Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr.

The last Katy-Jacob book club pick for 2007 was Last Exit to Brooklyn. It was also the latest entry in my own reading mini-theme for 2007, "Pre-Giuliani New York was so much more interesting."

The book is a collection of semi-connected stories. The biggest link is the geography: the same rough neighborhood of Brooklyn, 1950s-ish. The other connection is the repetition of certain characters, but the recurring names may be a writerly trick to establish universality--or just the simple fact that Brooklyn used to have an awful lot of Vinnies hanging around. Otherwise, the stories don't have much of a shared theme, other than the unrelenting brutality of the wrong side of the tracks.

The first story is a short one about a fight between wannabe tough guys and local sailors. It's kinda like West Side Story--only Maria is a hooker, and there's 150% more broken teeth and bleeding kidneys.

Next, there's a longer, better story about Georgette, a transvestite who obsesses over a neighborhood guy who treats her like crap. The really fascinating thing is the inversion of gender roles in this one. Georgette (along with her drag queen clique) is a hyperfeminized figure, a wistful man's conception of what a girl should be. But she still acts like a "man," in that she pursues Vinnie. In turn, Vinnie becomes the coquette, suggesting that he'll let Georgette sleep with him for cash. Unusual for the time period, I would think. There's a very laid-back attitude about the gender/sex issues overall. It's never clear whether Vinnie and his friends are merely hard-up for sex, and are willing to play fast and loose with "girl" parts in order to get some; or whether they're really latent homosexuals, and know exactly what they're doing. These technicalities are beyond the main issue, which is the cruel pageantry of sexual attraction. Also, the story taught me that "Miss Thing" has been in use by drag queens far longer than I would have expected. If everyone weren't so horrible and benzadrine-laden, the matter-of-fact sexuality would have been refreshing.

The book's centerpiece is "Strike," which follows union lackey Harry as he pretends to run a factory strike. Really, he's just using the union's petty cash to escape from his unhappy marriage, and to explore his taboo gayness. Again, the sexual roles are very much switched around: Harry's wife is the bedtime aggressor, and he can't handle it. So he gets ill, lashes out physically, and exaggerates his machismo at work. There's also a weird duality about what he wants. He seeks the softness and femininity of a traditional wife, but the fact that he's gay complicates that. So all biological women are "ballbusting [c-bombs]," but the transvestites and effeminate men become ideal partners. You want to feel pity for his trappedness, but the fact that he's a total jerk (and commits an ultimately irredeemable act) makes that impossible. Unfortunately, the story bears little resemblance to Last Exit to Springfield despite the union elements, but maybe that's best for Homer's sake.

"Tralala" is the apex of the sexual violence in the book, but by the time you get there, it's like, "Oh, is there more spunk and blood? No biggie." Basically, it's the story of young Tralala, whose cheery name doesn't stop the cynicism and obsession with petty amounts of cash that lead her down the ol' spiral. You know, in Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, I don't remember the scene where soldiers, killing time before they ship out to Europe, lined up in a junkyard to gang rape a strung-out girl who's too far gone to care. Maybe I should go back and check.

The book concludes with "Landsend," which is a smaller nexus of stories about a housing project. While discussing, we tried to figure out whether the poverty of the projects was really worse back then, before welfare reform, or if the drug and gang complications of today make that old-style poverty seem quaint. Hard to tell, because the only remotely decent people in this section are a senile old lady and a woman who thinks the trashiness of her neighbors is contagious. The thread of sexual and social dysfunction from the rest of the book continues here, but seems to have exploded. The anecdotes come together to create a purgatory of poor people and even poorer choices.

When the book ends, it's not because there's any redemptive moment, or even an instance of clear social commentary. It just stops. This is the only justifiable way to end it, but it's hard to take the necessary step back, breathe, and try to process what you've absorbed. I can't help but wonder if the book would have faced the same obscenity trial and villification if it had tried for some (any) moralizing on behalf of the characters. We can handle the Hester Prynnes of the literary world, but what do we do with the Tralalas?

I guess you just try to appreciate the blood and the honesty, and look at the parts that are kinda sweet. Like the small scenes of genuine sensuality that pop up sometimes in all the violent or dirty sex, or the hoped-for romance that Georgette tries so hard to create in an environment that just can't sustain it. Or you wait for Rudy Giuliani to come along and clean it all up.

Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007 by Dave Eggers et al

The Best American books have become one of the best rackets in publishing. I used to stand in the bookstores at year's end, and be guilted into the idea that I hadn't read nearly enough good essays/sportswriting/short stories throughout the year. Then, when the series grew to about fifty different books every November, I gave up on the guilt-induced buying. Best American Poetry by Monkeys 2007 is just never going to fit into my book budget or my limited fun-reading time. But I do make it a point to pick up Best American Nonrequired Reading each year, mostly because it fills me in on the quirky essays/topical writing that I would have enjoyed reading in the first place. Plus it's got the Eggers/McSweeney's stamp of approval. And what good Park Slope-ite doesn't support her neighbors?

Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007 was actually better than its lackluster predecessors from the past few years. More brief and funny pieces, fewer wankfest essays from super-literary journals that no one outside of the Iowa Writers' Workshop has heard of. Also, the intro, traditionally from a celebrity who goes out of his way to sound literary, was less boring this year. Sufjan Stevens (whom, admittedly, I know only from recommendations from friends who have much hipper music taste than I) had the honor this year, and he didn't try to be too writerly. He told an entertaining story about growing up in the hippiest of hippie schools in the 1970s--and it could have been the work of any NPR clique member.

One of the things I like best about Nonrequired Reading is that it gives a taste of the genres I can't tolerate in large doses, but should make a nominal effort to know. Like graphic novels. This year's selection is from Fun Home, which was the edgy comic du jour (am I allowed to call it a comic?) about a year ago. I'd avoided it, because it seemed too trendy--but was nicely surprised by the depth of story. I can still look askance at webcomics, though, right?

The cutesy elements get tiring ("Best American Beginnings of Ten Stories About Ponies," "Best American Names of Television Programs Brought to Their Logical Conclusions"), as does the annual segment where scientists are polled about their "dangerous" political ideas. This is the edgy Best American, we get it.

The good parts more than make up for the tedious bits. Scott Carrier's Rock the Junta looks at censorship and rock-and-roll in the uber-repressive Myanmar. Spin sends a writer to cover a goth music fest in the Midwest (three years ago, you know it would have been Chuck Klosterman). Several stories, including a charming one by Miranda July, show why yuppies shouldn't have kids. And the post-Katrina pieces are starting to be less shellshocked and more interesting. Plus, there's a commencement speech from Conan O'Brien that's pure Conantastic joy, especially when you've gone without him for a while (52 days, not that I'm counting).

I don't think I'd trust all (or most) of my reading to a cabal of high schoolers from California, but I'm certainly content to let them weed out some of the wit and grit from the year's literary morass.

Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen

Woody Allen the director makes concessions to modernity. He casts Will Ferrell, has (finally) stopped casting himself as the romantic lead, and seems to have moved beyond the New York of the 1970s. Woody Allen the writer, not so much. Sure, he makes the occasional reference to the internet, or comments on modern food insanity. But for the most part, his prose is pretty much the same it's been since the 60s. Not many contemporary writers could get away with using slang that was first heard in Brooklyn delis in 1956.

In his latest collection, Mere Anarchy, the Woodman does pretty much the same thing he did in Without Feathers and Getting Even--which is to say, he writes a lot of short pieces with hyperactive premises and even speedier language. None of them here captured my heart quite like "The Whore of Mensa" did, but the book was highly readable. It was actually kinda comforting in its familiarity. I was tempted to tag Woody an Endangered Author, merely because of his age and the unevenness of his last five years' worth of films, but he's not really making a last-ditch attempt at anything. He's keepin' it real--1967 or 2007. In fact, I'm not even sure if he was parodying himself, or if he's just perfected the conceit of overwriting on purpose. I guess he's just Woody being Woody.

More importantly, style issues aside, the book is simply entertaining. For every tired borscht belt joke that my eyes slipped over, I found two or three things that made me chuckle out loud on the subway. Some favorite parts:

"To sum up: apart from my own Beyond Good and Evil Flapjacks and Will to Power Salad Dressing, of the truly great recipes that have changed Western ideas Hegel's Chicken Pot Pie was one of the first to employ leftovers with meaningful political implications. Spinoza's Stir-Fried Shrimp and Vegetables can be enjoyed by atheists and agnostics alike, while a little-known recipe of Hobbes's for Barbecued Baby Back Ribs remains an intellectual conundrum. The great thing about the Nietzsche Diet is that once the pounds are shed they stay off--which is not the case with Kant's 'Tractatus on Starches.'"

"Donald lived at Mr. Eisner's home for six months when he and Daisy Duck were separated. Donald had been having an affair with Petunia Pig, Porky Pig's girlfriend. It was a no-no at Disney to socialize with creatures from a competing studio, but in Donald's case Mr. Eisner chose to look the other way, which upset the shareholders."

Norman Mailer

"Mailer had always thought it senseless to undertake an attack unless you made certain it was printed, for otherwise you were left with a determined enemy who was an unmarked man, and therefore able to repay you at leisure and by the lift of an eyebrow."

When I saw Norman Mailer speak at Harvard earlier this year, he was awfully frail. When he canceled his scheduled part in October's New Yorker Festival, it seemed ominous. And when Philip Roth's new book suggested that Mailer was next to go, it sounded likely. Well, now it looks like the foreshadowing wasn't just hokum. Mailer's gone, and with him he takes a giant chunk of literary heart.

Whatever his personal flaws were (and there were many, as the ex-wives and various stabbees could tell you), he was always fierce. Self-aggrandizing and obnoxious, sure. But he never shied from doing anything in print that he wanted to do. And up until last February at least, he was still prodding, prodding, prodding, trying to goad people into reacting to him as entertainingly as possible. It's like he never stopped being the Mailer of Armies of the Night (always one of my favorites), pissing off as many people as necessary to get to the exact intersection of politics and literary theater. We're losing the guys willing to do this without publicists, without focus groups. The mid-20th century writers were never meant to keep this energy up forever, but it still hurts to see it all dying, bit by bit.

Strike, week 2

People have been predicting what the Writers Guild members would do during the strike...humor columns, illicit scripts, blogs. Most of the guesses were jokes, and it looks like that in less than a week, pretty much all were right.

My heart goes out to these guys--especially when Rachel Axler says, "But we’ve given up our salaries and our jobs — easily the only jobs we’re qualified for — to stand outside and yell at people." If I were funnier on the spot, I like to think that I would have tried the TV writing thing. I love publishing, but I'm not sure I'd be in it if I could hack it as a real writer. And I definitely sympathize with the "but this is the only thing I'm good at!" vibe. So this week's project may be doing something nice for the strike people. Something other than avoiding the few reality shows that aren't scripted.

Exit Ghost by Philip Roth

Junior year of college, I had an American Lit professor who seemed positively insane. He'd rant and rave about the inherent pornography of narrative, and tie everything somehow to sex and primal urges. On the morning of September 11, he kept us cooped up in the TV-less classroom, and railed for an hour about how we (as a generation) had been given an amazing historical opportunity. So yeah. Kinda nuts. But he taught me how to read literature in a much more mature way (my high school self never interpreted The Great Gatsby as a love story between Nick and Gatsby)--and he introduced me to the writing of Philip Roth, whom I've enjoyed quite a bit since that fall. Turns out the professor was a friend and editor of Roth's. After I read a few more of the books, Crazy American Lit Prof made a lot more sense. And I found myself thinking of him often as I read the latest (last?), Exit Ghost.

If Roth and the professor are correct, then life really does come down to the basest of human issues: sex drive and control over one's own body. Exit Ghost is a meditation on the end of both of those--and it's terrifying. It's pretty clearly the end of Nathan Zuckerman, the Roth alter ego from so many of this books. Zuckerman can't pee properly and can't get it up, thanks to a prostatectomy, and this isn't really a problem for him--until it is. The plot is set in motion by his emergence from his self-exile, when he leaves his Berkshires hideaway to get medical treatment in New York. The exhilaration of being back in his old city leads him to answer a home-swapping ad (which resolves my longstanding question of who responds to those strange ads in the back of NYROB); and he becomes involved with a young married couple who ignite his long-dormant alpha male urges. (Zuckerman wants to one-up him and possess her.) The infatuation gets out of hand extremely fast, and he struggles with his total impotence (both physical and game-wise, since he can't elicit more than mild curiosity out of young Jamie). Meanwhile, he's dealing with a minor literary scandal, as an old boyfriend of Jamie's is trying to publish an expose on Zuckerman's former mentor. That's when everything becomes a weird tangle of sublimated urges and frustration.

Roth creates a tangible sense of physical deterioration around Zuckerman, who obsesses over his own state. Zuckerman does it in a curiously detached way, though: while he talks almost incessantly about his incontinence and lack of libido, it takes 162 pages before the word "penis" even shows up. He can't face it directly, so he takes the literary route of describing the hell out of it. He also writes around it, creating a strange play of how things should have gone between himself and Jamie. Since seduction is the one thing he can't do, it becomes the charged focus of their fake flirtation. And it's incredibly sad. He gives "Jamie" all sorts of qualities and expressions he never sees in the real girl--qualities that are suspiciously like his dead mentor's young mistress, who made an incredible impression on him back in the 1950s. Said mistress comes back into Zuckerman's life as well, but as a flawed old woman. The parallel between then and now, as Zuckerman starts to disintegrate in every way possible, is painful to see, but pretty fascinating.

One might argue that this is Zuckerman's swan song, not necessarily Roth's...but the sense of finale is hard to ignore. Roth likes to do books in groups, or arcs--why not finish the same way? The Plot Against America was the end of youth. Everyman was the end of the man (no pun intended). And now Exit Ghost is the end of the creation. I think this might be it for him. There's a section where the line between Zuckerman and Roth becomes especially blurred, when Zuckerman talks about the death of George Plimpton, and the concurrent death of American literature. The parts where Zuckerman derides the upcoming generation of literati are extra steely and angry, even beyond the narrator's usual indignance. It's almost like Roth is daring the reader to compare character and author. Eerie, and yet fitting for a writer who has based so much of his career on daring people to look away--from sex, from class, from politics.

If he is going out, he's going out with some excellent, very Rothian writing. Some passages I liked especially:

"I started toward the subway to take a train downtown to Ground Zero. Begin there, where the biggest thing of all occured; but because I've withdrawn as witness and participant both, I never made it to the subway. That would have been wholly out of character for the character I'd become. Instead, after crossing the park, I found myself in the familiar rooms of the Metropolitan Museum, wiling away the afternoon like someone who had no catching up to do."

"To possess control over one's bladder--who among the whole and healthy ever considers the freedom that bestows or the anxious vulnerability its loss can impose on even the most confident among us? I who'd never thought along these lines before, who from the age of twelve was bent on singularity and welcomed whatever what was unusual in me--I could now be like everyone else.
As though the ever-hovering shadow of humiliation isn't, in fact, what binds one to everyone else."


"The light fading, the room getting smaller, a cab or two going by in the street, the city receding while everything around them becomes close and dark. These two people taking their time with each other, listening to each other. So sexual and so sad. Thick with each of their pasts, though neither knows much of the other's. The pace of it, all that silence and what might be in there. Each of them desperate for entirely different reasons."

"For this wholly unautobiographical writer, blessed with his genius for complete transformation, the choice was almost inevitable. It's what opened his predicament out for him and enabled him to leave the personal behind. Fiction for him was never representation. It was rumination in narrative form."

"So yada yada yada, my cookbook looks just like hers."

Elaine: Yeah. I met this lawyer...we went out to dinner...I had the lobster bisque...we went back to my place, yada yada yada. I never heard from him again.
Jerry: But you yada yada'd over the best part.
Elaine: No, I mentioned the bisque.

Anyway, what does Seinfeld have to do with books, you ask? Well, you may have seen Mrs. Seinfeld, erstwhile socialite and current Friend of Oprah, on all the TV shows plugging her new book, Deceptively Delicious. She's made chocolate pudding with secret avocado in it for Al Roker, and be-squashed mac and cheese for Oprah. And the book itself is cute, not to mention a good idea.

Too bad it's awfully similar to The Sneaky Chef, which just happened to be pitched to HarperCollins TWICE before they jumped on Jessica Seinfeld's proposal. The ideas contained aren't so novel (can recipes even be copyrighted?). But I do feel bad for Missy Lapine and Perseus Books on the timing. It's pretty clear that HarperCollins wanted the book, but turned her down because they wanted a celebrity author (or an author married to a celebrity, anyway).

The New York Times has a good article on the whole thing: Sneaky Food Books: Hot and a Hot Topic.

Book publishing is fun, isn't it?

"We were fractious and overpaid."

Okay, so if you didn't go out and read Then We Came to the End because I liked it, you should go out and read it because the National Book Award committee liked it! I'm just sayin'....

I'm glad to see it getting the props--it was easily one of my favorite books of the past year. Had I not heard about it beforehand, I never would have guessed it was a first novel. And I find myself hearing echoes of the prose whenever I'm doing something banal at the office, which is to say every day. Maybe this should be required reading for all new hires at any office job. I hope the special sales people at Little, Brown are all over that.

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

The first time I heard about Prep, someone was talking about it in my book editing class, and describing it as a guilty pleasure kind of book. So I was really expecting something like the Gossip Girl series, a slick package of gratuitous teen bitchery and sex. [Disclaimer: I haven't read any of the series, but having seen a few minutes of the new CW show, I don't think my assessment is far off.] When I saw the book on my roommate's bookshelf, I thought maybe it would be a good end-of-summer vice read. Color me surprised when the cover held a sticker proclaiming, "New York Times Book Review: One of the Top Ten Books of the Year!" Maybe the Times editors, like the thousands of people who made Prep a bestseller, enjoy a little Mean Girl drama too?

But what's this? The book has no uber-bitches, no rainbow parties. (Don't Google the latter if you have any faith left in the innocence of teenagers.) Instead, it's a fairly quiet coming-of-age book about a swank Massachusetts boarding school. The narratrix is Lee Fiora, a girl whose averageness (social, academic, economic) puts her on the wrong end of the social scale at the prestigious Ault School. However, this is mostly her own doing. She's too timid (and later, too apathetic) to compete with the rich kids--they're not really the ones keeping her alienated. Her crippling self-awareness stops her from engaging in any meaningful ways with her surroundings. However, despite her best efforts at hiding, she manages to acquire friends (or at least allies), and a bizarre, masochistic relationship with one of the chosen boys of her grade. There IS some non-PG stuff, but it's more the endearing, fumbly kind than the "oh my God, I can't believe I'm reading this" kind.

It's one of the slower and more maddening maturation narratives--and all the more real because of that. Kind of Holden-esque, in that you kind of want to shake Lee and make her do stuff in her own interest. And frankly, it scared me a little how much I understood Lee. When she gets into a shadowy "relationship" with social king Cross Sugarman, my cringes were for her, but also for all the times I let myself be the secret girlfriend. Most of the observational stuff is similarly incisive. Sittenfeld really nails what it's like to be the unspectacular kid trying to keep up with inflated circumstances.

The writing's quality comes from its ability to keep Lee's voice young, even though she's working from a much later vantage point. It's funny, light, and quick. The pacing gets a little wonky, moving unevenly through semesters, but it's not that big of a distraction. Overall, it's easy to see why so many people picked this book up, and why it was received so well--even without any mean girls involved.

Some bits I liked best:

"But I was living my life sideways. I did not act on what I wanted, I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was always imagining something else. Grades felt peripheral, but the real problem was that everything felt peripheral."

During a game of "Assassins":
"I knew right away I had ruined it. Whatever jokiness had existed between us--I had killed the substance of it. McGrath would be friendly to me from now on...but the friendliness would be hollow. In killing him, I had ended the only overlap between our lives....McGrath didn't want to talk, of course, it wasn't as if we had anything to say to each other. I knew all this, I understood the rules, but still, nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny."

"When I think of Cross now, a big part of what I remember is that sense of waiting, of relying on chance. I couldn't go to his room--it was decided. And that meant that in order to convey to him my concern about his injury, I would have to run into him in the hall when few or no other students are around, and when I did, I'd have to quickly intuit his mood to find out if adjustments were to be made so that we could keep seeing each other.
I realize now: I ceded all the decisions to him. But that wasn't how it felt! At the time, it seemed so clear that the decisions belonged to him. Rules existed; they were unnamed and intractable."

Brooklyn Book Festival

So today was the second annual Brooklyn Book Festival. Taking place in picturesque downtown between Borough Hall and the courthouse, it was basically a big jumble of publishers hawking books, authors hawking themselves, and nobody hawking fair food (to Jacob's discontent).

The booths were unspectacular. It's always good to see little presses working hard to stay alive, but it's hard to get excited about what they're pushing. There should have been more free stuff: books, catalogs, even t-shirts (my big new book publicity idea). And I say that because I'm a free stuff whore, but also because I don't want to spend $10 on a completely unknown book/author. Maybe it's due to all that time I spent with MFAs at Emerson. And if I'm not willing to take risks on new stuff, with my background in how publishing works, what are the chances that most people will? It's not the best system, but the small presses will need to do something to address that. There was some swag, though, and now I have a Nancy Drew "Get Caught Reading" poster, an issue of Poets & Writers, and a "Leave No CEO Behind" button from The Nation Books.

Also, there was some free edumacation. We observed the "Define-a-Thon" for a while, which was basically a spelling bee, but with dictionary definitions. None of the questions we heard seemed all that difficult. I bet some seventh grader would have wiped the floor with those adults.

I didn't catch many of the readings (those tend to be better in quieter, less time-restrictive settings), but the panels were quirky enough to be kinda fun. The first one was a retrospective on On the Road, featuring some dude from Viking Books (who was pretty much there to let us know that the book still sells 100,000 copies per year), an ex-lover of Kerouac's who has published two books of their intimate details, a journalist who's written a book about Kerouac, and another woman who was there to fill in crucial 1950s social details for all of us whippersnappers who wear jeans to public events. There was nothing revelatory, just a lot of the usual background about how Kerouac wasn't really a hippie, how Neal Cassady wasn't a role model, etc. I was hoping that the ex-lover would turn it into a Cheever-esque situation. But no--she stuck to lame, PG stories about Kerouac's reactions to book reviews.

It made me wonder, though: is there a whole subculture of women who sleep with struggling writers, on the tiny chance that someday they'll get a book deal out of it? Like groupies, but with higher aims? If so, I totally squandered my time at Emerson. I could have planned far more effectively.

Later in the afternoon, there was a session with the Simmons family, a.k.a. the guys responsible for part of Run DMC and the Def Comedy/Poetry/Phat Farm empires. This was possibly the most un-literary book pub event I've ever seen. Probably because the guys were artists and not writers, they answered questions with real person answers, not Author Answers--and Rev Run didn't even want to publicize his former books. His wife, Justine, tried hard to get him to talk about his writing (and she did a good job publicizing her own children's book), but Rev Run just rolled his eyes at her and refused to answer anything he didn't feel like talking about. It was refreshing. I didn't see any MTV cameras, so I guess those sparks of family dysfunction won't be broadcast any time soon.


The day's ultimate event was a panel called "Everyone's a (Former) Critic," featuring culture critics who are venturing out of the zone and publishing novels/memoirs. The critics were Chuck Klosterman (whom I still read and like, even when he annoys me), Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone, and Ed Park of The Believer and the Village Voice. They talked at length about what it's like to move from moving from critic to critee (no idea if that's a word, but I'm going with it). There was also a lot of talk about the nature of criticism in general, and all three had insightful comments about trying to create art by talking about someone else's. I was especially struck by something Klosterman said, that book criticism is the only kind of criticism that takes the same form as its subject. Apparently, there's an inherent unfairness in writing about music or movies instead of taking them on in the same media. He talked about the irony that the only thing he's really qualified to do (write about other writers) is the one thing he won't do, opting to take on music and television instead. I'm butchering his words here, but the concept made a lot of sense at the time.

The panel started to get very strange toward the end of the hour. While the critics were still talking, a woman began to creep up the stairs on the side of the stage. Judging by the uneasy looks that the moderator kept casting that way, this was definitely unplanned. When the woman reached the stage and started wandering around, no one really knew what to do. When she sat down behind Chuck Klosterman, nobody (onstage or off) was paying any attention to what Rob Sheffield was saying. Nobody escorted her off, though (ahhh, meek literati). A minute later, after the moderator chose to ingore her, she stole Ed park's water bottle before wandering off again. If the whole thing was staged: worst clown ever.

Cool bit at the end: I ran into some Emerson folks who moved out here last year. Random, but neat.

So yeah...I look forward to an even better organized event next year (they're promising international authors! I assume it will take a full year to get all the visas approved). Either way, definitely a fun way to spend an early fall weekend afternoon.

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.

'ello, gov'nor. welcome to the dreariest place on earth!

Why go to sunny Orlando when you can get just as much theme park goodness in foggy England? At least the Charles Dickens theme park won't have giant mice running around (run-of-the-mill London rats, maybe). And perhaps the "It's a Small World" equivalent will have haunted-eyed street urchins instead of smiley United Nations children. This has the potential to be great--yet I can't help but feel it's unfair to Scrooge McDuck, who will probably be the first casualty in the anti-Disneyfication movement.

Until I can visit this monument to London's dark social problems, it'll just have to serve as a reminder that I need to read Dickens. Aside from an annual re-read of A Christmas Carol, I haven't read any of his novels since high school. It seems kind of unfair not to have approached him as an adult. I should take this up with my book club....

solving the world's literary crime, one writer at a time

Because I'm way behind on fun reading, I had no idea until this evening that The New Republic ran a story last month about possible Sedaris fraud. On one level, I don't really blame them. Who better to be a watchdog for literary crimes than the former enabler of Stephen Glass? It's the literary equivalent of gaydar. Plus, I assume their factchecking department has improved in the interim.

However, the logic is definitely flawed. Not fatally, but close. David Sedaris has been pretty open about the exaggeration factor. The article explicitly mentions this. But trying to prove the precise extent of the exaggeration feels a bit too nitpicky. The grain of salt offered by this admission should be enough for most marginally intelligent people; do we really need an itemized list of what was enhanced and what wasn't? If Sedaris runs for president or American Idol, maybe this will be more relevant.

And this was all dredged up with the James Frey mess, but nobody's pushing David Sedaris as a beacon of what anybody should do with his life. His writing is a lot of things, but "life affirming" isn't quite one of them. He's a humorist. Dismissing that claim out of hand--as the secondhand Slate article does--is a mistake. No one wants to read ostensibly funny memoirs that detail everything exactly as it happened--mostly because no such book exists. Real life is rarely funny; and when it is, it's the kind of quiet, poignant funny that isn't really funny at all. (See: every memoir ever written by a female comedian detailing her uterus-related illness.) We pretty much expect our memoirists to punch it up. That's why these books aren't published under the banner of "self help," or "go ahead and sue me if you find inaccuracies."

And most of Sedaris's books aren't even published under "autobiography." Walk into any bookstore--the books are in Humor. According to the Library of Congress, David Sedaris is an American humorous essayist. Check and...check. Naked is the only one that lists "biography" among the LOC designations. Admittedly, that's the one under the most contention in the TNR article, but still...kinda weak. If the books were marketed as being inspirationally true, this would be much different. Call me when you can verify every claim Donald Trump has ever made in print.

Alex Heard squanders whatever points I may have given him for journalistic integrity when he details how he dug up long-gone acquaintences, a random nurse, and Lou Sedaris to prove that some moments and pieces of dialogue may have been fluffed. Very Fox News, Mr. Heard. Good job. The whole thing smacks of "vendetta," even though there doesn't seem to be any real animosity. Parts like this are especially telling:

Libby describes a friend who was funny and caring, and who had a soft spot for outcasts. She thinks the depiction of Sharon in David's "novels" (her term) is entertaining but a little off, because Sharon, far from being the full-time grouch of David's stories, was a capable mother. "The sarcasm is a little bit her," Libby said. "But she was nurturing, she was warm, she cooked dinner every night. I thought she was a marvelous woman."

She "thinks" the description is "a little off"? That's not a breaking news story. That's a personal issue between the writer and his writees. And discussing whether the dialogue sounds "too good" is probably less of an accuracy issue than a language one. Unless there's a verbatim record of every conversation ever had, memoir dialogue is going to be somewhat more approximate than, say, a transcript of Meet the Press.

But whatever its many flaws might be, the TNR article does have one of the best magazine illustrations I've seen in a long time. So, you know, there's that.

Another Life by Michael Korda

About halfway through Michael Korda’s insider extravaganza about the publishing industry, Another Life: A Memoir of Other People, I realized that I probably could have skipped grad school. Emerson was great and all, but what I’ll take from it boils down to the structure of book publishing and the fun anecdotes about how it all works. Appropriate, then, that this book was actually an assignment for Book Editing in the twilight of my Master’s career. It’s probably just as well that I skimmed just enough to get by in the class discussions; had I read the whole thing, I definitely would have questioned the sanity of spending four hours a week listening to the instructor’s anecdotes when I had Michael Korda’s tucked in my bag all along.

So maybe I should be thankful that the book is a little slow to get into—so slow that I didn’t pick it up again until a reading drought this spring. It starts, despite its subtitle, as a memoir of Michael Korda. And this early Michael Korda is quite the name-dropper, thanks to his Hungarian-Hollywood-American upbringing. Until he gets an entry-level job at Simon & Schuster in the late 1950s, there’s a very real fear that he’s going to spend all five hundred pages talking about things like people he knew at Oxford, and which Hollywood washout hosted the best pool parties. But once he settles into New York book publishing, the dishy, informative parts start, and the references to “my father’s great friend, the movie producer X” become more sporadic and slightly less obnoxious.

After that, the book moves on two tracks, which wind up fused: practical information about how the industry functioned in the latter half of the 20th century, and anecdotes about particular authors/agents/publishing figures. The former bits make for an incredibly detailed look at the industry. A lot of things surprised me here. Like, it appears that book publishing has changed extremely little over the past fifty years. (For instance, publishing has to be one of the only industries with a business plan based on New Deal bailout policies.) Korda touches on the kind of patchy modernization when he muses that while the actual business of buying and selling books has stayed pretty much the same, it’s the world outside the bubble that’s changed. Crunchy corporate shell, smooth chocolate center. I also didn’t realize how recently publishing was the province of WASP-y males. Total non-kosher sausage fest until the late 60s.

The gossipy anecdotes about literati are the best part of the book. Korda was apparently the Forrest Gump of book publishing: in addition to being there for a crazy amount of bestsellers and nascent trends, his list of authors includes Graham Greene, Larry McMurtry, Richard Nixon, Woodward and Bernstein, Kitty Kelley, Ronald Reagan (at the same time Kelley was writing her Nancy book, no less!), Tennessee Williams on the decline, Philip Roth, and others that I can’t even remember. Korda wasn’t necessarily the editor on all of their big-name books, but still…impressive list. Some of the longer author spotlights are apparently adapted from New Yorker profiles that Korda did; the strongest are the ones on former presidents Nixon and Reagan, a long bit about Jacqueline Susann (which I believe was made into that Bette Midler movie a few years ago), and a great account of working with a painfully delusional Joan Crawford. Just as good are the snapshots of people who work behind the scenes, like various agents and editors. There’s a surprising candidness—it’s possible that by 2000, most of the major players were retired, or lunching at that big Algonquin table in the sky. It probably also helps that Another Life is published by Random House, while Korda did all his editor-in-chiefing at Simon & Schuster (another fun tradition in publishing: or, “what constitutes a conflict of interest, anyway?”).

The vivid characters definitely make up for unevenness in narrative flow, structure, chronology, and even language. Korda’s voice fluctuates throughout: sometimes he’s the cool observer, other times he’s much more present. I guess that’s a product of morphing previously published articles with a bigger timeline.

Anyway, despite the dishy qualities and the insider baseball, this was a pretty good read. Not that my career path is likely to change at this point (given that I did spend the cash and time on that M.A. and all), but it made me more excited about becoming a part of this world—God and interviewers willing. At the same time, I’d recommend it for anyone who’s not really familiar with the book industry. It’s a fantastic crash course, if you ever wanted to know more about those wacky literati.

And now some of the more amusing bits:

On editing:
“It is possible to simultaneously overwork and underachieve—indeed, for an editor, nothing is easier. You can spend weeks—months, even—lovingly rewriting a manuscript that was never worth anything in the first place. You know it’s someone else’s mistake, even as you sit up late every night with half a dozen sharpened number-two pencils, long after your partner has gone to bed with a martyr’s sigh and a strong hint that he or she won’t be responsible for what happens if this kind of thing doesn’t stop so the two of you can have a normal marriage in which a person doesn’t get pushed aside in favor of a manuscript every night of the week and gets fucked like a normal person every once in a while, not to speak of getting taken to the movies every once in a blue moon.”

On Joan Crawford’s advice to women:
“She strongly advised having afternoon sex and making men talk about their work. To the question of how a woman could take an interest in her husband’s work if, for example, he was a cashier, Joan suggested asking him (presumably before or during afternoon sex): ‘Any holdups today?’”

On publishing presidents:
“The only reason any normal citizen wants to visit the White House on business, I told Anderson, is to get the cuff links, or whatever the equivalent is for women. After all, take away the cuff links, and who on earth would want to meet Jimmy Carter? Anderson was not amused—at the time, he took the view that Carter was leading a moral crusade and was going to be part of a great moment in American history—but he managed to persuade the president to send me a handwritten letter of thanks when the book was finally published. To my surprise, Carter misspelled the title of his own book (‘A Goverment as Good as it’s People’). I had it framed.”