Saturday, September 29, 2007

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

The first time I heard about Prep, someone was talking about it in my book editing class, and describing it as a guilty pleasure kind of book. So I was really expecting something like the Gossip Girl series, a slick package of gratuitous teen bitchery and sex. [Disclaimer: I haven't read any of the series, but having seen a few minutes of the new CW show, I don't think my assessment is far off.] When I saw the book on my roommate's bookshelf, I thought maybe it would be a good end-of-summer vice read. Color me surprised when the cover held a sticker proclaiming, "New York Times Book Review: One of the Top Ten Books of the Year!" Maybe the Times editors, like the thousands of people who made Prep a bestseller, enjoy a little Mean Girl drama too?

But what's this? The book has no uber-bitches, no rainbow parties. (Don't Google the latter if you have any faith left in the innocence of teenagers.) Instead, it's a fairly quiet coming-of-age book about a swank Massachusetts boarding school. The narratrix is Lee Fiora, a girl whose averageness (social, academic, economic) puts her on the wrong end of the social scale at the prestigious Ault School. However, this is mostly her own doing. She's too timid (and later, too apathetic) to compete with the rich kids--they're not really the ones keeping her alienated. Her crippling self-awareness stops her from engaging in any meaningful ways with her surroundings. However, despite her best efforts at hiding, she manages to acquire friends (or at least allies), and a bizarre, masochistic relationship with one of the chosen boys of her grade. There IS some non-PG stuff, but it's more the endearing, fumbly kind than the "oh my God, I can't believe I'm reading this" kind.

It's one of the slower and more maddening maturation narratives--and all the more real because of that. Kind of Holden-esque, in that you kind of want to shake Lee and make her do stuff in her own interest. And frankly, it scared me a little how much I understood Lee. When she gets into a shadowy "relationship" with social king Cross Sugarman, my cringes were for her, but also for all the times I let myself be the secret girlfriend. Most of the observational stuff is similarly incisive. Sittenfeld really nails what it's like to be the unspectacular kid trying to keep up with inflated circumstances.

The writing's quality comes from its ability to keep Lee's voice young, even though she's working from a much later vantage point. It's funny, light, and quick. The pacing gets a little wonky, moving unevenly through semesters, but it's not that big of a distraction. Overall, it's easy to see why so many people picked this book up, and why it was received so well--even without any mean girls involved.

Some bits I liked best:

"But I was living my life sideways. I did not act on what I wanted, I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was always imagining something else. Grades felt peripheral, but the real problem was that everything felt peripheral."

During a game of "Assassins":
"I knew right away I had ruined it. Whatever jokiness had existed between us--I had killed the substance of it. McGrath would be friendly to me from now on...but the friendliness would be hollow. In killing him, I had ended the only overlap between our lives....McGrath didn't want to talk, of course, it wasn't as if we had anything to say to each other. I knew all this, I understood the rules, but still, nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny."

"When I think of Cross now, a big part of what I remember is that sense of waiting, of relying on chance. I couldn't go to his room--it was decided. And that meant that in order to convey to him my concern about his injury, I would have to run into him in the hall when few or no other students are around, and when I did, I'd have to quickly intuit his mood to find out if adjustments were to be made so that we could keep seeing each other.
I realize now: I ceded all the decisions to him. But that wasn't how it felt! At the time, it seemed so clear that the decisions belonged to him. Rules existed; they were unnamed and intractable."

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Brooklyn Book Festival

So today was the second annual Brooklyn Book Festival. Taking place in picturesque downtown between Borough Hall and the courthouse, it was basically a big jumble of publishers hawking books, authors hawking themselves, and nobody hawking fair food (to Jacob's discontent).

The booths were unspectacular. It's always good to see little presses working hard to stay alive, but it's hard to get excited about what they're pushing. There should have been more free stuff: books, catalogs, even t-shirts (my big new book publicity idea). And I say that because I'm a free stuff whore, but also because I don't want to spend $10 on a completely unknown book/author. Maybe it's due to all that time I spent with MFAs at Emerson. And if I'm not willing to take risks on new stuff, with my background in how publishing works, what are the chances that most people will? It's not the best system, but the small presses will need to do something to address that. There was some swag, though, and now I have a Nancy Drew "Get Caught Reading" poster, an issue of Poets & Writers, and a "Leave No CEO Behind" button from The Nation Books.

Also, there was some free edumacation. We observed the "Define-a-Thon" for a while, which was basically a spelling bee, but with dictionary definitions. None of the questions we heard seemed all that difficult. I bet some seventh grader would have wiped the floor with those adults.

I didn't catch many of the readings (those tend to be better in quieter, less time-restrictive settings), but the panels were quirky enough to be kinda fun. The first one was a retrospective on On the Road, featuring some dude from Viking Books (who was pretty much there to let us know that the book still sells 100,000 copies per year), an ex-lover of Kerouac's who has published two books of their intimate details, a journalist who's written a book about Kerouac, and another woman who was there to fill in crucial 1950s social details for all of us whippersnappers who wear jeans to public events. There was nothing revelatory, just a lot of the usual background about how Kerouac wasn't really a hippie, how Neal Cassady wasn't a role model, etc. I was hoping that the ex-lover would turn it into a Cheever-esque situation. But no--she stuck to lame, PG stories about Kerouac's reactions to book reviews.

It made me wonder, though: is there a whole subculture of women who sleep with struggling writers, on the tiny chance that someday they'll get a book deal out of it? Like groupies, but with higher aims? If so, I totally squandered my time at Emerson. I could have planned far more effectively.

Later in the afternoon, there was a session with the Simmons family, a.k.a. the guys responsible for part of Run DMC and the Def Comedy/Poetry/Phat Farm empires. This was possibly the most un-literary book pub event I've ever seen. Probably because the guys were artists and not writers, they answered questions with real person answers, not Author Answers--and Rev Run didn't even want to publicize his former books. His wife, Justine, tried hard to get him to talk about his writing (and she did a good job publicizing her own children's book), but Rev Run just rolled his eyes at her and refused to answer anything he didn't feel like talking about. It was refreshing. I didn't see any MTV cameras, so I guess those sparks of family dysfunction won't be broadcast any time soon.


The day's ultimate event was a panel called "Everyone's a (Former) Critic," featuring culture critics who are venturing out of the zone and publishing novels/memoirs. The critics were Chuck Klosterman (whom I still read and like, even when he annoys me), Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone, and Ed Park of The Believer and the Village Voice. They talked at length about what it's like to move from moving from critic to critee (no idea if that's a word, but I'm going with it). There was also a lot of talk about the nature of criticism in general, and all three had insightful comments about trying to create art by talking about someone else's. I was especially struck by something Klosterman said, that book criticism is the only kind of criticism that takes the same form as its subject. Apparently, there's an inherent unfairness in writing about music or movies instead of taking them on in the same media. He talked about the irony that the only thing he's really qualified to do (write about other writers) is the one thing he won't do, opting to take on music and television instead. I'm butchering his words here, but the concept made a lot of sense at the time.

The panel started to get very strange toward the end of the hour. While the critics were still talking, a woman began to creep up the stairs on the side of the stage. Judging by the uneasy looks that the moderator kept casting that way, this was definitely unplanned. When the woman reached the stage and started wandering around, no one really knew what to do. When she sat down behind Chuck Klosterman, nobody (onstage or off) was paying any attention to what Rob Sheffield was saying. Nobody escorted her off, though (ahhh, meek literati). A minute later, after the moderator chose to ingore her, she stole Ed park's water bottle before wandering off again. If the whole thing was staged: worst clown ever.

Cool bit at the end: I ran into some Emerson folks who moved out here last year. Random, but neat.

So yeah...I look forward to an even better organized event next year (they're promising international authors! I assume it will take a full year to get all the visas approved). Either way, definitely a fun way to spend an early fall weekend afternoon.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

I'm not sure how I avoided reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn the past many years, or why I always assumed it was one of those sentimental kids' books about plucky orphans (no offense, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm). Whatever was going on in my warped and biased little mind, it was wrong. I received a copy of the book as a going-away present from Serena--and I should have figured out then that if my smart, cynical, "I'm from Queens, bitch!" friend loved the book, maybe it was a little edgier than I'd supposed.

It's probably appropriate that this was the first full book I read after moving to Brooklyn. As much as I love my new neighborhood, it was nice to get a sense of a Brooklyn not overrun with free trade coffee places and yuppie strollers. The Brooklyn of Smith's narrative is pre-WWI Williamsburg, where the working class Irish, Italians, and Jews share the uneasy bond of just barely scraping by. No hipsters, thankfully.

The titular tree is technically growing in a concrete yard, but the fancy literary trick is that it's really Francie Nolan, whom we first meet as an eleven-year-old. Francie is a little like Lisa Simpson: underappreciated by her family, she's pretty much on her own for advancement. It's not that she lacks love or care or anything that would tragify her in a Dickens novel; it's more that no one around her is equipped to provide anything more than low-grade physical support. Her father, Johnny, is a singing waiter who's well-liked, but always drunk. The mother, Katie, works several janitorial jobs to provide the basics for the family. Relatives come and go, but mostly on an anecdotal basis. No one's around to provide much mentorship. So Francie haunts the library (despite weekly disses from a snotty librarian), writes down everything that comes into her mind, and struggles along in a school that favors attractive kids with money. All the elements are there for the requisite social commentary, but the book never really gets around to pitying Francie, or her circumstances. Smith presents it more as a chronicle. It reminded me of a lot of the stories I've heard from my dad about his own childhood. It never occurs to him to milk them for pity points--it's just how things were.

As with most coming-of-age novels, the plot is episodic and almost secondary. While much of the narrative is told from Francie's point of view as she goes through childhood and adolescence, the points where it switches to her mother's perspective are more striking, and give the book its depth. Where Francie is forgiving and childlike, Katie Nolan is unsentimental. Her assessments of the family's poverty, and her own culpability in the raw deal given to Francie, are surprisingly frank. She's the head of the family in virtually every way, and takes on the guilt for having married a charming guy at 17 and started a family too early. Katie also introduces a thematic element that makes the book more interesting: she loves Neely, her second child and only son, more than Francie. It's a simply stated fact, and it complicates the relationships. This made me want to call my mom and challenge her historical assertion that she loves me and Sam exactly equally.

I guess I was just struck by the honesty and sophistication of the relationships. I (naively) expected that kind of whitewashed, memoir style, particularly given the 1910-ish setting and the 1940s publication date.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is an entertaining story told in clear, honest language. I couldn't think of a better introduction to my new hometown, or a more effective antidote to my own petty financial and social worries.

Here are some passages I particularly liked:

"Lately, she had been given to exaggerating things. She did not report happenings truthfully, but gave them color, excitement and dramatic twists. Katie was annoyed at this tendency and kept warning Francie to tell the plain truth and to stop romancing. But Francie just couldn't tell the plain undecorated truth. She had to put something to it. Although Katie had this same flair for coloring an incident and Johnny himself lived in a half-dream world, yet they tried to squelch these things in their children. Maybe they had a good reason. Maybe they knew their own gift of imagination colored too rosily the poverty and brutality of their lives and made them able to endure it. Perhaps Katie thought that if they did not have this faculty, they would be clearer-minded; see things as they really were, and seeing them loathe them and somehow find a way to make them better."

"Again the lonely evenings. Francie roamed the Brooklyn streets in the lovely nights of fall and thought of Ben. ('If you ever need me, write and I'll manage to see you.') Yes, she needed him but she was sure he'd never come if she wrote: 'I'm lonely. Please come and walk with me and talk to me.' In his firm schedule of life, there was no heading labeled 'Loneliness.'"

On how women are about as screwy as everyone thinks they are:
"If she never had any lovers, she kicks herself around when the change comes, thinking of all the fun she could have had, didn't have, and now can't have. If she had a lot of lovers, she argues herself into believing that she did wrong and she' s sorry now. She carries on that way because she knows that soon all her woman-ness will be lost. And if she makes believe being with a man was never any good in the first place, she can get comfort out of her change."

"She looked out over Brooklyn. The starlight half revealed, half concealed. She looked out over the flat roofs, uneven in height, broken once in a while by a slanting roof from a house left over from older times. The chimney pots on the roofs...and on some, the shadowing looming of pigeon cotes...the twin spires of the Church, remotely brooding over the dark tenements...And at the end of their street, the great Bridge that threw itself like a sigh across the East River and was lost...lost...on the other shore."

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

This summer contained reason #649 why I'm baffled that Jacob continues to put up with me. I say I want to read Dickens for our little book club. He says sure. I pick Bleak House, the 12-hour miniseries of which he's already sat through. He's still game. I find out the book is over 900 pages. He buys a copy. I'm pretty sure most people would have opted out by then.

But outside of his good sportness and the fact that both of us dragged the behemoth of a book on various planes, trains, and automobiles, I stand by the choice. I really enjoyed the book, despite the parts that dragged a little, and some tedious Victorianisms. A lot of those could be ascribed to the fact that Dickens was (let's face it) a very commercial writer. Sure, Bleak House is noted as major fiction over a hundred years later, but at the time he was just another writer being paid to keep people hooked into a magazine by installments. Wouldn't you try to make something sixty chapters long? And besides the length, I think there are probably a lot of pandery elements--characters and situations that would have been little in-jokes to late-Victorian Brits--that don't translate as well nowadays.

As Jacob mentioned in his own review, the best way to get through the novel is to pay limited attention to the many extraneous plots and characters. The gist of the story is this: there's this lawsuit, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, rotting in the London court. The lawyers are all money-sucking jerks. Everyone involved in the unwieldy and unclear suit suffers misfortune--well, everyone involved by choice, anyway. There are bright spots, though. Like the generosity of John Jarndyce, who tries to balance out his lawsuit karma by providing for the orphans involved in the case (and picking out his future bride in the process! How efficient/creepy is that?) The beating heart really belongs to Esther Summerson, one of those orphans. As the narratrix for most of the book, she has the least connection to the court case itself, but the most connection to all the peripheral characters. She's the Kevin Bacon of 1850s London.

Also, Esther is pretty much the nicest person who ever sort-of-lived. At first, I thought she was far too good to be serious. And she was. But not for the cynical reasons I supposed, or because Dickens didn't get how to portray women (which is, admittedly, a little true). Instead, Esther is a tricky voice of her own creation. She starts out hesitant, covering herself (good and bad) with the perceptions of everyone around her, but gains confidence. By the time she's making sly comments about the idiocy of her friends, she seems more reliable as a narrator. She still cuts out a lot of convenient information (there're some sneaky "oh, by the way, I'm totally in love with this guy" shenanigans), but she's more open to the idea that her loved ones might not always be so smart or so pure. This also comes in handy when she finds out that she's got some shady parentage. Anyway, I liked Esther a lot.

I think Dickens could have pushed things a little further, in terms of the risque elements. I mean, even The Scarlet Letter got away with some sexual energy. With an illegitimate pregnancy, a drug overdose, and a young couple itching to get together, there could have been a little passion somewhere in Bleak House. Instead, the exuberance is channeled into the platonic relationships between girls. Kind of an odd choice.

And because this is a Charles Dickens book, about 80% of the novel is tangential social commentary. Black sheep of a good family who proves respectable after all? Check. Uneducated, noble hooligans? Check. Frivolous rich people? Check. Sick street urchin who would live, if only Scrooge were a little more generous? Aaaaaaaand check.

Anyway, it wasn't very conventional summer reading, but it looks like we survived. Maybe some Russian nihilists next year?