The New Dork Review of Books

Love At Absolute Zero: Nerd On The Prowl

2012-01-31T14:44:00.000-06:00

"If Einstein could have sex, love and physics, so could I," intones our nerdy protagonist Gunnar Gunderson partway through Christopher Meeks' indie romp, Love at Absolute Zero. But the question is, can he really?

We spend the whole novel with Gunnar, a 32-year-old physics professor at the University of Wisconsin trying to find out. Early in the novel, Gunnar is granted tenure and decides it's time to find a wife. Luckily, that same day, he runs into a high school crush, and he's certain they are meant to be together. But alas, she has a boyfriend -- she met at a speed dating event. And so Gunnar decides to try speed dating as well (that's some impenetrable logic, if I've ever heard it), but not before he does some serious self-renovation. And then, of course, things go a bit awry.

Gunnar's an infuriating fellow -- you often want to reach into the novel and slap him around. But his missteps are hilarious, and it makes for a goofy, lighthearted read. To be fair, this novel's never going to win a Pulitzer Prize, and Meeks won't soon be confused with Philip Roth. Indeed, much of the comedy in the novel is probably unintentional on Meeks' part -- like a sex scene described thusly: "Their hands again traced each other. With fingers and oral stimulation, they satisfied each other." That's giggle-worthy on a number of levels.

But you know what? Overall, I liked it. Gunnar sure is a dumbass, but he's definitely of the "lovable loser" variety. And he learns from his mistakes, which is a commendable quality in a protagonist, even one as ignorant in matters of the heart as Gunnar is. Overall, it's a breezy read not to be taken too seriously, because, really, it can't be.

Three-and-a-half stars.

Oryx and Crake: Where's the Love?

2012-01-26T10:57:00.001-06:00

The blurb on the back cover describes Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake as "at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future." It's certainly the latter, but I must've missed the former. What love story? This is a safe bet: You'll never hear me complain about the lack of love story again, probably — but for a novel to set itself up like that, and then fail to deliver, was disappointing.

But, let's accentuate the positive: The dystopia Atwood imagines is, indeed, very compelling — the novel tells the story of childhood friends Crake and Jimmy. Crake is a scientific genius who fits in well with the decaying, stratified-by-class world that finds nothing ethically wrong with bio-engineering animals — and, eventually, humans. The story jumps back in forth in time — alternating between Jimmy and Crake's coming of age and early adulthood, and the post-apocalyptic world in which Jimmy (who now calls himself Snowman) finds himself. He's all alone, except for the "Crakers," the genetically engineered humans who think Snowman is a god, and how it came to be that way is the thrust of the novel.

So, what's the love-story angle, then? It starts like this: One day, when Jimmy and Crake are in high school, they're trolling around the Internet, looking for porn, as high school boys do, they come across a beautiful eight-year-old girl who, for reasons that Atwood never fully explains, deeply affects Jimmy. The girl (surprise, surprise) is Oryx, and she haunts his dreams. He loves her from the start. And for the life of me, even when she finally appears in the flesh in the novel, I couldn't understand why. What's she supposed to be a symbol of? Why is Jimmy so obsessed with her? Why does it matter?

Atwood is an elegant writer — this is actually the first time I've read her — once she gets going with this story (and it does take a while — a lot of the first hundred pages shows us Snowman lying around going, "Uh, this sucks,"), it really hums along. I read the last 200 pages in two sittings.

Perhaps because for me this was an effort in "branching out," I didn't enjoy this as much as most readers seem to. Again, the inventive dystopia and the idea of scrubbing ethics from science were intriguing enough to keep me turning pages quickly. But I just couldn't find my way totally into this. So, three stars from me, but I won't hate you if you hate me for not enjoying it.

On to The Year of the Flood...

11/22/63: Time Travel Done Right

2012-01-19T11:31:00.000-06:00

Sure, Stephen King's 11/22/63 is first and foremost a time-travel novel. Jake Epping, mid-30s divorcee, steps through a wormhole to 1958, and endeavors, at the behest of his dying friend Al, to stop the Kennedy assassination. But this is also a thriller of the highest order, a love story that might wring tears from even the most emotionless jerk, and a glance back to and an examination of American culture in the early '60s.

And it's all friggin' awesome!

This is the first book I've finished in 2012, but it's going to take a lot to knock it from its pedestal as a favorite of the year. Yes, it's that good.

(One second...I'm trying to get this gush under control.)

Okay. So what does Jake do in the intervening five years between when he steps out of the wormhole on a sunny, warm September day in 1958 and the late-November day that changed the world? To me, that's the most interesting part — Jake basically gets a second chance at life, just as he's hoping to provide a second chance for the last half of the 20th century not to be so horrible. (Working theory: If Jake can prevent the Kennedy assassination, by extension, it'll also prevent MLK's death, the Vietnam War, and the bring about a quicker end to the Cold War.) He goes to Texas and teaches English, and tries to shadow Lee Harvey Oswald to find out if he's really the sole shooter or not. Will history be changed as Jake and his buddy Al expect, if Jake is successful? That's the question that hangs over the novel, and gives it a huge sense of page-turning immediacy.

There is a definitive answer, and it's part of what makes this novel a huge success: A carefully crafted, wonderfully insightful ending. It's such a departure for King, who has a tendency to head off the reservation with crazy ending. (see: Under The Dome) Not so, here. You'll love it, I promise you.

The only negative thing I've heard from readers about this novel (other than that King has sold out because there are no monsters or killer clowns, criticism which is absurd to me.) is that King takes his time getting to the Kennedy part. Jake spends the first half of the novel trying to prevent a murder of one of his present-day GED students (a janitor at his high school).

Yes, on the surface, this is a bit of detour to the "meaty" Kennedy parts. But I loved this back story because it gives the reader a chance to really understand how King's time-travel "universe" works. Often, the success or failure of a novel is dependent upon how well it follows its own rules. And with time-travel, that's always tricky. And it can be boring, if the author takes up several chapters continuously discussing and reviewing the rules. But King nails it — he assumes the reader knows the basic "rules" of time-travel and only slightly tweaks those for his own purposes. And so the novel just sings right along.

It's really superb. I can't recommend it more highly. Five stars.

(Finally, if you're interested in a comparison of my two favorite time travel novels of all time — now that this one has taken one of those spots — check out my post on Book Riot today.)

A Few Items of Bookish Interest

2012-01-12T12:17:00.000-06:00

I'm about two sittings away from finishing Stephen King's new novel 11/22/63. You'll get a review next week, but here's a preview: It's approximately 1,398 better than Under the Dome.

In the meantime (the only downside of my penchant for reading long novels, especially during the winter, is the long gap between reviews), here are three literary items of relative importance.

1. The 2012 Tournament of Books list announced — The ToB (as those hip to the lingo call it) is one of the best bookish events of the year. If you're unfamiliar, the tournament consists of a March Madness-like bracket of match-ups pitting two novels against each other — a judge carefully selected from the literary community makes the call (and publishes his/her reasoning) and the winner moves on. I've only read three (The Art of Fielding, The Tiger's Wife, The Marriage Plot) of the 16 on this year's list (and, incidentally, wasn't a huge fan of two of those three), so I've got some work to do before the winner is announced March 7. What's your pick to win? I'm rooting for The Art of Fielding, but I think The Tiger's Wife may take it.

2. USA Today's Bestselling Books of 2011 — Not surprisingly, The Help is No. 1. A little bit surprisingly, all three Hunger Game novels are in the top 10 and all three Millennium Trilogy novels are still in the top 13. It's not until #47 that a literary fiction novel actually published in 2011 makes the list — The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain.

3. The Joy of Books — Thanks to my friend Jeff for pointing out this nifty little stop-action video of a bookstore organization project.

(Finally, if you're interested, here are links to my two Book Riot posts this week: An op/edit about how print is here to stay, which sparked a great conversation in the comments, and a look at my Top 5 Miscast Literary Roles.)

12 Books I Can't Wait For In 2012

2012-01-05T10:00:00.017-06:00

After perusing both The Millions' Most Anticipated list and The Atlantic's 15 Books To Look Forward To list, it's pretty clear there is, indeed, a lot to look forward to in 2012. Here are 12 books from those (and a few other) lists I'm especially geeked about.

12. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, by Nathan Englander (Feb. 7) — I read something recently, which of course I can't find again, in which Colum McCann said Englander is the best short story writer alive. High praise! And since I loved Englander's bizarre little novel The Ministry of Special Cases, this volume of short stories will be a high priority.

11. Wild Thing, by Josh Bazell (Feb. 8) — Bazell's Beat The Reaper was awesome! Uh, that's awesomely disturbing, actually. Can't wait for this follow up.

10. Gods Without Men, by Hari Kunzru (March 6) — British Indian novelist Kunzru's last book, My Revolutions, was fantastic. So, again, I'm excited about this follow-up.

9. Hot Pink, by Adam Levin (March 13) — This is a collection of short stories by the genius, DFW-esque writer who wrote one of my favorite novels of 2010, The Instructions.

8. Farther Away: Essays, by Jonathan Franzen (April 12) — This probably won't have quite the same publicity run-up as Freedom did a few years ago, but I'm junkie for anything this guy writes. So this volume of essays is exciting.

7. The Newlyweds, by Nell Freudenberger (May 1) — Since she occupies a spot on the Top 10 Hottest Female Writers list, I should probably check out her new novel...in case, you know, I ever meet her in a bar or something.

6. In One Person, by John Irving (May 8) — I'm a huge Irving fan. This is my most anticipated novel of the year.

5. Home, by Toni Morrison (May 8) — When an American literary institution like Morrison publishes a new novel, you just have to read it.

4. Canada, by Richard Ford (May 22) — Frankly, I was bored to tears by Ford's The Sportswriter and Independence Day, which are supposedly his two seminal works. But this one sounds different enough from those two that I'm willing to give him another shot.

3. Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter (June 12) — If this is even a third as good as The Financial Lives of the Poets, Walter may take a few more steps up my "favorite authors" list.

2. Office Girl, by Joe Meno (July 17) — I've never read Chicagoan Meno, but he's always been high on my list, and this novel sounds especially intriguing.

1. Back to Blood, by Tom Wolfe (sometime in the fall) — It's been eight years since Wolfe's last novel, the apparently underwhelming I Am Charlotte Simmons. Hopefully the wait's worth it for this long-rumored story about Miami.

What are you looking forward to in 2012?

The Last Werewolf: A Bit on the Contrived Side

2012-01-03T11:13:00.000-06:00

The Last Werewolf, by Glen Duncan, is a bit of a contradiction. On one hand, it rigidly follows its own rules regarding its protagonist: Jacob Marlowe, a 200-year-old werewolf living in modern-day London. That's a good thing, and readers should be more than willing to accept (and be intrigued by) Jake's "supernaturaledness." But then, after some initial stage-setting, the plot spins off wildly and more than a bit convolutedly, making the reader have to suspend disbelief where s/he shouldn't have to. So it's the stuff (Jake is a freakin' werewolf) we couldn't really expect to believe that works, and the stuff we're supposed not to question that doesn't. And that's why I closed this novel thinking, "good attempt, but no."

We get Jake's "rules" right from the start: Each month, "the Curse" causes him to change to his savage, lycanthrope form, feeding on a human victim. The rest of the month, Jake spends in his human form having deviant sex with prostitutes, chain smoking and drinking expensive scotch.

As the novel opens, we learn that Jake is, officially, the last werewolf. The second-to-last has just been hunted and killed, and since humans seem now to have become immune to "the Curse" — and werewolves aren't able to "change" others to their kind anymore — Jake's carrying the torch by himself. The problem is, he's lost his will to live; he can't find meaning in life anymore. And so he plans, much to the chagrin of his long-time friend Harley, to let the hunters take him down, too.

But, suddenly, fate — or what seem like fate, but is, at best, convenient coincidences, and, at worst, terrible contrivances — intervenes. Jake is knocked out of his misanthropic comfort zone and must re-evaluate what he truly believes. If that sounds too movie-trailerish, then you sort of get the idea. In fact, Jake is constantly comparing what's happening to how it would play in a movie — if this were a movie, I could simply invent a deus ex machina to solve such-and-such problem, for example. But the problem with the novel is that just about every plot hinge actually does feel like a deus ex machina, including the denouement, which feels like it's right out of a crappy Michael Bay-directed movie.

I will say this: Duncan writes with a real flair for the dramatic (though often bordering on overly sensational or hyperbolic). And he's often witty and profound. As well, the "action" sequences here are riveting. But they're too few and far between. In the space between are all sorts of reflections on making meaning out of life and whether it's worth going on. Dull.

This is certainly an inventive story — fitting nicely into the up-and-coming genre of "literary monster novels." But, it all feels too convenient; a hard trick for a supernatural werewolf novel. Three stars.

The New Dork Review of Literary 2011

2011-12-29T10:55:00.000-06:00

From Leo Tolstoy (twice) to Vince Flynn and from Stieg Larsson to Margaret Mitchell, an eclectic year in reading, it was. So much so that I'm writing like Yoda now, apparently. Anyway, in total, I read 43 novels comprising about 19,000 pages. Out of that, here are some high (and low) lights:

Novels That Had Me Near Tears...of Funny
Domestic Violets, by Matthew Norman, and Fathermucker, by Greg Olear -- Of all the novels I read this year, I probably had the most pure fun reading these two.

Best (But Most Depressing) Novel About Catholicism
Faith, by Jennifer Haigh -- Haunting. A gut-punch to your guilt-basket. But very, very good.

Longest, Most Scaled-the-Summit-Feeling-When-Finished Novel
War and Peace, of course. As one commenter suggested, I can now where the "I Read War and Peace" Tshirt. You know, if something like that existed. It doesn't, right? Right?

Uber-Hyped Trilogy That Kept Getting Worse As The Books Got Longer
I liked The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. But The Girl Who Played With Fire was mostly dull and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest made me glad there are no more novels.

First Time With a Famous Novelist...Success
Haruki Murakami -- I loved both Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore. I'm hoping to take on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84 in 2012.

First Time With a Famous Novelist...Failure
T.C. Boyle -- When The Killing's Done just didn't do it for me. But it was just intriguing enough to give Boyle another try...at some point.

Most Sobering Reading Moment of 2011
Finishing The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace. Made me incredibly, incredibly sad.

Most Overrated Book of the Year
The Tiger's Wife, by Tea Obreht -- The writerly chops are clear, but why this novel won so many awards isn't.

Biggest Surprise of the Year
I really, really enjoyed Gone With The Wind. I had assumed it would be an ooey-gooey slog. Not so at all. Ta'dow, Rhett!

Favorite Non-Fiction
In The Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson -- Just a fascinating, intricately researched look behind the curtain of Berlin in the 1930s.

(and finally...)

Favorite Fiction of the Year
3. The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
2. Domestic Violets, by Matthew Norman
1. The History of History, by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

Cheers to a great Literary 2012!

Fathermucker: Parenting is Rewarding?

2011-12-23T11:53:00.000-06:00

Joshua Lansky, the SAHD (that's "stay at home dad") protagonist of Greg Olear's fantastically comic meditation on parenthood and marriage, hates a lot of things -- Josh Duhamel, The Devil Went Down To Georgia, the Kardashians, 99 percent of Facebook status updates. But he does love his children, even though they drive him practically batty. And, thus we have a novel. The conflict between Josh's striving to be a good parent and his sarcastic cynicism (he still hasn't quite given up the ghost on being "cool") are what make Fathermucker such an awesome read.

This novel takes place over the course of one particularly hectic day. While Josh's wife is away for what is ostensibly a week-long business trip, Josh has to hold down the fort with his two high-maintenance little whipper-snappers, three-year-old Maude and four-year-old Roland. An early-morning playdate yields a potentially life-changing secret: Another mother tells Josh she suspects his wife is cheating on him.

The rest of the novel chronicles Josh's day. Josh is quite the contemplative chap, but hilariously so. And so we get his meditations on everything from oral sex to rock and roll to why the hell he can't seem to write another screenplay -- he'd sold the option for one five years ago, but has been basically blocked ever since. We watch as Josh takes Roland on a fieldtrip, deals with his idiotic babysitter and even more idiotic pest control guy, tries to score an interview for a freelance article with the frontman for a popular 90s punk band whose kid happens to be in Roland's class, and all the while wonders if his wife of 10 years is, indeed, having an affair.

I'm not a parent, but I loved this novel. It's a quick, easy read (I read it in two days) that'll have you alternating between giggles, *snorts* and gut-wrenchingedness -- Josh's wife isn't really cheating on him, is she? IS SHE? Sometimes Josh is sure she is, sometimes he's positive she's not. But most of the time, he literally doesn't have time to think about it as he's trying desperately to shepherd the kids to the next thing. At any rate, this book is high quality. Definitely check it out!

The Submission: Confronting Beliefs

2011-12-21T11:11:00.000-06:00

This is a novel that demands a lot of its readers. That's not to say Amy Waldman's The Submission is difficult or dull -- in fact, it's the polar opposite of both. What it is, though, is a novel that makes readers think; that asks readers to challenge long-held beliefs and ideas, no matter how firmly they think those ideas are held. Notions you may judge to be obvious, aren't. And ideas that may have seemed odious suddenly may not seem that way either. To me, it's one of the best kinds novel: A novel that feels perfectly in tune with how our society operates (for better and, mostly, worse), and that demands that you confront your own feelings and beliefs.

Enough with abstractions. Here's the deal: Two years after the attacks of 9/11, a jury convenes to select a design for the memorial to be built at Ground Zero. The jury selects (without knowledge of the designer, since the submission process was anonymous) a design for a beautiful garden with flowing canals and the victims' names written on the walls in the shapes of the twin towers. Most everyone's happy, until...envelope please...the designer is revealed to be a Muslim. Or at least he's a guy with a "Muslim name": Mohammed Kahn.

The public outcry is immediate. And furious. How could a Muslim be allowed to design an "Islamic paradise" to effectively memorialize the "jihadist martyrs," not the victims, right-wing conspiracy theorists ask? Obviously, not all Muslims are terrorists, you bigoted fools, say Mo's advocates. So why shouldn't Mo, an irreligious American architect, be allowed to build his design, since the design was judged the winner based on aesthetics, not politics or religion? But Muslims are responsible for 9/11, counters the opposition, so it'd be, at best, insensitive,and at worst, horribly insulting, to allow a Muslim designer to memorialize them.

This culture war is the basis of the novel, and the frenzy that follows is examined through the eyes of several New Yorkers -- including Mo himself, and Claire Burwell, a 9/11 widow who is the leading proponent of Mo's design. But both of these characters begin seeing themselves through the lens the increasingly polarized public sees them. They begin to question and doubt, to yield, especially in Mo's case, to others' (often stereotypical) visions of them.

A Bangledeshi immigrant who lost her husband in the attacks, a woman who runs an organization called Save America From Islam, a buffoonish right-wing talk show host, and a down-on-his-luck blue collar fella named Sean who lost his brother round out the cast of characters that give this novel a really complete feel. And the media circus (another character is a less-than-ethical journalist) and the political wrangling (the governor of New York has national ambitions and is constantly waiting to see which way the wind blows and maneuvering politically) feel spot on. As do the difficult questions the novel raises.

Are moral absolutes really absolute? Why is bigotry so wrong (and idiotic...and harmful)? Can art ever really be separated from artist? The readers must grapple, especially those of the conservative persuasion, at whom Waldman often takes aim.

Much like the politically charged environment portrayed, this novel itself was also divisive. It's the only book I've seen wind up on a "most overrated novel of the year" list, as well as several "best of the year" lists, including this one from Entertainment Weekly. I tend toward the latter -- perhaps not one of the best books I've read this year, but a very, very good one, nonetheless. Waldman (a former journalist) writes lucidly and knows her stuff -- whether architecture or the ins-and-outs of a newsroom. You trust her, even if her characters piss you off. This is highly recommended!

The Marriage Plot: A Book Report

2011-12-13T09:53:00.000-06:00

Here's how Jeffrey Eugenides tells this story: Each section starts in the present and continues for just a couple of pages. (eg. The novel opens with main character Madeleine waking up hungover on her graduation day from Brown in 1982.) Then, we go back six months to a year or more so it can be explained how everything leading up to where we are now came to be that way. (eg., Madeleine had been dating mysterious, but sexy, Leonard, but they fought and broke up. And she'd also fought with her friend Mitchell, who is secretly in love with her.) Then, once we're caught up on everything, the story continues onward. (eg. Leonard and Madeleine reconcile. Mitchell's left out in the cold, and goes to Europe.)

Of course, that's a fine way to tell a story. But here's the problem: The "rehashing" parts are all much, much longer than the real-time parts, so the novel has the effect of seeming like a book report of the book this book was supposed to be. We feel like we're constantly reading summary, not story.

Here's the other problem: The first 100 pages are a LOT about literary theory and semiotics, which not only adds to the "book report" feel, but also makes the beginning of the novel feel like a freshman weed-out class — it's tough to get through, but once you do, you're supposed to be treated to the "good part." But what happens here is that high expectations for this novel (based on how awesome Middlesex was) are almost immediately dampened. And unfortunately, the novel never fully recovers.

So the rest of the story is about Madeleine and Leonard's troubled life together, and Mitchell's travels throughout Europe, during which time his college crush, Madeleine, is never far from his mind. But is Mitchell really in love with Madeleine, or is he in love with the idea of being in love with Madeleine?

Look, I'm more surprised than anyone I didn't like this novel. I'm willing to allow that certain readers who have more of an appreciation for 19th century literature (Madeleine considers herself a "Victorianist" and loves novels by writers like Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters) may decode some allusions in this novel that I missed, and therefore like it much more. And furthermore, parts of the novel are amazingly lucid and insightful. Other than the first 100 pages, this is a really smooth, easy-to-read book.

But sadly, Eugenides fluid prose can't save many other snooze-inducing episodes — eg., as we learn about Leonard's family history and while Mitchell is working in India. So I'm giving this 3 out of 5 stars.

Upon Finishing War and Peace

2011-12-09T11:25:00.000-06:00

Did I like it? Sure, I liked it well enough. That is to say, I liked chunks of it. Parts were snooze-inducing, but parts were as fast-paced and fun to read as any modern thriller. It's only when you see the whole and start thinking about the scope and how it all came together — and start missing the characters — that you realize that you did truly enjoy it; that you didn't just keeping reading to say you'd read it.

So was it worth it? Absolutely! Indeed, the hardest part isn't reading the novel itself — contrary to popular opinion, it's not difficult at all; it's just long. No, the hardest part is coming up with anything reasonably intelligent to say from 1,400 pages and three months of reading.

One thing I can tell you for sure; here's my favorite quote from the novel, about Pierre:

"And it was the lack of an purpose that gave him the complete and joyous sense of freedom underlying his present happiness."

If you're unfamiliar, Pierre, a Russian nobleman who inherits a huge sum when his father dies, spends most of the novel on a sort of vision quest to find life's meaning. He carouses with women. He drinks heavily. He gets religion. He turns philosophical. And then mystical. But then he finally gets it, and the moment of his catharsis is one of the great moments of the novel. I loved it!

The thing that most surprised me about the novel is the much higher proportion of "peace" scenes to "war " scenes. Only about a third of the novel takes place on the battlefield, or deals with other men-at-war-related stories, including a few chapters from the point of view of Napoleon, which were hilarious in that it was clear how much Tolstoy detests him.

But it's in one of these war scenes in which Tolstoy gets to what seems to be the point of the novel, inasmuch as you can pinpoint a single point in a 568,880-word novel.

"The course of a battle is affected by an infinite number of freely operating forces (there being no greater freedom of operation than on a battlefield, where life and death are at stake), and this course can never be known in advance; nor does it ever correspond with the direction of any one particular force."

Just as true in war as in peace (life), yeah? This is an idea Tolstoy brings full circle in his (rather tedious) epilogue, in which he discusses his philosophy of history and argues that free will is false.

Anyway, so here we are, at the end of a three-month climb. And you know what the best part about it is? Finally (finally!), this photo I've been bandying about on this blog for more than two years isn't just a sad example of blatant grandstanding anymore. It's real. Yeah, this actually happened! Woohoo!

Two Months of Book Rioting: A Short Update

2011-12-06T15:42:00.001-06:00

It's been a great few months over at the new site venture Book Riot. Have you been by to check it out? There's a TON of great content over there — from one of the funniest, most gruesome book-related things I think I've ever seen (When Used Books Attack: Banana Edition) to a post that stirred up quite a bit of controversy (Why Aren't Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult Pissed At Jeffrey Eugenides?).

I've been posting twice a week over there, and really enjoyed the developing community and the feedback. (...except for the guy who called my Booze and Books "stupid" and "insensitive." That guy can ram it.) One of my posts is currently second (behind the Banana thing) in traffic — George Orwell's 1984 vs. Real 1984: Which Was More Gnarly? (If I had it to do over again, I'd probably re-write that headline and not try to be overly clever with the word "gnarly." It's kind of cringe inducing now. So it goes...) And my David Foster Wallace Reading Pathways post is currently sitting at third. Good times!

On the not-so-successful-but-still-fun-to-write-front: I did a post trying to evoke a Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal — satirically "explaining" why we need more celebrity-penned novels, like those that have recently been published by Snooki, Tyra Banks and the Kardashians. It pretty much went over like a lead balloon. So later that week, I posted a companion piece that was a bit more straightforward. Lesson learned. But they were still fun to work on, even if they were mostly ignored.

Anyway, if you haven't swung by, please do. Here's the page that lists my posts from the last two months, in case there's anything you missed.

As always, thanks for reading!

Zone One: The "Literary" Zombie Novel

2011-11-22T10:47:00.001-06:00

If the Jesse Eisenberg/Woody Harrelson film Zombieland (one of the more underrated movies of the last five years, in my humble opinion) was slightly less funny and slightly more disorienting, detailed and flash-backy, you'd have Colson Whitehead's Zone One.

The basic plot is the same in each — survivors of a zombie apocalypse try to continue to survive. Zone One, however, takes place over three days in New York City at the supposed tail end of the plague, as main-character Mark Spitz and his three-person "sweeper" crew go building-by-building to clear out the remaining "skels" in an attempt to make lower Manhattan re-habitable.

The schtick for Zone One, as you may have heard, is that it's a "literary" zombie novel. Just as Zombieland was a new take on the traditional zombie apocalypse story, so is Whitehead's novel an attempt to break out of the genre's convention. He does so with incredibly detailed, metaphor-laden sentences and paragraphs, constant flashbacks, and digressions inside of digressions. It's all very disorienting. And not always fun.

Put it this way: It's not a novel everyone will enjoy. But even if you don't enjoy the novel as a whole, there are several set pieces (a flashback to Mark Spitz and some friends holed up in a farmhouse, the story behind how our Mark Spitz came to be known as Mark Spitz) that are absolutely dazzling. And the last 30 pages or so scream by at a pace approximately triple that of any 30-page stretch in the rest of the novel. So even though it's a difficult novel to engage with — you have to really be in the mood to read diligently — I'd still recommend checking it out.

Whitehead is an amazingly skillful writer. As one of the back blurbs states, "Whitehead has a David Foster Wallace-esque knack for punctuating meticulously figurative constructions with deadpan slacker wit..." Agreed. Whole-heartedly.

Who Still Cares About Book Awards?

2011-11-18T10:27:00.001-06:00

Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction earlier this week. And there was much....indifference?

The novel sounds really interesting — it's about 12 days in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — but I'd never heard of it before it was nominated, and I'd guess most casual readers hadn't either. Such was also the case when the Man Booker Prize shortlist was announced in September. Most readers glanced casually at the list, gave each other a shoulder shrug, and went about the rest of their days.

I don't know how big a deal the literary prizes ever really had been to casual readers, and if we put the debate over selection criteria aside (merit vs. popular, etc.), it still seems like interest is waning more and more. Earlier this year, Jeff at The Reading Ape wrote a piece ostensibly defending the literary prizes, explaining that readers still care about them because, for one, they vet novels for us that are probably pretty good. That's certainly true, and it's also true, as Jeff says, that they funnel an invaluable resource towards a novel: reader interest.

Sure, there's an overall bump in readership resulting from an award. There's no question about that. But I wonder if that bump isn't declining, as only dyed-in-the-wool word-junkie literature geeks put any stock in these awards anymore.

Frankly, I don't make any special effort anymore to pick up an award-nominated book I hadn't heard of before it was nominated...or awarded. I'm no closer to reading Salvage the Bones now than I was on Monday. Neither am I any closer to reading last year's NBA winner, Jaime Gordon's Lord of Misrule, or either of the last two Pulitzer winners, Paul Harding's Tinkers (2010) or Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge.

And in some cases, an award may even be a deterrent for readers. When Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad won the Pulitzer this year, I heard several readers say they'd probably skip it now (and I'm paraphrasing here), as the Pulitzer, in their minds, is synonymous with pretentious, boring ficiton. I thought that was interesting. (For the record, I did try to explain that it's not, and they should read it!)

So all this brings us to the question, and I'm really interested to hear what you have to say. How much do you care about literary awards? Why do you care or why don't ya? Do the awards factor into your book-purchasing decisions?

The Leftovers: The Rapture Is Real! (...kind of)

2011-11-15T10:31:00.000-06:00

The standard "disappearance" novel usually goes something like this: A guy says he's going out for a pack of cigarettes. And he never comes back. His family, then, is forced to confront the emotional pain of his disappearance/abandonment.

The Leftovers, by Tom Perrotta, also explores the idea of dealing with emotional pain when loved ones suddenly disappear. But in this novel, the loved ones disappear in a rather different way. Perrotta concocts a Rapture-like event called the Sudden Departure, in which people quite literally disappear, seemingly at random. One second they're eating dinner or riding their bikes or piloting airplanes. The next, they're gone. And there's no discernible reason why and no recognizable pattern of disappearance — those Raptured aren't just Sanctimonious Evangelical Christians.

And so this narrative trick gives Perrotta a new and inventive way to explore how those who are left behind must move on with their lives. Some join cults or follow crazy but charismatic prophets, thus disappearing from their families in a different way. Some try to prove that the ones who were taken actually were bad people — that way, those who are still on Earth can talk themselves into the fact that the Sudden Departure was not actually the prophesied Rapture of religious lore. But the majority of people do their best simply to try to go on with life as it used to be.

That last category includes Kevin Garvey. Kevin is the mayor of the small suburban town of Mapleton. As the novel begins — three years after the Sudden Departure — Kevin's wife Laurie has abandoned the family to take up with a group that calls themselves the Guilty Remnant. Kevin and Laurie's son Tom has quit college, and begun following a nutjob named Holy Wayne. That leaves daughter Jill, an increasingly precocious teenager, who drinks and does drugs and has casual sex — but at least she's still there.

The story chronicles six months in these characters' lives, showing how individual decisions to "disappear" from one's family can be just as sad and with just as many emotional consequences (perhaps more!) than if disappearance was sudden and unexplained.

Perrotta writes a smooth, easy-to-read story — a modern parable, if you will. It's 90 percent great, and then 10 percent poor near the end, so I'm giving it four stars. But if you like modern, hip writing and an inventive story, The Leftovers is definitely for you.

Pop Culture Pervasiveness: George Orwell's 1984

2011-11-08T11:08:00.000-06:00

You know those lyrics in the Rage Against the Machine song Testify that go "Who controls the past now, controls the future / Who controls the present now controls the past"? (And then it rocks your face off!) Yeah, those are direct quotes from Orwell's 1984. And the line in the Muse song Resistance that goes "Kill the prayers for love and peace / you'll wake the thought police"? Obviously "thought police" is another 1984 reference. Radiohead wrote a song titled 2+2=5 and the Incubus song Talk Show On Mute invites us to "come one, come all into 1984."

And those references are just off the top of my head — which, I'm sure, means the above is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of references to the novel 1984 in music specifically, but also in general pop culture. (Just so we're clear, I'm not even mentioning the idiotic show Big Brother.)

It's a pretty influential novel (...states Captain Obvious). If you've never read it, give it a try. It's not nearly the slog some "classics" are. There are slower parts where there's no "action," per se, but if you're like me, and you're interested in politics and philosophy and the philosophy of politics, even the slow parts are fascinating.

One example: Orwell spends 30 pages showing us Winston Smith reading a book about the counterarguments to the Party's ruling philosophies (Ingsoc, or English Socialism) and slogans (i.e., War is Peace). It takes some brain work, but unpacking the arguments is rewarding. So is reading the epilogue in which Orwell describes Newspeak — the invented language of the Party that reduces the number of words in order to reduce critical thinking and opposition to the Party.

And you get to learn about solipsism — which, if you don't remember your Phil 101 course, is the notion that reality exists only in the mind. So once you get that, then you can sound smart at cocktail parties by saying things like, "You know, Greg seems like a reasonably intelligent person, but his solipsistic views and the fact that he rejects the objective nature of reality, make me want to brain him with blunt object."

Finally, here's this: A little tongue-in-cheek thought experiment on Book Riot to determine which was better, Orwell's 1984 or real 1984.

So, what other 1984 pop culture references have you noticed?

A Nod To The Classics

2011-11-03T11:22:00.002-05:00

I sure didn't want to be on Stephen King's shit list, so I put off reading War and Peace until the fall. It makes sense, anyway — the chill in the air these days signifies more than just a shift in the weather. People's reading habits shift from the fluffy summer reads to the more "stuffy" classics.

I can personally back up that claim. In addition to my continued assault on War and Peace (I'm on page 727 of about 1,400...whew), I've been re-reading George Orwell's 1984 for the third or fourth time. Man, is it good — one of my favorite "stuffy" classics.

But that's not all — chatter on the bookish interwebs about the classics has picked up recently, almost from the moment the calendar switched from October to November. Exhibit A is this fantastic Book Riot post by Wallace Yovetich about how to read a classic.

Additionaly, Twitter's been a flutter about next year's Back To The Classics Challenge. Every year, I sort of do a personal Classics Challenge (without having to limit myself to certain categories). This past year, my goals were Gone With The Wind, Anna Karenina and War and Peace. (Last year, it was Gravity's Rainbow, which damn near ended me.) Next year, I have five classics goals. Here they are:

5. Underworld, by Don DeLillo
4. Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin
3. The USA Trilogy, by John Dos Passos
2. East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
1. Sophie's Choice, by William Styron

There was no real method to the madness for picking those five books — they're just five books I've always wanted to read, and fear never well unless I set them aside with targets on their covers.

Have you read any of those five? What did you think? What's on your classics schedule for this winter?

Uncollected Thoughts On the Literary Week That Was

2011-10-28T11:47:00.000-05:00

Crazy week. Brain fried. Some brief thoughts:

1. Wanna win $100? If you're a book blogger, Book Riot is giving away a $100 gift certificate to your favorite book store. All you have to do is write a post "about the time you went the crazy nerdiest for a book." More details are here.

2. Speaking of Book Riot, I put up a post yesterday about David Foster Wallace. There are always so many emotions when I write about my favorite writer. The post is here, if you're interested. Something about DFW always seems to resonate with people — the post has gotten more than 1,000 pageviews in two days!

3. I was in Phoenix for work this week. I've been trying to think of any literary novel set (or even with a scene taking place) in Phoenix. Coming up blank. Anyone else have any ideas?

4. Lots of people have started Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. I wish I could, but B&N has yet to deliver mine. Have you started it? Any first impressions?

A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion: A Sordid Affair...

2011-10-25T10:43:00.000-05:00

Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Girl convinces boy to murder her jerk husband. While not your standard love story, it is an easily recognizable literary plotline. And Ron Hansen's new novel A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion deftly chronicles a famous real-world instance of such a story of manipulation and murder.

Dateline: New York City, 1925. Voluptuous Ruth Snyder, secure in her sex appeal and her ability to manipulate men, begins a torrid affair with brassiere or corset salesman Judd Gray. Both are unhappily married — Ruth because she's abused, Judd because he's bored. Over the course of several alcohol-soaked rendezvous (Hansen makes clear how easy it was to get around Prohibition) and trysts at the Waldorf-Astoria, Ruth slowly breaks down Judd's moral defenses, convincing him that he really has no other choice but to help her kill her husband.

The last section of the novel, to me, was the most fascinating, as Hansen departs a little from the fiction of Ruth and Judd's relationship, and carefully recounts (from newspaper accounts and other primary sources) the trial and the publicity circus around it. Think OJ Trial of the '20s. And if you've read Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (which Hansen mentions in Guilty Passion), you're familiar with how well this narrative structure can work. It reads like non-fiction, and it's absolutely riveting.

I'd highly recommend this slim novel, especially if you're not familiar with Ron Hansen, who is a vastly underrated novelist. This novel's a perfect example of what he does best — turning a footnote of history into a rich, elegant novel. My biggest complaint about this book is the cover — which earned me more than one dirty looks whilst reading in public. But A+ for the novel itself!

Notes From a Chad Harbach Reading

2011-10-21T09:51:00.001-05:00

I can't make this sound any other way but disparaging, but if you look at Chad Harbach's author photo on The Art of Fielding, he looks, well, nerdy; and even a bit smug — like a dude who was always joshin' the jocks in high school and therefore was constantly having to buy new pairs of tighty-whiteys to replace the ones destroyed by Atomic Wedgies.

In real life, though, he's neither nerdy nor smug. I don't know why I'm always surprised that successful novelists are actually cool in person, but Harbach is another in a long line of novelists I've met who is as good an entertainer as he is writer. Harbach was comfortable enough cracking jokes as answer to one question but then answering seriously and insightfully to others, including the inevitable question about his "writing process." Anyway, it was a great event, and I was thrilled to get to meet him.

Here are a few other notes from the reading:

1. The event took place at Boswell Book Company, an indie bookstore in Milwaukee (Harbach is from Racine, about 30 miles south of Milwaukee). The place was packed, and for the first time at any reading I've ever attended, there were more men than women there. Harbach opened by joking that he'd hoped no one would show up tonight because everyone would've been occupied rooting on the Brewers in Game 2 of the World Series. Sadly, that didn't happen.

2. I asked Harbach what he thought of the article Keith Gessen wrote partially about him titled How A Book Is Born. He said he didn't read it until it was finished — that Gessen, who is a friend of his, had sort of awkwardly asked Harbach if it was okay to write about him, and that was it. There was no formal interview or anything — since the two were living together in New York at the time, Harbach said Gessen pretty much had all the material he needed. (If you haven't checked out that piece, definitely do. It's really enlightening!)

3. An attendee asked Harbach what he thought about all the hype and attention his novel has gotten. Whether Harbach's answer was a (very well orchestrated, 'cause he has to have been asked that question before) act or not, I don’t know, but it was the only time of the night he seemed uncomfortable. He stuttered, started to answer, stopped, looked down at the podium for a beat, then composed a smile and just said “It’s really, really nice.” And that was it.

4. Several of the sweet people of Wisconsin may need to take a gander at Spoilers: A User's Manual, as not one, but two, of the audience questions blatantly gave away key plot points — one all but revealed what happens at the end! Unbelievable!

5. When Harbach was signing my book, I asked him if he'd really chosen Little, Brown because of the opportunity to work with David Foster Wallace's editor, Michael Pietsch. (He actually took less money to publish Little, Brown, as reported in How A Book Is Born.) He kind of smiled and said that Pietsch editing his book was certainly one factor, maybe the dominant one, but he also knew what Little, Brown, as a publishing house as a whole, could offer him in other areas (publicity, marketing!). Makes sense — and a very diplomatic answer.

6. You should’ve seen Mr. Harbach’s socks. To be honest, I rarely notice another man’s hosiery, but Harbach was wearing these what must’ve been flannel, multi-primary-colored things that were far and away the brightest thing in the room. I tried to subtly get a photo of them without appearing to be a foot-fetishy creeper, but sadly, it didn’t turn out. I only mention it as another example of Harbach’s somewhat quirky personality.

Here are some other photos from the event that did turn out. My apologies for my substandard photography skills.

The Art of Fielding: A Baseball Fan's Baseball Novel...With a Twist

2011-10-18T14:15:00.002-05:00

I love baseball. Always have. In fact, my one and only bar trick is to be able to recite on command any or every World Series winner since 1972. Name a year, I'll tell you the winner. And so, as an enormous baseball fan, I couldn't have been more delighted to spend a couple weeks with Chad Harbach's debut novel The Art of Fielding.

The biggest reason I enjoyed the novel — and I think you will too, especially if you're a baseball fan — is that it's as authentic as they come; authenticity being the No. 1 factor in a good sports novel, in my view. I mean, when a writer totally flubs sports jargon in a novel (i.e, "He got a homerun," or "He made a touchdown,"), even if not critical to the plot, not only does Matt Christopher roll over in his grave, but to me that writer has lost credibility for his/her novel at large. Writing about sports and making it sound authentic is tricky — perhaps one of many reasons why there are so few good sports novels.

Harbach, though, absolutely nails it. He clearly knows and understands baseball and writes about it as realistically as any novelist I've ever read. And he doesn't dumb it down. That was my No. 1 fear going into this novel — that the baseball scenes would be cheesy and cliche. Not so here at all. Hell, the whole plot hinges on a little-known "condition" called Steve Blass Disease, made famous by a 1970s Pirates pitcher who suddenly and inexplicably lost his control. Harbach clearly understands the big-picture view of baseball — its quirks, superstitions and deference to history. But even on a granular level, passages like the following illustrate just how adept Harbach is at rendering in-game scenes authentically and in a way that's fun and exciting to read:

"In the bottom of the fourth, finally, and Opentoe batter laced a low shot into the hole between short and third. Henry broke toward it with typical quickness, snapped it up cleanly on the backhand side. As he set his feet to throw, though, the ball seemed to get stuck in his glove. He had to rush the throw, which flew low and wide of the bag. Rick O'Shea stretched to full length and scooped it out of the dirt, lifted his glove to show the ump he had the ball."

But this novel has much wider appeal than just a baseball novel. Indeed, if you're not a baseball fan, to you, this will probably be more a story about relationships. But instead of continuing to talk in abstractions, let's take a look at the story.

Ankiel had one of the most famous cases of Blass Disease

Henry Skrimshander is a smooth-fielding shortstop who, along with his mentor Mike Schwartz, have double-handedly turned the Westish College baseball program from laughing-stock to powerhouse. Henry is about to break the all-time collegiate record for error-less games in a row, previously held by his idol Aparicio Rodriguez (not a real baseball player, if you're wondering). But, suddenly, quirk strikes — as it so often does in baseball. Henry makes an errant throw that drills his bench-bound roommate Owen in the skull. And after that, Henry can't seem to make the routine throw to first anymore — the notorious Steve Blass Disease.

But speaking of quirk, Guert Affenlight, the previously heterosexual president of Westish (which is a fictional liberal arts school in northern Wisconsin) finds himself head-over-heals infatuated with Owen (Owen actually is gay). And so the rest of the story chronicles how Henry deals with his affliction and how Owen and the president deal with their budding love. Guert's daughter Pella and Mike Schwartz are also caught up in the maelstrom, and no one's life will ever be the same.

Only time will truly tell if The Art of Fielding will join The Natural and The Brothers K in pantheon of great baseball novels. It's definitely not a perfect novel — Harbach can be long-winded at times and part of the resolution is a tad, for lack of a better word, preposterous (nothing to do with baseball, thankfully). So I'd give this four and a half stars. Still, to paraphrase a common Owen-ism: "You are skilled, Chad Harbach. I exhort you." And furthermore, as my all-time favorite baseball broadcaster Marty Brennaman is fond of saying, "If you swing the bat, you're dangerous." And Harbach has definitely swung for the hallowed fences of baseball literature lore.

(One other note: I loved the names in this novel. Henry Skrimshander, Guert Affenlight, Owen Dunne, Adam Starblind, etc. I felt like it may have been a tribute to the goofy names in Philip Roth's The Great American Novel — another terrific baseball novel.)

Top 10 Books I Wish I Could Read Again For the First Time

2011-10-11T14:35:00.001-05:00

I've always wanted to do one of these Top Ten Tuesday posts — but since, until recently (launch of Book Riot), I always posted on Mondays, I never did. It's kind of liberating stepping out of your own rigid self-imposed rules, isn't it?

Today's topic is the top ten books you wish you could read again for the first time. I like this idea a lot, because whenever I see someone starting a book I really loved, my first thought is jealousy — that s/he is at the precipice of a really great experience.

So, here we go:

10. Trinity, by Leon Uris — For a good part of my life, this was my answer to the "favorite book of all time" question. It's fallen down the list a little, but I still wish I could be as transfixed by it as I was the first time I read it when I was in college.

9. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides — With all the buzz about Eugenides' follow-up, I've been reminded how fantastically original Middlesex is.

8. Straight Man, by Richard Russo — This is one of the funniest books I've ever read. If I could start fresh, I'd do a better job of slowing down and appreciating the humor.

7. The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein — If I had this one to do over, I'd do something really manly right before reading this, so I wouldn't feel so bad about this novel turning me into a blubbering fool.

6. American Pastoral, by Philip Roth — I read this at a point in my life (college) when I couldn't give it the attention it deserved. I'd love to go back and give this the close read it deserves.

5. House of Leaves, by Mark Danielewski — If there's one book I've ever read I wish I could erase from memory to start again fresh, this is it. Some books are good on a reread, but for others (like this one), once their secrets are revealed (and your mind is sufficiently blown), it's no good going back.

4. Everything Is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer — I had no idea Foer was such a quirky writer when I read this the first time, and therefore was annoyed with this book as much as I enjoyed it. I wish reverse and reread with a better understanding of what I was about to read.

3. White Teeth, by Zadie Smith — It's been so long since she published new fiction, I wish this — her best novel — could be new to me again.

2. A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving — My favorite Irving. Enough said.

1. Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace — My favorite author's best book? Also a no-brainer...

Looking For Something To Read?

2011-10-07T14:14:00.000-05:00

You are? That's fantastic! Here are five suggestions for five great novels from five great bloggers:

1. The Submission, by Amy Waldman — reviewed by Brenna at Literary Musings: This novel has some real ripped-from-the-headlines appeal. It's already high on my priority list, and Brenna says it's one of her favorites of the year.

2. The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern — reviewed by L.L. at The Story Girl: This book has garnered the biggest buzz of the fall. My copy just arrived, and after reading this review, I'm even more excited to dive in.

3. The Leftovers, by Tom Perrotta — reviewed by Rebecca at The Book Lady's Blog: What if the Rapture happened, but those who were Raptured weren't just sanctimonious Christian fundamentalists? Here's how Rebecca describes how Perrotta's apparently fantastic novel answers that question: "So, The Leftovers. It’s like the Left Behind books if they were smart and funny and not about religion but the human condition in general and well-written and did I mention smart?"

4. Fathermucker, by Greg Olear — reviewed by TNBBC's The Next Best Book Blog: This looks like the pseudo-dude-lit hit of the fall. It's also far and away the best titled book of the year! I just ordered it myself, and was happy to see this glowingly positive review.

5. We the Animals, by Justin Torres — reviewed by Rachel at A Home Between Pages: I'd only heard bits and pieces about this novel, and because it's so short, I'd all but written it off. But Rachel loved it, so it's back on my radar — maybe for a lazy fall Sat. afternoon in the near future.

Also, in case you missed, and if you did you're kind of a jerk (kidding), here is my first contribution to Book Riot. Why aren't there more good literary sports novels?

The New Dork Review Turns Two: Time to RIOT!

2011-10-03T12:13:00.000-05:00

On the scale of momentous book blogging days (a scale which totally exists), today might be an all-timer. For one, I'm celebrating two years of computerized-scribbling about books here at the New Dork Review — or, as they say in the biz, it's my two-year blogoversary. (Actually, the real anniversary is Oct. 1, but since I'm a dude, I get a little leeway on the exact date, right?)'

As totally mind-blowingly awesome as a two-year blogoversary is (whoops, the sarcasm font isn't loading properly today), the really exciting news today is the launch of Book Riot. I couldn't be more thrilled to be involved with 11 other contributors in this new website dedicated to all things bookish, with a decidedly snark, humorous and absolutely-not-at-all stuffy tone. I mean, one of the first posts up is a conversation between two contributors about Jersey Shore and pop culture and books. It's awesome! Please go check it out and visit frequently — it just launched today and there's already a ton of fun content there to peruse, but there will be new content every single day.

So, naturally, you're wondering how Book Riot and The New Dork Review of Books will complement each other, buy each other beers, scratch each other's back, etc. I mean, you've been stopping by here twice a week for two years now, right? (RIGHT?!) You're used to your routine. Am I just going to leave you hanging? Short answer: No. Longer answer: Nooooooooo. (Hehe...)

Frankly, I don't know what's going to happen here, but I do know that I probably won't be as OCD about posting twice as week here as I was in the pre-Book-Riot past. I'll be contributing there twice a week, at least, and I'll be recycling some of that content here (after a Book Riot exclusivity window expires). There will still be new content here, too, so don't delete your bookmark or "stop following this blog" in Google Reader, or cancel your email subscription. The New Dork Review of Books is not going away. After two years, and 210 posts, it'll continue to go strong. Thanks as always for your continued readership!

Domestic Violets: A Heartbreaking Tale of Staggering

2011-09-29T09:38:00.001-05:00

When you endeavor to review a novel you enjoyed as much as I enjoyed Matt Norman's Domestic Violets, it's easy to slip into platitudes and/or hyperbole: "I loved this novel more than fat kids love cake" or "This novel reminded me why I love reading...and why I hate work" or "This is a deeply affecting family drama. Matt is a modern-day Tolstoy." But I won't. I promise. Hopefully I can cover all those (maybe slightly exaggerated sentiments) with just this: Domestic Violets is one of my favorite novels of the year. It's very, very good.

Here's the deal: Tom Violet is 35. He's married to a smart, modern woman named Anna, and they have a precocious seven-year-old daughter named Allie. The family lives in Washington, D.C and for the last seven years, Tom has written copy for a soulless management consulting company, and therefore, is woefully unfulfilled professionally. His only joy at work is a hot 23-year-old copywriter named Katie, who may or may not have a crush on him (a crush which he may or may not reciprocate).

But let's back up a second: In the very first scene in the novel, we find out Anna is as unfulfilled in the bedroom as Tom is at work. To put it bluntly (or softly, as it were), Tom can't get it up (which is hilariously ironic; Tom's mother tells us later that the Greeks believed violets symbolized potency and fertility). That same night, after they've tried and once again given up hope of carnal delights, Tom's father Curtis Violet, a celebrated novelist and serial philanderer, swoops drunkenly into the house, announcing that he has finally won his first Pulitzer, completing a grand slam of literary prizes. The sadly funny juxtaposition of the marital "failure" with his father's literary success sets the tone for the rest of this story.

Domestic Violets is Tom's first-person account of his collisions with the trials life. It's part workplace comedy, part brutally honest meditation on the difficulty of marriage (Tom's mostly-happy-but-hitting-a-rough patch marriage is often contrasted with Curtis' several unhappy ones), and part about what it means to have a famous father (especially in a field in which Tom is interested in joining himself — he's been secretly writing a novel for the last five years).

Because Tom is a wise-cracking, self-deprecating, smart ass, it'd be easy to pigeonhole this novel as your run-of-the-mill dude lit. But similar to other novels — like those by Jonathan Tropper and The Financial Lives of the Poets (by Jess Walter) — to which Domestic Violets will reside adjacently on my categorized shelves, the mix of low-brow comedy with wit, honesty and empathy is what raises this novel from beach read to brilliant.

There are scenes is this book that I don't possess the writerly chops to describe (well, without again resorting to platitudes, like "I laughed, I cried...oh, the emotional ride"). Suffice it to say, a couple times, I literally had to put my hand over the page and reveal a line at a time so I wouldn't accidentally glance ahead and ruin the drama.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll readily admit that part of the reason (maybe most) I connected so well with this novel is that, as a near-35-year-old, self-deprecating dude myself, I felt often like Matt (I'm calling him Matt, not Matthew; he won't mind, I hope) Norman had crawled into my brain, thieved my thoughts, and spilled them onto his pages. Would that I were as clever, honest and funny as Tom (and Matt) are. I can't recommend Domestic Violets more highly.

(A big thanks to Rachel at A Home Between Pages, whose own glowing review first put Domestic Violets on my radar.)

My Top Five Fantastically Filthy (Ban-able?) Books

2011-09-26T11:55:00.000-05:00

An entire week dedicated to combating stupidity, censorship and narrow-mindedness? Yes, please!* To celebrate Banned Books Week, many bookish folk are reading from their favorite banned books and posting the videos on YouTube, which is awesome.

But I'm going to do something a little less high-road. What follows is my list of filthy, but fantastic, books that are (and probably at one point have been) easy targets for book banners. Just so we're crystal clear, I'm not AT ALL suggesting that these books be banned. I'm only suggesting that they're easy pickins for the type of people who do try to ban books.

That is to say, if people who tried to banned books actually read or understood good literary fiction, these would probably certainly be near the top of their list. But they don't, usually. So it's a pretty safe bet that some chucklehead in, say, Wakefield, Mass., who, say, banned Harry Potter, probably isn't going to have a good working knowledge of Philip Roth. In other words, he's ignorant of Philip Roth. And isn't ignorance the dominant characteristic of a book-banner anyway?

And, so without further adieu, here is my Top Five Books That Would Be Banned If Ignorant Idiots Had Their Way:

5. Sabbath's Theater, by Philip Roth — Everyone knows about the liver scene in Portnoy's Complaint, but Roth's National Book Award-winning (1995) novel is probably his filthiest. Mickey Sabbath, the novel's 64-year-old sex-tagonist, in one memorable scene, um, chokes the bishop on the grave of his dead wife. And that's one of the more tame scenes.When I finished this novel, I wrote: "I don’t know whether...I’m in awe of Roth, or terrified of him, or just grossed out by how perverted he seems to be." Good times!

4. Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami — This was the first Murakami book I'd read, and after hearing about his ethereal prose and how his novels hinge upon their own metaphysical logic, I was surprised by the sheer amount of sex in this novel. Careful: includes lesbians.

3. Lamb, by Christopher Moore — Lest you think I'd only consider dirty sexual novels ban-worthy, here we have a satiric look at the life of Jesus Christ, told by his childhood pal Biff. If the ultra-religious type gets itchy about Harry Potter, my God, reading (or kids reading, God forbid!) this novel would cause paroxysms of penance prayer on par with news that the Rapture is imminent.

2. Beat the Reaper, by Josh Bazell — There are certainly a lot of options for books that would meet the "way too violent" criteria, but I picked this one, because I loved it, and because it's so-over-the-top violent, I couldn't look away — including a ball-shrivelingly violent ending that will leave you fetal-positioned. I'll let Rachel of A Home Between Pages explain, as she did in a comment on my review: "When I got to the end of Beat the Reaper, I literally sat there with my mouth hanging open, holding the book over my head, going Oahhmaahhhgawd!!!!!"

1. Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, by Tom Robbins — One of the funniest novels I've ever read is also one of the filthiest. It includes some, um, non-traditional, sex with a nun. And that's I probably all I need to say about this novel's gross-out factor. But it's awesome (the novel, not necessarily the fact that it includes nun sex).

What would be on your list?

*Banned Books Week, if you're unfamiliar, is an almost 30-year-old week-long celebration of books that at one point or another have been, well, banned. Check out this awesome map of censorship activity just in 2010 — 348 just in one year. Ugh!

The Lonely Polygamist: Can Anybody Hear Me?

2011-09-22T10:27:00.002-05:00

Golden Richards has chewing gum stuck in his pubic hair, and he has no earthly idea how it got there. It's just one more calamity in the life of this lonely polygamist, who, with four wives and 28 children, has all but lost control. As Udall tells us about halfway through the novel, "(Golden's) very life, including his marriages to his wives, his children, his church position, was none of his own doing." Indeed, his life is a combination of a careful orchestration by his wives of where to be and when, and putting out fires caused by misbehaving kids and a failing construction business. Dude just can't get a moment to himself to relax!

Brady Udall's irony rich (starting with the title!), tragi-comedy novel is a fantastic (if a bit lengthy) read. Believe it or not, Golden is one of the more sympathetically pathetic characters I've read in a while. Will he ever be able to take control of his life? Here's a great detail to illustrate just how much he's been emasculated: His first wife Beverly, who rules the brood, has placed instructional signs everywhere in Old House (where she lives with her litter of 10), most notably above the toilet: "Golden, Please Take A Seat." Poor guy can't even pee like a man.

Really, the gum-in-the-pubic-hair (the reader does know how it got there, and it's hilarious) is a rather inventive metaphor for Golden's life — it's tangled beyond relief. And, other than making a clean break/cut, he has no idea how to extract himself. Despite being surrounded with his family, he's lost the emotional attachment to them, and starts looking elsewhere to relieve his loneliness.

Compounding the loneliness theme of the novel is the interspersed narratives of two other characters. One is Golden's 12-year-old son Rusty, who is a misunderstood miscreant who tries on his sisters' underwear, steals things from his siblings and generally misbehaves as a sincere cry out for attention. Golden's young and beautiful fourth wife, Trish, also is just beginning to realize the true degree of her own loneliness. She grew up in a polygamist sect and vowed never to live that life herself, but after an abusive first marriage, her mother has convinced her to join Golden's family for security and emotional support. She's getting neither, and she may soon look elsewhere, too?

But this is really Golden's story, and again, it's equal parts funny and sad. This novel had gotten great reviews when it came out last year, but I put it off because I was worried that it might be a "look how bizarre polygamy is" story in which I'd have to keep track of a War-and-Peace-like number of characters. Not the case. Udall doesn't totally ignore the "abnormality" of the Richards clan, mentioning awkward moments for Golden here and there in the community at large, and that Rusty gets teased at school for being a "plyg kid." But it's really a story of how Golden, Trish and Rusty combat their loneliness. And it's really good. Highly recommended!

Reading To Remember, or One More Way Books Are Awesome

2011-09-19T11:55:00.001-05:00

Last spring, when I was "stuck" in Berlin, thanks to an unpronounceable Icelandic volcano, I was reading Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind. Now, whenever my eye catches that book where it sits on my shelf, thoughts of that trip immediately come to mind.

But it's not just travel for which this "book/memory association" works. For instance, whenever I happen to glance at Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated, I'm reminded of Marquette's surprise run to the Final Four in 2003. The memory of reading that fantastic book and that fantastic few weeks of basketball are permanently intertwined.

Indeed, what I realized is that my bookshelf has become a virtual travelogue / diary / database of memories. Of course, memory is associative, so it makes sense that this would be the case. I just never really consciously considered it before.* It certainly doesn't work for every book (I'm not some sort of literary Rain Man. Sadly. 'cause that'd be awesome!), but when I look at many of the hundreds of books on my shelves, I know what I was doing, where I was reading, what was happening in my life at that time. It's kind of awesome. Actually, it's really awesome!

And here's what I also realized: I love technology and gadgets and such, and yet I still haven't bought an e-reader. The main reason I haven't is not because I'm opposed to reading electronically (I'm not), or because I like the "feel" of physical books (I do), or that I like collecting my books (I really do.) No, the main reason is that I'd lose this "book memory" phenomenon that only comes from glancing through physical books ensconced in their permanent home on my shelf. That, I'm not willing to give up.

So I'm sure this "book memory phenomenon" isn't unique to me. How does it work for you? Do you ever spend an afternoon just staring at your shelf and reminiscing?

*The funny thing is, this whole idea — or at least the reason it crystallized into enough of a coherent idea to write a post about it — came as I was watching the movie Limitless this weekend. If I could have one Super Power, it'd be to remember and connect any memory anytime I wanted. C'mon, that would be cool, right?

How Has Blogging Changed Reading Habits?

2011-09-15T10:56:00.000-05:00

Last fall, I had one of those rare moments when I finished a book and wasn't sure what to read next. So I went to my shelf, fixed it with my most withering glare, and hoped a book would present itself. It did. Sean Wilsey's memoir Oh The Glory Of It All jumped right out. That book had been high on my priority list for a long time and I'd just read an article in which Jonathan Franzen had recommended it.

"But," said the red literary devil who popped up on my right shoulder (and who bore a striking resemblance to Nic Sparks), "this is an obscure book, such that when you blog about it later, you probably won't get as many readers/visits/pageviews."

That's when the white literary angel (sporting a du-rag and long hair) popped up: "And but so, read what you want, dude. After all, fiction is what it means to be a f#$%ing human being — even though that book's a memoir. You know what I mean, though. Oh, what a f#$%ing mess." So I did (though I was still reeling a bit by the amount of cursing the angel did). And Wilsey's memoir was great!

The point here is this: Blogging has changed my reading habits in a number of ways (at least five, as you'll see below), but it hasn't changed my fundamental philosophy on choosing books: I'm gonna read what I want. I'm not going to feel pressure to read what's popular or what other people think I should or what will get the most pageviews. I know, bold statement, that. But I think it's important. (And just so we're clear, I'm literally patting myself on the back right now.)

That said, there are several ways my reading habits have changed since I started The New Dork Review of Books in October 2009 (yep, creeping up on two years). Thankfully, they're all positive. Here there are:

5. I read a lot more — I covered this earlier this spring in a post about GoodReads. My greater reading pace has borne out so far in 2011, too. I'm probably going to eclipse by a wide margin the number of pages read last year — which was by far and away the most ever.

4. I've been motivated to read my bucket-list books and authors — Last year, I took down Gravity's Rainbow. Being able to tweet, periodically blog, and receive encouragement about that chore is pretty much the only thing that kept me sane enough to get through it. This year, so far, I've read Gone With The Wind, Anna Karenina, and I'm 11 percent done with War and Peace. That rules. Also, I finally read Haruki Murakami. Twice. That also rules.

3. I've read more indies and other books I'd never have heard of — One of the biggest unexpected benefits of blogging about books is getting free books. I'm still really particular about accepting books for review, but I have a few times, and as a result, read books I might never have heard of. Two examples: Kapitoil, by Teddy Wayne, and Fight For Your Long Day, by Alex Kudera. Reading the latter led to one of my favorite blogging experience so far: The conversation with the author about how he viewed book bloggers. Also, other bloggers' recommendations have expanded my reading horizons widely. But that's a topic for another post.

2. I've read with greater attention and more depth — I mean, you have to, right? Nobody wants to look like an idiotic jerk when they post a review. So I try hard not to. Secondly, and it's hard to avoid being totally unoriginal here and saying something like "I've gotten more out of my reading," but, I've gotten more out of my reading. I use little post-its to mark quotes in books ('cause writing in books is a mortal sin) and reviewing those quotes when I go to write a review or reaction really does jog memory and help solidify connections between themes, characters, etc. I never did that before I started blogging.

1. Frankly, reading has never been more fun — Of course it is. And of course, reading being more fun isn't necessarily a changed habit. But what would this list be without more fun? The reason reading's been more fun is that I know for sure I'll have someone with whom I can discuss the book. And, as solitary as reading is, it's a million times more enjoyable in a community. Cheers to this community!

(For those curious about why there's that weird logo at the top of this post, this week is Book Blogger Appreciation Week — a fairly cool five-day back-pat to all things book bloggery.)

How A Book Is Born: The Making of The Art of Fielding

2011-09-12T11:50:00.002-05:00

Chad Harbach is broke. He's spent all 10 years of his post-Harvard life writing a novel that, at one point, even his best friend calls "insubstantial." He writes, and rewrites and writes more. Then, he gets his break, and it's a big one. An up-and-coming agent falls in love with the novel, and sells it for $665,000.

That's the basic origin story of this year's debut du jour, The Art of Fielding — a novel I've been describing to my friends as The Help for dudes. (I haven't read it yet, but my copy just arrived and I can't remember the last time I've been so excited to read a book.) And the piece that describes Harbach's odyssey from struggling mid-20s New Yorker to the toast of the literary world is one of the more interesting pieces of journalism I've read in a long, long time.

The article actually takes the form of an 18,000-word e-book written by Keith Gessen. It's an expanded version of an article that appears in the October issue of Vanity Fair. Gessen and Harbach went to Harvard together, remained close in their post-college years and founded n+1 (a Brooklyn-based literary journal) together.

So Gessen has VIP access to Harbach's story. And it's a fascinating one, to be sure. But how The Art of Fielding went got published is also the vehicle that allows Gessen to give us a behind-the-curtain look at the publishing industry. Drawing on his own experience (Gessen published a novel titled All the Sad Young Literary Men a few years ago. I read it. It's okay. Not my favorite book ever, though.) and that of many of his publishing industry friends, Gessen discusses the health of the Big Six publishing houses, their often contentious relationship with Amazon, all that goes into marketing and publicity for novels, as well as how they're sold to bookstores, how a cover design comes to be, and what it's really like to be able to hear from your agent something like "Yes, David Pietsch, David Foster Wallace's editor, has said that if we accept Little, Brown's offer, he'll personally edit your book." How awesome is that?

How A Book Is Born costs $1.99 as an instant download from Barnes & Noble or Amazon. I can assure you, it's the best two bucks you'll spend this week. If you don't have a Nook or Kindle, you can download a Nook or Kindle app for your PC or Mac to read this piece on your computer; that's actually what I did. Isn't technology great?

What Should We Expect From 9/11 Fiction?

2011-09-09T11:08:00.002-05:00

Four years ago, in a review of Don DeLillo's Falling Man, NY Times critic Michiko Kakutani noted that:

"not enough time has passed for any novelist to put the events of that day (9/11) and its shuddering consequences into historical perspective; perhaps not even enough time has passed for any novelist to grapple convincingly with those actual events, without being eclipsed by the documentary testimony (from newspaper articles, television footage and still photographs) still freshly seared in readers’ minds."

Does that seem right to you? I've wrestled with that sentence since I first read it four years ago. Part of me thinks she is right. Even now, 10 years later, it's still impossible to "grapple convincingly" with those events with any degree of perspective and detachment.

Part of me also thinks it's a too-easy dismissal for why, Kakutani would likely argue, there hasn't been a truly great 9/11 novel yet. But many readers, me included, would argue that there have been many very good ones.* And so why is historical perspective such a critical criteria for a great novel about an event?

The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer, was published a mere three years after World War II ended, is still hailed as one of the best examples World War II fiction. James Jones' From Here to Eternity was published in 1952, seven years after the end of the war. It's also still regarded as a classic of World War II fiction.

I'll admit, two novels published half a century ago is slim evidence for the notion that it's possible to write a great novel based on an event soon after that event. But my point here is this: Perhaps the historical perspective Kakutani referred to is required not by novelists to write a truly great novel about an event, it's required by readers and critics to recognize and appreciate the true greatness of such novels. Once the historical perspective for the event itself melds with the historical perspective on the novel, then, and only then, do we recognize a novel's greatness as a depiction of that event.

In that review, Kakutani goes on to pan Falling Man as "small, unsatisfying and inadequate" — a sentiment with which I whole-heartedly disagree. If were to wager on any of the 9/11 novels I've read standing as the 9/11 novel, it'd be this one. (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a close second.)

Still, this question of what to expect from a 9/11 novel is one I think about frequently. And it's sort of shaped — positively or not, I have no idea — how I've read subsequent 9/11 novels.

What do you think? Is it reasonable to expect a great 9/11 still so relatively soon after an event? What would be the criteria for a great 9/11 novel? Or is a great 9/11 impossible until more time (how much) has passed?

* The list I've read includes: Falling Man, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Netherland, The Garden of Last Days (Slate put this one on its worst 9/11 fiction list, with which I also lustily disagree), The Emperor's Children, and Let the Great World Spin.

(By the way, the most emotionally stirring scene about 9/11 in any novel I've read is, strangely enough, in The Time Traveler's Wife. Henry knows what's about to happen, and gets up early just to quietly experience the world before it changes forever. Something about that scene really resonated with me. I think about it often.)

On Starting War and Peace (War, What Is It Good For?)

2011-09-06T10:53:00.000-05:00

I know it's a tad cliché, but I can't think of War and Peace without thinking of that one Seinfeld episode. Elaine makes a misguided attempt to ingratiate herself with a famous Russian writer (hilariously named Testikov) by telling him what Jerry had jokingly told her earlier: that the original title of War and Peace was War, What Is It Good For? Things don't turn out well for her after that.

After deciding 2011 would be the year I'd finally read War and Peace, it took me eight months to gear myself up to start, but here we are. I finally started it last night. When I wrote about War and Peace as my "bucket list" novel back in March, the advice about how to read the novel poured in fast and furious. Last night, I reviewed all those comments, as well as Ingrid's (of the Blue Bookcase) post offering five tips on how to read the "greatest novel of all time." I took her advice and reviewed the Wikipedia pages on the Napoleonic Wars, specifically on the French invasion of Russia. I read Anna Karenina earlier this year to familiarize myself with Tolstoy's style. I've bookmarked the Wikipedia character page, as well as the one provided in my edition. And I've set a goal to finish the novel by the end of the year, which seems entirely realistic.

My edition is the Anthony Briggs translation, which has been on my shelf for years, and has morphed into a sort of symbol of not-yet-achieved intellectual nirvana. Several folks have warned me off of that particular translation, but I have to use this one. I just have to. It's been with me on four different moves and three different cities. I can't imagine completing this mission without this particular book. Is it strange that an unread novel could have emotional significance?

Anyway, 20 pages in, I'm having no quarrels with the style at all. It seems to read easily enough, and it includes common phrases like "the straw that broke the camel's back." So, it's very early, but so far so good. The Briggs edition also includes endnotes, maps and an essay by some British wanker named Orlando Figes. It's actually the one you can see me pretending to read in the "About Me" page. (Have you stopped over there to check out my favorite joke, by the way?)

So, all this is a long-winded way of getting to the point. Here at the start, I need your help. If you've read the novel, what tips, tricks or (to use a tired business-speak) best practices have you used to get through the 1,400+ pages? Did you honestly like the novel (or do you just tell people that you did so they'll think you're smart)? Will I be a changed literary man four months from now? I'm looking forward to your input!

West of Here: Past, Present and One Giant Dam

2011-09-01T10:18:00.002-05:00

On the surface, Jonathan Evison's West of Here is pretty simple: It's the story of the people who inhabit the small fictional town of Port Bonita, Washington. Two dueling story lines from two different times (1890 and 2006) chronicle the fortunes of the folks in the tiny burg located on the northern coast of Washington's Olympic Peninsula.

But when you really dig into the underbrush, you discover an incredibly inventive story that churns along at a deceptively quick pace. Having told you that, it may seem hard to believe that the centerpiece, as well as the central symbol, of the story is a dam. Yep, a dam. But it works, because the dam is really only the unifying force of the various themes of the story. This is a character-driven novel, and these characters are a lot of fun to "watch."

Ethan Thornburgh built the dam in 1890, hoping it'll be the key to putting Port Bonita on the map. Now, Ethan's great-grandson, Jared runs the last remaining processing plant of the town's dying fish industry, bemoaning what he perceives to be his inescapable past. "...he forever lived in the shadow of this obsolete dam, his fortune linked inextricably to its hulking existence, its legacy of ecological menace...Such were the trappings of history."

The dam is a symbol both of progress, as well as attachment to a flawed past. Exploring that idea of the past's link to the present is what drives this story. That in itself is less original than some of the ways Evison chooses to tell the story, sprinkling in a little Native American mysticism, providing a hugely diverse cast of characters, and shifting perspectives among them to keep the story fresh.

Like Ethan and Jared, each of the novel's character from the 1890s story has a sort of counterpart in the 2006 story. In addition to the past-present link, this also gives Evison fertile ground for examining another main thrust of the story: the age-old nature vs. nurture question — or, as one character asks, "Do you think people are born a certain way? Or do you think people are made?"

West of Here is far from a perfect novel — for instance, there's a scene told from the perspective of a mule about to be shot, which is just silly. And some of the parts in which characters are exploring the peninsula start to sound repetitive — but I really enjoyed it. What you have here is a touch of David Mitchell (in terms of story originality and fluid prose), a sprig or two of David Guterson (in terms of writing about the natural wonders of the Pacific Northwest), and a pinch of Richard Russo (in terms of vivid, empathetic writing about small-bust-town life). Give it a try if you're a fan of any of those three novelists, or if you like the dueling past-present storytelling strategy, or if you simply like an original story that explores some common themes in new ways.

Post #200: A Late Summer Edition of Literary Links

2011-08-29T12:15:00.000-05:00

A busy week at work last week led to me stockpiling several literary articles to read when I had time. With such a wealth of literary miscellania saved up, I figured I'd spend a post resurrecting a past monthly New Dork Review feature: The Compendium of Literary Links.

Also, since this is the 200th New Dork Review post (that means it's my 100-week anniversary), check out my top 5 five favorite discussion-inducing posts below. After all, the discussions and comments are still the reason this blog is fun. Cheers!

But first, here's a late-summer, spaghetti-at-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks edition of literary links:

1. Interview with Paul Murray — I knew nothing about this fella before reading Skippy Dies, but it's clear from reading this interview that a lot of his personality came out in that brilliant novel.

2. Book Review Cliches I'd Like To See — This is a great take on how, when reviewing books, we can sometimes write ourselves into inescapable patterns. But more importantly, it's good advice on how to emerge from those patterns.

3. Top 100 Most Sought-After Out-of-Print Books — Pretty, pretty interesting. Madonna's #1. You pervs!

4. Interview with Ann Patchett — I haven't yet read her new novel State of Wonder, but people keep raving about it. And I love how the interview starts by discussing Patchett's penchant for creating setting. A good setting can make a book almost as much as a plot or characters, right?

5. The Decemberists' Calamity Song video — This could not be more awesome; it recreates the game Eschaton from Infinite Jest. I've probably watched this about two dozen times in the last week.

6. Reading: Free entertainment, for life — Great op/ed on CNN. Even if you did nothing else for the rest of your life but read, and even if another book was never published, you'd still have plenty of material.

7. Back From the Dead: The State of Book Reviewing — This long piece in Poets & Writers does a brilliant job of describing the changing landscape of book reviewing.

Top 5 Discussion-Inducing New Dork Review Posts
5. Top Five Sins of the Book Reviewer — This post holds the New Dork record for most comments — 52. I loved hearing that most people agreed about most of these, or disagreed just in shades of degree.

4. My Top Five Literary Nemeses – This was probably the most fun post to write, and the comments were great! We effectively panned all the posers in the literary world!

3. The Play's The Thing: A Look At Literary Gimmicks — This was one of those posts where readers really came strong with additional recommendations. That's another one of my favorite things about this blog — discovering new reading landscapes.

2. A Reasonably Short, Fairly Impassioned Defense of Reading Fiction — If you've read the blog for any amount of time, you know David Foster Wallace was one of my heroes. So I drew from his influence for this post about why reading fiction is important for the real world. (The title is of the post is his influence as well, of course.)

1. Should Art Be Separated From Artist? — This discussion went on for several weeks with a total of 38 comments. This was the most challenging post to write, and the yielded the most stimulating comments.

As always, thanks for reading. I hope you'll still be here at post #400!

President Obama, Read Whatever You Want, Regardless of the Author's Gender

2011-08-25T10:15:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, Salon.com published an op/ed written by a short-story author named Robin Black, titled "President Obama: Why don't you read more women?" The piece, as you may surmise from its title, complains that President Obama's reading list is offensively light on female authors. Then, it devolves into one of those now all-too-familiar articles about what dolts we men readers are for not carefully monitoring our male/female author ratio. This piece in particular really got my blood boilin', and so I wanted to spend a post to look at some of Black's arguments, Reading Ape-style.

Right off the bat in this piece, Ms. Black sets a combative tone.

While there's no way to know whether Hillary Clinton would have hung tougher than President Obama with those recalcitrant Republicans, here's a safe bet -- her summer reading list would have included a few more women authors than his.

So, the assumption here is that, because she's a woman, Hillary Clinton would read more women authors. But isn't that the same wrong-headed gender-biased logic Ms. Black is attempting to take Obama to task for? What we get here is your standard-issue double-standard. It's okay if it's a woman reading mostly (or just a "few more"? what's the proper balance?) women writers, but it's not okay when it's a man reading mostly men writers. This is especially troubling given that, later, Black writes:

As I suspect Obama would agree, matters of prejudice are never entirely minor, even when their manifestations may seem relatively benign.

That's true. But Ms. Black started her piece with the same matter of gender prejudice, i.e. that a woman would read more women. That's not minor there either, right? Still, as I'll contend later, none of this really matters all that much.

Okay, let's take a breath, and laugh through an easy-to-spot hyperbole.

Now the fact that the president of the United States apparently doesn't read women writers is not the greatest crisis facing the arts, much less the nation -- but it's upsetting nevertheless.

Ms. Black points out that Obama has read very few (maybe as low as 30 percent this year, and 4 percent overall) women authors. That means he actually does read women writers. Sloppy writing.

Now, let's get down to the heart of the matter. Here's what seems to be Ms. Black's central thesis for why men don't read women writers as much as they apparently should.

It is a well-known fact among those of us to whom this matters that while women read books written by men, men do not tend to reciprocate. The reasons for this imbalance are the subject of much speculation and little conclusion, but, simple as this may sound, it looks an awful lot to me like we think they are more interesting than they think we may turn out to be.

First of all, that first sentence is FAR from a fact. Case in point: me. I reciprocate. I read lots of women novelists, and actually, so do 99.9 percent of the male readers I know. But, secondly, Black's point seems to be that men don't read women because we find women boring. (Indeed, the subtitle of the article she links to as "proof" is: "Women are underrepresented in literary publishing because men aren't interested in what they have to say.") That subtitle specifically and Ms. Black's central thesis in general are what almost shot me through the roof. This paragraph was the moment in the article when it began to feel less like a sophisticated discussion of reading preferences and more like an attack on male readers as knuckle-dragging neanderthals who have to be coaxed into listening to their women.

Look, here's the rub: We read for fun, not to be fair. Regardless of the gender of the author, we read for enjoyment, not to make other people happy. Those are true whether you're the leader of the free world or the purveyor of a lightly trafficked literary book blog. If some (but not all) male readers wind up reading more men writers than women, it's probably for the same reason that some (but not all) women readers read more women writers than men. Maybe we can convince Malcolm Gladwell to write an article explaining that reason in more detail. But for now, I know this for sure: The reason is definitely not that a reader stands in a bookstore, prepares for a book purchase, but then makes one last check of the gender of the author to make sure it's the "right" one.

Onward...

The Franzen/Weiner/Picoult stuff in the last half of the piece is a nice walk down last summer's memory lane, but that dead horse has been sufficiently beaten. I don't think, though, that most people saw Weiner as attacking Franzen. People were more perplexed that she seemed to consider herself in the same category of writer as Franzen. And that's preposterous, in my view — like Adam Sandler getting on Jack Nicholson's case.

Lastly, I couldn't agree more with this:

Women authors write kick-ass books.

Of course they do. (Though, I'd disagree with her that The Year We Left Home is an example of that.) My favorite novel of the year is written by a woman (Ida Hattemer-Higgins' The History of History). But I think it's silly to suggest we all must be equal opportunity readers. So let's all be cool, and read and let read.

The Year We Left Home: Not Quite Franzen

2011-08-22T11:27:00.002-05:00

A few weeks ago, The Year We Left Home, by Jean Thompson, appeared on Entertainment Weekly's back-page Bullseye feature. It suggested that if you "love" Jonathan Franzen, check out this book. It's kind of rare that a not-big-name novel shows up in Bullseye. And I do love Jonathan Franzen.

So, I thought, let's do this! I'd never heard of Thompson, but luckily, I had a copy of the novel on hand — I'd won it several months ago in a Friday Reads giveaway. So I dug it up from where it'd been buried at the bottom of a pile of non-priority novels, and dug in. Especially after reading Murakami, I needed something more realistic, relatively straightforward and not long. The Year We Left Home fit the bill.

I'm telling you all this because, at least to me, the story of how I came to read the novel is actually more interesting than the novel itself. Beginning in 1973 with the marriage of the eldest daughter, the story traverses 30 years in the lives of the members of a small-town Iowa family. We get short 20-page or so vignettes advancing the stories of each of the four siblings (as well as a crazy cousin named Chip) a few years at a time, chronicling their successes and failures, tragedies and victories.

Yes, it rings very true; it is some the more authentic fiction I've read — as someone who grew up in a small Midwestern town, I can say that definitively. But it sure isn't very interesting. My favorite mini-story was one that takes place in Chicago, and I only liked that one because of the "recognizable places / street names" effect.

Overall, I kept wondering if the story of this family is a story that really needed to be told. It's just so mundane. For example, one of the first stories is about one of the siblings and her mother going to visit their sick aunt. And that's it. They visit her. And they're sad she's dying. And then we jump ahead a couple years, and she's already died. In fact, in the rare cases that something interesting happens, it always happens either off-page or at the very end of one of the vignettes, and we wouldn't learn the true effect of that interesting or important event until several years later, and then from the perspective of one of the other siblings. Strange storytelling choice, that. The effect is that it pretty much removes any of the drama from the novel.

So, I wasn't a fan. But if you're looking for an ultra-realistic Midwestern family saga, you may enjoy this. Also, if you like depressing fiction, man, this is right in your sweet spot. A little 'net research has revealed that Jean Thompson is better known for her short stories, including her National Book Award finalist collection Who Do You Love: Stories. Her short-fiction prowess is pretty clear from the style and structure of this novel, so I'd also suggest checking out any of her volumes of short stories.

Kafka On The Shore: "The World is a Metaphor"

2011-08-18T10:12:00.000-05:00

There's a common joke about literary over-analysis (specifically in regards to teaching literature) involving blue curtains. Why did the author make the curtains blue? What does the curtains' blueness symbolize? Most times, the answers are pretty simple, the author would say: The reason the curtains are blue is because they are f$#%ing blue.

In Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, however, the curtains are not just f#@$ing blue. Indeed, every detail of this ethereal, intricate novel means something, is connected to something, is a symbol or metaphor for something, or is a key to puzzling out some of the novel's central riddles. And guess what? It's up to you to figure out what it all means. There are no easy answers.

That may sound daunting, but don't worry. The novel's far from impenetrable. And it's actually a lot of fun to try to figure it all out. But even if that sort of literary sleuthing isn't your thing, the story itself at the surface level is pretty entertaining as well.

There are actually two alternating threads of story, and they both hum along pretty quickly. Kafka Tamura, 15, runs away from his Tokyo home and takes up residence in a room in a small library (a metaphor for memory?) in a seaside town. Nakata is a strange old man who had been the victim of an mysterious accident in his youth that has left him mentally incapacitated, except for his unique abilities to talk to cats and make it rain fish and leeches. He undertakes a mission beyond his understanding with the aid of a young man named Hoshino, who is looking for meaning in his own life. There's a bit more to it that, but that should be enough to give you a flavor for the plot that provides the framework for Murakami's metaphysical playground.

As the stories converge (or don't?), the reader is left to tangle with notions of metaphor, consciousness, personal identity, fate and love. It's heady stuff, sure, but again, not completely beyond the realm of comprehension. Murakami is infinitely quotable (see quotes below) and a lot of the fun of the novel is to turn these over and over in your head to figure out meaning both on their own and also how they relate to the rest of the story.

Beethoven

Along the way, Kafka and his buddy Oshima (the receptionist at the library), use music, literature and historical figures (like Adolf Eichmann and Beethoven) to try to understand Kakfa's situation. I loved that as a sort of reverse meta-fictional storytelling strategy — instead of a story that is "self-aware," this story uses fiction and "characters" from history to help the reader burrow deeper into its own fictional world. I know that's not unique to Murakami, but especially in a high-concept novel like this that can easily set readers adrift, Murakami does his readers a great favor by mooring us in real-world fiction and history. Does that make sense?

Anyway, I loved it. Yes, Kafka On The Shore is a novel that requires (gasp!) a re-read to fully grasp. But a once-through is enough to get you hooked; that is, to spend hours combing message boards and other websites to search for meaning. There are definitely some right answers, but there's also much open to discussion. At least I hope that's the case, because I certainly don't know what all the right answers are.

Do you?

Quote Well:

"Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe."
"Reality's just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life."
"Actually getting closer to a metaphorical truth? Or metaphorically getting closer to an actual truth? Or maybe they supplement each other?"

"A reciprocal metaphor. Things outside you are projections of what's inside you, and what's inside you is a projection of what's outside."

"For every theory, there has to be counterevidence — otherwise science wouldn't advance." But, later, Crow says, "A theory that still doesn't have any good counterevidence is one worth pursuing."

Unrelated Thoughts About Reading Haruki Murakami

2011-08-15T10:47:00.001-05:00

The more I read this Haruki Murakami fella, it's easier to understand why his fans are as loyal and passionate as they are. He's pretty freakin' good. As of this writing, I've finished 1.87 of his novels (all of Norwegian Wood, and most of Kafka on the Shore), which admittedly, is a small sample size of his work. But I've got a few more in the queue before his magnum opus 1Q84 comes out Oct. 25.

And so reading two of his novels in a month has made me think some thoughts. Profound, eh? So here are some unrelated (and rather unacademic) thoughts about reading Murakami, from a new member of his legion of fiercely loyal fans.

— Murakami is a clear influence on Ida Hattemer-Higgins, who penned my favorite novel of the year, The History of History. (my review) Unfortunately, I didn't realize that when I read The History of History this spring, because I hadn't yet read anything by Murakami. Had I known that then, I'd be much deeper into Murakami's catalog by now.

— As further evidence that Amazon is trying to systematically destroy the world, it has Kafka On The Shore labeled as "Reading Level: Young Adult." Nice one, jerks. What's next? Twilight is a "Modern Classic"?

— Have you seen that blurb and book review cliché "effortless prose?" What the hell does it mean? Presumably it attempts to convey the idea that the prose appears to have required little effort to write because it flows so smoothly. Of course, that idea's absurd. Even though it's hyperbolic, we know the writing required tons of effort. For Murakami's fiction, however, that cliché just feels apt. It just does. To read Murakami is to devour 100 pages without any notion of time passing. I'm not a particularly speedy reader, but I've read 404 pages of Kafka On The Shore in five days. That pace is a new record for me. How much of the credit for how smooth Murakami reads in English goes to the translator, I have no idea. But someone did something really well to make reading "difficult" fiction so easy.

— Anybody else planning to re-read 1984 in anticipation of 1Q84? Yeah, me too.

— John Updike wrote in the NY Times that Kafka On The Shore is a "real page-turner." He also called it an "insistently metaphysical mind-bender." Those two descriptions next to each other make as little sense to me as the term "effortless prose" used to. But Updike is right. The novel's both. Murakami's all about blowing up traditional notions of fiction, it seems.

— Both titles of the novels I've read of his are actually song titles. Norwegian Wood is a Beatles song, and the plot draws from the first few lines. Kafka On The Shore is a fictional song, the lyrics for which roughly form the "rules" of the novel. As someone who obsessively reads the lyrics of songs I like, I love this story-telling/titling strategy!

— Here's a simple syllogism:
Haruki Murakami likes music.
Because I like music, I like novelists who like music.
Therefore, I like Haruki Murakami.

— Here's another one:
Haruki Murakami seems to like baseball.
Because I like baseball, I like novelists who like baseball.
Therefore, I like Haruki Murakami.

— Next up on my Summer of Murakami list is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and then Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World...and then 1Q84, which is about a thousand pages. Yes!

Do you think thoughts about reading Haruki Murakami? Let me hear 'em. Please comment below!

(Also, though I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to do this yet, look for some somewhat coherent thoughts about Kafka On The Shore on Thursday.)

A Dude's Guide to The Help, or Five Reasons Dudes Should Read The Help

2011-08-11T10:45:00.001-05:00

Yep, I'm a dude and I read The Help. Can you believe it?

If you can, I hope you'll also believe I didn't read it only to curry favor with this blog's female readers. Nor did I read it only so I could write a gushing, positive review and bump up my traffic numbers. And I definitely didn't read it in order to time this post for the week the movie opens as a cheap stunt to attract new readers.

Actually, in all seriousness, the reason I read it is simple curiosity. No literary novel in the last several years has garnered the attention and readership The Help has. If there's such thing as a modern classic, it's it. So, to consider myself a well-rounded biblio-nerd, I read.

Even before I read, it was easy to tell why the large majority of The Help's readers are female: It's a story about women written by a woman. And just look at the cover — the washed-out burnt sienna/yellow color and the precious little birds surely are intended to appeal to women more than men, right? Those are probably enough to ensure most men will only give it a cursory glance. But I'm here to tell you, I liked it, and if you're a beer-swilling, fantasy football-playing dude like I am, you may like it too.

Here are five reasons why:

5. Everyone likes a good literary revenge — It's not quite on the Monte Cristo scale here, but the cornerstone of this story is a good heaping helping of revenge. For those fellas not familiar, here's the dime tour of the plot of The Help: Two black maids named Aibileen and Minny in early 1960s, early Civil Rights-era Jackson, Mississippi, band together with a young white woman named Skeeter to write a book about their experiences as maids. Despite the risks to themselves and their families, the main reasons the maids agree to tell their stories is that they're angry about the blatant racism and indignity they're forced to endure, and the violence perpetrated upon others in their community (Medgar Evers has just been assassinated). They want people to know their society is broken. And so telling their stories is their form of civil disobedience, and their way to get back at the people who have treated them poorly. I love the idea of using a story as revenge, and if you're a dude, you should too.

4. Almost all the male characters are totally unlikable — Does that sound like a counter-intuitive reason for why dudes should read The Help? Granted, but here's the deal: With only two exceptions (Johnny and maybe Skeeter's father), all these male buffoons are pretty much models for what you don't want to be as a dude: at best condescending and racist and at worst a drunken wife-beater. So, as you're reading, in some weird way, you get a nice sense of "despite all my own short-comings, at least I'm not like these idiots." You feel positively enlightened. And that should always be an effect of a good book — in some small way, it makes you feel good.

3. Understanding the evil and ignorance of racism is important — As I read, I kept thinking, "this isn't an historical novel, it's a novel set in history." Yes, that's parsing hairs, but I tend to think of a historical novel more as a 30,000-foot-view of historical events. And in this novel, you're in the shit with these characters. In this case, that includes a deep, ugly, pervasive racism. James A. Michener once wrote, "Knowledge of the past gives men courage to face the future." But knowledge of the past also gives us courage to change the future. An ideal future is one without racism. And hoping for and working towards that should be the goal, no matter your race or gender. This novel helps you understand how disgusting racism is.

2. Emma Stone is adorable — I started reading the novel knowing Emma Stone had been cast as Skeeter, so she was my vision of that character all through the novel. Perhaps a tad shallow, I'll give you, but let me explain a little more. As this week's Entertainment Weekly article about the The Help movie says, Stone's "energy, her approachable beauty, her playful sexiness, and her specialty: a skeptical smile" make her "catnip to both male and female audiences." Yep, I dig Emma, and I think most dudes do, too. And so I conflated her with Skeeter, however fallacious that might be. Therefore, Skeeter is awesome. Yes, she's awesome on her own, but for dudes reading The Help, I'd suggest that "mistaking" Stone for Skeeter is a good way to get yourself interested in that character. It makes for good readin'.

1. Good literature should be gender neutral — I know, that's a bit idealistic — and maybe even a bit contradictory, since I already told you The Help is a feminine novel (I don't mean that in a derogatory way). But for novels that, by any objective measure, are pretty freakin' good, I really think both males and females can find something to like. I took a chance on The Help, knowing full well it wasn't my usual cup'o'tea. But I read with the notion that if such a novel is universally adored, there had to be something there for me, too. And that's really the point of the post, to show dudes not to be afraid of this book. I could spend another 2,000 words enumerating the reasons why The Help is good, but just take my word for it, it is. Just ask your sister, wife, mother or any other female friends, and there's approximately a 100 percent chance several of them have read it and loved it. They can tell you why it's good. I just wanted to try to convince you to ask the question in the first place. Did it work?

Ladies, any other advice for dudes to get the most out of The Help? Fellas, have you read it? What'd you think?

The Blogger/Novelist Relationship, with Alex Kudera (Part 2)

2011-08-08T09:51:00.002-05:00

Last week in Part 1 of our discussion, Alex Kudera, author of Fight for Your Long Day, explained his take on blogger book reviews and the nature of the contact he's had with book bloggers. The conversation elicited a lot of great feedback, including a related strain of conversation at The Reading Ape's blog about what a "reader-centered review" really means.

In today's installment, Kudera discusses the impact book bloggers have on the publishing industry. To me, this is one of the more interesting book blog-related topics. So, thanks again to Kudera for giving us his take. Here's what he had to say:

Greg: How do you think book bloggers have changed the way publishers promote and market novels? Are these changes good things for authors?

Alex: First, yes, absolutely, I do think book bloggers have changed the way publishers promote and market novels.

In fact, as stated, I’m a bit of a book blogger myself, well, truly, more of an “author interviewer” at When Falls The Coliseum, where I’ve spoken with established novelists like Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Dan Fante as well as young upstarts like Lee Konstantinou and Eleanor Henderson. Further, I’m not a “connected” person beyond a few mafia ties from my used-car-selling days, but a contact I have in PR at a major house told me that connecting with book bloggers and other reviewers is her best advice and exactly what she tells all of her authors (and yes, I probably should interrupt this interview to beg her to pick up my next novel, and then pray I can finish writing it).

As far as I can see, the right review at the right book blog can have even more impact than traditional press, and within the world of established media, it can often be better to get one’s review posted online than to have it only appear in a print version of the same publication.

I’m also seeing that tweets about the book, from an enthusiastic blogger, are extremely helpful, sometimes more than the review itself. The total number of book mentions, as long as the majority are positive, might be the most important thing.

So I’m led to wonder if this suggests that books are often an impulse purchase, and ironically, a message of 140 characters or less can drive us to buy a novel of 90,000 words or more? I do know that some of my favorite writers are ones I stumbled upon randomly in bookstores, on days when I walked into the store with no firm intention of buying anything, so perhaps it works this way online as well?

As for whether or not these changes are good for authors, I’m certain that they are good for authors willing to take the time to reach out to bloggers and other readers, but I also like to believe, perhaps too idealistically, that it is still possible for books to disappear from public view, but then to slowly resurface due to their originality, and eventually, like a Melville or Nietzsche, get recognized as an all-time great despite selling very few copies while the author was alive. The documentary The Stone Reader is one of my favorites and connects well to this theme.

If you would like to see Amazon sales for Fight for Your Long Day since December 2010, with paperback and e-book sales separated since February, here are the Novel Rank stats. The spike for my novel in early June was due to two blog mentions at The Chronicle of Higher Education, and so that would be strong evidence that blogs with visibility certainly sell books. These figures do not include sales of all the other “virtual bookstores” selling new and used copies on Amazon’s website, and I do notice that these disappear and reappear, too (a shrinking number of “new” and “used” means sales). I’ve heard that Amazon accounts for 1 in 2 books sold in the United States — yes, a scary thought — but I don’t think we can merely double amazon sales to get total sales for a specific book.

Greg: Do you think breaking down the line between reviewer/blogger and author is inherently a good thing? Why or why not?

Alex: I don’t see it as “inherently a good thing,” but I will say that the line is already broken; maybe it’s a dotted line indicating that passing is allowed? (For me, it has become exciting to see book bloggers become debut novelists.) In fact, novelists who also blog are the norm these days; if I’m not mistaken even big names like Rick Moody are blogging, and I believe that I’ve read it’s required by Moody’s publishing contract.

I see a lot of reciprocity within online writing communities, and there seems to be some sort of “you blog on me, I blog on you” expectation, and I’m very aware of a couple books I owe a read or blog to. For most of my life, I’ve experienced writing as a solitary act, but in the past year, I’m learning how to be a supportive part of the Indy book community — from active blogger-novelists like Ben Tanzer, Charles Dodd White, Lavinia Ludlow, and Steve Himmer (his Bee Loud Glade is also from Atticus Books).

It’s important to remember that there has probably always been intense subjectivity within the writing and publishing process, so the idea that breaking down the barriers between bloggers and “authors” could corrupt a process that was previously an objective one is inaccurate; the idealized world never perfectly was. So to speak.

Indeed, Cyrus Duffleman’s (Eds note: Duffleman is the protagonist of Kudera's novel.) neurotic angst often twists and contorts around the less idealized and intensely subjective world, one full of dehumanizing inequalities and also the possibility that everything can be seen in more than one way. And the readers who “get” it, seem to find his antics and doubts laugh out loud funny and yet also meaningful.

With that in mind, buying the book is always appreciated, but if you’d like to sample my novel without committing to a purchase, three great ways to do so are 1) via interlibrary loan or 2) by reading free preview pages of the google e-book or 3) by listening to the free first chapter as an audio book coming soon to ears near you.

Well, speaking of ears, I’m afraid that I’ve written a few off, so thanks again, and to everyone, happy reading!

(Again, if you missed it, Part 1 of the interview is here.)

So, what's your take on how bloggers are affecting, positively or negatively, the publishing industry? Are we strictly promotion machines, or are we adding something concrete to the discussion about books? If so, what? Is contact between reviewers/bloggers with authors a good thing or does it break an unwritten ethical rule?

The Blogger/Novelist Relationship, with Alex Kudera (Part 1)

2011-08-04T10:46:00.004-05:00

Under most circumstances, this could've been a bit awkward. Earlier this week, I reviewed, somewhat tepidly, Alex Kudera's satirical novel, Fight for Your Long Day. A few hours after posting the review, Kudera, the novelist himself, messaged me on GoodReads. "Ah, crap," I thought. "This is gonna lead to some unpleasantness."

I was wrong. Here's the first line of the message: "Thanks so much for reading and sorry it wasn't quite the book for you." Kudera went on to talk about some of the book's more positive reviews and why he thought others may have enjoyed it more than I seemed to. I was kinda shocked — if it were me in his shoes, I would not have been quite so not querulous.

One of the last lines of Kudera's message again thanked me for reading because ".. what you are doing is clearly helping books--if you like them!" That was intriguing to me, as I constantly wonder what authors think of we amateur book bloggers and what (if any) influence we have. Even though I was in no position to petition for a favor, I asked Kudera, a lecturer in the English Department at Clemson University, if he'd be willing to answer a few questions about the blogger/novelist relationship and the degree to which he thinks bloggers are part of the publishing conversation now. He agreed. Here's what he had to say:

(Note: This is Part 1 of the interview. Part 2 is here.)

Greg: What do you, as a published author, expect from a blogger in terms of review rigor? Do you expect "reaction" — with lots of "I thought..." or do you prefer more academic/journalistic style reviews?

Kudera

Alex: Hi, Greg, and thanks for having me aboard for this interview. I appreciate your generosity in sharing some time at New Dork although it sounds like my book was not for you. To be honest, when I saw “Dork” in the title, I thought your blog and my book might be a perfect match. Alas, it was not to be.

But back to the question, I’d say that the most important thing is exposure, and that any published author has to be grateful whenever his or her book is mentioned online, in print, on the air, or anywhere else. So, to an extent, as authors, we should be grateful even if the review is indifferent or worse, and we’re not in a position to judge the “rigor” of the review.

At the same time, the most detailed reviews are almost always the best reviews, and we can see on amazon that review readers find these to be the most helpful as well. So perhaps the wide world of readers can help sort out these in-depth reviews from the others?

But because a mediocre review can be a conversation stopper, my personal rule for writing about books and authors is based upon my understanding that it is extremely difficult to write and sell one and that writers have starved and publishers have lost huge amounts of money by making a wide array of literary fiction available to the reading public. For these reasons, I almost invariably post positive notes about books, and so at my blog or GoodReads, there’s a bit of a “if you don’t have anything nice to say..." rule in play. I do realize that one could argue that this jeopardizes the integrity of my blogs and comments.

For Fight for Your Long Day, I like it when reviewers love the book, “get” the humor, and include specific favorite quotations. The more favorable and detailed the review, the more I feel like I’ve connected with that particular writer-blogger.

Greg: What interaction have you had with book bloggers? What has been the nature of this interaction? Contentious? What outcome?

Alex: Most of the book bloggers I connect with are also novelists, and the interactions are largely positive. I suspect this connects to shared experience and understanding. Perhaps surprisingly, we do not always have the same taste in literature.

It seems like authorial suicide to be contentious with anyone, and when I’ve lost my cool, it’s mainly been due to the combined workload and stress of teaching, parenting, writing, and promoting. I try not to get angry, of course, and it has hurt me when I’ve lost my cool in various situations. Teeth Are Not For Biting is one of my daughter’s favorites, and its lessons can be applied to the adult world, too (let’s leave the saying, “always treat children like adults, and adults like children” for another interview). I’ve been teaching for 15 years, and in commission-based sales before that, so I’ve grown accustomed to being on the front lines of a service economy, interacting with lots of people every day.

I guess, whenever a writer is frustrated by the process, my best advice is to try to remember that the potential blogger, reviewer, or bookstore manager could also be an extremely stressed-out, overworked person trying to endure life in a backbreaking world, and that taste in literature can be very personal.

And also, just to breathe, and take a break from book promotion — let it rest for a couple days and then find other readers to connect with. There are hundreds of different ways to find readers and promote books although it can still seem difficult to sell them.

So, what do you think? Do you agree that authors aren't in a position to (or just shouldn't) judge the rigor of a review? As a blogger, do you abide by the "if you don't have anything nice to say..." rule? What rules in regards to the relationship to authors (if any) do you think bloggers should follow to be responsible, ethical, and informative?

Fight For Your Long Day: Adjunct Hell

2011-08-01T13:34:00.005-05:00

Cyrus Duffleman has committed all seven deadly sins of literary blockage: "daily drudgery, anxiety, low self-esteem, depression, lack of talent and determination, and above all, laziness." These have "stole away any chance he had of concentrating for long enough to produce anything even loosely resembling a work of art."

We, the readers of Alex Kudera's novel Fight for Your Long Day, learn this about the Duffler (as Kudera is fond of calling his antiprotagonist) on pg. 14. And so we know right off the bat what we're stuck with for the next 250 pages. Forty-year-old Duffy is fat, lazy and horny, and that's how he must go through life. The novel chronicles his long day — a Thursday in the spring of 2004 where he teaches three writing and English classes at three different Philadelphia universities, sleep-tutors through a tutoring session at a fourth, and completes a shift as a security guard.

But as hard as he seems to work, Duffy can barely make ends meet — pulling in a measly two grand per class for adjunct teaching gigs. And he's pissed about it. It's not fair. It wasn't supposed to be this way.

I took a chance on this indie novel because it's purported to be a cross between a rollicking campus comedy reminiscent of Richard Russo's Straight Man which I loved, and A Confederacy of Dunces, with it's mad-at-the-world-and-misunderstood character, Ignatius Reilly. I love Ignatius Reilly — he's one of the best characters in modern literature. Sadly, Fight For Your Long Day is but a shadow of either novel.

It's supposed to be a comic novel, but it's overstuffed with Duffy's political musings (he's a bleeding-heart liberal) and his serious existential crises (has he ever really helped any student?) that there are few laughs to be had. And since you can't laugh at this character, all that's left is to feel sorry for him (his work is unrewarding, he can't get laid, he's just pathetic), and that doesn't exactly make this an enjoyable read.

I won't dismiss it out of hand. If you're a liberal English professor who's worked on an adjunct basis, you might like this novel (most of the positive blurbs seem to be from other adjuncts who can totally sympathize with the Duffler). It also won an Independent Publishers Book Awards gold medal for the Mid-Atlantic region earlier this year, so obviously, someone appreciated it much more than I did. And while laughs are far between, there are a few — the seven deadly sins of literary blockage, i.e., is pretty funny. And some of the rants against President "Fern," even if you don't agree with the politics, are generally amusing, as well. 2.5 out of 5 stars.

Matterhorn: War Is Hell

2011-07-28T10:20:00.004-05:00

During a particularly rough patch — and there are many, many rough patches for the Vietnam War soldiers who inhabit Karl Marlantes' novel Matterhorn — Lieutenant Mellas nearly loses it. He busts out laughing, and "he (keeps) laughing, shaking his head in wonder at the world." And there it is, as the Marines were fond of saying — what an absurd thing war is. What an absurd concept to fight and die to take a hill, only to abandon it the next day. What an absurd notion of morality that it's murder to kill a drunken, inept commanding officer who sends troops to their useless deaths, but it's not murder to kill other people whose only crime is standing on the other side of a line.

But what a brilliant novel.

Many reviewers of Matterhorn have begun their acclaim with some variation of "I'm not normally a fan of war novels, but I loved this." They're right on the mark — my sentiments exactly. True, this a war novel to the core — there's blood, guts and gruesomeness. But it's a novel that also moves beyond the theater of war and the Xs and Os to examine other themes of more universal appeal, like race relations, guilt, despair, fear, friendship, and importantly, the pros and cons of ambition.

But it's the characters that make this story. There's the seemingly fearless Vancouver who always volunteers for point on patrols, the 23-year-old First Lieutenant Fitch who is unable to extricate himself from the doghouse of his commanding officer, the platoon leader Goodwin who calls everyone Jack because "it's easier than remembering his name," the executive officer Hawke who becomes fast friends with Mellas, and Cassidy, the racist lifer who draws the ongoing ire of the black Marines.

Marlantes

One of the hallmarks of this novel is how authentic it feels, and no where is that more evident than in how Marlantes, a decorated Vietnam veteran himself, renders these characters. Mellas, the protagonist, is the best example of this — he has come to Vietnam fresh from Princeton to win medals and build his résumé. Soon, though, he's assimilated, and actually becomes a soldier. It's funny to watch how his language changes over the course of the novel — by the midpoint, he's picked up all the slang like "there it is" and he's using the "F" word in every sentence, just like the Marine lifers.

And so we follow these Marines through the bush and watch as they encounter ever-increasing hardships. Just when you think it couldn't possibly get worse, it does. And then it gets worse again. The opening scene in the novel sets the tone. Lieutenant Mellas has just arrived on Matterhorn (a fictional hill near the Laotian border) to begin his tour commanding a platoon, and one of his squad leaders has to be medevaced back to base because he has a leech stuck in his urethra. Then, there are the never-ending, nerve-shattering patrols through the jungle, a week-long forced marches in the rain with no food, a soldier attacked by a tiger, and finally, the actual combat itself.

All of this adds up to a novel that, while horrific, is still immensely readable — even for the squeamish. It's universal. It's intense. And it's absolutely absorbing. Marlantes, a decorated Vietnam veteran himself, wrote this novel over the course of 30 years. The polish shows. This has classic potential. Highly recommended!

I Love Reading Fiction, Why Can't I Write Fiction?

2011-07-25T11:56:00.002-05:00

Last week, we learned about one of my literary successes: the 10-year-old reading journal list. (As comedian Jim Gaffigan tweeted yesterday, "I have to give it up to myself for being so humble.") Today, though, let's talk about my most shameful literary failure: writing fiction. Or, more accurately, not writing fiction.

Every reader endeavors to write, right? But in 11 years since I graduated with a degree in Writing Intensive English (Marquette's English lit degree with 12 additional credit-hours of writing classes...pretty cool, eh?), I've produced precisely one short story. And it wasn't great — one of my workshopmates called it "pretentious," and it's hard to disagree with that. (Because I'm a glutton for punishment, you can read it on the "Mason" page I just put up, if you're interested.)

I've always been a reader, and always seen myself as a writer. As a trade magazine editor, I actually do write for a living. But when it comes to fiction, it wasn't supposed to be this way. If you'd have asked my 23-year-old self, I'd have predicted I'd have cranked out dozens of stories and maybe even a novel or two by now. Just hasn't happened.

Thomas Mann famously said "A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." I've always thrown that quote around ruefully when I have trouble with a magazine article for work or a blog post or whatever. Of course, if you think about it literally, it's absurd. Writing is a lot easier for those who see themselves as writers than it is for, say, structural engineers or computer scientists or underwear salesmen. But I get the spirit of the quote — that writers are often perfectionists, take writing way too seriously, and spend weeks on a single paragraph. And, frankly, that's one thing that's prevented me from writing fiction — I do take it too seriously, try to make it perfect, and that prevents it from being fun.

And here's another thing. My senior-year (actually, my second senior year, but who's counting?) creative writer teacher A. Manette Ansay, constantly bandied about her favorite Flannery O'Connor quote: "A writer is someone who can't not write." (or something to that effect — my second senior year is bit of a blur). What's frightening is that apparently it's been pretty easy for me to not write fiction. Does that make me not a fiction writer? Sh!t! Every once in a while (now, for instance) I'll be wracked by that question and with it the guilt that I haven't written fiction forever. But it usually passes, and I go back to reading and critiquing others' fiction.

One more thing: At the risk of eliciting eye-rolls, there's the ever-constant fear of failure. To me, that fear manifests itself more as a fear of wasting time. What if I spend 30 hours on a story, and then nothing happens? That's 30 hours I could've been reading instead.

So what's the answer? Well, the first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem, right? I just need to re-discover that writing fiction is fun, and carve out some time to actually do it. Lately, I've been half-assedly researching online creative writing MFA programs. I'm not sure that's the right move, but it's been fun to think about.

And of course, I'm hoping you can help me with your ideas. What has gotten you out of a writing funk — even (especially!) if it's more than a decade? How do you make writing fiction fun? How do you get over the "fear of failure" idea?

How Do You Remember Books?

2011-07-21T11:23:00.006-05:00

Like a typical dude, I just totally blew it on a pretty significant anniversary. But I'm the only one who cares that I missed it, so no harm, no foul, I suppose.

Ten years ago, in early June, 2001, a year out of college, and hoping desperately to devise a way so that all the books I read wouldn't be stowed on the shelf and totally forgotten, I started my "list" — essentially, my book journal. So for the last 10 years, after finishing a book, I sit for 20 minutes or so (longer for better books, usually — I wrote about Infinite Jest for almost two hours) and type out unorganized thoughts about the book. It always must be the day after I've finished reading, to give the book a bit of time to percolate. I'll never start another book until I've finished writing in the list. And I've never shown the list to anyone.

At some level, it's a bit obsessive-compulsive, I grant. However, it's also comforting. What was Augie March's girlfriend's name? What was Amir's big regret in The Kite Runner? Was it liver or roast beef that Portnoy, um, defiles in Roth's novel? Yes, the answers to those questions are trivial and inconsequential to understanding what these books are actually about, but still, to have a place to be able to go back and look up stuff like that eases my mind when I'm reading. (And whether or not we're remembering the specifics of books, they're still adding something to our "worldview," as this fantastic NY Times piece from last year argues. )

In addition, for me, the list has also been hugely beneficial over the last two years as I've read and commented on others' blogs. It's great being able to remind myself whether I agree(d) with what someone's written about a book, and to be add to the conversation more so than "I know I read this, and I think I liked it, but I don't remember specifics. Good review."

So, the list is now 10 years old. After my entry last week on Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, the list has grown to 364 single-spaced typed page. It is 250,744 words. By way of comparison, War and Peace is 568,880 words. Just under halfway there, baby! The first book I wrote about on the list is Rabbit, Run, by John Updike and the first line is "This book started out pretty slow, plotwise, but I really could appreciate Updike’s writing style. His work reads like a manual for any sort of writing student." Man, beyond being downright cringe-inducing, that is some Grade A-mateur analysis, isn't it?

But I bring up the Ten-Year Anniversary of The List not just to pat myself on the back for keeping this up for 10 years and to open myself up for the potential ribbing that will surely ensue, I also bring it up to find out how others remember books they've read?

I realize the idea of a "reading journal" isn't exactly original, but how do you keep yours? What personal flavor does your journal have? Other than just storing your titles on GoodReads, what have you found to be effective for remembering the particulars of books you've read? Let me know — I'm excited to hear about what other readers do.

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Crossing Mediums: Songwriters As Storytellers

2011-07-18T12:28:00.004-05:00

No matter the medium, I just love stories. In fact, you might say that when it comes to storytelling, I'm medium-agnostic. A good story is a good story, whether it's on film, on stage, on the page, or even to a tune.

Because it's summer, the season for live music, let's take a literary look at that last one. It'd be fair to say that songwriting was storytelling before storytelling was storytelling. Song was the first way people told stories, as they sat around their cave campfires enjoying their roasted woolly mammoth. These days, music as a means to tell a story has advanced quite a bit, so much so that musicians frequently cross over into other mediums. And lately, several famous musicians have traversed the medium-line to publish generally well-received novels.

Here are a few examples: Crooner Josh Ritter published a novel last month titled Bright's Passage, about a man who returns to his West Virginia home after fighting in World War I. It has an average rating of 3.73 stars on GoodReads. Pretty solid. Folksy performer Steve Earle published I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive, about a guy who lives with the ghost of Hank Williams, in April to better-than-average reviews (3.56 GoodReads average). Nick Cave, Jimmy Buffett and Bob Dylan are other examples of folks whose primary medium is songwriting, but who have also published novels. I'm sure there are more examples — please comment below if you know of more.

This is a trend that doesn't take a Mensa membership to decipher. As my friend Doug said, as we were discussing this last weekend during a show (after a beer or six), "songwriters just have an innate gift with language, a natural talent for telling a story." He mentioned one of his favorite artists, New Orleans-based songwriter Paul Sanchez. He said the last time he caught Sanchez, during Jazz Fest this year, there was a woman sitting near the stage talking loudly on her cellphone and generally being a nuisance. Sanchez, on the spot, made up a song about (read as: making fun of) her — "it was amazing. He developed this story in his head while he was playing another song," Doug said.

More so than possibly any other type of artist, musicians are creative about how they tell their stories. If it's not publishing a novel, it might be a CD-length concept album. Even generally considered neanderthal heavy metal and alternative musicians like Iced Earth, Mastodon, Coheed and Cambria, and Queensryche tell a story start to finish over an album or several albums, and set it all to music. In fact, Claudio Sanchez, frontman for Coheed and Cambria, includes a 350-page novel in the deluxe edition of their latest CD titled Year of the Black Rainbow, adding details to the story in the band's five-album set. He'd also published comic books to go with the albums, as well. Even if you don't like the music, you have to appreciate the storytelling talent. (Or, actually, since Iced Earth, Coheed and Cambria, and Mastodon actually tell fairly "out there" sci-fi stories, the music, to me, is more interesting than the stories. I'm just not a sci-fi guy, you dig?)

At any rate, musicians who adapt their craft to another medium are eternally fascinating to me. We've already covered the idiot celebrities who trade on their name recognition to publish novels. That's the low, dark-and-seedy end of the medium-crossover spectrum. This is the high end. I'm about 300 times less skeptical of a musician-published novel than I am of one published by an actor/actress — both in terms of whether the celeb actually wrote the novel and how much I might enjoy it. I'm excited to check out both Earle's and Ritter's novel (at some point), and that's something I'd probably never say about other medium-crossover types of projects.

By the way, and to bring this post full-circle, Steve Earle and Paul Sanchez have both appeared in the HBO series Treme, set in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the flood. While we're speaking of spectacular storytelling, that series is spectacular storytelling to a "T." Season One is available on DVD, and Season Two, which just wrapped up, should be soon. I can't recommend it more highly.

So what other musician-penned novels are out there? Why specifically do you think it is that musicians are able to cross mediums better than other artists? Or would you argue that that's not actually the case?

Norwegian Wood: Better To Have Loved And Lost?

2011-07-14T15:18:00.000-05:00

A Japanese version of The Catcher in the Rye, only with more atmosphere and depth, and a lot more sex? Does that sound like something you might be interested in? Then, I'd humbly submit Haruki Murakami's slim, ethereal novel, Norwegian Wood.

Norwegian Wood is, of course, a Beatles song, the opening lyric of which is "I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me." The song itself, as well as the idea presented in its lyric of first love and the stinging memory thereof, are two of the major themes of the novel. The novel asks us to try to understand the dangers of taking love for granted; of assuming that there will always be time to work out problems; of waiting on one love at the expense of the possibility of another.

Such are the issues our narrator Toru Watanabe, a 19-year-old Tokyo college student, deals with. The year is 1969, and one day on the train, Toru runs into Naoko — the ex-girlfriend of Toru's best friend in high school, who had mysteriously killed himself. Toru and Naoko begin seeing each other once a week, and soon, their feelings intensify. But are the feelings genuine, or is Naoko simply using Toru as a stand-in for her dead boyfriend?

Meanwhile, Toru meets the flighty, but fascinating Midori, and begins seeing her regularly, as well. Such is Toru's dilemma: Whom should he choose? Or, is the answer neither: Should he continue going out with his friend Nagasawa, getting drunk and sleeping with slutty girls? At one point, he wonders aloud, "What if there were a deux ex machina in real life?" In other words, why couldn't life be simple like a Greek drama in which the resolution to any problem is simply a god's intervention.

Murakami

And as if to make all these questions even more complicated for himself, Toru begins questioning how much he should even trust his own vision of the world. Midori lies to him. A friend's life is ruined by a manipulative, lying 13-year-old girl. And his friend Nagasawa constantly lies to his own girlfriend to continue his carousing ways. Toru begins to distrust his ability to parse the truth. "If I told myself (the events of last night) were real, I believed they were real, and if I told myself they were a fantasy, they seemed like a fantasy." And so how to make decisions regarding matters of the heart on information that's not trustworthy?

This book is loaded with difficult questions. And sex. Lots and lots of sex. Indeed, Norwegian Wood is blurbed as "the most erotic of Murakami's novels." So, if you're not into all those coming-of-age, difficult life questions, there that to keep you interested, anyway.

But it is a quick, fluid read, and one I really enjoyed. This is the first time I've read Murakami, and while I understand that Norwegian Wood isn't the best representative of his oeuvre, it does seem a good introduction to both his style, which is as clear and sharp as any writer I've ever read, and also his acumen as a storyteller. This is the kind of novel you read in hundred-page chunks, and is over before you know it. How did it go that fast? What did that all mean?

Film To Books: Top 3 Movies About Fiction Writing

2011-07-11T11:24:00.001-05:00

We don't talk much about film here at The New Dork Review of Books, but we shall today — and in a rather bookish context, no less. Don't worry, I fully realize the "best movies based on books" conversation has been done to death. That's not where we're going here. Instead, let's look at some really outstanding movies about the process of writing fiction.

Now, naturally, there seems to be a ton of movies about screenwriting and playwriting, and a ton of novels about writing fiction. But there is a definite dearth of movies about writing fiction. There is your The Hours (a pseudo-biopic of Virginia Woolf), there is your Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (which, I haven't seen, and so the actual connection, if there is one, to Virginia Woolf is unclear to me), and there is your The Door In The Floor, a fantastic film based on the first section of John Irving's novel A Widow for One Year. If you haven't seen this last one, starring Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger, throw it up on your Netflix queue post-haste.

But those aren't the three movies I want to talk about. The three movies I want to point out all have one thing in common: They're actually about the fiction-writing process. That's not an easy thing to pull off on film — fiction writing being the loneliest, most solitary of arts. However, all three of these films show both writers' internal relationships with their craft, and also how the process of writing fiction emanates outward from the writer to affect those around, whether family or fans. Let's take a look.

3. Finding Forrester — One of the great Sean Connery's last film's, this Gus Van Sant (of Milk and Good Will Hunting fame) vehicle tells the story reclusive writer William Forrester and his at-first hesitant, and then willing, collaboration with an inner city high school kid, who between basketball games, also happens to love writing fiction. It's a good look at the dangers of stereotype, as well as a great portrait of a student-teacher relationship. It's not real deep, if I remember correctly, but it is entertaining — though it's more of a mass-market, rather than indie-film type of entertainment.

2. Starting Out In The Evening — This film about a perky graduate student (Lauren Ambrose) writing her master's thesis about an aging writer (Frank Langella) successfully takes a sort of bizarre young-woman's-idol-worship-of-older-man love story beyond the cliché. It also touches on a lot of literary themes: the sources of inspiration, "the madness of art," and even the uphill battle for literary novels in today's publishing environment. The superfluous, dull side story of Langella's character's daughter (Lili Taylor) and her relationship troubles put a dent in the film's overall merit, but on the whole, it's very, very good.

1. Wonder Boys — This is one of my favorite movies of all time. The short tagline that comes up on the channel guide whenever this movie's on best sums it up: "A professor and his student collide with life." The cast (Michael Douglas, Frances McDormand, Ripp Torn, Tobey Maguire, Robert Downery Jr., Katie Holmes) is fantastic. It's an infinitely quotable film ("Oh, Professor Trip, you're bleeding." "No shit, James.") And it's a film that just makes you happy about being into books. And if you don't laugh out loud with James as Ripp Torn proclaims "I....am a writer," well, you better check your own pulse.

As always, let's discuss. What did you think of any of the three films above — specifically, in how they treat the fiction-writing process? Any other fiction-writing films you'd recommend?

(Yes, I realize two of these three — Wonder Boys [Michael Chabon], Starting Out In The Evening [Brian Morton]— are actually based on novels. But that doesn't make it any less of a feat to show how fiction writers write, how what fiction writers write affects others, and how fiction writers interface with the world.)

The Literary Device Post

2011-07-07T12:12:00.001-05:00

The former English major part of me is openly standing and cheering this week's prompt at The Blue Bookcase's Literary Blog Hop. The question: What are your favorite literary devices?

I have two. And, not coincidentally, they also happen to be two of my favorite words. Let me a drop a little juxtaposition and synecdoche on y'all.

I remember learning about juxtaposition in a Shakespeare class in college. Apparently, Billy S. was the original DJ Juxtapositioner. After I learned what it meant, and that it could apply to many, many real-life situations outside of literature, I never missed (and still try not to) an opportunity to use it. It's fun. "Wow, today's weather is quite a juxtaposition to yesterday's, eh?" or "The floral hints in this chardonnay nicely juxtapose the boldness of flavor in these chicken wings." Anyway, having just read Eric Larson's In The Garden of Beasts, juxtaposition has been fresh in my mind. It was even the lead for the review. I also used it as a headline here. In fact, it could probably be argued successfully that I overuse that term. But that's a discussion for another time.

And so, also in the category of fun: Just saying the word "synecdoche." But I also like it as a literary device for its capacity to illustrate with brevity. An example: In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace is describing one of Jim's crazy films and uses the phrase "camera as audience-synecdoche." Got it? It means a part standing in for the whole. Now that know you understand, can you spot the two examples of synecdoche in this made-up sentence: "I'ma cruise out in my new wheels on Sat. night and find me a real nice piece'o'ass, y'all." By the way, have you ever seen Charlie Kaufman's film Synecdoche, New York? Good God. I love that PS Hoffman fellow, but that movie nearly drove me mad. I was not a fan. At all. But that's a discussion for another time.

(PS. My blog is the process of transition from its blogspot URL to its own domain. So, pardon my dust, vis-à-vis any irregularities in redirection to the right page, or goofs in page elements. Cheers!)

Review: Faith: A Novel, by Jennifer Haigh

2011-07-05T11:22:00.003-05:00

Faith without works is dead: It's an unassailable truth for Catholics. But it's also often true that no good work goes unpunished, especially in emotionally charged, mid-priest-sex-abuse-scandal 2002 Boston, the setting for Jennifer Haigh's deftly crafted, deeply affecting new novel Faith. But this isn't a novel about orthodoxy or catechism. It's not even really about the abuse scandal, either. More so, it's a novel about empathy and trust. And it's absolutely riveting.

Father Arthur Breen, a model priest his whole life, stands accused of molesting an eight-year-old boy named Aidan, who he'd befriended and mentored while the boy's mother, a former meth head and stripper, tries to put her life back together. Arthur's Irish Catholic family, including his half brother Mike and half sister Sheila (our narrator), is divided in their loyalties. And frankly, that's about as much as you should know, plotwise.

That's because one of the many strengths of this novel is how carefully Haigh (through Sheila) goes about revealing information. One of the morals of this story is that making judgments without understanding a situation is incredibly dangerous. In fact, in might be delusional — and that's true whether we're talking about religious faith or faith and trust in people. Indeed, as Sheila says, "It was a thing I'd always known but until recently had forgotten: that faith is a decision. In its most basic form, it is a choice."

And so Haigh (via Sheila) gives us a sort of a first pass at describing events, providing readers a framework and just enough information to begin formulating our own idea about Father Breen's guilt or innocence. In fact, as a reader, you feel slightly awkward — you know you're not supposed to be rushing to judgment, but you can't help it. The sex-abuse scandal is an incredibly emotional issue. You try to understand, but you just don't yet have enough information. You either like him or you don't; you either trust him or you don't.

Essentially, you either empathize with him or you don't. But, as Father Arthur Breen himself wonders, "How did anyone know, ever, what another person was feeling?" But to stop trying is to become a misanthrope — to pack it in on life. And whether you're a recovering drug addict or an accused priest, empathy is a form of conscience, a safeguard against doing really horrible things.

This novel is like a beautiful stained-glass window: Amazing at first glance, but even more so when it becomes further illuminated. I laid in bed for a good four hours last night, wide awake, just rolling this novel over in my head. Even more emerges. Every detail in this intricately detailed novel means something, adds something, furthers something. Unlike the play/film Doubt, to which this book is compared frequently, there is a resolution. And it's shocking, haunting, and yes, even fulfilling. Whether you're Catholic or not, you'll appreciate the craft here. Five stars: One of my favorites of the year.

Review: When The Killing's Done, by T.C. Boyle

2011-06-30T10:33:00.001-05:00

Conventional wisdom is that the further apart on the political spectrum two people are, the greater the intensity of the culture war. In T.C. Boyle's new novel When the Killing's Done, the war is definitely intense, and the casualty counts are high, but the war waged is between two groups most would consider ideologically similar: environmentalists and animal rights activists. And in this novel of left-on-left violence, one side emerges as the unequivocal winner.

The problem, though, is that there's never any question which side will win. There's no real moral conflict for the reader. Boyle makes his own agenda clear from the outset by making it painfully obvious who you're to side with. And let's just say it's not the animal rights side that includes a bunch of fanatical, cartoonish weirdos. That's especially true when the environmentalist side is represented by a mild-mannered, reasonable, sympathetic Asian-American biologist. Who would you root for?

The battleground for the novel is the Channel Islands, a small group of islandds off the California coast near Santa Barbara. Alma Takesue is a young biologist who works for the U.S. National Parks Service, and is working hard to rid the islands of man-brought invasive (and nasty) species, such as rats and feral pigs, in order to return the ecosystem to its natural state. This involves a lot of killing, anathema to Dave LaJoy, a 42-year-old dreadlocked electronics magnate, who has founded and funds an organization called For the Protection of Animals. In a novel that's supposed to draw you in with moral ambiguity, this much is very clear: Dave is an asshole — he's the kind of guy who is needlessly mean to strangers (at a restaurant, he sends three bottles of wine back before leaving in a huff), who is convinced the whole world is against him, and who is always yelling at his folk singer girlfriend Anise.

Pockmarking Dave and Alma's increasingly intense clashes is flashback to Alma's family history and Anise's mother's time on the island as a sheepherder. Intended to illustrate the characters' historical connections to the island, they feel superfluous, like dropped-in short stories (of course, Boyle is an accomplished short story writer, as well), and thus add little to the story.

Furthermore, very much in contrast to a novel that is otherwise intricately and precisely written (well, for the most part — there are a few over-written descriptions and a tortured metaphor here and there*), Dave's dialogue is atrocious. It just doesn't fit. He says things like "Don't f@ck with me. Not here. Not now," and "You're no better than executioners. Nazis, that's what you are. Kill everything, that's your solution. Kill, kill, kill." It's so bad, I began to wonder if Boyle is doing it on purpose, as another tactic to be sure readers are not on Dave's side. What it does accomplish, though, is not only to turn Dave further into a caricature of an animal rights activist, but also to me further away from enjoying this book.

Amidst the detritus of Bad Dave and his bad dialogue, there really is an interesting moral dilemma here. Outside the context of this novel, the question of whether it's okay to kill animals for the sake of restoring a natural ecosystem is an incredibly complex and interesting one to ponder. Not so to Boyle, apparently. But why set up such a great conflict only to make the winner a foregone conclusion? This novel could've been great — it had potential to really make readers think hard to determine which side they are on. But that idea is immediately smothered and destroyed, like so many native species without capability to defend themselves.

*Not because it's gross, but because it feels like purposefully bad fiction, this particular one made me close the book, take a deep breath, and then continue: "...the boy steps forward on his own in initiative and grinds his heel into the animal's head till the gray and pink strands of the neural matter sluice free, like spaghetti."

Top 10 Female Writers (In Terms of Hotness)

2011-06-27T10:53:00.002-05:00

Last week, Brenna at Literary Musings published her list of Top Ten Sexiest Male Writers. I thought it was such a good idea, I totally ripped it off...with the one minor tweak of listing women instead of men. Now, if you’re thinking that creating a list of sexy female writers trivializes their talent and reduces their art, well, at some level, I don't disagree with you. I suppose it is a bit sexist, and I'm really sensitive to that, having been accused of being a sexist reader several times since I started this blog — since I tend to read more men writers than women. But this is just for fun. So, before you toss off an angry comment, just take a deep breath...and enjoy:

Left: Nell Freudenberger is one of my first literary crushes, dating back to about 2001 when her story collection Lucky Girls came out. She's since published a novel titled The Dissident, and writes regularly for the NY Times. To dispel your cynical notions that I just poached her name from last year's "20 Under 40" list, I can tell you I vividly remember reading and being appalled and angered by this 2003 Salon piece titled "Too young, too pretty, too successful" written by Jealous Writer Curtis Sittenfeld.
Right: Marisha Pessl, author of the novel Special Topics In Calamity Physics, will really get your atoms racing. (Sorry. could. not. resist.)

Left: Sloan Crosley, author of extraordinarily witty and funny essay collections I Was Told There'd Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number, is the only non-novelist to make my list. And if you're skeptical that her charm translates to real life, check out her appearance on Craig Ferguson.
Right: Zadie Smith actually is just as attractive in person as she appears her dust jacket photos (I got to meet her at a signing a few years ago). To put it nicely, this is a relative rarity amongst writers...of both sexes. Her merits as a writer is well-traversed ground.

Left: Nicole Krauss is the better half of the first family of contemporary lit. Is it fair to say Jonathan Safran Foer overachieved? Krauss has published three novels, Man Walks Into Room, The History of Love (which is brilliant!), and Great House.
Right: Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of the Pulitzer-winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies and the (brilliant) novel The Namesake. The Indian-American writer adds a degree of exotic hotness to our list.

Left: Amy Greene, author of one of my favorite novels of last year, Bloodroot, adds some down-home hotness to our list. According to her jacket bio, she lives in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, the setting of her brilliant debut novel.
Right: Sarah Hall is a British novelist who first made a name for herself when her second novel The Electric Michelangelo was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I liked it, but not enough to fawn over. (The author herself, though, is a different story!) She's since been long-listed for the Booker Prize for her latest novel, 2009's How To Paint a Dead Man.

Left: Ida Hattemer-Higgins has a bit of European chic about her...even though she was born in Cincinnati (she now lives in Berlin and Moscow). I loved her debut novel The History of History so much I had to include her on this list. Have you read it yet? Please do.
Right: Vendela Vida, probably better known as Mrs. Dave Eggers, is a published (and generally well-received) novelist and screenwriter in her own right. Perhaps her best-known novel is Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name, which I have but haven't read, and which is one of my favorite titles ever.

There you go. Who did I miss? Who's on your list?

(One final note: If you're reading this on RSS, email, or Google Reader, I'd encourage you to stop by the blog itself. I did a little summer relaunch — the site includes a new design, as well as links to all New Dork Reviews, an updated "About Me" section, and a new review policy page. Thanks, as always, for reading!)

In The Garden Of Beasts: Larson's 1930s Berlin

2011-06-23T10:37:00.004-05:00

Eric Larson makes his money on juxtaposition; bringing two seemingly unconnected stories together in surprising ways. That strategy is what made The Devil In The White City such a riveting read. (Thunderstruck also employs the dueling stories strategy, though to a lesser degree of riveting, I've heard). But in his fantastic new narrative non-fiction, In The Garden of Beasts, the juxtaposition is more in regards to how two people see the same story differently. That story: the darkening storm of Hitler's reign in 1930s Berlin.

William Dodd, a University of Chicago history professor, was the first American ambassador to Hitler's regime, arriving in Berlin in June 1933. A liberal with a strong sense of history, he saw the story for what it was: terrifying. But his flighty, romantic 24-year-old daughter Martha became enthralled with Berlin. She loved the city and the German people immediately, and refused to recognize the mounting signs of trouble.

Today, it's easy to look back and be perplexed by appeasement. Didn't anyone sound the alarm? Weren't the warning signs clear? It seems like they very well should have been — and to Dodd, they were. But he was not a career diplomat, and as an outsider, he had no support from the entrenched old boy's network at the State Department. In fact, he was FDR's fifth choice for the German ambassadorship — he'd been hoping for a much quieter post, because all he really wanted was to finish his life's work, a multi-volume history of the American south. Adding to Dodd's difficulty was America's general bent toward isolationism after the Great War and the fact that the country was in the midst of the Great Depression, and it's easy to see how Dodd's warnings went unheeded.

Larson alternates between Dodd's diplomatic struggles and Martha's exploration of Berlin, and its men. She dates several, often concurrently, including the head of the Gestapo and a Russian diplomat/spy. At one point, a German minister even sets her up on a blind date with Hitler himself — the theory being that the Fuhrer dating the daughter of the American ambassador would quell what were becoming increasingly tense German/American relations.

Throughout, Larson tells us these stories based directly upon fantastic primary sources, namely Dodd's and Martha's diaries. Martha was an aspiring novelist, so her writings contain rich detail of the city and her other adventures around Germany. As an historian, Dodd wrote with an incredible level of detail, too — down to conversations between himself and many of Hitler's henchman.

This is a fantastic book — clear, precise, and fast-paced, especially as you become increasingly horrified by Hitler's machinations. I'd humbly submit that the two most important criteria for judging a narrative non-fiction book are how interesting it is from start to finish (i.e., that there are not too many detours or superfluous or silly detail), and how much you learn from it. If you'll buy that, then believe me when I tell you, In The Garden of Beasts is top-tier reading. It'll appeal to a wide range of readers, from serious historians to beach readers. It's highly recommended.

Amazon vs. B&N vs. Goodreads: Rating the Ratings

2011-06-20T12:17:00.003-05:00

I'm no mathelete, but I do know this: The more data there is about something, the more complete the picture of whatever it is that data are measuring. (Yes, "data" is plural, jerks.) It's common sense, right?

So, this "more is better" idea is why I've been looking at the ratings for books on Goodreads much more than Amazon or B&N to vet potential book purchases. But the switch got me thinkin': Is there a difference between the three in terms of how each site's users rated novels? More fundamentally, is there a huge difference between average book ratings between sites? If so, what might account for such a difference?

So I thought I'd spend a post and take a look. Now, what follows is hugely unscientific. It's just a random sampling of five novels. But the interesting thing to me, and hopefully to you too, is the conclusions that can be (however tenuously rooted in logic) drawn about the ratings, both on a book-by-book and also on a sitewide basis.

(Liked = Four- and five-star ratings, Neutral = three-stars, and Didn't Like = one- and two-star ratings.)

1. Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen
Amazon: 895 total ratings. Average: 3 stars. Liked: 365 (41%). Neutral: 113 (13%). Didn't like: 417 (47%).
B&N: 2,143 total ratings. Average: 3 stars.
Goodreads: 19,079 ratings. Average: 3.66 stars. Liked: 11,627 (61%). Neutral: 4,494 (24%). Didn't like: 2,783 (15%).

My thoughts: I picked this one to look at because it of its huge hype — and the resulting push-back against Franzen for having the temerity to write a very good, popular literary novel. Looks like the push-back was most pronounced on Amazon. The percentage of "didn't like" ratings compared with Goodreads is astounding. My opinion is that this was a very good novel, and therefore Goodreads is far and away the most accurate here.

2. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
Amazon: 3,435 total ratings. Average: 4.5 stars. Liked: 3,132 (91%). Neutral: 120 (3%). Didn't like: 183 (5%).
B&N: 6,911 total ratings. Average: 4.5 stars.
Goodreads: 123,656 ratings. Average: 4.46 stars. Liked: 111,937 (90.5%). Neutral: 8,760 (7%). Didn't like: 1,827 (1.5%).

My thoughts: Yep, everyone loved it — but, again, the same rating over more than 120,000 ratings is much more statistically relevant than only 3,400.

3. Fall of Giants, by Ken Follett
Amazon: 880 total ratings. Average 3 stars. Liked: 419 (47%). Neutral: 67 (7%). Didn't like: 394 (45%).
B&N: 1,407 total ratings. Average 3.5 stars.

Goodreads: 5,696 ratings. Average 4.0 stars. Liked: 4,271 (75%). Neutral: 1,128 (20%). Didn't like: 282 (5%).

My thoughts: As Goodreads' ratings show, when people actually rated this novel on its merit, it did well. This analysis shows how much the deplorable practice of rating a novel poorly to protest its eBook pricing can affect a novel's rating — when Fall of Giants came out last fall, it was ground-zero for this type of idiotic protest. Please, if you're one of the offenders, stop doing that.

4. Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart
Amazon: 166 ratings. Average: 3.5 stars. Liked: 93 (56%). Neutral: (17%). Didn't like: 44 (27%).
B&N: 229 ratings. Average: 3.5 stars.
Goodreads: 4,592 ratings. Average: 3.44 stars. Liked: 2,355 (51%). Neutral: 1,415 (31%). Didn't like: 787 (17%).

My thoughts: I was pretty lukewarm on this book, so I wanted to see if that lukewarmness carried over in all three sites. It did — and surprisingly consistently. Just about as many people liked it as didn't on both Amazon and Goodreads, and it got the lukewarm 3.5 on B&N.

5. Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
Amazon: 443 ratings. Average: 4 stars. Liked: 312 (70%). Neutral: 31 (7%). Didn't like: 100 (23%).
B&N: 113 ratings. Average: 4.5 stars.
Goodreads: 9,455 ratings. Average: 4.29. Liked: 7,643 (81%). Neutral: 926 (10%). Didn't like: 805 (9%).

My thoughts: Of course, I wanted to find out how one of my favorite novels of all time did. And again, Amazon raters were the most critical (read as: Didn't get it), and Goodreads raters were closest to my own feeling about it. What sticks out here is the very low number of raters on B&N. I have no idea why that'd be the case.

Conclusions: This mini-analysis seems like good justification for continuing to use Goodreads. It has the most comprehensive, and in my view, most accurate cumulative ratings. I'll continue to be skeptical of (Read as: avoid) Amazon ratings. Raters there seem to rate books on lots of tangential issues like eBook pricing, slow shipping and cynicism, which drives the rating down. Boo. B&N to me is sort of a non-factor for ratings, as they don't give you an easy-to-read breakdown of the different ratings.

(Final Disclaimer: I'd never advocate that you pick books solely on these sites' ratings. Just making sure we're clear on that.)

What do you think? Any surprises here? Any of these three sites you tend to rely on more than the others?

What's With The Spate of Zadie Hating?

2011-06-16T10:27:00.169-05:00

She's actually pretty good.

So freakin' sue me, but I really like Zadie Smith. That is to say, I've liked approximately 75 percent of everything I've read of hers.* And with such critically well-received novels** as White Teeth and On Beauty, and a robust roster of widely read essays, I would've thought Zadie's literary cred was unassailable.

Not so, apparently. But what stands out about a recent spate of Zadie hating, is the acrimony, and frankly, malevolence with which she's denounced. Far be it from me to make heads or tails of this. I just don't get it. Let's look at two examples.

In an essay published by Huffington Post Books, Ruth Fowler calls Zadie "a great literary bore." Fowler, who no one's ever heard of, goes on to say reading Zadie is like "being forcibly strapped into a Cambridge lecture theater and waterboarded by some bratty, egotistical over-read teen's pompous thesis on art." To punctuate that sentence, Fowler throws in a "Shut up, Zadie" and then calls her "as entertaining as an enema." Wow! I mean, that's some serious titty-twisting! And what's craziest of all is that the essay isn't even about Zadie! It's ostensibly a thousand-word whine about Tea Obreht winning the Orange Prize, couched as a complaint that MFA writers are apparently the worst plague to to be unleashed upon the literary world since, well, the plague. Fowler even has to remind herself she's not writing about Zadie specifically by throwing in the awkward transition "But back to Tea."

Another example: In his mostly very good, very funny (my review) satire How I Became A Famous Novelist, Steve Hely has his protagonist imagining what it'll be like once he cons his way into the upper echelon of literary society. He envisions Zadie leaning over to him at a dinner and telling him, "You know I'm on to you, you bastard." Then she smiles, and says, "Takes one to know one. I won't tell on you if you don't tell on me." (Then, later, they'd do coke off a manuscript.) The insinuation is, of course, that like the protagonist, she also is a literary fraud. But the significant thing here is that no where else in his novel does Hely mention a real-life novelist by name. Zadie's it. Other writers like Tom Clancy, Janet Evanovich and Dan Brown are recognizable as ridiculous fictional characters, but Zadie's the only one who shows up as herself — as if Hely wants to be really sure you got his meaning there; that she's awful.

None of this make any sense to me. I was absolutely knocked over by White Teeth. When I finished it several years ago, I gushed to my reading log "this is one of the more enjoyable, best novels I've ever read." I loved On Beauty, too — if to a slightly lesser degree than White Teeth. (I wrote about On Beauty here, and if you scroll down to the bottom of the comments, there's another example of some really vitriolic Zadie Hate — and this one's even slightly racist!) Finally, Zadie's essay on David Foster Wallace that concludes her collection titled Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays is just so mind-shatteringly amazing, I went into another two- or three-day "God, I really miss DFW" funk. (I wrote about that essay collection here.)

So, to reiterate, I just really am befuddled here.*** Why does such a talented writer draw such a visceral, negative reaction from what seem to be otherwise smart people? Help me understand this. Please!

*Her second novel The Autograph Man, and a few of the more academic essays in Changing My Mind comprise the other 25 percent.
**Regarding On Beauty, published in 2005, NY Times reviewer Frank Rich wrote: "What finally makes "On Beauty" affecting as well as comic is Smith's own earnest enactment of Forster's dictum to "only connect" her passions with the prose of the world as she finds it." White Teeth reviewer Anthony Quinn called the Smith's 2000 debut novel "eloquent" and "wit-struck" among other praises.
*** If you missed it in my post last year about Top 10 Humorous Book Related Anecdotes, here's a sort-of-funny Zadie-related story: As a "pick-up" line, I once asked a girl in a bar if she knew who Zadie Smith is, because she looked exactly like her. It didn't work.

Hornby's How To Be Good: Accentuate The Positive

2011-06-13T11:37:00.001-05:00

How To Be Good is, what I assume to be after reading Hornby twice now (this and Juliet, Naked), another example of Hornby's schtick: mixing modern, hip characters that have major relationship problems and quirky, funny writing to ask some very serious questions. On the whole, though, this novel didn't quite work, but there is always something positive to derive from a generally poor novel, right? So, let's take a look at a brief plot summary and then the novel's plusses and minuses.

Katie (a doctor) and David (an angry newspaper columnist) are early-40s Londoners whose marriage is on the ropes. Katie has had a half-hearted affair basically because she's bored. David meets a street-healer calling himself DJ GoodNews, who, as a result of over-indulgence in Ecstasy in his youth, can now heal with his hands. David soon falls under GoodNews' thrall, and the two plot to make the world good — by giving away wealth, by convincing neighbors to let homeless teenagers sleep in their extra bedrooms, and by writing a book called "How To Be Good." Katie is less than pleased with her newly milquetoast husband (does it make her bad that she doesn't like him trying to be good?), and pines for the days of her husband who was angry and their marriage that was on the rocks — that, at least, she understood.

Assuming a novel starts out with a perfect five stars, here's a look at the factors that influenced me to arrive at my final rating of 2.5 stars.

- 2 for preposterous plot twist: Ultimately, the novel doesn't work because of the DJ GoodNews angle. If this fellow as such a successful healer (he cures David and Katie's daughter Molly of eczema, just by touching her), I'm pretty sure he'd have a bit larger following and not have to shack up with middle-class surburbanites. Plus, the whole miraculous healer angle — even if meant to be satiric — is just tired.

+1 for interesting questions to ponder: If Hornby had wanted to be a bit more concise than this novel-length, quasi-morality tale he could've just quoted Harold Bloom. Bloom famously said, "Until you become yourself, what benefit can you be to others?" And that's exactly what this novel's about — in fact, a better title for Hornby's novel might be How To Be Yourself. Katie has always assumed she's a good person because she's a doctor, and helps people. But, as she says, "I'm beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn't count for anything much, if you're a bad person in one way." (Has her affair, and her resistance to swallowing GoodNews' good news as her husband has made her bad?) The idea of examining long-held assumptions about yourself is a positive lesson, and an interesting one to consider. Katie learns that she needs to discover how to make herself happy before she can be happy with her life and family. And if that involves a bit of selfishness (especially with time), then so be it.

- 1 for not avoiding cliché religion angle: Hornby made it two-thirds of the way through the novel before deciding to have Katie, a bleeding-heart liberal who has never had any use for religion, go to church to look for answers. Maybe he felt like in a novel about being good, he had to throw that in or it'd be a glaring omission. Katie ultimately does find an answer from religion — at least from a minister who's pretty much thrown in the towel on God, herself — but in an unexpected and kind of silly way. Katie withholds a prescription from the minister until the minister tells her whether or not to leave her husband. C'mon.

- 1 for Katie's voice: The novel is told in Katie's first-person perspective, but instead of sounding like a depressed 40-year-old, she sounds like a sarcastic mid-20s hipster. Not genuine, but...

+ .5 for Hornby: I haven't liked either of the plots of his novels I've read, but I've enjoyed reading him for his funny, sarcastic and witty writing. Even as I'm annoyed by the silly plot, I always find something on a page that makes me keep reading. For instance, even though the religion trick was off-putting, this line's great: "I decide, on the spot, to let God into my heart, in the hope that my newfound faith can somehow be used as a vicious weapon in the marital war."

Total: 2.5.

What'd you think? I know a lot of you warned me about this book, but I stubbornly read it anyway. But it still wasn't enough to put me off Hornby forever. He's the kind of writer I love reading — we just haven't gotten on the same page yet.

How I Became A Famous Novelist: Literary Con Job

2011-06-09T11:51:00.002-05:00

There are your boring, everyday cynics, and then there is Pete Tarslaw, the slacker and faux-novelist who weasels his way into the literary discussion in Steve Hely's hilarious publishing-industry satire How I Became A Famous Novelist. Pete, who works at a company that furnishes admissions essays for rich college kids and Asian businessmen who want their MBAs, is convinced that literary novelists are nothing more than talented con artists and readers are deluded idiots. He forms a begrudging respect for the former because it takes one to know one, and he plans to exploit the latter. How? He'll simply write a novel — so he can become rich and famous, so he can have a "stately home by the ocean (or scenic lake)" and, most importantly, so he can "humiliate Polly (his ex-girlfriend) at her wedding." His literary intentions are as pure as the driven snow, as you can tell.

So, aided by an experimental drug that helps him concentrate, he commences work on his novel. He bases his plot on an examination of the common characteristics of the (fake) NY Times Best Sellers list. His list of rules for what his novel must include (Christmas, food, cross-country trips, murders, etc.) and the justifications for why these are in novels is one of the hilarious highlights of this book. For example, "Rule 15: Must have obscure exotic locations" because "Americans trust knowledge acquired abroad....as evidenced by their love of Andrea Bocelli and the Olive Garden. Even kids like Chef Boyardee."


Hely: Nerdy, but funny.

The fake NY Times Best Sellers list Hely includes is, other than the fake blurbs: "America's Cervantes has appeared," my favorite part of the novel. It's clearly intended to illustrate how silly we readers are for reading the novels we do. Even though the names and titles are fake, you'll recognize a few real people/novels (Dan Brown, Tom Clancy, Janet Evanovich) here. It'd be immensely worth your time to use Amazon's "Look Inside" feature to read page 43 (or better yet, just buy the book— it's $5.60 right now!). An example: The Lavender Willow, by Thomas Quinn — On Nantucket, a beautiful nun who's given up on love finds herself attracted to a psychic man who may be a dangerous arsonist.

So Pete's novel is published. It's panned by serious critics, but embraced by readers, aided by a series of serendipities. From there, the second half of the novel is a bit predictable and not nearly as well-written or funny as the first part (except for the part when Pete has a tryst with a cougar novelist he hates). But it's a short book, so it's easy enough to cruise through this to find the answer to the key question: Will Pete get his comeuppance?

At the heart of this satire is the idea that publishers really don't know what's good and what's not anymore. Pete's friend Lucy, who is an assistant editor at a publisher, has a drunken rant to this effect. "I just can't tell anymore," she says. And readers don't know either. They're happy to be spoon fed

You're not going to like Pete, but you're going to like this novel. If you're interested in publishing, if you have a cynical streak in you, and if you like good satire and sharply funny writing (see below for example), this is for you.

(Thanks to Brenna at Literary Musings for recommending this. She was right: I DID like it.)

My favorite quote from novel: "That false-hearted overcapitalizing strumpet was welcome to marry whatever Pacific Rim lout would call her missus."

A Short, Not-Incredibly-In-Depth Look At Satirical Novels

2011-06-06T11:44:00.000-05:00

As a Daily Show and Simpsons-watching, Wag the Dog and Spaceballs-loving, Onion-perusing sarcastic and mildly cynical jerk, good satire is one of the main reasons I drag myself out of bed each morning. I mean, who doesn't love a good satire? Nerds with no sense of humor, that's who!

Satire in literature's tricky though — lay it on too thick, and the book reads like you're just angry and have an axe to grind (The Devil Wears Prada...but, yes, I realize grinding the axe was part of the point), but lay it on too lightly, and folks may not get it (Ian McEwan's Solar, for some people). Of course, there are plenty of good literary satires out there — from American Psycho to Animal Farm to just about any Vonnegut or Tom Robbins, to Catch-22, to the greatest satirical novel of all time (in my view), A Confederacy of Dunces. (I maintain — though this may not be an original sentiment — that Ignatius Reilly is the basis for The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy.)

The key to good satire is wit. Slapstick satire is fine and well, but it doesn't have the same impact as smart satire. It's probably not a coincidence that the word "biting" is often used to preface both words when they're done particularly well. Satire must be marked by biting wit and biting wit is how satire moves from only decent to biting. Additionally, when times are tough and people are ticked off (i.e. times of total silly ridiculousness or when something is going horribly wrong) satire is often the richest. The financial crisis yielded one my favorite novels (satirical or otherwise) of last year, The Financial Lives of the Poets, by Jess Walter. And The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live (Tina Fey as Palin, or if you prefer, Carvey as Ross Perot) and The Onion are at their finest during the run-up to any election.

If you'll buy that theory, then these days, writers must be rather annoyed with the publishing industry. Two novels in the last few years — Adam Langer's The Thieves of Manhattan (my review) and Steve Hely's How I Became A Famous Novelist (with which I'm almost finished — review later this week. Preview: read it!) — take great pleasure in lampooning, with majestic cynicism, how novels are produced and published. Now, I realize two little-read novels does not a trend make, but it's at least interesting that these two novels similar novels came out about the same time. It's also interesting, as well as a tad ironic, that these novels about the dumbassedness of the publishing industry are being published by, well, publishers.

Anyway, the point here is rather simple and not exactly controversial: Satire is good and fun. I like it, and you should too. What are your favorite satirical novels? Why do you like satire?

The Pale King: Reading In The Moment

2011-06-02T10:42:00.002-05:00

Yes, it's very apparent that David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel The Pale King is unfinished. And, yes, even so, it's still very good. But it's not until the end — editor Michael Pietsch includes eight pages of notes Wallace had written to himself about further character development and plot ideas — that we understand just how unfinished The Pale King really is, and also how good it would have been.

Reading the 550 pages we do have, though, is, for the most part, very satisfying. Knowing full well you're not reading a complete story — and even if Wallace had finished, how "complete" the story would've been is debatable — you concentrate only on enjoying Wallace on a section-by-section, page-by-page basis. You read in the moment, and if you can do that, you'll be treated to some of Wallace's finest writing ever.

The Pale King explores the stories and back-stories of IRS "wigglers" at a Regional Examination Center (REC) in Peoria, Ill., in the mid-1980s. This setting allows Wallace to explore the themes of concentration, awareness, and most significantly, boredom. Wallace explains in a short snippet of a chapter near the end (though it was Pietsch who actually arranged the order, since Wallace left no hints about how the material should be arranged): "The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable."

The characters here are vintage Wallace. There's a man who's so generous, he's actually selfish because "...other people, too, want to feel nice and do favors...that he'd been massively selfish about generosity." There's a man named David Cusk who is plagued by a sweating problem (hyperhydrosis), and only intense concentration on a single external focal point will prevent a sweating attack.* A fellow named Chris Fogle, whose drug use increases his awareness, likens his calling to work for the IRS to a religious awakening (more on this in a minute).** A character we meet at the end literally levitates as he concentrates on an incredibly boring story an attractive woman is telling him. And a David F. Wallace appears as a character. David F. Wallace also happens to be our narrator, explaining how he came to write the book we're holding. His sections are fantastic examples of Wallace's (the novelist, not the character) unique gift to make it seem as though he is talking directly to the reader; that reading is actually a dialogue, not a one-way information download.

RIP

One particular 60-plus-page chunk of Wallace (the character, not the novelist) chronicles his trip to the REC from the airport. Only a writer as imaginative and eloquent as David Foster Wallace could render a traffic jam in such a way that it reads like a thriller. This was one my favorite sections.

But back to Fogle, whose 100-page "memoir" is the highlight of the novel. It's probably the most polished, complete part and it's the one section where the themes of boredom, concentration and awareness all come together. Fogle tells us about his college-hopping and drifting, and his father's death after getting his arm caught in an El train in Chicago — which is one the better-written, most riveting scenes I've ever read in a novel. Fogle takes a drug called Obetrol which increases his awareness and concentration.*** The idea here is that by concentrating, one becomes more aware (enlightened?) and thus can deal with boredom. Or, is it that the more aware one becomes, the better able s/he is to concentrate, even on dull tasks, and thus not be bored by them. These circular puzzles, are of course, another Wallace signature — and one of the many things that make reading him so much damn fun.

As Fogle's story continues, the point he (and Wallace) is making is that dealing with boredom through some combination of awareness and concentration is a gift. "The fact is that there is probably just certain kinds of people who are drawn to a career in the IRS," Fogle tells us. But not only is dealing with boredom a gift, it's also heroic.**** Fogle, as a student at DePaul, accidentally wanders into a graduate level accounting class right before a final. The instructor gives his students a pep talk about their future careers in accounting, and Fogle is mesmerized to the point of being converted.

But these bigger chunks only make up a few of the 50 chapters of The Pale King. Much like in Infinite Jest — which, as other reviewers have pointed out, The Pale King is sort of a companion to; IJ dealt with entertainment, TPK deals with boredom — Wallace throws out a lot of pieces of stories in different forms and lenghths, and assumes you'll trust him to reveal eventually how they're related, thematically or by plot. But since Wallace didn't live to arrange these how he'd have liked, the connection to the whole isn't always clear. Some of these are fantastic. Some are as dull as Wallace hopes you'll believe an IRS examiner's job to be. For these smaller pieces, you really do have to read in the moment — enjoying Wallace for Wallace. If you like him, you'll also like most of this. I really, really did.*****

*"As Cusk discovered the year after his grades had jumped in high school, his chances of an attack could be minimized if he paid very close and sustained attention to whatever was going on outside of him."
**(This quote doesn't so much illustrate the point above as it is just tangentially related or is a set-up for the "religious" experience Fogle has later. I include it here because it's awesome and made me laugh and nod my head in agreement.) "Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as — and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be — lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value or reason to go on living before they were 'saved.'"
***It had something to do with paying attention and the ability to choose what I paid attention to, and to be aware of that choice, the fact that it's a choice. I'm not the smartest person, but even during that whole pathetic, directionless period, I think that deep down, I knew that there was more to my life and myself than just the ordinary psychological impulses for pleasure and vanity that I let drive me."
****"Gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither I nor you have made, heroism. Heroism."
*****Of course, the alternate meaning of "reading in the moment" here is that I never wanted this book to end — not because it's the best novel I've ever read or because I was super attached to a character or for any reason at all having to do with the book itself. I read in the moment but because I knew as soon as I finished, I'd never read another new word from my favorite writer. That's just an impossibly sad idea to try to comprehend.

Anna Karenina: Tolstoy Translates To Today

2011-05-30T11:16:00.005-05:00

Anna Karenina (published in the mid 1870s) is a bit like a 130-year-old, still-in-use country house — the foundation is still solid and it still can be a wonderful escape. It's only the decorations and adornments that may seem a little outdated. But even so, they do little to distract you from the bigger picture: That it's a beautiful historical construction, whose purpose is just as relevant today.

If Tolstoy had been a 21st century American, he may well have been a staff writer for a sitcom like Friends or Seinfeld — pointing out the foibles and absurdity of everyday life, drawing out relationships between characters with a keen eye, especially as they rise and fall on the happiness continuum, all the while dealing with some rather big-picture issues; the meaning of life, i.e.

In fact, to me, the most interesting aspect of an incredibly interesting, fun novel is how these characters — especially Anna and Levin, the two protagonists, each struggle with metaphysical questions in different ways and how their choices, the results of those choices, and the search for truth (Levin decides life has no meaning but then sees Kitty, Anna feels her freedom stifled and wants to make Vronsky pay or he'll "regret it") combine to send them on roller coaster rides of happiness. One finds his answer (after a few precarious moments) and continues his ride, the other ends up underneath the train.

The supporting characters translate to today just as well, too — Stepan Arkadyich, Anna's brother, absolutely slayed me. He's that super laid-back, easy-going friend everyone has who's always trying to bring everyone together, who solves huge problems with his connections rather than with hard work, and who justifies anything he may have done to piss someone off by tossing off a "Sorry for partying, dude."

And, of course, everyone knows a Vronsky — he's the popular, athletic guy who is the first one you call when you have an extra ticket. But he's also got a bit of a dark side (to borrow from a State Farm commercial). He's got a different lady for each day of the week, but isn't willing to commit to any of them — mostly because they exasperate him. He doesn't truly understand them, especially when they begin to go crazy with jealousy.

Only the long discussions of politics and peasants, of foreign wars and farming methods — not critical to the plot's foundation — make it clear to the reader how old this novel really is. Still, this is a must-read for any literature fan. Contrary to somewhat popular belief, this is not a hard novel to read. (I mean, Oprah made it her summer pick a few years ago!) It's a straightforward story, and if you use an edition that lists the principal characters with all their names and nicknames, you've negotiated the only really major impediment to understanding the novel. I'm very happy I finally read it, but sad I put it off for so long.

Now, if somebody would just make a movie...

(I'm kidding, of course. Anna Karenina is one of most filmed novels of all time — at least 10 different versions exist. A British version from 1948 stars Vivien Leigh, who also had played Scarlett O'Hara nine years earlier in Gone With The Wind. A post for another time, perhaps, but Margaret Mitchell was clearly influenced by Tolstoy in some of her own themes and characters in Gone With The Wind. But if you've read this far, I'm probably not telling you anything you don't know.)

Top 10 Most Anticipated Books For the Rest of 2011

2011-05-26T10:09:00.000-05:00

Last year at about this time, I was counting down the days to Freedom. This year, by contrast, there's no single to-be-published book that has even close to the pants-wetting anticipation that Franzen's brilliant novel carried. Still, collectively, there are several high-profile novels from big-name writers to be excited about that are coming out later this summer and fall. So, since many of you lucky jerks are at Book Expo America in New York this week, learning first-hand about all the great novels to be published in the second half the year, I figured I'd submit my own list (in ascending order of publication date, not necessarily level of anticipation).

10. A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion, by Ron Hansen (June 14) — I loved Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy and Hitler's Niece, and Guilty Passion sounds like it continues his oeuvre of lucid novels crafted around a footnote in history. He's a really fun-to-read, under-the-radar novelist — I'd highly recommend checking him out, if you're not familiar.

9. Flashback, by Dan Simmons (July 1) — I will finally read Dan Simmons. I will finally read Dan Simmons. I will finally read Dan Simmons. I will finally read Dan Simmons. This actually sounds really interesting, too — part dystopian, part detective novel, part social commentary. Count me in!

8. Sex On The Moon, by Ben Mezrich (July 12) — Yeah, Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires was about as big a flop as The Social Network was a success, but I liked Bringing Down the House a lot — which incidentally, was about as big of a success as the movie 21 was a flop (at least in my mind — those floating, slow-motion cards were really irritating!). But I'm willing to give Mezrich another shot, and this sounds like a rather fascinating story. After all, if we learned anything from diaper-wearing Lisa Nowak's love-triangle meltdown, it's that astronauts make for some delightful drama!

7. The Leftovers, by Tom Perrotta (Aug. 30) — The "chronicler of the suburbs" throws a bit of a dystopian twist into this long-awaited follow-up to The Abstinence Teacher — which was a bit of trudge. And, frankly, The Leftovers, has disaster potential written all over it because of its gimmicky plot hinge (lots of people have randomly disappeared). I'm going to give it a try, though. Perrotta's probably best known for the terrific movies made from his novels, including Election and Little Children.

6. Nightwoods, by Charles Frazier (Oct. 4) — I bet I'm not the only one who read the crap out of Cold Mountain, but totally ignored Thirteen Moons. But I'm willing to let Nightwoods be the tie-breaker — though, I have to admit, the premise (a woman in 1950s North Carolina caring for her murdered sister's twins) doesn't exactly get my pulse racing.

5. The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides (Oct. 11) — Here is the mother lode! It's been nine years since Eugenides published Middlesex. Nine years: the exact same interval between Franzen novels. The hype for this won't be as huge, but The Marriage Plot will no-doubt still be a huge hit among book nerds, given that, according to The Millions, which published the first paragraph earlier this week, "the first paragraph sets the stage for what may be a very bookish novel." Woohoo!

4. Zone One, by Colson Whitehead (Oct. 18) — And here we have yet another post-apocalyptic/dystopian novel from a literary novelist. (Biting my tongue to keep cynicism at bay.) Anyway, I first read Whitehead two summers ago — his summer-y novel Sag Harbor is tremendous. And, it's arguable that Whitehead does some of his best writing on Twitter. He's a must-follow.

3. 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami (Oct. 25) — Published in Japan in 2009, the much, much anticipated English translation arrives in October. It's a brick: 928 pages. I'm making it my goal this summer to become well-acquainted with Murakami's other much-loved books — including Kafka On The Shore, Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — to get geared up for this one.

2. 11/22/63: A Novel, by Stephen King (Nov. 8) — It's true, the man can tell a story. But let's hope this story, which chronicles a time-traveler attempting to stop the Kennedy assassination, is a little better than the abysmal Under The Dome.

1. The Prague Cemetery, by Umberto Eco (Nov. 8) — Ever since I cursed and screamed my way through the damn-near-impossible The Name Of The Rose (I DO NOT care whether Jesus ever laughed or not!), I've wanted to try reading another Eco novel to see if anything else he's written is more accessible. I picked up Foucault's Pendulum and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana with the best intentions, but they're both still gathering dust. There seems to be a push-back against Eco lately, as some wonder how relevant he (and his massive ego, apparently) is to modern readers.

So there are mine. What did I forget? What's on your rest-of-2011 list?

Harold Bloom: Grumpy Old Literary Man

2011-05-23T12:39:00.001-05:00

Most casual fiction readers, I'd be willing to wager, know delightfully little about critic and Yale professor Harold Bloom. Part of me wishes I fell into that category, too — it would've saved me a lot of money buying books like Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, Genius, and The Western Canon (all of which are still unread) to make myself feel smart.

But part of me is glad I stumbled across him as a bright-eyed reader several years ago. He is, after all, widely recognized as our foremost literary critic. He's also the ultimate literary snob — which in some respects is a good thing, as he makes sure we don't forget about his favorite American writers like Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy. And dude also loves his Shakespeare, and the more often Shakespeare is "publicized," the better, I say. But his snobiness can certainly rub casual readers the wrong way, since he often only makes non-nerdy-literary-journal-headlines when he's complaining about something.

Two examples: In 2003, when the National Book Foundation gave Stephen King its annual Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Bloom wrote a cantankerous op/ed for the Boston Globe titled "Dumbing Down American Readers" in which he called King an "immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis" and expostulated that if King is the criterion for distinguished, perhaps the Nobel for Literature should go to J.K. Rowling. Ouch. And speaking of Rowling, a few years before that he'd written that Rowling's "prose style, heavy on cliche, makes no demands upon her readers." Like 12-year-olds are putting aside The Sorcerer's Stone and thinking, "Man, I wish this book was a tad more literary."

Because we're such stupid readers with horribly short attention spans now, Bloom is famous for being one of the first to begin making the case that the novel (at least in the form he likes) is dying. That was one of the themes of the one book of his I have read, How To Read and Why. While the book is more a chance for Bloom to tell you about why he reads and what he likes, there are a few interesting take-aways. He spends a lot of time talking about how important irony is — in fact, Bloom makes the argument that it may be the single most important component of good literature. That's a notion I can get behind. Looking for irony and identifying the specifics regarding how characters change throughout a novel (in reading, another technique of major import for Bloom) have really informed how I've read novels after reading Bloom's book. And it's helped me read more intelligently, catch more subtleties and arrive at the end of a novel with a better understanding of what a novelist was trying to accomplish. That's to say, I'd highly recommend How To Read and Why for any reader.

I bring this up now because Bloom just published another book (titled The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life), which he calls his "virtual swan song," as quoted in a rather academic, rather lengthy article by NY Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus. I'll be honest, I could care less about Bloom making his name taking on New Criticism, etc., etc. Unless you're a literary criticism grad student or a total and utter dork, this stuff is as dull as the day is long. But what is interesting about him, and the point of the post really, is just to share what I know about Bloom, and to point out what an enduring — and, frankly, important — literary figure Bloom is. And that it's sad that he's winding down his career. If you've read him, chances are you either love or hate him, but you definitely have an opinion about him.

What's yours? Which Bloom books (or articles) have you read? What'd you think and why?

Literature for the Apocalypse: A Top Five

2011-05-20T11:39:00.000-05:00

Yes, some Nostra-dumbass in California has predicted that we're all going to die tomorrow. You have to admit, the guy's theory — spelled out humorously in this Esquire article — is nothing if not interesting in its creativity. Based on a literal interpretation of the Second Epistle of Saint Peter (for God, a day is like a thousand years), and given that God gave Noah seven days' warning before the first flood, and given that the flood occurred in 4990 BC (no idea how he settled on that year), this Camping dude "reasonably" concludes that 7,000 years later is 2011 (if you include year 0, presumably), and "May 21 corresponds to the 17th day of the second month in the Hebrew calendar, the anniversary of the original Judgment Day." Man, that is some A+ delusional logic!

So, of course, this has gotten me thinking about end-of-the-world literature. There seems to be a dearth, at least in my reading experience. Perhaps that's because Hollywood's got that market cornered, churning out awful blockbusters like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 just as fast as Roland Emmerich can churn out recycled story ideas. But here's a selection — and I'm interested in hear yours too. (Though there is a fine line between apocalyptic fiction and dystopian, let's try to stay as close as we can to the former.)

5. The Stand, by Stephen King — I'm no great King fan, but I read this in high school and loved it. You know the story here, right? A killer virus leads to a post-apocalyptic battle of good vs. evil. The characters — King's signature — really make this story, though. I still have nightmares about Randall Flagg. (Now seems like as good a time as any to mention that, yes, The Passage is also an example of the genre — just pointing it out now, so you don't have to comment about what an idiot I am for forgetting it. ;) )

4. The Footprints of God, by Greg Iles — This smarter-than-your-average thriller has scientists storing a human brain on a computer, with near-disastrous results, i.e. the "Great Collapse" of the universe into a single consciousness. Sounds a bit fantastical, yes, but Iles is a master at bringing you along with him — delivering an impressive Philosophy 101 course along the way.

3. The Omega Theory, by Mark Alpert — I really enjoyed this thriller about a bunch of religious fanatics trying to destroy the world with a nuclear bomb so they can all go to heaven. The novel asks the question: If the universe is nothing more than an incredibly complex computer program, what could cause it to crash?

2. Everything Matters, by Ron Currie, Jr. — The first real example of literary fiction on my list, Currie's novel begins with its protagonist Junior Thibodeau born into a world of which he knows the exact date of its demise. So Junior has to go through life trying to make meaning out of a seemingly purposeless existence, or as he says at a particularly low point of his adulthood, "...life has never been any great f#$%ing shakes in my opinion. In fact, it's always seemed a messy and heartbreaking and overall pointless affair." With a few flaws, this is still a solid novel — I'd recommend it.

1. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy — This is the standard by which all post-apocalyptic, end-of-the-world novels should be judged. It is bleak, but beautiful.

So, if you have a second or two between finishing up the items on your bucket list before tomorrow, I'd love to hear about your favorite end-of-the-world books. What's on your list?

(Of course, if we silly sane people all are wrong and this Camping fellow is on the money, I look forward to seeing you all in the aisles of the Barnes & Nobles on the other side...)

A Morning With Thomas Friedman

2011-05-16T12:06:00.003-05:00

We don't talk much about non-fiction here at The New Dork Review of Books, so I hope you'll bear with me for a post — because this was exciting. Last week, I got to hear one of my heroes speak live and in person. At a convention in New Orleans, NY Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman delivered a witty, profound, educational and immensely entertaining keynote about how America needs to take the lead in solving some of the biggest problems we Earthlings are facing.

If you've read any of Friedman's books — I loved both The World Is Flat and Hot, Flat and Crowded — or his regular column, you know he has an easy, conversational style and a way to make complex geo-political issues easy to understand without much prior knowledge. Not surprisingly, that is exactly how he speaks, too.

After he made it clear that he's no dyed-in-the-wool greenie (On writing Hot, Flat and Crowded: "I wasn't inspired by environmentalism, I was inspired by the fact that America has lost its groove.") he continued on to make two really interesting points.

First, he explained that what the Great Recession really was (is?) was both the market and mother nature "getting together to send us a message: 'The way you are growing is not sustainable.'" There were three key characteristics of the recession that apply to both mother nature and the market — underpriced risk, privatizing gains and socializing loss — that made this message painfully clear. The subprime mortgage crisis was clearly a case where risk was underpriced, but certain entities were still profiting hugely...and when it all came tumbling down, the bailouts for the banks funded by taxpayer dollars were the ultimate example of socializing loss. In terms of the environment, as we continue to use cheap (underpriced) energy sources like coal-fired electricity and foreign oil, we're creating huge profits for (in some cases) energy conglomerates and foreign petrodictators. And the socialized loss is climate change and its effects — because the detriments of our continued dirty-energy growth accrue to the entire planet.

The second highlight was when he explained that, "when it comes to climate change, I'm just like Dick Cheney." That elicited more than a few gasps from the audience. But he explained: When Cheney was making the case for the Iraq invasion (which Friedman actually backed, but now regrets), he argued that if there was even a 1 percent chance that Saddam had nukes, we had do whatever was necessary to eliminate that potentially existential threat. Friedman called it a low probability, but catastrophic risk proposition. Well, doesn't the same logic apply to climate change, he said? The only difference is that there's much more than a 1 percent chance that climate change is going to cause catastrophic damage at some point in the future — so we should do everything humanely possible to mitigate that risk. And America needs to lead that charge.

Friedman spent the second half of his talk summarizing the arguments made in Hot, Flat and Crowded, so there wasn't much new there, for me anyway. He did acknowledge that there are still many climate change deniers out there (climate change is the "hot" part of Hot, Flat and Crowded) — "That's fine if you don't believe in climate change, that's between you and your beach house" — but the intersection of the "flat" (how interconnected the world is now) and "crowded" (overpopulation, and at a higher standard of living) are enough to show that our model of growth is not sustainable. If you're interested in this type of thing, I'd highly recommend that book. It's a very clear, concise explanation of why we do need a green revolution and why America has to lead it.

Now, back to fiction...

Any other Friedman fans out there? Which of his books have you read/enjoyed?

The Instant eBook: A Publishing Game-Changer?

2011-05-14T12:39:00.000-05:00

Last week, former Newsweek editor, current executive editor at Random House, and all around awesome dude, Jon Meacham, went on The Daily Show to talk about the Modern Library's re-release of Shelby Foote's classic Civil War Trilogy, to which he contributed a new introduction. Four minutes into the interview, though, Meacham switched gears to talk about an "instant eBook" he'd edited titled Beyond Bin Laden: America and the Future of Terror.

"How did you edit an eBook on the future of terror and Osama bin Laden's death? It just happened on Monday!" quipped Jon Stewart. "I know, that's why it's called an instant book," Meacham replies. The book is a collection of entirely new essays written by high-level foreign relations and terrorism experts collected together with an intro by Meacham...and published five days after the event that inspired it!

Beyond Bin Laden is Random House's first instant eBook, and as best I can tell, the first significant instant eBook by any publisher. In my mind, this is an idea that could be an absolute game-changer in the publishing industry. Even if you're not totally sold on the eBook idea, the instant eBook is actually something entirely new — sort of halfway between a weekly magazine and a rushed-to-publication book. But because it's all original content written specifically for this new format, the instant eBook can actually be more flexible and limber than either. Publishers are acutely aware that the key to getting readers to pay for content is to give them something they can't find elsewhere and at a high enough quality that readers "can't live without reading." If done right, as struggling publishers are looking for new ways to package content and engage new readers, the instant eBook satisfies both of those requirements.

It's no surprise that this first instant eBook was the brainchild of the former editor of a weekly magazine — Meacham says he simply emailed each contributor and ask them to write something on very short notice. (If you're unfamiliar, that's how we magazine editors roll...giggle, giggle.) So production costs are minimal and the possibilities are endless — even for fiction. Imagine a newspaper holding a creative writing contest and publishing the winners in an instant eBook — not something they could do in the newspaper itself, and much quicker than publishing it as a collection in a magazine or book.

Beyond Bin Laden is only $1.99 and is available for Nook, Kindle and iPad. I don't even own an eReader yet, but I couldn't be more excited about this. What do you think? Is the instant eBook a potential game-changer or a gimmick?

The Tiger's Wife: Atmospheric, But Edgeless

2011-05-09T10:31:00.240-05:00

"We're all entitled to our superstitions," a Franciscan monk explains to Natalia, a young doctor who is trying to understand the seemingly bizarre burial ritual of some Balkan villagers late in Tea Obreht's debut novel The Tiger's Wife. Later, Obreht drives home that notion of the intersection of superstition and fact, of the overlap of legend, history and memories: "He learned too that when confounded by the extremes of life — whether good or bad — people would turn first to superstition to find meaning, stitch together unconnected events in order to understand what was happening.” But unfortunately, this novel as a whole has a stitched-together feel as Obreht crosses back and forth between past and present, between legend and real-time story. And while the idea of the gray area between legend and reality is interesting, the story itself isn't.

Let's take a look: The story takes place in an unnamed country soon after the conclusion of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. Natalia has traveled to a remote Balkan village to bring medicine to an orphanage. On the way, she learns that her grandfather, with whom she was very close, has died. Mysteriously, he had wandered off to a village Natalia has never heard of, leaving no explanation for his wife, daughter, or granddaughter.

Natalia, who narrates the story, reminisces about the two stories, or legends, her grandfather had told her as she's grown up, which, by remembering (and telling readers), she hopes might provide clues to the circumstances surrounding her grandfather's death. One is about a tiger that escaped from a zoo and lurked near the village in which her grandfather grew up during Wold War II. Another is about a deathless man her grandfather, who is also a doctor, has encountered three different times at various stages in his life.

As these legends unfold, the questions for the reader become: How real is either? Could these two seemingly unrelated legends really provide clues to why Natalia's rational grandfather would've done something so irrational and inexplicable as go off to die without telling anyone where or why?

Obreht skips back and forth between the present and these two legends, building on each by introducing new characters and circumstances. Obreht writes beautifully, with drama, atmosphere and extraordinary sharpness. Her spot as the youngest of The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 is well deserved.

But the problem with this novel for me is that as clear and sharp as her prose is, the story itself is just as dull. The three strains of story never really live up to the original intrigue of the mystery behind Natalia's grandfather's death. As Obreht continues to build upon the legends, the initial immediacy of the mystery is lost. In addition, the individual strains of story have no real edge to them; for lack of a better word, the novel is just a bit bland. While lovely, Obreht's colorful prose tends to bleach the stories themselves because the mood is so dreamlike and surreal — an effect of the fact that we're always wondering the degree to which grandfather's stories are real personal history, allegories or just cute superstition-infused legends.

Obreht is an unequivocally talented writer, and no doubt other readers will get along with this novel better than I did. But this novel just didn't land for me. It reminded me a little of Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, a Booker-prize winning novel that many people loved, but of which I also wasn't a huge fan.

My Top Five Literary Nemeses

2011-05-05T10:31:00.241-05:00

The literary mood is darkening a bit over here. Neither of my two current reads — Anna Karenina and The Tiger's Wife — is exactly a cheer-fest. And there's still a giant Pale King-sized cloud hanging over my head. (To be clear, though, I'm not dreading reading it. I'm dreading finishing reading it.)

So what better way to raise my spirits than to sling some vitriol, right? If you've lurked around The New Dork Review of Books for any amount of time, you've probably noticed a passing reference here and there to my literary nemeses. But I've never really fleshed out specific reasons, so I thought I'd spend a post expounding upon those reasons — that is, why the five folks below (they're not in any specific order) generally make me crazy. Enjoy!


Brown, proud of himself.

5. Dan Brown — Let's start with the big kahuna. My being-bugged-by-Brown phase started right at the height of The Da Vinci Code mania. I actually enjoyed the book, but I started getting really irritated the more frequently I'd see Brown go on TV and, with a straight face and much earnest, talk about how the conspiracy theory he'd used as the plot of his fictional novel was very, very real. Talk about a guy drinking his own Kool Aid! And it wasn't even his own theory — he'd borrowed it from a book called Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and as a result, got sued for copyright infringement in England (somehow, he won, though). I've read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and even those authors admit at the end that nothing they put forth can be proven. Besides this, have you read Digital Fortress? It's my no-hesitation answer when anyone asks me about the worst book I've ever read. And to put a bow on this, Brown was more than three years late on his Da Vinci Code follow-up, during which time several employees at his publisher were laid off. And, THEN, The Lost Symbol turned out to be a total hack job.

Right back at ya, buddy.

4. James Frey — One of my biggest pet peeves is a big ego, and Mr. Frey has this in spades, as this wonderful article makes clear. The article also explains Mr. Frey's latest literary endeavor, which amounts to a sweat shop for writers. He gets all the credit and most of the profits, and the writers who did all the work have to sign ridiculous contracts that basically ensure the glory is all and forever Mr. Frey's. Therefore, it was with no small degree of schadenfreude that I watched the ultra-crappy sci-fi movie I Am Number Four fail miserably — that was the first film from a book his fiction factory produced. In addition, of course, there was that whole made-up-memoir and Oprah dress-down debacle. I was glad he got his comeuppance, but it's too bad it had little effect on his supernova-sized ego. Most recently, Frey published a novel (priced at $50!!) in which Jesus lives in modern times in New York...and is bisexual. Look, I'm not religious at all, but only a writer with such an I-don't-give-a-f$@k ego could have so little care for certain sensibilities and taboos.

3. Celebrities Who Publish Fiction — We've already been over this one in this post from last year...and that was even before Snooki published a novel! Writing a novel — or any fiction — is very difficult, and it boils my blood that publicists for air-headed celebrities hire a ghost writer, slap a famous name on the cover, and get published. It's the height of literary disingenuousness.

2. Michael Crichton — I don't mean to dance on a man's grave here (he died in late 2008), because I have enjoyed most of the Crichton novels I read...up until I gritted my teeth all the way through State of Fear, his 2004 novel that has a bunch of "eco-terrorists" purposely causing huge environmental disasters, like hurricanes and earthquakes, to prove that global warming is not a myth. Look, The New Dork Review of Books is largely a politics-free zone, but to fully explain why Crichton is on my nemesis list, it bears mentioning that I write about environmental issues for the magazine I work for, and environmental issues are important to me. State of Fear is an absolute turd of unmitigated anti-environmental and global-warming-skepticism propaganda. There were even rumors when the book was published that noted anti-environmentalist Dick Cheney had used his bully pulpit to commission Crichton to write the novel.

Genius, just not my kind.

1. Cormac McCarthy — Alright, I can already hear your boos. But doesn't everyone have that one famous novelist everyone else is ga-ga over, but that you can't stand? For me: Hello, Cormac. I've never not remembered three books more than I don't remember his Border Trilogy. I know I read them. Don't have a clue what happened in any of them. They all seemed like pretty much the same thing, didn't they? And I absolutely despised Blood Meridian — it seemed like another version of All The Pretty Horses, only much more confusing and needlessly violent. (Disclaimer: I loved The Road!)

So there you have it. But before I go, I'd like to bring up a few honorable mentions:

Honorable mentions: Jennifer Weiner, Borders executives, people who protest kids reading Harry Potter books because they have magic in them, Thomas Pynchon, Stephenie Meyer, book bloggers who do these things, Ayn Rand, blog hoppers who link-drop without commenting on content, Glenn Beck, idiots who post one-star reviews on Amazon to protest e-book pricing, Nicholas Sparks, your mom, people who don't like David Foster Wallace, Greg Mortenson.

Who are your literary nemeses? But to be fair, you have to post a good reason why this person or group of people bug you?

Who Can We Trust? A Look at Unreliable Narrators

2011-05-02T11:36:00.001-05:00

The first time I saw the movie The Usual Suspects, I was absolutely stunned at the ending.** (See below if you're lost.) The trick at the end is a brilliant piece of storytelling — one which helped writer Christopher McQuarrie earn a well-deserved Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 1996. That film was my first real brush with the concept of the unreliable narrator.

Later, in a college literature class, we read Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire — a total mindf#$k of a novel that also employs the unreliable narrator trick. The reader has to decide whether what narrator Charles Kinbote is telling us is real or just delusional fantasy. Of course, Nabokov is also responsible for probably the most famous example of the unreliable narrator — Humbert Humbert in Lolita, who almost succeeds in convincing his audience that his pedophilia is perfectly normal.

The concept of the unreliable narrator is pretty self-explanatory. But if you want a good definition, check out #39 on this list of 40 Literary Terms Every Bookworm Should Know. Whether via insanity or just simple misinterpretation of reality, the unreliable narrator gives us a myopic or slanted or just dead wrong account of events. Some readers are turned off by an unreliable narrator, arguing that it's a dirty trick because the narrator is generally all we have to know the story. We're not conditioned to consider that the story is taking place inside a larger fictional framework. We are trained to trust that narrator implicitly. After all, if we can't trust the storyteller, how are we supposed to really understand or enjoy this story?

I'd say that trying to understand what's going on from other intratextual clues is the enjoyment of such stories. You have to read between the lines, to interpret the "notes the author isn't playing." It's not always easy for the reader, especially because sometimes we have no reason to suspect the narrator is unreliable until some seminal event that clues us in. And then we have to re-look at the whole story in light of what we've just learned.

Can you imagine the craft and skill necessary to write something like this? That's the real mind-boggler, and it must be why there are so few good examples of this narrative technique. But one recent example, and the reason why the unreliable narrator's been on my mind lately, is Ida Hattemer-Higgins' novel The History of History. We're never really sure how sane Margaret is — as she tries to come to grips with memories she can't consciously remember. If you're a fan of the unreliable narrator technique (or just great fiction in general), I can't recommend The History of History enough.

Are there other successful examples of the unreliable narrator you've come across? Anyone read Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost? I've had that novel on my shelf for years and never read it.

Is the unreliable narrator a technique you enjoy reading, or something of a turn-off?

**(The movie came out in 1995, so it's past the statute of limitations for a spoiler alert, I think — but it you don't remember or haven't seen it, Verbal Kint actually is Keyser Soze, and has been fabricating the story the entire time. And then, "And like that, he's gone.")

A Visit From The Goon Squad: Time Marches On

2011-04-28T12:08:00.007-05:00

Music as a metaphor for the ebb and flow of life is a fairly common strategy in literature. But rarely is it employed with such hipness and fun as it is in Jennifer Egan's 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit From The Goon Squad. To drive home this music-as-metaphor notion, near the end of the novel, a character explains: "Hey Dad, there's a partial silence at the of 'Fly Like An Eagle,' with a sort of rushing sound in the background that I think is supposed to be the wind, or maybe time rushing past!"

In fact, the passage of time is the real rub in this series of 13 interconnected stories featuring several recurring characters. "'Time's a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?'" an aging music producer named Bennie tells an aging guitarist who is hesitant to play a show. Bennie, who owns a record label, and his assistant, Sasha, are really the two main characters. The novel goes back and forth in time explaining both their successes and failures. Sasha is a kleptomaniac with a checkered past — as a teenager, she'd run away with (you guessed it!) a musician, and supported herself by stealing, among other socially frowned-upon activities, in Naples. And Bennie struggles to come to terms with middle age and a failed marriage.

The crescendo and diminuendo of Bennie and Sasha's lives, mixed with those of several related characters, is what makes up the meat of the book. As time marches on, and mistakes are made, are the characters able to redeem themselves? And if so, how? And if so, is that redemption authentic?

The characters' quests for authenticity, whether real or not, is another one of the more fascinating themes of the novel — an appropriate theme for a novel about the music business, don't you think? One of the stories chronicles Bennie's high school days (from the perspective of a female friend named Rhea who happens to have a crush on him) in the late '70s in San Francisco. Bennie and his friends — mostly from upper class families — fancy themselves punks, but Rhea acknowledges that even with the green hair and dog collars, nothing is real until they leave their parents' houses and join the real world. Another story deals with a PR specialist who tries to rebuild a murderous general's reputation by hooking him up with a famous actress. And finally, the last story has a blogger (though in a futuristic way — because it's the year 2021) paying other bloggers to write nice things about a musician desperately in need of a big break.

Egan tells these stories in different voices and with different methods — one of my favorites is a faux magazine article, the tone of which bears more than a passing resemblance to a David Foster Wallace piece. There's also a story told in shapes that resemble PowerPoint slides — that story itself isn't as interesting as many of the others, but the form and ingenuity is, and this is where the music-as-metaphor theme is driven home in that the character Lincoln is obsessed with pause in classic rock songs.

This is a novel (four stars from me) much deserving of its Pulitzer — and on a related note, it's awesome reading a Pulitzer-winner that's not a stuffy, too-literary trudge. Read this!

Branching Out: Novels as Linked Short Stories

2011-04-25T12:19:00.001-05:00

Last week, Kerry at Entomology of a Bookworm put up a fascinating post discussing changes in how she reads since she started blogging. Her post really got me thinking about how, or if, or in what form this blog has changed my own reading habits. Here's what I came up with: This blog hasn't so much changed how I read as it's changed what I read. (We've already been over the fact that the blog has sped up my reading in terms of books-per-year.)

Here's one major example: In my entire 32 years of life before starting this blog, I'd never willingly read one of those interconnected-short-story novels. And the only one I had read — rather unwillingly in college — was Winesburg Ohio. Those types of novels have always been turn-offs for me. Given my preference for longer books — staying with characters and story for hundreds of pages — these tales-told-in-snapshot just weren't appealing.

But last March, a friend, having recently discovered my blog, lent me her copy of Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders — a National Book Award-nominated collection of interconnected stories about life in Pakistan. Soon after that, I agreed to participate in a blog tour for Colum McCann's Let The Great World Spin, a National Book Award-winning novel of stories about New York. And then, earlier this year, based on about 153 blog-comment recommendations, I read Tom Rachmann's The Imperfectionists, a novel of linked stories about an English-language newspaper in Rome. There's no two ways about it, all three of these novels are phenomenal. I loved 'em!

And now, I'm almost through Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Good Squad, which I'd avoided, despite the facts that I'd very much enjoyed the three novels-via-linked-short-stories mentioned above, and that it comes highly recommended by The Reading Ape, and that it won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and that it just won the Pulitzer.

The lesson here: I'm nothing, if not a stubborn reader. A Visit From the Good Squad is fantastic as well, and so having avoided these types of novels my whole reading life, now I've read four really, really good ones in the past 12 months. Amazing, right? See, it pays to get over your hang-ups and try new things! And it's almost all attributable to conversations via this blog.

And now that I'm over that hang-up, what can you recommend in the way of other great novels told as linked short stories? What are some of your favorites?

The History of History: High-Concept Fiction of the Highest Order

2011-04-21T11:09:00.004-05:00

The History of History, Ida Hattemer-Higgins' debut novel, is, simply put, an awe-inspiring piece of fiction. The genius of this fiercely intelligent novel — other than the fact that Hattemer-Higgins' prose is absolutely gorgeous — is that it's an unconventional, postmodern (fractured narrative, bizarre dream sequences, unreliable narrator) tale that still crackles with mystery and page-turning intrigue. It's the kind of novel you really only should read 20 to 30 pages at a time and then put aside to digest and puzzle out the significance of what you've read. Normally, with "difficult" fiction, that's easy to do. Not here — it's a story with a magnetism that won't let you leave it.

Margaret Taub is a mid-20s American living in Berlin, Germany in the early 2000s. As the novel opens, Margaret stumbles out of a forest, not remembering how she got there. Fast-forward two years — Margaret has settled back into her life in Berlin as a history student and English-language tour guide, but still has a significant gap in her memory before and after emerging from the woods. One day, she receives a mysterious note addressed to Margaret Täubner, summoning her to an appointment with a Dr. Arabscheilis. Despite the fact that she thinks it's a mistake, Margaret goes, hoping for some clues about her missing memory.

Then, the novel really starts rolling. Margaret soon becomes obsessed with the story of Magda Goebbels, the wife of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. As the Russians were nearing in the final stages of World War II, Magda murdered her six children in Hitler's bunker before she and her husband committed suicide themselves. Margaret, who is haunted by visions of Magda all around Berlin, wants to try to understand why. Was it an act mercy, or an act of evil? In the course of her research, she stumbles across a clipping about a Jewish couple who also killed their three children before being deported to a camp. To Margaret, that seems to be more an act of mercy, when compared with Goebbels'. But when is killing your own children ever morally justifiable?

Intrigued by Dr. Arabscheilis' wisdom after their first meeting, and becoming increasingly unmoored, Margaret returns frequently to the doctor who becomes her spiritual guide/guru. The doctor, an old woman with a giant head, is a wonderful character, imparting advice and constantly speaking in dichotomy (difference between story and memory, difference between anestheticizing memories vs. aesthetizing them). At one point, Dr. Arabscheilis tells her:

"You, my pet, are having an identity crisis that has become moral despair. It is impossible for the human animal to remember his or her own life without cleaving a line, a line of some kind, however capriciously zigzag, lazy, narcissistic, arrogant or, on the other hand, self-blaming and unforgiving, between right and wrong, credit and blame."

The novel's intricate plotting and Margaret's obsession with history allow Hattemer-Higgins to deal with a number of heady moral and philosophical issues, all the while bringing us along at a pretty fast pace as Margaret tries to figure out what happened to her...or what it was that she did. Throughout the book, we're constantly wondering about Margaret's sanity. Are her visions — Berlin's buildings turned to flesh, Magda Goebbels in the form of "hawk-woman," playing a weeks-long game of Hearts with a ghost — a product of her declining mental faculties, or simply beautiful dreams? "And a sense of beauty, my pet, to each his own, is the weir that staunches the flow of madness," the doctor tells Margaret in the later stages of the novel. The degree of Margaret's madness is the riddle Hattemer-Higgins presents her readers, and even at the novel's shocking, stupefying conclusion, that's never really clear.

Sadly, this novel — published in January 2011 — remains obscure to most readers. Most likely, that's attributable to the fact that many readers hear "difficult" and run screaming towards Dan Brown. But this novel isn't difficult in the Gravity's Rainbow or Ulysses sense. In fact, it's not difficult at all — it's just that it does require a fair amount of thought and concentration to get the most return on the reading investment. And even then, it almost certainly requires a second reading to decipher all the symbolism and philosophizing. Still, this is high-concept fiction of the highest order, and therefore, highly, highly recommended!