Apr. 21st, 2008
Book Review: Candy, by "Maxwell Canton"
Apr. 21st, 2008 05:40 pmCandy by "Maxwell Canton" (a psuedonym for Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg) is a 1958 novel that is apparently fondly remembered by lots of its fans for its breathless descriptions of an excessively naive, manipulable and attractive young lady as she careens through one bizarre encounter after another while a rolling cast of late-50s stereotypical characters attempts to seduce her: her teacher Professor Mephesto, her Uncle Jack and his wife Livia (who apparently also swings wildly between cocaine-fueled cockwhore and sullen brat), the peculiar Dr. Krankeit and the desperate Dr. Duncan, and thereafter by equally creepy physicians, doctors, police officers, cult leaders, Communists, religious gurus, and finally The Buddha himself. Very few of these men (and sadly, never Livia) ever get into her pants; those that do tend to have less-than-succesful moments. The book is replete with descriptions of her lush nakedness and cute euphemisms for various body parts.
The book is really a succession of farcical set-pieces about pretentious teachers, "liberated" women, the weird "sexology" of the late 1950's, the rise of strange religious cults (although why they take a swipe at the Quakers I can't tell), the relationships between cops and gay bars at the time. There's an almost painfully extended piece about Jews and the way they did or did not integrate well with the larger American community at the time. (I write "painfully" because there were a lot of men from my family and their extended communities who bore the scars of those battles. One of my relatives in the early 1970s delighted his mother by becoming a law professor-- "A doctor and a lawyer!"-- a career which he almost immediately abandoned to write porn. Sadly, I'm not actually related to him and my parents adamantly refused to tell me his pen name.)
I found the book a bit disappointing. I can see how it was a thrill to read in 1960. I can see how the authors thought it was subversive and funny. But one of the things I've learned in the past forty years is that we don't really run to a reductio world when we have one of these bizarre societal adolescent moments; instead, we outgrow them, establish a new equilibrium, and move on. It was a "smile, yeah, that was probably amusing once" kind of book.
I should probably track down a copy of The Happy Hooker and reread it. Xaveria Hollander was my introduction to the perversity of the world.
The book is really a succession of farcical set-pieces about pretentious teachers, "liberated" women, the weird "sexology" of the late 1950's, the rise of strange religious cults (although why they take a swipe at the Quakers I can't tell), the relationships between cops and gay bars at the time. There's an almost painfully extended piece about Jews and the way they did or did not integrate well with the larger American community at the time. (I write "painfully" because there were a lot of men from my family and their extended communities who bore the scars of those battles. One of my relatives in the early 1970s delighted his mother by becoming a law professor-- "A doctor and a lawyer!"-- a career which he almost immediately abandoned to write porn. Sadly, I'm not actually related to him and my parents adamantly refused to tell me his pen name.)
I found the book a bit disappointing. I can see how it was a thrill to read in 1960. I can see how the authors thought it was subversive and funny. But one of the things I've learned in the past forty years is that we don't really run to a reductio world when we have one of these bizarre societal adolescent moments; instead, we outgrow them, establish a new equilibrium, and move on. It was a "smile, yeah, that was probably amusing once" kind of book.
I should probably track down a copy of The Happy Hooker and reread it. Xaveria Hollander was my introduction to the perversity of the world.
I read this book because it was listed as one of the two most "deeply sick and depraved" books of SF, at least according to the readers of rec.arts.sf.written. Unfortunately, it's not really that depraved. Or if it was, I was so overwhelmingly bored by it that the supposed sickness didn't make much of an impression.
Perhaps the best thing I can say about I, Weapon is that it isn't a novel at all; it's the plotter's synopsis for a Marvel comic about the same year as the book. Doing a synopsis of the synopsis will be difficult, but here goes: it is The Future. The Morlocks-- excuse me, the Progs-- live on the Moon and on habitats about Jupiter. Their agents, the Stafi and Landed, do the grunt work and raise the Eloi-- excuse me, the Unguls-- humans so mutated after Terra's first nuclear war that they are fit only as foodstock. Humanity had spread throughout the galaxy, only to be forced back to a few dozen worlds by the villainous Vim. A desperate Prog, consulting The Computer, learns that the only possibility of success is a breeding cycle to create a godlike human who can crush the Vim. The first half of the book deals with her struggles to reach her goal: she has to collect the sperm of an Ungul, an Unchanged, and an "Evolutionary Variant", mix them all together, and then carry the product to term herself all "the old-fashioned way, without the use of a breeding tank or gene equipment," The Computer tells her. The end of the book is an unchallenging narrative of her offspring's heroic success after success. I won't spoil the ending, such as it is, for you.
Is it "depraved?" It certainly may have been once upon a time: we have flat, drab, colorless passion meandering across the page as our blue-skinned, bug-eyed heroine (the lights are low in those sublunarian bases to preserve power) mates with these various creatures. Runyon takes particular delight in displaying the ranches where human-stock meat is raised and butchered, and spends inordinate amounts of time when the hero starts making it with a Vim female.
So: you got your cannibalism, your pornography, your vague sense of bestiality. There's even a snuff scene for those with that kind of bent. There's a hint of lesbianism when the logic-driven Prog heroine tries to describe her feelings for her oh-so-useful-and-beautiful (illegally gengineered to be a sex toy, but now free and educated) Stafi assistant, but then puts them aside as irrational and never acts on them-- pity, as the Stafi seems to be the only real human in the place.
But it's all so boring! Runyon is a complete hack; his exposition goes on for page after page after page. His dialogue is completely "as you know, Bob." When the hero gets into Vim territory he discovers that he is carrying a "psychic inhibitor"; without it, he is a God and an unimaginative one at that, and the book is really over when Runyon has another 80 pages or so to fill. Terrible read.
Perhaps the best thing I can say about I, Weapon is that it isn't a novel at all; it's the plotter's synopsis for a Marvel comic about the same year as the book. Doing a synopsis of the synopsis will be difficult, but here goes: it is The Future. The Morlocks-- excuse me, the Progs-- live on the Moon and on habitats about Jupiter. Their agents, the Stafi and Landed, do the grunt work and raise the Eloi-- excuse me, the Unguls-- humans so mutated after Terra's first nuclear war that they are fit only as foodstock. Humanity had spread throughout the galaxy, only to be forced back to a few dozen worlds by the villainous Vim. A desperate Prog, consulting The Computer, learns that the only possibility of success is a breeding cycle to create a godlike human who can crush the Vim. The first half of the book deals with her struggles to reach her goal: she has to collect the sperm of an Ungul, an Unchanged, and an "Evolutionary Variant", mix them all together, and then carry the product to term herself all "the old-fashioned way, without the use of a breeding tank or gene equipment," The Computer tells her. The end of the book is an unchallenging narrative of her offspring's heroic success after success. I won't spoil the ending, such as it is, for you.
Is it "depraved?" It certainly may have been once upon a time: we have flat, drab, colorless passion meandering across the page as our blue-skinned, bug-eyed heroine (the lights are low in those sublunarian bases to preserve power) mates with these various creatures. Runyon takes particular delight in displaying the ranches where human-stock meat is raised and butchered, and spends inordinate amounts of time when the hero starts making it with a Vim female.
So: you got your cannibalism, your pornography, your vague sense of bestiality. There's even a snuff scene for those with that kind of bent. There's a hint of lesbianism when the logic-driven Prog heroine tries to describe her feelings for her oh-so-useful-and-beautiful (illegally gengineered to be a sex toy, but now free and educated) Stafi assistant, but then puts them aside as irrational and never acts on them-- pity, as the Stafi seems to be the only real human in the place.
But it's all so boring! Runyon is a complete hack; his exposition goes on for page after page after page. His dialogue is completely "as you know, Bob." When the hero gets into Vim territory he discovers that he is carrying a "psychic inhibitor"; without it, he is a God and an unimaginative one at that, and the book is really over when Runyon has another 80 pages or so to fill. Terrible read.
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