Wakefield Redux

"That's the stupidest story I ever heard, and I've read the entire Sweet Valley High series." -- Moe Szyslak

Sweet Valley High is back! And it's got a Gossip Girl makeover. I'm not really pissed that they're making the Wakefield twins a size thinner, or that the girls will drive a Jeep instead of a Fiat. But I'm ticked that they're upgrading it at all. The series is a fantastic representative of the girl genre in the 80s. It's a time capsule--why not leave the original books as such? Don't fear the past, Random House. What's next: Laura Ingalls Wilder getting a hip job as a prairie au pair and texting her friends about it?

At the same time, I'm super jealous that I don't get to be the editor on the relaunch. That's the job I was born to do, dammit! I read dutifully until #100 or so, when it was time to stop and relinquish the brand to the next group of tweeners. As a kid, I studied all the new SVH covers in B. Dalton books, and had most of them read while my parents did other stuff around the mall. I walked out of the library with stacks of the older, 1983-tastic books. I had the board game (I was always Elizabeth). If pressed, I could probably still talk fluently about plotlines and characters.

I hope they don't change the deeply literary prose: Jessica stared at herself in the full-length mirror and saw a picture of utter heartbreak and despair. But what was actually reflected in the glass was about the most adorable, most dazzling sixteen-year-old girl imaginable.

The Year of Living Biblically by AJ Jacobs

Once you've mastered all the knowledge in the world (or at least all the knowledge in the encyclopedia), where do you go from there? Well, if you're AJ Jacobs, Esquire writer and all-around infopreneur, you go for the biggest book of all: the Bible. Jacobs decided to follow up his encyclopedic memoir The Know-It-All with an even more intense test of the academic spirit and his wife's patience: he would live for a year, following every possible rule in the Bible.

Now, that's a lot of rules. And many of them involve things like stoning your fellow citizens--which is, surprisingly enough, not so cool in modern-day New York. But Jacobs makes a pretty good go of it in his latest book, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. As an agnostic, his main connection to Judaism is through purely social stuff and slightly wacky relatives. Curious, he wonders what a person misses by avoiding religion, and whether he's depriving his toddler son of a moral and emotional imperative. Hence the quest. But a writerly review of the Bible would be too easy--so Jacobs has to plunge himself, fully committed, into following every rule, every commandment, every suggestion in every book of The Book. (Well, minus the stoning ones.)

A lot of his journey is personal. He talks about growing out his beard (which Leviticus says can't be groomed) for an entire year. He tries to pray, wondering if his newfound piety will make him feel genuinely spiritual. He struggles with the Biblicality of his wife's fertility treatments (is it unnatural, or is it being fruitful and multiplying?). He risks his wife's constant exasperation with the rule that prohibits him from touching a woman while she's "impure" every month, and from sitting on any surface that might have been touched by an impure woman (good luck with that one on public transportation). He faces family drama by connecting up with his zany former uncle Gil, a wannabe cult leader in Israel. He alienates friends with limited conversations (sarcasm is a no-no, brutal honesty is a must) and many, many dietary restrictions. And it's all done in a funny, frank manner that makes you groan and sympathize with everyone who had to put up with him for a year.

The parts that aren't so intimate, which make it a real book and not just a long humor essay in Esquire, are Jacobs's interactions with real spiritual advisors and actively religious people to provide background. So many tidbits were interesting....Like the Orthodox Jewish man who freelances as a clothing-fiber consultant to make sure that one's clothes don't mix wool and linen. Or the aforementioned Uncle Gil, whose Jerusalem dinner parties are a combination of a 1970s Woody Allen movie and Waco.

One of my favorite informational bits was about the Red Heifer, the animal that must be sacrificed, cremated, mixed with water, and sprinkled on one's head for true purification. But the red heifer must be completely unblemished (not a single non-red hair), and have never plowed a field. No problem--except no such cow exists. Apparently there's an international breeding initiative supported by super-fundamentalist Christians and super-Orthodox Jews, because without the cow and its total purification, no one can build the Third Temple. No temple, no Jewish Messiah and battler of the Antichrist. So basically, everyone wants the cow. It's a fascinating project, and one I'd never heard of before. But while it's easy to categorize it as those loopy zealots doing their thing, there are political implications as well. "It's not just that it's zany...it's that it's potentially dangerous. If the red heifer arrives, it'll be seen by some as divine permission to build a Third Temple. Where would it go? On the Temple Mount, which is currently under the administration of Muslims--home to their sacred Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque. Then it really might be the end of the world." Yikes. Shades of Jesus Camp, which is, to date, the scariest movie I've ever seen.

All around, it's a very entertaining and informative book. Jacobs is really engaging, and isn't shy about making himself look like an idiot to get to some deeper knowledge. I am, however, glad I'm not his (obviously very patient) wife. Remember, kids: never marry a creative nonfictionist. And the next time you see a Moses-y looking guy on public transportation or walking down the street, and you think, "Uh oh, religious nut," be kind. He could have a book deal.

Some of my favorite passages:

"Is half the world suffering from a massive delusion? Or is my blindness to spirituality a huge defect in my personality? What if I'm missing out on part of being human, like a guy who goes through life without ever hearing Beethoven or falling in love?"

"Speaking of dinosaurs, if they were really on the ark, as creationists claim, how did Noah squeeze them all in?

'He put them in when they were younger and smaller. The equivalent of teenagers.'"

"[Gil] talks about his days as a cult leader only occasionally. At one point he grouses about the burden of having forty servants. 'You know what I said every day? "God, get them out of here!" What a pain in the tuchus to have to tell forty people what to do.'

When he finds out that one of the girls speaks American Sign Language, he boasts of the sign language he invented as a cult leader--and how it swept New York in the 1970s.

'I found that a lot of my signs were the same as deaf sign language. Like the word understand.'

Gil puts two of his fingers on his palm.

'You just did the sign for toast,' says the girl. Gil shrugs.

'Well, it wasn't the most important thing that I invented in my life.'"

Jon Stewart's book club

At tonight's taping of The Daily Show, I was thinking about what a boon Jon Stewart has been for the publishing industry. In between the Doris Kearns Goodwins and the Tom Brokaws who turn up to push their books, there are more obscure authors whose books on the Teapot Dome scandal or Mary Todd Lincoln would never get any play anywhere but C-Span2 on weekends.

I wondered whether these books see a sales bump, the way almost all of the authors booked on Oprah do. Of course, Jon Stewart is no Oprah (proven by the fact that there were no car keys under my seat this evening). But The Daily Show is hitting an awfully desirable demographic: educated liberals, otherwise known as People Who Buy Books.

As I checked the Bookscan sales for the books who have been on the show lately, I realized there was a problem: if the author appears on The Daily Show the same week the book comes out, how can you tell whether the sales are due to this publicity and not whatever else the publisher is doing? Well, you can't. So "new" books were out.

BUT. There are cases where the author appeared on the show months after a book's release for whatever reason (political timeliness, late pushes from the book publicist, etc.). Like Robert Dallek's Nixon and Kissinger. Book was released in April. Dallek was on the show in late July. Sales increased 133% the week after the show, and another 28% the week after that. Last week, Ronald Kessler came by to talk about torture--with his November book, The Terrorist Watch, on full display. Sales have gone up 100% this week.

Our previously mentioned friend, Doris K-G, was on the show in late January to talk about the state of State of the Unions. No mention of her last book, and no copy sitting on the desk. No spike in sales. So it's clearly the specific mentions that are driving this. I'm willing to bet (and offer 9-1 odds!) that Colbert's author guests see similar results.

It's not that I'm surprised that television publicity leads to sales. And there's so little proof of what does cause people to go out and buy books, outside of assumption and possibly coincidental timing. But what I do find amazing is that The Daily Show and its progeny have amassed this kind of power. Who saw that coming, back in the Craig Kilborn days--or even the early Stewart days? If someone had said, in 1996, that Comedy Central would become the go-to place for authors, he'd have been burned at the stake (they did that back then, right?).

The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

If Freud was right, and all women really do have penis envy, I'm pretty sure I've been cured of that by modern American literature. Between the Rabbit Angstroms and the Nathan Zuckermans and now the Frank Bascombes, I am eternally thankful that I will never be a middle-aged man.

Based on recommendations from friends, Jacob and I picked Richard Ford's The Sportswriter as our latest book club selection. Ford's hero is Frank Bascombe, a quasi-sportswriter whose home field is suburban New Jersey. Since no one in his right mind chooses to live in suburban New Jersey, that should tell you right away that dude's got issues. But I digress.... Frank's main problems are these: his life has completely fallen apart after the death of his son two years ago; his wife stopped enabling his neverending string of midlife crises (teaching in New England! Relationships with other women! A motorcycle!) and left him, taking their two surviving kids to a different neighborhood; and he doesn't know how to manage his relationships with women. Or with men, for that matter. Frank can't really connect to anybody anymore. A lot of this is his own fault; he tries so hard to see everything from every perspective that he fails to commit to anything, whether it's spending time with his kids, or his new girlfriend, ditzy nurse Vicki. He sees what he could do, he sees what could happen accordingly, and then he reacts by panicking and doing or saying the worst possible thing. That's how he ends up in a quarrel with pretty much everyone he meets on Easter weekend in 1983. Without going back through the book, I'm pretty sure he gets punched more than once.

But Frank does try to have a smooth suburban life. He keeps the house he bought with his wife when they were first married, and he was a newly published author. He takes in a seminary student border. He joins a Divorced Men's Club, a gruesome exercise in male bonding that involves phony fishing trips and torturous conversations over beer. He sees himself as the genial Other figure in everyone's life, so he doesn't have to figure out how to be the central figure in his own--and he sees the homogenous greenness of New Jersey as the way to accomplish that. Same deal with his career. Even though he seems to have little interest in actual sports, he loves the process of ferreting out the feel-good stories, and bringing tidy ideas of literature to the masses of men who read his magazine. In short, he wants to be That Guy Down the Street, the one who can bullshit with you about the Knicks over a beer or two, but doesn't go any deeper than that. He wants to be simple and uncomplex, but he lives so fully within his own head that everything is totally self-conscious.

His relationships with the women in his life are more problematic. He wants his ex (whom he actually calls X) to be more accessible to him, but sort of accepts that she gets to move on without him. He wants his girlfriend, a deceptively sweet belle from Texas, to be the uncomplicated lover--sometimes he thinks they should get married and then can't stand to be in the same room with her, usually in the same minute. And when X and Vicki start looking less likely, he thinks he wants another crack at his previous lovers, even though those relationships ended just as awkwardly. Jacob astutely pointed out that Frank thinks the women are there just for him: appearing in hotel bars, or naked on the bed exactly when he wants them to be. Objectively, he knows that they've got lives too, but he can't really see them branching out after he's been around. By the end of the book, Frank has become unglued because he can't find the female tethers anymore--he's basically adrift in a sea of Boy Issues: post-divorce loneliness, sexual confusion, life situations that can't be fixed with sports metaphors or a quick one-night stand.

Honestly, the whole book left me unsettled--it was one of those books that got darker the more I thought about it. The writing was good, but my desire to shake Frank eventually eclipsed that. It didn't do much for my fear that all guys cheat when they see a more attractive opportunity (which is more my fault than Frank's, but still), or my hope that maybe living in your head isn't so bad. If nothing else, it's a good argument for going out there and making emotional connections, before you find yourself 38 and unable to do it. Oh, and for not moving to New Jersey. That's probably always a bad idea.