Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

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

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

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

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

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

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

Underworld by Don DeLillo

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

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

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

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

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

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

State of the Union

Once again, the New York Times has rated its top 10 books of the year. Once again, I've read exactly one of them.

The 100 most notable books? I've read three. This is about status quo, though I still feel guilty. However, a quick check of the handy book spreadsheet confirms that I've actually read far more current-release books than usual this year--I guess I'm just not reading the right ones. Or the Times just doesn't appreciate Victorian zombie lit like it should. Whatevs, Michiko Kakutani.

The spreadsheet also reveals that the J&K book club has been remarkably productive as well: we managed to do six books this year, or a little less than half of our overall total. 2009 may have been the Year of the Great "Modern" Debate (to date, the only real book club disagreement since the non-ratification of the unwritten constitution), but we seem to have pulled through.

Also, while I didn't hit my 50-book goal for the year, the overall quality was high. The disappointments were few among the books I committed to reading. And I discovered several authors who've become staples in my reading diet (like Arthur Phillips and Colson Whitehead), and fell in love anew with some old favorites (like Lorrie Moore). So, y'know, God bless us, every one--or something like that.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Americans like Swedish things. Those little meatballs with gravy and jam. Incomprehensible Muppets. Our Ektorp sofas from IKEA. And now, possibly the year's unlikeliest bestseller, the English translation of late Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson's book Män som hatar kvinnor.

Written as the first book in a trilogy of brutal suspense thrillers, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo starts with Mikael Blomkvist, a magazine journalist/publisher who's been disgraced by a recent libel case against one of Sweden's most prominent businessmen. On his way to a light prison sentence and licking his ego wounds, Blomqvist becomes involved in an old missing persons case. Harriet Vanger, the sixteen-year-old heiress to a large corporate fortune, disappeared years ago--and everyone except her great-uncle, Henrik, thinks she's dead. The case is Henrik's white whale, and as he gets older and more frail, he wants definitive answers. Knowing that Blomqvist is a good journalist (pesky libel conviction aside) with some time on his hands, he hires the writer to come out to his tiny town, which is populated by his eccentric, hostile, and just plain awful relatives. Pretty much everyone involved has a motive to have wanted Harriet gone, and Mikael is tasked with finding out which one of them is responsible for the girl's disappearance back in the 60s (under the guise of writing a biography of the Vanger family).

Blomqvist takes the case, 'cause he needs the truckloads of cash that Vanger promises--as well as the super-secret evidence that Vanger supposedly has that proves Blomqvist's innocence in the libel case. Blomqvist hires an unlikely partner, Lisbeth Salander, to help. Lisbeth is a young woman who has zero social skills, but some kind of ninja ability to uncover top secret information. The two dig deeper into the Vanger family secrets, and discover that--surprise!--someone in the Vanger family really doesn't want them finding out what happened to Harriet. It's kind of like Clue, but with 100% more shady blond people.

While Blomqvist and Salander are struggling with ugly revelations of murder, double identities, and horrific sexual practices, the B-plot follows the fate of Blomqvist's magazine, Millenium, as he and his best friend/f-buddy/editor-in-chief Erika Berger try to keep everything afloat.

Overall, I liked the book quite a bit. I don't read many thrillers these days, and this one reminded me of how compelling they can be when done well. And Larsson makes his social justice agenda clear. The Swedish title of the book translates into "Men Who Hate Women." (Something tells me this book wouldn't have been the subway-reading hit it was, if the American publisher had kept that on the cover.) And Larsson is not squeamish about hitting the reader with all sorts of male-on-female violence. Pretty much any way a modern woman can be used and abused by the worst of men is in the book somewhere. And I also liked the way he created the female characters--bold, sexual, and not apologetic at all. For example, the female lead, Lisbeth, is not a pleasant person. She's blunt, probably on the autism spectrum, and unable to trust anyone. But she's extremely good at what she does, and draws attraction and respect (from non-evil dudes, anyway).

The plot has a few too many deus-ex-machina moments, but they're not so clunky that they don't fit in. And given that the writer dropped dead of a heart attack before the book even came out, I don't really fault the lack of polish/editing. The characters are interesting enough to make it worthwhile, and the writing (whether through translation or by design) is straightforward. I enjoyed it enough to rush out and get my hands on the sequel, to see what those zany Swedes will get up to next.

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

So the dirty little secret of the Jacob & Katy book club is that occasionally, we read books that are popular for timely reasons. Most of the time, we go out of our way to pick either unusual or uncommon books. But it doesn't always work out that way. We did Light in August around the same time Oprah picked it, and Infinite Jest right after David Foster Wallace died. Because when is Faulkner ever a bad idea? And if we weren't going to do Infinite Jest then, it never would have happened ("Infinite Summer" would have been waaaaaay out of the question). And this time around, President Obama just happened to endorse Netherland right after Jacob decided he wanted to read it. But despite the urge to ditch the choice as it gained popularity among the bookier Americans, it squeaked onto the short list for this round, and into the finals.

Netherland is a novel by Joseph O'Neill, set mostly in New York shortly after 9/11. Hans, a Dutchman by way of London (where he acquired a wife and a stable career in finance) moves to New York at the insistence of his wife. She freaks out and return to London shortly thereafter with their infant son and Hans's testicles firmly in hand. He flounders around in a sort of bleak comfort--he makes plenty of money at his Wall Street job, but can't really think of a way to spend it, except on an overpriced apartment in the Chelsea Hotel. The only thing that tethers him to--well, anything, really, is his love for cricket. He joins a weekly cricket game in Staten Island, populated by guys from India, the West Indies, and various other former British protectorates. There, he meets Chuck Ramkissoon, a gregarious Trinidadian dude who knows what he wants from life: sex, money, and a world-class cricket stadium in Brooklyn.

While dealing with his various losses (his mother, his sweetly ordinary Dutch childhood, his wife and kid), Hans lets Chuck pull him into his orbit. This involves a lot of random-ish errands out to Brooklyn, where Chuck describes (in increasingly alarming detail) his plans to finance a cricket mecca in East Flatbush. It becomes clear that Chuck is doing some seriously shady stuff to finance his dream: iffy Russian friends, a gambling ring among local West Indians, schmoozing hazy international donors. Hans is both curious enough to go along for the ride, and bored enough to disregard any potential illegality on his own part. He idolizes Chuck a little without sentimentalizing him--both men, as modern immigrants to the country, are seeking the American prize, whatever that might be. For Chuck, it's American capitalism with an extra helping of jingoism. For Hans, it's owning the potential for freedom--his obsession becomes getting a driver's license and buying a car, even though a) no one needs a car in NYC; and 2) he seems to have no plans to go anywhere outside the metro area. But they're both looking for a piece of the action, and appear to respect that in one another. That they both love a sport that 99.9% of the American population couldn't care less about, that's just cake.

As Hans starts pulling his own life together, he starts to have less use for Chuck--and the way O'Neill juxtaposes their trajectories is interesting. In a review blurb, NY Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani suggests that there are "echoes of the Great Gatsby." And I can see that (though my partner in bookish crime begged to differ). There's a similar sense of melancholy over both books, and Chuck is a bit of a Gatsby--the faux-naive, cheerfully sociopathic part, anyway. Both novels are about finding the sacred in American life.

I also really enjoyed O'Neill's writing. At times he's a little too sentimental, but that may have been just a function of his mopey, nostalgic narrator. I liked the complex, streaming language:

"I came to step around in a murk of my own making, and to be drifted away from my native place, and in due course to rely on Rachel as a human flashlight.... To give an example, she was the one, all those years ago, who brought cinema and food to my attention. Undoubtedly I had already watched movies and eaten lunch; but I hadn't located them in the so-called scheme of things."

"I was taken by lightheaded yearning for an interlude of togetherness, a time-out, as it were, during which my still-wife and I might lie together in a Four Seasons suite, say, and work idly through a complimentary fruit basket and fuck at leisure and, most important, have hours-long, disinterested, beans-spilling, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may conversations in which we'd examine each other's unknown nooks and crannies in the best of humor and faith."

"...I began to dream in all seriousness of a stadium, and black and brown and even a few white faces crowded in bleachers, and Chuck and me laughing over drinks in the members' enclosure and waving to people we know, and stiff flags on the pavilion roof, and fresh white sight-screens, and the captains in blazers looking up at a quarter spinning in the air, and a stadium-wide flutter of expectancy as the two umpires walk onto the turf square and its omelette-colored batting track, whereupon, with clouds scrambling in from the west, there is a roar as the cricket stars trot down the pavilion steps onto this impossible field in America, and everything is suddenly clear, and I am at last naturalized."

So popularity aside, this was a book chosen in good taste, and I'm glad to have read it.

Prague by Arthur Phillips

Ah, to be young, American, and idealistic in...Budapest. Wait. Is that right? Probably not. Anyway, that's the basic premise of Arthur Phillips's novel Prague. (You might think said novel would take place in the titular city, but you'd be wrong.)

The book follows five young expats in Budapest in the early 90s, right after the Velvet Revolution, and right before Czech shed Oslovakia. There's Mark, a Canadian grad student who devotes every minute of his existence to studying nostalgia. It's every bit as circular as you might think. There's Emily, a somewhat bland midwesterner indulging an Electra complex by working as an American embassy assistant to impress her civil servant father. There's Charles, a Hungarian-American who shifts between the cultures according to whichever one he disdains less at the moment. And then there are the Californian brothers, Scott and John--one of whom has a love-hate relationship with his brother, while the other has a hate-hate one. John, who follows Scott to Prague for foolishly optimistic bonding reasons, becomes the ostensible protagonist of the book 'cause he's young, and can talk earnestly about how the MTV generation coming of age in the late 80s is going to fix everything. The five are friends more or less due to proximity and shared American-ness, but become entangled despite always seeming annoyed with one another. They do share, however, the nagging feeling that everything would be more interesting if only they were living in Prague instead.

The novel follows them (particularly John) as they move throughout Budapest, glib and hopelessly American despite their deepening interactions with the locals. It's kind of like a slightly downer L'Auberge Espagnole. Phillips does a good job of contrasting the promise of a new Hungarian culture (McDonalds! American t-shirts!) in 1990 with the gray, lingering vestiges of Communist-era thinking. The twentysomething characters become involved with old guard figures, like a septaugenarian lounge singer with crazy war stories to spare, and Horvath, the heir of a Hungarian publisher whose fortunes fluctuated with the country's.

Phillips devotes almost half of the book to the story of that press (the Horvath Kiado), and Horvath's eventual ruin at the hands of one of the young protagonists. I think this was a risky choice--I found the movement back and forth from the history to the present too jarring. The structure of the book was my biggest issue with it. Also, probably due to being a first-time novelist at the time, Phillips seemed unsure of what to do with the characters past a certain point, letting them devolve into soapy plots and odd endings.

I did like the overall Phillips style, though, and am willing to forgive a lot in a first novel.

Parts I liked especially:

"Whatever safety precautions Mark Payton had taken in graduate school while clinically investigating the toxins of nostalgia, they had been insufficient."

"Of course, vegetarian cooking was elusive, and the air quality left a lot to be desired, but the city was good-looking, and you could breathe fine if you stayed in shape, avoided hostility and fat, ate three garlic cloves each morning, absorbed plenty of antioxidants, avoided yeast bread within three hours of a scheduled elimination, lived up in the Buda hills, and avoided rigidity in your attitudes."

"As the band tuned up underneath the blue sky, white clouds, and long-gone heroes, the saxophonist introduced the first number, " 'Beatrice,' a lovely tune written by the saxman Sam Rivers for his wife."
Nadja listened in silence for seveal minutes. 'It is a pretty tune, no? And a time-honored tradition, I think: Write something pretty, name it for your wife or lover, and vow it will make her immortal. A familiar lie, yes? You men all do that, John Price."

"In business school, you know, the phrase had a distinct meaning. 'I'm going into publishing' meant something very specific. Like when you came out of an exam and someone asked you how you did and you knew you blew it, you just said, 'It looks like I'm going into publishing.' Or someone gets nailed with a professor's question on a case study, unprepared, and they fumble it, you can hear other students in the class singsonging: 'Looks like somoene's going into publishing!'"

Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow

So Ragtime was the 13th (we think) entry in the Jacob-Katy book club. What's more summery and patriotic than y'know, the "Maple Leaf Rag," and ice cream socials, and Americanized last names streaming into New York from Ellis Island?

Okay, so the book doesn't actually talk about...well, any of those things, really. But E. L. Doctorow's novel is set in the freewheeling ragtime era of the U.S.--when only about three white guys got to be millionaires, and we could still confine those pesky immigrants to a few tenements in New York. It's a fictionalized historical narrative, weaving the stories of made-up characters with real people like crime-of-passion-inducing Evelyn Nesbit, anarchist Emma Goldman, a Jocasta-happy Harry Houdini, and unapologetically rich J.P. Morgan.

The celebrities move in and out of the narrative, mostly to remind us that this is an Important Historical Novel, grounded in actual political-social-sexual upheavals. For instance, Emma Goldman gives Evelyn Nesbit a lecture on feminist freedom--with a happy ending (yes, that kind of happy ending). J.P. Morgan contemplates his richness, at home and abroad. And Houdini lives with his mother while wowing crowds of socialites and doing his feats of escape and endurance.

The real heart of the story is the fictional characters, who fall into three parts (though these mix at several points):

1. An upper-class family from 1910-ish New Rochelle, who begin to shake off their WASPy bourgeoisness (is that a word?) and join the "new" America. The mother takes in an abandoned black baby (and later his mother). Her younger brother stalks Evelyn Nesbit for a while, then gets involved in domestic anarchist groups. The son interacts freely with a Jewish child of immigrants. And the father starts to realize that maybe African-American people desire (and deserve) the same protections in society that he gets.

2. A pianist from Harlem, the father of the abandoned baby, who snaps after a personal tragedy and forces a new racial consciousness on the city via the media and oddly placid domestic terrorism. His is the most compelling story, and the most tied to the shift in social consciousness at the time.

3. A Jewish immigrant and his young daughter, who manage to get out of urban poverty and into the movie business...somehow. 90% of it happens offscreen. The kid is amazingly beautiful, and his desire to protect her from predators keeps moving him into the right place at the right time. His story intersects with the WASP family's in a fairly uncontroversial way, ultimately leading to one of the biggest "I want my money back" book endings I can think of.

All of that might sound like I didn't care for the book--I did, overall. Doctorow has an agenda of melding fiction and history, and gets points for never wavering from that. Writing from the 1970s, he has the luxury of long-perspective social commentary, which a writer closer to the ragtime era just wouldn't have had. And appropriating long-dead historical figures is a little unfair (he fictionalizes others, however thinly, in at least one of his other books), but it's a time-honored literary tradition. Also, I liked the writing itself better than Jacob did, for the most part. I think Doctorow was going for the slick, neat package, and once I accepted that, the lack of penetrating language didn't really bother me much.

Parts I enjoyed:

"Younger Brother understood the love in some hearts as a physical tenderness in that part of the body, a flaw in the physiological being equivalent to rickets of the bones or a disposition of the lungs to congest."

"The events since [Father's] return from the Arctic, his response to them, had broken [Mother's] faith in him....Yet at moments, for whole days at a time, she loved him as before--with a sense of appropriateness of their marriage, its fixed and unalterable character, as something heavenly. Always she had intuited a different future for them, as if the life they led was a kind of preparation, when the manufacturer of flags and fireworks and his wife would lift themselves from their respectable existence and discover a life of genius. She didn't know of what it would consist, she never had. But now she never waited for it."

New York stories

New Yorkers love talking about New York. It's a fact. Anyone can write a travelogue of London, or Chicago, or Rome. But New Yorkers trust only themselves to do it for NYC. That's part of what makes this kind of navel-gazing travel lit so special: the writers who live here are more than a little in love with their surroundings, and it shows. It's not the shallow love you feel for Hawaii, or some other pretty, beachy spot; it's more of a hard-fought admiration for all the stupid, gritty things that annoy you on a daily basis--but which you'd miss if they disappeared suddenly.

For the twelfth entry in the Jacob-Katy book club, we picked a pair of such New York books: Here is New York, by E.B. White, and The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead. They're both made up of impressionistic essays about New York City--but White's gives a glimpse of 1948, while Whitehead's is current as of 2004. Read together, they're testaments to what has changed in sixty years, what hasn't changed, and what never will change.

Here is New York is almost entirely told from the E.B. White perspective, as he comes back to visit his old city from a new country life in Maine. Most of the impressions are his own, as he moves through cafes, talks to people around him, and ponders the city itself. Colossus is more of a collective work, trying to find what's at the heart of every New Yorker's experience. It bounces from one person's internal monologue to another, in chapters loosely based on a particular aspect of the city (the Brooklyn Bridge, Broadway, Port Authority, etc.) Both books are insightful--particularly White's eerie description of how vulnerable New York was and is to breaches like 9/11. And 60+ years later, White's has the advantage of describing the quaint New Yorkian touches that just don't exist anymore (bring back the pneumatic tubes, please, Mayor Bloomberg!)

White's writing is always solid and charming, but I thought the language was especially beautiful in Colossus--and that's what really cements it as just as crucial a time capsule as White's essay has become. (Maybe in 30 years, it'll be Whitehead's NYC prose in the Barnes & Noble subway ads alongside Dr. Smizmar.)

If either book had a drawback, it was that they didn't go quite far enough--there are plenty of topics that are crucial to any narrative of New York, but that just aren't present in either author's stuff. (Like sports.)

Favorite passages...

From Here is New York:
"...I am probably occupying the very room that any number of exalted and somewise memorable characters sat in, some of them on hot, breathless afternoons, lonely and private and full of their own sense of emanations from without."

"When a young man in Manhattan writes a letter to his girl in Brooklyn, the love message gets blown to her through a pneumatic tube--pfft--just like that. The subterranean system of telephone cables, power lines, steam pipes, gas mains, and sewer pipes is reason enough to abandon the island to the gods and the weevils."

From Colossus of New York:

On the Brooklyn Bridge: "They paste the name of the new mayor over the old mayor to save our tax dollars....Because no matter their political bent they understand the romance of bridges and have taken this walk more than once. This is non-partisan emptiness. Just yards to go. Remembering that disappointed feeling she gets each time she reaches the other side, then feeling that disappointed feeling. Check yourself for damage. Everything is where it should be. No miracle. The key to the city fell out of her pocket somewhere along the way and she's level again."

On Grand Central: "Of course the Dutch were quite shocked to find Grand Central Station under that big pile of dirt. Alas the Indians and their strict no-refund-without-receipt policy. And lo, as the earth cooled, Grand Central bubbled up through miles of magma, lodged in the crust of this island, settled here. The first immigrant. Still unassimilated. Ever indigestible. The river of skyscrapers flows around it. Travelers swim to it and cling, savoring solid handhold in roaring whitewhater. Churches fill up at regular intervals, on a schedule laid out in the business plan. like the best storms, rush hour starts out as a slight drizzle, then becomes unholy deluge."

On Times Square: "Simmer the idea of a metropolis until is reduced to a few blocks, sprinkle in a dash of hype and a tablespoon of woe. Add hubris to taste. Serving size: a lot."

[Editrix's note: when the Katy-Jacob collection of New York essays comes out, it will have both the aforementioned sports section and a lengthy discussion of the Ugg boot- and sweatpants-wearing denizens of 42nd and Broadway.]

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Depending on which book you count as the first, Infinite Jest was number 11 in the Jacob-Katy book club. And it was a doozy. We've had our share of long, complicated ones (Ulysses, Bleak House), but this one was definitely the unwieldiest. Yet it may have been the most rewarding, in terms of sheer accomplishment. Between the two of us, we dragged the book across several continents (him), and on innumerable trains (me), took several months to read and reflect, and ultimately conquered the 1000+ pages (including 388 end notes).

And now, having read it and talked it over, I'm glad to have done it. It's an undeniable part of modern lit, and now that David Foster Wallace is gone, we'll never get anything quite like it again. Jacob has a much better plot overview than I was going to do, so here's the quick gist.

Basically, at an unidentified point in the near future, America is a mess. Large parts of the country are now wastelands. Technology and branding have pretty much taken over. We've absorbed Canada and Mexico--and French-Canadian separatists are especially pissed at the assimilation. Said French-Canadians are looking for a way to punish the Americans, and they've found out about a tape that's so addictive, anyone who views it is reduced to instant, irreversible mental mush. (Supposedly, what's on the tape is a veiled mother figure, bending down over the camera as though talking to a newborn infant, and saying, "I'm sorry.") But while the tape is the catalyst for the book, the plot is really about the tape's dead creator, and everyone/every place touched by him somehow. It's all loosely grouped into three main spheres, which rarely touch one another: the Canadian spies talking about the tape, the filmmaker's son and his friends at a ritzy Boston tennis academy, and the drug addicts at a rehab facility next door to the tennis academy.

But when I say things like "plot," I mean it in the loosest sense possible. 'Cause it's really just a thousand pages of David Foster Wallace including every detail that's ever crossed his mind, exploring issues he finds interesting (like tennis as war, addiction recovery as religion, or how easily Americans could be taken down by psychological porn). The language is good, though. There are literally hundreds of characters, and Wallace takes care to shift vocabulary and syntax accordingly. The sections which really shine are the ones where he pays equal attention to wonky detail and to description. Like in a scene where the kids in the tennis school play a game called Eschaton--essentially Risk on a tennis court--and end up going crazy, U.N.-style.

Also excellent are his descriptions of drug addiction and suicidal depression--they're terrifyingly vivid. And his passionate details about how and why someone would kill themselves are painful to read. Given that he'd clearly had mental health issues for a long time, part of me wonders if Infinite Jest was originally intended as a kind of suicide note--the serious writer's ultimate purge before he leaves the world. And it's all so scattered. I have no idea how he, let alone some poor schmuck of a development editor, could possibly keep track of the hundreds of characters, many plot threads, and erratic timeline enough to edit the manuscript. I have to assume that he cashed in his Famous Author Points, said, "Publish this as is," and that was pretty much it. But he's got enough bluster to pull it off, and even while you're struggling to read the book, you sense that there's something brilliant simmering underneath the extraneous crap.

And if you enjoy things like plot resolution and endings? Look elsewhere, friend.

I found it much easier to read once I started looking at the book as more of a collection of short stories, obliquely connected--kinda like Last Exit to Brooklyn.

Again, I'm glad to have read it. Now I can go back to reading Wallace's more straightforward (though still heavily footnoted) journalism without much guilt. And I'm also glad to have had a partner in crime, because I totally would have ditched the book after the first few chapters if I didn't know that Jacob was doing it too. All the same, I see the next book club selection being short and sweet. Something Seussian, perhaps?

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

On the back cover of On Beauty, there's a New York Times blurb: "wonderfully engaging, wonderfully observed...a novel that is as affecting as it is entertaining, as provocative as it is humane."

You know, I never thought I'd agree with Michiko Kakutani, but....

I really loved On Beauty. It might even be on the elusive list of favorites. At the very least, it's near the top of the book club picks. (No offense, James Joyce and William Faulkner.) Zadie Smith's third novel is so full of character detail, fantastic descriptive language, and genuine charm that it's easy to overlook any small flaws. You can barely even see the behind-the-scenes conceit, that it's a modern reworking of Howards End. In the hands of a lot of other authors, that skeleton would be painfully obvious, like dubbing southern accents over a Merchant Ivory film. Here, it's more of a pleasant realization that you're seeing something vaguely familiar, but still refreshing. Think West Side Story.

The book channels its Bloomsbury-era inspiration by exploring whether it's possible to break class barriers (even when your intentions are good), and looking at the small legacies we leave one another. It's set in academia (a Boston-area college that's like pretty much every college/liberal arts department we've all known and loved), and focuses on the Belsey family. The father, Howard, is an art history professor, a British expat, who gets off on university politics much more than on Rembrandt. His African-American wife, Kiki, is his feisty conscience. Their grown kids are born-again Christian Jerome, obnoxious college student Zora, and adolescent Levi, who wants to identify with ghetto kids despite his very middle-class family. They love each other, but they're not the happiest bunch. Howard recently cheated on Kiki with a family friend (and not a one-night stand floozy, as he told his wife). They're not really separated, but not really talking much, either. The kids are isolated, too: no one takes Jerome's Christianity, or any of his emotions, seriously; Zora is completely absorbed in her own little quest to dominate Wellington College politics; and Levi is getting deeper and deeper with a group of unhappy Haitian immigrants, while still pretending that he's going to school and holding down a weekend job. Plus, the family's nemeses, a rival British family headed by a Clarence Thomas-type who once insulted Howard in an academic throwdown, is moving in down the street.

The main plot of the story involves the Belseys moving outward and engaging both the upper class (the rival professor, Monty Kipps) and the lower (Carl, a talented kid from the Roxbury projects with a knack for poetry). The latter becomes part of a campus tug-of-war over affirmative action, and whether kids who aren't paying tuition through the nose can sit in on poetry seminars. The Conservative bootstrap effort is led by Kipps, while his wife and daughter fraternize heavily with the Belsey enemies. Meanwhile, Howard just wants tenure--but his wounded professional pride and his unfortunate libido keep him right in the miserable middle with everyone else. The crumbling marriage is the backdrop for all the chaotic dealings going on outside their house.

This indictment of academia is exactly what I expected/wanted from White Noise, and just didn't get. You don't need absurdism to highlight a system that's already absurd. You just have to describe it well, and Smith does that. She hits all the right character notes, too. Even less fleshed characters, like Jerome and Carlene Kipps (whose bond with Kiki pushes the plot along in very technical ways), don't feel too awkward. Other characters are spot-on--like Zora's pushy Lisa Simpson-ism as overcompensation for physical insecurities. And the poet/professor Claire, whose 60s-style politics and blithe narcissism reminded me of half the English professors I had in college.

But more than anything, I really loved Smith's prose. She has an amazing way of distilling the essence of things into a sentence or two that smacks you right in the face with its accuracy. By the end of the book, I wasn't even tired of the Belseys. I'd gladly read follow-up stories about them. Maybe not another whole novel, but some short stuff in the New Yorker or something. And I enjoyed this one much more than White Teeth. I look forward to what Smith comes up with next.

It was hard to pick favorite parts, but since it would be a shame to waste the Post-It flags littering my copy....

"Jerome said, 'It's like, a family doesn't work any more when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone. You know?' Kiki's kids always seemed to say 'you know' at the end of their sentences these days, but they never waited to find out if she did know. By the time Kiki looked up, Jerome was already a hundred feet away, tunnelling into the accepting crowd."

"Mozart's Requiem begins with you walking towards a huge pit. The pit is on the other side of a precipice, which you cannot see over until you are right at its edge. Your death is awaiting you in that pit. You don't know what it looks like or sounds like or smells like. You don't know whether it will be good or bad. You just walk towards it. Your will is a clarinet and your footsteps are attended by all the violins."

"God knows, even the story he ended up giving--a one-night stand with a stranger--had caused terrible damage. It broke that splendid circle of Kiki's love, within which he had existed for so long, a love (and it was to Howard's credit that he knew this) that had enabled everything else."

White Noise by Don DeLillo

Disclaimer: I am very much a product of go-go 80s Reaganaut commercialism. I owned the Rainbow Brite dolls created by Hallmark. I nagged my mom to get whichever sugary cereal had the best cartoon mascot. I drank the Kool-Aid--literally!

So maybe that's part of why White Noise, the latest Jacob-Katy book club selection, didn't reach me as deeply as it should have. As a criticism of America's hysterical consumer culture, the book feels like familiar territory. What must have seemed novel to DeLillo and his readers in the early 1980s (pre-internet, pre-cable, pre-Oprah) now feels kinda stale. We know we're surrounded by a hum of constant radiation--we just don't seem to care anymore. Being alarmed about it seems almost quaint and Cold War-ish, like Yakov Smirnoff.

DeLillo chooses to do a sendup of a "normal" family by making his protagonists as wacky as possible: Jack, the Hitler-scholar father; pill-popping fourth wife who reads erotic poetry aloud; ex-wives who all happen to be spies; and an assortment of kids who do super-precocious things like research prescription drugs and have glib opinions about consumerism. They're a boisterous, name-brand-buying crew that functions pretty normally until there's a chemical spill in town, and all the suburban "white noise" overwhelms them. In the resulting panic there's a lot of "I told you so" going on, from the teenage son and Jack's smug fellow professor, who studies Elvis Americana and looks down on suburbia.

By the time the cloud hits, any chance at literary subtlety goes out the window. If DeLillo let the reader infer anything, the book would be more enjoyable. But alas, he does not. Want to parody society's obsession with death? Have two characters argue over who's more afraid to die. Of course. I'm down with absudity, but it's done so self-consciously here. There's no challenge to figuring anything out, because there's always a character doing it for you.

DeLillo's writing is technically fine, and he has some really great descriptive stuff going on. Like Jacob, I just found it hard to connect with any of it. Maybe I should take some Prozac for my apathy, and wash it down with some refreshing Diet Coke.

The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

If Freud was right, and all women really do have penis envy, I'm pretty sure I've been cured of that by modern American literature. Between the Rabbit Angstroms and the Nathan Zuckermans and now the Frank Bascombes, I am eternally thankful that I will never be a middle-aged man.

Based on recommendations from friends, Jacob and I picked Richard Ford's The Sportswriter as our latest book club selection. Ford's hero is Frank Bascombe, a quasi-sportswriter whose home field is suburban New Jersey. Since no one in his right mind chooses to live in suburban New Jersey, that should tell you right away that dude's got issues. But I digress.... Frank's main problems are these: his life has completely fallen apart after the death of his son two years ago; his wife stopped enabling his neverending string of midlife crises (teaching in New England! Relationships with other women! A motorcycle!) and left him, taking their two surviving kids to a different neighborhood; and he doesn't know how to manage his relationships with women. Or with men, for that matter. Frank can't really connect to anybody anymore. A lot of this is his own fault; he tries so hard to see everything from every perspective that he fails to commit to anything, whether it's spending time with his kids, or his new girlfriend, ditzy nurse Vicki. He sees what he could do, he sees what could happen accordingly, and then he reacts by panicking and doing or saying the worst possible thing. That's how he ends up in a quarrel with pretty much everyone he meets on Easter weekend in 1983. Without going back through the book, I'm pretty sure he gets punched more than once.

But Frank does try to have a smooth suburban life. He keeps the house he bought with his wife when they were first married, and he was a newly published author. He takes in a seminary student border. He joins a Divorced Men's Club, a gruesome exercise in male bonding that involves phony fishing trips and torturous conversations over beer. He sees himself as the genial Other figure in everyone's life, so he doesn't have to figure out how to be the central figure in his own--and he sees the homogenous greenness of New Jersey as the way to accomplish that. Same deal with his career. Even though he seems to have little interest in actual sports, he loves the process of ferreting out the feel-good stories, and bringing tidy ideas of literature to the masses of men who read his magazine. In short, he wants to be That Guy Down the Street, the one who can bullshit with you about the Knicks over a beer or two, but doesn't go any deeper than that. He wants to be simple and uncomplex, but he lives so fully within his own head that everything is totally self-conscious.

His relationships with the women in his life are more problematic. He wants his ex (whom he actually calls X) to be more accessible to him, but sort of accepts that she gets to move on without him. He wants his girlfriend, a deceptively sweet belle from Texas, to be the uncomplicated lover--sometimes he thinks they should get married and then can't stand to be in the same room with her, usually in the same minute. And when X and Vicki start looking less likely, he thinks he wants another crack at his previous lovers, even though those relationships ended just as awkwardly. Jacob astutely pointed out that Frank thinks the women are there just for him: appearing in hotel bars, or naked on the bed exactly when he wants them to be. Objectively, he knows that they've got lives too, but he can't really see them branching out after he's been around. By the end of the book, Frank has become unglued because he can't find the female tethers anymore--he's basically adrift in a sea of Boy Issues: post-divorce loneliness, sexual confusion, life situations that can't be fixed with sports metaphors or a quick one-night stand.

Honestly, the whole book left me unsettled--it was one of those books that got darker the more I thought about it. The writing was good, but my desire to shake Frank eventually eclipsed that. It didn't do much for my fear that all guys cheat when they see a more attractive opportunity (which is more my fault than Frank's, but still), or my hope that maybe living in your head isn't so bad. If nothing else, it's a good argument for going out there and making emotional connections, before you find yourself 38 and unable to do it. Oh, and for not moving to New Jersey. That's probably always a bad idea.

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.

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?