A Morning With Thomas Friedman

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?

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

"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

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

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. 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.")