Post #200: A Late Summer Edition of Literary Links

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

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

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"

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

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.)