You're a big girl now

So here's something I never thought I'd say (or write): I was reading an interview with Danielle Steel in USA Today.

It was tied into her new book, Big Girl, in which the main character "struggles with her weight, body image and self-esteem from childhood through her 20s." Okay. If there's a cheesy romance to be found in any subject, chances are Danielle Steel will dig it out. But as I read through the interview, it started to feel insulting--specifically, Steel's answers to the insipid questions about her inspiration in writing about a fat heroine. Oh, and about her expertise on weight issues (she gained weight during pregnancy. Twice!).

If you replaced "overweight" with any kind of "other"ness in the piece, would this be such a breezy book feature? If this were a white author writing about a black character, a male author writing about a female character--would we be patting her on the back for making such a noble choice? I don't think we would. So doing it here feels hollow.

"Books are always written about beautiful people who find other beautiful people, but most people are regular people, and weight is an issue for a lot of them. I thought, it must be a drag to always have beautiful people highlighted in books. Why not make a heavier woman the star of the show?"

Why not, indeed? But hey, here's a thought: why not write a heavier heroine without fetishizing it in the title, or making her weight the central issue of the book?

"If you notice, I do not have Victoria lose weight by the end of the book, but she gets a great guy."

Congrats. A great guy, no less! It must have been agonizing to write a romantic lead character with such an obvious flaw!

Steel clearly means well, but it's still ridiculous to treat this as a bold choice. Even if Bridget Jones hadn't already jumpstarted the whole "he loves me just as I am" fairytale trope fourteen years ago, this would still feel cliched. Steel asks the right question ("why no overweight heroines?"), but answers it in the most shallow and pandering way possible.

And then there's the cover. While Steel is fighting the good fight for "big girls" everywhere and graciously allowing them to appear lovable, what image is chosen to represent all of this? A model-perfect face, licking an ice cream spoon. Because we can't show an overweight girl on the cover--heavens, no. That might scare the natives. It reminded me a little of last year's cover controversy, where jackets were whitewashed to be more "appealing." Apparently brown people and fat people are literary kryptonite on the shelves. Who knew?

Clearly, this is what I get for continuing to read past "Danielle Steel" and "USA Today." Chances are that nothing good was ever gonna come of that. But this was particularly irksome and disheartening.

Remnick on Obama

Good news, everyone! David Remnick is going to write an Obama biography. Sounds like interesting stuff: private interviews, historical research, the signature Remnick writing style. Should be a good read, if probably not the next Game Change. The New York Times tells us all about it.

But...what's this? At the bottom? In sheepish "Correction" italics?

An earlier version of this post misquoted Mr. Remnick on his comparison between the book and a New Yorker article he had previously written. He said the book would not be a "pumped up" version of the article; he did not say that it would not be a “pimped out” version of the article.

Pimped. Out. A presidential biography, written by the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker. It's okay, Gray Lady. I wish he'd really said it too.

Better Know a Classic - Little Women

Joey: Uh, Rach? These...these little women...
Rachel: Yeah?
Joey: How little are they? I mean, are they, like, scary little?

Louisa May Alcott's Little Women was one of my favorites as a kid. I knew it was kinda hokey even then, but I loved the sweet, wholesome New Englandness of it. Why didn't I have Lincoln-supporting, all-knowing parents who steered us through genteel poverty with a smile and life lessons? Where was my saintly and consumptive sister, sacrificing herself at home while the rest of us went gallivanting off into the world? And where the heck was the inexplicable houseservant, a remnant of our prewar glory (before Papa made that vaguely catastrophic investment we don't talk about)? Suburban, middle-class Connecticut seemed decidedly un-noble in comparison.

I read the book again in middle school (around the time the very good Gillian Armstrong adaptation came out)--but hadn't really touched it since. And I don't know that I would have any time soon, if I hadn't fooled around with the Kindle app on my iPod and downloaded it for free. But I did, and got engrossed, even on the tiny screen.

At this point, the sisters are the most compelling reason to read (and revisit) the book. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy are basically tropes, but entertaining ones. Jo's the tomboy writer; Meg is the matronly sister ultimately fulfilled by husband and kids; Amy is the worldly, selfish one; and Beth is the Dead One. But it's easy to see how they would have been somewhat refreshing in the 1870s--all four get distinct personalities and are loved for their foibles, even if they're all ultimately validated by men in the long run.

As for the writing itself, well....The saddest aspect of my reread is that it's now official: I can't digest purely sentimental writing anymore. Some may say it's because I'm dead inside; others may speculate it's because all I seem to read these days are cynical modern male writers. But either way, I now lack the necessary sense of whimsy you need to be enchanted by the idea of gentle Christian feminism/transcendentalism. And the loss of that sense makes me feel a little sad, and uncomfortably cynical. But I just don't have the patience anymore for Victorian ideals and games.

I was also a little surprised to find my sympathies realigned. Before, I'd always sided with Jo, and lamented her rejection of her best friend and would-be lover, Laurie. This time, I found myself bored by her "I'm an independent tomboy, whee!" character--and rooting for Amy, the sister I'd traditionally liked the least. Jo talks a good game, but Amy's the one who actually pursues her ambitions (first art, then marrying well--the girl has goals!). She's the one who evolves the most out of any of the characters, a point I'd never noticed before. So by the time Jo turned Laurie down, I was already over it and ready for him to hook up with her sister. (Spoiler alert!)

And Beth, well...she still dies. (Spoiler alert #2!) But her final moments are sweet and touchingly written, and illustrate why Little Women endures. It's hard to stay truly dead inside when Beth's running out the clock and being brave for her family. Alcott makes her gentle moralizing so easy to read--very insidious.

Anyway, the best reason to read Little Women is not the fact that Alcott was way ahead of the curve on many social issues of the day (though she was). It's not the idea that we need to return to an ironclad, Victorian system of goodness and grace and civility. It's the idea that a story of a family, simply told, is more powerful than even my cynicism.

U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton

Back when I was in middle school, I found Sue Grafton's "alphabet series" in the Mystery section of the local library, and fell in love. (A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar, etc. Though being the rebel that I am, I think I started with "C.") Somewhere in the binge, I decided to use one of the books for an oral book report for Reading class. It wasn't until halfway through my presentation that I realized that it was impossible to summarize the plot in a way that would a) hold my 13-year-old peers' interest; and b) do any justice to the book itself. And that's what Sue Grafton's mystery novels do--they create deft mazes of people, information, and red herrings.

Her 21st, U is for Undertow, is part of that tradition. Like all the other books, its primary voice is that of Kinsey Millhone, a California private investigator. Kinsey isn't really your hardboiled type--she hits the criteria of being fiercely independent and jaded, but her beachy town and wacky friends are more sitcom than noir. But she's smart, sneaky, and tenacious as hell, so she's definitely the person you want ferreting out information for your cold case murder or missing person.

Undertow takes place over a few weeks in April, 1988, when a twentysomething guy wanders into Kinsey's office and insists that a newspaper article about a long unsolved kidnapping case (a 4-year-old girl disappeared in 1967, never found) triggered a buried childhood memory of him stumbling upon two guys burying a bundle a few days after the girl disappeared. The guy, Michael, isn't the most stable or reliable dude around, and no one believes him. So he hires Kinsey for a day to try to figure out whether he could possibly have seen what he thinks he saw.

Of course, the plot mushrooms from there, but did you not see what I wrote earlier about summarizing? Lost cause. Rest assured that as with many of the other novels in the series, we get introduced to various members (savory and otherwise) of the Santa Teresa community, who have odd connections to the original kidnapping, the aftermath, and the present day investigation. The climax is a little unsatisfying--Grafton takes the unusual (for her and for mystery writers in general) approach of lining up pretty much everything early on, and using pure exposition to fill in the blanks. But overall, the mystery is a good and layered one.

There's also a B-plot involving Kinsey's own personal life, which I found more interesting. After 21 books, you feel pretty attached to someone, whether she's fictional or not. And Kinsey (despite her protestations that she needs nothing more than her spartan lifestyle and one or two token friends) has steadily grown from an orphan (by circumstance early on and then later by choice) to someone with actual obligations in life. In Undertow, that means possibly opening up to estranged family. And checking in with her hot (and unfortunately platonic) detective friend.

I also appreciate that Grafton has stayed within the 80s timeline. These books would be totally ruined by modern technology. There's something appealing about a detective who does her work by cross-referencing old directories and schlepping to a cat hospital to ask questions that Google would answer so easily today.

So overall, a very entertaining read. I'm starting to get nervous because there are only five novels left. But I probably have seven-ish years before I really need to worry about the end. In the meantime, I'll just wait impatiently for V.

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.

The Song is You by Arthur Phillips

I believe in radio omens. Or these days, given that I rarely listen to the radio, iPod omens. Like, if I'm feeling nostalgic for the zaniness of college, my iPod turns up that song that happened to be playing in the background at Spring Weekend 2002. Even this morning, I was on the subway, thinking about how much has changed in the past few months, and the Whiny Frat Rock song that dominated my summer playlist came on.

Of course, they're not really omens. These songs are on my iPod because I've sought them out, and kept them in the rotation for their sentimental attachments. But part of me believes in the possibility that the universe knows what I really want to hear. (And sometimes, that's just gonna be Justin Timberlake--let's be honest.) And that's part of what made me so receptive to Arthur Phillips's novel The Song is You. Like Phillips, I'm happy to suspend logic and cynicism as long as there's a patina of pop music gloss.

The Song is You follows another iPod omen believer, Brooklynite Julian Donohue, a commercial director whose sense of self is largely defined by his music collection. (This isn't a Nick Hornby novel, I swear.) He sees his iPod as an extension of his old portable CD player, which was in itself an extension of his Walkman, which provided the soundtrack to his days as a young and soulful stud. But Julian hasn't just been pining for his youth--in the intervening years, he's gotten married, started a family, even given up his casual infidelities. But a family tragedy pushes all of that aside, and pretty much all he's left with is the music collection. This isn't to say he's a sad sack--just a more philosophical version of his younger self. Julian, like so many Modern Men (literary and otherwise), couches his shallowness and narcissism in existential hooey. He convinces himself that his aesthetic preferences are just so much more refined than everyone else's, and that's why he only sleeps with models.

This is about where he is when he wanders into a Brooklyn bar and scoffs at the hipsters assembled there to hear Cait O'Dwyer, spunky Irish lass (do we know any other kind?), perform with her backup band. Cait, we see, is upwardly mobile. Her demo CD has already been optioned by a label, the hipsters whisper over pitchers of PBR. Julian isn't really impressed, one way or another--but he does pick up her demo, which works its way into his iTunes rotation. Suddenly her poignant pop songs are getting to him like nothing else can, and he starts attending her shows around the city. At one, he leaves her a gift, which he doesn't really expect will get to her--but it does, and she, in turn, starts becoming fascinated with him as well.

Thus begins a game of stops and starts, of borderline stalking, of infatuation, of wistful song lyrics posted online. Both Julian and Cait get off on the thrill of their hidden Svengali relationship. They're both in love with the idea of a shared future of passionate love and creative fulfillment, but they can't figure out how to make the jump into physical reality--or at least they can't figure out how to do it without turning into the mundane. So they whip themselves into a frenzy of potential, as her career starts to flourish and he stokes it.

Both Julian and Cait come with entourages trying to pull them away. There's Ian, Cait's guitarist, who puts up with a more-than-friends-and-less-than-kind relationship with her, because their unconsummated co-dependency pushes their music further. Ian, suspicious of the stranger who leaves cryptic messages for Cait wherever they go, has a vested interest in taking the guy down--as does a has-been rockstar who sees Cait as his path back to the A-list. In Julian's corner, there's a sweet-but-neurotic estranged wife, and a socially inept brother--both of whom have strong (and valid) reasons for not wanting him to follow a cute pop star around the world.

The book follows both Julian and Cait pretty closely, but Julian is by far the more clearly defined. Cait is a little too perfect. By the middle of the book, you realize that's because Phillips himself is probably a little too in love with her. And because it's hard to get a real perspective on her, it's difficult to get 100% behind the Julian-Cait relationship--especially by the time things take a definite "Every Breath You Take" turn.

But as with Prague, what Phillips does well, he does exceptionally well. I do love his writing style. And the bonus point? A critical scene is set in a college bar in Storrs, Connecticut. Well played, Arthur Phillips. Brooklyn landmarks + UConn landmarks + pop songs = high score.

Some of my favorite parts:

"The choice was mutual but they had opposite reasons: he was a coward, she was ruthless. In his defense, he hadn't known the choice was going to be inscribed as eternally as grave marble law. That was her will, enforced from that moment on with flinchless discipline. If he'd known, he told himself, he would have chosen her over the music, over anything. He would have."

"When they wrote together, or when one presented the other with something prepared in private, with no audience to absorb the excess, he felt the room crowding with their other selves, lives unled and correspondences unwritten, happinesses opted against, and he could not believe she did not see it too."

"...He laughed at himself, and he laughed at Cait O'Dwyer's sorcery, and he wondered if, in real life, she required a steady diet of recent heartbreak in order to manufacture fresh emotion for her consumers. Two months ago, she was raw and unblended; tonight she was reasonably effective; someday very soon she would be in danger of marbling over into a slick cast impression of herself. The target was only mircons wide, and history's great singers may simply have been those who happened to make a record in the brief time between learning and forgetting how to manage their power."

Year-end addendum

I don't know why, but I always kind of assumed that David Sedaris's reading taste (at least the public one) would be considerably more esoteric than mine. Then I saw his bit in The New Yorker blog discussing his 2009 favorites. Among them was the Lorrie Moore novel (as on everybody's end-of-year list, it seems)--but also two other books I really want to read, the upcoming Joshua Ferris novel and Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

Also, there was a revelation in there: Dorothy Parker as read by...Elaine Stritch! I don't know what planets aligned for that one, but it must have been amazing.

And this reminds me that 2009 was actually a really good year for quality books, despite the ongoing cataclysm that is publishing--and Sarah Palin.

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.

Indignation by Philip Roth

So for the last three Philip Roth books, I've talked/written about the endangered author syndrome among the mid-20th century luminaries, where they're working on a long goodbye/capstone to seal the legacy. And when it came to proving my theory, Roth was the proviest of them all. The Plot Against America = meditation on his childhood. Everyman = dying New Jerseyan reflecting on his life. Exit Ghost = end of Zuckerman. Poignant, no?

Then I read one of his latest, Indignation. Way to prove my vague and untenable theory wrong, Philip Roth. Now he's just cranking out one-off books like he used to. Which also means that I don't have to worry about approaching the book with reverence, and can admit that I didn't love it.

Indignation is the story of Marcus Messner, a New Jersey kid who tries to slip his father's suffocating anxiety and the ankle-deep blood of the family's kosher butcher shop. His blind, groping efforts to get the hell out of Newark land him on the campus of Winesburg College, a WASP-y liberal arts school in Ohio. Marcus just wants to keep his head down, not talk to anyone, get straight A's, and avoid the Korean War draft. But people have a pesky habit of getting in the way. And rather than accept this with equanimity and get on with his life, Marcus's general reaction is to melt down, and either a) make immediate plans never to talk to the offending parties again; or b) say "f--- you" in the worst possible ways and at the worst possible times.

To be fair, he seems to come across the most obnoxious people on campus: the pompous Christian dean, unbalanced roommates, and your standard fictional unstable chick--who seems awesome at first, and then lets loose with every single piece of baggage she's ever had. Guys, let this be a lesson: when a girl says that she's "only done this once before," and the next minute has the Crazy Eyes? Shut. It. Down. I'm just sayin'.

But anyway, there's something halfhearted about the whole thing: from the smattering of anti-semitism suggestions (none of which really pan out in the plot) to the usual tortured romance, it's all very Roth, but very auto-pilot. There's no reason for this to be as small a book as it is--either in scope or in physical format (largest font ever). There was just so much more space and potential here than the "kid leaves home for college, doesn't fit in" narrative. And when the climax pretty much pops up out of nowhere and seals off the nebulous foreshadowing at the beginning of the book, it's awfully tidy and convenient. Kind of like a morbid version of the epilogue of Animal House.

I think what disappointed me most was the lack of the usual saving grace, Roth's amazing descriptive power. There just isn't much description going on in Indignation, and the novel suffers for it. What little there is, though, is good. There's a scene near the end where Roth manages to turn a frat-guy panty raid into a graphic, stomach-turning bachanal of douchebaggery. And that's the Roth I want more of. This one had the right Rothian elements (anger, sex, Newark), but they just didn't come together the way they usually do. Sad.

short stories

Having fallen way behind on New Yorkers, I spent a good chunk of time this weekend plowing through. Most pieces were status quo, but I thought that the fiction has been especially good lately. This one in particular, "Alone" by Yiyun Lee, has been haunting me since I read it. It's beautifully written and structured--really, a complete novel in four pages. (I hope all the people trying to pound out thousands of words a day for internet bragging rights are paying attention to this.) Recommended.

Conversely, I was kinda disappointed by "Premium Harmony," a new story by Stephen King. In general, I like King's (non-horror) writing, especially as he gets older and more reflective. But this story just felt stunted and melancholy. I would have happily read more about the characters, but the arc wasn't very engaging at all. And I saw the big climax coming, about three paragraphs in. If it were a normal story by an unknown author, I don't think I'd have been as bothered. Probably unfair, but true. Especially given that he's someone who could probably knock out a rough draft NaNoWriMo novel in a slow weekend, and have it sell 8 bajillion copies.