A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

I'm not sure how I avoided reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn the past many years, or why I always assumed it was one of those sentimental kids' books about plucky orphans (no offense, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm). Whatever was going on in my warped and biased little mind, it was wrong. I received a copy of the book as a going-away present from Serena--and I should have figured out then that if my smart, cynical, "I'm from Queens, bitch!" friend loved the book, maybe it was a little edgier than I'd supposed.

It's probably appropriate that this was the first full book I read after moving to Brooklyn. As much as I love my new neighborhood, it was nice to get a sense of a Brooklyn not overrun with free trade coffee places and yuppie strollers. The Brooklyn of Smith's narrative is pre-WWI Williamsburg, where the working class Irish, Italians, and Jews share the uneasy bond of just barely scraping by. No hipsters, thankfully.

The titular tree is technically growing in a concrete yard, but the fancy literary trick is that it's really Francie Nolan, whom we first meet as an eleven-year-old. Francie is a little like Lisa Simpson: underappreciated by her family, she's pretty much on her own for advancement. It's not that she lacks love or care or anything that would tragify her in a Dickens novel; it's more that no one around her is equipped to provide anything more than low-grade physical support. Her father, Johnny, is a singing waiter who's well-liked, but always drunk. The mother, Katie, works several janitorial jobs to provide the basics for the family. Relatives come and go, but mostly on an anecdotal basis. No one's around to provide much mentorship. So Francie haunts the library (despite weekly disses from a snotty librarian), writes down everything that comes into her mind, and struggles along in a school that favors attractive kids with money. All the elements are there for the requisite social commentary, but the book never really gets around to pitying Francie, or her circumstances. Smith presents it more as a chronicle. It reminded me of a lot of the stories I've heard from my dad about his own childhood. It never occurs to him to milk them for pity points--it's just how things were.

As with most coming-of-age novels, the plot is episodic and almost secondary. While much of the narrative is told from Francie's point of view as she goes through childhood and adolescence, the points where it switches to her mother's perspective are more striking, and give the book its depth. Where Francie is forgiving and childlike, Katie Nolan is unsentimental. Her assessments of the family's poverty, and her own culpability in the raw deal given to Francie, are surprisingly frank. She's the head of the family in virtually every way, and takes on the guilt for having married a charming guy at 17 and started a family too early. Katie also introduces a thematic element that makes the book more interesting: she loves Neely, her second child and only son, more than Francie. It's a simply stated fact, and it complicates the relationships. This made me want to call my mom and challenge her historical assertion that she loves me and Sam exactly equally.

I guess I was just struck by the honesty and sophistication of the relationships. I (naively) expected that kind of whitewashed, memoir style, particularly given the 1910-ish setting and the 1940s publication date.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is an entertaining story told in clear, honest language. I couldn't think of a better introduction to my new hometown, or a more effective antidote to my own petty financial and social worries.

Here are some passages I particularly liked:

"Lately, she had been given to exaggerating things. She did not report happenings truthfully, but gave them color, excitement and dramatic twists. Katie was annoyed at this tendency and kept warning Francie to tell the plain truth and to stop romancing. But Francie just couldn't tell the plain undecorated truth. She had to put something to it. Although Katie had this same flair for coloring an incident and Johnny himself lived in a half-dream world, yet they tried to squelch these things in their children. Maybe they had a good reason. Maybe they knew their own gift of imagination colored too rosily the poverty and brutality of their lives and made them able to endure it. Perhaps Katie thought that if they did not have this faculty, they would be clearer-minded; see things as they really were, and seeing them loathe them and somehow find a way to make them better."

"Again the lonely evenings. Francie roamed the Brooklyn streets in the lovely nights of fall and thought of Ben. ('If you ever need me, write and I'll manage to see you.') Yes, she needed him but she was sure he'd never come if she wrote: 'I'm lonely. Please come and walk with me and talk to me.' In his firm schedule of life, there was no heading labeled 'Loneliness.'"

On how women are about as screwy as everyone thinks they are:
"If she never had any lovers, she kicks herself around when the change comes, thinking of all the fun she could have had, didn't have, and now can't have. If she had a lot of lovers, she argues herself into believing that she did wrong and she' s sorry now. She carries on that way because she knows that soon all her woman-ness will be lost. And if she makes believe being with a man was never any good in the first place, she can get comfort out of her change."

"She looked out over Brooklyn. The starlight half revealed, half concealed. She looked out over the flat roofs, uneven in height, broken once in a while by a slanting roof from a house left over from older times. The chimney pots on the roofs...and on some, the shadowing looming of pigeon cotes...the twin spires of the Church, remotely brooding over the dark tenements...And at the end of their street, the great Bridge that threw itself like a sigh across the East River and was lost...lost...on the other shore."

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

This summer contained reason #649 why I'm baffled that Jacob continues to put up with me. I say I want to read Dickens for our little book club. He says sure. I pick Bleak House, the 12-hour miniseries of which he's already sat through. He's still game. I find out the book is over 900 pages. He buys a copy. I'm pretty sure most people would have opted out by then.

But outside of his good sportness and the fact that both of us dragged the behemoth of a book on various planes, trains, and automobiles, I stand by the choice. I really enjoyed the book, despite the parts that dragged a little, and some tedious Victorianisms. A lot of those could be ascribed to the fact that Dickens was (let's face it) a very commercial writer. Sure, Bleak House is noted as major fiction over a hundred years later, but at the time he was just another writer being paid to keep people hooked into a magazine by installments. Wouldn't you try to make something sixty chapters long? And besides the length, I think there are probably a lot of pandery elements--characters and situations that would have been little in-jokes to late-Victorian Brits--that don't translate as well nowadays.

As Jacob mentioned in his own review, the best way to get through the novel is to pay limited attention to the many extraneous plots and characters. The gist of the story is this: there's this lawsuit, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, rotting in the London court. The lawyers are all money-sucking jerks. Everyone involved in the unwieldy and unclear suit suffers misfortune--well, everyone involved by choice, anyway. There are bright spots, though. Like the generosity of John Jarndyce, who tries to balance out his lawsuit karma by providing for the orphans involved in the case (and picking out his future bride in the process! How efficient/creepy is that?) The beating heart really belongs to Esther Summerson, one of those orphans. As the narratrix for most of the book, she has the least connection to the court case itself, but the most connection to all the peripheral characters. She's the Kevin Bacon of 1850s London.

Also, Esther is pretty much the nicest person who ever sort-of-lived. At first, I thought she was far too good to be serious. And she was. But not for the cynical reasons I supposed, or because Dickens didn't get how to portray women (which is, admittedly, a little true). Instead, Esther is a tricky voice of her own creation. She starts out hesitant, covering herself (good and bad) with the perceptions of everyone around her, but gains confidence. By the time she's making sly comments about the idiocy of her friends, she seems more reliable as a narrator. She still cuts out a lot of convenient information (there're some sneaky "oh, by the way, I'm totally in love with this guy" shenanigans), but she's more open to the idea that her loved ones might not always be so smart or so pure. This also comes in handy when she finds out that she's got some shady parentage. Anyway, I liked Esther a lot.

I think Dickens could have pushed things a little further, in terms of the risque elements. I mean, even The Scarlet Letter got away with some sexual energy. With an illegitimate pregnancy, a drug overdose, and a young couple itching to get together, there could have been a little passion somewhere in Bleak House. Instead, the exuberance is channeled into the platonic relationships between girls. Kind of an odd choice.

And because this is a Charles Dickens book, about 80% of the novel is tangential social commentary. Black sheep of a good family who proves respectable after all? Check. Uneducated, noble hooligans? Check. Frivolous rich people? Check. Sick street urchin who would live, if only Scrooge were a little more generous? Aaaaaaaand check.

Anyway, it wasn't very conventional summer reading, but it looks like we survived. Maybe some Russian nihilists next year?

Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney

Before I left Boston, my former boss John tried to "scare" me about New York publishing by invoking Bright Lights, Big City. And when I did leave, his going-away present was a copy of the book--though at that point I think it was less of a cautionary tale than an in-joke and a field guide for what not to do in the fast city. Unfortunately for John, I took less from the book about life lessons and more about where to score the good cocaine.

Luckily for all of us, this information is outdated by about twenty years.

In all seriousness, I really enjoyed the book. It's Jay McInerney's first novel, and very much a product of its time (1985). It has some of the interesting grit of New York during that period, without the utter cheesiness that we've all come to associate with the mid-80s (like the retroactive application of Duran Duran to everything in sitcom flashbacks and lame movies). Instead, there's an authenticity to the go-go 80s Reaganauts here: the glitz looks awful in daylight after the coke runs out, and the protagonist knows it.

In fact, most of the book takes place in this harsher light. The unnamed main dude (or "narrator," I guess, although the book is in the second person) spends the majority of the book's two weeks in search of Bolivian marching powder, sex, or his ex-wife--and none of them are easy to come by. He has a job at a literary magazine as a factchecker (it sounds suspiciously like the New Yorker), and a halfhearted desire to do something "better." His rising-model wife has recently left him, and he can't figure out whether he's upset that she's gone, or just disgruntled that she had the audacity to leave him, when he condescended to marry her in the first place despite her white-trash ways. Everything around him is flashy, but he's lost the enthusiasm to sustain it all.

Later, it becomes clearer that his everyday life is an elaborate social construct to distract him from a crumbling inner life. The trendy horndog best friend, the unfinished novel, the obsession over the departed Amanda....these make him seem amusingly sympathetic at first, then increasingly asshole-ish. Right about the time he reaches the point where he (and the reader) knows that he can't be any more self-destructive, he starts revealing the real reasons for the overpriced, escapist life. One of the neatest things McInerney does is balance the climax between the self-serving justification that the hero has used all along and the genuine emotional pull of quiet tragedy.

The pacing and tone of the book are just right for the story: brief, caustic, and funny. No single anecdote is longer than a few pages, echoing the speedy thread of white powder that snakes through the narrative. Yet there's no disjointedness either; each episode is a clear step in the evolution (or devolution, I'm still not sure which) of the character. The whole is an excellent snapshot of a guy at a weird personal point and even weirder cultural time.

Some passages I really liked:

"You see yourself as the kind of guy who wakes up early on Sunday morning and steps out to cop the Times and croissants. Who might take a cue from the Arts and Leisure section and decide to check out an exhibition--costumes of the Hapsburg Court at the Met, say, or the Japanese lacquerware of the Muromachi period at the Asia Society. The kind of guy who calls up the woman he met at a publishing party Friday night, the party he did not get sloppy drunk at. See if she wants to check out the exhibition and maybe do an early dinner. A guy who would wait until 11 a.m. to call her, because she might not be an early riser, like he is. She may have been out late, perhaps at a nightclub. And maybe a couple of sets of tennis before the museum. He wonders if she plays, but of course she would. When you meet the girl who wouldn't et cetera you will tell her that you are slumming, visiting your own 6 a.m. Lower East Side of the soul on a lark, stepping nimbly between the piles of garbage to the gay marimba rhythms in your head. Well, no, not gay. But she will know exactly what you mean."

"'Things change, people change,' is what Amanda said. For her that covered it. You wanted an explanation, an ending that would assign blame and dish up justice. You considered violence and you considered reconciliation. But what you are left with is a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you, like a book you have read too quickly, leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions, until all you can remember is a name."

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling

You know those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books that were really popular in the 80s? You'd pick one course over another, and ostensibly learn that choices have consequences (even though you could easily ditch a bad result and take a do-over). Anyway, thanks to the capricious nature of book publishing, here's what I think JK Rowling's Adventure would have looked like:

"You've written three modestly successful books about wizards. If you want to see what happens when you take your chances on globalization, please go to page 65. If you want to try modest British methods instead, go to page 89.

Page 65: Congratulations! Book publicity works! Please take your seat among George Lucas and the X-Files people, and revel in your overblown mythology for four more books.

Page 89: Uh, congrats. You get to deliver new manuscripts, structured exactly like the first three, just as your last advance runs out. Ad infinitum. Welcome to the midlist, Ms. Rowling!"

It's only due to the former chance that any of us are here, consuming an 800-ish page book in a single weekend just because it's Harry Potter, and because it's the last. But here we are, at the supposed end of the most remarkable publishing fad of the time. Honestly, I'm a little relieved. I've loved the books since sophomore year of college, when the burgeoning trend and a friend's obsession with the books prompted me to pick up Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone over Christmas. But the publishing schedule and the hype became so tedious. Everything I despise about the Star Wars phenomenon was showing up around these books, and loyalty and curiosity will only go so far. I don't think any of us would have the energy to maintain this cycle for six, twelve, twenty more years.

So it is, indeed, over. And the end was fine. It was certainly what Ms. Rowling promised her readers. It tied up most loose ends, anchored a lot of free-floating characters, and kept Steve Perry out of the equation (unlike certain other pop culture shapers, David Chase).

The novel is extremely dark. One of the best aspects of the previous six books was the mixing of levity with the darkness--that even though there was always a constant hum of evil in the background, people found bright spots in their everyday lives. That was all but gone, sacrificed here to the need to get everything in and resolve the unwieldy mythology surrounding Harry. As a result, the book spends most of its time in small, dark places. There's none of the expansiveness of Hogwarts, or the airiness of the outer wizard world. Everything feels claustrophobic. This is fine in smaller doses, as it's a good way to establish the strangling nature of Harry's destiny. But when it's so pervasive (the main trio spend at least half of the book in a tent in the woods), the gloom is thicker than Fleur's accent.

The unrelenting fear and death didn't sit well with me. I woke up, screaming, the night after I finished reading. Granted, this is more of a debit to my adulthood than to the book, but is this really the best outcome for a book marketed to kids? I don't think children should have things whitewashed, but a bloodbath is something else. She gets points for the vividness, I guess. Whatever her deficiencies as a writer, she always gets the sensory details in there.

Plotwise, there aren't many huge surprises. The "is Snape good or not?" resolution isn't anything that wasn't hinted before. The horcruxes discussed at the end of Book 6 should have been enough of a quest narrative, but then she might not have been able to squeeze an extra hundred pages. So we have the Deathly Hallows (a trio of items that make a person the "master of death" when brought together). I didn't really have a problem with that, or with the left-field plotline about Dumbledore's sordid past. In fact, I was hopeful that these'd combine to create a new kind of ending--without the Dumbledore ex machina that ends just about all the other books. No such luck. Even dead, the guy finds a way to get his standard three pages of exposition.

Perhaps in atonement for all the death and negativity, there's a much lighter epilogue. It's sweet, but kinda blah...all it really does is throw a bone to the fanfic writers who obsess over whether Hermione needs to be with Ron or Harry. The book would have been much better ended with the last official chapter. But hey--why finish with an already neat ending when you can add twenty minutes? That's the Spielberg special.

This all seems pretty grim, but there were parts I liked. For instance, there are no extended quidditch scenes. I like the game as much as the next reader, but those bits were getting tedious by Book 6. Also, the romance doesn't feel as forced this time, mostly because there was very little. Plus, we get thisclose to finding out what premarital wizard sex is like. Slightly creepy to consider, yes, but it's one of the few areas of wizard life that Rowling hadn't laid out (no pun intended).

I also like that Rowling kept Harry pretty close to the course she hewed out in the beginning. It got so unwieldy as the story swelled to accommodate everything Rowling wanted to accomplish, but it did come down to the basic ideas she put forth before. I'd quote something here from my senior thesis, but I don't even remember what I wrote about destiny narratives. Clearly one of my better scholarly exercises.

But no matter what the issues may be with the narrative at this point, they're moot now. Rowling will go and live in her castle, and write something suspiciously Harry-like in a few years. The kids will move on to something else, and the non-readers will go back to ignoring books. Everybody wins. Except Snape. He pretty much got screwed from one end to the other.

premature evaluation

Everyone knows that kids read the Books section of the New York Times. Sure, their crayon-written letters to the editor get bumped in favor of whiny screeds from unhappy authors and nitpicky professors, but they still read the reviews over their morning orange juice and Apple Jacks. Right?

'Cause that's the only way the flap over Michiko Kakutani's early review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows makes any sense. The review showed up last night, ahead of the much-vaunted midnight release of the book tomorrow night. How odd--a book reviewer did her job by not only reviewing a book before its release, but also taking the initiative to go out and get a copy somehow. She broke the story like a Times reporter is supposed to do--and in this particular case, the review is indeed a story.

But JK Rowling is NOT happy. Neither are Scholastic and Bloomsbury. In fact, a rep for the latter compared this act to the Boston Tea Party. The Boston Tea Party! Is that how current British people think of the Revolutionary War? As a minor act of cultural betrayal? Methinks the residents of Tony Blair's England got a crash course in Bush-style accusatory logic.

As widely read as the Times is, a book review in the weekday Arts section is hardly front-page spoilage. Anyone who reads the article is someone seeking information about the book. The "literally millions of readers, particularly children" that Rowling speaks of can easily avoid the review...and most probably wouldn't have known anything about it until she complained. So her response is a) hysterical or b) an unnecessary way to draw more attention to the book before Saturday. Either way, good job. There obviously wasn't enough panic and kerfuffle surrounding the book already.

Call me when someone publishes a review with the headline, "Harry dies!"

Saturday by Ian McEwan

At 59, Ian McEwan isn't quite an Endangered Author (tm)...but he's working on it. In his 2005 novel Saturday, he dips his toe into the post-midlife mortality pool. And while there's less morbid self-interest than, say, the last couple of Philip Roth books, there's a good deal of naval-gazing for the older white male. It's almost as though the narcissism and arrogance that get us through adolescence and the 20s (I can't vouch for any other decades, sorry) starts ripening into extra neurosis with age. This may not hold up, though--otherwise, how would Woody Allen not have imploded by now?

McEwan's protagonist here is Henry Perowne, a fancy-schmancy brain surgeon in London. He wakes up early one morning--quick, guess which one!--and the book follows him throughout his day. Simple premise, and McEwan doesn't deviate much from the promise of the title. At first, it looks like McEwan may be making the bold choice of just following some dude around on a boring day. Henry sees a plane on fire, and gets excited thinking it might be terrorism. After that proves to be anticlimactic, he kinda hangs out with his jazz musician son, putters around, wakes up his wife for a little nookie, dozes, showers, etc. Nothing too exciting. Things pick up when he ventures out to his weekly squash game and has to deal with a quick mashup (literally) of his comfy lifestyle, history (Londoners are gathering downtown to protest the incipient Iraq invasion), and the dark underbelly ('cause there's always a dark underbelly) of the city he loves. After this he becomes fairly unhinged, despite attempting to go about the rest of the day normally; and his worries about his life, his family, and the outer world dominate the rest of his day.

The violence in the climax is largely literal, but it might as well be metaphorical. It's almost a fantasy of what could happen after a random encounter. There's a strange, physical neatness to the ending--a surprising bloodlessness, despite an emergency surgery. If it were a TV show, we'd all be bellyaching about how nobody's guts got sprayed all over, say, a diner.

McEwan manages to get his power across in other ways. For example, none of the characters is quite what one would expect from the setup. Henry is anxious about his son's future, and whenever they cross paths, you almost expect one of those teary, "You don't understand my art!" screamfests that make for good novel tension. Same deal with the daughter, although she brings them a little closer to drama. But the relationships ebb and flow like real ones, with the unspoken dotage and concerns between actual parents and kids. And with the wife--not only does she not have a poolboy on the side somewhere, they get it on (twice!) and seem to like one another. Crazy. Once you realize that McEwan is trying for something honest, that's pretty potent.

Also, the language is remarkable. McEwan is so good at describing place, along with everyday thoughts and processes, that it's easy to overlook the built-in tedium of setting several hundred pages in a single day. This helps things feel balanced between the less dramatic early parts with the plot-heavier latter half. There are other threads too (the whole post-9/11 world thing, Henry's passion for his career, etc.) that unify the whole story, but nothing binds better than a consistent authorial voice. For the length of the novel, he keeps up the conflict between the solidity of everyday life with the fragility of the human brain. Much of that is done with the thrust of the inner dialogue; a lesser writer would have hit the reader over the head with that point early, and never let up. It's much more pleasant and organically done here.

Accordingly, I had a lot of favorite bits. Believe it or not, this is a reduced list from my earlier notes. This is a book that needs to be read aloud--with company or without should depend on how good one's British accent is.

"Standing here, as immune to the cold as a marble statue, gazing towards Charlotte Street, towards a foreshortened jumble of facades, scaffolding and pitched roofs, Henry thinks the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece—millions teeming around the accumulated and layered achievements of the centuries, as though around a coral reef, sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part, nearly everyone wanting it to work."

[On Theo's music] "He moves on up the fret and the diffidence begins to carry a hint of danger. A little syncopated stab on the turnaround, the sudden chop of an augmented chord, a note held against the tide of the harmony, a judiciously flattened fifth, a seventh bent in sensuous microtones. Then a passing soulful dissonance. He has the rhythmic gift of upending expectation, a way of playing off triplets against two- or four-note clusters. His runs have the tilt and accent of bebop. It's a form of hypnosis, of effortless seduction."

[On the wife, Rosalind] "Solitude and work were less threatening to her inner world than kisses."

[On waking up next to his wife] "This commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover, with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting faces together in a ritual of affection, briefly settled in the eternal necessities of warmth, comfort, safety, crossing limbs to draw nearer—a simple daily consolation almost too obvious, easy to forget by daylight. Has a poet ever written it up?"

[on losing at squash] "The game becomes an extended metaphor of character defect. Every error he makes is so profoundly, so irritatingly typical of himself, instantly familiar, like a signature, like a tissue scar or some deformation in a private place. As intimate and self-evident as the feel of his tongue in his mouth. Only he can go wrong in quite this way, and only he deserves to lose in just this manner. As the points fall he draws his remaining energy from a darkening pool of fury."

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

Incurable plague. Zombies. Worldwide collapse. Pretty serious stuff. Therefore, it must have come from the only son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, right?

Not that the world should be expecting Young Frankenstein Junior from Brooks Junior, but I definitely did a double take after reading the author blurb on the dust jacket of World War Z, a fictionalized look at what might happen during and after a devastating plague. Anyway, Brooks's previous book, The Zombie Survival Guide, was definitely tongue-in-cheek; this one is not. It's presented as a series of interviews conducted by a vague narrator (who also happened to write a civilian zombie survival guide--go figure), about ten years after the world managed to contain the zombie virus. There's no real parody--some cheeky references to the "brushfire war" that depleted U.S. war resources/good will, and a rather clever twist on Cuban-American immigration issues do surface--but they're not dominant in the tone. The book works pretty well as a sober sociopolitical allegory.

It's also effective as a zombie story. I don't care much for horror or sci fi, but I was hooked almost immediately. The scariest part is how thoroughly Brooks has considered the many ways in which we'd be screwed. If an unforseen and unconventional crisis snuck up on humanity, the dependence on outdated methods and international distrust would kill us all. And it's not so futuristic: the timeline puts the start of the undead plague a few years from now, but clearly not far. Brooks paints the details of the plague, and its spread, so matter-of-factly that it doesn't even seem improbable. Why not a strange virus that reanimates the dead? Who knows what lurks in Chinese rivers? Anybody checked lately?

If there's a weak part, it's the fact that this is obviously a first novel. The interview structure gets a little tedious about halfway through, when it's clear that the voice is largely the same whether it's a Russian soldier, a South American diplomat, an American grunt, or a blind Japanese sensei talking. And some of the anecdotes could be cut pretty easily without hurting the story (a random bit of grandstanding at the end, about how all the whales died in the war, comes to mind). It's definitely apparent that Brooks had this cool idea, but didn't know how to sustain it, without breaking it up into narrative chunks. Also, I found more typos in the book than in any other I've read lately. Typos happen, even with the best publishers, but there's very little excuse for leaving "materiel" in the text four different times. Way to go, copyeditors.

Overall, though, I would absolutely recommend the book for fun reading. I was always excited to pick it back up again, and found myself walking to and from T stops with my nose in it (other pedestrians and sidewalk hazards be damned!). Plus, now I have a self-entertaining habit of evaluating everyone else in my office/subway car/line at Dunkin Donuts, and figuring out what I'd do if one of them suddenly reanimated. (Here's a tip: always go for the brain.)

Parts I liked especially:

From a prewar CIA director:
"We couldn't defend ourselves without violating national security. We had to just sit there and take it. And what was the result? Brain drain. Why stick around and be the victim of a political witch hunt when you could escape to the private sector: a fatter paycheck, decent hours, and maybe, just maybe, a little respect and appreciation by the people you work for. We lost a lot of good men and women, a lot of experience, initiative, and priceless analytical reasoning. All we were left with were the dregs, a bunch of brownnosing, myopic eunuchs."

From a wartime White House Chief of Staff, on alternative media coverage of the virus:
"Oh, sure, and you know who listens to them? Pansy, overeducated know-it-alls, and you know who listens to them? Nobody! Who's going to care about some PBS-NPR fringe minority that's out of touch with the mainstream? The more those elitist eggheads shouted, 'The dead are walking,' the more real Americans tuned them out."

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

"If I had to, I could clean out my desk in five seconds and nobody would know I had ever been here. And I'd forget too." -- Ryan "The Temp" Howard, The Office

The desk-dwellers at Dunder-Mifflin (and their predecessors at Wernham-Hogg) have opened the door so we can chuckle at the banal absurdity of office life. After all, most of us are familiar enough with the quirks and frustrations that fill the week. But in real life we can't gain the necessary distance to really laugh at the office weirdo, or see past the petty alliances and feuds. Joshua Ferris's novel Then We Came to the End hits a little closer to the reality of working in the cubicle zone.

The novel (Ferris's first) is about a group of coworkers at an unnamed advertising firm in Chicago, presumably during the heady days of the very early 2000s. The coffee bar lattes are plentiful and the desk chairs ergonomic, but an ever-larger rash of layoffs is starting to make everyone a little crazy. There's the resident psycho, who spouts off about philosophy, whines about his ex-wife, and hides rotting sushi rolls as a form of cosmic punishment. There's the office "couple," in which half is newly pregnant and the other half is already married (much less cute than Pam and Jim). There's also the quasi-boss, who's hated by the staff for no good reason; and the real boss, who's so removed from the group that everyone would rather sneak around and get illegal, confidential information from a hospital than ask her directly if she's dying of breast cancer like they believe she is. Everyone is weird, but believably so.

In all of these people, however, there's no real protagonist. The dominant voice is a royal "we," where the "I" has been entirely absorbed by the group. This is a pretty unusual choice--I can't think, offhand, of any other books which use the omniscient second person like that. At first, I waited patiently for a character to emerge from the shield of solidarity, but after a while I liked that the narrator was sucked so completely into the absurd gravity of the office.

The casual cruelty, the superficial interests--they're the heart of the atmosphere. It's not unlike Mean Girls in the picture the book creates of non-physical brutality. No action or thought is simple enough for the watercooler vultures. It's got to have reasons, secret motivations, instant repercussions, etc. For example, the office's failed aspirants (novelist and screenwriter turned copywriters, etc.) are mocked for trying to find the golden narrative thread that justifies their sellout status. Yet everyone else is trying to find the same meaning, in the same building. My stuff is sacred, but yours is not, because you dare to be open about it. The sustained hypocrisy of being annoyed at others' idiocy while fearing exclusion is palpable, and it's probably the best part of the book.

The climax is a farce of violence, and it reflects our own wish for drama and our inability to cope with it when it comes and screws up the mundane. Good stuff.

Not that everything is mired in depressive social commentary. In all the awkwardness and the cruelty, there are spots of genuine sweetness and humor. They keep the whole thing from being too depressing and monotonous. Just like with real coworkers.

Some of the bits I liked best:

"When we heard Benny was not getting rid of the totem pole but had chosen to keep it, even going so far as to store it at great personal expense, we kept asking him why. Why, Benny? Why? Benny, why? When he continued to refuse to tell us--or perhaps he just found himself unable to explain his reasons even to himself--we let the full force of our dissatisfaction be known. We did not like not knowing something. We could not abide being left in the dark. And we thought it was the height of hypocrisy for Benny, who was always telling everyone about everyone else, to try and keep a secret from us. So we took up squawking at him. We did mockeries of ceremonial dances in his doorway. The worst thing we did was take scissors to this old toupee Chris Yop had in his basement, and put the mangled thing on Benny's desk, which Karen Woo doused with a bottle of fake blood she had in her office, so that what lay on the desk looked like a fresh scalping. Someone suggested we find a yarmulke to put on top, but we all sort of agreed that to marry those two atrocities together would be stepping over a line."

"But enough daydreaming. Our desks were waiting, we had work to do. And work was everything. We liked to think it was family, it was God, it was following football on Sundays, it was shopping with the girls or a strong drink on Saturday night, that it was love, that it was sex, that it was keeping our eye on retirement. But at two in the afternoon with bills to pay and layoffs hovering over us, it was all about the work."

"She took comfort knowing where he was, even if she wasn't with him. Finding him at home, however, waking him up, she realizes she knows nothing of where he might have been or what he was doing, and that's very, very unsettling. She thinks the worst--a drink with someone new, fresh conversation, the beginning of what he does want. She's lost him."

"Even with the best of intentions, it was impossible not to offend one another. We fretted over the many insignificant exchanges we found ourselves in from day to day. We weren't thinking, words just flew from our mouths--unfettered, un-thought-out--and next we knew, we had offended someone with an offhand or innocent remark. We might have implied someone was fat, or intellectually simple, or hideously ugly. Most of the time we probably felt it was true. We worked with some fat, simple people, and the hideously ugly walked among us as well. But by god we wanted to keep quiet about it."

What You Have Left by Will Allison

If you told me last week that I'd really enjoy a book that uses NASCAR as a cultural backdrop, I probably would have scoffed at you in that special "Eastern Egalitarian"1 way and changed the subject. But What You Have Left, by Will Allison (long time writer, first time novelist) manages to transcend my petty geographical biases.

It's a tricky little novel, despite seeming simple. The plot is nothing groundbreaking: spunky woman dies after a waterskiing accident in 1971; husband feels guilty, panics, and abandons their kid to be raised by her overprotective grandfather; the daughter eventually seeks her deadbeat dad for answers, both with and without the help of her boyfriend. Allison doesn't seem to be going for anything shocking: by three pages in, you pretty much know who's married, who's dead, and how they die. He chooses to let all the secret motivations, histories, and personalities unfold instead, and it works really well.

The efficiency extends to the characters as well. The voices are frank and somewhat southern, but not in a twangy way--it's more of a no-bullshit manner. Although South Carolina provides a backdrop and some plot points, the story really could have taken place in any vaguely rural area. The perspective shifts from chapter to chapter, sliding from Holly (the abandoned girl who grows up to be a drunk driver, video poker addict, and commitmentphobe while still remaining likeable), to her husband in the 90s, to her absentee father in the 70s, and back again. By jumping around in time, Allison gets all of the history across without much unnecessary stuff. He also (and this is key) doesn't let the narration apologize for anybody's behavior. Rather, you get the sense of how an event's account can differ from person to person, but nobody gets to justify his or her actions while explaining them. Sympathy is possible, but cancellation is not.

The NASCAR bits come in mostly as a way of exploring the dead mother, who doesn't get her own voice. As a talented stock car driver starting to rise above the yokels at the local track in the late 60s, she personifies the career/motherhood dilemma--but because she dies so young, her husband and daughter are stuck guessing at her motivations. It's a fresh perspective on these issues, without being particularly feminist or maudlin. She's not a saint, just a chick who liked speed.

There are some nominal attempts to tether the book to social issues (at one point, South Carolina's infamous Confederate flag and the legal debate over video poker parlors push the plot along), but those parts distract a little from what's really going on.

I'm not sure the book would have worked on a bigger scale. At 200 pages, it's compact and compelling--enough so to be the first book in ages that I've breezed through in only a few hours. I wouldn't complain about a few extra chapters (especially the ones from the absurdly patient husband), but it's probably better to be left wanting. Especially when more material would increase the risk of random Jeff Gordon mentions. Let's just keep it short and good.



1 See The Heidi Chronicles by Wendy Wasserstein

getting the john travolta vote sewn up

What was the best political news story in the past few days? Was it the latest gladiatorial posturing by Bush and Pelosi? Congress subpoenaing the emails between Karl Rove and the DOJ? Hillary being Hillary? Hardly. Try a bit of campaign fluffery: Mitt Romney's favorite books.

First, we have the Bible. Not the Book of Mormon (too polygamous). Not any of the transcendentalists (too Massachusetts). The Bible. Thank you, campaign manager concerned about the South. You've done your advising well.

Then we have his favorite novel. Battlefield Earth. Battlefield...Earth. My God. Should we be happy that he believes in science enough to endorse a Xenu-filled universe? Maybe we should just be content that he reads. I mean, no one would lie about that being a favorite book. You lie about The Stranger, or Green Eggs and Ham, or the Bible. Not a crappy sci-fi novel by a third-rate writer and second-rate guru.

So either someone's been getting campaign cash from the Scientology compound, or Tom Cruise is firing up the private jet--at this very moment--to come give Romney a stress test. Either way, this doesn't end well.