Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer

Of the five people who showed up to book club this month, I was the only one who liked this book--let alone raved about it. I went through about four interpretations of it before settling on one, and even though my fellow clubbers didn't enjoy the selection, their perspectives--especially Belinda's--helped set my opinion that this is one of the two best books I have read this year.

This presents me with a problem. Nothing is simpler than to rail against a book I don't care for, or to make a connection between a tepid book and something interesting from my own mind. What is difficult is to read a book that has so many interesting aspects that it is difficult to piece them all together in something cogent. Even more difficult, Miller's book is fragmented to begin with. Let my try and touch on a few of the more interesting aspects, but I know I will be unsatisfied with the result.

Miller would have wanted me to be unsatisfied anyway. The book is designed to unsettle, not only with topic (drinking and sex) and language (cunt after cunt after fucked-out cunt of a whore), but also with marvelously disturbing imagery (the remains of a ham sandwich floating in a bidet is my favorite). The book inveighs against the tendency to put things in flowerpots, to compartmentalize, to write stories--books and internal narratives--that limit the wonder of experience. The point of existence, as I see it through Miller's eyes, is to experience those grand moments of epiphany that make the rest of the agonizing tedium worth it. "I had moments of ecstasy and I sang with burning sparks," the narrator explains (251). The book itself is Miller's attempt--and he never has illusions about it being more than an attempt--to capture that experience, to write "pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses" (248). Whatever else can be said, this he did do. And I choose to believe that he revealed, at points, the single unwavering band of light that Vonnegut assures us is at the center of each one of us.