Juxtaposition: Profiles of David Mitchell and James Patterson

Enjoy this — it may be the one and only time you'll find David Mitchell, British postmodernist extraordinaire, and James Patterson, prolific purveyor of the Alex Cross series of thrillers, mentioned within literary shouting distance of each other. But because both published new novels this week, both were recent subjects of entertaining profile articles that I thought are worth pointing out for a few different reasons.

Let's take Patterson first. If you're expecting a good genre fiction-bashing here, I'm sorry to disappoint. Believe it or not, after reading the 10 Questions feature in Time, I gained a somewhat begrudging respect for Patterson. When a reader asks how he'd respond to critics who say he's not a good prose stylist, he responds simply that "I am not a great prose stylist. I'm a storyteller." I loved that!

Earlier in the piece, he had said that his writing is all about story, story, story. As a genre-fiction writer, he's right on the money, isn't he? I mean, who's reading genre fiction for anything other than for the escapism of an enthralling story? Story is king.

Without getting into a whole big thing here, in literary fiction, a so-so story can be carried on the strength of prose or other literary flair, but not so in mass-market thrillers, where a reader isn't examining the symbolism behind Alex Cross' color choice of necktie. So, despite the fact that he may not even actually pen all the novels that bear his name and despite the fact the ones he does pen may not exactly be works of literary art, it was refreshing to see Patterson admit that he's not James Joyce. And then he concluded by throwing in a barb at his critics as well: "There are thousands of people who don't like what I do. Fortunately, there are millions who do." I loved that, too — a genre fiction writer with a little edge to him! 

Secondly, I love that Patterson says his two favorite novels are Ulysses and One Hundred Years of Solitude. You can't help but respect that, right? (His new book, by the way, is titled Private.)

Now let's move from a novelist who enjoys reading James Joyce to a novelist whose writing has been compared to Joyce, as this wonderful profile article in the NY Times Magazine points out.  The article gives readers an engrossing, fun-to-read introduction to David Mitchell, by all accounts one of the more innovative and fresh novelists who has published in a long, long time. "Formal ingenuity...is just one feature of Mitchell’s excellence," says the piece's writer, Wyatt Mason. (Mitchell's new novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet came out June 29.)

The whole piece is great, but I loved the first few paragraphs the most — as Mitchell explains an encounter with a fan in New Zealand and how that episode has taught him to stay humble. "False modesty can be worse than arrogance," he says.  Indeed! This discussion of modesty is one Mason returns to later in the piece, when we learn from one of Mitchell's former professors, that modesty has always been one of his cornerstone qualities.

This is what I loved learning most about the well-traveled, worldly Mitchell, who enjoys a "cult following" and "'Lost'-like fanaticism" among his fans. One of the characteristics of novelists (and humans) that turns me off most is arrogance — hence, my seething disdain for Dan Brown. But despite his genius, Mitchell is just a dude — much like David Foster Wallace was, and part of the reason why DFW is my all-time favorite writer.

So, this article has greatly accelerated my timetable for reading Mitchell — in fact, now I'm really embarrassed to admit I haven't. But, I just picked up Mitchell's Cloud Atlas over the weekend, and Thousand Autumns (which, shockingly, was mostly well-reviewed by the NY Times' resident fiction hater, Michiko Kakutani) arrived in the mail earlier this week. I can't wait.

I haven't read Patterson either, but I enjoyed his responses to those questions enough that I'm willing to give him a shot next time I need a good plane read.

Help me out — any Patterson or Mitchell fans care to weigh in on their experiences with reading either?  

Top 10 Literary "Things" of 2010...So Far

Here we are, already at the midpoint of 2010. So let's take a post and look back at the Top 10 most interesting, funny, and stupid book-related events, stories or general happenings of the first 180 days of the year.  

10. Jonathan Safran Foer on The Colbert Report — It's very rare that a literary novelist makes an appearance on a mainstream TV talk show, so this was exciting. Let's just conveniently ignore the facts that Foer's Feb. 8th appearance was on a "fake" talk show to discuss his non-fiction book, Eating Animals, okay? Foer kept up with Colbert pretty well, which is significant as Colbert almost always gets the best of his guests, or at least flusters them to some degree. It's just a great clip. "Since you seem to be very interested in animal love-making..." 

9. Publish or Perish — This mid-April New Yorker piece laid out the e-book landscape and explained how iPad is changing it. The article is as complete and interesting as any piece you'll find on the changing publishing culture.

8. Walter Kirn Snubbed for Oscars (at first) — Note to readers: If you ever publish a novel, and that novel is adapted into a screenplay, and that screenplay is made into a movie starring George Clooney, and that George Clooney is nominated for Best Actor (and the movie is nominated for Best Picture), your invitation to attend the ceremony is far from a sure thing. Up In The Air novelist Walter Kirn eventually did get to attend the Oscars, but his initial snub seemed like a huge slap in the face to the real creative genius behind many movies.

7. Dan Brown is MIA — I don't have a link for this one, but in my view, when it comes to Dan Brown, no news is good news. I must say I find it refreshing that after the initial publicity bounce from last year's deplorable The Lost Symbol, we seem to have collectively decided to ignore Dan Brown. Kudos to us! 

6. Tinkers, by Paul Harding Wins Pulitzer; Heads Are Scratched — Though I still haven't read it, I have it on good authority that Tinkers is actually a very good book. Still, it seems very bizarre that the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded in April, was awarded to a novel actually published on January 1, 2009 and that it was a book very few had heard of and even fewer had read. 

5. R.I.P. J.D. Salinger and Jose Saramago —  The Catcher in the Rye novelist, also famous for his reclusiveness, died Jan. 27. Saramago, the Portuguese Nobel Laureate, probably most famous for Blindness, died June 18.

4. This Just In: Christopher Moore IS Funny — I'd put off reading Christopher Moore for years, but finally got around to Lamb in January. I absolutely loved it! On another note, because I love books and I love music, I thought, naturally, I'd love books about music — but I wasn't really a fan in my first foray into Nick Hornby. 

3. Sparks to Readers: Stop Miscategorizing Me! — And we have our leader in the clubhouse for the 2010 "Totally Un-Self-Aware Award." Nicky Sparks, who clearly didn't understand that photo-posing with Miley Cyrus wouldn't help his cause when attempting to make himself appear smart, tried to make the case that he's a literary, not romance, author. Anyone who knows anything about books (and terrible romance movies) laughed heartily after reading this March USA Today article, and then went about their day. 

2 . Millenium Series on Cover of Entertainment Weekly — Especially as EW has increasingly toed the People/US Weekly line, it was refreshing to see a novel show up on the front cover of a pop culture mag, as it did for the June 25th issue. I really gotta get to these Stieg Larsson books, or you're going to start wondering about my literary cred.

1. Amy Greene's Bloodroot is the Best Book of 2010...So Far — Bloodroot is simply mesmerizing.You should definitely check it out. If you do, I'll read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Deal? 

So what has caught your eye so far in 2010? What did I miss here? Any nominations of your own for Best Book of 2010...So Far (must have been published in 2010)?

Motherless Brooklyn: Brilliantly Defying All Convention

In his treatise On Writing, Stephen King says the spark for many of the best novels is when a writer combines two or more disparate ideas/topics/themes and then figures out how they can complement each other in interesting or unexpected ways. Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn is one of the best examples you'll ever find of this theory in action.   

To explain why, let's try to follow (an absurdly abbreviated version of) what must've been Lethem's thought process before actually sitting down to write: "What I want to write is a literary detective novel that pays tribute to the masters like Raymond Chandler. I like that. But I need something more. What if one of the characters has Tourette's Syndrome? Yeah, that'll add intrigue. But he can't be a punchline, he has to be sympathetic. And his relationship with language is how I'll make him sympathetic. Boom, novel."

Then, he sat down to write, and the book he produced (in 1999) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, turned out to be one of the most-read novels of the aughts, and is often cited as a favorite novel of all time.  

The plot is pretty simple: Gangster Frank Minna is murdered, and the four wise guys he's nurtured since orphan-hood (Tourrette's-afflicted Lionel Essrog being one of them) try to find out who killed him and why. Lionel tells us the the story in first person, as he wanders around New York City and then coastal Maine looking for clues and doing his best to manage his disease.

In my mind, Motherless Brooklyn succeeds spectacularly for two reasons: 1) The novel is incredibly inventive, and avoids cliche, when cliche would've been easy, and 2) It's very clear how much fun Lethem must've had writing this novel, which makes it fun to read.

First, how easy would it have been to make Lionel and his Tourette's a silly source of comic relief? Instead, Lethem uses Lionel's Tourette's in an  unexpected way: He uses the disease to show us how intricate and clever language can be. Lionel must use the "wall of langauge" as a way to protect himself from his disease-addled brain's attempts to destroy him. For Lionel, language isn't what sets him apart from what's normal, it's what helps him be normal himself. If he didn't have language, even nonsensical strings of language, as an outlet to oppose his other physical tics, his disease would get the better of him, rendering him useless. This is part of Lethem's trick to make Lionel a sympathetic and incredibly self-aware character, as opposed to a source of cheap laughs. He also has Lionel continuously explain Tourette's to us so that we not only understand it (see below for an amazingly written passage explaining Tourette's), but we also understand how his unconventional thinking is actually helping him solve the mystery.

Secondly, if we understand #1, then we can also understand that when Lethem has Lionel let loose with a string of language (Franksbook! forkspook! finksblood, i.e.), the effect is not meant to be comic relief. It's just Lionel being Lionel. But, those Tourette's word explosions (ghostradish! pepperpony! kaiserphone!), which appear frequently, sure had to be helluva lot of fun to write! If Lethem wants to be funny, he'll have his characters tell a joke, use a pun (i.e., soon after Frank's dead: "my mourning brain had decided renaming itself was the evening's assignment"), or toss in a word like "chucklehead" — which cracked me up every time. It wasn't until about two-thirds of the way through the novel when this notion of how much fun the novel had to be to write dawned on me. And that's the moment the novel really clicked for me. Lethem's not showing off or being superfluous, he's having a blast! And therefore, as a reader, you can't help but have a blast also. 

I read this book as the third in my personal New York trilogy (Let The Great World Spin and New York: The Novel being the other two). And while I'm sad to "leave" New York, I'm thrilled that I finished up with one of its resident poets. I'd always met to read Lethem but never had until now, and can't wait to take on his other stuff. I'd highly, highly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys detective novels, the complexities of language, and just great writing. 

Have you read Motherless Brooklyn? What'd you think?

(Side note: Motherless Brooklyn is currently being made into a movie —- though set in the 1950s instead of the late '90s. Edward Norton wrote the screenplay, is directing and starring. I can't find a firm release date, but some sites say late 2010.)

(Passage explaining Tourette's that I absolutely loved: "Tourette's teaches you what people will ignore and forget, teaches you to see reality-knitting mechanism people employ to tuck away the intolerable, the incongruous, the disruptive — it teaches you this because you're the one lobbing the intolerable, incongruous and disruptive their way.")

When Writers Write Outside Their Comfort Zones

Remember several years ago when John Grisham — master of the courtroom thriller — came out with a slim, satirical novel titled Skipping Christmas?  Reactions were divided. Grisham fans scooped it up and devoured it with a semi-surprised look on their faces that seemed to say "Well, there's no lawyery intrigue here, but this actually isn't half bad." Then, of course, there were the skeptics who, simply upon hearing the title/author combo, guffawed noisely and retreated to the New York Review of Books to learn what Hilary Mantel thinks about VS Naipaul. (Sweeping generalizations are fun, aren't they?)

Despite the risk and the resulting blood-pressure-hike for their publishers, writers who publish outside the basic genre or type they're known for is a relatively frequent phenomenon. Most recently typified by Justin Cronin, an erstwhile literary writer who just published the much-acclaimed apocalyptic thriller The Passage, these cross-genre efforts, more often than not, seem to meet with a fair degree of success.

Take, for instance, arguably the most successful and highest quality example of this cross-genre writing: Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth. Follett, known since the mid-70s for his international spy thrillers like Eye of the Needle and Lie Down With Lions, says in the preface to Pillars: "In the book business, when you have had success, the smart thing to do is write the same sort of thing once a year for the rest of your life." Certainly, there are many novelists, both good and crappy, following that formula. But Follett had always been fascinated with architecture and how these cathedrals not just were built, but were built so that they've stood for more than 800 years. So he did his research and published the 1,000-page epic. And the result was what Follett considers his "best book" and what readers have definitely made his most popular. Talk about a risk that paid off!

By way of further example, post-modern stalwart Thomas Pynchon recently published a detective novel set in the early 1970s titled Inherent Vice. Reviews are generally positive, and the novel's been acclaimed as Pynchon's most accessible work. Philip Roth (The Plot Against America) and Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen's Union) both published wonderful alternate history novels, way outside the zone of their typical literary fare. And then there's the case of John Banville. The Booker Prize-winning (for The Sea), undisputed literary novelist also writes crime fiction under they pseudonym Benjamin Black — almost as if Banville hopes to stay far clear of the cross-genre discussion by creating an entirely separate identity lest his genre fiction goes awry.

And let's be clear, sometimes it really does go awry. Again, our example is John Grisham, whose Playing for Pizza, a sad, silly swing-and-a-miss sports novel, has been roundly booed by his fans and unfans unlike. As a literary snob, I sort of wish there were more examples like this to make fun of. But, as I said, I must begrudgingly admit these novels by writers who defy their own conventions, seem generally to be successful.

So, what's your take? Do you agree that these cross-genre novels seem to generally work? And which novels/novelists am I missing? 

New York: The Book Review

Edward Rutherfurd's New York: The Novel delivers what it promises: A sprawling historical fiction that links generations of characters through significant events of the city's rich history. Beginning in the 1600s with the original Dutch settlers, we work our way through the Revolution, the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, the Depression and into contemporary times. The cornerstone characters are the "old money" Master family, who trace their roots back to the original Dutch and English settlers on Manhattan island. Over the centuries, though, the story brings in tangential characters from all walks of life that range from slaves to Italian immigrants who land at Ellis Island to a middle-class Jewish family.

But much of the joy of this book is the little-known nuggets of historical fact, and how Rutherfurd relates these episodes to his characters. For instance, did you know that to quell the Panic of 1907, when widespread unscrupulousness in investing and banking practices nearly brought down the entire financial system, President Theordore Roosevelt handed $25 million to JP Morgan and basically said, "Save us"? And he did.

These bits of trivia (Wall Street is so-named because it at first literally was a wall that protected Dutch settlers from Indian attacks) are the take-aways from the book because looking back, it's tough to remember which Master character made a narrow escape from the 1863 New York Draft Riots or the name of the Italian immigrant who helped lay bricks for the Empire State Building as it went up during the Depression.

But that's okay, because this is an event-driven novel. For the most part, the characters are simply the vessels through which Rutherfurd allows his story of New York to flow. They're there to be representatives of their time and as a way to interface with the historical events. In a novel that spans 400 years, there's not time to give these characters a full emotional range.
 

That said, it's also worth mentioning that Rutherfurd's style can be a bit grating at times. Even during the longer sections that span a few hundred pages and several years with the same characters, Rutherfurd writes in page to page-and-a-half sections, which gives the narrative a bit of a choppy, start-and-stop feeling. James Michener, who invented this historically hefty genre, writes better than Rutherfurd does, in my view.

The book winds up telling the stories of Gorham Master, a rich Wall Street banker, and his wife Maggie O'Donnell, a lawyer and descendant of the Masters' 19th century poor servants from Five Points. Though it takes more than 800 pages to get to the one part of New York's story that will really resonate with readers, Rutherfurd does a very commendable job of fitting his characters into a dramatic and harrowing 9/11 narrative. The wait is worth it for this part.

Overall, if you're a fan of the Michener-esque long historical novel, you'll probably enjoy this. I'd give it 3.9 out of 5 stars (yes, just slightly below four stars). I learned a lot from this book and, for the most part, enjoyed the three weeks I spent with it. It also was a lot of fun to read this book before, during and after trip to New York — and then visiting Battery Park, Wall Street, Trinity Church, the Empire State Building and other historical landmarks, all which figure prominently in the story. So if you have similar plans, that'll probably bump up your enjoyment of the book as well.