The Next Dark Age

Book 48

John Gregory Dunne was a writer.  He was also the husband of Joan Didion and the brother of Dominick Dunne.  Harp was a memoir that he wrote after two big, bad things happened in the late 1980’s.  First, his younger brother killed himself.  And he was diagnosed with the heart trouble that would later kill him.

Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking was about the year after Dunne’s death.  I loved it and I love her.  One of the striking things she remembered was Dunne saying, right around the time that he wrote this book I imagine, that it was a really strange thing to know how you are going to die.  She denied his statement.  He wasn’t going to die from that episode.  But he knew that someday, it would come back and get him.

That’s the guy I was looking for in this book.  And while he didn’t speak so directly about his feelings – he isn’t the type – I am happy to say that I found him.

He spoke a bit about the falling he and Dominick had at the time of Stephen’s suicide.  John was an ass and then Nick was a big drama queen and it sounds like the kind of thing that happens in every family and you just want to smack them both.  Then he went on a bit of a European tour to find himself or whatever.

He started in Germany, where he served in the army post-WWII.  He went on to Ireland to find his roots or something.  He writes about it all in a very detached way.  “Observational” is the way he writes it.  He went so far as to say he was watching himself experience it.

There are a couple of times when he challenges the veracity of something just written.  He takes an “it is all true, in a way” attitude that bothers me.  I can certainly accept that “truth” is a matter of perception and he gets to remember and present his own experience as he chooses.  The self-consciousness, however, annoys me.  I guess it was a self-conscious time.

This was the first of Dunne’s books that I have read.  I think the rest are fiction.   I can manage that.

Book 47

Norman Mailer was the kind of writer that liked to mess with your head and in his final novel, he outdid himself.  This is the most disturbing thing I have read all year.

Well, duh.  The premise is that minions of the devil watched and guided the Hitler family from even before the time when Adolf was born.  The narrator was assigned to the infant and tells the family story.

It is demented, as one would expect.  Although I wouldn’t have thought as far as two generations of inbreeding.  Really close inbreeding.

Also, I don’t know how I picked up a novel about Hitler being guided by the Devil’s Minions without understanding that at some point, something terrible was going to happen to a dog.

Mailer pulled a pretty cool stunt in there, too.  He left the Hitler action to cover the coronation of Czar Nicholas II.  Because the minion was assigned to that, too.  What is even cooler is that the narrator said if the reader wasn’t interested, he or she could pick up the Hitler action again on page 261.  I sure wanted to hear about Russia.  A shorter detour was later taken to the assassination of Empress Elisabeth of Austria.  The point is that Evil weaves it Evil Web at different times and places.  And it is patient.

I began losing some interest after the death of Alois Hitler, the father.  But the chilling epilogue said that after 1945, the Devil’s Minions set up shop in the U.S. and began “investing” in both Israel and the Arabs.

It would not surprise me if that was what Mailer intended to write next.