Year-end addendum

I don't know why, but I always kind of assumed that David Sedaris's reading taste (at least the public one) would be considerably more esoteric than mine. Then I saw his bit in The New Yorker blog discussing his 2009 favorites. Among them was the Lorrie Moore novel (as on everybody's end-of-year list, it seems)--but also two other books I really want to read, the upcoming Joshua Ferris novel and Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

Also, there was a revelation in there: Dorothy Parker as read by...Elaine Stritch! I don't know what planets aligned for that one, but it must have been amazing.

And this reminds me that 2009 was actually a really good year for quality books, despite the ongoing cataclysm that is publishing--and Sarah Palin.

State of the Union

Once again, the New York Times has rated its top 10 books of the year. Once again, I've read exactly one of them.

The 100 most notable books? I've read three. This is about status quo, though I still feel guilty. However, a quick check of the handy book spreadsheet confirms that I've actually read far more current-release books than usual this year--I guess I'm just not reading the right ones. Or the Times just doesn't appreciate Victorian zombie lit like it should. Whatevs, Michiko Kakutani.

The spreadsheet also reveals that the J&K book club has been remarkably productive as well: we managed to do six books this year, or a little less than half of our overall total. 2009 may have been the Year of the Great "Modern" Debate (to date, the only real book club disagreement since the non-ratification of the unwritten constitution), but we seem to have pulled through.

Also, while I didn't hit my 50-book goal for the year, the overall quality was high. The disappointments were few among the books I committed to reading. And I discovered several authors who've become staples in my reading diet (like Arthur Phillips and Colson Whitehead), and fell in love anew with some old favorites (like Lorrie Moore). So, y'know, God bless us, every one--or something like that.

Indignation by Philip Roth

So for the last three Philip Roth books, I've talked/written about the endangered author syndrome among the mid-20th century luminaries, where they're working on a long goodbye/capstone to seal the legacy. And when it came to proving my theory, Roth was the proviest of them all. The Plot Against America = meditation on his childhood. Everyman = dying New Jerseyan reflecting on his life. Exit Ghost = end of Zuckerman. Poignant, no?

Then I read one of his latest, Indignation. Way to prove my vague and untenable theory wrong, Philip Roth. Now he's just cranking out one-off books like he used to. Which also means that I don't have to worry about approaching the book with reverence, and can admit that I didn't love it.

Indignation is the story of Marcus Messner, a New Jersey kid who tries to slip his father's suffocating anxiety and the ankle-deep blood of the family's kosher butcher shop. His blind, groping efforts to get the hell out of Newark land him on the campus of Winesburg College, a WASP-y liberal arts school in Ohio. Marcus just wants to keep his head down, not talk to anyone, get straight A's, and avoid the Korean War draft. But people have a pesky habit of getting in the way. And rather than accept this with equanimity and get on with his life, Marcus's general reaction is to melt down, and either a) make immediate plans never to talk to the offending parties again; or b) say "f--- you" in the worst possible ways and at the worst possible times.

To be fair, he seems to come across the most obnoxious people on campus: the pompous Christian dean, unbalanced roommates, and your standard fictional unstable chick--who seems awesome at first, and then lets loose with every single piece of baggage she's ever had. Guys, let this be a lesson: when a girl says that she's "only done this once before," and the next minute has the Crazy Eyes? Shut. It. Down. I'm just sayin'.

But anyway, there's something halfhearted about the whole thing: from the smattering of anti-semitism suggestions (none of which really pan out in the plot) to the usual tortured romance, it's all very Roth, but very auto-pilot. There's no reason for this to be as small a book as it is--either in scope or in physical format (largest font ever). There was just so much more space and potential here than the "kid leaves home for college, doesn't fit in" narrative. And when the climax pretty much pops up out of nowhere and seals off the nebulous foreshadowing at the beginning of the book, it's awfully tidy and convenient. Kind of like a morbid version of the epilogue of Animal House.

I think what disappointed me most was the lack of the usual saving grace, Roth's amazing descriptive power. There just isn't much description going on in Indignation, and the novel suffers for it. What little there is, though, is good. There's a scene near the end where Roth manages to turn a frat-guy panty raid into a graphic, stomach-turning bachanal of douchebaggery. And that's the Roth I want more of. This one had the right Rothian elements (anger, sex, Newark), but they just didn't come together the way they usually do. Sad.

short stories

Having fallen way behind on New Yorkers, I spent a good chunk of time this weekend plowing through. Most pieces were status quo, but I thought that the fiction has been especially good lately. This one in particular, "Alone" by Yiyun Lee, has been haunting me since I read it. It's beautifully written and structured--really, a complete novel in four pages. (I hope all the people trying to pound out thousands of words a day for internet bragging rights are paying attention to this.) Recommended.

Conversely, I was kinda disappointed by "Premium Harmony," a new story by Stephen King. In general, I like King's (non-horror) writing, especially as he gets older and more reflective. But this story just felt stunted and melancholy. I would have happily read more about the characters, but the arc wasn't very engaging at all. And I saw the big climax coming, about three paragraphs in. If it were a normal story by an unknown author, I don't think I'd have been as bothered. Probably unfair, but true. Especially given that he's someone who could probably knock out a rough draft NaNoWriMo novel in a slow weekend, and have it sell 8 bajillion copies.

Evil at Heart by Chelsea Cain

Apparently I've been on a sex, drugs, and brutality kick lately--but only with the reading list, don't worry. After reading the first two Stieg Larsson thrillers (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire), I snuck Evil at Heart into the queue. Evil at Heart is Chelsea Cain's third book about Portland detective Archie Sheridan and serial killer Gretchen Lowell, after Heartsick and Sweetheart.

I was excited for this one--I really liked the the first two. Fun reads, but also challenging enough to be worthwhile. This one was just kind of...easy. It follows the same universe of characters (the Portland cops and reporter trying to bring down Gretchen, the most attractive serial killer this side of Ted Bundy), and a similar plot line. Gretchen is back on the loose, after manipulating Archie Sheridan from her prison cell for two novels and ultimately using him to escape. Archie, for his part, is still royally effed up by her, but is trying to push past it. He's in rehab for the pill addiction he developed after she carved him up and brought him back to life, and has finally started to break her psychosexual hold over him. But not much actually happens in the book, except a series of copycat murders that may or may not be Gretchen's handiwork.

There's also the world's slowest love interest development going on, between Archie and crime reporter Susan Ward. It took him one book to get rid of his wife, 2.5 to stop fantasizing about Gretchen, and now finally Archie and Susan are both admitting there might be a mutual crush. Who do they think they are, me? I don't know how many books Cain is planning, but jeez. Just get there already. Not that there's no romance going on in this installment--there's a touching scene of self-mutilation fetishization.

The most interesting part of the book is Cain's characterization of America's relationship to sensational crime stories. The newly escaped Gretchen is an object of obsession for the country, with TV specials like America's Hottest Serial Killers and "Run, Gretchen, run" t-shirts. There's also a cult of Gretchen-obsessed psychos who convene on an online message board (surprise, surprise) and meet up in spots where previous victims were found. The social commentary gets a little heavy-handed (the TV show in particular is a bit too on-the-nose), but I think Cain's pretty spot-on about the terror-to-fascination ratio.

The book also suffers from Dan Brown Syndrome, where the author uses chapter breaks to create artificial movement and action. The first fifty pages have about twelve chapters. And it's not a long book. I still really enjoy Cain's style and writing--and I would have been fine waiting longer, for a deeper and more substantial read. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the next one will be a little more satisfying. I bought this book knowing it'd be quick and dirty, but it turns out I needed a little more conversation first.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Americans like Swedish things. Those little meatballs with gravy and jam. Incomprehensible Muppets. Our Ektorp sofas from IKEA. And now, possibly the year's unlikeliest bestseller, the English translation of late Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson's book Män som hatar kvinnor.

Written as the first book in a trilogy of brutal suspense thrillers, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo starts with Mikael Blomkvist, a magazine journalist/publisher who's been disgraced by a recent libel case against one of Sweden's most prominent businessmen. On his way to a light prison sentence and licking his ego wounds, Blomqvist becomes involved in an old missing persons case. Harriet Vanger, the sixteen-year-old heiress to a large corporate fortune, disappeared years ago--and everyone except her great-uncle, Henrik, thinks she's dead. The case is Henrik's white whale, and as he gets older and more frail, he wants definitive answers. Knowing that Blomqvist is a good journalist (pesky libel conviction aside) with some time on his hands, he hires the writer to come out to his tiny town, which is populated by his eccentric, hostile, and just plain awful relatives. Pretty much everyone involved has a motive to have wanted Harriet gone, and Mikael is tasked with finding out which one of them is responsible for the girl's disappearance back in the 60s (under the guise of writing a biography of the Vanger family).

Blomqvist takes the case, 'cause he needs the truckloads of cash that Vanger promises--as well as the super-secret evidence that Vanger supposedly has that proves Blomqvist's innocence in the libel case. Blomqvist hires an unlikely partner, Lisbeth Salander, to help. Lisbeth is a young woman who has zero social skills, but some kind of ninja ability to uncover top secret information. The two dig deeper into the Vanger family secrets, and discover that--surprise!--someone in the Vanger family really doesn't want them finding out what happened to Harriet. It's kind of like Clue, but with 100% more shady blond people.

While Blomqvist and Salander are struggling with ugly revelations of murder, double identities, and horrific sexual practices, the B-plot follows the fate of Blomqvist's magazine, Millenium, as he and his best friend/f-buddy/editor-in-chief Erika Berger try to keep everything afloat.

Overall, I liked the book quite a bit. I don't read many thrillers these days, and this one reminded me of how compelling they can be when done well. And Larsson makes his social justice agenda clear. The Swedish title of the book translates into "Men Who Hate Women." (Something tells me this book wouldn't have been the subway-reading hit it was, if the American publisher had kept that on the cover.) And Larsson is not squeamish about hitting the reader with all sorts of male-on-female violence. Pretty much any way a modern woman can be used and abused by the worst of men is in the book somewhere. And I also liked the way he created the female characters--bold, sexual, and not apologetic at all. For example, the female lead, Lisbeth, is not a pleasant person. She's blunt, probably on the autism spectrum, and unable to trust anyone. But she's extremely good at what she does, and draws attraction and respect (from non-evil dudes, anyway).

The plot has a few too many deus-ex-machina moments, but they're not so clunky that they don't fit in. And given that the writer dropped dead of a heart attack before the book even came out, I don't really fault the lack of polish/editing. The characters are interesting enough to make it worthwhile, and the writing (whether through translation or by design) is straightforward. I enjoyed it enough to rush out and get my hands on the sequel, to see what those zany Swedes will get up to next.

What to Write Next

One of my favorite "why didn't I know this guy before?" literary discoveries this year has been Colson Whitehead. And this morning's Times Sunday Book Review has a great, funny essay by him: What to Write Next.


Realism: Take this test. When you read “These dishes have been sitting in the sink for days,” do you think (a) This is an indicator of my inner weather, or (b) Why don’t they do the dishes? Does the phrase “I’m going as far away from here as my broken transmission will get me, and then I’ll take it from there” make you think (a) Somebody understands me, or (b) Why don’t they stay and talk it out? What is more visually appealing, (a) a Pall Mall butt floating in a coffee mug, or (b) those new Pop Art place mats in the Crate & Barrel catalog? If you answered (a), do we have a genre for you.

Recommended for: The rumpled, drinky.

...

Southern Novel of Black Misery: Africans in America, cut your teeth on this literary staple. Slip on your sepia-tinted goggles and investigate the legacy of slavery that still reverberates to this day, the legacy of Reconstruction that still reverberates to this day, and crackers. Invent nutty transliterations of what you think slaves talked like. But hurry up — the hounds are a-­gittin’ closer!

Sample titles: “I’ll Love You Till the Gravy Runs Out and Then I’m Gonna Lick Out the Skillet”; “Sore Bunions on a Dusty Road.”

Southern Novel of White Misery, OR Southern Novel: What race problem?

Sample titles: “The Birthing Stone”; “The Gettin’ Place.”

The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe

I've noticed that publishing memoirs (or thinly veiled fiction) are rarely inspirational. Instead, they're more of a paean to the horrors of the industry. When I first read Another Life in grad school, I thought it was quaint. Surely things had calmed down in the industry since the mid-twentieth century. Then I actually started working in NYC publishing, and discovered how accurate it still was. Only now there are no martini lunches or perks.

My most recent Ghost of Publishing Past reading was Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. Written from the perspectives of several young women, the novel is a soapy snapshot of New York publishing/life/love in the early 50s. The ringleader of sorts is Caroline Bender, a naive Westchester girl who has a Radcliffe degree and a recently-ended engagement. She has no idea what to do with her life now that she's not getting married, so she takes a secretarial pool job at Fabian Publications. Caroline is positively jaded compared to April, a Colorado girl who comes to the city with two weeks' worth of funds and a vague desire to be an actress. A third girl, Gregg, finds her way into the secretarial pool as well. She's an actress too, but is more driven than April to make connections and plug away at the New York theatre scene. While the girls become and remain friends, the book kind of splits off into three different narratives:

1. Caroline, who turns out to be a smart and capable editor, rises quickly at Fabian, despite the heinous, chauvinistic politics involved. Her romantic relationships are secondary--especially because she's still pining after the fiance who dumped her for a Texas socialite. All of the book publishing commentary comes from her rise from reader to editor.

2. April stays in the secretarial pool, and eventually picks up a fluffy publicity job at the publisher, but her main priority is getting her awful socialite boyfriend to a) acknowledge that they're dating, and b) marry her. You can imagine how well that ends.

3. Gregg ditches Fabian pretty early, and makes progress in the Broadway world--but not onstage. She gets involved and obsessed with an established director. He's kind of a dick, but to be fair, many of their issues are her fault for obsessing over someone so clearly incapable of a relationship.

Most of the book is, as mentioned before, a sudsy, girly novel. But it does offer an interesting glimpse into my chosen industry fifty years ago (as well as the realization that junior editorships are pretty much the same). Also compelling is the variation and depth of women's roles and relationships. There are the women who are only working until they can land a man and retreat into the home...a single mother working toward professional success, but faltering socially...Caroline, who ultimately puts her professional and mental fulfillment over romance...women at the mercy of a male-dominated power structure that puts them in very distinct boxes: workplace playthings or home-making wives. The latter duality is especially intriguing to me--it's nothing we haven't seen in Mad Men or the like, but given that book publishing is so heavily skewed toward the female editors/executives today, I always wonder where that switch happened.

Anyway, for a bit of easy fiction, I recommend. The writing isn't challenging, but done well enough to keep the story moving. So the parts I liked were more about resonance than language:

"Blind dates...She could not decide which was worse, the anticipation or the final actuality. A year ago, six months ago, she had thought she was through forever with the unholy three of the single girl: loneliness, being unprotected and blind dates. Now it had started again."

"There was now more reason than ever to want the promotion, and Caroline began to worry about it....She didn't want to push him or appear anxious, but she began to have the fear that he was using her to do two jobs at once for the salary of the lesser one, and she didn't quite know what to do about it."

"For the first time Caroline realized how much they needed her here. She was a good editor and they knew it. And she was so good that she was above office politics and secret knifings and social intrigues. She would never know whether or not she had been close to losing her position five minutes ago in Mr. Shalimar's office, but her few moments of panic had shown her how much her work here really meant to her. It had started out as a stopgap, but now it had become a way of life. It gave her a sense of value and of belonging. Perhaps that, besides ability, was what had made her so good at the job that they could not now afford to lose her."

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

So the dirty little secret of the Jacob & Katy book club is that occasionally, we read books that are popular for timely reasons. Most of the time, we go out of our way to pick either unusual or uncommon books. But it doesn't always work out that way. We did Light in August around the same time Oprah picked it, and Infinite Jest right after David Foster Wallace died. Because when is Faulkner ever a bad idea? And if we weren't going to do Infinite Jest then, it never would have happened ("Infinite Summer" would have been waaaaaay out of the question). And this time around, President Obama just happened to endorse Netherland right after Jacob decided he wanted to read it. But despite the urge to ditch the choice as it gained popularity among the bookier Americans, it squeaked onto the short list for this round, and into the finals.

Netherland is a novel by Joseph O'Neill, set mostly in New York shortly after 9/11. Hans, a Dutchman by way of London (where he acquired a wife and a stable career in finance) moves to New York at the insistence of his wife. She freaks out and return to London shortly thereafter with their infant son and Hans's testicles firmly in hand. He flounders around in a sort of bleak comfort--he makes plenty of money at his Wall Street job, but can't really think of a way to spend it, except on an overpriced apartment in the Chelsea Hotel. The only thing that tethers him to--well, anything, really, is his love for cricket. He joins a weekly cricket game in Staten Island, populated by guys from India, the West Indies, and various other former British protectorates. There, he meets Chuck Ramkissoon, a gregarious Trinidadian dude who knows what he wants from life: sex, money, and a world-class cricket stadium in Brooklyn.

While dealing with his various losses (his mother, his sweetly ordinary Dutch childhood, his wife and kid), Hans lets Chuck pull him into his orbit. This involves a lot of random-ish errands out to Brooklyn, where Chuck describes (in increasingly alarming detail) his plans to finance a cricket mecca in East Flatbush. It becomes clear that Chuck is doing some seriously shady stuff to finance his dream: iffy Russian friends, a gambling ring among local West Indians, schmoozing hazy international donors. Hans is both curious enough to go along for the ride, and bored enough to disregard any potential illegality on his own part. He idolizes Chuck a little without sentimentalizing him--both men, as modern immigrants to the country, are seeking the American prize, whatever that might be. For Chuck, it's American capitalism with an extra helping of jingoism. For Hans, it's owning the potential for freedom--his obsession becomes getting a driver's license and buying a car, even though a) no one needs a car in NYC; and 2) he seems to have no plans to go anywhere outside the metro area. But they're both looking for a piece of the action, and appear to respect that in one another. That they both love a sport that 99.9% of the American population couldn't care less about, that's just cake.

As Hans starts pulling his own life together, he starts to have less use for Chuck--and the way O'Neill juxtaposes their trajectories is interesting. In a review blurb, NY Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani suggests that there are "echoes of the Great Gatsby." And I can see that (though my partner in bookish crime begged to differ). There's a similar sense of melancholy over both books, and Chuck is a bit of a Gatsby--the faux-naive, cheerfully sociopathic part, anyway. Both novels are about finding the sacred in American life.

I also really enjoyed O'Neill's writing. At times he's a little too sentimental, but that may have been just a function of his mopey, nostalgic narrator. I liked the complex, streaming language:

"I came to step around in a murk of my own making, and to be drifted away from my native place, and in due course to rely on Rachel as a human flashlight.... To give an example, she was the one, all those years ago, who brought cinema and food to my attention. Undoubtedly I had already watched movies and eaten lunch; but I hadn't located them in the so-called scheme of things."

"I was taken by lightheaded yearning for an interlude of togetherness, a time-out, as it were, during which my still-wife and I might lie together in a Four Seasons suite, say, and work idly through a complimentary fruit basket and fuck at leisure and, most important, have hours-long, disinterested, beans-spilling, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may conversations in which we'd examine each other's unknown nooks and crannies in the best of humor and faith."

"...I began to dream in all seriousness of a stadium, and black and brown and even a few white faces crowded in bleachers, and Chuck and me laughing over drinks in the members' enclosure and waving to people we know, and stiff flags on the pavilion roof, and fresh white sight-screens, and the captains in blazers looking up at a quarter spinning in the air, and a stadium-wide flutter of expectancy as the two umpires walk onto the turf square and its omelette-colored batting track, whereupon, with clouds scrambling in from the west, there is a roar as the cricket stars trot down the pavilion steps onto this impossible field in America, and everything is suddenly clear, and I am at last naturalized."

So popularity aside, this was a book chosen in good taste, and I'm glad to have read it.

Prague by Arthur Phillips

Ah, to be young, American, and idealistic in...Budapest. Wait. Is that right? Probably not. Anyway, that's the basic premise of Arthur Phillips's novel Prague. (You might think said novel would take place in the titular city, but you'd be wrong.)

The book follows five young expats in Budapest in the early 90s, right after the Velvet Revolution, and right before Czech shed Oslovakia. There's Mark, a Canadian grad student who devotes every minute of his existence to studying nostalgia. It's every bit as circular as you might think. There's Emily, a somewhat bland midwesterner indulging an Electra complex by working as an American embassy assistant to impress her civil servant father. There's Charles, a Hungarian-American who shifts between the cultures according to whichever one he disdains less at the moment. And then there are the Californian brothers, Scott and John--one of whom has a love-hate relationship with his brother, while the other has a hate-hate one. John, who follows Scott to Prague for foolishly optimistic bonding reasons, becomes the ostensible protagonist of the book 'cause he's young, and can talk earnestly about how the MTV generation coming of age in the late 80s is going to fix everything. The five are friends more or less due to proximity and shared American-ness, but become entangled despite always seeming annoyed with one another. They do share, however, the nagging feeling that everything would be more interesting if only they were living in Prague instead.

The novel follows them (particularly John) as they move throughout Budapest, glib and hopelessly American despite their deepening interactions with the locals. It's kind of like a slightly downer L'Auberge Espagnole. Phillips does a good job of contrasting the promise of a new Hungarian culture (McDonalds! American t-shirts!) in 1990 with the gray, lingering vestiges of Communist-era thinking. The twentysomething characters become involved with old guard figures, like a septaugenarian lounge singer with crazy war stories to spare, and Horvath, the heir of a Hungarian publisher whose fortunes fluctuated with the country's.

Phillips devotes almost half of the book to the story of that press (the Horvath Kiado), and Horvath's eventual ruin at the hands of one of the young protagonists. I think this was a risky choice--I found the movement back and forth from the history to the present too jarring. The structure of the book was my biggest issue with it. Also, probably due to being a first-time novelist at the time, Phillips seemed unsure of what to do with the characters past a certain point, letting them devolve into soapy plots and odd endings.

I did like the overall Phillips style, though, and am willing to forgive a lot in a first novel.

Parts I liked especially:

"Whatever safety precautions Mark Payton had taken in graduate school while clinically investigating the toxins of nostalgia, they had been insufficient."

"Of course, vegetarian cooking was elusive, and the air quality left a lot to be desired, but the city was good-looking, and you could breathe fine if you stayed in shape, avoided hostility and fat, ate three garlic cloves each morning, absorbed plenty of antioxidants, avoided yeast bread within three hours of a scheduled elimination, lived up in the Buda hills, and avoided rigidity in your attitudes."

"As the band tuned up underneath the blue sky, white clouds, and long-gone heroes, the saxophonist introduced the first number, " 'Beatrice,' a lovely tune written by the saxman Sam Rivers for his wife."
Nadja listened in silence for seveal minutes. 'It is a pretty tune, no? And a time-honored tradition, I think: Write something pretty, name it for your wife or lover, and vow it will make her immortal. A familiar lie, yes? You men all do that, John Price."

"In business school, you know, the phrase had a distinct meaning. 'I'm going into publishing' meant something very specific. Like when you came out of an exam and someone asked you how you did and you knew you blew it, you just said, 'It looks like I'm going into publishing.' Or someone gets nailed with a professor's question on a case study, unprepared, and they fumble it, you can hear other students in the class singsonging: 'Looks like somoene's going into publishing!'"

Dancing About Architecture

So I haven't yet gotten around to writing up Arthur Phillips' Prague (the next book club book may have come and gone by then--eep!), but in the meantime I should share an article that MTL passed along: Dancing About Architecture. In it, Phillips muses about how to approach music through writing.

I like his points about the risks of inserting music into narrative, particularly the idea that "the author is betting on a shared musical vocabulary, an occasionally dangerous wager." It gets a little too meta at times, but he does it charmingly enough. I'm looking forward to checking out The Song is You.

He also uses the old saying, "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." For the record, I would like to note that Dancing About Architecture was the working title of the movie Playing By Heart, which features some of Jon Stewart's finest acting this side of Death to Smoochy. (Okay, so it's actually a very cute, very 90s little romantic comedy. And you're not gonna see Stewart making out like that with, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin on The Daily Show, so I recommend checking it out for the novelty factor.)

Reader-in-Chief

So yesterday I bought a copy of Netherland by Joseph O'Neill at Borders. On it was a big red sticker proclaiming President Obama's adoration for the novel. (For the record, I'm not reading it because he did--but Jacob, if you're reading this, I think we should use this as an opportunity to invite Mr. Obama to join the book club. B&J&K book club has a nice ring to it.)

Anyway, I found the sticker interesting, because this is an issue we've been discussing lately at work. How do you take public, glowing praise from the president and use it to sell the heck out of your product? It's a fairly exclusive marketing opportunity--and the rewards can be great. Just ask J. Crew and any Portuguese Water Dog.

But at the same time, you can't just slap a sitting president's name on something as an endorsement. Random House ducks this neatly by blurbing an Obama soundbite from Newsweek about the book. The only thing missing is, "But you don't have to take my word for it!" Way to use the liberal media to do your dirty work, Random House. The system works.

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

The other day, I told someone that I don't cry when I read something sad. That's mostly true--but as with just about everything else, there's an exception. Lorrie Moore has managed to beat my heartlessness twice. First was her short story "People Like That Are the Only People Here." Next was her new, upcoming novel A Gate at the Stairs (thanks, BEA!). Moore is great, better than any author I've come across, at getting to my weakest spots, and doing it so deftly that I don't even notice the piercing until it's too late. It's like the sweetest sucker punch ever.

A Gate at the Stairs follows Tassie Keltjin, a midwestern farm girl trying hard to push back her ordinary roots in favor of something more urbane. This lands her at an unnamed liberal arts college in her home state, a dot of blue surrounded by provincial red politics around 9/11. The book's events start just after the World Trade Center bombing, and I appreciate that Moore made it essentially a footnote as she moved into the bigger themes of love and loss.

But Tassie's main path is less historical. Looking for a basic babysitting job, she ends up on the doorstep of Sarah and Edward, a couple seeking a nanny for the baby they're trying to adopt. Tassie is sucked into this family, which represents the liberal/academic/foodie pretension she seems to want, and its attendant drama. At the same time, she distances herself from her actual family, which has more timely things going on: shifting farm economics, and a son joining the army just in time to be shipped off to the early days of war in the Middle East. Both families erupt into chaos soon enough, and in the middle Tassie finds herself in college lust with a super-sketchy guy. (This plot line is the weakest, but has some interesting meditations on the nature of love.)

The part that actually made me cry wasn't any of the somewhat soapy twists of the plot, but rather a quick, devastating moment involving Tassie and her brother. I can't spoil it, but it was just so unexpected that it hit me hard in the solar plexus. That's how Moore got me with her short story too--taking a sad moment, but writing it so unsentimentally and perfectly that it smacks you in the face.

But don't let the mention of tears fool you: the book is sweetly funny. Tassie has a cute, pun-filled way of viewing the world, and Moore's language is always spot-on. I feel extremely lucky to have scored an advance copy (after waiting several years for this book), and like Jacob, I'm quite sad that it'll be a long time before the next one.

For anyone interested, the book is excerpted in this week's New Yorker.

It's hard to narrow down specific passages for this one, but here are some I liked especially:

"I did not have any good solid plans for the long-term--no bad plans either, no plans at all--and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school) sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior--my life was open and ready and free--but that did not make it any less lonely."

"Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around. They were like the poor that way, perhaps. What sense did anything they were being told possibly make, given the scarcity of their world?"

"'Hello,' he said, unsmilingly and as if from a great bleak distance. He glanced at my face and then away....I had seen this exact same expression and movement before--where? (Edward. I'd seen it the first day I met him.) In the future I would come to know that look as the beginning of the end of love--the death of a man's trying. It read as Haughty Fatigue. Like the name of a stripper. There was the sacredness, immersion, intrusion, and violence to the ordinary that preceded romantic love. And then there was Haughty Fatigue, the stripper, who stole it away."

"I guessed that only at the last possible minute did the soul in a determined fashion flee the dying flesh. Who could blame it for its reluctance? We loved our lives more than we ever knew, and at the end felt the bounty of them, as one would say in church, felt even the richness of their missed opportunities, or just understood that they were more than we had realized during the living of them."

"I had never eaten such intricately prepared food before, and doing so in this kind of mournful, prayerful solitude, in a public place, where no one but I was seated without a companion, made each bite sing and roar in my mouth. Still, it was an odd experience for me, alone in the darkening evening, to have the palate so cared for and the spirit so untouched. It was a condition of prayerless worship. Endless communion. Gospel-less church."

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Back in early December, Lisa, Myles and I had a conversation about which works of classic literature could be improved by the presence of zombies. My favorite idea, of course, was The Great Gatsby, with Gatsby crawling out of the pool looking for brains and revenge. None of us had any idea that any such book was in the works--just a shared fascination with zombies.

I am definitely not a sci-fi person when it comes to reading. But when Myles thrust World War Z into my hands a few years ago, I loved it--and have spent an obscene amount of time since then pondering what would happen if the zombie plague ever hit. And thanks to Seth Grahame-Smith, now we know what it would have been like if the zombies invaded 19th century England.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is about as faithful an adaptation as a book can be when it mixes Victorian hijinks with the undead (obvious parallels aside). It's almost too lovingly done to be a true parody, although that's the ostensible intent. It's a fully zombie-integrated little world--it's not like monsters are dropped into a pastoral scene, and all hell breaks loose. Rather, the zombies have been around the English countryside for a while. The origins are vague, but the "unpleasantness" has made the world's citizens evolve a little. For example, the five Bennett sisters (pretty Jane, plucky Elizabeth, and, uh, the other three) are all lovely young middle-class ladies--who just happent to have been trained by their father and a Chinese martial arts master in the deadly arts. The sisters attend balls with eligible bachelors, take long walks through the countryside, and can disembowel a zombie in about ten seconds flat.

I'm not the biggest fan of Victorian lit as a rule (I won't ever read Tess of the D'Urbervilles again, no matter what kind of monsters you add), but the further I got into the book, the more I liked Pride and Prejudice. Maybe it's because the social commentary is more direct in this edition: even the best female fighters give it all up as soon as they get married; and it's mostly the underclasses who fall victims to the zombies, because the rich can afford more protection. It may just have been the seamlessness of Austen's narrative with the surreal element. The zombies are essentially scenery--the traditional boy-girl misunderstandings are still the primary element of the book. It's a fun context, though, and makes the Victorian absurdity more palatable. I always thought that Jane Austen needed a touch more brutality.

Lisa, who read the book with me (zombie book club!), even went back and re-read the original to see how it stacks up. Her verdict: zombie-less Bennetts are not as exciting, but the adapted writing is shockingly on point.

I'm still holding out for Gatsby, but am now considerably more receptive to zombified classic lit. Can't wait for Little Women. I bet Beth would be an awesome zombie.

Parts I liked:

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. Never was this truth more plain than during the recent attacks at Netherfield Park, in which a household of eighteen was slaughtered and consumed by a horde of the living dead."

"Elizabeth accepted their company, and they set off together, armed only with their ankle daggers. Muskets and katana swords were a more effective means of protecting one's self, but they were considered unladylike; and, having no saddle in which to conceal them, the three sisters yielded to modesty."

"At length, quite exhausted by the attempt to be amused with her own book, which she had only chosen because it was the second volume of his, she gave a great yawn and said, 'How pleasant it is to spend an evening this way! I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!'
'Spoken like one who has never known the ecstasy of holding a still-beating heart in her hand,' said Darcy."

"In spite of her deeply rooted bloodlust, she could not be insensible to the compliment of such a man's affection, and though her intention of killing him did not vary for an instant, she was somewhat sorry for the pain he was about to receive."

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

After reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, I needed to read something considerably less wholesome. Good news--I found it! More specifically, I found it in Aravind Adiga's Man Booker Prize-winning novel The White Tiger.

Now, The White Tiger comes not only with a prized pedigree--it's also got fans in some of the toughest review venues: The Times (both London and New York), WaPo, and possibly the biggest of them all, the South China Morning Post. The blurb pages proclaim this to be pretty much the best book ever. Is it?

Probably not, but it is one of the better first novels I've read. The story is one told mainly in flashback, in a series of (presumably unanswered) letters to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao from Bangalore "entrepreneur" Balram Halwai. Balram is a self-styled businessman, fluent in concepts like American outsourcing and internet marketing. But while his letters begin as a friendly offer to teach Indian entrepreneurship to the Premier so that he can spread the gospel to China, they begin to take on a much more confessional tone.

Balram delves into his rural childhood poverty, and his eventual job as a servant for a rich man's spoiled son. Held in his place by ridiculously low wages, and deprived of basics like privacy, sex, and open speech, Balram seems destined to be pitifully stuck in India's sociopolitical dregs. But he's smart enough to realize it--and smart enough to lay low while he figures out how to shift everything to his advantage. But no matter how clever he is (the rare "white tiger" among his generation of ignorant, apathetic country schoolchildren), there's not much Balram can do to overcome his servant caste and his "half-baked" education. Most of the novel's tension comes from when and how Balram will slash his way out of his rut. He announces very early on that he's a wanted criminal--but the full connection between that fact and his current, letter-writing perspective is left fuzzy until the end.

While the story rambles a bit, especially in the middle of Balram's stint as a lackey, the writing makes up for it. Balram has no sympathy for anyone--including himself--and Adiga keeps up the darkly humorous tone very nicely. Balram is essentially a coarse sociopath, so anyone looking for a noble Slumdog message should probably look elsewhere. But even without that kind of sentimentality, the absurdity of the characters is grounded by the starkness of India's inequalities.

I don't think The White Tiger revolutionizes literature, but it certainly gives a novel perspective on postcolonial India. It yanks away all the gauzy mystique put up by writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, and goes straight for the everyday: the petty politics, the call centers we know we're reaching when "Bob" answers the Verizon help line.

Parts I liked:

"I don't go to 'red light districts' anymore, Mr. Jiabao. It's not right to buy and sell women who live in birdcages and get treated like animals. I only buy girls I find in five-star hotels."

"White men will be finished within my lifetime. There are blacks and reds too, but I have no idea what they're up to--the radio never talks about them. My humble prediction: in twenty years' time, it will be just us yellow men and brown men at the top of the pyramid, and we'll rule the whole world. And God save everyone else."

"Here's a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life--possessive, even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life; only you know why his body has to be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on earth."

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

You know what takes balls? Writing a fluff book about WWII atrocities (Tom Brokaw not included). But somehow, in the novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, authors Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows pull it off.

Guernsey is written entirely in the form of 1946 letters to and from Juliet Ashton, a writer who's become famous by fictionalizing her WWII experiences in London as "Izzy Bickerstaff," a spunky character from a newspaper column. Juliet is looking for material for her next book (ideally more substantial than Izzy), and is getting tired of the book tours that her publisher/editor/longtime friend Sidney keeps sending her on. Mixed into her letters to and from Sidney is a random fan note from a man named Dawsey on Guernsey. Because this is what strangers do--spill their guts in writing to random authors--he begins telling her the story of the ad hoc book club (the titular group) which sprung up in his idyllic seaside village during the very non-idyllic German occupation. Soon his friends and neighbors are also writing her long, detailed letters about their personal lives and literary quirks--until Juliet is so overwhelmed by their charm and pluckitude that she decides to go live among them and scrape together their wartime stories for her next book.

The whole setup is a little contrived, as are most of the plot points (rich man falls desperately in love with Juliet after one quasi-date; publisher Sidney is her faithful friend; Dawsey is sweet and shy and bookish and selfless; which one will she end up with?). But dammit, as much as I wanted to stay askance, the whole thing snuck up on me.

There's a weird thread of darkness running throughout: nearly all the Islanders have horrible stories of deprivation and cruelty by the occupying German soldiers; a key character suffers terribly at the hands of the Nazis; and the village adopts a French Holocaust survivor as a kind of mascot. It's very strange, in contrast to the bright sudsiness of the book's general tone. But the historical details are probably the most compelling part of the novel, so it's easier to forgive the tonal unevenness.

On the whole, it's fast-moving and cute, and worthy of the recommendation that dropped the book in my lap.

Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow

So Ragtime was the 13th (we think) entry in the Jacob-Katy book club. What's more summery and patriotic than y'know, the "Maple Leaf Rag," and ice cream socials, and Americanized last names streaming into New York from Ellis Island?

Okay, so the book doesn't actually talk about...well, any of those things, really. But E. L. Doctorow's novel is set in the freewheeling ragtime era of the U.S.--when only about three white guys got to be millionaires, and we could still confine those pesky immigrants to a few tenements in New York. It's a fictionalized historical narrative, weaving the stories of made-up characters with real people like crime-of-passion-inducing Evelyn Nesbit, anarchist Emma Goldman, a Jocasta-happy Harry Houdini, and unapologetically rich J.P. Morgan.

The celebrities move in and out of the narrative, mostly to remind us that this is an Important Historical Novel, grounded in actual political-social-sexual upheavals. For instance, Emma Goldman gives Evelyn Nesbit a lecture on feminist freedom--with a happy ending (yes, that kind of happy ending). J.P. Morgan contemplates his richness, at home and abroad. And Houdini lives with his mother while wowing crowds of socialites and doing his feats of escape and endurance.

The real heart of the story is the fictional characters, who fall into three parts (though these mix at several points):

1. An upper-class family from 1910-ish New Rochelle, who begin to shake off their WASPy bourgeoisness (is that a word?) and join the "new" America. The mother takes in an abandoned black baby (and later his mother). Her younger brother stalks Evelyn Nesbit for a while, then gets involved in domestic anarchist groups. The son interacts freely with a Jewish child of immigrants. And the father starts to realize that maybe African-American people desire (and deserve) the same protections in society that he gets.

2. A pianist from Harlem, the father of the abandoned baby, who snaps after a personal tragedy and forces a new racial consciousness on the city via the media and oddly placid domestic terrorism. His is the most compelling story, and the most tied to the shift in social consciousness at the time.

3. A Jewish immigrant and his young daughter, who manage to get out of urban poverty and into the movie business...somehow. 90% of it happens offscreen. The kid is amazingly beautiful, and his desire to protect her from predators keeps moving him into the right place at the right time. His story intersects with the WASP family's in a fairly uncontroversial way, ultimately leading to one of the biggest "I want my money back" book endings I can think of.

All of that might sound like I didn't care for the book--I did, overall. Doctorow has an agenda of melding fiction and history, and gets points for never wavering from that. Writing from the 1970s, he has the luxury of long-perspective social commentary, which a writer closer to the ragtime era just wouldn't have had. And appropriating long-dead historical figures is a little unfair (he fictionalizes others, however thinly, in at least one of his other books), but it's a time-honored literary tradition. Also, I liked the writing itself better than Jacob did, for the most part. I think Doctorow was going for the slick, neat package, and once I accepted that, the lack of penetrating language didn't really bother me much.

Parts I enjoyed:

"Younger Brother understood the love in some hearts as a physical tenderness in that part of the body, a flaw in the physiological being equivalent to rickets of the bones or a disposition of the lungs to congest."

"The events since [Father's] return from the Arctic, his response to them, had broken [Mother's] faith in him....Yet at moments, for whole days at a time, she loved him as before--with a sense of appropriateness of their marriage, its fixed and unalterable character, as something heavenly. Always she had intuited a different future for them, as if the life they led was a kind of preparation, when the manufacturer of flags and fireworks and his wife would lift themselves from their respectable existence and discover a life of genius. She didn't know of what it would consist, she never had. But now she never waited for it."

BEA shenanigans

There aren't many landmark times in the book publishing landscape these days. There's Big Tweener Book Release, which gets twelve-year-old-girls to show up at Barnes & Noble at midnight. There's Fraud Unveiling Day, when Oprah and various bloggers have to eat crow after supporting the latest genocide survivor/celebrity parent who turns out to have defrauded everyone. And then there's BEA--Book Expo America, not a tribute to the late Bea Arthur (though how awesome would that have been)?

This was my first year attending BEA. None of my authors were going to be there on Saturday, so it was mostly an exploratory expedition. And really, who doesn't love going out to the isolated, inconvenient, too-close-to-New-Jersey Javits Center?

Even aside from everyone saying that it was toned down this year (what with the impending collapse of the written word and all), it was pretty clear that no one was in much of a party mood. There was a Twitter-related event, organized by a coworker Friday night, which had a drink named after the elusive Michiko Kakutani--so there's that. But otherwise, it didn't seem like there was much festivity going on in and around the convention. Saturday, the expo floor was crowded with elaborate booths, publishing types, indie booksellers, and librarians, but it didn't seem much different from any other event at Javits.

What did make it different (and therefore bearable) was the literary swag. Like a bizarre towel tied in to the new fake Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book; a zombie Jane Austen poster; and a C-SPAN2 BookTV tote bag. I think I was the only person to visit the C-SPAN2 booth and voluntarily put myself on the BookTV mailing list. And even in a down year, I managed to grab a few cool galleys/free books:

* Home Game, Michael Lewis's new memoir about fatherhood and (presumably) being married to everyone's favorite VJ-journalist
* Cafe Society, an NPR-approved bio about a famous Depression-era nightclub owner here in NYC (signed by the author)
* Lunch Lady and the Cyborg Substitute, a graphic novel (signed and cartooned by the author)
* (And my favorite...) A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore's upcoming novel

I didn't even realize Moore would be there, until I saw a poster for the book signing at the Random House booth. In order to make sure I'd get to meet her, I bailed out of the long signing line for Michael Lewis (sorry--I'll make some kind of restitution to the Moneyball gods, probably at the altar of Theo Epstein). It was worth it. I totally didn't impress with the smalltalk, but I don't think I embarrassed myself, and it was nice to meet a favored writer. Plus--free advance copy! No waiting until September like the rest of you suckers.

My company didn't have an official booth this year, so I didn't really see my colleagues circling the floor. But I did run into one briefly, and did manage to bump into some family friends from my hometown--ones not even close to being in The Biz. It was surreal; they were about the last people I'd have expected to see. Is this some bizarre Truman Show thing? Is my brother going to pop out on the subway platform? Will my third grade teacher be getting falafel from my favorite lunch cart?

Anyway, it was a decent way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Who doesn't enjoy making friends, influencing people, and pretending that she's a real publishing professional? I'm looking forward to the next one. By then I'll have forgotten how many godforsaken avenue blocks you have to walk down 34th street, and how much a bottle of water costs once you're in the doors. Good times.

Comedy at the Edge by Richard Zoglin

Standup comedy in New York has gone the way of everything else that was cool in the city in the 1970s: expensive, mainstream, and rigidly branded. But if you go to Comic Strip Live on the Upper East Side, on a Friday evening around 6, you see something different from the bland, two-drink-minimum efficiency of Caroline's in Times Square.

A pint-sized whirlwind of wry energy, simultaneously busting chops and betraying a motherly pride, Gladys introduces the lineup of unknown comedians waiting for their chances at the open mic. Dressed in a blazer and jeans, and in the spotlight glare against a brick backdrop, Gladys suggests these are young Dave Chappelles or Jerry Seinfelds--not just a ragtag assortment of stockbrokers, cab drivers, and real estate agents who want to turn funniness at parties into sitcom deals. There's nothing pretty or efficient about it. These guys, with lots of honing to do, are not likely to be on Comedy Central anytime soon. But there's an authenticity to it. With the rare joke that hits in the sparsely filled showroom, you feel a buzz of upward mobility--not the packaged, institutionalized mediocrity we've come to expect from these clubs.

That sense of raw potential is why I enjoyed reading Richard Zoglin's Comedy at the Edge: How Standup in the 1970s Changed America. It's basically a review of the major comedians who came of age in the 70s. After Lenny Bruce. Before "what's the deal with ____?" became a catchphrase. Guys like Carlin, Martin, and Pryor. And for someone who wasn't even born until these guys were safely into the sellout phases of their careers, it's good to get a glimpse of their edgier days.

The material itself isn't so novel, but the anecdotal nature makes it interesting. Each chapter goes in-depth with a comedian (except the cop-out chapter called "Women," which halfheartedly shouts out Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, and Elayne Boosler). Some are more interesting than others. For example, Richard Pryor's meltdowns are pretty well-known by now. Ditto Andy Kaufman's bone-deep wackiness. My favorite parts--by far--were the chapters on guys you don't really think of anymore as having been standups. Like Albert Brooks (always a favorite of mine). Has anyone else managed to be so funny while taking himself so freaking seriously? And I found myself mourning the also-ran career of Robert Klein, who I hadn't even known was a comedian before becoming one of those character actors who show up everywhere.

The problem with the book is that there's no cohesive timeline or structure. You don't really need a narrative thread here, but something to tie it all together besides "Hey, look, the 70s" would have been appreciated. But Zoglin is a snappy writer, and good at picking anecdotes, so the aimlessness is easy enough to forgive. If, however, in 30 years he decides to write a book about Dane Cook, I will be considerably less lenient.

I am so smart, S-M-R-T...

E.B. White is an evil, evil man. Not only did he kill Charlotte, he's been giving bum advice to impressionable young undergrads. But don't worry--a pretentious Cambridge grammarian will save us all!

Choice excerpt: So I won't be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst.

Yeah, that's the problem with the world today. Grammar angst. Also, I'm sure his outrage has nothing to do with the fact that his own doorstop grammar manual has sold 1,733 copies over seven years, while Elements of Style has sold 1,214,022 over ten years. Hmm.

God knows I'm picky enough about grammar (sometimes it's okay to say "and me," people!), but this dude is insane. If it comes down to having to choose between solid and accessible (if imperfect) grammar advice and snooty academic potshots taken from a snooty academic platform, I'm siding with the "grammatical incompetents." Or is it "the side which I will choose is that of the 'grammatical incompetents'"? I'd say the former, but apparently all of my grammatical knowledge is built on a foundation of lies and cotton candy--so what do I know?

New York stories

New Yorkers love talking about New York. It's a fact. Anyone can write a travelogue of London, or Chicago, or Rome. But New Yorkers trust only themselves to do it for NYC. That's part of what makes this kind of navel-gazing travel lit so special: the writers who live here are more than a little in love with their surroundings, and it shows. It's not the shallow love you feel for Hawaii, or some other pretty, beachy spot; it's more of a hard-fought admiration for all the stupid, gritty things that annoy you on a daily basis--but which you'd miss if they disappeared suddenly.

For the twelfth entry in the Jacob-Katy book club, we picked a pair of such New York books: Here is New York, by E.B. White, and The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead. They're both made up of impressionistic essays about New York City--but White's gives a glimpse of 1948, while Whitehead's is current as of 2004. Read together, they're testaments to what has changed in sixty years, what hasn't changed, and what never will change.

Here is New York is almost entirely told from the E.B. White perspective, as he comes back to visit his old city from a new country life in Maine. Most of the impressions are his own, as he moves through cafes, talks to people around him, and ponders the city itself. Colossus is more of a collective work, trying to find what's at the heart of every New Yorker's experience. It bounces from one person's internal monologue to another, in chapters loosely based on a particular aspect of the city (the Brooklyn Bridge, Broadway, Port Authority, etc.) Both books are insightful--particularly White's eerie description of how vulnerable New York was and is to breaches like 9/11. And 60+ years later, White's has the advantage of describing the quaint New Yorkian touches that just don't exist anymore (bring back the pneumatic tubes, please, Mayor Bloomberg!)

White's writing is always solid and charming, but I thought the language was especially beautiful in Colossus--and that's what really cements it as just as crucial a time capsule as White's essay has become. (Maybe in 30 years, it'll be Whitehead's NYC prose in the Barnes & Noble subway ads alongside Dr. Smizmar.)

If either book had a drawback, it was that they didn't go quite far enough--there are plenty of topics that are crucial to any narrative of New York, but that just aren't present in either author's stuff. (Like sports.)

Favorite passages...

From Here is New York:
"...I am probably occupying the very room that any number of exalted and somewise memorable characters sat in, some of them on hot, breathless afternoons, lonely and private and full of their own sense of emanations from without."

"When a young man in Manhattan writes a letter to his girl in Brooklyn, the love message gets blown to her through a pneumatic tube--pfft--just like that. The subterranean system of telephone cables, power lines, steam pipes, gas mains, and sewer pipes is reason enough to abandon the island to the gods and the weevils."

From Colossus of New York:

On the Brooklyn Bridge: "They paste the name of the new mayor over the old mayor to save our tax dollars....Because no matter their political bent they understand the romance of bridges and have taken this walk more than once. This is non-partisan emptiness. Just yards to go. Remembering that disappointed feeling she gets each time she reaches the other side, then feeling that disappointed feeling. Check yourself for damage. Everything is where it should be. No miracle. The key to the city fell out of her pocket somewhere along the way and she's level again."

On Grand Central: "Of course the Dutch were quite shocked to find Grand Central Station under that big pile of dirt. Alas the Indians and their strict no-refund-without-receipt policy. And lo, as the earth cooled, Grand Central bubbled up through miles of magma, lodged in the crust of this island, settled here. The first immigrant. Still unassimilated. Ever indigestible. The river of skyscrapers flows around it. Travelers swim to it and cling, savoring solid handhold in roaring whitewhater. Churches fill up at regular intervals, on a schedule laid out in the business plan. like the best storms, rush hour starts out as a slight drizzle, then becomes unholy deluge."

On Times Square: "Simmer the idea of a metropolis until is reduced to a few blocks, sprinkle in a dash of hype and a tablespoon of woe. Add hubris to taste. Serving size: a lot."

[Editrix's note: when the Katy-Jacob collection of New York essays comes out, it will have both the aforementioned sports section and a lengthy discussion of the Ugg boot- and sweatpants-wearing denizens of 42nd and Broadway.]

Love is Strange

Last night was the inaugural New Yorker Speakeasy, a new series of literary cabaret nights sponsored by the magazine. Given the date, the theme was "Love is Strange." I'm not so sure love was strange last night, so much as intellectualized and neuroticized to the point of no return. Luckily, that's the kind of love I have tons of experience with, so I had a great time.

There was about an hour between when the doors opened and when the festivities started, so Miranda, Jacob, and I amused ourselves with questions like, "Does Sasha Frere-Jones get paid in iTunes giftcards?" and "Who would win in a fight--David Byrne or Gabriel Byrne?" (2 to 1 for Gabriel Byrne, unless the fight takes place in "David Byrne reality.")

The first act was a reading of the most risque story in New Yorker history: "Alma," by Junot Diaz. The magazine's fiction editor claimed that the story's publication marked the first time people canceled subscriptions due to sexual content--no mean feat, in 80+ years. I remember reading the story last year, enjoying it as a piece by a rising modern author, and not thinking too much about the graphic (but well-written!) sex stuff. I guess that's probably more of a reflection on my lack of boundaries or morals or whatever than of the magazine's readership in general. The actor reading it, Victor Rasuk, was charming and energetic enough to pull it off without any of the audience storming out in a huff, and running home to cancel their subscriptions.

Next came a mini-panel on writing and reading about love in fiction (not to be confused with erotimance, by the way). For what is a New Yorker event without a panel? This one had authors Karen Russell and Jeffrey Eugenides picking their favorite love stories from My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekov to Munro (copies of which had been left on our chairs beforehand). Russell's selection was from "We Didn't," a sweet, straightforward piece about teenage fumblings. Eugenides's pick was a little less fun, about the domestic ins and outs of bringing your life partner to a holiday dinner.

Then it was audio-visual time: Richard Brody, the ever-controversial David Denby, and David Remnick all picked their favorite love scenes from movies (In Praise of Love, The Big Sleep, and--strangely enough--Duck Soup).

While the event space was dark for movie time, and Miranda was being hit with the revelation that Bogey and Bacall weren't really talking about horses, Bonafide Celebrity Gabriel Byrne snuck in and sat down a few rows ahead of us. He was the penultimate segment of the night's entertainment. He got up on stage, and instead of launching right into his promised reading of Dylan Thomas's love letters, started telling a story from his own past. A story of lust, loss, and miniskirts in 1960s Dublin. It was rambly but sweet. The letter from Dylan Thomas to his wife was similarly rambly, but less sweet, when you consider that he was drinking himself to death at the time.

The big finale came in the form of Grizzly Bear--a Brooklyn-based indie band which sounds exactly like a Brooklyn-based indie band (complete with skinny jeans, natch), but who reduced Sasha Frere-Jones to gushing openly during their intro. Their set was okay enough, but the best part was a re-imagined version of Jojo's classic "Too Little Too Late" (provided here for Jacob, who swears he hasn't heard the song before).



Anyway, it was a fun evening--love-ish without being saccharine, sexy without being cheap. Cocktails and wit are definitely the way to go on Valentine's Day. I think Dorothy Parker would have been proud.

Hub Fan Bids Updike Adieu

The recent Updike tributes, in the New Yorker and other magazines, were great reminders of his work outside of the Rabbits and the Witches--like an excerpt from one of my favorite sports pieces ever, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." Updike introduced me to a Fenway Park I never knew, but wish I did:

Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

And the Updike extravaganza reminds me that I still haven't attempted to recreate his "Rockefeller Center Ho" trip (from a February 1956 issue of the New Yorker), and see if it is, in fact, possible to get from the Empire State Building to Rockefeller Center without touching 5th or 6th Avenues. I should get on that.

Americana by Don DeLillo

Even before the sad news on Tuesday, I'd been thinking about John Updike lately. And Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Jay McInerney, and all the other Angsty Young Man writers of years past. I recently finished reading Americana, Don DeLillo's first novel, and it's very much in the vein of those others. Glib dude seeks self, seeks tail, seeks less glibness.

Americana follows David Bell, a successful New York TV executive in 1970. Only 28, he's slightly obsessed with being the wunderkind around the office (making his secretary research the ages of any successful peers who might possibly be younger than he is). The first part of the book is a Mad Men-meets-Then We Came to the End scenario, with sharp, entertaining observations about life, love, and quirks in corporate Manhattan.

David is unhappy, although he feels like he shouldn't be: he has girls aplenty; he has an easy job; and he's good-looking, as he tells us repeatedly. David is also obsessed with framing his life as a movie. He describes his outfits in detail. He and his (now ex) wife move through their life together as though Fellini were following them with a camera. Even in divorce, they try for Neil Simon-style hijinks, by living in the same building.

When David's pet TV project is canceled and executives start dropping like flies at the network, he leaves the city, ostensibly to work on a Navajo-themed documentary for the network. He never quite gets there, though, and parts two and three are an On the Road-style attempt at finding meaning in American minutiae. David tags an artist friend whom he really just wants to sleep with, a washed-up journalist, and a failed novelist to go with him in a camper. They travel through the heartland, getting hung up in places like Chicago while he reminisces about his past and makes locals participate in an a weird, obtuse movie, restaging events from David's life. He rearranges all of his inner chaos, but with better blocking and pretentious exterior shots of sweeping American landscapes.

Although David isn't quite likeable (every time you want to cut him some slack for being glib and shallow, he tells an anecdote involving blunt, casual cruelty), it's hard to dislike him for long stretches of time, either. And he's kind of a perfect container for DeLillo's anti-consumerism spiel. It feels more authentic coming from a young, conflicted narrator standing in for a young, conflicted writer. It flows more easily, too--there's just not as much self-conscious social commentary as there is in White Noise, and so I liked Americana better.

I also liked the writing better. It's bumpy sometimes--it's pretty clearly a first novel--but in an endearing way. And the early descriptions of office life are just so dead-on, even 38 years later.

It looks like I'll have to do another DeLillo book soon, to see where the best-of-three lands.

Parts I liked especially:

"One sought to avoid categories and therefore confound the formulators. For to be neither handsome nor unattractive, neither ruthless nor clever, was to be considered a hero by the bland, a nice fellow by the brilliant and the handsome, a nonentity by the clever, a bright young man by the ruthless, a threat by the dangerously neurotic, an intimate and loyal friend by the alienated and the doomed. I did my best to lay low."

"Meredith was not so secure in her maturity that she did not suffer those periods of despondency and self-doubt which seem to weave through the lives of self-reliant women."

"There is a motel in the heart of every man. Where the highway begins to dominate the landscape, beyond limits of a large and reduplicating city, near a major point of arrival and departure: this is most likely where it stands....Men hold this motel firmly in their hearts; here flows the dream of the confluence of travel and sex."

Save the words

Remember how in the 80s, Cabbage Patch dolls would come with little adoption certificates? And you'd have a good feeling, 'cause you were saving some adorable, chubby-cheeked urchin from a life of drudgery, picking cabbage leaves or whatever? Well, I don't have a Cabbage Patch Kid anymore (little Oliver Wendell is languishing somewhere in my parents' attic, I think), but I've found something that provides similar warm fuzzies and similar uselessness to society at large: save the words.

You "pledge" to save a word by using it in conversation, or scrawling it on the subway or whatever. This clearly isn't a decision to take lightly, so here are the words I'm considering saving:

frutescent - shrublike

oncethmus - the loud and harsh cry of a donkey

legatarian - pertaining to a deputy

panchymagogue - medicine purging bodily fluids from the body

phylactology - science of counter-espionage

plebicolar - appealing to the common people

venustation - the act of becoming beautiful or handsome

So tough to choose...they all need good homes...and how do you know which ones are going to grow up to resent you, once they're accepted back into the lexicon thanks to your love and nurturing?

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

We live in a post-superhero world. Today's presidential events aside, as a society we seem to be past the need for a cool dude--wrapped in American determination and blessed with superb ass-kicking kills--to sweep in and dispose of our street crime. We've got bigger problems.

The interesting thing about Watchmen, a limited-series DC comic, is that its creator saw this coming--23 years ago. Now retroactively repurposed as more of a graphic novel (thus saving its dignity, I guess), Watchmen is more sophisticated than your average superhero comic.

The main action of the book takes place in an alternate October 1985, where Nixon is still president (!). About seven years earlier, a federal act illegalized (is that a word? I'm going with it) "costumed adventurer" vigilantism, because the self-appointed heroes were getting in the way of the police. By the time the act was passed, costumed adventuring had become a cottage industry: some heroes had cashed in with endorsement deals and action figures; others offered themselves as rent-a-heroes for corporations; and the porn implications were pretty much endless. In short, Americans ruined helpful vigilantism the way we ruin everything else. So all practicing adventurers were forced into retirement or underground.

These included an old clique of heroes, who spent more time bickering than actually saving anyone:

• the Comedian, a brutal government mercenary who's not actually funny;
• the Nite Owl, a nebbishy guy who came up with a lot of Batman-esque gadgets with a bird theme;
• the original Silk Spectre, the token chick, who pushed her daughter into the family business;
• the second Silk Spectre (Laurie the daughter), who bitches a lot about being forced into the costume, but enjoys the benefits of dating other heroes;
• Ozymandias, a genius with an Alexander the Great fetish, who turned his previous hero popularity into a multibillion-dollar brand;
  
• Rorshach, an ink-blot-masked sociopath who avenges anything and everything he can get his hands on; and
• Dr. Manhattan, the one genuine "superhero," who was accidentally baked in a nuclear test oven, was obliterated to atoms, and reconstructed himself somehow as a godlike being. He has the ability to change matter, teleport, and know everything that will ever happen at all times. Because he's indestructible and has unlimited powers, of course he's on retainer by the U.S. government as the not-so-secret weapon of national security.

The story kicks in when one of them is found dead, and it starts looking like someone is hunting "masks," or the adventurers of old. But the more intriguing underplot is the unfolding of these heroes' history together--all the nastiness, the ineffectiveness, and neuroses that undid the whole lifestyle. The comics themselves, divided up into about ten different "chapters," are interspersed with fake memoir excerpts, magazine articles, etc. which give context to the characters.

Perhaps most interesting of all is the idea of how America would really approach grown men in costumes, taking it upon themselves to fight crime. This is the kind of thing that was touched upon in The Dark Knight last summer--what happens when a social construct outlives its usefulness? What do you do when the hero causes more damage than the villains he's chasing? You legislate it out of existence, that's what you do. But by then it's already part of the larger cultural consciousness, so you get a weird, shadowy area in the middle.

The writing is sharp--beyond the superhero issues, there's an interesting channeling of Cold War anxiety. And the art is pretty gorgeous, in a dark and grim kind of way. I don't know that this will get me into comics any more than The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay did last summer, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. If the movie is anywhere near as good, I'll happily fork over my ten bucks.

Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008

Sometimes I like to pretend that I'm cool and literary. If I had more time and money, this double identity would involve reading magazines like n+1 and The Paris Review, and being familiar with the hip new short story writers. But I have neither time nor cash, so I depend on Dave Eggers's Best American Nonrequired Reading every year to fill the gap.

But the collection has been disappointing in recent years, and I thought about skipping it this year altogether. Then I saw who wrote the introduction for the 2008 edition: Judy Blume. Five minutes later, the Amazon transaction was complete. (My inner eleven-year-old makes far too many of my financial decisions.)

It's not actually a traditional intro, but rather an interview with Ms. Blume. It's full of non-sequiturs (and features a hand-drawn self-portrait), but it's entertaining enough. Plus, it reveals that her favorite Judy Blume book is also mine (Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, FYI).

The "Best American ___" lists at the front were uneven as usual. Bad hipster band names stop being funny after the first two. But I did like "Best American NY Times Headlines from 1907" and "Best American Facebook Groups," which included:

Legalize Dueling
Automatic Doors Make Me Feel Like a Jedi
I Have to Sing the ABCs to Know Which Letter Comes Before the Other
It Wasn’t Awkward Until You Said “Well, This Is Awkward.” Now It’s Awkward.
Carol Never Wore Her Safety Goggles. Now She Doesn't Need Them.

And I really liked
Best American Diary of the Living Dead: Are You There, God? It's Me. Also a Bunch of Zombies. It's no zombie-version-of-The Great Gatsby, but then what is?

The journalism is so-so. There's a New Yorker article that I never made it through when it was in the magazine. They reprint the Pulitzer-winning piece on Joshua Bell and busking that still makes me feel guilty when I tune out subway musicians. And the requisite Serious International Piece (an essay about African-Americans and Israel by Emily Raboteau) is interesting, but overlong. Probably the most interesting one is "Bill Clinton, Public Citizen," by George Saunders. Saunders was on the press corps for Clinton's big African tour, and giddy about it from start to finish. The Vanity Fair article, this is not. It does provide flashes of the old, much more fun Bill Clinton--pre-primary. In fact, I think Hillary is mentioned just once, in passing. The article is much more about Saunders's mancrush on Bill. Also, AIDS patients in Africa. But mostly the mancrush.

The short stories are better."Darkness," by Andrew Sean Greer, explores the relationship of an elderly lesbian couple, set against the backdrop of the sun's sudden and total disappearance. I'd disliked Greer's previous novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, but he's redeemed himself now. Another story I enjoyed was "Cake" by Patrick Tobin, which follows a thoroughly unlikeable chronic pain patient through a final meltdown. A new story by Stephen King was good too (slightly eerie, decently written, and only partly set in New England).

The graphic novel excerpts, well...I'm still not a graphic novel convert. I'm trying, but when one of the chosen excerpts is about a graphic novelist who has trouble writing his graphic novel, things are getting a little too meta. Give me good old-fashioned prose any day. But they do add visual interest to the book.

All in all, the book made for good subway reading--and now I can hold off on that Paris Review subscription for at least another year!