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!"