Faithful Place by Tana French

Ah, the cop with a traumatic past. It's a classic. Bonus points for having a dysfunctional family and a past relationship that has ruined his ability to connect with any other woman. Super double bonus points if he's a loose cannon at work.

Anyway, such a figure has been the basis for many a beloved thriller/crime novel, and Tana French's Faithful Place is no exception. The rogue cop in question is Frank Mackey, a minor character from French's second novel, The Likeness. Frank is an undercover specialist who has no fear of mingling with drug dealers and Dublin thugs, but is terrified of his own dysfunctional family. You can guess who, then, is the driving force behind his narrative.

Everything starts when Frank gets word from his sister (the one member of his family he hasn't completely shunned) that a suitcase was found in a crumbling house in the Old Neighborhood(tm). The suitcase just happens to belong to Rosie Daly, the girl with whom teenage Frank had made secret plans to run away from home in 1986. Rosie never showed up that night, and a wounded Frank moved on by trying to disappear (almost literally) into police work and an unhappy marriage. It's not an ideal life, but it kinda works for him, and he gets along on the thrills of his job and the genuine happiness his young daughter brings him. Then the suitcase turns up, and all hell (read: introspection) breaks loose when he's force to go back to his the neighborhood (Faithful Place) to figure out what the hell happened to Rosie. Did she ditch their plans and their ferry tickets to run off to London by herself? Was she a casualty of the ugly, booze-soaked underbelly of their blue-collar cul-de-sac?

The book moves back and forth between the ordinary love story of two blue-collar kids wanting to escape the Dublin projects (which makes it more Bono than Bon Jovi) and Frank's present-day struggle to accept the various possibilities of Rosie's abandonment. And looking into Rosie's disappearance means hanging around the old 'hood, which hasn't changed much--and his family, who have changed even less. At first, you think Frank might be exaggerating about the awfulness of the Mackeys--but then the obvious resentment they all feel (alternately shrieking and simmering) starts to create pressure in your own head by about a hundred pages in, and you start to understand why Frank would rather be punched in the face than go home for Sunday dinners. Drinking, emotional cruelty, neighborhood brawls, this crowd has it all.

As with her previous books, French's best work is in her characters. Frank is obnoxious, but likable (something I didn't think was possible after his first appearance in The Likeness). Even his collectively awful family has some positives as well, undercutting Frank's characterization of them as total savages. Rosie comes off as a little, well, rosy, but that's probably to be expected when she exists mostly as a flashback of first love.

And I still love her method of series-building--creating place and mood without confining her fictional world to a single voice/perspective. Of the three novels, I think Faithful Place is the best-written, start to finish. Frank's arc is most satisfying of all the protagonists', and French doesn't let the plot kind of sputter out like she does with the first two. This one does deal more in cliches (the aforementioned short-fused cop, the heavy-drinking Irish family, etc.), but the writing is layered, and constructed tight enough to distract from that. French works hard to refine familiar elements of crime/detective fiction, and mixes it all up so inextricably in her characters that it feels fresh. My biggest regret with this one is that now it'll be at least a year or two until her next one comes along.

One Day by David Nicholls

If you have a one-night stand with someone who becomes your best friend, is that a touching story of human connection, or a lesson in how not to have a one-night stand? Well, both.

One Day, a novel by David Nicholls, explores the twenty-ish-year relationship of Dexter and Emma, two young Brits who cross paths for the first time on the night they graduate from college in 1988. The book checks in on them every subsequent year on the same date, July 15 (St. Swithin's Day). (There's a reason behind this structure, which you find considerably later in the narrative.) After an exceptionally awkward--but cute--night together, they find they can't cut each other loose or make the decision to become lovers for real. So they take the platonic path by default.

Dexter, a charmed kid all around, heads out on postgrad travel to figure things out (read: spend his parents' money while "finding himself" in India, Dublin, Venice, etc.). Meanwhile, Emma, an earnest and practical suburban girl, is stuck with a more pedestrian self-discovery process in England. But they stay in touch--Dexter's brief, cheerful postcards cross paths with her long, self-consciously cute letters for that first year. And somehow, they end up as each other's de facto best friend.

The next few years find Dexter's life moving upward (he's got television career opportunities and more girls than he can handle), and Emma's settling in somewhere around "aimless despair." There are some painful near-misses, as they alternate being the one who contemplates pursuing something deeper (mostly on her part, though there's an especially cringe-inducing letter that Dexter decides not to send). But for the most part, they settle into a pattern: Dexter sleeps with anything attractive that crosses his path, and takes it for granted that "good old Em" will be there whenever he needs companionship (unless a better sex or party option comes up). Emma unintentionally keeps all her other relationships at arm-distance in case Dexter changes his mind. Once they're both settled in London, it becomes a form of "just friends" kabuki, with specific rules and expectations.

Over the years, their circumstances shift and their relationship shifts (spouses, baby, career success, career failure, an estrangement, etc.), but their codependence is such that you know that no matter how douchey Dexter gets (and it gets pretty heinous) or how neurotic Emma gets, there's no walking away from that shared history. It's an honest, sometimes brutal portrait of a relationship between two people who know on some level that they need to be together--but just can't verbalize it or push it to the next level. And the best thing that Nicholls does is make Dexter and Emma appealing and funny enough that even in their most unpleasant individual moments, you still want them to get together (or kill the other one once and for all) on the next July 15th. The ebbs and flows, like and dislike, lust and meh, feel awfully real as the advantage pings back and forth between them over the years.

Also entertaining is the time span: 1988 - 2007. It's basically a rousing game of "hey, remember the 90s"? Dexter becomes a VJ-type microcelebrity who hosts various loud pop culture shows on TV. Emma works at an obnoxious American Tex-Mex chain restaurant in London, and dates an aspiring stand-up comedian who bases his material on observational humor. From the clothes to the hair, the little touches are cute.

The writing itself is solid and Hornby-esque: engaging, full of self-amusing references, and extremely readable. The structure, the once-a-year check-in, keeps the narrative from getting too bunchy. And it lets Nicholls keep the sentimentality to a minimum (until the somewhat maudlin ending, which didn't thrill me). In fact, some of the cuts and revelations are flat-out merciless, because they have to be. I appreciated the fact that this forces the writer and reader to look at the long-term implications for both Dexter and Emma, not just the endless present that most novels would pick. And it'll translate well into its movie incarnation--especially because the story's not as predictable as you might expect.

Overall, a satisfying read.

Parts I liked:

"She had imagined this arrangement to be sophisticated, modern, a new design for living. But so much effort is required to pretend that they don't want to be together that it has recently seemed inevitable that one of them will crack. She just hadn't expected it to be Dexter."

"Sometimes, she thought, she missed the intensity....of the early days of their friendship. She remembered writing ten-page letters late into the night; insane, passionate things full of dopey sentiment and barely hidden meanings, exclamation marks and underlining. For a while she had written daily postcards too, on top of the hour-long phone calls just before bed. That time in the flat in Dalston when they had stayed up talking and listening to records, only stopping when the sun began to rise, or at his parents' house, swimming in the river on New Year's Day, or that afternoon drinking absinthe in the secret bar in Chinatown; all of these moments and more were recorded and stored in notebooks and letters and wads of photographs, endless photographs. there was a time, it must have been in the early nineties, when they were barely able to pass a photo-booth without cramming inside it, because they had yet to take each other's permanent presence for granted."

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

If you've ever wondered what keeps a friendship together over the years, I don't recommend going to an Ian McEwan book for answers--the response could be "banging the same chick" or "not much."

McEwan's Amsterdam, the latest Jacob-Katy book club novel, delves into issues like the nature of friendship, as mentioned, but also explores what happens when spite bubbles up through the veneer of civility and poisons everything. It's an interesting character study of what people do when petty disagreements are inflamed further by ego and self-justification.

The novel focuses on Clive (a composer working on a major piece to celebrate the upcoming millenium) and Vernon (an editor trying desperately to prop up a flailing newspaper), two old friends who come together for the funeral of Molly Lane. Molly wasn't just a mutual acquaintance--at various times in her life, she'd dated both men. But at some point their shared lust for (and ultimate loss of) Molly turned into a slightly bitchy, though apparently genuine friendship. They've also bonded over their joint contempt for two other guys connected to Molly: her last husband and another ex, a vaguely insufferable British politician. After Molly's death, the four men come together for one last show of (subdued) macho one-upsmanship, before returning to their lives.

In the funeral's aftermath, terrified of their own mortality, Vernon and Clive make a pact to be there for one another if things ever get as bad as they did for Molly, who died from a rapid and grotesque degenerative disease. Meanwhile, Molly's husband presents Vernon with a shocking memento from his wife's belongings: pictures of Julian, the politician, in a politically embarrassing position. Vernon struggles with the possibility of saving his career by publishing such a sensationalistic story--but at the cost of ruining a man's life. As Vernon tries to move ahead with the photos, against the nagging voices telling him otherwise, there are some interesting Julius Caesar-esque intrigues in his newspaper office. He looks for some guidance from his friend, but gets little except testy opposition from Clive, who is increasingly consumed by the symphony he's trying to compose.

As Vernon bumbles around trying to justify his decision, Clive starts sacrificing everything to create his musical masterpiece--and makes a few moral blunders of his own. The stressed-out crankiness of both men escalates into an overblown fight, which leads to regrettable decisions that undo pretty much all of the goodwill they'd built in their post-Molly lives.

The book is short, and very blunt. The story never ventures far from its central line, and McEwan doesn't waste time in pushing the narrative to a vicious and somewhat surprising (if a little underbaked) ending. I think he could have fleshed out the story a little more--and could have illustrated Molly a little better, too, before dropping her almost entirely from the story. McEwan's female characters tend to have a bit of a glossed-over appearance: doting, attractive, and game for the male chatacters' sexual whims. They're plot levers. But what I like most about McEwan's writing is in full effect: his sharp and perfectly-phrased sentences, as well as characters you can't shake right away.

Amsterdam is one of the shorter and less complicated books in the book club oeuvre, but was fairly successful. And the discussion had no friendship-ending arguments, so I don't think we need to worry about going the way of Clive and Vernon--at least not for a few years yet.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Audiobooks, But Were Afraid to Ask

While the world is obsessing about eBooks, Woody Allen has a different ultra-modern technology on his mind. Audiobooks.

Audiobooks by a Technophobe

From the article:

Q. How were you persuaded to embrace the audiobook format? Do you own or regularly use any of the high-tech gadgets that play these files?

A. I was persuaded in a moment of apathy when I was convinced I had a fatal illness and would not live much longer. I don’t own a computer, have no idea how to work one, don’t own a word processor, and have zero interest in technology. Many people thought it would be a nice idea for me to read my stories, and I gave in.

Oh, Woody. What do you want to bet someone told him audio would be a nice idea...in 1974? (...She scoffs, as she runs to iTunes to fork over $1.95 for "The Whore of Mensa.")

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith

Some people think President Lincoln was gay. Some think he was a patronizer of prostitutes. Some think he was a Republican. Lots of theories, lots of dubiousness. But we can shut all the rest down, y'all, 'cause I think we have a winner: Abraham Lincoln was a vampire hunter, and that was the consuming issue of his life.

Okay, not really. (But this seems just as plausible as the idea that he was ever in the same general political room as Dick Cheney, no?) And it's the central idea of Seth Grahame-Smith's novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. The book essentially takes what Grahame-Smith started in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and applies it to a public domain life instead of a public domain Victorian novel.

As someone who would put Lincoln in her top five presidents, but isn't necessarily a presidential purist, I liked it. I think there are respectful ways to be playful and cheeky with historical content, and that's what Grahame-Smith does--he takes something you already know, tweaks it a little, and makes it seem fresh without undercutting the original. In P&P&Z's case, that means channeling Austen-style feminist rage through flesh-eating monsters. In Lincoln's case, it's pulling a context (vampire domination) over the crushing inhumanity of the slavery issue. (Slaves are essentially captive prey for vampires, leading Lincoln to conclude that African slavery ends up enslaving all Americans.)

The most successful part of the book is that Grahame-Smith weaves everything together so that you tend to forget where the real threads stop and the absurd new ones begin. Like, I know that Real Abe Lincoln suffered some heavy losses in his life (mother, sister, girlfriend, children, etc.). But I also don't stop to question it when I read that his mother's "milk sickness" was really the act of a malicious vampire. Or that Jefferson Davis was fighting the Union to serve evil vampire overlords who viewed Southern-style repression as the way to keep humans in check. I don't think twice when I think of Abe and his good buddy, Joshua Speed, fighting vampires side by side (though honestly, that one might be because I find their rumored real-life hooker-based shenanigans to be pretty icky).

The least successful part of the book is that it takes 300+ pages to hammer this singular "what if?" point. The book opens with a great set piece that explains how the author (or "biographer") came to possess Lincoln's secret journals and was chosen to spread this "truth" to the world. And the re-framing of Lincoln's childhood and young adulthood as a 19th century Buffy Summers has its charm (there's even an Edgar Allen Poe cameo!). But by the time the umpteenth Lincoln loved one is killed by a vampire, and the Civil War is raging, with supernatural-tinged casualties at Bull Run, you're kind of over it. And so is the author, I think. But such is the problem with taking existing material for your base: you have to run its predetermined course. And any purported Lincoln biography has to end at Ford's Theater, if you're really going to commit to your conceit.

Overall, I'd recommend, especially for summer reading. No one will mistake the the scholarship for Doris Kearns Goodwin, but at least now we know that one of our presidents was committed to saving us from the scourge of vampires (thanks for nothing, Millard Fillmore).

The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut

Even if you haven't read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or either of its sequels, chances are you know someone who has--or at least you've seen someone with his or her nose stuck in the Swedish noir on public transportation. But if you've actually read it, you know that the writing has some...challenges. Namely, beloved tropes and repeated language that the author uses to shoehorn certain plot elements in there.

This week's New Yorker has a spot-on parody of the books by Nora Ephron. No word on whether her movie version will star Meg Ryan.

"She tried to remember whether she was speaking to him or not. Probably not. She tried to remember why. No one knew why. It was undoubtedly because she’d been in a bad mood at some point. Lisbeth Salander was entitled to her bad moods on account of her miserable childhood and her tiny breasts, but it was starting to become confusing just how much irritability could be blamed on your slight figure and an abusive father you had once deliberately set on fire and then years later split open the head of with an axe."

As JF pointed out, the only thing missing from the Ephron version is a trip out for sandwiches and espresso in the middle of the night.

A Harper Lee joint

Who knew there's a reclusive author out there who makes the late J.D. Salinger look like an extrovert?

Britain's Daily Mail managed to score a rare and prized interview with Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the book. The catch? She won't talk about the book. Or anything relating to the book. The extent of the interview:

"Thank you so much,’ she told me. ‘You are most kind. We’re just going to feed the ducks but call me the next time you are here. We have a lot of history here. You will enjoy it."

Something tells me she won't be hitting up Oprah next. But I found it kind of charming. You've got to respect a writer who either knows her limitations, and didn't force a bunch of less satisfying books into the market just to prove she could do it again; or who simply decided she was Over It and didn't want to publish anymore.

Of course, there's the "what literature could we have had?" argument. But while I'd be curious about that, I don't think authors really owe us anything. And I don't think I'd trade the impact of, say, Franny and Zooey for a drawn-out, increasingly morbid and self-obsessed canon (sorry, messieurs Roth and Updike).

And this article reminded me that I really do need to read To Kill a Mockingbird (instead of saying I'd read it when, really, I'd just "read" the Gregory Peck version). It's a sad fact of my public school education, English major career, and general American Lit devotion that I've managed to avoid it so far. This summer, I swear!

40 is the new 26

So the New York Times announced The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 list. Do we really need an article about an article? Why not just wait for the magazine to print the freaking list? Usually, this kind of hijinks is saved for the hard-hitting venues, like Access Hollywood's exclusive "Inside People's 50 Most Beautiful People List." But anyway, since it's obviously not a secret anymore, here are the picks for the top 20 young go-getters of fiction:

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 32
  
• Chris Adrian, 39
  
• Daniel Alarcón, 33
  
• David Bezmozgis, 37
  
• Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, 38
  
• Joshua Ferris, 35
  
• Jonathan Safran Foer, 33
  
• Nell Freudenberger, 35
  
• Rivka Galchen, 34
  
• Nicole Krauss, 35
  
• Yiyun Li, 37
  
• Dinaw Mengestu, 31
  
• Philipp Meyer, 36
  
• C. E. Morgan, 33
  
• Téa Obreht, 24
  
• Z Z Packer, 37
  
• Karen Russell, 28
  
• Salvatore Scibona, 35
  
• Gary Shteyngart, 37
  
• Wells Tower, 37

Of the 20, I've only read one extensively (Joshua Ferris). So I can't really get excited one way or another about the actual inclusions. But I find their ages very interesting. Only two of them are younger than I am. This means there's still time to produce that great work of fiction I haven't managed to produce in almost 30 years. Nice! See ya, Orson Welles watermark.

BEA postgame

Book Expo America (BEA) this year was kind of a weird affair. Book publishing has been in death throes for a while now (if you listen to all the Chicken Little articles, anyway), but apparently books are still being signed, created, and publicized--go figure. But the times, they are a-changin' regardless. Instead of the usual four-day book bacchanalia, this year's expo was condensed to two midweek days at the Javits Center here in NYC--and one floor of the convention center. Lean times or late reservation paperwork? You decide.

There were still the usual elegant booths for the big publishers, homey little ones for the smaller ones, and freebies galore. I scored, in no particular order:

* a large purple umbrella
* a foam rubber gavel
* a massive tote bag (I felt slightly guilty about accepting it from a direct competitor, but it probably saved my poor shoulders, which can't schlep as much free stuff as they used to)
* several smaller tote bags, including a replacement for my beloved BookTV one from last year
* a candle advertising the latest James Patterson book
* a tree sapling
* a Steve Martin lunchbag
* lots of galleys

I was a little surprised at the overall selection of books coming out this fall. I didn't see much in the way of big-name memoirs. Even the event's headliner, Barbra Streisand, was there for her book on design. The high-profile stuff was mostly political-ish, like the upcoming Earth (The Book)--and The Promise, signed by Jonathan Alter, which was my personal highlight of the day. I'm still working on The Bridge, but am really looking forward to this one too. Sadly, I didn't manage to complete the Obama trifecta by getting a copy of The Manchurian President, the author of which was also at BEA. Shucks. (On a similar note, the Regnery booth just didn't seem as busy as many others. Fewer freebies than other companies? Not many birthers among the librarians, booksellers, and publishing people milling about?)

There was also a surprising number of books on growing/legalizing pot. Not so surprisingly, those booths (at least three different publishers by my count) were hopping.

All in all, it was a good day. Believe it or not, my main intent wasn't (just) free books, but rather research. I got some interesting info on digital products (the smaller companies really seem to be ahead of the curve on that), and met a good number of people. I also made a friend at one point when a guy walking by was excited about the James Patterson galley I had in my pile, and was genuinely touched when I offered it to him. Good book karma. (And justification for my indiscriminate galley-accepting policy at these events.)

Now I just have to read everything I got. Good thing I finally cleared out the pile from last year! (...she said, knowing that the best of intentions won't stop this vicious cycle from repeating itself in 2011.)

Better Know a Classic: The Great Gatsby

Every couple of years, I reread The Great Gatsby. It's my favorite book, but that's not really why I keep picking it up--I've had plenty of favorites over the years that I don't really turn back to, for fear that they won't hold up. (I've been avoiding the Memoirs of a Geisha reread for pretty much that reason.) But I know that Gatsby will. And it never disappoints--it's still as close to a perfect novel as I've ever read.

I didn't always feel that way. The first time I read it, in an "eh, it's a classic and I should do it" fit of self-improvement in high school, I wasn't enamored. But then it was taught in one of the craziest lit classes I ever took in college (American Lit with a certifiable professor), something clicked, and I fell in love. (That's kind of how I roll; it's always the second glance that gets me.) And each time I read it, I notice something different--a turn of phrase that sparkles, a subtlety of character, or some random little moment that never jumped out at me before.

I think the narrator, Nick Carraway, has benefited the most from these multiple looks. First I thought he was too reticent; then I thought he was using the Daisy-Gatsby drama to cover up his own latent crush on Gatsby; and eventually I just decided he was unreliable. But I don't think so anymore. Maybe it's because he's 30 and I'm pushing it as well, but now I think he just kind of patches things together as best he can, as the only sane person on Long Island. He's very efficient, that Nick. He keeps everything moving along at a good clip, hustling through back stories that would have been fifty pages of exposition in another author's book (cough*Faulkner*cough).

I also feel more lenient toward Daisy these days. She's still a jerk, don't get me wrong--having a voice "full of money" doesn't excuse pitting men against one another for sport, or mowing down your husband's mistress--but I don't think she's malicious. She's bored and unhappy and desperate, with childlike comprehension of consequences. And without actual stuff to do (how did people entertain themselves in 1925 when gin wasn't handy?), it's easier to see how and why she lets things get so far out of hand, so fast. There's also the fact that everyone's pretty much egging her on, something I never really noticed before. No one (even Nick, with his constant disapproval) really stops to say, "Hmm, maybe you shouldn't cheat on your husband with the rich guy with the crazy eyes."

And I think the part that amazes me most is how wall-to-wall good the writing is. Nearly every sentence is airtight and eloquent. There's no questionable extravagance in a book that's all about questionable extravagance. So this book is as much a triumph of editing (both Fitzgerald's and, presumably, Maxwell Perkins's) as it is of the writing. (And having dealt now with some...colorful authors myself as an editor, I appreciate the wrangling it must have taken to get Fitzgerald to turn in anything on time and in decent shape.)

All in all, very happy with the biennial visit to West Egg.

Some of my favorite parts, this round:

"The bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names."

"She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented 'place' that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village--appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand."

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

When the shortlist for this round of book club came up, I picked The Day of the Locust because it's been lauded as one of the best novels of the 20th century, and even had blurbs from author Nathanael West's contemporaries, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Malcolm Cowley. So I figured that with the lavish praise and the book's 1930s Hollywood setting, it would be somewhat Fitzgeraldesque.

Not so much. It's really more of a novella than a full novel, and an underdeveloped one at that. It's the story of Tod Hackett, an artist-cum-set-painter who moves to Los Angeles for the same reasons presumably everyone else did in the 30s: to trade the hardship and tedium of Depression-era America for something more exciting and glamorous. West's Hollywood is filled with people who have "come here to die," and Tod is fascinated by the quiet, insistent subclass that has popped up--the extras, crew members, and various hangers-on who fill out the movie industry. So between the actual scenery and the human scenery, Tod is kept pretty busy with an unofficial "artistic" study of it all. (He doesn't seem to notice or care that he's one of them as well.)

But of course there's a girl, too. He falls in lust with one of his neighbors, the beautiful movie extra Faye Greener, who wants to be an It Girl. But Faye doesn't seem to have much working for her on that front, except a vague idea that she needs to be a star, and a knack for making men act like idiots in her presence. She manages to hook Tod, a hapless Midwestern dude named Homer Simpson (seriously!), and a couple of cowboy types who basically stand around doing nothing until there's a movie that needs, well, cowboy types. Faye flirts, teases, and manipulates her way through the group of men, getting what she needs for herself and her aging showbiz father. And the guys all put up with it--paying for cuckolded dates, jockeying for her attention, buying her things. The only one who's close to a decent human being is Homer 'cause he's sweet and clueless, and even he's on the far end of the "acceptable" spectrum. And if there's any point that the book approaches Fitzgeraldism, it's in the fact that none of the characters are especially likeable--but here, there's no amazing prose to back that up, or an especially compelling plot.

The plot feels episodic and a little random. The only real common thread is violence: in the book there's a subtext-heavy cockfight, an actual fight among Faye's suitors, a fight with a little person, a fight with a child, forced sex...you name the brutality, it's in here somewhere. And for all of the emphasis on Tod's chronicling all of this for his art, you don't actually get to see much of that happen. And after a few carefully thematic scenes, including a riot at a movie premiere, West relies on very little else to convey meaning and relevance.

And I think it's a shame, because this novella could have been so much better as a standalone work if it had just been fleshed out, and not reliant on the ennui/inertia of the characters to get the major points made.

Oh, well--not the favorite book club book (on either of our parts, unless Jacob has had a major revelation since last night), but at least it was brief. On to the next one! And to The Great Gatsby, because I realized that I would have been much happier doing the semi-annual reread.

The Likeness by Tana French

A few weeks ago I read In the Woods by Tana French, an absorbing mystery set in Dublin. I enjoyed French's style, and was enthusiastic to read what came next.

The Likeness picks up, plot-wise, where its predecessor left off. But instead of following the same narrator, it focuses on Cassie Maddox, the (now former) partner of the previous protagonist, Rob Ryan. Basically, after the events of the last novel, Cassie is left completely burned out. She has ditched her primo Murder job to join the much less glamorous Domestic Violence squad, and struggles to get through the day-to-day mundanities, despite a supportive boyfriend (Sam, who's still a Murder detective) and a job with much less pressure.

But lest we think Cassie is going to be left to wallow for long, a murder victim turns up stabbed in a cottage in the Irish countryside. And theoretically it's not Cassie's problem anymore. But not only is the victim a dead ringer (ha!) for Cassie, the girl's papers identify her as "Lexie Madison"--the identity that Cassie herself invented for an undercover assignment that began and ended years ago. But identity theft aside, it's not every day that you get a victim who happens to look exactly like a local detective with undercover experience, I'm guessing. But once you get past that awfully convenient set-up, things get interesting fast.

Cassie's former mentor, a gung-ho type who's frothing at the mouth to investigate a murder from the inside out, has a plan: they'll tell the dead girl's friends that hey, false alarm, the stabbing wasn't fatal. Cassie will undergo a crash course in Lexie's daily life, mannerisms, and known associates. Cassie will become the dead girl, figure out how the chick ended up with the fake identity in the first place, and suss out who wanted her dead. Of course. Detective-on-the-case Sam doesn't want Cassie to take the risk of a) pretending to be someone who generates stabby ill will; or b) putting herself in the position of becoming Lexie Madison a second time--'cause what if the killer was someone holding a grudge against Cassie's iteration of Lexie, and not the impostor's? However, in the grand tradition of mild-mannered boyfriend characters everywhere, Sam's objections are quashed pretty quickly, and Cassie agrees to go undercover as Lexie.

The most difficult part of the transition is that Lexie had been living with a small,extremely close group of friends from her literature PhD program. Because there's a good chance that one of them is the killer, none of them can know what Cassie's up to. So, much of the novel is Cassie assimilating into this tight-knit group--no small task when the group (three guys and two girls) is so codependent that menstrual calendars aren't even secret. It involves a good bit of disbelief suspension, but it's interesting to watch Cassie straddle her duties as a cop with her devotion to melding into Lexie's life, and becoming caught up in the quirks and appealing (if odd) structure of Lexie's life with this crew. At the same time, Cassie needs to figure out how the girl ended up with the Lexie Madison identity at all. So it's one big ball of potential clusterfuck. Cassie knows it, and starts caring less. The reader knows it, and that's what keeps the tension going throughout.

As with In the Woods, what French lacks in plausibility, she makes up for with good characters and solid writing. Cassie makes a better (and much more reliable) narrator than Rob, and the sequel is both tighter overall, and structured better than the first. And I like the way French is creating her series: keeping the setting, the sensibility, and the periphery, while switching out the voices. Commercially, people like a protagonist they can get behind for ten books (and however many movies)--but literarily (is that a word?), it's much richer to create an arc this way. Although I definitely got attached to Cassie, I'm looking forward to the third book this summer, with yet another narrator.

Parts I liked:

"I don't tell people this, it's nobody's business, but the job is the nearest thing I've got to a religion. The detective's god is truth, and you don't get much higher or more ruthless than that. The sacrifice, at least in Murder and Undercover--and those were always the ones I wanted, why go chasing diluted versions when you could have the breathtaking full-on thing?--is anything or everything you've got, your time, your dreams, your marriage, your sanity, your life. Those are the coldest and most capricious gods of the lot, and if they accept you into their service they take not what you want to offer but what they choose."

"Have you noticed how easily the very young die? They make the best martyrs for any cause, the best soldiers. It's because they're held here so lightly: they haven't yet accumulated loves and responsibilities and commitments and all the things that tie us securely to this world. They can let go of it as easily and simply as lifting a finger. But as you get older, you begin to find things that are worth holding onto, forever. It changes the very fabric of you."

Shorts

Last week's New Yorker was one of the more satisfying ones in recent memory--and they've been on a good streak with the fiction as well.

I really liked E.L. Doctorow's piece Edgemont Drive. Short, simple, meditation on dispossession and suburban priorities.

And last week's story, Allegra Goodman's La Vita Nuova, was similarly punchy. I found this one poignant 'cause I identified with it more directly, but I think it's well-constructed. I'm a little leery of a story that begins with a woman getting dumped by a fiance, but it never veers into chick lit-ish self-pity. I'm not familiar with Ms. Goodman's work, but I'll probably check her out.

Underworld by Don DeLillo

So the latest book club book was Don DeLillo's Underworld. Jacob already has this covered, but I felt guilty not holding up my end of the book club. (Especially since I was the one who proposed this round's short list.) And this one is significant because he's our first repeat author, after we did White Noise a couple of years ago. Neither of us liked it much, but I'd tackled Americana by myself and enjoyed it considerably more. So Underworld, the canonical one, was the true test.

And the verdict is: meh. I think I'm getting burned out on ultra-post-whatever-modern writers. A girl needs a plot that hangs together once in a while, y'know? I don't want an epic that shows me everything you can do. I don't want clever conversation; I never want to work that hard; I want you just the waaaaay you are....Oops.

So yeah. I do like challenging books. But I'm willing to expend less and less patience on books that shuffle you around, tell you everything's brilliant, you'll see, it's coming, and then...fin. And DeLillo is really good at that--possibly the best. His writing is solid enough to keep you hooked in on the promise of a revelation that never actually comes. I get that this puts the focus on the characters and the mini-arcs he creates. But unless those come together in a cohesive way, it's more of an ambitious collection of short fiction than a single novel. And Underworld has too many moving pieces (few of which are linked in anything more than a perfunctory way) to be a satisfying whole.

The novel ostensibly follows Nick Shay, an Arizona waste management executive struggling in middle age with an unsatisfying marriage and a juvenile delinquent past he doesn't really want to think about. But DeLillo does, and so 80% of the book is spent trying to tie Nick's past with the American 20th century landscape. This includes baseball (of course), the atomic bomb, the New York art scene, and Cold War anxieties. As separate pieces of fiction, they work. I especially liked the middle section, following an artist, Klara Sax, who struggles with her identities as a wife/mother and an artist in the 50s. But DeLillo needs to connect it to the whole, so he has her seduce a young Nick, cougar-style, so that she's joined with the rest of the book. It seems like a waste of a strong female character, to have her only real use to the main narrative be a single sexual encounter.

And I really did enjoy the book's opening set piece, the 1951 Dodgers-Yankees pennant game, featuring an unexpected cast: a young Harlem kid who'd snuck into the game and manages to come away with the mythic homerun ball; Frank Sinatra; Jackie Gleason; and J. Edgar Hoover. It's interesting and extremely well-written. I just wish the rest of it could have been more cohesive in its grandness.

Savior of the week

Ever since Steve Jobs announced the much-rumored iPad in January, the publishing industry has been simultaneously having a collective orgasm at the possibility of a superior e-reader, and trying to figure out what the heck to do with this information.

In this week's New Yorker, Ken Auletta dissects the current state of book publishing, in one of the clearest and most candid pieces I've seen on the subject. What I found most interesting, though, is that much of the article veers from the ostensible subject (e-readers and their glorious potential), and turns into an episode of Everybody Hates Amazon. I'm on the fence about Amazon: professionally, I hate that they're creating a sales stranglehold from the WalMart playbook. But personally, they're the first place I turn when I want a discount on a hardcover bestseller, or don't feel like paying more than ten bucks for a paperback. And I like that they've all but obliterated the distinction between backlist and frontlist. So basically, accessibility good; monopoly bad.

But let's face it: my career is staked on the idea that not only are books necessary in the new Jobsian world order (in whatever format), they need someone to shepherd them along. And Amazon is helping to create an atmosphere where that shepherding is less necessary. The article brings that up directly, the idea that editors and author relationships are getting lost in the shuffle in favor of leaner self-publishing models for digital products. And it's something that's becoming a problem in traditional publishing as well: editorial input being quashed in favor of digital expertise. Is a developer going to take angry phone calls from an author who needs to be soothed? I doubt it.

Another interesting aspect of the piece is how the Big Six trade publishers (Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Penguin) and--to a lesser extent the smaller ones--are more or less uniting in this. No real holdouts, even though everyone's negotiating digital royalties, pricing structures, etc. on their own. But everyone seems to carry the new "we heart e-books" mantra like a badge. And all of them seem similarly frustrated by what needs to be implemented now to become truly content agnostic, and somehow stave off complete unprofitability in 5-7 years.

And at this point, Apple is the good son because there's no real plan to take over (like Amazon) or repurpose content (like Google), just push content out there. From the article: "'Ultimately, Apple is in the device—not the content—business,' the Apple insider said. 'Steve Jobs wants to make sure content people are his partner. Steve is in the I win/you win school. Jeff Bezos is in the I win/you lose school.'" So essentially, Google is the oldest kid who outgrew its rebellious phase; Amazon is the rage-filled middle child who hasn't been getting enough attention; and Apple is the favored youngest.

So we'll see, I guess, which company wins out in this codependent mess of a relationship. (Though I'm probably not putting my money down on the Kindle any time soon.)

Mean Girls, literary-style

Cady: And they have this book, this "burn book" where they write mean things about girls in our grade.
Janis: Well what does it say about me?
Cady: You're not in it.
Janis: Those bitches!

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I do love a good literary slap fight.

I was reading an article today (courtesy of JF) that authors should pay it forward with blurbs--meaning that if they've received the all-important jacket endorsements from other authors, then they should repay that by blurbing other writers as well. Somehow, I don't think this is the kind of thing that article writer had in mind:
The 50 Best Author Vs. Author Put-Downs of All Time.

It's basically a love letter to writer-on-writer violence. And it's funny, not least because a good percentage of them are taking potshots at people who died long before, and thus can't avenge themselves or hold grudges--in print or otherwise. It's the literary way. The sexist ones and the death-wishing ones are less entertaining, but all part of the same unfortunate bitchy package, I suppose.

Some of my favorites:

22. Gertrude Stein, according to Wyndham Lewis (1927)
"Gertrude Stein's prose-song is a cold black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through and all along."

23. Emile Zola, according to Anatole France (1911)
"His work is evil, and he is one of those unhappy beings of whom one can say that it would be better had he never been born."

26. Marcel Proust, according to Evelyn Waugh (1948)
"I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective."

27. William Faulkner, according to Ernest Hemingway
"Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You're thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes -- and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he's had his first one."

Being an abstainer himself, Hemingway is clearly the authority on the evils of drinking. And some of them are just painful. Hemingway again:

39. James Jones, according to Ernest Hemingway (1951)
"To me he is an enormously skillful f#*&-up and his book will do great damage to our country. Probably I should re-read it again to give you a truer answer. But I do not have to eat an entire bowl of scabs to know they are scabs...I hope he kills himself...."

(Just...yeah.)

Anyway, it reminds me of one of my favorite Dorothy Parkerisms: "If you haven't got anything nice to say...come sit by me." Now good old Dotty, she could give an anti-blurb and a half. I'm a little surprised she didn't turn up here. Maybe they're saving that for Volume 3, 'cause goodness knows there's plenty more material where this came from.

In the Woods by Tana French

Having spent a fair bit of time lately reading books by writers more concerned with esoteric leaps of plot and logic than with with basic readability (looking at you, Underworld), I've come to appreciate stories that have a beginning, middle, and end. And they don't get much more beginning-middle-and-end-y than a mystery. So for that, I definitely appreciated Tana French's debut novel In the Woods.

In the Woods is the story of the investigation into the murder of Katy Devlin, a 12-year-old ballerina living in the Dublin suburbs. Her body is found on a controversial archeological site--and in the very same place where three neighborhood kids disappeared in 1984. Two of those kids were never found, but the third turned up the next day, covered in blood and so traumatized that he could never identify what had happened to him and his friends.

The primary detective on Katy Devlin's case just happens to be that third kid, grown up and one of Dublin's finest, under a changed name. Along with his partner, Cassie Maddox (with whom he has an intensely intimate but platonic relationship), Rob Ryan ends up with the case by virtue of being stuck in the squad room at the wrong time. Rob assures himself that it's okay that he works on Katy's murder because a) he's totally recovered emotionally (despite maintaining total amnesia of the event); and b) what if his unique insight can not only solve this new and tragic mystery, but the old cold case as well? The reader and Cassie are less sure that he's as sound as he says, but what choice is there but to go along?

The story is procedural but literary--the standard Law & Order stuff is balanced out by the device of being in Rob's head as he struggles to deal with new information, coax old information from his bruised subconscious, and come to terms with all of it while maintaining a professional veneer. The biggest problem with Rob as narrator and central figure is what he tells the reader early on: he's unreliable as hell. He lies, he equivocates, he skates around information you know he's hiding. He tells you he has no memory of his childhood, then produces oddly detailed and idealized scenes. You never really know whether he's going to have the necessary breakthrough in time, but you do know that he's going to break up on these rocks--it's inevitable. So this element keeps things interesting throughout the otherwise fairly straightforward murder investigation, though I think French relies a little too heavily on Rob's POV to bring about essential plot points.

Also interesting is Rob's relationship with Cassie. They have a stereotypically close partnership, these young cops who trust one another with their lives and share everything--except bodily fluids, which Rob works very hard to emphasize. He mentions the luckiness he feels at not falling prey to the curse of the straight man-straight woman sexual temptation, and spends a lot of time highlighting their jocular, familiar banter. But here, too, you get the feeling that he's very specifically not sharing information. It may seem like Harry and Sally, but an Ephron novel this is not, and so there are some major issues lying in wait.

While I enjoyed the overall writing and French's approach to the cliched detective genre, I was decidedly un-wowed by the ending. I'm not as furious about it as some of the Amazon reviewers, but I think it could have been handled with more resolution and less abrupt exposition. Not a dealbreaker, but not the best ending I've ever seen.

Parts I liked:

"Obviously, I have always wished I could remember what happened in that wood. The very few people who know about the whole Knocknaree thing invariably suggest, sooner or later, that I should try hypnotic regression, but for some reason I find the idea distasteful. I'm deeply suspicious of anything with a whiff of New Age about it--not becuase of the practices themselves...but because of the people who get involved, who always seem to be the kind who corner you at parties to explain how they discovered that they are survivors and they deserve to be happy. I worry that I might come out of hypnosis with a sugar-high glaze of self-satisfied enlightenment, like a seventeen-year-old who's just discovered Kerouac, and start proselytizing strangers in pubs."

"I am not good at noticing when I am happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart's desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern."

The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris

I'm one of the many people who loved Joshua Ferris's debut novel, Then We Came to the End. But I had no idea how he'd follow that up. Would he do another first-person-plural book? Put out another book solidifying his status as the voice of cubicle ennui?

Nope on both counts. The Unnamed is his second, and it's completely different from the first--but similarly unsettling. It's the story of Tim, a middle-aged attorney who lives comfortably with a wife and teenage daughter. But since this is a novel and all, there has to be something wrong with him, right? Of course. He has a mysterious disease where one day, at a random time, he'll just start walking. He's awake, but he can't stop, can't slow down until he collapses in exhaustion--in a bus terminal, outside a fast food restaurant, in a park in Newark in the middle of the night. Tim's "spells" come and go; sometimes he's in remission for months or years at a time, but he accepts it as inevitable that at some point, he'll start walking jags again.

He and his wife, Jane, have a system for these flareups. Once he starts up with these spells, they get him ready: he sleeps in hiking gear and carries a pack of essentials with him at all times (even to his fancy Manhattan firm). And Jane will come get him, no matter where he is, no matter what else she has going on. She quits her job when he needs treatment, takes care of their daughter while he's either working long hours or wandering, and never questions his unwavering assertion that it's a physical illness, not a mental one.

The latter point becomes one of the major tensions of the book--is he crazy or isn't he? This moves into a question of whether he's doing all he can to figure that out for sure. After years of trying tests and various treatments (and an NEJM article starring him for his utterly unique and unidentifiable condition), he has more or less taken a "whatever happens, happens" approach. This is pretty much where the start of the book finds him, after a remission of a few years.

But the medical mystery of it all is almost beside the point, as the narrative focuses tightly on his partnership with Jane in their unusual situation. It's a fascinating glimpse into the limits of so-called unconditional love, and ponders just how far "in sickness and in health" goes. Tim's sickness transcends the diagnosis, and becomes relevant only insofar as it reveals a different facet of their marriage with every frustrating relapse, every small disintegration of an aspect of their lives. The interesting thing about Ferris's approach is that the good is not mutually exclusive with the bad--some of Jane and Tim's best and most heartfelt moments are also the most horrifying.

Like with Then We Came to the End, Ferris's writing is clear, unpretentious, and solidly constructed. He seems to know that with a somewhat out-there plot device at the heart of the book, the prose needs to be uncomplicated. And I just like his style. I definitely recommend this one for a well-paced, absorbing read.

Some of my favorite parts:

"Did she need him? She didn't think so. Was there really only one person for you, one man, the one? She didn't think so. She would sit with him if he were wasting from Parkinson's. If he was wasting from cancer or old age, she'd sit with him. If he just had an expiration date, of course she'd sit with him. But this thing, this could go on forever. Is that how she wanted to spend her life?"

"He realized he might have been doing it wrong for years. He might have seen interesting things had he been able to let go of the frustration and despair. He wondered what kind of life he might have had if he'd paid attention from the beginning."

"He discovered fourteen messages waiting for him. One was from Becka wishing him a happy birthday. The others were from Jane. He had meant to be self-preserving, not cruel, in not calling her back, but he understood now that he could not have it both ways."

Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

Earlier this year, Jacob and I were inspired by this McSweeney's piece to think about presidential brawl brackets. (#1 seed Andrew Jackson wins, by the way.) It's not such a stretch to think of presidents in the melee scenario, once you start--and especially once you realize that each one of them had to smack down a variety of foes just to get to that cushy seat in the Oval Office. Some of those fights were more entertaining/historically significant than others, though. And even though Obama only made it to the second round or so in the Jacob-Kate bracket (#15 seed, sorry Mr. President), he triumphed in one of the craziest primary brawls ever in real life.

Enter Game Change, this season's hot political book on the 2008 Democratic primaries and the general election. Remember when we all thought nothing was gonna stop the Hilldawg train? Remember when McCain was counted out as an irrelevant old coot in the face of Romney's slickness and Rudy's 9/11 Yankee caps? Remember when we didn't know or care who Sarah Palin was? Well, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann do. And they go to great lengths to show us how all that fell apart.

This book is just as compulsively readable as you think it will be. Most of it is familiar ground--the public sniping, the rumors, the debates, the polls--but when it's pulled together into a single narrative, you realize anew how clusterf*cked the whole thing was, start to finish. Drawn out over two years, it was fascinating (and frightening) enough. But condensed and peppered with enough insider detail (many of the anecdotes are anonymously sourced), it's a powerful story of neuroses, one-upmanship, and inconceivable stakes.

The Obamas fare the best overall--particularly Michelle. Halperin and Heilemann make it clear that the Michelle we saw during the campaign (blunt, wry, and fiercely protective of her family) was the real thing. Obama doesn't take much of a hit either--he was more or less the candidate I thought he was. Cockiness and occasional insecurity are essentially the worst the book has to say about him.

And then there are the Clintons. Oh boy, there are the Clintons. I thought I was holding a lot of anger toward them after the primaries, but of course that was nothing compared to their ex-staffers, judging by what the anonymous birdies told the authors. And while it was interesting to get confirmation that Hillary's campaign was every bit as dysfunctional as it seemed on the outside, I ended up feeling more respect and pity than I expected. I still don't understand how someone who wanted something so badly and singlemindedly as she did had no real idea how to get it, if it wasn't handed to her as an inevitability. And even then, ambition can't overcome a staff of bickering jerks, a husband sabotaging everything (consciously or not), or a public reputation that's more Lady Macbeth than Margaret Thatcher.

Because the extended Hillary/Obama showdown is the heart of the book, the day-to-day of their respective campaigns is covered pretty exhaustively. But one aspect that barely comes up, surprisingly, is the Michigan/Florida fiasco. I don't know if the authors just didn't get juicy soundbites from anyone involved in that process or what, but I remember it being a more significant part of the Clinton campaign's death throes.

Bill Clinton takes a beating (usually, we save the revelations of ex-presidential jerkiness, p-word-hounding, and unpleasantness for the postmortem memoirs, right?). But that's nothing compared to the evisceration of the Edwardses. The book's biggest splash on release was its thorough dismantling of the Elizabeth Edwards-as-saintly-victim persona. Apparently she was neurotic, controlling, and prone to screaming jags. But the book's flagship Elizabeth anecdote (her in a parking garage with her husband, pleading him to "look at me" and ripping her shirt open) made me wince. The writers are clearly using it to portray her as unstable--but given what she'd been through with cancer and the then-recent revelations of John's total douchebaggery, pointing and laughing at her for that moment of hysteria seems awfully harsh.

Good thing her husband steps up to be revealed as the Worst Politician in the World. John Edwards gets to be Vanity Smurf, Baby Daddy Smurf, Delusional Smurf, and Laughingstock Smurf, all at once. The one noble-ish thing he's portrayed as doing/saying in the book is helping Obama out during a debate. And dropping out, I guess, though by then he was pretty much out by force, and still thinking he had a chance at VP. At this point, there's really not much else to do but laugh in disgust.

And then there are the Republicans. They're kind of an afterthought for the first two-thirds of Game Change, much as they were throughout most of 2008. McCain is a hothead. His wife is kinda mean, but essentially a decent person. No one vetted Palin. And Rudy may still be floating around Florida somewhere (his strategy still cracks me up).

And it all culminates on the night of November 4, 2008--which is still, hands down, one of the most amazing nights I've ever seen. But that's a little anticlimactic, 'cause we all know how that one turned out. The ending of the book is kinda weak: basically, "...and the Team of Rivals lived happily ever after." But I don't know how else you'd write that ending, really. I'm just glad it wasn't "to be continued."

Some of my favorite parts:

On chasing Ted Kennedy's endorsement: "Bill Clinton took the opposite tack: he got up in Ted's grille. In a series of follow-up calls, Clinton went from arguing heatedly to pleading desperately with Kennedy. (At one point, Kennedy told a friend, Clinton went so far as to say, 'I love you'--a declaration that Kennedy rendered mockingly in a Boston-Irish imitation of Clinton's Arkansas twang.)"

On chasing Gore's endorsement: "There was much Gore found attractive about Obama...and he could scarcely say the same about the Clintons. His relationship with Hillary had been strained and hostile since their White House years, when she and Gore were, in effect, co-vice presidents, competing for power and influence. (Gore felt he had less of both than Hillary; the Clintons neither disagreed nor cared.)"

Obama on McCain, during their senator days: "'The tone of [McCain's] letter, I think, was a little over the top,' he said. 'But John McCain's been an American hero and has served here in Washington for twenty years, so if he wants to get cranky once in a while, that's his prerogative.'
Did you just call McCain 'cranky'? a reporter asked.
'You got my quote the first time,' Obama said tartly. Back in his office, Obama was blunter with his aides about his sentiments. 'I'm not interested in being bitch-slapped by John McCain,' he said."

On Biden: "Sitting outside by the pool, Biden reassured them that he could keep his mouth in check, cited examples of how he'd done it before, promised he could do it again. In talking about how he could control his talking, Biden kept talking and talking--offering a soliloquy that, had it been a one-man play, might have been titled QED."

On Palin: "She also continued to stumble over an unavoidable element: her rival's name. Over and over, Palin referred to Obama's running mate as 'Senator Obiden'--or was it 'O'Biden'?--and the corrections from her team weren't sticking. Finally, three staffers, practically in unison, suggested, Why don't you just call him Joe?
Palin stared at them quizically and said, 'But I've never met him.'"

You're a big girl now

So here's something I never thought I'd say (or write): I was reading an interview with Danielle Steel in USA Today.

It was tied into her new book, Big Girl, in which the main character "struggles with her weight, body image and self-esteem from childhood through her 20s." Okay. If there's a cheesy romance to be found in any subject, chances are Danielle Steel will dig it out. But as I read through the interview, it started to feel insulting--specifically, Steel's answers to the insipid questions about her inspiration in writing about a fat heroine. Oh, and about her expertise on weight issues (she gained weight during pregnancy. Twice!).

If you replaced "overweight" with any kind of "other"ness in the piece, would this be such a breezy book feature? If this were a white author writing about a black character, a male author writing about a female character--would we be patting her on the back for making such a noble choice? I don't think we would. So doing it here feels hollow.

"Books are always written about beautiful people who find other beautiful people, but most people are regular people, and weight is an issue for a lot of them. I thought, it must be a drag to always have beautiful people highlighted in books. Why not make a heavier woman the star of the show?"

Why not, indeed? But hey, here's a thought: why not write a heavier heroine without fetishizing it in the title, or making her weight the central issue of the book?

"If you notice, I do not have Victoria lose weight by the end of the book, but she gets a great guy."

Congrats. A great guy, no less! It must have been agonizing to write a romantic lead character with such an obvious flaw!

Steel clearly means well, but it's still ridiculous to treat this as a bold choice. Even if Bridget Jones hadn't already jumpstarted the whole "he loves me just as I am" fairytale trope fourteen years ago, this would still feel cliched. Steel asks the right question ("why no overweight heroines?"), but answers it in the most shallow and pandering way possible.

And then there's the cover. While Steel is fighting the good fight for "big girls" everywhere and graciously allowing them to appear lovable, what image is chosen to represent all of this? A model-perfect face, licking an ice cream spoon. Because we can't show an overweight girl on the cover--heavens, no. That might scare the natives. It reminded me a little of last year's cover controversy, where jackets were whitewashed to be more "appealing." Apparently brown people and fat people are literary kryptonite on the shelves. Who knew?

Clearly, this is what I get for continuing to read past "Danielle Steel" and "USA Today." Chances are that nothing good was ever gonna come of that. But this was particularly irksome and disheartening.

Remnick on Obama

Good news, everyone! David Remnick is going to write an Obama biography. Sounds like interesting stuff: private interviews, historical research, the signature Remnick writing style. Should be a good read, if probably not the next Game Change. The New York Times tells us all about it.

But...what's this? At the bottom? In sheepish "Correction" italics?

An earlier version of this post misquoted Mr. Remnick on his comparison between the book and a New Yorker article he had previously written. He said the book would not be a "pumped up" version of the article; he did not say that it would not be a “pimped out” version of the article.

Pimped. Out. A presidential biography, written by the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker. It's okay, Gray Lady. I wish he'd really said it too.

Better Know a Classic - Little Women

Joey: Uh, Rach? These...these little women...
Rachel: Yeah?
Joey: How little are they? I mean, are they, like, scary little?

Louisa May Alcott's Little Women was one of my favorites as a kid. I knew it was kinda hokey even then, but I loved the sweet, wholesome New Englandness of it. Why didn't I have Lincoln-supporting, all-knowing parents who steered us through genteel poverty with a smile and life lessons? Where was my saintly and consumptive sister, sacrificing herself at home while the rest of us went gallivanting off into the world? And where the heck was the inexplicable houseservant, a remnant of our prewar glory (before Papa made that vaguely catastrophic investment we don't talk about)? Suburban, middle-class Connecticut seemed decidedly un-noble in comparison.

I read the book again in middle school (around the time the very good Gillian Armstrong adaptation came out)--but hadn't really touched it since. And I don't know that I would have any time soon, if I hadn't fooled around with the Kindle app on my iPod and downloaded it for free. But I did, and got engrossed, even on the tiny screen.

At this point, the sisters are the most compelling reason to read (and revisit) the book. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy are basically tropes, but entertaining ones. Jo's the tomboy writer; Meg is the matronly sister ultimately fulfilled by husband and kids; Amy is the worldly, selfish one; and Beth is the Dead One. But it's easy to see how they would have been somewhat refreshing in the 1870s--all four get distinct personalities and are loved for their foibles, even if they're all ultimately validated by men in the long run.

As for the writing itself, well....The saddest aspect of my reread is that it's now official: I can't digest purely sentimental writing anymore. Some may say it's because I'm dead inside; others may speculate it's because all I seem to read these days are cynical modern male writers. But either way, I now lack the necessary sense of whimsy you need to be enchanted by the idea of gentle Christian feminism/transcendentalism. And the loss of that sense makes me feel a little sad, and uncomfortably cynical. But I just don't have the patience anymore for Victorian ideals and games.

I was also a little surprised to find my sympathies realigned. Before, I'd always sided with Jo, and lamented her rejection of her best friend and would-be lover, Laurie. This time, I found myself bored by her "I'm an independent tomboy, whee!" character--and rooting for Amy, the sister I'd traditionally liked the least. Jo talks a good game, but Amy's the one who actually pursues her ambitions (first art, then marrying well--the girl has goals!). She's the one who evolves the most out of any of the characters, a point I'd never noticed before. So by the time Jo turned Laurie down, I was already over it and ready for him to hook up with her sister. (Spoiler alert!)

And Beth, well...she still dies. (Spoiler alert #2!) But her final moments are sweet and touchingly written, and illustrate why Little Women endures. It's hard to stay truly dead inside when Beth's running out the clock and being brave for her family. Alcott makes her gentle moralizing so easy to read--very insidious.

Anyway, the best reason to read Little Women is not the fact that Alcott was way ahead of the curve on many social issues of the day (though she was). It's not the idea that we need to return to an ironclad, Victorian system of goodness and grace and civility. It's the idea that a story of a family, simply told, is more powerful than even my cynicism.

U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton

Back when I was in middle school, I found Sue Grafton's "alphabet series" in the Mystery section of the local library, and fell in love. (A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar, etc. Though being the rebel that I am, I think I started with "C.") Somewhere in the binge, I decided to use one of the books for an oral book report for Reading class. It wasn't until halfway through my presentation that I realized that it was impossible to summarize the plot in a way that would a) hold my 13-year-old peers' interest; and b) do any justice to the book itself. And that's what Sue Grafton's mystery novels do--they create deft mazes of people, information, and red herrings.

Her 21st, U is for Undertow, is part of that tradition. Like all the other books, its primary voice is that of Kinsey Millhone, a California private investigator. Kinsey isn't really your hardboiled type--she hits the criteria of being fiercely independent and jaded, but her beachy town and wacky friends are more sitcom than noir. But she's smart, sneaky, and tenacious as hell, so she's definitely the person you want ferreting out information for your cold case murder or missing person.

Undertow takes place over a few weeks in April, 1988, when a twentysomething guy wanders into Kinsey's office and insists that a newspaper article about a long unsolved kidnapping case (a 4-year-old girl disappeared in 1967, never found) triggered a buried childhood memory of him stumbling upon two guys burying a bundle a few days after the girl disappeared. The guy, Michael, isn't the most stable or reliable dude around, and no one believes him. So he hires Kinsey for a day to try to figure out whether he could possibly have seen what he thinks he saw.

Of course, the plot mushrooms from there, but did you not see what I wrote earlier about summarizing? Lost cause. Rest assured that as with many of the other novels in the series, we get introduced to various members (savory and otherwise) of the Santa Teresa community, who have odd connections to the original kidnapping, the aftermath, and the present day investigation. The climax is a little unsatisfying--Grafton takes the unusual (for her and for mystery writers in general) approach of lining up pretty much everything early on, and using pure exposition to fill in the blanks. But overall, the mystery is a good and layered one.

There's also a B-plot involving Kinsey's own personal life, which I found more interesting. After 21 books, you feel pretty attached to someone, whether she's fictional or not. And Kinsey (despite her protestations that she needs nothing more than her spartan lifestyle and one or two token friends) has steadily grown from an orphan (by circumstance early on and then later by choice) to someone with actual obligations in life. In Undertow, that means possibly opening up to estranged family. And checking in with her hot (and unfortunately platonic) detective friend.

I also appreciate that Grafton has stayed within the 80s timeline. These books would be totally ruined by modern technology. There's something appealing about a detective who does her work by cross-referencing old directories and schlepping to a cat hospital to ask questions that Google would answer so easily today.

So overall, a very entertaining read. I'm starting to get nervous because there are only five novels left. But I probably have seven-ish years before I really need to worry about the end. In the meantime, I'll just wait impatiently for V.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

So there's this writer. He was brilliant, restless, and died young while trying to maintain both his creativity and a stable life. Sounds familiar, right?

Not so fast. The troubled writer in question here is the late Chilean writer Roberto Bolano. His novel The Savage Detectives (as translated by Natasha Wimmer) was the most recent book club book, chosen as much for its unique perspective on modern Latin American literature as for the hesitance that 2666, Belano's posthumous, 900-page opus, instilled in at least one of us.

The Savage Detectives is a novel that spans the 70s to the 90s, tracing two young poets (and co-founders of a poetry "movement," the Visceral Realists) from their early shenanigans in Mexico City to nomadic lives in Israel, Spain, and Mexico (again). The young Ulises Lima and Arturo Bolano gather a group of self-serious young poets to overthrow Mexico's reigning literary elite (mostly just Octavio Paz). And through them, we see the joys and pettinesses of poetic revolution--which happens to be high on drama here, and low on actual poetry and actual revolution. But they assemble a ragtag group of young writers who like the idea of literary godhood, even if they have no idea how to achieve it. So the group members mostly just drink, talk endlessly, sleep with each other and various hangers-on, and occasionally write poetry that no one publishes.

The first third of the book, which follows the group as it coalesces around Lima and Bolano, is written as a diary by Juan Madero, a 17-year-old who sees the Visceral Realists as his entry to sex, excitement, and more sex. Juan drops out of school to pursue poetry and waitresses, and sets his sights on becoming a Visceral Realist like Lima and Bolano. Juan doesn't really know what a Visceral Realist is, per se (and neither do we), but he knows he wants in. The section is a humorous, rather joyous coming-of-age set piece introducing us both to the Visceral Realists and 1976 Mexico City. The section ends on a bit of a dark note, though, as Lima, Bolano, Madero, and a prostitute named Lupe flee Mexico City in a borrowed car, trying to get Lupe away from her violent pimp.

The second section of the book is written in a completely different style--instead of one kid's journal, it's a series of documentary, first-person interviews with a parade of previously unintroduced characters. After a few pages, you realize each new speaker (whose recollections range from a page to several) is someone who came into contact with Ulises Lima, Arturo Bolano, or both, since their abrupt exit from Mexico City. The timeline unfolds more or less straightforwardly, giving episodic updates on the pair's travels. Ulises Lima becomes a drifter throughout the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America, seemingly content with a hard, very physical life of odd jobs and fleeting sexual encounters. Bolano is also a drifter, but he seems slightly more concerned with his intellectual and philosophical development. He moves around Europe for the most part (Spain especially), but ultimately becomes a freelance journalist with a penchant for African war zones. With both men, you get the impression from all of these different voices that they're haunted by something that changed them fundamentally, and that dimmed the youthful arrogance that held the Visceral Realists together in the first place.

The third section brings us back to Juan Madero's diary, and the poets' exodus into the Sonora desert with Lupe. The little group is not only hiding from the pimp, but also seeking out Cesarea Tinajero, a woman who had been considered the "mother of Visceral Realism" sixty years before. Cesarea left little (if any) poetry behind, and completely disappeared from the literary social scene. The traces followed by Lima and Bolano (with Madero and Lupe just kind of along for the ride) are increasingly sad, and the climax sheds light on why both men led such effed up adult lives after the fact.

This may be one of my favorites of the book club books--I loved Bolano's complexity of language and perspective, while he kept an unwieldy structure mostly under control. There were spots that could have been pruned (the middle section is approximately 400 pages, with some unnecessarily repeated speakers and themes), but overall I think he did an excellent job making about a hundred different speakers seem like unique voices and characters. And he does that while also developing Lima and Belano in a thoughtful and believable way. The language he uses is terse when it needs to be, lush and sensual when it needs to be, and absurd when he needs it to be. And one of the most interesting aspects of the novel is that for a book about poets, there's extremely little poetry in it, making the story about the Visceral Realists and the motives behind them much more than the words any of them put on paper.

I think I'll still wait a while to tackle 2666, but in the meantime I'm glad to have finished out 2009 with this one.

The Song is You by Arthur Phillips

I believe in radio omens. Or these days, given that I rarely listen to the radio, iPod omens. Like, if I'm feeling nostalgic for the zaniness of college, my iPod turns up that song that happened to be playing in the background at Spring Weekend 2002. Even this morning, I was on the subway, thinking about how much has changed in the past few months, and the Whiny Frat Rock song that dominated my summer playlist came on.

Of course, they're not really omens. These songs are on my iPod because I've sought them out, and kept them in the rotation for their sentimental attachments. But part of me believes in the possibility that the universe knows what I really want to hear. (And sometimes, that's just gonna be Justin Timberlake--let's be honest.) And that's part of what made me so receptive to Arthur Phillips's novel The Song is You. Like Phillips, I'm happy to suspend logic and cynicism as long as there's a patina of pop music gloss.

The Song is You follows another iPod omen believer, Brooklynite Julian Donohue, a commercial director whose sense of self is largely defined by his music collection. (This isn't a Nick Hornby novel, I swear.) He sees his iPod as an extension of his old portable CD player, which was in itself an extension of his Walkman, which provided the soundtrack to his days as a young and soulful stud. But Julian hasn't just been pining for his youth--in the intervening years, he's gotten married, started a family, even given up his casual infidelities. But a family tragedy pushes all of that aside, and pretty much all he's left with is the music collection. This isn't to say he's a sad sack--just a more philosophical version of his younger self. Julian, like so many Modern Men (literary and otherwise), couches his shallowness and narcissism in existential hooey. He convinces himself that his aesthetic preferences are just so much more refined than everyone else's, and that's why he only sleeps with models.

This is about where he is when he wanders into a Brooklyn bar and scoffs at the hipsters assembled there to hear Cait O'Dwyer, spunky Irish lass (do we know any other kind?), perform with her backup band. Cait, we see, is upwardly mobile. Her demo CD has already been optioned by a label, the hipsters whisper over pitchers of PBR. Julian isn't really impressed, one way or another--but he does pick up her demo, which works its way into his iTunes rotation. Suddenly her poignant pop songs are getting to him like nothing else can, and he starts attending her shows around the city. At one, he leaves her a gift, which he doesn't really expect will get to her--but it does, and she, in turn, starts becoming fascinated with him as well.

Thus begins a game of stops and starts, of borderline stalking, of infatuation, of wistful song lyrics posted online. Both Julian and Cait get off on the thrill of their hidden Svengali relationship. They're both in love with the idea of a shared future of passionate love and creative fulfillment, but they can't figure out how to make the jump into physical reality--or at least they can't figure out how to do it without turning into the mundane. So they whip themselves into a frenzy of potential, as her career starts to flourish and he stokes it.

Both Julian and Cait come with entourages trying to pull them away. There's Ian, Cait's guitarist, who puts up with a more-than-friends-and-less-than-kind relationship with her, because their unconsummated co-dependency pushes their music further. Ian, suspicious of the stranger who leaves cryptic messages for Cait wherever they go, has a vested interest in taking the guy down--as does a has-been rockstar who sees Cait as his path back to the A-list. In Julian's corner, there's a sweet-but-neurotic estranged wife, and a socially inept brother--both of whom have strong (and valid) reasons for not wanting him to follow a cute pop star around the world.

The book follows both Julian and Cait pretty closely, but Julian is by far the more clearly defined. Cait is a little too perfect. By the middle of the book, you realize that's because Phillips himself is probably a little too in love with her. And because it's hard to get a real perspective on her, it's difficult to get 100% behind the Julian-Cait relationship--especially by the time things take a definite "Every Breath You Take" turn.

But as with Prague, what Phillips does well, he does exceptionally well. I do love his writing style. And the bonus point? A critical scene is set in a college bar in Storrs, Connecticut. Well played, Arthur Phillips. Brooklyn landmarks + UConn landmarks + pop songs = high score.

Some of my favorite parts:

"The choice was mutual but they had opposite reasons: he was a coward, she was ruthless. In his defense, he hadn't known the choice was going to be inscribed as eternally as grave marble law. That was her will, enforced from that moment on with flinchless discipline. If he'd known, he told himself, he would have chosen her over the music, over anything. He would have."

"When they wrote together, or when one presented the other with something prepared in private, with no audience to absorb the excess, he felt the room crowding with their other selves, lives unled and correspondences unwritten, happinesses opted against, and he could not believe she did not see it too."

"...He laughed at himself, and he laughed at Cait O'Dwyer's sorcery, and he wondered if, in real life, she required a steady diet of recent heartbreak in order to manufacture fresh emotion for her consumers. Two months ago, she was raw and unblended; tonight she was reasonably effective; someday very soon she would be in danger of marbling over into a slick cast impression of herself. The target was only mircons wide, and history's great singers may simply have been those who happened to make a record in the brief time between learning and forgetting how to manage their power."