White Noise by Don DeLillo

Disclaimer: I am very much a product of go-go 80s Reaganaut commercialism. I owned the Rainbow Brite dolls created by Hallmark. I nagged my mom to get whichever sugary cereal had the best cartoon mascot. I drank the Kool-Aid--literally!

So maybe that's part of why White Noise, the latest Jacob-Katy book club selection, didn't reach me as deeply as it should have. As a criticism of America's hysterical consumer culture, the book feels like familiar territory. What must have seemed novel to DeLillo and his readers in the early 1980s (pre-internet, pre-cable, pre-Oprah) now feels kinda stale. We know we're surrounded by a hum of constant radiation--we just don't seem to care anymore. Being alarmed about it seems almost quaint and Cold War-ish, like Yakov Smirnoff.

DeLillo chooses to do a sendup of a "normal" family by making his protagonists as wacky as possible: Jack, the Hitler-scholar father; pill-popping fourth wife who reads erotic poetry aloud; ex-wives who all happen to be spies; and an assortment of kids who do super-precocious things like research prescription drugs and have glib opinions about consumerism. They're a boisterous, name-brand-buying crew that functions pretty normally until there's a chemical spill in town, and all the suburban "white noise" overwhelms them. In the resulting panic there's a lot of "I told you so" going on, from the teenage son and Jack's smug fellow professor, who studies Elvis Americana and looks down on suburbia.

By the time the cloud hits, any chance at literary subtlety goes out the window. If DeLillo let the reader infer anything, the book would be more enjoyable. But alas, he does not. Want to parody society's obsession with death? Have two characters argue over who's more afraid to die. Of course. I'm down with absudity, but it's done so self-consciously here. There's no challenge to figuring anything out, because there's always a character doing it for you.

DeLillo's writing is technically fine, and he has some really great descriptive stuff going on. Like Jacob, I just found it hard to connect with any of it. Maybe I should take some Prozac for my apathy, and wash it down with some refreshing Diet Coke.

Sloane Crosley Redux

So continuing our new hobby of Timely Literary Jaunts, SPG and I caught a reading by Sloane Crosley (whom you may remember from last week, or, umm, right below, if this is still on the main blog page). She and Keith Gessen were speaking at Court Books in Brooklyn, in support of their respective first books.

It didn't do much to dispel the theory that we could totally be writing and promoting books like these ourselves as twentysomething editors. But unfounded bitterness aside, it was fun. The whole thing had a fun publishing insider vibe: tiny venue, book publicist/editor authors, young crowd. In fact, the crowd was SO young that the first question came from an actual six-year-old: "How did you make your book?" Good question, kid. She saved us all from having to ask the same thing, even though she was clearly a plant by her Gessen-editor father. Very shrewd!

The next big author event should be a little less intimate and more chaotic: David Sedaris at Union Square. (Yay!)

I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloane Crosley

I put a lot of thought into various "what-if" scenarios--especially morbid, what-happens-if-I'm-hit-by-a-bus-today ones. (Not that this stops me from leaving my bed unmade some mornings, or stuffing yet another bag of junk in my closet.) I like to think it's part of my unique charm. So imagine the intrigue when I started reading Sloane Crosley's new collection of essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, and was greeted with the following sentences:

Back in the apartment I never should have left, the bed has gone unmade and the dishes unwashed. The day I get shot in a bodega (buying cigarettes, naturally) will in all likelihood be the day before laundry Sunday and the day after I decided to clean out my closet, got bored halfway through, and opted to watch sitcoms in my prom dress instead.

I was hit by three simultaneous thoughts:

1. I could have written this.
2. I did not write this. Curse you, procrastination!
3. Sloane Crosley and I should probably be neurotic BFFs.

Every so often, a book or magazine piece comes along and reminds me that I spent a lot of money on a quasi MFA, and haven't written anything since. But on the bright side, someone's keeping it real for all the urban twentysomething navel-gazers. Crosley's book is a hilarious collection of suburban childhood trauma (or what passes for trauma in happy Westchester kids) and highlights of Generation Y adulthood.

A giant blurb on the front cover has Jonathan Lethem proclaiming that Crosley is from the "realm of Sedaris and Vowell." And while that's technically true, it gives everyone involved some short shrift. Crosley is witty like Sedaris. Except female. And straight. And young. The overlap with Vowell is even more narrow: both are female and funny. Picking the two most popular humor essayists may be a good sales hook, but it's getting old. Why not just throw in Augusten Burroughs, too, for the memoir trifecta?

For the most part, Crosley lives up to the blurb. The essays are self-deprecating and merciless. She moves pretty smoothly between the childish (summer camp) and adult (wanting to have a one-night stand because it always seemed so glamorous), so that it's all one big post-adolescent blur.

So rather than grumble about someone else writing the book I was too lazy to write, I suppose I should show some love for the many parts I liked:

"Suburbia is too close to the country to have anything real to do and too close to the city to admit you have nothing real to do. Its purpose is to make it so you can identify with everything. We obviously grew up identifying with nothing. Then one day you look in the rearview mirror of your existence and realize that you can see clear down the hill-less and curveless and bridgeless road of your life, straight to the maternity ward where you were born. And then you go to college. Where your bland past meekly follows, sluggishly scraping its feet on the floor."

"I'm not exactly sure how the ponies happened. Though I have an inkling: 'Can I get you anything?' I'll say, getting up from a dinner table, 'Coffee, tea, a pony?' People rarely laugh at this, especially if they've heard it before. 'This party's supposed to be fun,' a friend will say. 'Really?' I'll respond, 'Will there be pony rides?' It's a nervous tic and a cheap joke, cheapened further by the frequency with which I use it. For that same reason, it's hard to weed out of my speech--most of the time I don't even realize I'm saying it. There are little elements in a person's life, minor fibers that become unintentionally tangled with our personality. Sometimes it's a patent phrase, sometimes it's a perfume, sometimes it's a wristwatch. For me, it is the constant referencing of ponies.

I don't even like ponies."

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri writes about Indian-Americans. It's a fact. And a lot of critics (as well as one audience member at her Strand reading two weeks ago) take issue with it. Such a lovely writer...why restrict herself to a small subset of people and circumstances? But what they all seem to overlook is that she uses Bengalis in the way Faulkner uses residents of Yoknapatawpha County--the repetition of geography and particular ethnic themes building a very specific sense of space. That's a big part of why her latest collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth, is her best work yet.

I loved Interpreter of Maladies and enjoyed The Namesake, and wasn't sure how Unaccustomed Earth would stack up. But as I read, I found myself feeling reluctant to put it down, even though I dreaded finishing the book. Rather than being a rehash of old stories (after all, why mess with a Pulitzer-winning formula?), every story built upon the base. Having already broached the themes of Indian emigration and arranged marriages in the earlier books, Lahiri's free now to reflect on the deeper mechanics of relationships.

In a way, Lahiri moves her previous characters into a post-immigration era. Her new set of characters is almost all second-generation Indian-Americans, with parents who've long since assimilated into Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, etc. One of the most common threads of the book is the transference of anxiety from the parents to the children, who worry not about fitting in with Americans, but with their parents. White spouses, American food, and zero interest in Calcutta-based customs--those are the rebellions. But the rejections of heritage, no matter how small, cause the various protagonists to second-guess their lives, their lovers, and their own legacies. Nearly all of the relationships in the book are marked by this anxiety, tinged with a deeper melancholy than Lahiri's other stuff.

Perhaps the biggest difference in this book --and the most evidence of a maturing perspective--is the examination of marriage. Maybe it's because Lahiri is now married herself and has kids, but she seems especially interested in the ongoing conversation and evolution between two people who've committed to one another. One story features a couple attending the wedding of the husband's old friend/infatuation. Lahiri doesn't take the expected route, the "he still has feelings for the ex" one. Instead, she looks at the protagonist's complex feelings about his wife in general. There's no artificial choice between the old love and the current one.

The book's centerpiece is a trio of stories about Hema and Kaushik, whose lives cross several times. The first story is Hema recalling how Kaushik and his family, friends of her parents, came to stay with them for a month when the kids were teenagers. Hema uses the second person, clearly talking to Kaushik, saying the kind of intimate things you can't tell someone when he's sitting on the couch a foot away from you. The next story is Kashiuk's, and although Hema isn't actually present at all, it's his turn to use the private "you." Their final story, third person, details the most significant intersection of their lives. He's an itinerant photojournalist, and she's a professor about to give in and marry an arranged husband. This was by far my favorite story in the book. "Going Ashore" is such a perfect meeting of plot development, realism, and lush language that it has an extra sparkle. The last few paragraphs actually made me tear up because they were so unexpected--definitely not a common occurrence for me ever, but especially not when reading.

I'm not sure any contemporary writer conveys the love/loss duality like Jhumpa Lahiri does. And if she wants to keep doing it with Bengali characters who live in Boston, fine by me. I'll line up every time and hand over my money.

So much of the writing is beautiful, but there were some standouts:

"These women, with their rich, loose tangles of hair, their sunglasses concealing no wrinkles, were younger than Hema, but she felt inexperienced in their company, innocent of the responsibilities of rearing children and running a household. She had grown used to this feeling over the years with Julian--her position as the other woman, which had felt so sophisticated when their affair began, was actually a holding pen that kept her from growing up. She had denied herself the pleasure of openly sharing a life with the person she loved."

"And wasn't it terrible, how much he looked forward to those moments, so much so that sometimes even a ride by himself on the subway was the best part of the day? Wasn't it terrible that after all the work one put into finding a person to spend one's life with...that solitude was what one relished most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane?"

"Kaushik never fully trusted the places he'd lived, never turned to them for refuge. From childhood, he realized now, he was always happiest to be outside, away from the private detritus of life."

The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin

This morning, I watched Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia do the book publicity song-and-dance on Tim Russert's show. He took questions about his judicial philosophy, and tried hard to behave himself. It felt strange. As a kid, all I knew of the Court was what I saw in snippets on the nightly news: confirmation hearings, swearings-in, and stock footage of Anita Hill. Never any selling or cajoling, which is the point of any Sunday morning talk show appearance.

This "better know a justice" phenomenon seems to be a direct byproduct of both the Rehnquist era and the hard work of Supreme Court groupies--er, journalists--like Jeffrey Toobin. His book The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court has all the personality tidbits you could ever want, while laying out many of the significant decisions and issues of the past 25 years. And for someone who's paid attention mostly to anecdotal Court stuff over the years, it's a great narrative of the Rehnquist regime.

The book does have its flaws. Like the adherence to the same handful of issues we hear about over and over in the coverage of the Court. In fact, about fifty pages in, I was afraid the whole book would be about abortion cases (it wasn't, thankfully). Toobin does much better when he gets off the Roe v. Wade path, and talks about the justices' personalities.

Also, Toobin doesn't do much to disguise his own loyalties to the justices. He totally hearts Sandy Day O'Connor. Either she gave the most extensive interviews, or his mother was a WASP-y blonde dynamo. And his dislikes are equally obvious. Calling Justice Thomas "the nation's most famous beneficiary of affirmative action" who opposes the policy for everyone else probably won't get Toobin a seat at the next Thomas dinner party.

All the same, each justice gets his or her share of quirk. Ginsburg and Scalia spend New Year's together, despite bitter philosophical fights. Thomas kept photos on his desk of his clerk's lesbian partner. Breyer can't conduct conversations at a normal decibel. O'Connor made her clerks exercise with her. Rehnquist wrote a song about the Miranda case. Stevens defies all odds by sticking around and holding out for a Democratic president. Kennedy is a Republican who cares what the international community thinks. And Souter is a woodsman who pretends to be Justice Breyer at Massachusetts rest stops.** Souter actually gets some of the funniest moments in the book. Like when O'Connor, the "Yenta of Paradise Valley," tries to fix up the hermit bachelor on awkward dates.

I also enjoyed the insight into Clinton's justice-selection process (we came dangerously close to having to listen to Alfonse D'Amato trying to out-New York Scalia), and the shout-outs to some of my favorite recent cases. Kelo v. New London got a page or two, and even Bong Hits 4 Jesus scored a mention (I believe this is one of Scott's favorites as well, at least until the Court has to rule on the constitutionality of fogcutters).

There's also some heartache mixed in. Turns out I still can't read about Bush v. Gore without a physical tug of revulsion. Knowing that O'Connor came to despise Bush isn't much comfort after her very partisan swing vote put him into office. And I'm more terrified than ever that Stevens will drop dead before November, despite his best efforts to the contrary.

But fears and political ulcers aside, the book is fast-paced and witty. I'm pretty sure there aren't many jurisprudential books that would be compelling enough to make me drag them on the subway.

Some of the favorite parts:

"Meanwhile, Scalia wrote his own dissent, which surpassed even his own high standards for invective and hysteria."

"There, surrounded by many of the most powerful people in the country, Thomas paid tribute to himself for having the courage to agree with them."

"One of his fellow justices once prevailed Souter to take a woman out to dinner, and she reported back that she thought the evening had gone very well--until the end. Souter took her home, told her what a good time he had, then added: 'Let's do this again next year.'"

"At an appearance at a New York synagogue in 2005, Scalia was asked to compare his own judicial philosophy with that of Thomas. 'I am an originalist,' Scalia said, 'but I am not a nut.'"

"At his home in the Naval Observatory, Gore passed the news to his family and watched the coverage on television. At 3:11 p.m., he sent a BlackBerry message to his chief spokesmen, Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane: 'Please make sure that no one trashes the Supreme Court.'"




**This episode is under dispute by my independent Supreme Court expert. "What's the subset of Massachusetts rest-stop patrons who a) recognize the face of a sitting Justice, b) do not recall the name of said Justice, and c) recall the name of a different, semi-obscure Justice?"