Left with simply the feeling of time wasted: (The Rum Punch Review of "The Infinities," by Banville, Part 3)

Read Part 1 here.

Read Part 2 here.

I began part 2 by wondering how Banville got The Infinities published, and I think I might have found the answer: he got it published by using at least one of my tips for creating a best seller. In that post -- which any aspiring author should read -- I mentioned that one of the surefire ways to create a bestseller was to "recast an old classic:"

What humans mean, when we say we want variety and new things, is this: we want the same old things, but with slightly different sauce. We want Lady Gaga, who is just Madonna done all over again. We want John Grisham to keep writing the same exact book, over and over. We want Tom Cruise to keep playing Tom Cruise in movies, regardless of what the plot of the movie is. That's why Top Gun, Risky Business, Jerry Maguire, Rain Man, and the Mission: Impossible movies were hits while Valkyrie and The Last Samurai weren't: Nobody wants to see Tom Cruise The Nazi, as varied and new as that is. And that's why Taco Bell survives: every single thing that Taco Bell sells is identical to every single other thing that Taco Bell sells; it's just rearranged to look different.

Banville, as it turns out, did just that: he adapted someone else's work, more or less. In an interview with Amazon, --which I won't call "Amazon.com" because calling a company "dot-com" is stupid: the dot-com is its address. Calling a company Amazon.com or Pets.com or anything is like calling Microsoft "Microsoft One Microsoft Way." Just call the company by its name and leave the address out of conversation -- Banville said:

Question: Where did you get the idea to use Greek gods as characters in a novel? And then how did you settle on the ones we meet in The Infinities? John Banville: I have always been an admirer of the great German dramatist Heinrich von Kleist, particularly the play I consider his masterpiece, Amphitryon, which I adapted for the Irish stage. In this wonderful tragi-comedy Jupiter falls for Alcmene, wife of the Theban general Amphitryon, and comes to earth with his son and sidekick Mercury, to spend a heavenly night with the lady; the next morning Amphitryon returns unexpectedly from the wars, precipitating an intricate comedy of errors. Originally I intended to base The Infinities quite closely on Amphitryon, but fiction has its own laws and its own demands, and the finished novel is an autonymous creature, though the Kleist is still there in skeletal form.

So he simply adapted the story: "The Infinities" might as well be that Hamlet-only-with-dogs book, or Jane Eyre Plus Skeletons, or whatever other meager gruel is being passed off as new work these days.

That might explain part of why I disliked it so much; I'm not one to dote on ancient Greeks or required reading from high school or anything that's considered a classic when they're not really a classic anything. (As you know.) I find that things that were relevant to one era very rarely are relevant to another era, and so while the themes may be universal, the pacing, humor, and styles are not, and they leave people disliking them. You want to read a classic story of star-crossed lovers? Don't read Romeo & Juliet; do read any number of star-crossed lovers stories written in the past 30 years, including Twilight, which I can't believe I just recommended, but if that many people have loved it, it must have something going for it.

Which brings me back, in a way, to one of what are turning out to be the two themes of this review: whether people liking one thing and then liking another thing can be a good guide to whether I will like it -- in other words, "John liked A, and then liked B" may be true, but is it transitive to me if I liked A?" -- and why would anyone bother reading "The Infinities?"

Because, as I've said over and over, nothing happens! I finally realized nothing was going to happen when I hit 88% completed on the book, and nothing had yet happened, and I realized, then, that I had simply been sitting and waiting for something to happen, that what had been pulling me forward through the book was the expectation that at some point, something or other would actually take place to justify all this standing around.

But nothing ever did. There are major events in the book that go completely unexplained, for example: Petra-- that's the sister's name that I forgot last time and only remembered now because I read it in that Amazon-not-dot-com interview -- cuts herself ceremonially using a kimono and why she has the kimono or what its significance is never gets discussed. Benny Grace introduces Old Adam, in a flashback, to a mysterious older woman who appears to have some power over Benny Grace but it's never explained. Old Adam has a flashback to when he was in Venice and slept with a prostitute after his first wife died. And so on, and so on: these scenes are never developed or explained or even tied into the story...

... which is likely because there is no story. There's not a single thread of narrative element here, no plot, no rising climax, nothing for a reader to hook into. The whole story is buildup to something that never happens, though Banville tries hard to disguise that by making something happen at the very end, sort of, and by wrapping the whole thing up in literary conceits.

The first literary conceit, one I didn't get until I read that interview, is that one of the main characters has been cast in a play -- that play being the same Greek play that the book is a ripoff of. I'm assuming Banville thought we were all familiar with "great German dramatists" and that we'd get the insider-joke/house of mirrors feeling that he maybe was trying for, but, frankly, I didn't, because I'm not familiar with Kleist, and, if I had been familiar with Kleist, I likely would have earlier come to the conclusion that The Infinities was nothing more than a highbrow version of those Family Guy parodies, Robot Chicken for The New Yorker readers.

The second literary conceit is the building thunderstorm -- as the day wears on the heat becomes more and more oppressive and the air becomes more still and the whole day seems to take on the charge of expectancy, much like the book got a little bit of a buzz when Benny Grace shows up, buzz that kept growing and growing like a static charge.

Did you ever, when you were a kid, scuff your feet around to build up static electricity with the intention of giving someone a shock, only to have it not work? I did that once, in Boston Store, a place my mom liked to shop and which was a reliable source of static electricity. Shopping for back-to-school clothes with my mom and my brothers once, I scuffed around and around the boys' department for about 10 minutes, never lifting my feet and anticipating that I was going to probably light my brother Matt's hair on fire when I finally zapped him, and, when I felt that I couldn't bear it any longer -- that if I kept going I might spontaneously combust -- I scuffed over to him and stuck out my finger and waited for him to jump, start crying, complain, something.

He looked at me and said "What?"

That is the ending of The Infinities, in a nutshell: The thunderstorm builds and builds throughout the day, rising in power as the characters... do nothing... and then two characters sneak off to the woods for no reason, and the storm builds more, and they end up at the unexplained, no-reason-for-it-being-mentioned holy well, and then Zeus takes over the body of the man (Roddy, Petra's boyfriend) and kissed the other (Helen, young Adam's wife), and we actually are shown that, instead of telling it...

... and then it's back to everything happening offstage, as Helen shows up back at the house wet, and the thunderstorm is thunderstorming away, and Roddy is being driven (again, offstage) to the train, and the whole storm is made to feel like it's the high point of the book, which makes it anticlimactic, only moreso, when Old Adam doesn't die.

He doesn't live, exactly, either -- he's brought down from his deathbed, apparently no longer in a coma but not much different from when he was comatose. A doctor is summoned, the family puts on the radio, there's a bit of perspective from the dog, Old Adam is sitting on a couch still hooked up to his IVs and even if he isn't in a coma he's still old and obviously not going to last much longer...

... and SCENE.

That's it.

The book ends.

AND, I might add, not only does the not-yet-dying of an elderly character serve as what's supposed to be the climax of the book but the book fades midway through that scene -- with a final, inexplicable mention of Benny Grace for no reason -- but there was no $$#*#&% point in having Old Adam live.

It's not like anyone had unfinished business with him; no mention was made of the kids just wanting to speak to him one more time, or his wife needing to let go or anything like that. It's not clear, either, how Old Adam originally suffered his injury or illness -- that, too, happened offstage.

It's not clear why anything happened in this book, which is what makes me so upset that I wasted time, and ten bucks or so, reading it, and makes me wonder how it got published in the first place. Having thrown money at Banville, did the publisher just decide to go with it and hope for the best? Was there a need to balance out the bookstore's shelves?

I'm not saying that every book has to have a reason for existing... no, wait, that's exactly what I'm saying. That reason could be something highbrow, or lowbrow, but it should be. It could be simply here's an interesting story I have to tell, or the like.

I can't figure out why Banville wrote this book or why someone published it. I know why I read it -- because my Kindle told me that people who bought books that I'd bought went on to buy this book, so now I can't even trust my Kindle anymore, and if you can't trust the electronics in your life, who can you trust?

I think, overall, the best possible analogy for The Infinities might let me get away with a literary conceit of my own: The Infinities is like a stage play that's not very interesting, but has a lot of behind-the-scenes melodrama. It's Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, only in literary form: The storyline itself is ho-hum and doesn't have much to recommend it, but backstage the action is compelling. Nobody really wants to see Spider-Man The Musical, but everyone is eagerly reading about the infighting and the injuries and the overspending and the firing.

That's The Infinities: All the hints at otherwordly stuff, all the suggestions that the characters have done something interesting in the past, all the flashbacks to just after or just before something compelling happens, without bothering to actually show the compelling scenes, hints that there could be something exciting about to happen, and so nobody gets up out of his or her seat for fear of missing it -- until it's too late and the show's over and nobody's actually fallen from the sky, and we're left with simply the feeling of time wasted.

This is the only time you'll read a book review that detours to talk about a deranged clown... (The Rum Punch Review of "The Infinities," Part 2)

Read part one here.

How, I wonder, does a book like The Infinities get published, and get marketed? I remember reading reviews of the book, and thinking "that sounds like something I would probably enjoy" and eventually I bought the book (on my Kindle, which is how I buy all books now) and started reading it, pretty eagerly, too, because it sounded good, like I said.

Almost immediately, I knew I was in trouble. Well, not almost immediately, as the beginning actually starts off in a tantalizing kind of way, with the main character -- Adam, not to be confused with the other main character, Adam, or, rather, to be confused quite a bit with the other main character, Adam, because Banville doesn't often bother distinguishing which Adam he's talking about or which point of view he's using -- and I'll come back to that annoyance/bad writing in a bit -- the main character, Adam, or one of the characters, at least, since there's really no main character, at all, is wandering around in the early morning in an old house, and there's a train stopped outside, a train that's almost ghostly in the way it's described and the effect it has on Adam-the-Younger, a train that for some reason stops by this house in the middle of nowhere and then moves on, stopping for no reason. Nobody gets off, nobody gets on, the train does not refuel or anything like that. It just stops, and then goes, while Adam watches it and thinks.

That's kind of a neat beginning, in that it's otherworldly and well-written and sets the stage for a novel that will take me to unusual places and have unusual things happen and which will open up new windows of thought for me.

Too bad The Infinities doesn't do any of those things. In fact, the opening setpiece accurately sets the stage for what really will follow: the rest of the book, too, will be filled with inexplicable stops and starts, hinting at something interesting and unique, while never actually doing anything before moving on, leaving us stuck here, with these people, doing nothing, while elsewhere there is a world to be visited.

And it's not bad enough that here, with these people -- Adam, his wife, his sister, her boyfriend, their mother, and some hired hands, plus the dying Elder Adam, plus Zeus and Hermes -- is boring, stultifyingly boring. That's not bad enough, but Banville has to go make it worse by (a) hinting at all the exciting things that are going on elsewhere, and (b) constantly shifting points of view from character to character, sometimes without telling you he's doing so or even giving a clue.

I don't know which bothered me worse: the fact that everything seems to happen offstage, or the fact that I never knew who was telling the story.

Either way, the book sucked, but I'll continue to rant for a while about it.

The plot of The Infinities, if it can be said to have a plot at all and I'm not the one saying it does, is that Elder Adam is dying in his house, and the family has gathered around him. The whole story takes place, it seems, in a single day -- the day after Adam and his wife Helen have returned home, the day on which Roddy (the sister's boyfriend and gadabout) and Benny Grace arrive at the house.

Viewing these people, who mostly sit around and do nothing, are two gods: Zeus and Hermes, who have descended to watch whatever it is they want to watch, for no apparent reason. No reason is ever given why the gods have chosen to watch this Adam die (or, as it turns out, not die. I'm not sorry if I spoiled it for you by simply saying that; Elder Adam doesn't die, so don't bother reading this book because now you know the ending.) The gods are just there, being infinite in their existence and apparently infinite in their boredom, too -- an infinity of infinities that served only to demonstrate to me just how infinite my boredom could be, as well.

The people who are in the house quite literally do nothing unless briefly possessed by the gods. Helen and Adam have sex in the morning -- but it's Zeus disguised as Adam. The hired hands get engaged, but only after Hermes briefly possesses one of them to set it up. Other than that, everyone mostly stands around doing nothing, or, worse yet, we get after-the-fact descriptions of everyone standing around doing nothing. There's a seemingly-lengthy bit about Adam The Younger fixing a radio, and Banville frequently mentions the fact that Adam The Younger's clothes don't quite fit.

I was this close to giving up on the book, about halfway through, when Benny Grace came on the scene.

Benny Grace was to The Infinities what the clown in the rocker was to the movie Amusement, and if you have neither read the book nor seen that movie, but are determined to do one or the other, I'd say go with "Amusement" because it'll cost you less in both money and time.

Amusement is a 2008 horror movie:



That Sweetie and I actually watched last night, because Sweetie was told to watch it by Netflix - -using, again, that "people who watched that also watched this" feature that doesn't bother to tell you that the latter one sucked. According to Sweetie, we got told to watch Amusement because of our interest in such latter-day classics as "Sorority Row," so she rented it and we watched it last night, and the entire thing was a waste of time except for one 10-minute sequence in which the main character -- Katheryn Winnick:



Who I thought looked first like Scarlett Johannsen, then like Jennifer Aniston, before deciding that she looked like a cross between the two, as if scientists had genetically melded Jennifer Aniston and Scarlett Johannsen into one super-being, which isn't a bad idea for scientists to be working on...

... I digress. Scarlett Aniston, in Amusement, is one of three girls who are, it turns out, being targeted by The Guy Who Played Todd In Wedding Crashers, because when they were kids Todd made a diorama of a tortured squirrel that they didn't like, so now he's going to kill them, and he's going to do it using (I'm not kidding) a hotel that he's run for years, a giant labyrinth that apparently doubles as an FBI office so far as social workers are concerned, a deserted farmhouse, and a truck driver with a penchant for surprise.

That would all take far too long to explain, so maybe you should watch the movie, and while you watch it, look for answers to these two questions that I still have and which I'll no doubt have to wait for the director's cut to get answers to:

1. Since the girls were aware of the "Peres Pension" hotel where one girl was lured to her death, that means that it was a longstanding commercial operation, so did the killer actually run a hotel for years to set up the attacks, because that seems like a lot of work, and

2. Why did the social worker believe she was really in an FBI office when the only entrances to that office were down a ladder into a tunnel in a deserted farmhouse, or through a maze in a hotel that was made up of deathtraps?

So the point of bringing up Amusement is that there's one scene that is actually very effective: It involves Jennifer Johannsen babysitting and having to sleep in a roomful of creepy clown dolls, one of which is lifesize and which is obviously the killer in an outfit, but Aniston Scarlett doesn't quite realize that, and opts to sleep in the room anyway, with the TV "accidentally" turning on and things like that happening, until she wakes up to answer a phone call from the parents of the kids, and says that she doesn't like the giant clown doll they have in the room, at which point the caller says "We don't have anything like that" and Scarlett Jennifer turns to look and the clown is gone.

The lead up to the clown disappearing is actually quite tense and well-done, even though you know all along what's going to happen, and I liked that part of Amusement even though I didn't like any other parts of it and later forbid Sweetie to rent movies ever again, and I intend to enforce that rule.

And Benny Grace's introduction to The Infinities is like that. When Benny Grace shows up, Banville distractingly and irritatingly switches the point of view and narration to the dog, for no reason, hinting that dogs are smart in this world, but I put up with it because Benny Grace's arrival is all foreboding and hints of thrills and danger: the dog doesn't trust him and wants to chase him away but Benny Grace knows the dog and is able to lull him into letting him in the house, where the sister/daughter meets him -- I don't remember her name and don't care -- and she's on edge by his being there and suddenly everyone is on edge, even old, dying Adam, and even Hermes, all clamoring about Benny Grace is here.

Benny's physical appearance would be comical if we weren't told he's so alarming: he's fat and described as having hoof-like feet, and it's not clear if that's literal, and he's sweaty and grins at the wrong time and always taking off his shoes, and he upsets everyone, even Adam, if Adam is Adam, because it's at the introduction of Benny Grace that Banville lets us see in side Elder Adam's mind, remembering things, only it's not clear if it's actually Adam or Hermes, as the points of view switch off almost at random, making me wonder for most of the book whether Hermes was Adam and vice versa, or whether Hermes was reading Adam's mind, or what was going on...

... but for a while, I didn't care, because the introduction of Benny Grace, like the clown in Amusement, had injected some well-needed tension and excitement into what had otherwise been a laughably tedious enterprise.

But that soon wore off: in Amusement, I was watching tensely and said to Sweetie "That clown better get up and attack soon or I'm going to have a stroke from tension," and I meant it.

In The Infinities, I was, literarily speaking, on the edge of my seat waiting to see what was going to happen now that Benny Grace was here -- halfway through the book, sure, but that wasn't too late to rescue this extended Victorian setpiece, and Benny Grace's introduction provided that tension: something's going to happen, I kept thinking,

and kept thinking,

and kept thinking,

until I noticed that I was 88% of the way through the book and nothing had happened after all, even though Benny Grace was there, and even though everyone was on edge, and even though Adam was remembering things that he and Benny Grace had done (remembering, that is, the aftermath of those things -- remembering coming back from adventures without ever detailing what the adventures were.)

Imagine if you got on a roller coaster and it started up that first hill and then just kept going up and up and up and up and up, tension rising along with you...

... and then the ride stops and you get off.

That's The Infinities. And I'm not done bashing it yet. I'm just out of time for today. There'll be more in part three.

No, I would NOT like fries with this book... (The Rum Punch Review of "The Infinities" By John Banville.)

Oh, my God this book was terrible.

And, frankly, I hold it against all of you, and by "you" I mean "people who read the same books I read so that when I look at a book that I read I get a little blurb that says People who read this also liked..." or some such, which is how I found The Infinities, by John Banville.

In part.

I also found it because critics reviewed it and generally gave it a good review -- EW gave it a B -- and that's generally a bad sign, because it doesn't take much to impress critics, as I've noted before. But I was thrown off by you, because enough of you read enough of the books I've read and then went on to read The Infinities that it was suggested as something I, too, would like, and therein lies the flaw with that system:

The I did this then did that recommendation system that many companies use -- a system they don't present as a favor to you but because it raises their revenues in a sort of high-tech "Would you like fries with that" way as well as clearing their shelves of old stuff ("Would you like old, leftover fries with that?") doesn't work perfectly, as shown by the fact that I was duped into reading The Infinities (and then goaded into finishing it by Sweetie) by just such a system, which had no way of reporting back to me something like

"People who read the book you just read also bought The Infinities but most of them didn't like it and many of them didn't finish it. One, in fact, was so disappointed that he took his copy of the book and threw it at a raccoon in his yard, which was kind of dumb in that he was reading it on a Kindle and now a raccoon has a Kindle, which with their opposable thumbs they might actually be able to use, so now your book recommendations are in part being shaped by that raccoon, which is how Snooki's book became a best seller. Would you like fries with this?"

Now, granted, I could have probably also read reviews by readers online, or other reviews, but I don't necessarily trust those reviews, either -- since top reviewers on Amazon and other places are rewarded for reviewing, so I can't trust them to be honest, since everybody knows that if you make money doing something you're incredibly biased and can't possibly be trusted.

In short, I'm not taking the blame for having decided to read The Infinities, a decision I made after finishing up Room and waiting a decent period of time to allow Room, which still kind of haunts me, to settle in.

The idea of The Infinities appealed to me -- the reviews I'd read and the synopsis of it online mentioned Greek gods, a slightly-different alternate universe, a dying patriarch who'd done something or other with mathematics -- part of the infinities of the title, he's discovered that there are an infinite number of alternate universes, a discovery that (a) was there for the taking from anyone who's ever read a comic book and (b) plays absolutely no role in the story. None at all. Not a single thing. It might as well not be mentioned.

In fact, much of the novel might as well not be mentioned, and Chekhov is probably rolling over in his grave, if he's dead, which I'm pretty sure he is, perturbed about the many, many guns that Banville brings on stage only to never ever use. (If you're not sure what I'm talking about, you can find out more about Chekhov's gun and how it relates to Cylons, here).

In fact-er, much of the novel might as well not have been written, and certainly shouldn't have been read, and shouldn't have been so long, and frankly, I'm not sure why The Infinities even exists, unless Banville's publisher owed him a favor or he was playing a practical joke on readers who expect something like plots and events and reasons for things to exist and the like in a book.

You won't find that here. You won't find much of anything to like about The Infinities, unless what you like is a lot of pointless blather with side notes that exist for no particular reason. In fact, I'll start ending this part of the review by listing, off the top of my head, all the things I can remember from this book that Banville makes a point to mention, at length, only to then completely drop, not explain, not ever make a reference to again, or otherwise reveal to be a more-pointless-than-usual red herring:

The train that stops.
The holy well.
Fusion powered cars.
The death of the main character's first wife.
The Greek Gods
The history of the house.
Roddy's career.
The "infinities" discovered by the main character.

Oh, and the dog that sometimes can think critically and sometimes can't and who sometimes we see the story from his point of view a la Patricia Cornwell, and it's really pointless to say, again, that presenting a story from an animal's point of view is a remarkably irritating and juvenile thing to do, isn't it? Or maybe it's just bad writers, like Banville and Cornwell, who can't do that, since you can have a magical talking goldfish that grants wishes in a story and it can be beautiful and amazing, like in the short story "What Of This Goldfish Would You Wish" by Etgar Keret, which you can also hear read on this episode of This American Life, and I'd go do that if I were you.

Oh, and the kimono at the end.
And the wedding ring and the play that one character is in.
And the entire illness that spurs the story.

And, most irritatingly of all, Benny Grace.

Benny Grace, the character, briefly got me to want to go on reading the book, and by the time I realized I'd been duped by him, too, it was too late and I had to finish it.

But I would like to throw Benny Grace to a raccoon, and maybe John Banville, too, for wasting my time with this book. More on that in part two of this review, which you can read by clicking here.