The Art of Racing in the Rain: Stay the Course!

Wow — what an emotional wallop!  Even as a football-watching, beer-drinking, dude-lit-reading, red-blooded American male, I say the following without an ounce of sarcasm: Garth Stein's The Art of Racing in the Rain is one of the sweetest, most heart-wrenching stories I've read in a long time. I haven't been that near to bawling my eyes out while reading a book since I was like nine years old!

You've heard about this book, right? (No shame if you haven't — I hadn't until about 14 people recommended it on my Dog (Book) Post.) It's narrated by dog named Enzo. Enzo is annoyed that he doesn't have thumbs and can't talk, but comforts himself with the notion that in his next life, he'll be human. In fact, he feels like he's ready to be human now. (He also thinks that the domestication of dogs was a conspiracy by humans to prevent them from evolving further. If I were a dog, I'd buy that for sure!)

Enzo lives with Denny, an amateur race car driver, Denny's wife Eve and daughter Zoe. Life is good for awhile. But then it's not. Eve gets sick. Her parents meddle. And increasingly bad things happen. But Enzo sticks by Denny's side, both as a companion and a voice (so to speak) of reason.

Enzo is a dog, to be sure, so there is much he doesn't understand. But what he does, what he's learned from Denny, is that race car driving can be a metaphor for life. And so, the lessons learned on the track are just as applicable when the dog poo hits the fan in real life. Denny explains that the key to racing in the rain is to remember that "that which we manifest is before us." A driver must be proactive because what he initiates, he can control. What he reacts to, he can't. So, too, in life. And as things get increasingly worse for Denny, he's tempted to give in and quit fighting. But it's Enzo's companionship that carries him forward. Denny is an incredibly admirable protagonist, and you root really, really hard for a happy ending. You root so hard, in fact, you're willing to suspend disbelief quite a bit for a few parts (of course, other than the fact that a dog is telling us the story).

This is a must-read for any dog-lover. But if you're a crier, keep the tissues nearby. It's a quick, frenzied read. It's simple, but intellectually engaging. It's funny, but often very sad, too. I really liked it!

October's Compendium of Literary Links

It seems like long magazine articles are going the way of the woolly mammoth. Shorter attention spans and pressure on the magazine publishing industry have both contributed to slashed word counts on most magazines' feature articles. (The New Yorker, thank goodness, is a notable exception.) To me, this is all too bad. I love spending an hour immersed in a good 10,000-word piece. So, for this month's compendium of literary links, I'd like to highlight few really good, really long articles (among a few other things). Take your time and savor them!

1) Philip Roth Goes Home Again — This Esquire piece profiles Roth on the occasion of publishing his 31st novel, Nemesis. It gives a rare glimpse of the actual personality of an American treasure (to use a tired cliche) who has shunned celebrity. It's a must-read if you're a Roth fan.

2) Nicole Krauss on Writing Great House —Krauss penned this piece for the Huffington Post to explain how she developed the different elements of her new novel. If you've ever wondered how "writers get their ideas" but are too afraid to ask, this piece is an incredible insight — not just for the genesis of ideas, but how those ideas evolve over the course of working on a novel.

3) The Book Collection That Devoured My Life — I suspect that Luc Sante's book-hoarding, described self-deprecatingly in this Wall Street Journal piece, is just slightly more obsessive than 99 percent of book collectors. But it's still fun to read about. Also, here's a semi-related, only-semi-interesting note: I love literary coincidences. The day my friend Jeff sent me this article, my copy of Tom McCarthy's novel C, which I plan to start soon, arrived in the mail — with a nicely written blurb by Sante on the back cover. I'd never heard of Sante before that day. Good times.

4. Good Writers. Bad Men. Does It Matter? — Ostensibly, this article is a review of a biography of writer VS Naipul titled The World Is What It Is. The piece's author says that reading the biography unexpectedly caused him not to be able to read Naipul anymore. The article provides an interesting take on the separation of art and artist question. Pete Karnas, who writes the highly literary and incredibly smart blog What You Read, pointed out this article from a journal called In Character in his comment on my post last week about separating art and artists.

5. Something Rotten in the Facebook Status — Let's wrap up on a note of brevity and levity. Here we have a retelling of Hamlet...in Facebook updates. Thank you, NPR. My favorite: "Hamlet posted an event: A Play That's Totally Fictional and In No Way About My Family."

Room: "Human Kind Cannot Bear Very Much Reality"

A novel narrated by a five-year-old boy with the title water-colored on the cover? Awww, how precious, right? Not so. Not by a long shot. Emma Donoghue's Room is one of the most fresh, terrifyingly good novels I've read this year, but it's anything but precious. Room works for three reasons: 1) The originality of five-year-old Jack's voice. 2) The originality of the story itself. 3) How these two combine to create a work of fiction that leaves its readers absolutely floored.

First, Jack's voice: He narrates the story as any normal five-year-old would. He's curious. He's unintentionally funny. And he negotiates some pretty tricky existential questions. (Is Room still there if we're not in it?) But my favorite part of Jack's voice is how he points out the absurdity of things we often take for granted. For instance, Jack hits his head, an adult says "careful," and Jack wonders, "Why do persons only say that after the hurt?" Also, Jack explaining lottery tickets: "The little cards with numbers all over are called a lottery, idiots buy them hoping to get magicked into millionaires." That one slayed me!

Secondly, Donoghue's plot is bold. A woman is kidnapped and forced to live in a shed in the backyard of the kidnapper's house. She has a son by her kidnapper. The son lives the first five years of his life in captivity with his mother. Donoghue says the plot was inspired by real-world events. But imagining what that ordeal must have been like to someone who doesn't consider it an ordeal but as simple reality, and then telling it as realistically as it seems, is a tremendous literary feat. The only thing I'll say about the rest of the plot — and normally I hate when reviewers do this, but I can't think of a book for which this is more true — is that the less you know about it, the more rewarding your reading experience. That's how it was for me. But know this: It's not always smooth emotional sailing. It can be dark, it can be incredibly sad, and it can be frightening, in the sense of getting a glimpse at humanity's worst. That's really what I mean by "terrifyingly good."

Finally, the combination of Jack's voice and the creativity of the plot make for a novel that unpacks in such a way that we, as adults, learn about the world along with Jack. Inasmuch as any five-year-old can come of age, we practically come of age with him. It takes Jack's innocent perspective for us to see things like evil, celebrity, family and friendship in new and interesting lights. Additionally, the strength of the mother-son bond in the worst of circumstances comes through extraordinarily clearly as the plot unfolds. The connection could not possibly have been so strongly rendered with an omniscient narrator, or really even if the mother had been telling the story.

I can't recommend this book more highly. Because Room was on the Man Booker Prize shortlist, I took a flier on it and am absolutely delighted I did. Simply put, Room's one of the best novels of 2010.

(The title quote is from a TS Eliot poem. It is quoted by a character in Room, and is a near-perfect seven-word representation of the book.)

Should Art be Separated From Artist?

A few weeks ago, one of my favorite musicians tweeted about something rather politically inflammatory. It so ground my gears and I was so disillusioned, I wondered if I'd ever be able to enjoy his music again. But then I calmed down. Reason (somewhat) returned. And I let it pass. That episode got me thinking, though, about a question I daresay every person who loves music, movies, and especially books, must've considered at some point. What if you learn something about an artist you find objectionable, but you love the art? Does that influence how you evaluate his/her art? Thus, is it truly possible to separate a work of art from the artist who created it?

There are really two parts to these questions: 1) To what degree should a writer's lifestyle, politics or general disposition affect how you read and evaluate his/her work, if at all? 2) To what degree do autobiographical details show up in a work? In other words, at its most simplistic, are character/event/setting based on a writer's own life?

To me, the more interesting question, and the one that readers really should put some thought into, is the first one. The second one is interesting, but doesn't matter quite as much (in most cases). That's because every piece of fiction necessarily contains some aspect of the writer. What, exactly, and how much is true shouldn't matter strictly in terms of evaluating a work objectively. Those details will only matter in terms of taste towards subject — you won't read Philip Roth if you don't like stories about Jewish kids growing up in mid-20th century Newark, for instance.

So, what would it be about a writer's personal life that would cause you not to be able to separate a writer from his/her fiction? Would it be something about his/her personal life? As everyone knows, Ernest Hemingway was a unapologetic drunk married four times who offed himself with a shotgun. Not exactly a moral stalwart. Yet every high school kids reads at least The Old Man in the Sea, and he's generally regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. There's no question that bad, even morally reprehensible, people can create good art, but where is the line? IS there a line? If a modern writer is convicted of pedophilia, would we stop reading him? Seems like a no-brainer, but people still seem to love Roman Polanski's and Woody Allen's films, right?

How about politics or religion? Would learning that a writer was across the aisle influence whether or not you'd pick up his/her fiction? I'm not talking about novels by political figures with clear political agendas, like, let's say Glenn Beck's The Overton Window or California Senator Barbara Boxer's series of thrillers. How about if you're an evangelical Christian and you just learned that Vladimir Nabokov was an atheist? Is Lolita off limits forever? What if your favorite writer converts to Scientology? Is that a deal-breaker?

And what if the novelist is a celebrity? Doesn't that carry some pretty strong preconceived notions about how good the fiction will be? Let's be honest, Snooki probably hasn't committed Word One of her novel to paper yet, and we're already positive it's the worst novel of the last quarter-century. In that case, I'm sure we're right, as we are with Pamela Anderson, Lauren Conrad and Tyra Banks. But James Franco's book of short stories seems to have gotten an unfair number of poor reviews simply because no one believes a movie star can write. Doesn't celebrity — or even success in another field  — automatically notch down a novel in our minds before we even pick it up?

What if your issue with the person is tame and unimportant? You went to a reading, and the guy cussed too much or was wearing stupid-looking red sweater? Or, on the other side of the coin, what if there was something unimportant about a novelist that actually influenced you more to pick up her book? I've done this before — I'll readily admit that, on more than one occasion, I've picked up a book by a female novelist who is smokin' hot. Silly, right? But I guarantee you every reader has done something similar.

So what's my take? Easy. Art should always be evaluated separately from feelings regarding details of an artist's life. To most academics, I think, this is a no-brainer. But that doesn't mean it's easy. Feelings about a writer flit unbidden into the subconscious while reading, and we may not even know how those thoughts are influencing our ability to diagnose a work. Even Mein Kempf has literary merit, but is it possible for most people to read it objectively? Probably not. 

It seems like the inability to separate art from artist is something that has become more common recently. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe it has something to do with our celebrity-soaked culture where we want to know everything about everyone's private life. Maybe it's because the Internet has made that easy. Maybe it's because we're getting more shallow and less serious. Whatever the reason, the implications are scary. Let's reverse it. Let's be smart. From now on, let's endeavor only to evaluate literature on its merits, not what color a writer's sweater is. Deal? Terrific.

Of course, I can't wait to hear what you think. Do certain personal details about writers influence how or whether you'll read them, whether consciously or not? Which? Do you think they should?

An Across-the-Pond Book Bonanza

I don't know about you, but the Man Booker Prize is one of my favorite literary prizes. The reason: I'm a mostly American-centric reader, and so the Booker nominees (see below for a short description of what the prize is, if you're not familiar) are usually authors I'd never heard of, thus opening an entirely new world of literary possibilities, already vetted by some pretty prestigious peeps (well, presumably — I've actually never heard of any of the Man Booker judges). 

My next three reads — Room, by Emma Donoghue (which I started over the weekend); C, by Tom McCarthy; and Skippy Dies, by Paul Murray (who is actually Irish) — were all on the Man Booker longlist this year, and I've never read (or even heard of) any of those three writers until the longlist came out over the summer. The winner was actually Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question, which sounds okay, but I'm not getting a speeding ticket on my way to B&N to pick it up. (Additionally, after much prodding from the peanut gallery, I finally read David Mitchell a few months ago — The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which was also a Booker longlister. Wasn't my favorite book ever, but not terrible.)

In the past, I've found some stuff from across-the-pond novelists I'd never have heard of had they not wound up on the Booker list. Some I really liked — Sarah Hall (The Electric Michaelangelo) — some were a tad dull — Kiran Desai (The Inheritance of Loss). In both of those cases, I vividly remember being in a bookstore and picking them up on a whim, hoping to "get in on the ground floor" of a novelists not many of my fellow Americans may have heard of. Isn't one of the best book dork feelings recommending books to others that they end up loving?

Anyway, here's a (not at all inclusive) list of other British/Irish authors I've enjoyed: Ian McEwan, Ken Follett, Zoe Heller, Zadie Smith, Colum McCann and Nick Hornby. And here's a list of the best British writers since 1945, from The Times (London). There are several on here I've always meant to read, but haven't: Salman Rushdie, VS Naipul, AS Byatt, John Fowles, etc., etc.

Who are some of your favorite across-the-pond novelists? Anyone obscure or up-and-coming you'd recommend? 

The Man Booker Prize aims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. The Man Booker judges are selected from the country's finest critics, writers and academics to maintain the consistent excellence of the prize.  The winner of the Man Booker Prize receives £50,000 and both the winner and the shortlisted authors are guaranteed a worldwide readership plus a dramatic increase in book sales.