consider "normal". I won't give away the ending, but this is worth a read if you like a good vampire story. I'm afraid the upcoming movie version is going to take out the best bits of the book in favor of a Hollywood ending, but hey, what can you do?

I had also started The Whole about mid-week and then finished it on Saturday afternoon. Here's a caveat -- John Reed is my editor at the Brooklyn Rail and my former teacher, so I suppose I'm biased. Also, I am a huge fan of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Reed's book is very evocative of that story. There are other reviews out there about this book that give a plot summary and a better analysis than I could, but what I particularly liked about this book was its language. The book satirizes modern-day youth language as much as it does anything else, and there's a creative playfulness in it that I really enjoyed. That being said, I'm still scratching my head over the ending, which was so ramped up into absurdity that I don't even know what to make of it.

In other news -- I keep meaning to mention that Annie Dillard has a new novel out. I'm pretty excited about that. She granted an interview, which is here, and there's a review of the novel in the Times, which is here. I have mostly read her nonfiction essays, but the novel sounds like a quick, dazzling read. I'm even tempted to invest in a hardcover version, which is a rare thing for me.

I'm on to Andrea Levy's Small Island now -- I'm reading it for the multi-narrative style, which I'm also using (far less successfully?) in my own work.