Beautiful Screaming Lady

The Booker Bridesmaid

2011-02-08T08:19:00.003-05:00

Oh, Booker Prize, you do love your little mini-contests, don't you? We've had the Booker of Bookers, the Lost Booker Prize, and now the Best of Beryl. You see, poor Beryl Bainbridge was shortlisted five times and never won, and now that she's died she never will. (The greatest disadvantage of death, of course, is that one will now never win the Booker Prize.) (But seriously, imagine how much it must suck to be Beryl Bainbridge and know that DBC Pierre and Yann Martel and Aravind Adiga have all won the Booker Prize and you haven't. It's really rather sad when you think of it that way. Yann Martel.)

So the Booker gods have decided that the way to make this all okay is to invent a new prize called the Best of Beryl (I originally thought they were calling it the "Booker Bridesmaid," which thank God they did have the good sense to avoid) and let the public decide which of Bainbridge's five shortlisted books should take home this august honor. I can't decide whether this is sweet or weirdly condescending. Most likely, it is both. However, it is a nifty excuse to link to and exhort you to read the five books:

The Best Thing I Read Today

2011-01-06T21:01:00.003-05:00

"The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance."

Anthony Powell
A Question of Upbringing
Volume 1 of A Dance to the Music of Time

Top Ten Books of 2010

2011-01-05T19:39:00.002-05:00

I didn't think it was a fantastic year for books, to be honest. Lots of disappointments: Writers like Ian McEwan and Jon McGregor turned out clunkers, and all of the prize lists were pretty lackluster. But there were definitely some winners as well.

My favorite work of fiction in 2010 was Brady Udall's The Lonely Polygamist. That was probably my favorite book of all, and I can't really put my finger on what I liked so much about it. A healthy Big Love obsession helps. But I also liked the old-fashioned storytelling feel that this book has. And I got really attached to some of the characters. I really had a hard time putting this one down while I was reading it, and putting it aside when I was done.

My favorite work of non-fiction in 2010 was Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. This book is also heavy on narrative, and also really made me care about its subjects. I was really impressed with Demick's research. This book was as haunting as anything I read in 2010. Demick should have won the National Book Award for this book, and I was so disappointed that she didn't.

The rest of my list, in no particular order:

Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
Kings of the Earth, Jon Clinch
Skippy Dies, Paul Murray
A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
The Surrendered, Chang-Rae Lee
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, Helen Simonson
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl: Stories, Yiyun Li

Five men and five women (I swear I didn't do that on purpose). Seven novels, two non-fiction books, one short story collection. Also, I seem to have been unusually interested in Asia this year.

Meanwhile, On the Internet

2011-01-04T15:16:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow, my list of my favorite reads of 2010.

Meanwhile, lots of interesting links:

At Perpetual Folly, Claire Foster's story "Foster" has been christened the best New Yorker story of 2010. I am woefully behind on my New Yorker reading, so can't comment.
Many, many 2011 previews. Here are three: The Millions, the Guardian, and the Telegraph. I am ridiculously excited about Claire Tomalin's biography of Dickens. Also: a new Edward St. Aubyn, a new Ali Smith, and sadly, the last Beryl Bainbridge.
The January issue of Open Letters Monthly is live. Of greatest interest (to me at least): Honoria St. Cyr reviews the memoir of Deborah Mitford, the last of the Mitford sisters; Sam Sacks tackles Joshua Cohen's novel Witz; and Greg Waldman covers Mark Feldstein's book Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture. (I have a tiny little Nixon obsession.)
Last but not least, here is Keith Staskiewicz (writing for EW's Shelf Life blog) on the new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that omits both "Injun" and the n-word:

Twain’s book has been one of the most often misunderstood novels of all time, continuously being accused of perpetuating the prejudiced attitudes it is criticizing, and it’s a little disheartening to see a cave-in to those who would ban a book simply because it requires context. On the other hand, if this puts the book into the hands of kids who would not otherwise be allowed to read it due to forces beyond their control (overprotective parents and the school boards they frighten), then maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to judge. It’s unfortunate, but is it really any more catastrophic than a TBS-friendly re-edit of The Godfather, you down-and-dirty melon farmer?
Personally, I don't like the "TBS-friendly re-edits" of movies (or TV shows like The Sopranos), and when I run the world they will not happen. So perhaps I'm not the best person to ask. But yes, I think this is worse.

Worst Books of 2010

2010-12-31T12:16:00.003-05:00

I'm not ready to list the best books I read this year, but I do have a list of the worst books. Hopefully in the next six days I won't read anything else that belongs on this list!

1. Even the Dogs, Jon McGregor. I love everything else McGregor has written. But this was a mess.

2. The Finkler Question, Howard Jacobson. The Booker judges and I are so rarely on the same wavelength.

3. Black Mamba Boy, Nadifa Mohamed. Just really, really boring.

4. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, Elif Batuman. Okay, I know everyone else loved this book. To me, it was as if a precocious child who has been told once too often that she is precocious was standing in the middle of the room trying to prove to me how precocious she is.

5. One Day, David Nicholls. I didn't like the characters, I didn't believe their relationship, I thought the ending was overwrought and hackneyed and too long. Yikes. Hated it.

Seasonal Reading Challenge: Day 3

2010-12-06T10:36:00.000-05:00

It is Day 3, and I feel hopelessly behind. I have finished one book (Liar's Poker, good for Part B of Task 30.2), and started three others. (Apparently I have a touch of ADD--it is nearly impossible for me to limit myself to one book at a time unless it is really, really compelling.)

I am up to 5 points. Bonus: the book for which I was awarded my 5 points is Genesis, it is really fabulous, and I might not have read it for months were it not for this challenge. (The task for which I read this book required us to find the shortest book on our TBR list.)

I'm a little concerned about the NBCC list, which will come out in January. I usually try to read the fiction and non-fiction nominees. Whatever will I do if I can't fit them into my remaining categories?

Currently I have 70 (70!) books on my TBR list for between now and February 28 and some of the tasks haven't been released yet. The question comes to mind: am I a crazy person?

The Seasoned Reader

2010-12-06T10:33:00.001-05:00

Finding myself at loose ends after quitting my job, with nothing to do but raise three children, run my husband's Website, and plan my daughter's bat mitzvah, I decided to join the GoodReads Seasonal Reading Challenge.

What, you may ask, is the GoodReads Seasonal Reading Challenge? It sounds so innocent. It is diabolically complicated, just the sort of thing that might appeal to someone who was most recently employed as a Medicare actuary. And let me tell you, the rules of this challenge put the government's Medicare Advantage guidance to shame. The rules of this challenge are so complex, Byzantine, and detailed that the rabbis who developed the Talmud would read them, stroke their beards, and mutter, "A little nitpicky, no?"

Frankly, the fact that I am attempting to read A Suitable Boy during this challenge makes me feel like I am not really getting into the spirit of things. To be properly competitive, shouldn't I be going for novellas instead of the longest novel ever written? (I don't know whether it is actually the longest novel ever written. That might be hyperbole. It is, however, definitely the longest novel on my shelves, and I have a lot of shelves.)

Margaret Atwood: She Knits!

2009-09-15T18:54:00.004-04:00

On the occasion of the publication of her latest book, The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood sits down for an interview with the National Post:

Yet her compulsion to prophesy is real. As anyone who knows their mythology is aware (and if anyone knows their mythology, it's Margaret Atwood), the thing about being an oracle is that you don't get to choose your visions.

"The moment you get into [writing] something, there really isn't something else you could have done. Otherwise, you would actually have done it," she says. "The books I end up writing are the ones that I would rather dodge altogether, but those are really the only ones I can write, because those are the ones I'm obsessed by. It would be so much easier to write an update of Pride and Prejudice and have everything turn out happily. If you don't have conviction about it, you can't do it." Then she laughs. "I can always knit to pass the time. There are other things that I could do. I don't have to be writing a book." Pause. "I could play solitaire."

The most important revelation for those of us who are yarn-obsessed: she knits! I knew she was good people.

2009 Booker Longlist Review: Wolf Hall

2009-09-07T07:57:00.003-04:00

Here's the thing about Wolf Hall. When I read it, back in April, I loved it. I thought it was brilliantly written and I loved the way Mantel had handled Cromwell. And I thought it was really accessible if you didn't know all the details of Tudor history, in a way that--for example--The Children's Book wasn't. And I've had a great admiration for Mantel ever since I read Beyond Black when it was longlisted for the 2005 Booker. Given all that, Wolf Hall has been my pick to win the Booker for several months now.

Except. I read other books on the Booker longlist at roughly the same time. And I still remember why I was so impressed by Samantha Harvey's The Wilderness. As time passed, I began to appreciate the merits of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn--particularly the characterization of Eilis--much more than I did when I first read it. Even a comparatively weaker book, Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger, managed to leave a lasting impression on me. Wolf Hall? I remember that I really liked it. I'm not sure I remember why. I can give you generalities--well-written, sharply characterized, etc., etc.--but I can't name a particular scene or plot point or line of dialogue that gave me goosebumps or stuck in my mind over the last several months.

(No, I take that back--I do remember one. When Cromwell wanted to bury his daughter's Latin book with her, and the priest told him that such things weren't done. That was a really nicely done moment.)

Anyway, that forgetfulness, the way that the details of Wolf Hall have nearly completely slipped from my mind in the past five months, makes this a really tough review to write. Not just because I can't really support anything that I want to say about it, but because I'm not even sure that I still want to say what I originally wanted to say about it. Because--even though I really like Mantel and even though I've been rooting for this book since April--if I can't remember much about the book anymore, doesn't that mean the book wasn't as good as I thought it was?

So what can I say and feel confident in? I truly admire the dialogue, which crackles and sounds reasonably authentic, as in this excerpt:

Audley's eyes snap open: he thinks More has shown himself the way out. But More's face, smiling, is a mask of malice. "I would not be such a juggler," he says softly. "I would not treat the Lord my God to such a puppet show, let alone the faithful of England. You say you have the majority. I say I have it. You say Parliament is behind you, and I say all the angels and saints are behind me, and all the company of the Christian dead, for as many generations as there have been since the church of Christ was founded, one body, undivided—"

"Oh, for Christ's sake!" Cromwell says. "A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided Church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs. You know history doesn't speak for you, More, not unless you distort it to your purpose. Whatever process of twisted complacence brought you here, you will drag down with you God knows how many, who will only have the suffering and not your martyr's gratification. You are not a simple soul, so don't try to make this simple. You know I have respected you? You know I have respected you since I was a child? I would rather see my only son dead, I would rather him beheaded, than see you refuse this oath, and give encouragement to every enemy of England."

I like that Mantel makes the world of her novel accessible to the modern reader, even a reader who doesn't have a lot of knowledge about Tudor politics. I like that Thomas Cromwell feels like a real person (if a touch too modern for his age). I wish the book had stuck with me more in the intervening months since I read it. This review would have been a lot more glowing if it had. But I would still put Wolf Hall on my personal shortlist--it's a lot stronger than Not Untrue and Not Unkind or Heliopolis or The Quickening Maze. But I'm not as sure as I once was that it is the clear winner.

Not at All Literary....

2009-09-06T20:09:00.002-04:00

...but I'm thinking of this headline on a sampler and putting it in the guest room before my in-laws' next visit:

Contemplating the scale of the universe makes a mockery of household chores

(Of course, in the time it would take to actually stitch such a sampler I could clean the house twice over. But let's not quibble.)

"Repressed, in the wider sense of the word": An Excerpt from John Coetzee's Summertime

2009-09-05T20:42:00.002-04:00

An excerpt from J. M. Coetzee's Summertime, a book that I liked far, far more than I expected to.

Top Ten Books About Lenin

2009-09-03T20:30:00.002-04:00

You all know how much I love book lists. And we are getting some awfully specific ones lately. A couple of days ago it was the Newsweek list of books about World War II in Poland; today the Guardian gives us the top ten books on Lenin. To my great surprise I actually have read and can vouch for one of these books: Dmitri Volkogonov's impressive, massive biography. (His Trotsky bio is also quite good; I haven't read the Stalin one, although looking to the bookcase on my right, I now see that I own it. Who knew?)

I was sort of hoping for a Lenin novel to make the list, but alas.

World War II in Poland

2009-09-01T07:16:00.002-04:00

In Newsweek, Ruth Franklin lists the top ten books about the war in Poland. Stunningly, I've read none of them, although I gave No Simple Victory to my grandpa for Christmas one year. Ghettostadt and Ashes and Diamonds are going on my to-be-read list.

Joyce Carol Oates on Ted Kennedy

2009-08-30T20:22:00.002-04:00

My girl Joyce Carol Oates writes about Ted Kennedy in the Guardian:

One is led to think of Tom and Daisy Buchanan of Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby, rich individuals accustomed to behaving carelessly and allowing others to clean up after them. It is often in instances of the "fortunate fall", think of Joseph Conrad's anti-hero/hero Lord Jim as a classic literary analogy, that innocent individuals figure almost as ritual sacrifices is another aspect of the phenomenon.

Yet if one weighs the life of a single young woman against the accomplishments of the man President Obama has called the greatest Democratic senator in history, what is one to think?

The poet John Berryman once wondered: "Is wickedness soluble in art?". One might rephrase, in a vocabulary more suitable for our politicized era: "Is wickedness soluble in good deeds?"

You might remember that one of Oates's finest novellas, Black Water, is transparently based on the Chappaquiddick scandal.

2009 Booker Longlist Review: The Little Stranger

2009-08-26T18:48:00.002-04:00

The Little Stranger is no Fingersmith. Let's get that out of the way right away, because that's Sarah Waters's best-known and probably best-loved book (I actually prefer Affinity, but I'm weird that way).

Having said that, if you've liked and enjoyed Sarah Waters's books before, I think you will like this one. I loved it. It's a little slow getting started--the vaunted ghost doesn't appear until about a third of the way through the book--but it's very absorbing and I was hooked by the end of the first chapter. Waters does a good job with her characters, as she always does--I thought Caroline and Faraday were particularly well-characterized. The characterization of Faraday has to be quite subtle, because the book is framed as a story he's telling about other people, and I really admired the skill with which Waters handled this.

I've seen some complaints that the book isn't creepy enough, but I thought it was extremely creepy--maybe because I was reading it late at night with only a lamp for light--but it was creepy enough that it invaded my dreams the night I finished it. The last few paragraphs made me want to reread and reevaluate the events of the rest of the book.

This book isn't as elegantly written as others on the longlist--I'm thinking specifically of Brooklyn and The Wilderness--but it is effective in creating an eerie atmosphere. The descriptions of the house, in particular, are quite detailed:

One corner was given over to a punishing-looking ironframed bed, with a dressing-table close beside it and, next to that, an antique washing-stand and mirror. Before the Gothic fireplace stood a couple of old leather armchairs, handsome enough, but both very scuffed and split at their seams. There were two curtained windows, one leading out via those convolvulus-choked stone steps to the terrace; in front of the other, and rather spoiling the lovely long line of it, Roderick had set up a desk and swivel chair. He had obviously put the desk there in order to catch the best of the northern daylight, but this also meant that its illuminated surface—which was almost obscured by a litter of papers, ledgers, folders, technical books, dirty teacups and overflowing ashtrays—acted as a sort of magnet on the eye, irresistibly drawing one’s gaze from every point in the room. The desk was clearly a magnet for Roderick in other ways too, for even while talking to me he had gone across to it and started rooting about for something in the chaos.

These kinds of descriptions can be a turnoff for some people, and they don't always work for me, but in this book I thought they set the scene well and I really enjoyed them. But this is not a novel that you read for the author's way with a sentence--although there's nothing wrong with Waters's style, it's not anything particularly special--it's a novel you read for plot and theme and setting.

The Little Stranger as twisty as Fingersmith, and I still think the story of Affinity was more original. But I still really liked this book and would highly recommend it. I don't know that it will make the shortlist--I think there's a lot of competition for those six slots--and it certainly doesn't deserve to win. Did Henry James do it better in The Turn of the Screw? Well, yes. But The Little Stranger remains a pleasantly creepy, compulsively readable ghost story.

2009 Booker Longlist Review: The Wilderness

2009-08-24T20:33:00.002-04:00

I always find it very difficult to write about a novel that I loved. It's much easier to pick apart a book than explain why you think it's amazing. So all I can say is: I loved Samantha Harvey's The Wilderness. I've said that I'm rooting for Hilary Mantel, and she is definitely my sentimental favorite--but if I'm being honest, as great as I think Wolf Hall is, I'm mostly rooting for Mantel out of sentiment. Of the seven longlisted books I've read so far, The Wilderness is--in my opinion--the most original and probably the best.

I know that some people disagree. Some people hated it, believing it to be badly written, opaque, confusing, or dreary. It certainly isn't an uplifting book--my initial reaction when I first read it was that I was so filled with existential despair I wouldn't be able to sleep that night. But it's about Alzheimer's. I suppose you could write a Tuesdays-with-Morrie-ish book about Alzheimer's that would offer some kind of cheesy, false uplifting message, but why would you do that? (Let's hope I didn't just give Mitch Albom any ideas.) And it is opaque and confusing at times--since we're seeing the world through the eyes of Jake, the dementia-stricken protagonist, I don't see how it could be otherwise. I can't see the "badly written" part, though. I think the writing is lovely, while remaining true to Jake's character:

The moors spread ahead of them, and behind them Quail Woods is being disassembled tree by tree. One must be careful, he thinks as he turns from the man's back and strains to see the land below, not to become too attached to what is gone, and to appreciate instead what is there. He eyes the small neat grids of houses below and finds, as he always has, that these spillages of humanity are not to be scorned for their invasion on nature but are to be accepted, loved even; he names some of the streets in his head and maps the area with compass points and landmarks, his hands now clasped to his knees.

At the point at which he expects the plane to descend, the pilot suddenly turns its nose upwards to the empty blue sky. "One last dance!" he shouts. The wind rips through the cockpit as they change direction and the prison appears way down below at a tilt, as if sliding off the surface of the earth. Looking down briefly he sees, perhaps, a figure waving. Henry said he would look out for him and wave. He lifts his arm in response, less edgy now and more exhilarated by the air smashing against them and the disorientation as the plane lists and the scenery changes faster than the mind can map it.

I will say that Jake's form of dementia does not resemble the dementia of any Alzheimer's patient I've ever known, or known of. I think this is a problem for some people, perhaps especially (and I'm speculating here) if they have been a caregiver or close family member of an Alzheimer's patient. This did not bother me, because I didn't find it to be a wholly improbable form of dementia and because we're mostly seeing the dementia through Jake's eyes, and it is conceivable to me that the dementia feels different from the inside than it appears to the outside world.

The book functions as something of a detective story, in which the reader has to unravel exactly what happened in Jake's life and how all the disparate images and people who recur in his dementia-ridden mind fit together. I usually don't like literary puzzles like this--I've said before that I don't even try to work out who the murderer is in mystery novels, I just allow the author to tell me--but in this case I thought it really worked; when the last pieces clicked into place in the final pages of The Wilderness, it was very satisfying.

The one aspect of this book that didn't work for me was the characterization of Jake's wife Helen. It seemed to me that she was supposed to be sympathetic, but I couldn't stand her. She seemed smug and self-absorbed, and reminded me unpleasantly of the protagonist's wife in Netherland. I don't have a problem with unlikable characters, but unlikable characters that the author seems to expect us to like always puzzle me.

All in all, though, The Wilderness is a great book, superior to everything on last year's longlist, and I highly recommend it. I hope to see it on the shortlist, although I think the competition for those six slots is pretty stiff and it's become clear to me over the years that the Booker judges and I rarely see eye-to-eye. I'm still rooting for Hilary Mantel. But if Harvey manages to overcome the odds and beat not only Mantel but also the likes of Colm Toibin, A. S. Byatt, Sarah Waters, William Trevor, and J. M. Coetzee to win the prize itself I don't think it will be a miscarriage of justice at all. (But I would feel a bit bad for Hilary Mantel.)

Fahrenheit 451, Illustrated

2009-08-20T07:37:00.002-04:00

Still on vacation, but wanted to post a link to Sarah Boxer's weird little review of the graphic novel adaptation of Ray Bradbury's classic novel Fahrenheit 451. I can't decide whether Boxer is in favor of a graphic novel adaptation or against it:

It turns out that Bradbury has another alter ego in Fahrenheit 451—a scholar named Faber, who helps the fireman Montag leave the book-burning business. And here is his take on printed books: "Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all." Pow! Take that, books! If we want to hold onto books in some form, we have to let go of the idea that there is an ideal form for books.

It's tempting to say that Bradbury, speaking through Faber, was foreseeing the great shift from print to pixel 56 years ago. Maybe, maybe not. But I'm guessing that Bradbury might not mind seeing a nonprint, totally digital edition of Fahrenheit 451. If and when Fahrenheit 451 does come out in a Kindle edition, then the progression from printed book to condensed script to comic book to kindling will, at last, be complete. Beatty and Faber will both be right.

The Time Traveler's Wife: A Physicist's Perspective

2009-08-14T20:34:00.002-04:00

I'm on vacation and far, far behind on blogging. (Not to mention Infinite Jest. But I'm going to finish by September 21!) But I thought I'd post a link to this entertaining Slate piece in which a physicist evaluates The Time Traveler's Wife from a scientific perspective. His surprising conclusion:

Most fictional accounts of time travel are rife with paradoxes, parallel universes, and plot holes that violate strict physical laws: Instead of exploring the limits of our understanding, they make a mockery of them.

That's why I'm so excited about the film adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, which tells the story of Henry DeTamble, a man with a rare genetic disorder that causes him to skip around in time while his long-suffering wife, Clare, waits for him at home. The premise is no more or less plausible than that of, say, Back to the Future, in which a tricked-out DeLorean must reach 88 mph to jump into the past. But The Time Traveler's Wife follows through on its premise in a realistic way.

2009 Booker Longlist Review: Brooklyn

2009-08-10T18:02:00.002-04:00

[Warning: This review contains spoilers, and I wouldn't want to have read it before I read the book.]

So here is what I said about Colm Toibin's Brooklyn immediately after I read it:

A quieter book than Toibin's acclaimed The Master, with the polar opposite of Henry James as the lead character--an exasperatingly passive young woman named Eilis, who dreams of nothing more than a steady bookkeeping job. I liked it more than that description might suggest--it's beautifully written, and I liked Eilis even though I did want to shake her sometimes. But very slight. It's a little like a lesser Alice Munro story writ large.

A lukewarm reaction indeed. And it is tempting to conclude that Toibin's slim new novel is just another in this year's series of disappointing minor offerings from gifted writers (I'm thinking of Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor, for example, or Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes). It is certainly not as ambitious as Toibin's novel about Henry James, The Master, which many believe should have won the 2004 Booker Prize instead of Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. (I didn't think either book compared to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.)

But unlike Sag Harbor and Nocturnes, Brooklyn has stuck with me. I think it's somewhat deeper than it appears on the surface. Tonally, I continue to think it is very much like an Alice Munro story; it leaves behind that same whiff of elegiac wistfulness. But I also think, in retrospect, that reducing it to "lesser Munro" is unfair to Toibin. Eilis is a remarkably complex character, which I think can be obscured by her very passivity. She's exasperating because she seems to take so little initiative, to be almost uninterested in the course of her own life, but she does feel like a real person. Then, too, the minor characters--her sister, her mother, but especially Miss Kelly--feel vivid and real as well. I think the one exception here is Tony, who is something of a "Marty Stu" character. He doesn't seem to have any real flaws, and I think making him so obviously a better choice than Jim is a misstep on Toibin's part.

Of course, like all of Toibin's work, it is gracefully written:

Eilis felt like a child when the doctor would come to the house, her mother listening with cowed respect. It was Rose's silence that was new to her; she looked at her now, wanting her sister to ask a question or make a comment, but Rose appeared to be in a sort of dream. As Eilis watched her, it struck her that she was already feeling that she would need to remember this room, her sister, this scene, as though from a distance.

Brooklyn is another historical, like The Children's Book and so many other entries on this year’s longlist, but because it is not so stuffed with names and dates its setting never feels oppressive, and I never felt that slightly guilty confusion I experienced when reading The Children's Book. Brooklyn wears its milieu lightly, and is all the more absorbing because of that. And it is absorbing, despite its slightness.

And then there's the ending. It's a frustrating ending, particularly because you want to see some growth in Eilis, some ability to choose rather than to be chosen for--and you don't see that. But it's not inconsistent, either with Eilis's character or with the tone of the book.

In a hundred years, will Brooklyn be regarded as a major work of the early 21st century? Will it be read at all? Well, who knows, really, but I doubt it. It really isn't, in my opinion, as good as The Master. But it's certainly a stronger book, I think, than I initially gave it credit for being. It's certainly not impossible that it will make my personal shortlist--although I still have a lot of reading to do. And I think it will certainly make the official shortlist; in fact, the more I think about it, the more I expect to see Brooklyn as the winner of the whole shebang. I'd rather see Wolf Hall or The Wilderness, but Toibin just might be the sentimental favorite of the judges.

2009 Hugo Winners

2009-08-10T05:33:00.003-04:00

G. B. H. Hornswoggler (otherwise known as Andrew Wheeler) runs down the 2009 Hugo winners. The fiction honorees: Neil Gaiman won the Best Novel Prize for The Graveyard Book (which I haven't read but might buy for the kids); Nancy Kress won Best Novella for "The Erdmann Nexus" (which I thought well-written but ordinary); Elizabeth Bear won Best Novelette for "Shoggoths in Bloom" (which I liked quite a lot); and Ted Chiang won Best Short Story for "Exhalation" (which I loved even though it's quite a downer).

2009 Booker Longlist Review: The Children's Book

2009-08-09T07:44:00.003-04:00

Ever since I read Possession, I've kept up with A. S. Byatt's ouevre. I've read every book that she's written since. Unfortunately, with the partial exception of Angels & Insects, each book has been a disappointment. I finished The Children's Book back in May, and I honestly am not sure I would have finished it if I hadn't been waiting for the Possession magic to kick in at some point. It never did.

The Children's Book got great reviews. In the Sunday Times, Peter Kemp wrote that "The Children’s Book is a work that superlatively displays both enormous reach and tremendous grip." Jane Shilling commented in the Telegraph that "The narrative vigour and passionate engagement with the human condition that has always informed Byatt’s writing ensures that one can approach The Children’s Book in perfect ignorance of Nesbit, Gill or any of the social, political and artistic convulsions of the Edwardian era and still miss nothing of its astonishing power and resonance." And in the Spectator, Caroline Moore said that "We are given characters that live through, without being merely defined by, their times; and engrossing narrative arcs that draw in the reader."

Now maybe it's because I read all of these reviews before I got the book and thus had extremely high expectations for it. But I don't get that. I especially don't get that "one can approach The Children’s Book in perfect ignorance of Nesbit, Gill or any of the social, political and artistic convulsions of the Edwardian era and still miss nothing of its astonishing power and resonance." I don't know all that much about the Edwardian era--I know the basics of world history at that point, and I feel pretty certain that the king's name was Edward (what do you want from me? I'm American). I am not familiar with the intellectual trends in Britain at the time, and I felt lost in many sections of this book. Contrast this to Hilary Mantel's handling of the Tudor era in Wolf Hall. Again, I know the basic outlines of royal succession during the Tudor era, and I can list Henry VIII's wives and tell you which ones he executed and which ones he divorced. And thus ends my knowledge of the Tudor era. But I never felt lost when reading Wolf Hall. I could even tell all the Thomases apart.

But that isn't the big problem with The Children's Book, at least not for me. I can look up the Fabian Society if I need to; that's why God made Wikipedia. The big problem was that it bored me. It's not particularly difficult reading, but it took me weeks to finish. It was just so dull. And it made very little impression on me. It's been several weeks since I finished it, and I'm struggling to remember the major plotlines. (Maybe this says more about me than about the book. On the other hand, I can tell you exactly what happened in Brooklyn and The Wilderness, which I read at roughly the same time.)

The book is serviceably written. The writing certainly isn't bad, but it doesn't really sparkle, either:

Olive believed she was a wonderful party-giver, and the belief was infectious, though not entirely well founded. It rested on the charm of her presence, and where she was, her parties were lively. She liked to be at the centre. She liked to charm, and to charm those she was excited to entertain--in this case leaders of culture, Prosper Cain and August Steyning, both of whom stood, champagne glasses in their hands, laughing at her self-deprecating jokes. She relied on others to do what was needful--introduce people, feed people, change the structure of groups. To a certain extent Violet could do this--she saw to bodily comforts, but was uneasy with bright talk. And Humphry could normally be relied on to amuse both men and women, but he had become ominously locked in argument with his brother. Children flickered and flitted along the flowerbeds and in and out of the shrubbery as the light thickened.

That passage was chosen almost at random, which may or may not be fair to Byatt.

So there you have it--my first big disappointment of the Booker longlist. Hopefully it will be the last (but Ed O'Loughlin's Not Untrue and Not Unkind is staring ominously at me from the counter--I'm trying not to prejudge but the buzz is not good). Sorry, Ms. Byatt--The Children's Book wouldn't make my shortlist. But I wouldn't be surprised to see it on the official one. And anyway, we'll always have Possession.

Terry Pratchett: "I live in hope I can jump before I am pushed"

2009-08-07T21:23:00.003-04:00

Probably you have heard by now that Terry Pratchett, author of the popular Discworld series (including my personal favorite, Reaper Man). He's written a fascinating essay in the Daily Mail calling for a law allowing assisted suicide in the UK:

I am enjoying my life to the full, and hope to continue for quite some time. But I also intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod - the latter because Thomas's music could lift even an atheist a little bit closer to Heaven - and perhaps a second brandy if there is time.

Oh, and since this is England I had better add: 'If wet, in the library.'

Who could say that is bad? Where is the evil here?

[...]

Life is easy and cheap to make. But the things we add to it, such as pride, self-respect and human dignity, are worthy of preservation, too, and these can be lost in a fetish for life at any cost.

I believe that if the burden gets too great, those who wish to should be allowed to be shown the door.

In my case, in the fullness of time, I hope it will be the one to the garden under an English sky. Or, if wet, the library.

Elizabeth Strout on Writing

2009-08-04T19:27:00.003-04:00

A nice long profile of Elizabeth Strout, who wrote my very favorite work of fiction last year--Olive Kitteridge--and won the Pulitzer Prize for it in the bargain. (I warn you, you'll probably enjoy the profile more if you've already read Olive Kitteridge, because she discusses it at some length.)

Hilary Mantel: Booker Favorite

2009-08-03T20:44:00.001-04:00

I'm still rooting for Wolf Hall to win the Booker, but I fear that Hilary Mantel has peaked too soon:

In the past 48 hours, British novelist Hilary Mantel's retelling of Cromwell's life in her novel, Wolf Hall, has gone from being a mid-ranking outsider to the outright favourite.

The odds on Mantel gaining the award have been slashed with 95% of all bets placed on her novel alone and the value of those bets rising tenfold, according to bookmakers. William Hill said it had "never seen a betting pattern like it", after a spate of bets made Wolf Hall "the only one in the running for the punters". A spokesman for the bookmakers, which over the weekend cuts the odds on the novel winning from 12-1 to 2-1, said: "It's almost like an unspoken psychic rumour has gone round that this will be Hilary Mantel's year. We'll lose a five-figure sum if the support continues. It is as though a tip has gone around the literary world telling everyone that Mantel is a certainty."

James Lever: "I haven’t done anything"

2009-08-01T20:25:00.002-04:00

A pair of interviews, by way of the Booker Prize forums with James Lever, author of Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood, perhaps the most surprising entry on this year's Booker longlist. Lever is bracingly honest about his feelings about the book. From the Times Online:

“I don’t believe it will, or indeed should be, on the shortlist,” James Lever says, with a disarming finality that suggests he can think of an infinite number of arguments to skewer his own work. “Whether or not it’s a good novel is a moot point. It is a very flawed novel.”

And from the Guardian interview:

"I hope Cheeta's an OK book, but in my opinion a good book comes out once every few years. I'm bloody not calling my book a good book. It's all right, you know." Then what, then? "Well, then next time I'll write a better one." What will you do if you end up winning the Booker prize? "I'll give it to charity." I don't mean the money. "What are you asking? Of course I'm not going to walk away thinking, 'Yes, this is the best book written in the commonwealth this year.' Unless, of course, I got it for the next one. They'd better give that the fucking Nobel prize, and quick."

I haven't yet read Me Cheeta, but having read these pieces I'm looking forward to it a bit more than I was. And I'm very curious to see what Lever publishes next.

Morning Miscellany

2009-07-30T05:21:00.003-04:00

Odds and ends from around the Internet:

A lengthy and interesting review of the new Library of America edition of Raymond Carver's collected stories in the Times Literary Supplement:

The debate about whether the minimalist works are paradoxically richer – because of what they conceal – than the later, more bountiful ones will continue. Although he reclaimed his artistic integrity after What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver never wanted his stories to go out into the world free of editorial influence. Even in 1982, as the two men discussed Cathedral, Lish was “the best editor there is”. In restoring Beginners, Stull and Carroll have “transcribed Carver’s typewritten words that lie beneath Lish’s alterations in ink on the typescripts” – itself a form of distortion, in the absence of the author’s validation. What is certain is that the Library of America Collected Stories is a fascinating event, and that if you haven’t read it you cannot claim, in the fullest sense, to have read Raymond Carver, whoever he may be.

Another review (by way of Conversational Reading), this one of Haruki Murakami's new novel (not yet translated into English) 1Q84. I am really looking forward to this one, but it's supposed to be huge, so I suppose I can use the wait for the translation to clear some space off my to-be-read pile. Disappointingly, this review seems to be lukewarm (I'll be honest, I only skimmed \because I don't want to spoil the book for myself), saying that although "Parts of 1Q84 rival Murakami’s best writing," there are problems with pacing and character inconsistencies.

Biographia Literaria has quotes from a Jonathan Franzen interview with boundary2. I'd link to the whole interview, but you have to have purchased access to read it (and I haven't). Here is Franzen on the Midwest:

I might lead with my theory about the Midwest and why so many interesting writers come out of it, from Twain and Fitzgerald and Cather to Saunders and Vonnegut and Wallace. I think it has to do with a prolongation of innocence there, a prolongation of childhood, that has to do with the Midwest being just a little bit farther from the rest of the world. Historically, there’s been no immediate point of contact with foreignness, and also no immediate contact with the true centers of power: New York and Washington, increasingly Hollywood as well. When I was young, styles that took over on the coasts would get to the Midwest about two years later. It was a shock for Midwesterners to find, when they got to college, that clothes they thought were cool everyone else has stopped wearing. Something about having been a victim of a time lag—something about not having had a clue when other people the same age were already getting a clue—produces both a sense of optimism and a kind of reactive curdled cynicism. You become more worldly in response to not having been worldly enough for a little too long.

And finally, Ron Horning has given up on Infinite Jest:

I just don’t have patience for long, incoherent books. Infinite Jest seemed like pointless jigsaw puzzle; unlike Pynchon’s books, in which their seems to be so much interconnection between the various threads and so many resonating levels of meaning criss-crossing through the text that it’s almost overwhelming but always compelling you to work at holding it together in your mind, Wallace’s book just seems to dump a bunch of confusing stuff in your lap and hope that you are too disoriented to recognize that it’s not interesting. I kept wishing I was reading the Cliffs Notes version of Infinite Jest that put the action in the right order and explained what all the stupid abbreviations stood for.

I haven't given up yet--and I think I like the book a bit better than he does--but I get what he's saying.

2009 Booker Longlist

2009-07-28T11:03:00.002-04:00

So the list has been announced:

The Children's Book, A. S. Byatt. I thought this was kind of dull, actually.

Summertime, J. M. Coetzee. I haven't read much Coetzee, but I'm really looking forward to this one.

The Quickening Maze, Adam Foulds. A fictional take on John Clare. I've heard that this is beautifully written. Other than that I know nothing about it.

How to Paint a Dead Man, Sarah Hall. As I said in my predictions post, I've never read Sarah Hall, but I love the idea of her books.

The Wilderness, Samantha Harvey. I'm very happy to see this one on the list. It's one of the best books I've read this year, and it's a first novel.

Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood, James Lever. Yeah, I don't know. A fictionalized biography of a Hollywood chimp. I'm very wary. It sort of reminds me of last year's A Fraction of the Whole. Mercifully, it is significantly shorter than that book.

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel. Still rooting for this one to win.

The Glass Room, Simon Mawer. Another one I really can't wait to read.

Not Untrue and Not Unkind, Ed O'Loughlin. Another first novel, this one about foreign correspondents in Africa.

Heliopolis, James Scudamore. I have no idea what this one is about. Something about slums and rich corporations?

Brooklyn, Colm Toibin. I'm rooting for Wolf Hall, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this one win. Remember how Ian McEwan won for Amsterdam instead of Enduring Love? Kind of like that.

Love and Summer, William Trevor. Can't wait to read this one.

The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters. I'm not sure this is a great novel, but it is definitely a page-turner.

I got seven right this year, which is definitely an improvement over the dismal two from last year.

And one more thing: the Booker longlist isn't the most exciting thing about today. The most exciting thing about today is that my daughter is turning ten years old. I can't believe I've been a parent for a decade. Happy birthday, Lou! May your future be filled with good books, and wonderful people to share them with!

Infinite Summer (V): I Am Not Amused

2009-07-28T05:27:00.004-04:00

I have not abandoned Infinite Jest, although my failure to post any complaints in the past couple of weeks must make it seem as though I have. No, I've just been too busy at work to formulate any coherent thoughts about this book. (I am behind in my reading. But not as far behind as I was this time last week! That's progress, right?)

Alas, the last many locations (I don't know what else to say when I'm reading on a Kindle. "Pages" doesn't seem right) have not worked for me. Doubtless this is partly because of my mental-energy-consuming job: every time I sit down to read my mind starts to wander to claims dollars and risk scores. I mean, I'm having trouble concentrating on Villette, too, and Villette is practically written just for me. But there are also aspects of this book that I just don't like. To wit:

I wish DFW would stop trying to be funny. By funny, I mean funny ha-ha. The wit he displays in, for example, Tiny Ewell's tattoo taxonomy is just dandy. But many of his jokes strike me as over-broad. For example, this sentence: "This was during the period of great pre-Experialist upheaval and the emergence of the fringe C.U.S.P. of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, and the tumescence of O.N.A.N.ism." See, I think I'm supposed to think it's funny, or at least clever, that he turned "onanism" into an acronym. But I just think it's juvenile. (Disclaimer: my beloved husband refuses to watch Animal House, There's Something About Mary, or other movies of the "stupid comedy"--his words--genre because I ruin them for him. Because I don't think they're funny.)

Similarly, I don't think the Subsidized Time thing is funny. And yes, I know that Wallace gave an interview at some point in which he said that Subsidized Time wasn't supposed to be funny. To which I say: oh, please. You don't call something "the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment" if you are not trying to be funny.

Speaking of Subsidized Time, why in the name of all that is holy did Wallace feel compelled to throw a little speculative fiction into this mix? There wasn't enough going on already? And it's not particularly subtle or nuanced speculative fiction at that.

This sentence almost irrationally irritated thirty-seven-year-old-mother-of-three me: "She made the Moms look like the sort of piece of fruit you think you want to take out of the bin but then once you're right there over the bin you put back because from close up you can see a much fresher and less preserved-seeming piece of fruit elsewhere in the bin." I know, I know, point of view and all that. It still bugged. I recognize that I am being slightly unreasonable here. On the other hand, let's face it, it's not particularly well-written. Or well thought out. Or--I'm getting irritated again, so I'll stop.

So why haven't I stopped reading this book? Oh, I considered it. But then I come across a passage like this:

Poor Tony had become an hourglass: time moved through him now; he ceased to exist apart from its jagged-edged flow. He now weighed more like 45 kg. His legs were the size his comely arms had been, before Withdrawal. He was haunted by the word Zuckung, a foreign and possibly Yiddish word he did not recall ever before hearing. The word kept echoing in quick-step cadence through his head without meaning anything. He'd naively assumed that going mad meant you were not aware of going mad; he'd naively pictured mad men as forever laughing. He kept seeing his sonless father again -- removing the training wheels, looking at his pager, wearing a green gown and mask, pouring iced tea in a pebbled glass, tearing his sportshirt in filial woe, grabbing his shoulder, sinking to his knees. Stiffening in a bronze casket. Being lowered under the snow at Mount Auburn Cemetery, through dark glasses from a distance. 'Chilled to the Zuckung.'

Yann Martel's Nutty New Novel

2009-07-27T20:58:00.004-04:00

And in other news tangentially related to the Booker Prize, Yann Martel--who, in one of the Prize's many miscarriages of justice, won the Booker for Life of Pi--is publishing a new book. I would ordinarily ignore this, but I am fascinated by the book's description: "It relates the story of an encounter between a famous writer and a taxidermist who is writing a play that features dialog between a donkey and a monkey imprinted on a shirt." Oh, and also? It's about the Holocaust. I'm sorry, reading that description is the literary equivalent of seeing a carbecue on the interstate. You know you shouldn't, but it's hard to keep yourself from slowing down and gaping at it.

Granted, the publisher says that "It feels like you are reading Beckett or Nabokov now . . . . It's a book that addresses a topic that's been written about many, many times but feels profoundly original." And one shouldn't judge a book before one reads it. But I am deeply, deeply skeptical

Gil Adamson: "I wrote it to see if I could."

2009-07-27T20:52:00.002-04:00

On the eve of the Booker longlist announcement, The Morning News's Robert Birnbaum talks to Gil Adamson, whose novel The Outlander might just find its way onto the longlist. Here is Adamson on the novel's genesis:

I wrote it to see if I could. I wrote it to see if I could actually write a novel. Because I didn’t put a huge amount of pressure on myself, I just decided to sort of give it a shot, it was incredibly enjoyable and so I stuck at it. In fact, when I started, I used one of my own poems as an outline. I don’t know if you’ve seen this; it’s one of the things that gets repeated…that I wrote a poem first, and then when I decided I was going to try to write something longer than a short story, I was casting about for ideas, and I remember—I’ve said this so many times I feel like I’m repeating myself—but I remember seeing Tom Stoppard interviewed on Charlie Rose, I think it was, and he was making jokes about himself and saying he has no ideas, no ideas at all, I have an impoverished imagination so what I do is that I steal from others. You know, Shakespeare, he steals from Shakespeare to write Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and I thought, Well, I can steal from myself, that seems reasonable. So I took one of my poems and just literally used it as an outline, and obviously it very quickly departed from the poem and it had its own DNA and it had its own trajectory, and it just sort of drove itself forward.

Andrew Sean Greer on Benjamin Button and Max Tivoli

2009-07-25T06:45:00.004-04:00

(via Mark Athitakis)

Please stop asking Andrew Sean Greer about the similarities between Benjamin Button and his (infinitely superior) novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli:

But here is the upsetting thing: people return the book to me and say they can’t get Brad Pitt out of their mind, that the movie actually ruined the experience of reading my book. They say this smiling. I have never been cut so deep in my life. I had expected to have explain the Button and Tivoli story. But I never expected the movie, coming out four years after Max appeared on bestseller lists, would retroactively destroy the book. People who recognize similarities in the movie and novel (his mind ages forward, sleeps with an older woman, travels the world, has three chances at love, etc) have begun to ask me if perhaps *I* was influenced by the movie! It is the strangest kind of science fiction: Brad Pitt’s movie traveling back in time to do damage to a possible rival!

If it's any consolation, Mr. Greer--and I mean this sincerely--the whole time I was watching the movie I was thinking how much better your book was

2009 Booker Longlist Predictions

2009-07-24T18:24:00.004-04:00

The Man Booker Prize longlist will be announced on Tuesday, and so I decided to put together a list of predictions. Last year a very impressive two of my thirteen predictions proved correct, so you'll want to pay careful attention to what I'm anticipating. So here's what I expect to see on Tuesday:

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel. Mantel's Beyond Black--which I loved--made the longlist in 2005 but missed the shortlist. Wolf Hall--in my opinion--is a great achievement: a nuanced portrait of Cromwell and really of Tudor England itself. I'll be very surprised if this doesn't make the longlist. It's my pick to win the whole shebang.

The Children's Book, A. S. Byatt. I admit I wasn't wild about this book--I thought it was sort of long and dull and self-important. But it got fantastic reviews, so maybe I missed something. And it's A. S. Byatt.

The Infinities, John Banville. Much like the previous entry--it's John Banville. On the other hand, is it my imagination or does the Book Depository blurb ("One long, languid midsummer's day, the Godleys gather at the family home of Arden to attend their father's bedside. Adam, the elder child, and Petra, only nineteen, find that relations with their stepmother, Ursula, and their dying father, old Adam, are as strained as ever") sound like something you would come up with if you were writing a parody of a Booker book? Every time I read it I hear it in a dry, ironic voice. But after the first two sentences, the blurb improves and makes the book sound almost interesting.

Among Thieves, Mez Packer. Because there has to be a Tindal Street entry on the list, right?

This Is How, M. J. Hyland. True, this book is getting some tepid reviews. But I know that some people love it, and her first book, Carry Me Down, made the shortlist in 2006.

Brooklyn, Colm Toibin. When this book came out, a lot of people reacted with mild, puzzled disappointment, and I was one of them. But the book improves in retrospect--the more time passes, the more I admire it. Eilis is a beautifully written character. And a lot of people think Toibin should have won the Booker for The Master in 2005. I'd be surprised if this didn't at least make the longlist.

The Wilderness: A Novel, Samantha Harvey. I think this moving novel told from the point of view of a man with Alzheimer's is a little bit of a long shot, but I'd love to see it on the list. I thought the writing was amazing. Harvey was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, so she should at least be on the judges' radar.

Red Dog, Red Dog, Patrick Lane. I don't know a lot about this book, except that a lot of people with good taste think it's fantastic.

The Holy City, Patrick McCabe. Again, I haven't read this one. But I find it hard to resist something Booklist calls "mesmerizing but unsettling."

The Glass Room, Simon Mawer. Great reviews. Supposed to be beautifully written. It's about a house. (I have a thing about books about houses.) I want it to be on the list, so I'm predicting it.

How to Paint a Dead Man, Sarah Hall. I don't think I've ever read a Sarah Hall novel--I still don't understand how I missed The Electric Michelangelo--but I love the idea in my head of what I think her books are like. And yes, I realize that's a pretty weak rationale for adding this book to my list.

Love and Summer, William Trevor. On the theory that if they'll shortlist The Story of Lucy Gault, they'll shortlist anything Trevor turns out. (I love William Trevor, but that Lucy Gault book did not belong on the shortlist.)

The Book of Negroes, Lawrence Hill. It's gotten good reviews, and it intrigues me.

And there were a few books that I really wanted to put on the list, but couldn't fit (so if one of these makes it, I'm totally claiming half-credit):

The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters

The Outlander, Gil Adamson

The Tin-Kin, Eleanor Thom

Little Gods, Anna Richard

The Quickening Maze, Adam Foulds

Anthony Blunt: The Spy Who Loved Art

2009-07-22T20:50:00.003-04:00

Not strictly literary, but the Telegraph reports that today Anthony Blunt's memoir was made public. Blunt was a well-known art historian (and "Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures," which at least sounds pretty impressive); he was also a Soviet spy. And his life is the subject of a marvelous biography by Miranda Blunt. From the Telegraph:

The manuscript is remarkable for what it does not reveal. Blunt does not go into detail about his own spying activities, or the consequences for others of his actions. This is not a memoir about facts so much as about his own feelings and character.

Blunt’s writing is nostalgic for the heady ideological ferment of the 1930s, but also suffused with regret, and tinged with self-pity. The decision to spy for the Soviet Union, he writes, was “the biggest mistake of my life”. The effects of that decision shadowed him, long after he had become disillusioned with Communism. Kim Philby’s memoir regretted nothing. Blunt’s regrets everything, but most particularly the way his espionage activities interfered with his career as an art historian.

Webster's Third: "Subversive" and "Permissive"?

2009-07-21T05:47:00.003-04:00

Mention of Webster's Third New International Dictionary always makes me feel nostalgic--it was the official dictionary of the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee, which consumed three years of my misspent youth. I remember it as an intimidating behemoth--so many words! So impossible to learn all their spellings! (In the event, I misspelled "inoculation" in 1983, "henrician" in 1984, and--most embarrassingly--"upsilon" in 1985. I added an extra L, and even as I did so I knew I was wrong.) I longed for my own copy, even though I knew that owning it would not make learning all the words any more likely. (I had to settle for reading Dickens and writing down any particularly complicated-looking words. If only I'd had Infinite Jest then!)

So after a lifetime of thinking of Webster's Third as my massive, silent nemesis, you can imagine my surprise to learn (via this article in Humanities) that, in fact, Webster's Third was considered highly controversial, slightly suspect, and even "permissive." Why? Among other things, it included the word "ain't":

The most infamous entry in Webster’s Third, by far, was for ain’t. The word was featured in publicity material issued by Merriam’s own public relations firm but misquoted to make its slightly modified treatment in W3 wrongly suggest a licentious break with the dictionary’s more formal past. Numerous ain’t-happy headlines and scores of one-liners—“Ain’t Nothing Wrong with Use of ‘Ain’t,’” “Say it Ain’t So”—resulted; the New Yorker ran a cartoon showing a receptionist at Merriam telling a visitor that “Dr. Gove ain’t in.”

The dictionary (as opposed to the press release) said in its first definition that ain’t was a contraction for are not, is not, and am not and gave as a usage note, “though disapproved by many and more common in less educated speech, used orally in most parts of the U.S. by many cultivated speakers esp. in the phrase ain’t I.” This way of putting things was hardly permissive. And it happened to mirror the preference of the august rhetorician H. W. Fowler but, like the correction Merriam belatedly issued, this amusing fact did little to neutralize the story at large that, as a New York Times editor put it, America’s great dictionary “has methodically removed all guideposts to usage.”

RIP, Frank McCourt

2009-07-19T20:06:00.003-04:00

Frank McCourt, best known for the memoir Angela's Ashes, has died of melanoma, reports the New York Times. The obit includes this explanation of the genesis of McCourt's famous book:

On the side, Mr. McCourt made fitful stabs at writing. He contributed articles on Ireland to The Village Voice. He kept notebooks. But at the Lion’s Head in Greenwich Village, where he became friends with Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin, he felt like an interloper, he said. They were writers. He was just a teacher. “I had no idea he had the ambition, much less the ability to carry it off in such spectacular fashion,” said Mr. Hamill, who first met Mr. McCourt at the Lion’s Head in the 1960s.

In 1977, Mr. McCourt and his brother Malachy, who was acting and bartending in New York, cobbled together a series of autobiographical sketches into a two-man play, “A Couple of Blaguards,” which opened Off Off Broadway at the Billymunk Theater on East 45th Street. They performed a revised version at the Village Gate in 1984 and again at the Billymunk in 1986 and took their show to several other cities.

This excursion into the past, along with his nagging sense that a writing teacher should write, motivated Mr. McCourt to undertake his childhood memoirs after he retired from teaching in 1987. An early attempt, when he was studying at New York University, had fizzled out, but 40 years later, he said, he had worked through his awkward, self-conscious James Joyce phase and gotten beyond the crippling anger that darkened his memories.

“After 20 pages of standard omniscient author, I wrote something that I thought was just a note to myself, about sitting on a seesaw in a playground, and I found my voice, the voice of a child,” he told The Providence Journal in 1997. “That was it. It carried me through to the end of the book.”

Villette (II): Lucy Loses It

2009-07-19T19:37:00.005-04:00

Another seven chapters in, and I'm still loving Villette. (If you've read it, by the way, you can still join the discussion at TheValve.org.) Lucy Snowe, in particular, continues to be a delight--or perhaps not a delight, but a fully realized character with great psychological depth.

Some thoughts on these chapters:

In this book, as in many Victorian novels, the social status of the main character is a major theme. Lucy is well aware that her own status makes a future marriage unlikely; in fact, she seems to pride herself on her self-awareness:

All the teachers had dreams of some lover; one (but she was naturally of a credulous turn) believed in a future husband. All the pupils above fourteen knew of some prospective bridegroom; two or three were already affianced by their parents, and had been so from childhood: but into the realm of feelings and hopes which such prospects open, my speculations, far less my presumptions, had never once had warrant to intrude. If the other teachers went into town, or took a walk on the boulevards, or only attended mass, they were very certain (according to the accounts brought back) to meet with some individual of the "opposite sex," whose rapt, earnest gaze assured them of their power to strike and to attract. I can't say that my experience tallied with theirs in this respect. I went to church and I took walks, and am very well convinced that nobody minded me.

Lucy has a little breakdown at the end of this section (hence the title of the post) and in general, her emotions are much less in check in these seven chapters than in the first eight:

...[A] kind of wrath smote me, and then bitterness followed: it was the rock struck, and Meribah's waters gushing out. I never had felt so strange and contradictory an inward tumult as I felt for an hour that evening soreness and laughter, and fire, and grief, shared my heart between them. I cried hot tears: not because Madame mistrusted me--I did not care twopence for her mistrust--but for other reasons. Complicated, disquieting thoughts broke up the whole repose of my nature. However, that turmoil subsided: next day I was again Lucy Snowe.

At one point, she even expresses affection for a child! And then there is this peculiar speech, made by a Catholic priest to whom the Protestant Lucy goes for confession:

You were made for our faith: depend upon it our faith alone could heal and help you--Protestantism is altogether too dry, cold, prosaic for you. The further I look into this matter, the more plainly I see it is entirely out of the common order of things.

Too dry, cold, and prosaic for our stoic Lucy?

I do not like Ginevra Fanshawe. She reminds me unpleasantly of some of the girls I went to high school with.

I'm not sure whether Lucy is in love with John or Ginevra. I'm not sure she knows which one she's in love with.

My goodness, but Lucy is affected by the weather ("I do not know why that change in the atmosphere made a cruel impression on me, why the raging storm and beating rain crushed me with a deadlier paralysis than I had experienced while the air had remained serene"--just one example).

I'm curious to see what, if anything, is made of the "cretin" Lucy was caring for--a girl with a "warped" body and a supposedly feeble mind but also a "propensity . . . to evil."

When I left Lucy last week, she had just pitched "headlong down an abyss." I'm very eager to see where her breakdown takes her.

Seamus Heaney on Growing Older

2009-07-18T21:04:00.002-04:00

Another author interview, this lovely one in the Guardian with probably my favorite living poet, Seamus Heaney. (I recommend Heaney's translation of Beowulf or Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996.) Here he describes his stroke three years ago:

Heaney reports his instinctive Ulster sang froid, saying: "My sense of humour was intact as they were carrying me down." Almost everyone involved in getting the bulky, 6ft figure of Heaney down the stairs had been involved with the Field Day theatre company, and many of the group had recently suffered minor illnesses. So now, with his natural detachment, Heaney made a joke. "It's the curse of Field Day, I said. But within an hour I was in the ambulance."

"The trip in the ambulance I always remember," he says, "because Marie was in the back with me. I just wrote about it three weeks ago. To me, that was one of the actual beauties of the stroke, that renewal of love in the ambulance. One of the strongest, sweetest memories I have. We went through Glendorn on a very beautiful, long, bumpy ride to Letterkenny hospital." There, they did a scan, he continues. "And the woman who was doing the scan - this is Ireland for you - the nurse said, 'I believe you were at Friel's last night.' Her uncle had been at the party. So this is Ireland," he repeats, with satisfaction.

Vikram Seth: "The novel isn’t a vehicle for throwing in the author’s political views"

2009-07-17T19:56:00.002-04:00

A long and interesting interview with Vikram Seth, in the wake of his announcement that he's writing a sequel to A Suitable Boy:

[I]f your novel is going to be about changing India and politics and so on, won’t you need to squeeze those discursive bits into it?

Only if they are involved in the lives of my characters. I’m not writing an essay or a political tract. If, for instance, in A Suitable Boy the minister of revenue had not been carrying out land reform, I’m not sure that land reform would have entered the book. The novel isn’t a vehicle for throwing in the author’s political views. It has to be based on its characters and their obsessions and enthusiasms.

Many novelists today are using the novel as a vehicle for ideas, rather than for telling a story. You don’t believe in that?

I won’t take a stand on that issue. But in my own case, the novel is based on characters rather than the author’s injection of something overtly extraneous. On the other hand, my characters would be boring if they didn’t have views of their own. . . . Quite apart from the author’s narrative voice—and one can get quite a lot about the author’s general attitudes through that—there may be certain aspects of the author’s specific views that enter the novel, but it’s best done, in my case, through the aegis of the characters.

And if you haven't read his memoir of his aunt and uncle, Two Lives, you really should--it's marvelous.

Sarah Hall: "I'm still quite an obscure writer"

2009-07-15T20:19:00.002-04:00

A Guardian interview with Sarah Hall, whose new book How to Paint a Dead Man will be available in the U.S. on September 8. Her novel The Electric Michelangelo made the Booker shortlist in 2005, but somehow I didn't manage to read it. (I'm not sure how that happened, actually. But my children's preschool years are very very hazy.)

Anyway, leaving my fading memory aside, here is what Hall has to say about her novel's setting:

"Setting novels in the north, even partly in the north, I don't think is limiting," she says. "I think you can tell any human story in a particular place. I'm fascinated by the north, even though I know it very well. There's something about it that I've never quite understood, and I think that's why I keep returning to it." American writers are never asked why they keep returning to a particular area, she points out: it seems "more acceptable to stake out your terrritory, whether it's the American south, or California, or the Pacific northwest, and be a writer of that region". In a literary culture dominated by a metropolitan elite there's a certain bloody-mindedness in returning to her roots in each novel, but she's unwilling to admit to any project to redress the balance: "I just know I'm not done with it." She prefers to think of the north as a kind of anchor to her work: even if she drifts some distance away, the north provides a stable point of reference. "There's a kind of intimacy I can draw on in terms of the world-building," she says. "I have these details that I can bring in to try to convince the reader of where they are."

Infinite Summer (IV): In Which I Fall Dauntingly Behind

2009-07-14T19:21:00.002-04:00

So this was the week in which I fell horribly, horribly behind on the Infinite Summer schedule. Life happened: work stuff came up, and I started working on the Society of Actuaries' Interim Assessment (the name makes me think of Wolfram & Hart's 75-Year Review--come on, SOA, come up with something a little less generically ominous). And then we ended up having dinner with friends on Friday night, which was the night I'd earmarked for catching up on Infinite Jest. And then Saturday morning, instead of doing the reading for the three summer reading projects I optimistically signed up for, I dove headfirst into an Elizabeth George murder mystery and didn't come up for air until sometime mid-afternoon.

And that, dear readers, is how I found myself climbing into a bubble bath at 5 o'clock this morning with a boatload of Infinite Jest to read. This may, by the way, be the ideal way to read David Foster Wallace. It was totally silent. All of the many other people who live in my house were sound asleep, which means I did not have to interrupt my reading once to pour a glass of milk, restart a computer, or mediate a dispute over a game of Carcassonne. People, I spent an hour in a bubble bath with a novel on a work day, which may be the most decadent, self-indulgent thing I've done in a decade. The only thing that would have made it better was a glass of red wine, but even I'm not that depraved. And I was only a little late to work.

So all of this decadence put me in the ideal frame of mind for appreciating David Foster Wallace. And perhaps because of that, or perhaps because over the last couple of weeks my patience had been severely tried by Wardine, Marathe, and yrstruly, or (most likely) perhaps for both reasons, I enjoyed today's pages much more than I enjoyed the previous installment. In fact, if you leave aside the fact that the plot remains obscure to me and I still don't get how many of the various set pieces connect to each other, I can't think of a single thing to complain about in what I read today. (I will now pause to give you all time to recover from your fainting fits.)

So here’s what I liked the best:

Jim’s father. This is the kind of stream-of-consciousness, consciously put-on voice that I like. For instance:

I'm predicting it right here, young sir Jim. You are going to be a great tennis player. I was near-great. You are going to be great. You will be the real thing. I know I haven't taught you to play yet, I know this is your first time, Jim, Jesus, relax, I know. It doesn't affect my predictive sense. You will overshadow and obliterate me. Today you are starting and within a very few years I know all too well you will be able to beat me out there, and on the day you first beat me I may well weep. It'll be out of a sort of selfless pride, an obliterated father's terrible joy. I feel it, Jim, even here, standing on hot gravel and looking: in your eyes I see the appreciation of angle, a prescience re spin, the way you already adjust your overlarge and apparently clumsy child's body in the chair so it's at the line of best force against dish, spoon, lens-grinding appliance, a big book's stiff bend...

I love that line--"an obliterated father's terrible joy"--and I love how well Wallace captures that feeling of watching your children grow up and begin to realize their potential. And I love that he gets that even though he never had children so he never experienced that. The point I'm making is that this perspective rings really true to me (truer than Wardine or yrstruly, but I promise to stop beating that dead equine) even though Wallace clearly isn't writing from personal experience.

The long list of things one learns at Ennet House, which I think could be a perfectly satisfying standalone short story:

That "acceptance" is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else. That different people have radically different ideas of personal hygiene. That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it. That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it's almost its own form of intoxicating buzz. That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused.

Tiny Ewell's tattoo taxonomy. Very funny and hard to resist:

As Tiny Ewell comes to see it, people with tattoos fall under two broad headings. First there are the younger scrofulous boneheaded black-T-shirt-and-spiked-bracelet types who do not have the sense to regret the impulsive permanency of their tatts, and will show them off to you with the same fake-quiet pride with which someone more of Ewell's own social stratum would show off their collection of Dynastic crockery or fine Sauvignon. Then there are the more numerous (and older) second types, who'll show you their tattoos with the sort of stoic regret (albeit tinged with a bit of self-conscious pride about the stoicism) that a Purple-Hearted veteran displays toward his old wounds' scars. Resident Wade McDade has complex nests of blue and red serpents running down the insides of both his arms, and is required to wear long-sleeved shirts every day to his menial job at Store 24, even though the store's heat always loses its mind in the early A.M. and it's always wicked motherfucking hot in there, because the store's Pakistani manager believes his customers will not wish to purchase Marlboro Lights and Mass. Gigabucks lottery tickets from someone with vascular-colored snakes writhing all over his arms.

And last but not least, Joelle Van Dyne’s last night on Earth. I really, really wanted to quote the party scene, with its overlapping dialogue, which is a brilliant send-up of that kind of party, but instead I'm going to go with this poignant passage near the end:

There's the pre-suicide's classic longing: Sit down one second, I want to tell you everything. My name is Joelle Van Dyne, Dutch-Irish, and I was reared on family land east of Shiny Prize, Kentucky, the only child of a low-pH chemist and his second wife. I now have no accent except under stress. I am 1.7 meters tall and weigh 48 kilograms. I occupy space and have mass. I breathe in and breate out. Joelle has never before today been conscious of the sustained volition required to just breathe in and breathe out, her veil recessing into nose and rounded mouth and then bowing out slightly like curtains over an opened pane.

(I cannot tell you how painful it was to choose quotes. I wanted to type up about fifty pages and post them. I’m not sure that would fall under the Fair Use doctrine, however.)

So if you'd given up on Infinite Jest because of Wardine or Marathe or yrstruly, I humbly suggest you give it one last try, because I thought this installment was very enjoyable and contained some of the best writing of the book so far. And if it's still not working for you--give the bubble bath thing a shot.

One Last Anne of Green Gables Book

2009-07-13T20:07:00.002-04:00

I adored Anne of Green Gables as a girl, but I don't know quite what to think about this:

Penguin Canada is due to publish Lucy Maud Montgomery's final book in its entirety, casting a new shadow over the author of Anne of Green Gables....

The book looks set to reveal a darker side to the author, with its publisher promising themes of "adultery, illegitimacy, misogyny, revenge, murder, despair, bitterness, hatred, and death – usually not the first terms associated with LM Montgomery".

I mean, I like despair, bitterness, hatred, and death as much as the next person--but I'm not sure I want them connected in any way with Anne of Green Gables.

Arundhati Roy: "Writing Has Become a Weapon"

2009-07-12T19:31:00.002-04:00

The Guardian has a long interview with Arundhati Roy, author of the Booker-Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, about her new book of essays, Listening to Grasshoppers:

The essays in Listening to Grasshoppers are her collected hand grenades from the last eight years. Roy says the process of putting them together has been "totally sad for me in a way - to see that six years ago you said something was going to happen and then it happened. It is not as though I am a genius or a witch. When you start seeing the way the whole machine works, the structure of what is happening is so clear."

That machine is the engine of free market "progress" that politicians in Delhi call "Indian Shining". Roy sees it as the destruction for multinational corporate profit of everything that her nation should care about. Her book begins with a question: "Is there life after democracy?" and goes on to count the ways that successive Indian governments and businessmen have waged a repressive war on the poor and on minorities, and have pursued devastating environmental destruction for economic and political gain.

Hmm. Wonder what she thought about The White Tiger.

Ten Books You Shouldn't Read

2009-07-11T19:28:00.003-04:00

At The Second Pass, a twist on the many, many lists of books that everyone should read: a list of books you don't need to bother with. Here are their nominations:

White Noise, Don DeLillo. I kind of agree with this, actually.

Absalom, Absalom, William Faulkner. I haven't read this yet; I still want to.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I so, so agree. I read this for the first time a few months ago and could not for the life of me figure out what all the hype was about. Read Love in the Time of Cholera instead. And then, in my opinion, you can be done with Garcia Marquez.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy. I can't comment. I've been avoiding the book for fear it would freak me out.

The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence. I've never even heard of this one.

On the Road, Jack Kerouac. Never even had the ghost of a desire to read this one.

The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen. I'm going to offer a tepid half-disagreement here, because I remember really liking The Corrections when it came out and I thought it suffered unfairly because of overhype followed by the whole Oprah foofaraw. On the other hand--I haven't had the slightest urge to pick it up again since. So there it is.

U. S. A., John Dos Passos. I tried this during one of my arty phases in college, and found it utterly unreadable. Then again, I was twenty. I still thought John Irving was a genius when I was twenty.

Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf. Haven't read it. Don't plan to. If I manage to read Mrs. Dalloway sometime before I die, that's all I'm demanding of myself.

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens. I make no secret of my Dickens adoration, so my first reaction to this entry was, "How dare you, sir?" Having given it some thought, however--it's really one of Dickens's weaker efforts. I mean, it's better than Barnaby Rudge, but if Dickens's grocery lists had been collected and published, they would probably have been better than Barnaby Rudge. And the problem is that A Tale of Two Cities is the book that's assigned in schools, so it's the only one people read, and they go through life thinking that Dickens is really boring (he isn't) and not at all funny (he is!). So--if there's anyone out there thinking of reading A Tale of Two Cities as their first Dickens. Think again. (I recommend Nicholas Nickleby or David Copperfield as your gateway Dickens novels.)

What would I toss out of the canon? The Vicar of Wakefield, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Catcher in the Rye.

Daniel Mendelsohn on Classics

2009-07-09T20:41:00.003-04:00

In Tablet Magazine this morning, an essay about Daniel Mendelsohn's memoir, The Elusive Embraces:

[I]f we take seriously The Elusive Embrace’s insistence on the inevitable flexibility of identity, we can see cosmopolitanism as a challenge now that assimilation has largely been accomplished. What’s more, it describes the kind of life that many American Jews try to pursue. Mendelsohn’s breadth and the curve of his career might profitably be taken as an experiment in mixed affinities, as a conscious example of what it would mean to live as both a Jew and a Greek. Part of the creativity of contemporary American Jews comes from their tolerance, not only of others, but of their own identification with Judaism. So, it might be productive to argue that most Jews in the United States these days are existentially, though not linguistically, ambidextrous. The difficulty they face, the difficulty of modern cosmopolitanism, is to be an Ianthes who understands the allure of Hedonism and Art, one who lives in Alexandria but won’t leave the synagogue behind.

Which gives me an excuse to link to Mendelsohn's 2009 2009 commencement address to the graduates of Berkeley's classics department:

And so, I would ask you this: when you think of what it means to be a classicist, don't think only about your deconstructive readings of Homer, or post-structuralist approaches to Plautus, or Freudian readings of the Euripidean romances, or Marxist interpretations of the Peloponnesian War, the iconography of red-figure vases or the prosopography of the late Roman Republic. Think about Mrs. Begley; think about the people in Kraków, who, when they had very good reasons to believe that civilization had ended, felt that the first thing they needed to do was to put on a play by Sophocles.

(I wanted to link to the whole thing, but it seems to have been taken down from Berkeley's site. Which would be a shame. But maybe it's just a glitch of some kind.)

Villette (I): Thoroughly Modern Lucy Snowe

2009-07-08T04:48:00.002-04:00

My second reading project for the summer: Villette. I'll be honest, I'm much more excited about this book than about Infinite Jest, so you can expect posts with less grouchy whining. I've read Jane Eyre too many times to count, but I've never read any of Charlotte Bronte's other work. Now that I've read the first eight chapters of Villette, I am hooked. People, this is my kind of book.

Two things struck me about the early chapters of this book: first, Lucy Snowe is one of the most unpleasant and also most psychologically real narrators I can think of. Think of her in contrast to Bleak House's Esther Summerson. Esther is an appealing character, but consider her background: she's an abandoned child left in the care of an unkind godmother who essentially instructs her to hate herself. Yet as an adult Esther burbles, jingles her little basket of household keys, and presents herself as a disgustingly happy ray of sunshine to everyone who crosses her path. (Er--maybe I don't really find her all that appealing. To be honest, I might get on better with Lucy.) Is it really likely that a child brought up as Esther was brought up would turn into such a cheerful domestic goddess? (I've always maintained that Esther's codependence and continual self-abnegation cry out for the help of a good therapist, but this doesn't seem to be Dickens's perspective. Then again, Dickens was kind of an ass.) Isn't it more likely that such a child might become Lucy Snowe--disconnected from everyone she meets, constantly striving to hide or even eliminate all emotions, preferring uneventful consistency to even pleasant disruptions of daily life? To wit:

Time always flowed smoothly for me at my godmother's side; not with tumultuous swiftness, but blandly, like the gliding of a full river through a plain. My visits to her resembled the sojourn of Christian and Hopeful beside a certain pleasant stream, with "green trees on each bank, and meadows beautified with lilies all the year round." The charm of variety there was not, nor the excitement of incident; but I liked peace so well, and sought stimulus so little, that when the latter came I almost felt it a disturbance, and wished rather it had still held aloof.

Or this moment, when six-year-old Polly's father has departed, leaving her at Bretton:

When the street-door closed, she dropped on her knees at a chair with
a cry--"Papa!"

It was low and long; a sort of "Why hast thou forsaken me?" During an ensuing space of some minutes, I perceived she endured agony. She went through, in that brief interval of her infant life, emotions such as some never feel; it was in her constitution: she would have more of such instants if she lived. Nobody spoke. Mrs. Bretton, being a mother, shed a tear or two. Graham, who was writing, lifted up his eyes and gazed at her. I, Lucy Snowe, was calm.

(Yeah, I don't actually want to hang out with Lucy or Esther.)

The other thing that struck me about the book is what a modern sensibility it has. Certainly you can tell it was written in the Victorian era: there's the reference to Pilgrim's Progress, for one thing, and its overtly Christian perspective--the unironic references to Providence--for another. But for all that much about the book seems to anticipate some of the themes of modern fiction: the psychological realism, certainly--Lucy's lack of affect reminds me more of the protagonist in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go than any Victorian era character I remember--but also the way that it plays with the conventions of Victorian prose. For example, this passage:

Deep was the pleasure I drank in with the sea-breeze; divine the delight I drew from the heaving Channel waves, from the sea-birds on their ridges, from the white sails on their dark distance, from the quiet yet beclouded sky, overhanging all. In my reverie, methought I saw the continent of Europe, like a wide dream-land, far away. Sunshine lay on it, making the long coast one line of gold; tiniest tracery of clustered town and snow-gleaming tower, of woods deep massed, of heights serrated, of smooth pasturage and veiny stream, embossed the metal-bright prospect. For background, spread a sky, solemn and dark blue, and--grand with imperial promise, soft with tints of enchantment--strode from north to south a God-bent bow, an arch of hope.

Which strikes me as the standard sort of flowery prose you often find in Victorian novels. But Bronte follows it up with this:

Cancel the whole of that, if you please, reader--or rather let it stand, and draw thence a moral--an alliterative, text-hand copy--

Day-dreams are delusions of the demon.

Becoming excessively sick, I faltered down into the cabin.

Probably Victorian scholars could give me half-a-dozen instances of such inversions. But to my ear, it's different from what I've read in, say, Dickens's work, and it gives me the feeling that Bronte was really trying something new here.

Infinite Summer (III): I Don't Trust David Foster Wallace

2009-07-06T16:08:00.004-04:00

Two weeks into Infinite Summer, I realize that I am in danger of running out of things to say about this book. I mean, let's face it, there are only so many times you can say "I'm finding this book digressive and self-indulgent but there are a few marvelous passages that keep me going anyway" before people get really really tired of it, right? Even if I quote the marvelous passages at length, which is lazy and a little self-indulgent in and of itself.

So today I want to write a little about what other Infinite-Summerites (Infinite Summerians?) are saying about their experience. (Which, yes, is also lazy, but strikes me as a little less lazy because let's face it, I did have to Google.) Here is what they are saying: trust David Foster Wallace.

First, Kevin Guilfoile urges us to trust the author based on the first ten pages of Infinite Jest:

We have a number of reasons to trust Wallace. We have the word of smart people who have read the book, like Marcus, Jason, and Matt. We have almost 15 years of people reading and rereading, mining the book for its pleasures. We have the place to which this book has rapidly ascended in my generation’s unconscious.

But best of all we have the first ten pages.

The first ten pages of this book are remarkable. The first 100 pages are very good (if sometimes frustrating) but the first ten are amazing, and he deliberately put them there, right at the front, in order to make you a promise.

Brian Barone makes pretty much the same argument using Wallace's essay "Consider the Lobster":

...[I]f your first week or so with Mr. Wallace has left you feeling the he’s a real like nice guy, who’s really funny — like majorly so — and who definitely has some chops when it comes to this whole writing business, and most definitely doubly so when it comes to esoteric knowledge and the footnoting of details re: any and all ingestible compounds, but who, on the whole, is fairly out of control with his prose and could use the like significant help of an editor with near-Lishian expurgative powers, then I really recommend you get your hands on a copy of the essay “Consider the Lobster” (available digitally here, but N.B. if you spring for the book you’ll also be treated to several of the essays mentioned here as well as a few other whiz-bang pieces). It is, without a doubt, the most tightly controlled, argumentatively awesome essay I’ve ever read. As I read it the first time I had the amazing sense that DFW was precognitively reading my mind — a thought or objection would pop in to my thoroughly-blown mind, and no sooner would I turn the page than Wallace would expand, refute, justify, or trump it. Any author who can so perfectly, so entertainly, so thoughtfully exert that sort of control not only over his own prose, but also over his readers’ thought processes has my unfailing trust.

I have to admit--and this makes me feel like Ebenezer Scrooge on a deadline at a Christmas parade--I don't find either of these arguments particularly compelling. I agree that the first ten pages are great. There is a lot of great writing in this book. The problem is that there's also a lot of--not bad writing, but problematic writing, and there are a lot of paragraphs where I feel that Wallace's point is not so much to communicate with me as to show me what a virtuoso he is. I actually am a little more compelled by the "Consider the Lobster" argument, because I think that essay rocks. But the essay was written several years after Infinite Jest. When Wallace wrote Infinite Jest, he was still finding his footing as a writer, and I think it shows. (And yes, I think that the "significant help of an editor with near-Lishian expurgative powers" would have come in handy.)

To this point, I liked Marcus Sakey's "Decoding Infinite Jest; or Don't". In fact, he seems to almost directly answer my whining about Wallace not communicating with me:

Fundamentally, IJ is a novel about two things: the pursuit of happiness, and the impossibilities of communication. Wallace explores those themes and their intersections in a hundred different ways. And because he was a genius who didn’t believe there were answers to these questions, he also contradicts himself over and over and over. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that there are no assertions of importance in the text that aren’t contradicted somewhere else.

In other words, ladies and gentlemen, Wallace is not communicating with me, but it's not just to show off--it's for a larger purpose. He fails to communicate to show us how impossible it is to communicate! (Sakey, by the way, has read the whole book at least twice, which is impressive.) (On the other hand, I'm a little depressed to hear that Sakey still isn't exactly sure what happens.)

Sakey, too, encourages me to trust Wallace. I liked Sakey's post quite a lot and I think it's well worth reading, but I have to admit that I'm struggling with the whole idea that it's okay--even laudable, even proof of genius--that Wallace made this massive novel so opaque and so difficult to read. (I'm a throwback; I was studying political history at the University of Chicago when all the cool kids were doing cultural history stuff. It just seems to be my natural state.) I think Sakey makes a great point when he says this:

There aren’t easy answers in life, and so Wallace didn’t want them in his work. There aren’t single perspectives in life, and so Wallace didn’t want them in his work. The world can’t be summed up in a sentence, and so Wallace not only didn’t try—he demonstrated some of the reasons why the world is the way it is.

But it's possible to show multiple perspectives without resorting to this:

The AM were wicked bright and us a bit sick however we scored our wake ups boosting some items at a sidewalk sale in the Harvard Squar where it were warm upping and the snow coming off onnings and then later Poor Tony ran across an old Patty citizen type of his old acquaintance like he would give a blow job On The House and we got the citizen to get in his ride with us and crewed on him good and we got enough $ off the Patty type to get straightened out for true all day and crewed on him hard and C wanted we should elemonade the Patty's map for keeps and everything like that and take his ride to this understanding slope strip shop he knows in Chinatown but Poor Tony turns white as a shit and said by no means and put up an arguement and everything like that and we just left the type there in his vehicle off Mem Dr we broke the jaw for insentive not to eat no cheese and C insisted and was not 2Bdenied and took off one ear which there was a mess and everything like that and then C throws the ear away after in a dumster so yrstrulys' like so what was the exact pernt to that like.

(If you're wondering why that quote was so long--I was waiting for a period.)

I just don't think that writers--even truly gifted, brilliant writers--should make massive sections of 1000-page books that difficult to read. (Honestly, I think I'd rather read Tender Buttons than read that passage again.) And the fact that he made is so difficult makes me suspect that he had motives other than putting together a solid, well-structured work of fiction. Reading fiction--even serious, important fiction--shouldn't be this much work. If you really want people to hear what you're trying to say, why give them so many reasons to put away your book in favor of something else?

And that's why I don't trust David Foster Wallace. I'm not going to stop reading the book, because its truly fabulous moments are worth slogging through Wardine and yrstruly. But I don't believe he was in control of his talent--at least not at the time that Infinite Jest was written--and I don't think I'm going to put this book down wowed by his ingenious structure. I reserve the right to change my mind, but for right now--I'm skeptical.

Weekend Miscellany

2009-07-05T17:48:00.005-04:00

A plethora of author interviews:

Joseph O'Neill talks to the Philadelphia Inquirer about his overrated (but beautifully written) novel Netherland--and its most famous reader:

When President Obama told a New York Times reporter that he was reading Netherland, sales for the PEN/Faulkner Award winner increased by double digits, and Vintage moved up the release date for the paperback reprint, which appeared at the beginning of May.

"It's very odd," says O'Neill of the idea that Obama is reading his work. "Really, the president is a quasi-fictional character. It's all pure hearsay, the existence of the president . . . and strange to have oneself and one's book caught up in that story. I suppose you flatter yourself that the story is the history of the United States. That's the weird, disorienting feeling you get."

At Infinite Summer, Michael Pietsch describes the experience of editing David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest:

We’d agreed early on that my role was to subject every section of the book to the brutal question: Can the book possibly live without this? Knowing how much time Infinite Jest would demand of readers, and how easy it would be to put it down or never pick it up simply because of its size, David agreed that many passages could come out, no matter how beautiful, funny, brilliant or fascinating they were of themselves, simply because the novel did not absolutely require them.

Wonderful news: Vikram Seth is writing a sequel to his epic novel A Suitable Boy, to be titled A Suitable Girl:

To be published in the autumn of 2013, publisher Penguin promised that Seth would "bring the action of the narrative up to the present day, encompassing some of the enormous social and economic changes India has undergone in the last 60 years".

Seth described the time shift as a "jump sequel" in an interview with Reuters. "That allows me in a sense to bring a whole lot of post-independence history to bear on the novel. It allows me to live in the present," he said. "I'm doing something quite different to keep myself interested rather than just writing another historical book that I've written before. I hope it can be read by a person who hasn't read the other book as well as by people who have."

(Incidentally, A Suitable Boy? Best maternity leave reading ever.)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks to BarnesAndNoble.com about her new short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck:

I've found that since this book came out, I've had to defend my affection for America, which is an odd position to be in. I am often asked, "In your stories, the characters don't necessarily have a good time in the U.S. -- do you hate America?" Then I have to find myself in the position of saying, "No, in fact I quite like the U.S., but I am drawn to writing about the minuses much more than I am to the pluses." And I did have, and continue to have, experiences that aren't fantastic in the U.S.

And finally, Alain de Botton had some 'splaining to do about the little temper tantrum he threw over Caleb Crain's review of his new book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. Here is his apologetic interview with Ed Champion:

I think that a writer should respond to a critic within a relatively private arena. I don’t believe in writing letters to the newspaper. I do believe in writing, on occasion, to the critics directly. I used to believe that posting a message on a writer’s website counted as part of this kind of semi-private communication. I have learnt it doesn’t, it is akin to starting your own television station in terms of the numbers who might end up attending.

Well, maybe "apologetic" isn't the word. Maybe "mildly regretful"?

July Books I Want to Read

2009-07-03T06:13:00.003-04:00

Seriously, people, this is getting ridiculous. I will never be able to read all these books. Why someone won't pay me just to read I will never understand. (If someone out there wants to pony up, I promise to write up a little review for each one--not a very long one, you understand. I'd hate to cut into my reading time.)

Here's the list for July:

Swimming, Nicola Keegan. It's a debut novel about an Olympic swimming champion. I have a thing about the Olympics.

The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larsson. Okay, so I haven't gotten around to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo yet. Eventually I'll read both of them.

A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition, Ernest Hemingway, Sean Hemingway, and Patrick Hemingway. I've read the original A Moveable Feast probably half a dozen times. I never knew the story behind its compilation. The new version is supposed to be closer to Hemingway's chosen structure, and has passages that had been removed restored. I really can't wait to see the two versions side-by-side.

The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes. A sort of collective biography of scientists in the Romantic Era. I majored in history so I could read stuff like this. (Little did I know that history majors were expected to read Heidegger and use words like "hermeneutics" and "metonymy." I totally would have rethought my decision.)

When You Reach Me, Rebecca Stead. This is YA book, so I'm probably going to buy it "for my daughter."

Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, Maile Meloy. A short story collection by the author of the marvelous collection Half in Love.

Young Woman and the Sea, Glenn Stout. Another swimming book, this one a non-fiction account of Gertrude Ederle.

The Book of William, Paul Collins. The story of the publication of Shakespeare's plays. I have a thing about Shakespeare, too.

Against a Dark Background, Iain Banks. Banks is one of my favorite writers working in speculative fiction. This one involves a "cult of intergalactic religious fanatics" and a weapon that works by altering reality. This is the kind of thing I find nearly impossible to resist.

Marsbound, Joe Haldeman. I think it will be fun to read this one with my Mars-fascinated son.

The Impostor's Daughter, Laurie Sandell. A memoir in graphic novel form about a woman's relationship with her father, who can't tell the truth to save his life.

Dreaming in Hindi, Katherine Russell Rich. A memoir about moving to India for a year to learn Hindi. (Does anyone think I could sell a memoir about trying to learn Latin in my spare time, but continually being derailed by actuarial exams? No, I didn't think so.)

The Woman Who Named God, Sarah Gordon. This is about Hagar. For those of you who are not up on your Jewish Bible, Hagar was Abraham's concubine, who bore him a son before Sarah gave birth to Isaac. I have had a lifelong sneaking sympathy for Hagar. This appalls my Hebrew-day-school-attending children.

A Brave Vessel, Hobson Woodward. The story of William Strachey's sea voyage to Jamestown. His account of this journey served as part of Shakespeare's source material for The Tempest. So a combination of Shakespeare and American history.

The Lady in Red, Hallie Rubenhold. Here's the subtitle: "An Eighteenth-Century Tale of Sex, Scandal, and Divorce." I don't think I need to say more.

Peaceable Kingdom Lost, Kevin Kenny. Another American history title, this one about how William Penn's dream of a peaceful colony where English settlers and American Indians lived side-by-side fell apart. I'm thinking of reading this one when we are on our big American history family vacation in August.

The Accidental Billionaires, Ben Mezrich. The story of how Facebook was founded, it promises "sex, money, genius, and betrayal."

It's Beginning to Hurt, James Lasdun. I thought Lasdun's novel Seven Lies was wonderfully written and constructed, so I'm eager to see how Lasdun handles short stories.

The Game of Opposites, Norman Lebrecht. A novel involving classical music and Hasidic Judaism.

How I Became a Famous Novelist, Steve Hely. This novel wouldn't ordinarily be my kind of thing. But the fake New York Times best-seller list made me laugh out loud.

The July book I least want to read? That award goes to Mary Jo Buttafuoco's memoir. Yes, people, just when we thought we'd finally gotten rid of the Buttafuocos for good--here they come again. I love how the subtitle ("Why I Stayed, What I Learned, and What Millions of People Involved with Sociopaths Need to Know") makes it sound as if she's performing an important public service. But I will give her points for the title: "Getting It Through My Thick Skull." Yes, Mary Jo, all of America was wondering how long it would take you.

Open Letters Monthly: Salman Rushdie, Katharine Hepburn, and the British Poet Laureate

2009-07-01T05:34:00.004-04:00

The July Open Letters Monthly has been posted, and as usual it's full of good stuff:

Irma Heldman calls Stieg Larsson's protagonist in The Girl Who Played with Fire, Lisbest Salander, "one of the most intriguing, mesmerizing, addictive, original female characters ever created." (I still haven't gotten around to Larsson's first book involving Salander, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But it's on my Kindle.)

Bryn Haworth writes about Carol Ann Duffy, the new British poet laurate, and argues that "if what the job really entails is “giving Britannia a poetic voice,” no one is better qualified than Duffy."

John G. Rodwan, Jr., compares Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence to Herman Melville's Moby Dick and finds that in both books, "the two writers enthusiastically pursue the wily, loose fish of truth even as they admire its elusiveness."

Sarah Hudson claims that the films of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy hold up "because their films tended to be about the clash between personal ambition and personal relationships, something that men and women haven’t really been able to reconcile in the sixty-five years since Woman of the Year premiered." I admit I'm a little skeptical of this--I had a Katharine Hepburn marathon after her death a few years back, and thought that the implicit argument in these films was both sexist and outdated. Maybe I'll rewatch.

Thomas J. Daly reviews Richard Beeman's new book about the making of the Constitution, Plain, Honest Men, and finds that "Beeman’s gift for subtlety, inquisitiveness, judicious judgments and dispassionate objectivity that makes his book to stand out."

Kay Ryan: "I didn't want to be dramatic"

2009-06-30T20:10:00.003-04:00

In Newsweek, a lovely profile of U.S. poet laureate Kay Ryan:

Ryan was not yet a poet. Though she felt drawn to writing, she resisted it. "I just didn't like the style that saying 'poet' meant," she says. "Anne Sexton was a poet. Robert Lowell was a poet. People who cut a dramatic swath. Lots of medication. I didn't want to be dramatic." But on a cross-country biking trip, she had what she calls an epiphany. (Always on guard for high drama, she adds that she considered it an epiphany "reluctantly.") "It was a real one," she says. It was also a complicated one. Writing poetry meant exposure, meant bearing herself to the public eye. She could have put her poems in a drawer and left them there, but she wanted her work to have an audience. "One of the elements of an art is the fact that it communicates," Ryan says. "The transaction isn't complete if you don't publish."

It's a really nice piece that reminds me that both Ryan and the British poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy are women who are made of awesome. If you're interested in reading their work, check out Ryan's Niagara River or Duffy's Selected Poems.

Infinite Summer (II): In Which This Book Kicks My Butt

2009-06-29T14:55:00.002-04:00

[Note: I neglected to say on Friday that I'm making no attempts to avoid spoilers. So if you're not caught up with the Infinite Summer schedule, read at your own risk.]

So I avoided reading Infinite Jest for thirteen years, and in all that time, it never once occurred to me that it might have a plot. I think I envisioned it as a sort of Gen-X Independence Day or even The Mezzanine--no real action, just wandering around inside the head of a character who has a lot of cleverly phrased thoughts.*

Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to tell you that Infinite Jest has a plot, a fairly complicated one, and despite my confident boasting on Friday that if I could handle Gramsci I could handle David Foster Wallace, I am not at all sure I'm totally grasping this book. (And I can explain the plot of Our Mutual Friend! How far the mighty have fallen.) Drugs are definitely involved, and I'm pretty sure there's tennis. I think I have a handle on the family relationships. Other than that--I'm pretty much just holding on to the hopeful belief that it's all going to come together at some point.

The reason I am having problems, I believe, is because of sentences like this one:

The organopsychedelic muscimole, an isoxazole-alkaloid derived from Amanita muscarla, a.k.a. the fly agaric mushroom -- by no means, Michael Pemulia emphasizes, to be confused with phalloides or verna or certain other kill-you-dead species of North America's Amanita genus, as the little kids sit there, Indian-style on the Viewing Room floor, glassy-eyed and trying not to yawn -- goes by the strucutral moniker 5-aminomethyl-3-isoxazolol, requires about like maybe ten to twenty oral mg. per ingestion, making it two to three times as potent as psilocybin, and frequently results in the following alternations in consciousness (not reading or referring to notes in any way): a kind of semi-sleep-like trance with visions, elation, sensations of physical lightness and increased strength, heightened sensual perceptions, synesthesia, and favorable distortions in body-image.

I'm sorry, when I read that sentence I, too, am "glassy-eyed and trying not to yawn." It may even induce a "semi-sleep-like trance with visions", although there's no elation that I detect. What is that sentence designed to do? It can't really be designed to communicate, because I am quite sure that David Foster Wallace knew quite well that most people--even most well-read, well-educated people--couldn't define "muscimole" if they had a loaded gun pointed at their temple. So what was he hoping to accomplish? I mean, I do realize that on some level he is trying to induce the same feeling that the little kids sitting Indian-style had. But I don't like it, personally, when words are used to obfuscate meaning rather than clarify it, even if it is just a rhetorical device. That sentence annoyed me so much I thought about putting the book aside for the day, or maybe giving it another try in another fifteen years or so.

But I pushed on, and was rewarded with James's (or possibly Orin's?) dream about a hypothetical tennis game. And the quite brilliantly written section about Kate Gompert's attempted suicide, which is made all the more poignant by the knowledge of how Wallace's own life ended. So, yes, in the middle of the second week, this book is thoroughly kicking my butt. I don't have a really clear idea of the plot yet, and Wallace continues to exasperate me regularly. But at the same time--to return to Friday's theme--there's so much here that's great.

*I do not mean that as a slam again Independence Day or The Mezzanine. I haven't read Independence Day**, but I've heard only good things about it, and I adore The Mezzanine.

**Yes, I am planning to read it someday, and no, I probably shouldn't have used it as an example, because some Richard Ford scholar is probably going to search this post out and scold me for it. But I can't remember the title of the Joyce Carol Oates book that's like this, and I'm on a (self-imposed) deadline, and she's written dozens of novels so it's not like I can do a little quick research. Please go easy on me, Unknown Richard Ford Scholar.

But What Does Her Mother Think?

2009-06-28T20:57:00.003-04:00

My mother, who believes that women should be modest and demure, had the vapors when I asked a boy to prom as a friend. ("Boys don't like girls who are forward.") One can only imagine what she might have done had I done what Rachel Kauder Nalebuff did:

They called her "period girl" at her New Haven, Conn., high school after she gave a speech to the student body in junior year about how girls shouldn't be afraid to talk about their menstrual periods, and collected first-menstrual-period stories for an independent study project during her senior year.

But the joke is on them: Rachel Kauder Nalebuff sent those stories to an agent, got a book deal and gathered stories from prominent female writers such as Gloria Steinem and Erica Jong for her anthology, "My Little Red Book" (an allusion to Chairman Mao's manifesto), which came out in February. All proceeds from the book are donated to charities promoting women's health and education.

I have very little desire to read this book. But I think it's a pretty cool idea. (For the record: I was home alone. I was fifteen. I was mightily relieved. I tore apart my parents' bathroom looking for pads, and then I called my Aunt Denise.)

Haruki Murakami on 1Q84

2009-06-27T17:38:00.002-04:00

A few words in the Guardian about Haruki Murakami's new novel 1Q84, from the author himself:

"[M]y interest was piqued by Yasuo Hayashi, who is on death row. He fled after killing eight people, the biggest number, in the Tokyo subway attack. Hayashi joined Aum without knowing exactly what he was getting into and committed murder after being brainwashed," Murakami told Japanese paper the Yomiuri Shimbun. "I think capital punishment is the reasonable decision when we consider Japan's penalty system and bereaved families' anger and sorrow. But I fundamentally oppose capital punishment, and I felt a heavy sense of gloom when the death sentence was given. At that time I imagined the terror of being left alone on the other side of the moon where a Joe Blow unwittingly commits a felonious crime and ends up becoming a death row convict. I considered for years the meaning of this. This served as a starting point for my story."

He describes 1Q84 as a "near-past" novel influenced by Orwell's 1984. It's been available in Japan since late May, when publishers increased the print run from 100,000 to 480,000. I cannot wait to read this book. No word on when the English translation will be out, though. Sigh.

Infinite Summer (I): DFW and I

2009-06-26T04:39:00.003-04:00

As June 26 approached, I found myself growing more and more wary of this Infinite Summer project—at least the blogging part of it. I wasn’t worried about reading Infinite Jest—I’ve read Gramsci, Pilgrim’s Progress, and a six-volume Thomas Jefferson biography, so I was pretty confident about my ability to tackle a novel, albeit a long one—but I was definitely worried about writing about it, lest I expose myself as a philistine or a dilettante or a complete dumbass. Because I have been largely immune to the charms of David Foster Wallace. I admired much of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and I’ve enjoyed some of his essays. But I found most of his work that I read—even the work that I liked—to be self-indulgent, scattershot, and uneven.

Part of this dislike, I reluctantly admit, is rooted in a searing jealousy. Fiction ranks fourth on my list of great loves (behind my husband, my children, and Judaism; just ahead of yoga, Shiraz, and my red patent-leather Mary Janes; tied with chocolate). If I could grant myself any native talent, I would choose the ability to compose sentences fluidly, to channel characters and voices, to write with the originality and virtuosity that Wallace displays. I do believe (to my chagrin) that this is a talent some people are just born with and most of us are not. Wallace was as naturally attuned to the music of language as Mozart was to the language of music.

I don’t mean to suggest that Wallace’s work was perfect or that he found writing easy. Clearly he did not. (You only have to read D. T. Max's New Yorker article to know that.) But it doesn’t seem to me that that the act of composing—putting words on paper—was his nemesis. Rather, he seems to have struggled with structure and discipline—knowing when to stop, knowing how much was too much, judging which of his many, many florid sentences and quirky metaphors helped a piece of writing and which ones did not. (Wallace left behind several hundred manuscript pages of a new novel. I’m guessing that there is at least one vivid paragraph or bit of striking imagery on every single page. And I’m also guessing it’s going to be nearly impossible to organize those paragraphs and images into a coherent novel. But I digress.) This is the self-indulgent side of Wallace; this is what I find frustrating—so frustrating that I have for the most part simply not read him. Much of his work exhibits flashes of brilliance; but the flashes are surrounded by so much stuff. Every thought that flickers into his mind seems to find its way to the page. Reading his work sometimes feels like looking for loose gemstones in a gigantic, dusty storage room filled with outmoded clothing and broken lamps.

For example, near the beginning of Infinite Jest, this: “My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.” This, I submit, is a metaphor that does not work. It does not work in isolation, and it does not work in context. If you saw it out of context, and were not given the name of the author, you would believe it came from one of those lists of bad student metaphors that circulate via e-mail forwards. It is downright bad. I reached this sentence and startled my sons by glaring at my Kindle and muttering, “Oh, for crying out loud, are you kidding me?”

But even Wallace’s clunkiest sentences are preferable to bland descriptions that employ words like “pretty” and “large” and “thin”; if nothing else, even his most awkward metaphors convey a very specific sensation. Wallace’s active imagination sometimes grates, but never bores. And when Wallace is at top form, you get descriptions like this:

You have to love old-fashioned men's rooms: the citrus scent of deodorant disks in the long porcelain trough: the stalls with wooden doors in frames of cool marble; these thin sinks in rows, basins supported by rickety alphabets of exposed plumbing; mirrors over metal shelves; behind all the voices the slight sound of a ceaseless trickle, inflated by echo against wet porcelain and a cold tile floor whose mosaic pattern looks almost Islamic at this close range.

And dialogue like this:

"So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo."

But then again, there’s this—“The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir”—which is witty, but doesn’t, to my ear, fit comfortably into its scene. More than anything else, it reminds me of something Barney would say on How I Met Your Mother.

In other words, six percent of the way into Infinite Jest, I am finding the David Foster Wallace I remember from my reading of his other work: self-indulgent, scattershot, and uneven. I find myself exasperated by his digressive, maximalist style. And I also find myself envious of some wonderful sentences and images--I love those "rickety alphabets of exposed plumbing," for example. It's the Wallace I really expected to find. But I am hoping, over the course of the summer, to find something more: to find that Infinite Jest, after all, was a book where all of his enormous potential comes together, all the digressions make sense, all of the broken lamps in the storeroom prove to be there for a purpose.

Middlemarch Movie?

2009-06-24T04:30:00.002-04:00

I'm honestly not sure whether to be appalled or intrigued. Apparently Sam Mendes (he of Revolutionary Road and American Beauty fame) is developing a Middlemarch movie:

The award-winning director Sam Mendes is developing the project, with the costume drama writer Andrew Davies to write the script.

Yesterday, Focus Features, the arthouse arm of the powerful Hollywood studio Universal, also came on board. Focus has made its name from the commercial and critical success of historical dramas including The Other Boleyn Girl, Pride and Prejudice and Gosford Park. The company is regarded as having a Midas touch for creating hits in the costume drama genre.

Eliot's 1871 classic has never been adapted for the big screen, perhaps due to the complexity of its storyline and enormous cast of characters. The project is likely to be an epic undertaking, with an immense budget.

He knows it's 800 pages long, right? I can't even conceive how you could ever turn Middlemarch into a two- or three-hour movie. I mean, I'll probably go see it. But I'm deeply skeptical.

The other interesting detail in the article? Martin Scorsese thought about adapting it, but was put off by the length. (Smart man.) I really think I'd rather see Scorsese's take on this book than Mendes's. Scorsese's adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence is one of my favorite movies of all time. I'm sure whatever he did with Middlemarch would have been amazing.

Alistair Reynolds: "The Science Is Almost Window-Dressing"

2009-06-23T04:43:00.002-04:00

In the Guardian this morning, an interview with Alistair Reynolds, whose science-fiction novel House of Suns was recently shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke award:

When I look back at many of the moments of wonder, awe or terror that I've got from science fiction," he says, "it's often been because I've been put in the head of one of the characters." And it's with characters or fragments of scenes that his novels begin, often with drawings, doodles, sketches coalescing around a kernel of an idea. Then it's a question of leaping in to the story, stopping halfway along his 200,000 word journey to structure his thoughts with a felt-tip pen and the kind of whiteboard to be found in each and every scientific laboratory. It never starts with the science, he explains – "that always comes later. The science is almost window-dressing."

Vampires: A Reader's Guide

2009-06-23T04:26:00.004-04:00

At Salon.com, Laura Miller offers a guide to books for those of us who adore Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Her recommendations include the obvious--Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse novels, Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake books--as well as a few series I'd never heard of: Kim Harrison's Rachel Morgan books, Patricia Briggs's Mercy Thompson books, Rachel Caine's Weather Warden series, Ilona Andrews's Kate Daniels books, and Jeaniene Frost's Night Huntress. Miller's conclusion:

Where working-class characters in literary fiction are often depicted as tragic and helpless, the urban fantasy heroine gets to surprise everyone by using her talents to save the world ("a lot," as Buffy's famous -- and premature -- epitaph added). Sookie, who turns out to have a good head for strategy as well as detection, consults for the vampire bigwigs, and Rachel bravely rescues a local tycoon from a netherworld known as the ever-after. Which is not to say that our heroines are always virtuous. Like the male protagonists of detective fiction, they tend to be hotheaded, smart-mouthed, petulant and even selfish, flaws that distinguish them from the typical romance heroine, who (to my mind) is a bland goody-two-shoes. Perhaps the trait that most distinguishes urban fantasy from its genre ancestors and bedfellows is its cheeky humor -- sharp-edged, slangy and wised-up, ever ready to stick a pin in the portentous and self-important -- a direct inheritance from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

An Actual, Word-for-Word Conversation with My Eight-Year-Old Son

2009-06-22T13:35:00.002-04:00

Me: You were so good in your school play! I see a Tony in your future! [Editorial note: he had a solo, and I had no idea what a great voice he had.]
Son (completely deadpan): I don't think I'll win a Tony. I think I'll win a Nobel Peace Prize, for bringing superheroes to the world after aliens attack.

I think he was kidding.

Pictures from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

2009-06-22T13:33:00.003-04:00

Not strictly book-related, but because I was obsessed with Alice in Wonderland when I was nine: pictures from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.

Sad News of Kaye Gibbons

2009-06-22T13:08:00.002-04:00

(via Bookslut)

Yikes. This is really, really sad:

“Someone had convinced her that she was cured,” said author Sally Buckner of Cary, who was the first person to publish Gibbons – a high school poem that won a Peace College contest. “And she went off her meds. And I thought, ‘Oh my Lord.' That was the beginning of the downward spiral” that led to her Wake County court appearance.

At her sentencing, attorneys said Gibbons had posed as a Florida doctor to write prescriptions for the painkiller hydrocodone, which she said took the edge off as she finished a novel.

Her lawyer said her addiction and the pressure to finish the book led her to submit bogus prescriptions online and try to pick them up at Raleigh pharmacies under the doctor's name.

Late last year, David Batts e-mailed Gibbons' friends, seeking help paying her bills.

Gibbons is the author of the well-regarded novel Ellen Foster and a host of other books.

The Best Thing I Read Today

2009-06-20T14:57:00.003-04:00

There is a philosophical, or metaphysical, position that can be taken--maybe it's a scientific hypothesis--that the past cannot in fact exist. Everything that can possibly exist exists only now. Things now may be expressive of some conceivable or describable past state of affairs, yes, but that's different from saying that this former state actually somehow exists, in the form of "the past." Even in our memory (so neuroscientists now say, who sit at screens and watch the neurons flare as thoughts excite them, brain regions alight first here and then there like vast nighttime conurbations seen from the air) there is no past: no scenes preserved with all their sights and sounds. Merely fleeting states of mind, myriad points assembled for a moment to make a new picture (but "picture" is wrong, too full, too fixed) of what we think are former states of things: things that once were, or may have been, the case.

--from Four Freedoms, by John Crowley

Sam Jordison on Possession: Better than Expected

2009-06-19T11:10:00.003-04:00

Sam Jordison reads A. S. Byatt's masterpiece Possession, and finds it better than he anticipated:

Indeed, the entire book is a clever joke; a sophisticated riff on the manners and tropes of detective novels. It swaps the private dicks for two literary academics – Maud Bailey and Roland Mitchell – who use their skills in textual analysis to follow a series of arcane clues in order to unravel a mystery surrounding two Victorian poets (Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte). So it reads like the Da Vinci Code – only with brains and a sense of the absurd.

Possession is one of my favorite books of all time, so I can't be objective. (But it's brilliant! Read it!)

Hebrew in Translation

2009-06-19T06:54:00.002-04:00

(via Literary Saloon)

A highly interesting article in Ha'aretz about the increasingly popular translations of Hebrew novels into Italian, French, and a host of other languages, including Drents, Urhobo, and Esperanto. (People read books in Esperanto? Who knew?) Apparently in Italy the three most famous Israeli writers--David Grossman, A. B. Yehoshua, and Amos Oz--have their own columns in daily newspapers. I had no idea. I found this bit deeply depressing, though:

After all, in the United States, which has not only the world's second-largest Jewish population, but also its most culturally confident, with many hundreds of titles of Jewish interest published each year, Israeli literature in translation is barely a blip on the publishing map. In fact, many titles that have found homes at publishing houses in European countries with far smaller general populations and infinitesimally tinier Jewish communities will never be published in America.

Apparently I'm going to have to learn Esperanto.

How to Speak Shakespeare

2009-06-18T08:13:00.002-04:00

One of the drawbacks to living in Detroit is that you never have Anne Hathaway coming to town to perform Twelfth Night. So I will have to content myself with Ron Rosenbaum's Slate.com essay in which he instructs us all on how to read a Shakespearean line properly:

Pay attention because this will change your life. What Edelstein suggested is that the pause at the end of the line Hall was insisting on was not a static stop. Even Hall now calls it a "slight sense break," rather than a pause. Edelstein says it's less like a break than a springboard; that in reading or speaking Shakespeare one should read a line and, when one comes to its end, take a brief moment as if one were thinking up the next line. In that evanescent moment, Edelstein believes, the actor "finds" the next line, and the "springboard" of inventing it gives the words a renewed energy.

June Books I Want to Read

2009-06-17T06:47:00.002-04:00

Again I'm late to the party, given that it's already June 17. But here are the June books I'm dying for:

The City & The City, China Mieville. I love Mieville. Already on my Kindle, next up if I ever finish The Mysteries of Udolpho.

A Short History of Women: A Novel, Kate Walbert. If it's half as good as Our Kind, it will be well worth reading.

Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann. I'll be honest, I've never heard of McCann, but I liked his op-ed in the New York Times yesterday. And the description of the novel sounds nifty.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, Katherine Howe. Alternating timelines, the Salem Witch Trials--I'm so there.

Dismantled, Jennifer McMahon. Sounds pleasantly creepy.

God Says No, James Hannaham. Having grown up evangelical/fundamentalist, I find it hard to resist books about conservative Christianity. Bonus: apparently it's partly set in Memphis.

The Art of Making Money: The Story of a Master Counterfeiter, Jason Kersten. I actually wasn't interested in this one at all until I heard the author on NPR, which intrigued me.

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, Greg Grandin. I did not know that Henry Ford tried to found his own little patch of America in the jungles of Brazil. Now that I know, I can't stop thinking about it.

The Bolter, Frances Osborne. A biography of Idina Sackville. It sounds very juicy and full of incident--perfect summer reading.

The Ascent of George Washington: The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon, John Ferling. I'm a history geek.

Two Woodstock books: Michael Lang's The Road to Woodstock and Pete Fornatale's Back to the Garden. I like to think that I had been of the proper age (instead of being negative three years old), I would have enjoyed Woodstock. In all likelihood I would have complained about the crowds and the noise and ended up with a migraine.

When the Rivers Ran Red: An Amazing Story of Courage and Triumph in America's Wine Country, Vivienne Sosnowski. The tale of how the nation's winemakers coped with Prohibition.

The Mistresses of Henry VIII, Kelly Hart. Mostly because I want to shelve it next to The Wives of Henry VIII and The Children of Henry VIII.

The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks. Three 16th-century sisters who were extremely hairy, and somehow turned this into a career move that landed them among the courtiers and nobles of Europe. I've been dying to read this since I read about it months ago in the Guardian.

428 AD: An Ordinary Year at the End of the Roman Empire, Giusto Traina. Again--history geek.

The State of Jones, Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer. Class struggle in the South during the Civil War. My many-times-great grandfather Asa Ladd was one of those poor men fighting for rich men's slaves, so I'm quite interested in this one.

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, Elijah Wald. If my friend Teri hears about this book, her head will explode.

Um. That's quite a list there. I'd better get cracking. And quit my job. And stop sleeping. (Seriously, the worst part of putting together lists like this is the knowledge that I won't read half of these books.)

Bonus: here's the book that gets my vote for most out of touch with the zeitgeist: William G. Hyland's In Defense of Thomas Jefferson: The Sally Hemings Sex Scandal. Dude. That ship has sailed.

James Wood: "All novels fail, really"

2009-06-17T06:35:00.002-04:00

In the L. A. Times, a fascinating interview with literary critic James Wood (author of How Fiction Works and several other works of criticism, and one novel, The Book Against God). Here is what he has to say about reading bad novels:

For as long as I can remember, I have read novels with the thought: “What can this novel teach me about writing a good novel?” (Of course, that is not the only interest, but it is, for me, the driving force.) Within that vision, a novel that fails to work is of course as interesting as a novel that absolutely succeeds, because it is all grist to the mill. And anyway, as Randall Jarrell said, all novels are just pieces of prose with something wrong with them. All novels fail, really; some just fail a bit less drastically than others.

Morning Miscellany

2009-06-16T11:21:00.003-04:00

What caught my eye this morning:

At Critical Distance, an essay on Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine. I adored that book when I read it, despite my suspicion that Baker is well and truly nuts. The essay, by Stephen Augustine, is well-written and interesting, if a little scattershot. Also, it uses the word "cloacal." Here's a bit that ties in with the Infinite Jest read this summer:

David Foster Wallace’s “trademark” footnote-mania as on display in Infinite Jest is sometimes (though Baker is by far the less-famous of the two writers) reckoned as a steal from Baker (The Mezzanine preceding Infinite Jest by about a decade), but neither writer invented the use of footnotes in fiction. It isn’t hard, though, to imagine Wallace reading The Mezzanine and wishing he’d written it, or thinking to himself that he could do better by bringing an epic, humanist plot to the formal (and possibly elitist) apparent barrenness of Baker’s twee-but-envy-seedingly original work. It’s not a stretch to see Wallace as the tragic little brother to Baker’s eldest son in this genealogy of a lacquered intensity of style.

Not one but two interviews with Joe Meno, whose new novel The Great Perhaps I just downloaded despite the fact that my Kindle is practically bulging with unread books. (I have no self-control when it comes to downloading books. This is the one great drawback to the Kindle. I sincerely hope my husband is not reading this post, by the way. But I digress.) Anyway, at IdentityTheory.com, Meno talks to Michele Filgate and makes this statement that I completely agree with: "That's why I feel like whether you're religious or not, I feel like probably the most important part to me about being alive is being able to use your imagination. It’s really, really sad that there’s not enough opportunity. The book to me, without sounding evangelical, to me is almost religious." And at The Millions, Meno discusses switching publishers and the importance of diversity with Edan Lepucki.

Like the rest of the Internet, I am baffled by the good people who are apparently so offended by Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be-Bop that they want not only to remove it from the library but also to publicly burn it and receive compensatory damages. Um, yeah. I'm wondering whether I can sue them, because I'm pretty sure just reading this story emotionally damaged me.

Tablet Magazine continues to entertain me, this time with an critique of the portrayal of grandmothers in Jewish children's books.

And finally, I really liked Colum McCann's op-ed in the New York Times, in which he says this: "This is the function of books — we learn how to live even if we weren’t there. Fiction gives us access to a very real history. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be." (McCann's new novel, Let the Great World Spin will be available on June 23.)

Blake Bailey: "To Know All Really Is to Forgive All"

2009-06-14T17:45:00.002-04:00

Okay, so I'm coming a little late to the party. But I'm in the middle of Blake Bailey's masterful biography of John Cheever, and I'm quickly becoming obsessed. Here's an interview the Economist did with Bailey, and here is the BookForum review of the biography. My favorite bit from the interview:

After I graduated from college, I shared an apartment in New York with my old friend Michael Ruhlman, who went on to become quite famous as a food writer ("The Making of a Chef", et al). In those days, we were both writing ghastly apprentice fiction, and one day Michael quipped that I'd probably end up as a literary biographer. So look what happened (and it was purely by accident, too, but that's another story).

Michael recently plugged my Cheever bio on his blog, adding, however, that to start out aspiring to be a fiction writer and end up as a biographer is like the actor who hopes to be the next Olivier and ends up as Wayne Rogers playing Trapper John on "M*A*S*H".

What I've learned, above all, about the creative process via my work on Yates and Cheever is (a) that it's a lot of damn hard work and (b) that it's dismally underpaid. Will I write more fiction? Absolutely, but I need to sell one of these biographies to the movies first.

If you haven't read John Cheever, you can get started with his Collected Stories. And if you haven't read Bailey's marvelous, Pulitzer-winning biography of Richard Yates--well, you should really get around to that.

The Best Thing I Read Today

2009-06-13T16:27:00.004-04:00

The summer of 1916 would later be known as the last summer of peace. Within a year the United States would be at war, but that summer we still believed that President Wilson would keep us out of it. As a nation, we were told, we were getting bigger, better, and more stylish. Our population had risen to 100 million. Prohibition laws had been passed in twenty-four states. Every household would soon own an automobile. Ostriches, grackles, blackbirds, orioles, egrets, herons, and doves were slaughtered by the thousands so that their feathers could adorn women's hats. Americans were full of all kinds of foolish hope, and my mother and I were no exception.

"Mudlavia," Elizabeth Stuckey-French

I read it in the O. Henry Prize Stories 2005, but it's available online at the Atlantic Monthly's website. I quoted the first paragraph because quoting the entire story would be a copyright violation, and would make my fingers tired. It's a wonderful story, very rich and very rewarding to rereads. After my first reading I thought the story was about the power of storytelling; after my second reading I realized that Stuckey-French was making other, subtler points as well. Even if you don't like short stories, you should check this one out; it's like a novel condensed to 25 pages. One of the finest stories I've read in some time.

Books That Make You Cry

2009-06-12T05:28:00.006-04:00

In the Independent, David Nicholls lists ten books that make him cry:

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens. No one loves Dickens more than I do. And in fact Great Expectations is my favorite Dickens novel. But of his oeuvre, for my money, Dombey and Son is the really sad one. I reread it about a year ago and cried even though I knew everything that was going to happen.

Franny and Zooey, J. D. Salinger. Never read it, because I didn't like The Catcher in the Rye.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey. Oh, yes.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy. I read this for the first time when I was fifteen, and cried buckets. I suspect I would find it too melodramatic these days.

And When Did You Last See Your Father? Blake Morrison. Somehow I have never heard of this book, despite the fact that it is a Major Motion Picture. How did that happen?

Tender Is the Night. Another gap in my reading. The only Fitzgerald I've read is The Great Gatsby, and that was just a few weeks ago. (Somehow I missed it in school.)

The Road, Cormac McCarthy. Yeah, I've avoided reading this one because I was afraid it would totally freak me out.

The Perfect Stranger, P. J. Kavanaugh. Another one I've never heard of. And I consider myself well-read!

Charlotte's Web, E. B. White. The first book I ever remember crying over. I sort of regret reading this to my daughter so early because I don't think she got the real emotional impact of it.

Danny, the Champion of the World, Roald Dahl. I haven't read this or bought it for the kids. But they loved both Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and its sequel, so maybe I'll pick it up for them.

For some reason, children's books seem to be particularly tear-jerking. The saddest books I ever read--neither of which made the list--were books I read in around third grade: Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Little Princess and especially Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia. And although I didn't find Little House in the Big Woods sad when I was a child, now I can't read the final pages without tearing up: five-year-old Laura is snuggled in her bed, listening to her Pa play the fiddle, and she thinks "Now is now. Now can never be a long time ago." But of course Laura's "now" is more than a century gone, and I seriously have tears in my eyes this second just thinking about it.

I don't think of myself as especially susceptible to tears when I'm reading, so I was surprised at how many books I remember crying over even as an adult:

Possession, A. S. Byatt
The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
The Truth About Celia, Kevin Brockmeier
Digging to America and The Amateur Marriage, Anne Tyler

What books make you cry?

"The Normally Dry Weather Report Was Turned into a Poem"

2009-06-11T06:00:00.004-04:00

I'm officially running late for work, but this is so cool I wanted to post it: the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz had the nation's finest writers--including Etgar Keret, A. B. Yehoshua, and my personal favorite David Grossman--put out Wednesday's issue of the paper in honor of Hebrew Book Week. And yes, Ronny Someck wrote the weather report in the form of a poem. I was unable to find links to many of the actual articles (note to Ha'aretz: improve your search engine), but this is Grossman's coverage of a drug rehab center. And I finally found the weather poem at Israelity:

Summer Sonnet

Summer is the pencil
that is least sharp
in the seasons’ pencil case.
With it I compose
a billet-doux
to the seamstress who snipped
from women’s clothes
collars that had hidden napes
and lopped
an inch or two of winter
from the bottom of their dress.
Perhaps this year too
it will be hot
in the low-lying spots.

Now, off to frantically prepare for work.

(Things I learned while browing Ha'aretz this morning: Adam Lambert is Jewish. Who knew? And Liberian dictator Charles Taylor has converted to Judaism. God help us all.)

Tablet Magazine: Jesus, George Eliot, and Frum Businesswomen

2009-06-11T04:51:00.003-04:00

So, Tablet Magazine. It's a new Jewish online magazine, a nifty revamp of Nextbook. Think Salon, only Jewish. And I'm actually finding a lot more of interest in Tablet than I am in Salon these days. To wit:

Eryn Loeb reads A Treasure for My Daughter, a 1950s era guide to Jewish womanhood that apparently includes a recipe for Brain Latkes.

Adam Kirsch applauds Gertrude Himmelfarb's The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (and I may read it even though Himmelfarb irritates me.

Paula Fredricksen makes Susannah Heschel's book about Nazi theologians, Aryan Jesus, sound like a must-read.

An enjoyable article by Allison Hoffman profiles a business-basics class for ultra-Orthodox women.

Philip Pullman on Form

2009-06-10T05:07:00.003-04:00

Rebecca Rosen interviews Philip Pullman (author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, and why Evangelicals aren't worried about that trio of books instead of concentrating all their ire on the Harry Potter series I'll never understand). He has some interesting thoughts on form, given what seems to be the increasing popularity of eBooks:

...[I]f there’s a chance to say something new in graphic form, then I think it’s worth doing. I’ve always been fascinated by this interplay between word and picture, and the one thing doing what the other thing can’t do—sometimes the one thing undercutting or subverting what the other can do. One thing I would like to do one day is a sort of PowerPoint book that exists in a kind of presentation with picture succeeding picture, graphic works merging with text, and so on.

Yeah, I can't imagine his PowerPoint book would look very good on my Kindle. On the other hand, it would probably look fantastic on my laptop.

Pictures were quite common in, say, Victorian novels--those drawings that appear in Dickens's novels are fantastic and really enhance the text, in my opinion. I don't know when publishers stopped using illustrations in adult novels, but I assume it was a financial decision. However, a graphic eBook would not incur printing costs and I don't think (though I might be wrong) that color illustrations in an eBook would be as prohibitively expensive as printed color illustrations. Will we come full circle?

Morning Miscellany

2009-06-09T04:56:00.003-04:00

What caught my eye this morning:

At the TimesOnline.co.uk, Declan Kiberd argues that Ulysses should be read and can be appreciated by everyone, not just eggheads. (I'm paraphrasing.) I'm skeptical. Granted, I've never read Ulysses. But I know enough about it to know that it's not everyone's cup of tea.

Did Orwell steal the plot and characters of 1984 from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We? In the Guardian, Paul Owen makes the case that he did--but it doesn't matter because 1984 is a better book than We. I'm puzzled as to how this is news. Wasn't 1984 written 60 years ago? Shouldn't this have come up then? But it's still interesting.

In the L. A. Times, David L. Ulin profiles Frances Ring, F. Scott Fitzgerald's secretary, who typed The Last Tycoon. Now 92, Ring was 22 years old when she started working for Fitzgerald. Makes my post-college scutwork--data entry at Federal Express--look quite lame. The story puts one in mind of the title story in Cynthia Ozick's Dictation.

At Advocate.com, Carl Rollyson claims that David Rieff's editing of Susan Sontag's journals (published as Reborn) was too heavy-handed: "We will probably never know the real Sontag because her son did the editing." I haven't read the journals, but it strikes me that if Rieff was willing to include lines like "I hardly ever dream of David, and don't think of him much. He has made few inroads on my fantasy-life," he couldn't have cut out that much. I think Rollyson (whom I know slightly from the late lamented Readerville) is being a bit hard on Rieff. More to the point, does a son--even a son serving as an editor--have a responsibility to present an objective view of his mother? Rollyson implies that he does; I don't agree.

Finally, yet another summer reading project--this one a reading of Charlotte Bronte's Villette at The Valve. I'm trying both this one and the reading of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest at Infinite Summer. I'll be totally honest and admit that I probably won't get through both books (and may not get through either). But I'm giving it a shot.

Why I Should Have Paid More Attention in German Class

2009-06-09T04:38:00.003-04:00

Professor Bruhwiler, you were so right when you told me to keep up my German. This interview with Junot Diaz and Alexander Hemon looks really interesting, but it's entirely in German. With a dictionary and a little (or a lot of) time I could probably translate it, but I have neither at the moment. So I can't read it despite taking two years of German in college. That was money well spent.

John Crowley on Historical Research and Slipstream Fiction

2009-06-08T04:26:00.004-04:00

John Crowley has a new book out! Why was not I not informed?

The new novel, Four Freedoms, is about an aircraft factory during World War II, and Crowley has also written a most excellent essay at Powells.com detailing how he researched it:

Of course, writers of fiction can be more or less conscientious about their research. (Though, they can't be exposed as frauds if they get the details, or even the big picture, wrong; they start out as frauds.) Some care a lot, others less; Walter Scott, who in a sense invented the historical novel, often footnoted his stories, to back up his inventions with evidence. Fiction writers can always claim that detailed research is unnecessary or peripheral to their work — but they can no longer claim that it's too hard. I don't know if the Internet in all its glory and some of its shame has changed things utterly for professional historians — if it has, they may not be telling — but it has made research for a writer of historical fiction a piece of cake: that sweet, that delightful, that filling.

(Here's what the essay made me wonder: why is it that details in historical fiction make the setting come alive, whereas brand names in contemporary fiction feel strained and instantly dated? At least that is my experience.)

Bonus: a long and enjoyable interview with John Crowley in The Believer. The interview is less about the new novel and more about genre in fiction. Well worth a read if you enjoyed the Aegypt novels or if you're interested in the murky line between speculative and "mainstream" fiction. Here's a snippet:

I don’t have much of a literary theory, in the sense that I would never subscribe to a manifesto about these things. But certainly the kind of fiction that always interested me is stuff that somehow manages to be convincingly actual—in the sense that you believe that truths are being told about the world you live in—and are also somehow connected to the imaginary in some way. If you read Pale Fire you can think either it’s a fantasy about some guy who once had a kingdom in some far-off land that he’d lost—or that he’s crazy. Because of the way it’s written, the book is not going to make that decision for you. I think that’s great. I think that is in a certain sense the way the world works, and the way that fiction can model that feeling that there are other worlds, that there are parts of reality and actuality that we don’t know.

(And now that I've learned about Crowley's new book, Four Freedoms is safely ensconced on my Kindle, eagerly awaiting my vacation.)

Aravind Adiga: "I simply wrote about the India that I know"

2009-06-07T12:26:00.004-04:00

A couple of interviews with 2008 Booker winner Aravind Adiga. Here is my review of the prize-winning novel, The White Tiger; suffice it to say I did not like it. At all. But based on these interviews, Adiga seems like a pretty interesting guy, which makes me feel a tiny bit guilty for suggesting the Booker judges were on mind-altering drugs the day they chose the winner. I may even check out his new story collection Between the Assassinations. (And seriously, two books in two years? Mr. Adiga, I hated your book, but I respect your work ethic.)

The Mystery of the Hidden Agatha Christie Stories

2009-06-06T06:33:00.003-04:00

It's the kind of treasure every fan would love to find: two hitherto unknown stories by one's favorite writer. That's what John Curran stumbled onto when he pored over Agatha Christie's archives in preparation for a new book. Among the jumble of grocery lists, character names, and draft sentences were two complete stories, "The Mystery of the Dog's Ball" and "The Capture of Cerberus." ("The Mystery of the Dog's Ball" eventually became the novel Dumb Witness.) The two stories will be published for the first time in Curran's forthcoming book Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks.

2008 Booker Longlist Reviews: The White Tiger

2008-09-01T05:34:00.003-04:00

Let me be frank right up front: I did not like this book.

This came as a surprise to me because when I started working on my longlist predictions, sometime in late June, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger was one of the first books on my list. I was eager to read it, and I suspected that it would be my favorite of the whole lot. I have a thing for books set in India, I always find it interesting to read debut novels, and I knew it had been highly praised. (For example, in the New Statesman, Nakul Krishna refers to the book's "distinctive narrative voice, rich with the disconcerting smell of coarse authenticity"; in the San Francisco Chronicle, Lee Thomas argues that the book "contains passages of startling beauty," but "Adiga never lets the precision of his language overshadow the realities at hand"; in the Sunday Times, Adam Lively calls the novel "extraordinary and brilliant.")

So I started the book with very high expectations. But instead of being my pick to win the Booker, The White Tiger proved to be the biggest disappointment in a very disappointing Booker year.

The basic plot of The White Tiger is a simple one: Balram Halwai is born into poverty. He gets a boring job as a driver for a wealthy family:

The worst part of being a driver is that you have hours to yourself while waiting for your employer. You can spend this time chitchatting and scratching your groin. You can read murder and rape magazines. You can develop the chauffeur's habit--it's a kind of yoga, really--of putting a finger in your nose and letting your mind go blank for hours (they should call it the "bored driver's asana"). You can sneak a bottle of Indian liquor into the car--boredom makes drunks of so many honest drivers.

The family treats Halwai extraordinarily badly--the only moments of real poignance and feeling in the book. But Halwai triumphas over his circumstances and eventually comes to own his own business and become wealthy himself.

The gimmick of the book is that Halwai is writing a series of letters to the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao in advance of Jiabao's visit to India. Halwai wants to explain the real India to Jaibao:

See, this country, in its days of greatness, when it was the richest nation on earth, was like a zoo. A clean, well-kept, orderly zoo. Everyone in his place, everyone happy. Goldsmiths here. Cowherds here. Landlords there. The man called a Halwai made sweets. The man called a cowherd tended cows. The untouchable cleaned feces. Landlords were kind to their serfs. Women covered their heads with a veil and turned their eyes to the ground when talking to strange men. And then, thanks to all those politicians in Delhi, on the fifteenth of August, 1947--the day the British left--the cages had been let open; and the animals had attacked and ripped each other apart and jungle law replaced zoo law.

That's a fairly representative passage of the book, and it's well-written in its own way. But I found 276 pages of it awfully tiring. Halwai sees himself, and I think the author sees Halwai, as a blunt truth-teller. But Halwai is one of those truth-tellers for whom the truth is always terrible. More than that--he takes a kind of bitter pleasure in the terribleness of the truth. Halwai is such a thoroughly unpleasant person that I had trouble sympathizing with him, even when terrible things happened to him.

And I do understand that that is part of the point that Adiga is trying to make: that Halwai is made a monster by the way he is treated. I think the problem with the book, though, is that the characters are all awful, and uniformly awful. It's difficult to see that poverty makes Halwai into a monster because we don't really see any development of his personality. He's a horrible poor person at the beginning of the book, and he's a horrible wealthy person at the end of the book. Other characters--Pinky Madam, Ashok--are just as awful. And their awfulness is the only thing that is memorable about them. (One reviewer compared Adiga's characters to Dickens's grotesques, which is both a deep insult to one of my favorite writers and completely perplexing--Dickens had his own problems, but forgettable characters was never one of them.) And so one begins to suspect that for Adiga, becoming a monster is not so much a condition of poverty as a condition of humanity. No one in the book is good or even happy; there seem to be no emotional connections between any of the characters:

"Of course, your caste you don't. . . Let me tell you, Balram, men drink because they are sick of life. I thought caste and religion didn't matter any longer in today's world. My father said, 'No, don't marry her, she's of another. . . ' I . . . " Mr. Ashok turned his head to the side, and I rubbed his back, thinking he might throw up again, but the spasm passed. "Sometimes I wonder, Balram, I wonder what's the point of living. I really wonder. . . " The point of living? My heart pounded. The point of your living is that if you die, who's going to pay me three and a half thousand rupees a month?

The White Tiger is perhaps the only book on the 2008 longlist that would have benefited from more length. Another hundred pages might have given Adiga the room to develop some convincing, memorable characters who serve the story he wants to tell. As it stands, it is a novel with sketchy characters, implausible plot turns (especially near the end), and an unrelenting misanthropy that serves to obscure the important points about modern India that Adiga hopes to make.

2008 Booker Longlist Reviews: The Enchantress of Florence

2008-08-24T10:32:00.002-04:00

Salman Rushdie's latest book, The Enchantress of Florence, is a fairy tale for adults, a fanciful version of the life of Emperor Akbar. In the book, a European visitor to Akbar's capital, Sikri, tries to convince Akbar that he is a legitimate member of the royal family. The visitor, who calls himself Mogor dell'Amore (the Mughal of Love), says that he is the son of the princess Qara Koz (Lady Black Eyes).

It sounds simple, but it isn't. Complexities layer on top of complexities. Mogor is also Uccello di Firenze; and also, he is Niccolo Vespucci. Qara Koz's lover Argalia is also Arcalio, Arqalia, and Al-Khaliya. Qara Koz herself is actually the Enchantress of Florence, also called Angelica. And she has a slave called Mirror who is identical to her.

The complicated inventiveness of the novel must have made it fun to write, and it is often—especially at the beginning of the book—just as much fun to read. The playful quality of the book is infectious.

But Rushdie does have something to say in this book about the power of imagination, about romantic relationships, and our expectations when we are in one. (One cannot help but wonder how his split from the former model Padma Lakshmi informed the book's portrayal of Qara Koz.) The emperor's favorite wife, for example, is imaginary:

Queens floated within his palaces like ghosts, Rajput and Turkish sultanas playing catch-me-if-you-can. One of these royal personages did not really exist. She was an imaginary wife, dreamed up by Akbar in the way that lonely children dream up imaginary friends, and in spite of the presence of many living, if floating, consorts, the emperor was of the opinion that it was the real queens who were the phantoms and the nonexistent beloved who was real. He gave her a name, Jodha, and no man dared gainsay him. Within the privacy of the women's quarters, within the silken corridors of her palace, her influence and power grew. Tansen wrote songs for her and in the studio-scriptorium her beauty was celebrated in portraiture and verse. Master Abdus Samad the Persian portrayed her himself, painted her from the memory of a dream without ever looking upon her face, and when the emperor saw his work he clapped his hands at the beauty shining up from the page.

One of the problems with The Enchantress of Florence is that the characters are paper-thin—not an uncommon problem with fairy tales. You can't imagine any of them leading real lives. That's not always a flaw in a novel—not every work of fiction has to be realist—but it is difficult to maintain this kind of stylized tone in a long work. Although The Empress of Florence is not an enormous book at 368 pages, it could have been cut to half the size and been twice as effective.

And Rushdie does not seem to have completely developed the themes that he introduces. This novel reminds me somewhat of The Lost Dog in the way that Rushdie seems to toss every idea that he has into the mix. Sometimes Rushdie's musings lead to high-school-essay earnestness:

Was faith not faith but simple family habit? Maybe there was no true religion but only this eternal handing down. And error could be handed down as easily as virtue. Was faith no more than an error of our ancestors? Maybe there was no true religion. Yes, he had allowed himself to think this. He wanted to be able to tell someone of his suspicion that men had made their gods and not the other way around. He wanted to be able to say, it is man at the center of things, not God. It is man at the heart and the bottom and the top, man at the front and the back and the side, man the angel and the devil, the miracle and the sin, man and always man, and let us have no other temples but those dedicated to mankind. This was his most unspeakable ambition: to found the religion of man.

Despite these flaws, The Enchantress of Florence is often well-written, often involving, often charming. And although the image of the imaginary queen is abandoned early on, I found myself thinking about that particular theme frequently after I finished the novel:

The first minister and the emperor were standing at the Khwabgah, the Place of Dreams, looking out over the still surface of the Anup Talao, the monarch's private, formal pool, the Pool Without Peer, the best of all possible pools, of which it was said that when the kingdom was in trouble its waters would send a warning. “Birbal,” said Akbar, “as you know, our favorite queen has the misfortune not to exist. Even though we love her best of all, admire her above all the others, and value her above even the lost Koh-i-noor, she is inconsolable. 'Your ugliest, most sour-natured shrew of a wife is still made of flesh and blood,' she says. 'In the end I will not be able to compete with her.'” The first minister advised the emperor, “Jahanpanah, you must say to her that it is precisely in the end that her victory will be apparent to everyone, for in the end none of the queens will exist any more than she does, while she will have enjoyed a lifetime of your love, and her fame will echo down the ages. Thus, in reality, while it is true that she does not exist, it is also true to say that she is the one who lives. If she did not, then over there, behind that high window, there would be nobody waiting for your return.”

The Best Thing I Read Yesterday

2008-08-13T09:37:00.002-04:00

You never hear about a sportsman losing his sense of smell in a tragic accident, and for good reason; in order for the universe to teach excruciating lessons that we are unable to apply in later life, the sportsman must lose his legs, the philosopher his mind, the painter his eyes, the musician his ears, the chef his tongue. My lesson? I have lost my freedom, and found myself in this strange prison, where the trickiest adjustment, other than getting used to not having anything in my pockets and being treated like a dog that pissed in a sacred temple, is the boredom.

Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

The Best Thing I Read Today

2008-08-11T21:45:00.002-04:00

Something inspires the only cow of late
To make no more of a wall than an open gate,
And think no more of wall-builders than fools.
Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools
A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit,
She scorns a pasture withering to the root.
She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten.
The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.
She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.
She bellows on a knoll against the sky.
Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.

--"The Cow in Apple-Time," Robert Frost

What can I say? I'm a Robert Frost geek. Also, I grew up on a cattle farm.

2008 Booker Longlist Reviews: The Lost Dog

2008-08-10T21:19:00.002-04:00

In Michelle de Kretser's novel The Lost Dog, Tom Loxley loses his dog in the bush of Australia. He spends the rest of the novel searching desperately for the dog, tending to his aging mother, and remembering the winding path that brought him to this point. The narrative spirals back in time to his parents' courtship and marriage, to his own failed marriage, and to his friend Nelly's suspicious past.

For some readers, de Kretser's spare but flashy style may smack of overwriting. I enjoyed the writing in the book for the most part, although in the last fifty pages I began to find it wearying. At its best, though, her sentences take on the cadence of Jim Crace's best work.

. . . [W]hat Tom took from the scene was the thrust and weight of leaves, the season's green upswinging. Over time, his eye had grown accustomed to the bleached pigments of the continent where he had made his life. But love takes shape before we know it. On a damp, plumed coast in India, Tom's first encounter with landscape had been dense with leaves. A faultless place for him would always be a green one.

The book does demand concentration, however, and several times I found myself flipping back to reread previous pages, to make sure I'd caught everything before moving on. De Kretser jumps from one thread of the plot to another with dizzying speed. It is distressingly easy to get lost.

Where the book shines is in its characters. Tom and Iris, in particular, are as complex, as contradictory and consistent, as real people. Tom loves his mother but resents caring for her; even thinking about her produces a frisson of impatience. Nelly puzzles and intimidates him; his ex-wife fills him with unease. Above all, he is desperate to find his beloved pet. He fears appearing “unironic”; but in fact he is as sentimental as any man of the nineteenth century. He simply takes pains to hide it:

On seeing a beggar, Tom's first impulse was to reach for money. Then he would imagine being observed in the act of placing a coin in a hand; a sentimental act, an act of feeling. The shame this occasioned was so strong that it triumphed over charity. He would walk on, ignoring the beggar. Now he realized that what he risked in showing empathy was to appear unironic. Irony was the trope of mastery: of seeing through, of knowing better. And it was a reflect with Tom. He had invented himself through the study of modern literature, and it had provided him with a mode: the twentieth-century mode. To be modern was to be ironic. Among the things he was ashamed of was seeming out of date.

The person who makes him feel more ashamed than any other is Nelly. Nelly is an artist, but the descriptions of her art suggest more gimmickry and pretension than talent. Instead of selling her paintings, she photographs them and sells the photographs. Once the photographs are made, she claims, she destroys the paintings; there are rumors that she keeps them instead, planning to sell them for high sums in the future. In one instance she photographs a wet painting, then begins to smear its paint, photographing each change in the painting until its original contours are indistinguishable.

Tom's mother, Iris, is facing her old age and the various disappointments and indignities of her adult life. Iris was born the light-skinned privileged daughter of a wealthy (and haughty) Indian. Her sense of her own superiority, and her father's sense of his, are neatly summed up by de Kretser in the story of one unfortunate suitor:

Matthew Ho, the doctor's son who lived next door to the de Souzas, waited for Iris after mass. She had known him forever. On the way home, he asked her to marry him. Hygiene and his Sunday suit notwithstanding, he went down on one knee on the pavement. A crowd materialized at once to offer advice and encouragement.

Iris, schooled in obedience, relayed the news to her father. “Damn Ching-Chong cheek,” said Sebastian de Souza. He might have been enraged but chose to be amused instead. After a moment, Iris could see that amusement was what the situation called for. Father and daughter tittered together.

For weeks, a word was enough to set them off. Chopsticks. Pigtail.

But Iris does not, in the end, marry well. Arthur Loxley proves a poor provider. Upon her father's death, Iris loses her family home and the family emigrates to Australia, where Arthur promptly dies and Iris must endure menial jobs and the cruel and meager generosity of her sister-in-law Audrey. In her old age, her beauty disappears and her body fails; she is dependent upon Audrey and, more occasionally, Tom, for nearly everything. Through it all what endures is her love for her son, which begins at the moment of his birth: “They wrapped the infant in clean cloths and presented him to her. She hadn't known that the universe weighed five pounds, eleven ounces.” Tom also loves his mother, but his love for her is more complicated and conditional than her love for him; both her dependence and her devotion suffocate him. Their relationship is as realistically drawn as any fictional mother-child relationship I can remember.

The real subject here, what de Kretser really wants to write about, is the twentieth century, and its differences from the past. She makes numerous references to modernity and to the past that haunts modern times. Tom is a Henry James scholar; de Kretser notes more than once that Henry James was all about modernity. (Tom's James specialty immediately brings to mind Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty; but where that novel presented a Jamesian slant on modern life, de Kretser's style and perspective are her own, and very different from James's.) Tom specifically, explicitly wants a modern life—“a life that was free to be trivial, that had filtered out the dull sediment of tradition and inherited responsibilities, a life shiny as invention, that floated and gleamed—but his old-fashioned mother and his own temperament hold him back. One of the central questions of The Lost Dog is whether this modern perspective is really superior, really something to be desired.

The book has its flaws. It is a pity that de Kretser does not delineate her themes a little more clearly. The images begin to pile up—an old neon sign that no longer flashes, a bundle of 5 ¼” disks—and toward the end of the book I began to wonder if even she knew exactly what she wanted to say, or if she was just tossing in references to the passage of time as they occurred to her, in hopes that they would prove meaningful. For example:

One evening, as he was putting out his rubbish, he had noticed a woman wave at a car pulling away from the curb. Then she rotated her forefinger rapidly: she was asking the driver to call her. And Tom had realized that this gesture, once commonplace, had almost disappeared. He couldn't remember the last time he had seen it. The rotary-dial telephone, until recently an everyday object, was glimpsed now only as a ghost inhabiting a gesture; itself an ephemeral sign, transient as progress.

Is she perhaps making too much of a hand gesture?

The mystery of the fate of Nelly's husband seems to be intended to add suspense to the novel, but in many respects it is the least interesting and successful aspect of the book. The mystery it presents is obvious and its solution is anti-climactic. Each paragraph about Nelly's unfortunate husband made me more impatient with the whole subject, and more eager to return to the lives of Tom and Iris.

But today, a week after I turned the last page of this book, I am already anticipating my eventual reread. It is a clever book, peppered with pithy aphorisms. (“Charity, as those who have endured it know,” de Kretser notes, “is not easily distinguished from control.”) It is often witty. It is filled with memorable and poignant set-pieces, such as Iris's unexpected encounter with a former suitor. But most of all, The Lost Dog has a lot to say, and even though I read it slowly and carefully, I don't think I caught all of de Kretser's insights or probed all of her questions. This is a not just a well-written and entertaining book—although it is both of those things—it is a challenging book that made me think about the issues that it poses.

The Best Thing I Read This Weekend (Poetry Division)

2008-08-10T12:33:00.002-04:00

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving
but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

--Pablo Neruda, "Sonnet 17", 100 Love Sonnets

The Best Thing I Read Today

2008-08-07T22:31:00.002-04:00

From Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, which I like much more than anticipated:

The first minister and greatest wit of the age greeted him at the Hiran Minar, the tower of elephants' teeth. The emperor's sense of mischief was aroused. "Birbal," Akbar said, dismounting from his horse, "will you answer us one question? We have been waiting a long time to ask it." The first minister of legendary wit and wisdom bowed humbly. "As you wish, Jahanpanah, Shelter of the World." "Well then," said Akbar, "which cam first, the chicken or the egg?" Birbal replied at once, "The chicken." Akbar was taken aback. "How can you be so sure?" he wanted to know. "Huzoor," Birbal replied, "I only promised to answer one question."

The Best Thing I Read Today

2008-08-06T22:07:00.002-04:00

What does the novel know? It has no practical or educational aim; yet it knows what ordinary knowledge cannot seize. The novel's intricate tangle of character-and-incident alights on the senses with a hundred cobwebby knowings fanning their tiny threads, stirring up nuances and disclosures. The arcane designs and driftings of metaphor -- what James called the figure in the carpet, what Keats called negative capability, what Kafka called explaining the inexplicable -- are what the novel knows.

-- Cynthia Ozick, "The Din in the Head"
(even though I disagree with the generally Luddite thrust of the essay)

2008 Booker Longlist Reviews: Child 44

2008-08-04T19:57:00.005-04:00

(If you have not read Child 44, I implore you not to read this review. It is rife with spoilers. I have made no attempt to hide any of the twists that happen in the course of this book. Do not read this review if you do not want to know.)

It is impossible to write about Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 at this point without at least mentioning the controversy over its inclusion in the Booker longlist. The controversy lies in the fact that many people perceive Child 44 to be purely escapist, a book that fails to really develop serious themes despite being set in Soviet Russia, a book that really fails to distinguish itself in writing or characterization or anything else other than a remarkably twisty plot.

I don't think that a book should be dismissed solely because of its genre. Yes, Child 44 is a thriller. So are Freedomland and Clockers, which have a lot to say and would be brilliant additions to the Booker list if only Richard Price were British. So is The Talented Mr. Ripley, which would have been a perfectly fine selection for the longlist if such an animal had existed fifty years ago. Science fiction novels have been tapped—I'm thinking of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and even David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Why not a thriller? Genre should not be a bar to the longlist if a novel makes a satisfying and substantial read.

And Child 44 has the advantage of a striking setting and an intriguing plot. When the book begins, Leo is a Soviet agent—one of the people responsible for waking up supposed spies in the middle of the night, tying up and beating them and their closest kin, torturing confessions out of them. He has two problems: an enemy—his underling Vasili—who is for obscure reasons plotting his downfall, and a fellow officer who is insisting for unknown reasons that his four-year-old son was murdered. When Vasili finds an opening, he strikes, and Leo and Raisa are transferred to a tiny, miserable outpost. There Leo gets himself even deeper into trouble, and is drawn more deeply into the mystery of the murdered child.

What's most frustrating about Child 44 is that its Soviet Russia setting gives it such potential for depth. There are probably a dozen themes that Smith could take up and develop. For starters: Is the Soviet system of repression actually creating monsters like Vasili? How does Leo go on with his life now that he realizes he's tortured and killed innocent people? How does Raisa justify living off the spoils of acts that she believes to be evil?

The relationship between Leo and Raisa has complexities at first:

Finally Leo said:

--I’m sorry.

--I’m sure he was lying. He would’ve said anything to get under your skin.

--He was telling the truth. I had you followed. And it had nothing to do with my work. I thought. . . .

--That I was sleeping with someone else?

--There was a time when you wouldn’t talk to me. You wouldn’t touch me. You wouldn’t sleep with me. We were strangers. And I couldn’t understand why.

--You can’t marry an MGB officer and not expect to be followed. But tell me, Leo, how could I be unfaithful? In practical terms, I’d be risking my life. We wouldn’t have argued about it. You’d have me arrested.

Raisa suspects Leo of being responsible for the arrests of some of her friends and tells him that she married him out of fear, not love. But Smith wants to give Leo and Raisa a happy ending, and so Child 44 lets Leo off the hook for denouncing Raisa's friends. No, we discover, that was actually Raisa's fellow teacher Ivan, pretending to be a revolutionary. (He offers to loan out a copy of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and then denounces anyone who accepts it.) By the middle of the book, Leo and Raisa are little more than a Soviet Tommy and Tuppence. By the end of the book, the dashing Russian officer and his very beautiful wife are, of course, madly in love.

The chief villain of the book is not the killer; in fact, one of the strong points of Child 44 is that Smith manages to create a tiny bit of reluctant sympathy for a man who's killed nearly fifty children. The chief villain of the book is Vasili, who is brutal rather than pathetic, who enjoys the power of life and death, the power to humiliate and shame and destroy. He takes pleasure in destroying Leo's and Raisa's lives, even ensuring that Leo's parents are thrown out of their comfortable apartment. At times he practically twirls his mustache:

He was handsome, certainly, but he was smiling as though a smile had been invented to express nothing other than ill will. When he finally reached them she noticed his pleasure at Leo’s humiliation and his disappointment that it wasn’t greater.
Vasili widened his smile:

--I insisted that they wait, so I could say good-bye. And explain what has been decided for you. I wanted to do it personally, you understand?

He was enjoying himself.

But never fear—this is the kind of book in which every evil-doer must receive his comeuppance, and Vasili assuredly receives his.

The great disappointment of the book for me is that I guessed the mystery very early on, at the end of the first chapter. The book shares a twist with the book Darkly Dreaming Dexter (and the vastly superior television show Dexter). Someone less familiar with the outlines of that story might have been surprised by the reveals of the killer's identity and of Leo's dark secret; I was only disappointed that the solution had turned out to be so expected.

As one might expect, Child 44 is filled with action scenes—the kinds of scenes that will make great sequences in the eventual movie. The action scenes have a nice sense of urgency, but in general Smith's style lacks elegance and descriptive power, and he has a regrettable tendency to rely upon cliché:

The ice collapsed.

Although he didn’t feel the full extent of the cold, doped up on amphetamines, he knew he had to move fast. At this temperature he had a matter of seconds. He spun around. There were shafts of light where the ice had broken in two places, but beyond that the water was dark, shielded from the sun by a dense canopy of snow. He pushed away from the bottom, heading downstream. Unable to see anything, he swam farther and farther, blindly groping right and left. His body was screaming for air. In response he increased his speed, kicking harder, pulling himself faster through the water. Soon he’d have no choice but the turn back or die. Realizing he wouldn’t get a second chance, and that returning empty-handed might mean death, he took another stroke downstream.

So it's a serviceable thriller—it does what thrillers are supposed to do. It keeps you turning the pages—nearing the end, I turned them eagerly even when I realized that I'd guessed the central surprise. To that extent Smith did what he set out to do. It's entertaining. The action scenes can be exciting; I'm sure they'll be even more so on film. There are twists—I anticipated most of them because of my familiarity with Dexter, but I suppose that not everyone would.

Does that make it worthy of the Booker longlist? I don't think so, because it does not challenge the reader. I don't mean that serious literature should be torturously difficult to read; I mean that serious literature should make the reader rethink an axiom he or she holds about life. Netherland, for all its flaws, does that. Child 44 does not; instead, it makes the reader more comfortable. All the good characters turn out all right in the end (except of course for those unfortunate children already killed), just as we expected all along. Leo and Raisa are reconciled and in love. They've adopted the two children orphaned by Vasili at the beginning of the book. Vasili is dead, Andrei is dead. And Leo—in an obvious set-up for a sequel—is setting off to create the first homicide department in Soviet Russia, determined to prevent more murders from happening. (How was the first homicide department in Soviet Russia created, anyway? Is there any resemblance to actual history here?) All's as well as it could possibly be without actually violating laws of nature. (The only omission is that Leo's parents seem to still be languishing in their new frigid, crowded living space.)

When you close the book you may feel relieved that the fictional world is set to rights, just as you feel at the end of an episode of Law and Order; you may feel grateful for your own life. But there is not much else to think about, because Smith never develops a theme more complex than “Repression is bad.” Its genre is not a problem; its depth is. Child 44, is finally nothing more than an escape.

The Best Thing I Read Today

2008-08-02T21:56:00.003-04:00

From Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog, which I adore so far:

He glanced back at Nelly's house. Afterward, he would remember his sense that everything--the pepper tree by the gate, the sloping driveway, the broad blue sky itself--was holding its breath, gathered to the moment. The impression was forceful, but Tom's thoughts were busy with Nelly as he had once seen her astride a sunny wall in the suburb where they both lived, a striped cat pouring himself through her arms.

In the corner of his eye, something blurred. At the same time, the rope skidded through his fingers. His head snapped around to see gray fur moving fast, and the dog in pursuit, the end to which sinew and nerve and tissue had always been building.

Tom swooped for the rope and clawed at air. On the hillside above the track, the dog was swallowed by leaves.

2008 Booker Longlist Reviews: Netherland

2008-08-02T10:56:00.003-04:00

In October 2001, Dutch emigre Hans van den Broek, the protagonist of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland is living with his wife Rachel and toddler son Jake in the Hotel Chelsea, to which the family has fled after the destruction of the World Trade Center. Faced with the possibility of returning to Tribeca, Rachel abruptly decides that she and Jake will flee instead to London, where her parents live. Hans, she announces, will remain in New York. “Let's not make too many big decisions,” she says when he suggests his own removal from the city. “We might come to regret it. We'll think more clearly in a month or so.”

And so Hans is left behind to navigate a city darkened by disaster on his own. The New York that Hans inhabits after his wife’s departure is an urban Purgatory, a vivid waking dream of a city peopled by exotic inhabitants:

On my floor there lived an octogenarian person of indeterminate gender—it took a month of surreptitious scrutiny before I'd satisfied myself she was a woman—who told me, by way of warning and reassurance, that she carried a gun and would kick the ass of anybody who made trouble on our floor. There was also an old and very sick black gentleman (now dead), apparently a legendary maker of prints and lithographs. There was a family with three young boys who ran wild in the hallways with tricycles and balls and trains. There was an unexplained Finn. There was a pit bull that never went out without a panting, menacing furniture dealer in tow. There was a Croation woman, said to be a famous nightlife personality, and there was a revered playwright and librettist, whom it almost interested that I knew a little Greek and who introduced me to Arthur Miller in the elevator. There was a girl with gothic makeup who babysat and walked dogs.

If O'Neill portrays New York as a dark Wonderland, then Chuck Ramkissoon is its White Rabbit. Chuck is a Trinidadian scam artist and force of nature. Among other ventures—some legal, some less so—he runs a kosher sushi restaurant and organizes “weh-weh,” a system of gambling native to Trinidad. “People like to play, it reminds them of the old country,” Chuck claims. “. . . Small bets, very small bets, just for fun.” Yeah, right, the reader thinks—and the reader is correct. Chuck is a consummate big talker, and Hans would be wiser to believe less in Chuck's sincerity.

But amid all of Chuck’s scams and schemes, he has one sincere passion: cricket. He meets Hans for the first time at a cricket game, and he frequently soliloquizes on the many beauties of the game. “Now, games are important,” he says. “They test us. They teach us comradeship. They're fun. But cricket, more than any other sport, is, I want to say . . . a lesson in civility.” Chuck points out that cricket was played in the United States before baseball--”actually, Benjamin Franklin himself was a cricket man”--and he longs to see cricket get the respect he believes it deserves. His one great dream is to build a cricket stadium that will host international matches. “Global TV rights,” he gushes. “A game between India and Pakistan in New York City? In a state-of-the-art arena with Liberty Tower in the background? Can you imagine the panning shots?”

The power of Netherland lies in O’Neill’s lovely, elegant prose. Sentence for sentence, it’s one of the most beautifully written books I’ve ever read. Here is a description of a restaurant in Phoenix:

The eatery abutted a ridge. On the far side of the ridge lay a flat sea of dust and rock. In the sky above it, a single cavaliering cloud trailed a tattered blue cloak of rain. Highlands showed in the extreme distance. Closer by, black heaps of volcanic rock protruded from the reddish waste. A ubiquitous gray-blue scrub gave everything a pixelated finish, as if this land were a vast malfunctioning television. “The Wild West,” Schulz said thoughtfully as he wandered off to absorb the view from atop a nearby boulder. I saw that each of my other companeros had likewise assumed a solitary station on the ridge, so that the four of us stood in a row and squinted into the desert like existentialist gunslingers.

And here is Hans, reeling from his wife's decision to leave:

I felt shame—I see this clearly, now—at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes were but randomly connected to our endeavors, that life was beyond mending, that love was loss, that nothing worth saying was sayable, that dullness was general, that disintegration was irresistible. I felt shame because it was me, not terror, she was fleeing. . . . Life itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.

But O’Neill still has much to learn about characterization and plot. Chuck is not a person but an archetype—the Ghost of New York Present, with a dash of Wise Black Man, more an unearthly spirit than a man. Rachel is a muddle, so unpleasant that I strained to understand Hans’s interest in reconciliation, selfish and self-righteous by turns. Where Chuck’s diction is implausibly formal, Rachel’s speech sometimes sounds as though it were lifted from an Internet political forum and at other times as though it were lifted from a soap opera.

And Hans himself is passive, self-absorbed and superior, both bored and boring. He is unaware, uninvolved, uninterested in his own life. Chuck shows Hans a old Dutch graveyard, expecting to pique his interest, and instead he “had no idea what to feel or what to think, no idea, in short, of what I might do to discharge the obligation of remembrance that fixed itself to one in this anomalous place. . . .” Hans confesses to an inability to formulate an opinion, or even to care about, the war in Iraq and passively drives Chuck from one appointment to another, never really wondering about the kinds of operations in which he might be involving himself.

The most touching and realistic relationship in the novel is that between Hans and his young son Jake. With their contact reduced to alternate jetlag-ridden weekends, Hans longs for a closer connection to Jake. In London, they sleep in the same bed, their backs pressed together. In New York—in what may be the most deeply felt scene in the book—Hans attempts to use modern technology to assuage his sense of loss:

Night after night I surreptitiously traveled to England. Starting with a hybrid map of the United States, I moved the navigation box across the north Atlantic and began my fall from the stratosphere: successively, into a brown and beige and greenish Europe bounded by Wuppertal, Groningen, Leeds, Caen. . . . From my balloonist's vantage point, aloft at a few hundred meters, the scene was depthless. My son's dormer was visible, and the blue inflated pool and the red BMW; but there was no way to see more, or deeper. I was stuck.

The plot of Netherland, such as it is, centers on Hans's desire to reconcile with Rachel—although it is difficult to tell what, if anything, he feels for her rather than Jake—and on Hans's wandering about New York with Chuck Ramkissoon. (The pretext for Hans's travels with Chuck is his need to get a driver's license; he chauffeurs Chuck from one illicit appointment to another in the name of driving lessons.) Although the book opens with the discovery of Chuck's body, little is made of his death and the mystery around it is never really resolved. The novel tends to drift from one milieu to another and can move backward or forward in time in the space of a single paragraph, which sometimes makes the thin plot deceptively confusing.

But O'Neill isn't really interested in the plot, and he doesn't seem to be interested in the characters either. What interests him—besides composing graceful paragraphs—are the themes: the seductions of New York, the difficulty of maintaining a distinct identity in the melting pot of the United States, the coming obsolescence of America in the Internet age. The cricket club is the symbol that binds all these themes together. As one of Chuck's associates tells Hans after Chuck's death, “Would the big project have worked? No. There's a limit to what Americans understand. The limit is cricket. . . . My idea was, you don't need America. Why would you? You have the TV, Internet markets in India, in England. These days that's plenty. America? Not relevant. You put the stadium there and you're done. Finito la musica.”

Despite the claims that some are making for it, Netherland is not the Great American Novel. Nor is the great 9/11 novel; it is not really a 9/11 novel at all. The terrorists’ act barely registers on the surface of the book; it only casts a puzzling, disturbing shadow over the lives of the characters. The book accommodates the aftereffects of the Twin Towers’ fall the way a sleeper incorporates a ringing alarm clock into her dream.

No, Netherland is a novel of New York. In the end, the novel’s greatest strength is its loving, ambivalent portrayal of the city. (Indeed, Netherland’s preoccupation with the siren charms of the city make it in some respects an odd choice for the Booker Prize longlist.) At its worst, it is a book of wooden characters meandering through a sketchy plot. But at its best, it is a yearning, wistful paean to what many call the greatest city in the world.

The Best Thing I Read Today

2008-07-31T21:09:00.002-04:00

From Cynthia Ozick's essay "Justice (Again) to Edith Wharton," collected in Art & Ardor:

To believe in her doubt is to reverse the terms of her life and her work. Only "half a dozen other occasions" when Wharton was a "believing artist"? Only so few? This would mean that the life outside her bed--the dressed life of conversation and travel, the matchstick life of drift--was the primary life, and the life with her writing boards--the life of the believing artist--the deviation, the anomaly, the distraction.

But we know, and have always known (Freud taught us only how to reinforce this knowledge), that the secret self is the true self, that obsession is confession. For Edith Wharton that is the only acceptable evaluation, the only possible justice. She did not doubt her allegiance. The writing came first. That she kept it separate from the rest was a misrepresentation and a mistake, but it may also have been a species of holy instinct--it was the one uncontaminated zone of her being: the place unprofaned. Otherwise she can be defined only by the horrific gyrations of "a life"--by the spiraling solipsism and tragic drift that led her to small dogs instead of babies, servants instead of family, high-minded male distance instead of connubial friendship, public virtue instead of private conscience, infatuation instead of the love that sticks. Only the writing board could justify these ugly substitutions. And some would say--myself not among them--that not even the writing board justified them.

The Best Thing I Read Today

2008-07-30T22:30:00.002-04:00

Some nice lines from the otherwise mediocre (and irritating) Netherland:

But in the taxi home, there's an epilogue of sorts: my wife, mooning out of the window at rainy Regent's Park, says, "God, do you remember those sirens?" and, still looking away, she reaches for my hand and squeezes it. Strange, how such a moment grows in value over a marriage's course. We gratefully pocket each of them, these sidewalk pennies, and run with them to the bank as if creditors were banging on the door. Which they are, one comes to realize.

(This passage aside, ignore the hype. Joseph O'Neill writes a lovely sentence, but the book is just not all that.)

2008 Booker: Post-Longlist Analysis

2008-07-29T18:18:00.003-04:00

Well, I didn’t do so well, did I? Three of my thirteen predictions made it onto the actual list. But I don’t think that many people did much better than I did. Four books that I would have thought to be locks—Breath; His Illegal Self; Kieron Smith, Boy; and Sputnik Caledonia—were omitted. On the other hand, the list included at least four books I’d not heard of in all the many discussions I’d read nor seen on anyone else's list (as far as I can remember): The Clothes on Their Backs, Girl in a Blue Dress, From A to X, and Child 44.

Only two women? Is that right? That’s a surprise in itself.

My big disappointments: I’ll have to put off reading The Behaviour of Moths, The Spare Room, and The Bellini Madonna for a few months (all by women, incidentally); and I’ll have to read The Enchantress of Florence.

Here’s the longlist:

Netherland, Joseph O’Neill—the only reason I left this off my list is that I mistakenly thought it wasn’t eligible. I started it on my lunch hour today and so far it is readable and interesting. I’m just a few pages into it, so I can’t say much more than that. Except—I never expected to read a novel about cricket.

The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga—One of the few books I actually expected to see on the list. And one of the books on the list that I’m really excited about reading.

The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie—Ugh. My expectations are very low. It’s possible I’m being unfair, since the only Rushdie I’ve ever read is Shalimar the Clown (which I thought was well-nigh unreadable), but—ugh.

Child 44, Tom Rob Smith—I’m torn, because it could be amazing, or it could be a Harrison Ford movie committed to print. It seems like it could go either way.

The Secret Scripture, Sebastian Barry—The only “lock” on my list that actually made it. I really admired The Long, Long Way Home, except for a vague nagging feeling that I was missing something (it was a sequel). Sebastian Barry writes exquisitely. High hopes for this one.

The Lost Dog, Michelle de Kretser—Also on my list. I have been really intrigued by this one, for reasons I don’t quite understand. I’m not an animal person! Why is the universe throwing books about dogs in my path? Still—I’m looking forward to this one.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Mohammed Hanif—I don’t know. I find the title offputting. I recognize that I’m being completely unreasonable.

A Fraction of the Whole, Steve Toltz—Book blurbs that contain the word “rollicking” make me itchy. It’s just an observation.

Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh—This is one of the total surprises for me. But I like books about ships, and books about India, and books about China, all of which seem to figure in this one, so—looking forward to it.

The Clothes on Their Backs, Linda Grant—I tend not to read novels about anti-Semitism because I find them deeply depressing. But I am willing to give it a shot.

The Northern Clemency, Philip Hensher—I’m still not totally sure what this book is about, but I’ve heard so many good things about it that I’m eagerly anticipating it.

From A to X, John Berger—An epistolary novel. Not yet released. Another one that could go either way.

Girl in a Blue Dress, Gaynor Arnold—Supposedly it is to be released in November, but that would make it ineligible for this year's Booker. Is it being released early? I'm a little skeptical of this one, but then on the other hand I adore Charles Dickens, so I will be reading it no matter what.

I’m a little dismayed by how few books I’m really looking forward to. It might be a bit of a slog this year.

Booker Longlist Predictions

2008-07-28T19:50:00.005-04:00

So without having read even a single book up for consideration (the first year I can remember that that has happened--thank you, actuarial study program) I am going to attempt to predict the Booker longlist. My only criteria are gut instinct and word of mouth. I fully expect to go down hard.

Here are my guesses, in no particular order:

The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga

The Spare Room, Helen Garner--I so hope this is on the longlist because I so want an excuse to read it

Breath, Tim Winton--I sort of want to read this even though I disliked Dirt Music--but I've already said that, haven't I?

His Illegal Self, Peter Carey--because Booker loves Peter Carey so much more than I do

Kieron Smith, Boy, James Kelman

Sputnik Caledonia, Andrew Crumey

The Secret Scripture, Sebastian Barry

The Lost Dog, Michelle de Kretser

Girl Meets Boy, Ali Smith--my wild card, but I just love Ali Smith so much

Carpentaria, Alexis Wright

The Imposter, Damon Galgut

The Bellini Madonna, Elizabeth Lowry--I've read so many glowing recommendations of this book I may buy it even if it isn't on the longlist (don't tell my husband)

The Behaviour of Moths, Poppy Adams--something about the title just seems Booker-y; also, I love the name Poppy

You'll notice I left Salman Rushdie's overrated self off the list. He's just won the Best of the Booker, what more validation does he need this year?

TurboBookSnob has posted her predictions on the longlist, based on what seems to be more scientific criteria. We overlap on six titles, for those of you keeping track at home:

Breath

Kieron Smith, Boy

Sputnik Caledonia

His Illegal Self

The Secret Scripture

The White Tiger

(A word to the judges: if you could somehow contrive to announce the longlist before I leave for work rather than after, that would be super.)

The Best Thing I Read This Weekend (Fiction Division)

2008-07-28T06:06:00.003-04:00

In honor of my own hometown (although there's no mining there):

Bakerton did this to people: slowly, invisibly, it made them smaller, compressed by living where little was possible, where the ceiling was so very low. Joyce thought of her father, a big man whome Bakerton had diminished. After thirty years of mining he'd walked with a stoop. Once, to show her how he spent his workday, he'd crouched on his hands and knees beneath the kitchen table, the contorted posture of a miner in low coal. How can I stay here? Joyce thought. How much smallre can I get?

From Jennifer Haigh's Baker Towers

The Best Thing I Read This Weekend (Poetry Division)

2008-07-28T05:56:00.003-04:00

Yehuda Amichai's "Summer Evening by the Window with Psalms," in the New Yorker:

I look out the window: a hundred and fifty
psalms pass through the twilight,
a hundred and fifty psalms, great and small,
What a grand and glorious and transient fleet!

I say: the window is God
And the door is his prophet.

The Best Thing I Read Today

2008-07-24T21:51:00.003-04:00

This from Tony Horwitz's A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World:

Setting aside local pride, why elevate the Pilgrims to iconic status and ignore all the others who came to American before them? Gomes responded by telling me about his appearance, some years ago, in a television debate with the owner of Berkeley Plantation in Virginia. Not only had Jamestown preceded Plymouth, the Virginian observed; documents showed that in 1619, colonists landing at nearby Berkeley had designated their arrival date a day of annual thanksgiving. "This man was energetically anti-Yankee," Gomes recalled. "So I decided magnanimity was the best response. I said, 'Of course, the gentleman from Virginia is quite correct. But it doesn't matter. Americans love us.'"

I wasn't sure I followed his argment. "So you're saying we should honor myth rather than fact?" I asked.

"Precisely." The reverend smiled benignly, as I imagined he might at a bewildered parishioner. "Myth is more important than history. History is arbitrary, a collection of facts. Myth we choose, we create, we perpetuate." He spooned up the last of his succotash. "The story here may not be correct, but it transcends truth. It's like religion--beyond facts. Myth trumps fact, always does, always has, always will."

I told a friend earlier this week that I didn't know why I bothered with all of the Passover rituals--weeks of cleaning, all of my pasta in boxes in the basement, gefilte fish and matzo ball soup for twenty--when I don't even believe the Exodus actually happened. But that's why: "Myth is more important than history. . . . Myth we choose, we create, we perpetuate."

The Best Thing I Read Yesterday

2008-07-24T05:04:00.003-04:00

Yeah, I'm a day late. I got tired.

It has occurred to me that this should really be called "My Most Favorite Thing I Read Today" or "The Random Thing That Caught My Attention Today" rather than "The Best Thing I Read Today," because I'm not really posting the most brilliant piece of writing from a day's reading. I mean, you'd get a little bored if I kept posting from Later, at the Bar until I finished it, and after three or four days I suppose I'd be hearing from Rebecca Barry's attorneys. But. "The Random Thing That Caught My Attention Today" doesn't flow. So there we are.

Yesterday's passage is from George Eliot's Adam Bede, which I started reading because I had this insane notion that I was going to join in the summer discussion of it at The Valve, which of course hasn't happened because I'm reading five thousand other things simultaneously, plus I have a full-time job and kids and I have to see The Dark Knight tonight and blah blah blah. And I'm way behind and I'm afraid Rohan Maitzen is going to find me and yell at me. But anyway. I'm still reading Adam Bede because I'd never read it before and I'm kind of enjoying it. And this quote amused me because it made me thing of the blasted actuarial exams:

You think knowledge is to be got cheap--you'll come and pay Bartle Massey sixpence a week, and he'll make you clever at figures without your taking any trouble. But knowledge isn't to be got with paying sixpence, let me tell you. If you're to know figures, you must turn 'em over in your heads and keep your thoughts fixed on 'em. There's nothing you can't turn into a sum, for there's nothing but what's got number in it--even a fool. You may say to yourselves, I'm one fool, and Jack's another; if my fool's head weighed four pounds, and Jack's three pound three ounces and three quarters, how many pennyweights heavier would my head be than Jack's? A man that had got his heart in learning figures would make sums for himself and work 'em in his head. When he sat at his shoemaking, he'd count his stitches by fives, and then put a price on his stitches, say half a farthing, and then see how much money he could get in an hour, and then ask himself how much money he'd get in a day at that rate, and then how much ten workmen would get working three, or twenty, or a hundred years at that rate, and all the while his needle would be going just as fast as if he left his head empty for the devil to dance in.

Book Review: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

2008-07-23T20:39:00.002-04:00

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is the most absorbing book I've read this year. Maybe the most absorbing book I've read in the past five years. I could not put it down. Luckily I was on vacation when I read it and I had the luxury of just reading it for hours at a time.

It strikes me as a very old-fashioned kind of book, thick and plotty and packed with incident. I've seen comparisons to John Irving, but I think that's unfair to Wroblewski as so much of Irving's recent work is subpar. And this book has a much more naturalistic feel to it than A Prayer for Owen Meany or The World According to Garp. I would compare this book more to, say, something that Sarah Waters might write if she decided to set a book at a dog-breeding farm in rural America.

The task Wroblewski has set for himself in this novel is to rework the plot of Hamlet. This structure gives the book some of its charms—it’s fun to recognize a character or incident from Hamlet in a completely different guise—but also introduces some flaws. One wishes Wroblewski hadn’t felt compelled to stick quite so closely to his source materials. The ghostly visitations and the cryptic warnings of Ida Paine do not work with realism of the book, and although the finale is very powerful in its own right--I read it twice, my heart pounding--I would have preferred an ending that offered more surprises. On the other hand, Wroblewski’s retellings of well-worn incidents in the play often sparkle; my very favorite scene in the book was his version of the dumb show.

The writing is elegant, but if you are looking for avant-garde experiments with language this is not the book for you. The closest Wroblewski gets to experimenting is the inclusion of a few (mercifully brief) chapters written from a dog's point of view. I was disappointed to discover that in Wroblewski's world dogs think pretty much exactly the way we do.

I fear that this review sounds more negative than I mean to, so let me reiterate that I. Could. Not. Put. This. Book. Down. I don’t think that Edgar Sawtelle was the deepest or most thoughtful new fiction I’ve read this year—that would be Olive Kitteridge, and if you haven't read that yet take yourself off to the library immediately—but it may have been the most enjoyable. And I’m not even a dog person! Its Calgon-take-me-away quality made it a very satisfying novel, set in a world that I was incredibly reluctant to leave. Highly recommended—but oh, how I hope you don’t have to go to work while you’re reading this novel. I doubt you’ll get anything done that day.

The Best Thing I Read Today

2008-07-22T22:08:00.004-04:00

I didn't get much chance to read today, but I did like this passage from the so-far-sublime Later, at the Bar, by Rebecca Barry:

He remembered a story Grace had told him about a time she watched her father and brother try to birth a calf that was too big. The birth was long and difficult, and they'd had to cut the cow open to get her calf out. Neither of them knew how to sew her up right, and she lost a lot of blood. She was still bleeding when they were done, but the men were tired and said leave her be, she'd be dead by morning. Grace hadn't been able to stand the thought of that lingering, lonesome death, so she had taken her father's gun and shot the cow herself.

That's how it is, Harlin had thought then. Men shoot things to kill them, women shoot things to save them.

I'm not sure what I like about that little anecdote. Something about was very evocative to me. Maybe it's just that I was raised on a cattle farm?

It's from the second short story in the collection, "Men Shoot Things to Kill Them." Sadly, I just this minute noticed that the title of the story comes from this passage.

The Best Thing I Read Today

2008-07-21T21:09:00.002-04:00

Here is my favorite passage that I read today, from E. M. Forster's A Passage to India:

Many years ago he had lost a great friend, a woman, who believed in the Christian heaven and assured him that after the changes and chances of this mortal life they would meet in it again. Fielding was a blank, frank atheist, but he respected every opinion his friend held: to do this is essential in friendship. And it seemed to him for a time that the dead awaited him, and when the illusion faded it left behind it an emptiness that was almost guilt: "This really is the end," he thought, "and I gave her the final blow."

By the way, I can die now: I've read all of Forster's novels. (But on second thought, maybe I'd better hang on until I can tackle Proust.)