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."