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.