Glass Soup, Part Two
On elephant eyeballs, dream logic, and the perils of performative weirdness
Glass Soup, by Jonathan Carroll
“His search…had been tedious, then frightening and grueling. Full of wrong turns and false hopes, eventually he had done it. He had no idea how long it took in life-time — a thousand years or ten minutes? This was death and the clocks here were different.”
— Jonathan Carroll, Glass Soup
It’s conventional wisdom that there are few things more tedious than listening to other people describe their dreams. For a solid chunk of this book — say the first hundred or so pages — this wisdom felt very…present.
Glass Soup opens with Simon Haden, a washed-up rake teetering on one side or the other of forty, as he moves about his shithole apartment getting ready for his job as a tour guide in an unnamed city.
Once very handsome and easily successful because of that, Haden’s best days are behind him. His wife has left him. His bills are past due. He is stuck in a low-existence limbo — bad apartment, bad job, bad TV — with seemingly no end in sight.
This is all laid out with a straightforward narrative economy that I appreciated, and it’s a good set-up for when Haden tears open the envelope containing the day’s work instructions and we are pitched this little curveball:
A little man the size of a candy bar stepped out of the envelope into his hand.
“Haden, how you doin’?”
“Broximon! Long time no see. How are you?”
The no-nonsense approach of our introduction to tiny Broximon (who, incidentally, is nattily outfitted in a blue pinstriped suit) is carried over as Haden steps out into a wider world where terriers bicycle up the street and Donald Duck and a human-sized bag of caramel candy are two of the passengers on Haden’s tour bus, which is driven by an octopus.
We soon discover — as he himself finally does (apparently he’s been here for awhile) — that Simon Haden is dead, and that this dream world is his own private purgatory, populated by and decorated in the dreams and memories left over from his life.
It’s a decent hook, but I was trepidatious. Because man, dream stuff. On the one hand, when it is executed well (as it is here), I like being exposed to dream logic. It is fun to see other people react to things as we all do in our own dreams, or rather, to see them not react to things, things that would otherwise be startling, horrifying, impossible, or all of the above. In real life, if you are talking to your grandma and she turns into a CD player and flies away, you are probably pretty alarmed (especially if your grandmother has been dead for years), but in a dream you just go “oh crap, I forgot my skis under the lava bed in Jeff’s jungle room” and you’re off to the next thing.
So I like that. On the other hand, though, the novelty can wear off pretty quickly when surreal just seems surreal for surreal’s sake.
One time in eighth grade I was walking down the hall behind three nerdy seventh graders, a boy and two girls. It was before school started, so we were the only ones in the hall, and they didn’t know I was there (sidenote: I’m a little proud of what a quiet walker I am). As I closed in on them, I caught them in mid-conversation. Apparently, they were playing a primitive version of “Would You Rather?” because as I came into earshot the boy said:
NERDY SEVENTH GRADER BOY: Okay, would you rather drown in a giant bowl of tapioca pudding or…a vat of elephant eyeballs?
NERDY SEVENTH GRADER GIRLS: Eeeeeeewwwwwwwwww!!!!!
NERDY SEVENTH GRADER TRIO: [just insane giggling]
I still remember the distinct sensation I felt…a physical aversion to such a deep level of lameness, a full-body wince. All at once, I was:
- deeply sorry for them
- ashamed on their behalves
- panicked at the possibility that such sweaty geekery might be contagious
- angry at them for not being better
- relieved for their sakes that I was the only one who had overheard. Wake up, nerdy seventh graders! This is junior high! Being this flamboyantly dorky is like wearing a bacon suit to Week Five of fat camp — the natives are going to tear you apart!
(I didn’t realize until much later that for whatever reason — hopelessness, maturity, some magical combination of the two — they probably didn’t mind what other, cooler kids thought of them, weren’t worried about rising up from the band-room bottom social stratum, and were content to simply entertain each other by finding creative, novel ways of grossing each other out.)
(Nerds.)
I mention this because I have a minor version of the same reaction to surreal for surreal’s sake stuff in general. Even though it’s handled pretty well here, dream description stuff can get a little…sweaty. I feel like the storyteller becomes a version of the nerdy seventh grade would-you-ratherer, where he describes zany impossibility after zany impossibility (“and then, you guys, the CHEETO ate HIM!”) and I’m supposed to be his nerdy seventh grade compatriots and go “WHAT? THAT’S SO CRAZY!!!” every time.
It can get old pretty fast.
In Glass Soup, the odds that we are going to be doing performative weirdness go up quickly, because as soon as we meet Simon Haden and little Broximon in Haden’s dream world purgatory, we abandon them and head to the real world, modern-day Vienna, where we meet a collection of people who have some pretty low-level connections to Haden (an ex-lover, a woman he lusted after but never conquered, a friend) as they find out that he has died.
And…surreal/weird/impossible/dream stuff starts happening there, too.
This is where I started getting nervous. Because if you don’t set some pretty clear ground rules early on in a situation like this and then stick to them, you completely lose any sense of stakes. It’d be like playing an old video game while the game developer is actively altering the code: you jump on to solid ground but now it’s a fire pit and the 1-Up you just got is now a time bomb and it explodes and you die and you come back behind a solid wall and you are stuck there and…
You would soon tire of playing this game, because it would become impossible to hold onto the fiction that the little guy up there was in anyway connected to “you”, was anything more than a few blurred pixels on a screen.
If everything is possible, then nothing matters. It’s one thing to have a dream world where the impossible happens, but when the lines start blurring and the impossible is happening everywhere without much explanation, you run the risk of zaniness, and then what are you even doing? Life’s too short for zany.
Luckily, after about 100 pages of laying quite a bit of pipe establishing characters and their relationships and the confusing circumstances they find themselves in, the plot kicks in. An antagonist is firmly established, and it is decently creepy and offputting and starts doing bad things to people we have come to like, and they react and act and interact and we start getting some answers to the why?’s and what-the-hell?’s that take up the first 100 hundred pages.
And Carroll is a good writer, so those first 100 hundred pages aren’t nearly as painful as they could have been. You meet a lot of characters in a short time, but he does a good job of showing you enough of each of them that they are easy to keep apart. He writes people well, he’s good at names, and he’s solid at sentence construction.
Like here, where two characters exchange uncomfortable truths they are then forced to confront:
Each struggled to process their different information. But it was like trying to eat a whole loaf of bread as fast as you could. No matter how quickly you chewed, your cheeks stayed full, your throat grew dry, and your jaw got tired. But still there was so much more left to eat.
By the time we got to the narrative meat of what the book was about, I was enjoying myself quite a bit. I liked the people, I liked the narrator’s voice, I enjoyed the world(s) I was visiting, and I wanted to know what happened next.
The ending felt a little abrupt to me, but man, endings are tricky, and partially I was just bummed that the story was over, which is a good sign.
One small thing: part way through the book, I felt like two characters in particular were being subjected to some pretty high levels of exposition dumping, where we were being told pretty perfunctorily that some seemingly very major things (like death and resurrection) had happened to them off screen, before the story even began. This gave me a feeling so I looked it up and found that yes, these two characters had starred in a preceding novel called White Apples.
I’m guessing that I would have appreciated Glass Soup, or at least these two characters, more if I had read White Apples, but it was still an enjoyable read and anyway, the overall vibe of Glass Soup was sort of disjointed and disorienting, so that being told matter-of-factly that oh, by the way, so-and-so had previously died and come back to life felt pretty fitting.
Come to think of it, it seems like the way it would have happened in a dream.
Books Read: 1
Should You Read This Book: Hell yeah, go for it.
