Husk, Leaf, and Paper

The List

2010-09-05T16:57:00.009-04:00

August 2009
Netherland - Joseph O'Neill
Brideshead Revisted - Evelyn Waugh
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Phillip K. Dick
My Life in France - Julia Child
The People of Paper - Salvador Plascencia
Fire to Fire - Mark Doty
Foundation - Isaac Asimov
Vile Bodies - Evelyn Waugh

September 2009
Dead In Dallas - Charlaine Harris
Club Dead - Charlaine Harris
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
What is the What - Dave Eggers
2666 - Roberto Bolano

November 2009
Genesis - Bernard Beckett

December 2009
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - Barbara Kingsolver
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
The Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley (re-read)
Franklin and Lucy: Mrs. Rutherford and the Other Remarkable Women in Roosevelt's Life - Joseph E. Persico

January 2010
(LSAT)

February 2010
In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan (4/5)
Zeitoun - Dave Eggers (4/5)
The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter - Peter Singer (3/5)
Working In the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won't Do - Gabriel Thompson (4/5)

March 2010
Cleaving: A Story of Meat, Marriage, and Obsession - Julie Powell (4/5)
Her Fearful Symmetry - Audrey Niffenegger (2/5)
School Lunch Politics - Susan Levine (3/5)
T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life - Lyndall Gordon (did not finish)
Marathoning for Mortals - John Bingham and Jenny Hadfield (3/5)

April 2010
Slow Man - J.M. Coetzee (did not finish)
Scarlet Sister Mary - Julia Peterkin (5/5)

May 2010

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro (5/5)
An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro (4/5)
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (4/5)
The Help - Kathryn Stockett (3/5)
The Crystal Cave - Mary Stewart (3/5)
The Hollow Hills - Mary Stewart (3/5)
The Last Enchantment - Mary Stewart (3/5)
The Parable of the Sower - Octavia F. Butler (4/5)

June 2010
Five Smooth Stones - Ann Fairbairn (4/5)
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston (re-read) (4/5)
Crossing to Safety - Wallace Stegner (re-read) (4/5)
The Bostonians - Henry James (re-read) (4/5)

July 2010
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (did not finish)
The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins (5/5)
The Knife of Never Letting Go - Patrick Ness (4/5)
The Parable of the Talents (did not finish)
Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins (5/5)
The Ask and the Answer - Patrick Ness (5/5)

August 2010

Solar - Ian McEwan (2/5)
Freedom Summer: The Summer that Made Mississippi Burn and Made America A Democracy - Bruce Watson (5/5)
The Magicians - Lev Grossman (3/5)
The Unnamed - Joshua Ferris (5/5)
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood (4/5)
The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today - Ted Conover (4/5)
Eating Animals - Jonathan Safran Foer (4/5)

September 2010
Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins (3/5)
The Lacuna - Barbara Kingsolver (4/5)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot (3.5/5)
The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver (4/5)
Hyperion - Dan Simmons (4.5/5)

October 2010
Monsters of Men - Patrick Ness (5/5)
The Fall of Hyperion - Dan Simmons (unfinished)
(Law School Applications)

November 2010
(Law School Applications)
The Life and Death of the Great American School System - Diane Ravich (4/5)
Feed - M.T. Anderson (2/5)

December 2010
Freedom - Jonathan Franzen (3/5)

January 2011
The Silver Chair - C.S. Lewis (re-read)
Born to Run - Christopher McDougall (5/5)
Oscar Wilde (did not finish)
Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami (did not finish)

February 2011

March 2011
The Big Short - Michael Lewis
Just Kids - Patti Smith
Flatland - Edwin F. Abbott
Mansfield Park - Jane Austen

April - June 2011

Fellowship of the Ring - J.R.R. Tolkien (re-read)
The Two Towers - J.R.R. Tolkien (re-read)
Game of Thrones - George R. R. Martin
Storm of Swords - George R. R. Martin
Clash of Kings - George R. R. Martin
Feast for Crows - George R. R. Martin
Room - Emma Donoghue
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
World War Z - An Oral History of the Zombie War - Max Brooks
Bossypants - Tina Fey
Brideshead Revisited (re-read)

July 2011

Planet Law School, II - Atticus Falcon
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling (re-read)
Dance with Dragons - George R.R. Martin
King of Torts - John Grisham
Law School Confidential - Robert H. Miller
Never Let Me Go (re-read) - Kazuo Ishiguro

August 2011

Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead - Orson Scott Card
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
Bleak House (re-read) - Charles Dickens

September 2011
Falling Man - Don DeLillo

The List

The Finkler Question - Howard Jacobson (Booker Prize 2010)
C - Tom McCarthy
The Lost Books of the Odysessey - Zachary Mason
A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan
Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart
Let the Great World Spin - Colum McCann (NBA 2009)
Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species - Sean B. Carroll (NBA 2009 )
Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy - Keith Waldrop (NBA 2009)
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice - Phillip Hoose (NBA 2009)
American Salvage - Bonnie Jo Campbell (NBA 2009)
A Happy Marriage - Raphael Iglesias
Portrait of a Lady - Henry James (re-read)
My Empire of Dirt - Manny Howard
Food Politics - Marion Nestle
The Crisis of Islamic Civilization - Dr. Ali A. Allawi
Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage and Presentation - Sharon Astyk
Food, Inc.: Mendel to Monsanto - Peter Pringle
Let Them Eat Junk: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity
Das Kapital - Karl Marx
As Is - James Galvin
The Penelopiad - Margaret Atwood
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
Saturday - Ian McEwan
Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon
Floodmarkers - Nic Brown
Home - Marilynne Robinson
The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver
The Summer Before the Dark - Doris Lessing
The White Man's Burden – William Easterly
Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity – Robert Jensen
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body – Courtney E. Martin
The Oxford History of the Biblical World – Michael D. Coogan
The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against Aids – Helen Epstein
The Enchantress of Florence – Salmon Rushdie
Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency – Barton Gellman
The Post-American War – Fareed Zakaria
What the Dead Know – Laura Lippman

Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins

2010-09-01T09:04:00.007-04:00

Mockingjay wasn't quite what I expected from the final third of this admittedly thrilling young adult fantasy trilogy. The first two books walked a delicate line between the somewhat conventional and the surprisingly fresh, or - maybe more pertinent - between the commercial and the avant garde. They were age appropriate and wholly familiar in their tropes, yet at the same time flirted with meta-narrative, containing nuanced examinations of friendship, loyalty, and attraction. They were satisfying on nearly every level.

Mockingjay is not nearly so satisfying, but that doesn't necessarily make it a bad book. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it's probably a better book, both for its refusal to pander to the reader's expectations and for its more willing embrace of the less commercial aspects of its predecessors. I came to Mockingjay (as I did with the Hunger Games trilogy in general) hoping to be titillated by good dystopic world building and pre-teen romance, and while the world building and romance are still there in flashes, Collins seems to have another goal in mind as she wraps up her trilogy.

The main characters are back: Katniss, still surly and fiercely independent, resisting the attempts of the rebels to make her their "Mockingjay," the symbol of the rebellion; her childhood friend Gale; other Hunger Games alumnae; and of course the irrepressible Haymitch, Katniss' Hunger Games mentor. The situation has changed, however - the Hunger Games have broken and given way to full-on rebellion. Katniss and her crew are housed in the long-forgotten District 13, a technologically advanced and draconian society, which is the breeding ground for the rebellion rising in the other districts. And while the power brokers from the previous books are off plotting in the distant Capitol, Collins gives us a whole new set of politicians and bureaucrats to mistrust - President Coin, of District 13, foremost among them.

Mockingjay is hung on a much looser frame than its predecessors. Kanitss must become the Mockingjay; the rebellion must go forward; they must rescue Peeta and the other captured Hunger Games tributes; they must advance on the Capitol and assassinate evil President Snow. It's much less a plot and much more a collection of sequential events, clustered around Katniss. To be honest, it's a disaster of a plot - linear and yet schizophrenic, dependent much less on a series of causes and effects and much more on some predetermined sequence of events. The previous books allow Katniss some agency once she enters the arenas of the Hunger Games; Mockingjay removes it from her almost completely. Although she manages to wrest some control during the fleeting scenes of battle scattered throughout the novel, and especially towards the end, Katniss is oppressively controlled through most of the novel, and it is this lack of agency that affects both the character and the plot.

Mockingjay could be a hot mess, a scatter-brained conclusion to a previously tight and controlled series; it could also be genius.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Collins, with this novel, has created an affecting picture of post-traumatic stress disorder and its effects. There's not a single character who isn't deeply scarred by the ordeals faced in the Hunger Games, not the least of whom is Katniss, who moves through much of the book in a kind of rage-induced haze. When I found myself concerned that Collins seemed to be skirting over the more essential actions of the rebellion, giving us reports without putting us in the action, so to speak, I realized that we are, like it or not, pretty firmly stuck in Katniss' point of view, and the alienation the saturates the novel is simply a manifestation of Katniss' own alienation. Katniss is, in effect, Harry Potter if Harry Potter had been written in absolute truthfulness - by this third novel, she is irreparably damaged by her ordeals.

Mockingjay is anarchic, distrustful, violent, and deeply unsettling. Katniss does get the boy in the end (though I won't say which one), but the "getting" is complicated and dogged with memories of trauma. It's ultimately unfulfilling, but I'm pretty sure that's beyond the point. Mockingjay wants to do more than fulfill.

The Magicians - Lev Grossman

2010-08-12T10:33:00.008-04:00

I'm not sure I quite get Lev Grossman's newest book, The Magicians. On the one hand, it's a genre-bending, sensitively observed treatment of a young man's life at a school for magic; on the other, it's a problematic and schitzophrenic novel that suffers from too much abstract framework and not enough attention to narrative.

The first half of the book is really exquisite, crack for grown-ups who still lust after books of the Harry Potter ilk - well-written tomes detailing lives more adventurous and fantastical than our own. It's written for those of us who grew up, as Grossman must have, reading Lord of the Rings and C.S. Lewis' Narnia books over and over, imbibing every detail and wishing that we too could step into Middle Earth, or Narnia, or through the looking glass, just once. And that's Quentin, the brilliant main character who at 17, seemingly set for a life of average brilliance at a Princeton or a Yale, instead finds himself set up at an elite school for magic in upstate New York. He's not a particularly happy young guy - Grossman adeptly describes him as walking with a slight stoop to his shoulders, as if expecting the world to come crashing down on him at any moment. And that, I think, is the root and soul of this wistful novel: how, in the process of growing up, we struggle to adapt and cope with what the world throws us, and how we either manage to survive and thrive, or crash and fizzle, or - worse than anything else - steel ourselves against the mania of life and move through the hours in a sort of glum haze.

The first half of the novel captures this theme beautifully, in scenes evocative of English boarding school novels. Though set in a backdrop of magical discovery, the Brakesbill sections are more interested in Quentin's journey of self-discovery, and they amble along with little else to propel them but impending graduation (after four years) and the promise of characters' growth. And, because of the delicacy of Grossman's writing and the detail he devotes to the magical world's dark and complex philosophy, these scenes largely work. At times, they feel rushed and truncated (four years in two hundred pages seems a bit of a stretch), but when Grossman drops from expository narrative into direct action of a scene, the magic really crackles.

The novel takes a bizarre turn about 2/3 of the way in. Newly graduated, Quentin and his girlfriend move to Manhatten to embark on the hedonism of young magicians, who have all the money and power in the world but no direction. Some life lessons are learned, and some hearts are broken, until an old friend from school shows up with the key to help them all enter the fictional fairytale land of their favorite childhood books. At this point, though still steeped in a kind of emotional realism, the novel begins to feel much more like allegory. The group of young magicians does indeed make it into the other world in search of a tidy quest, like the ones they remember from the books, only to find themselves, in the end, embroiled in a darker, more vicious battle than they had ever imagined, one that will tear them apart and affect the remainder of their lives to come.

The novel wavers through these scenes, and they never seem fully allegorical nor fully a part of the previous sections in the novel. The tones of alienation and abandonment are still present, but they're buried under the bizarre, still rather rushed, adventures of the characters. It's hard to know whether Grossman is participating in a send up of fictional lands, particularly Narnia, or whether he's trying to create his own contemporary version; regardless, the purpose is unclear, and these scenes feel flat and forced. When the character encounter some mild action and violence, Grossman seems unsure how to handle it, and the resulting effect is anticlimactic and, worse, boring.

The novel itself is anticlimactic, fizzling out rather than coming to any kind of satisfactory ending. It's also ambivalent, as Quentin wavers over what to do with his wrecked life, and as he trys to decide what will fulfill him.

But perhaps that's the point. Grossman, particularly in the beginning chapters, is an adept story-teller and seems in charge of his material. I have a hard time believing that he would allow the second half of the novel to go so wildly off the rails. Rather, I wonder if the trip through the land of Fillory isn't more of his meditation on coming-of-age, simply shifted into a different format. And the more I contemplate the ending, in which Quentin steps out the window of his high rise office building to join the magicians who have come fetch him, I wonder if it isn't simply an allegorical treatment for suicide. If so, I appreciate what Grossman is trying to do, but I can't help feeling incredibly unsatisfied, led down a path only to be disappointed by what was at the end.

The Ethics of What We Eat - Peter Singer

2010-03-02T13:18:00.003-05:00

True, I've been piling on the food reading these days. This is a fair assessment. But, honestly, the more I read about food, the more I want to read about food. This led me to Peter Singer, philosopher, ethicist, and author of the seminal animal rights text, Animal Liberation, who a few years back published The Ethics of What We Eat, his own journey through America's industrial food system and his search for how to establish an ethics for eating.

There are lots of similarities between Singer's book and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. Singer relies heavily on Pollan's work and cites him extensively; more obviously, Singer borrows Pollan's idea of tracking the food history of several different meals. While Pollan's meals are constructed by him, using three different "food systems," Singer looks at the food choices of three different families, each of which relies on a different set of principles in purchasing and eating food. He selects families that are pretty clear-cut representatives of different American sub-cultures - the meat-eating family that buys most of their food at Wal-Mart, the semi-vegetarian family who buys much of their food at Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, and the vegan family who buys most of their food through alternative avenues. He examines their food choices by looking at where the food comes from - the reality behind the labels - and tries to create an ethical hierarchy of the three family's choices.

Singer's book is oddly organized, by which I mean it's not, really. Rather than hanging the whole book on three evenly divided sections, Singer chooses instead to address issues as they crop up organically. So when it's time for a chapter on poultry production, there's a chapter on poultry production, and so on. The last few chapters are the most interesting, as Singer moves beyond the facts and label-scouting that have become pretty familiar in food-writing, and shifts into a more philosophical tone. It's fascinating to watch a "real" ethicist evaluate food choices and to see the process behind which Singer organizes his ethical hierarchy. Of course, as is obligatory, Singer ends his book with a chapter on what we should eat. (At this point, yawn.)

The Ethics of What We Eat is another good entry into the canon of intellectual food writing, and I recommend it for anyone interested in an ethicist's perspective on the whole food movement. (You get the added benefit that it's by Peter Singer, for crissakes - the man's a legend.) So if you're making a list of foodie books, add this one to it.

Zeitoun - Dave Eggers

2010-02-25T15:38:00.004-05:00

Some of you may recall my thoughts on Dave Eggers' What is the What, his nonfiction novel about one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, and his first long-form foray into writing the accounts of human rights victims. (See Eggers' Voice of Witness foundation for more information on this project.) Zeitoun is his second book along this vein, although it's billed as strict nonfiction, presumably because Eggers doesn't need as much novelistic license in recreating his main character's backstory.

[Disclaimer: Before writing this, I broke one of my cardinal rules and read a couple reviews of Zeitoun, so whatever I say will most likely be tinted with shades of other folks' opinions. I can't help it. For some reason, that's how I roll. Onward.]

Zeitoun's main character is Abdulraman Zeitoun, New Orleans resident, father of four, and small-business owner (he's a paint contracter and small-time landlord, to be precise). He's Syrian-American, an American citizen born and raised in Syria in a strong, sea-faring family; he's married to an American woman, Kathy, who helps him run his business; both devout Muslims, they have raised their children to be observant. The narrative describes the life of the Zeitoun family in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, during the storm, and in the subsequent weeks. Obviously, their perspective - that of Zeitoun and Kathy - is unique: not only are they invested residents of New Orleans, one of whom (Zeitoun) refused to leave during Katrina, but they are also members of the most marginalized culture in American society following 9/11. As their story unfolds, both Kathy and Zeitoun undergo experiences that are both indelible records of the horrors carried out after Katrina and microcosms of the paranoia and xenophobia that saturated the United States in the early, post-9/11 years of the Bush administration.

What is the What was a novel - a novel about a real person, but a novel all the same. Zeitoun, on the other hand, is chillingly, achingly real. Eggers writes with the uncluttered clarity of a journalist, and I appreciated all the more the submission of his own ego to the larger arc of the story. Even more importantly, Eggers refuses to make polemic a story that so easily could be used as an example in a larger critique of the Bush-era human rights violations; rather, Zeitoun is rigorously controlled, focused on the details and import of the Zeitouns' experience. Their experience speaks for itself, and Eggers is smart enough to know it.

It's similar, in many ways, to Tom McCarthy's 2008 film, The Visitor, which deals with similar themes but refuses to expound on them directly. Rather, both Eggers and McCarthy let their characters be real, breathing, living human people (which is always difficult, even in Eggers case, in which the characters are real people), rather than ideological mouthpieces.

Sure, there were more than a few moments when I had to remind myself that there was an author shaping the story, that our belief in the story is wholly contingent upon our trust in Eggers as a reliable author. After a while, however, I decided that Eggers (and, in fact, the whole Zeitoun family) has been nothing but transparent about their ordeal (you can read more about their lives on the Zeitoun foundation's website), and that it would be an insult not to accept their story as truthful.

The book is incredibly poweful. I can't tell you the number of times I stopped reading, looked up, and said, "Oh, my god," aloud. And I can verify that I spent at least an afternoon exploring strategies to extract myself from any kind of government participation. And I cried a couple of times.

So go read it... if you dare.

In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan

2010-02-23T10:13:00.002-05:00

Those of you who know me know my obsession with food and food writing. Among my favorite food writers are Mark Bittman, author of the inimitable How to Cook Everything Vegetarian (I should write a review of that!), and Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma. Love them both.

Recently, I picked up another of Pollan's books, In Defense of Food, a shorter read than The Omnivore's Dilemma and with a more practical focus. Although it draws on many of the same principles Pollan espoused in Omnivore, In Defense of Food goes further in laying down some simple rules for eating in our culture and effective strategies for "opting out" of what Pollan calls "the Western diet."

Pollan begins with a very, very simple maxim: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. While the first section of his book is dedicated to breaking down the problems with the Western diet, with our obsession with nutrition (what Pollan calls "nutritionism," in an effort to bring to light its ideological concerns), and with the power the food industry has over the Western consumer, the second section is dedicated to breaking down Pollan's initial maxim into practical componants. For instance, Pollan explains what he means by his injunction to "eat food" - what is "food"? Don't we eat it already? What isn't food? How do we tell food from not-food? And so on.

He gives practical, simple rules to guide us in how not to eat too much. He provides advice on why leafy plants are so very good for the body, and how the Western diet tends to eschew them in favor of meats and seeds. He points out the dearth of food culture in American society and encourages the development of one. He defends the idea of quality over quantity.

In short, In Defense of Food is sort of a primer to the wholistic view of eating and food that is championed by folks like Pollan, Bittman, and others - the idea that we don't really need "nutrition science" to tell us how to eat, but that we do need to step outside the current paradigm and re-align our way of thinking about food. It's a great book - simply and clearly written, and I particularly appreciate that Pollan spends a great deal of time examining the various nutritional studies that have been done and detailing their strengths and weaknesses. This kind of work is very needed.

In Defense of Food reiterated the themes and principals that I'd already encountered in The Omnivore's Dilemma, the documentary, Food, Inc., and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (to say nothing of the amount of food journalism I've consumed this year), and so much of it was a refresher course for me. Even so, I found it to be one of the most comprehensive and well-grounded of the wholistic food literature out there, and it's a book that I'll be forcing on all my friends and relatives in the near future.

You think I won't? Watch me.

Franklin & Lucy: Mrs. Rutherford and the Other Remarkable Women in Roosevelt's Life - Joseph E. Persico

2010-01-08T10:19:00.000-05:00

I received Franklin and Lucy as a Christmas gift from my boss, who sees it as his duty to educate me in all things Churchill, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. Having trudged through Doris Kearns Goodwins' No Ordinary Time (no review because, like another book I read at the same time, the very act of reading them was so demoralizing that I couldn't bring myself to think about them aftwarwards), I was apprehensive at the thought of beginning yet another Roosevelt book. Fortunately, this one was significantly smaller than Kearns' weighty (and ever-so-important) tome, so I decided to tackle it immediately after Christmas.

It was, in fact, a surprisingly easy and engrossing read. Though Persico's tone and treatment are both remarkably balanced, the subject matter itself is gossip-mag fodder. Obvs, fans of ER and FDR will no doubt be well familiar with the role that Lucy Mercer Rutherford played in FDR's life; however, as a relative newcomer to the genre ("Roosevelt Lit"), there was much I didn't know about FDR's primary mistress. This was the woman who shook up ER and FDR's marriage in 1918, and though supposedly banished, continued her friendship and relationship with FDR afterward, through her marriage and his bout with polio, through his terms as President, and who was with him the day of his death in 1945. Fascinating stuff.

In addition, I was pleased to find that Persico also spent a great deal of time discussing FDR's relationship with ER, as well as with his other "mistresses" - Missy LeHand, whose story is both heartwarming and tragic, Dorothy Schiff, and others. It's revealing of a different time when a man who held the Presidency for 12 years could have so many close relationships with women and yet not have it become the scandel it would most certainly become today. It wasn't that these relationships were entirely secret - a great deal of people were "in the know" - but there was much more discretion, it seemed, surrounding the Presidency that allowed FDR this kind of freedom.

Those who are more familiar with Roosevelt Lit might not find much new material - from what I hear, Persico's book is interesting more for its treatment than for any astonishing revelations. Even so, I found it an excellent entry-point into the fascinating lives of FDR and ER.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

2010-01-04T11:22:00.002-05:00

I am, shockingly, behind on reviews. In an attempt to catch up, here's something I read the weekend after Christmas.

My mom lent me The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society after she read it in a book club and enjoyed it. Though I'm not usually one for books with cutesy titles (I've avoided the series "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" largely because of the name), it was brief and promised to be light, and that's really what I needed in the weekend at home after a full Christmas.

As an initial matter, the authorship of this novel confuses me. Ostensibly, Barrows took over the manuscript after Shaffer couldn't complete it because of health issues; whether Shaffer eventually passed away from her health problems is hinted at but unclear. What's even more unclear is what role each woman had in shaping the manuscript, and so it's difficult to think of this book as the work of an author. Given its subject matter and style, I'm more inclined to think of it as the joint product of a publishing company, editor, and multiple authors. The thought that a book was written in conference diminishes somewhat the joy of experiencing it (at least to me); in this case, it also explains many of the novel's missteps.

Guernsey (I will dispense with the unwieldy title) is a novel in letters, which largely revolve around the central character Juliet Ashton, a newly minted best-selling British author living in 1946 England - less than a year after WWII had ended. The correspondence jumps between Juliet and a host of friends and relatives: her editor, sister-in-law, suitor(s), and other chums. A bulk of the correspondence, however, is devoted to a new acquiantance, Dawsey Adams, a farmer on the channel island of Guernsey, and with his fellow islanders, who describe to Juliet the trials they suffered under the German occupation of their island and the "literary society" (of sorts) they formed in response.

Of course the novel isn't really about this literary society, which is simply a means by which Juliet enters into the friendship of these island people; instead, it's about Juliet's slow mid-life, post-war re-awakening, and about the friendships that sustain us through difficult times.

Treacly subject matter, to be sure. Fortunately, the authors have imbued the characters (seen only in their letters) with distinct personalities and styles, and being essentially "small-town folk," most of the characters are quaintly colorful. The writing is lively and polished, and the novel moves seamlessly, easily through the progression of letters. It's quick and easy to read, and the characters are easy to love.

The novel is hampered partially by its structure. Story-in-letters is a useful technique, but I'm not sure it's enough to sustain a novel without suspending some serious disbelief. Obviously, the authors realized that developing back story and character within the context of letters was a tricky task, and they handle it as best as they are able - this essential information is inserted organically enough, as long as you ignore the fact that even the newsy letters of old rarely contained the level of detail and forthcoming that exist in Guernsey's letters. Additionally, the characters are so engaging that after a while you really wish to break free from the letters and see the characters actually doing something. The distinctions between letters and narrative are subtle, but there is always the sense that you are reading letters, and the immersion capable with a traditional third (or first) person narrative is impossible to sustain.

It's a sweet novel, and a delight, but it's little else. Tragedies are alluded to and drama is skirted with, but the novel insists on staying firmly inside beams of sunshine. There is a darkness in many of the characters, and there is definite tragedy in the very recent events of World War II, and I often found myself wishing that the authors had been more intent upon showing some of that darkness. At the same time, however, I can't shake the feeling that this book was manufactured specifically for the book-club set, and that grappling with darkness just wasn't the point.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - Barbara Kingsolver

2009-12-01T14:39:00.002-05:00

I've wanted to write about Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver, ever since I first read it a year ago. I read a rash of books at the end of last year that had some impact on me, but of them all, Kingsolver's book really changed my life the most. And when the weather turned cool again this fall, and the days became darker, I found myself wanting to read it again, which is not something I typically do, especially with a book read as recently as last year. But Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is that good.

It fits neatly into a sub-genre of memoir that has gained popularity in recent years: the "do-something-for-a-year-and-then-write-about-it" memoir. (No Impact Man and Julie and Julia come to mind as recently high profile examples of this genre.) Publishers keep churning these babies out, presumably because people like reading about such neat, ostensibly life-changing experiments. And, of course, that is what these books purport to contain; after all, if such experiments had not been life-changing, it wouldn't be worth much to write a book about it, would it?

So this is where I filed Animal, Vegetable, Miracle when I idly picked it up off the "Notable Paperbacks" table at the bookstore, and then idly took it home, and then idly began reading the first chapter. Kingsolver's take on the genre involves her family – a husband and two daughters – who move from their desert home in Tuscan, Arizona, to a family farm in the rolling hills of southern Virginia. Both Kingsolver and her husband grew up in this area of the country, and both feel that it's a return to their roots; for their daughters, both desert-born and raised, the move is quite a change, but it's also an adventure. Kingsolver takes this move as an opportunity, a move away the Tuscan food culture, in which food and water are imported from elsewhere, to a place where food can be (and is) grown all around her. The goal: for a year, eat only the food she and her family can grow for themselves or buy from someone they know.

Like all books of this sort, much of the beginning is devoted to explaining the "rules," and as with all these experiments, there are the inevitable concessions that must be made. In Kingsolver's case, these exceptions involve wheat milled in her county but grown elsewhere, and a single splurge item for each family member: coffee for her husband, spices for her, dried fruit for her children. Kingsolver also spends a great deal of time in the first chapters to detailing her family's reasons behind adopting this kind of lifestyle, and although her reasoning is sound, it's not entirely groundbreaking. Needless to say, the first chapters are something of an appetizer, a place where we get to know the dramatis personae and the location (which is a character in its own right, alongside Kingsolver and her family).

It's when Kingsolver begins to detail her year of eating locally that the narrative really unfolds. It's loosely structured around what Kingsolver calls the "vegetannual," a year in terms of crop growth, beginning with the first shoots of asparagus in early spring and continuing right through the harvesting of pumpkins and potatoes in the fall. Kingsolver refuses to adhere to a rigid structure, and each chapter blooms organically, centered around a different aspect of the successive seasons. One chapter is devoted to asparagus and morels, another to the mid-summer quiet period (during which the adults take a foodie vacation to Italy and encounter marvels), another to canning tomatoes, which occupies much of August. One of my favorite chapters involves eight-year-old Lily's egg business and details the careful planning for and arrival of the spring chickens, as well as Lily's near-obsessive devotion to poultry. Another discusses the intricacies of making homemade cheese.

The structure is where the implicit theme of the book reveals itself—though the expressed goal is to eat locally, it quickly becomes clear that eating locally, for Kingsolver and her family, also means eating seasonally. And it is the seasons, the "vegetannual," and the yearly observation of crops grown and eaten in their proper time that truly obsesses Kingsolver and makes her book so much more than a simple tract on eating organically. For eating seasonally means accepting both bounty and scarcity, of learning to do without, of learning to preserve, and of learning to accept that there is a time for everything. These are the lessons that Animal, Vegetable, Miracle really contains, lessons that are, by their very nature, so antithetical to our contemporary habits of wantonness and waste.

It doesn't hurt that Kingsolver is an adept writer by profession, and her proverbs and anecdotes are sprinkled with plenty of good humor and lyricism. At times, her writing drifts dangerously close to a treacly, worshipful sentimentality, but in general she retains good control of her lyrical monster and renders, on the whole, not only an important and timely memoir, but a well-written one as well.

The packaging of the book is one of its greatest strengths. Not simply a memoir by Kingsolver, it's also packed with text inserts authored by her husband, Stephen L. Hopp, describing the political background to many of the concepts mentioned. In addition, each chapter is followed by a short essay by the oldest daughter, Camille (eighteen when the book was written), detailing her perspective, and offering seasonal recipes and meal plans to accompany the content in the chapter. Finally, there is also a searchable companion website, which contains many of the recipes found in the book, along with other tips and tidbits.

For someone who grew up knowing little to nothing about growing, preserving, and cooking my own food, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was an eye-opener and a life-changer. It showed me the importance of our food choices and instilled in me a much more passionate relationship with food (and the culture that surrounds it) than I ever had before. If I could, I would give this book to everyone I know.

Genesis - Bernard Beckett

2009-11-02T15:33:00.000-05:00

I'm a sucker for a well-packaged book. It is very important to me how a book looks, how it feels, how much weight it carries in my hand. The tactile experiences of reading play a terribly important role in a journey through a book or novel - more often than not, I'll leave off reading a poorly packaged volume before I'm even finished with it. I can't help it. It's just the way I role, reading-wise.

Genesis, then, a novel by Bernard Beckett, is an appealing product from the outset: a small, slim hardbacked volume, no more than 150 pages and entirely unpretentious. The cover art is incredibly compelling - I must have spent a combined ten minutes staring at the front cover alone. I generally don't care for hardbacks, but Genesis is neither bulky nor weighty, and opened beautifully from the first page. It was, in a word, excellent airplane reading.

Genesis has been sitting on my shelf for the last month, since I took a break from reading to begin studying for the LSAT. I nabbed it off an Amazon Best-Of reading list because the blurb grabbed my interest; by the time I got around to reading it yesterday, however, I had forgotten whatever the blurb said that interested me. I came to Genesis with little idea of what I was getting into (per the usual, I didn't read the flaps before beginning).

It's a novel of rigid structure, spanning the four hours and three intermediate breaks of a student's oral examination for entrance into the Academy. Throughout the student's recitation of her subject of expertise (an important figure in her society's formation), we learn bits and pieces of the recent past, as well as the manner in which the contemporary society came into being. Though initially such a tight structure - involving, primarily, the Examiners' questions and the student's answers - might seem incredibly limiting, Beckett pushes it in unexpected ways, splicing the examination dialogue with bits of long narrative storytelling (on the part of the student), some carefully controlled flashback, and well-constructed scenes of the past, shown by hologram in the examination room. This surprising flexibility keeps the structure from becoming tedious, and it enables the story to gather speed quickly. Before we know it, we're engrossed in highly philosophic conversations between two historical figures and rushing towards an end that, as it unfolds, is in turns both satisfying and grotesque.

It's an excellent, quick, engrossing novel. Beckett exhibits excellent control over both his story and his style, the latter of which is spare and ironic, mercifully free of the clumsiness that clutters so much sci fi writing. It's not an entirely original concept, and the "surprise!" ending will not be such a surprise if you follow the writing closely, but the whole thing is so well-handled and so tightly executed that I found myself deeply impressed.

A suggestion: best read while listening to The Fountain's soundtrack.

Ursa Major - Third Eye Blind

2009-09-25T16:18:00.000-04:00

So there's one thing I can say definitively about Ursa Major, Third Eye Blind's first CD of new material since 2003 (BTW, WTF? what have you been DOING, dudes?): it's sure comfy. If you could wear the summers between 1997 and 2001, this is what they would feel like... maybe not quite as warm and mellow as a Snuggie, but certainly as comfortable as worn out jeans and your favorite flannel shirt. It's like this pair of khaki shorts from Abercrombie and Fitch that I got back in '97 or '98, when I was in high school: threadbare, crummy, and not suitable for wearing outside the house. But yet I do, and I feel damn liberated walking through Target with strings hanging down to my knees, in shorts from a store that used to make OK clothes until they went all tiny tweeny on us - wearing them a little out of irony (Abercrombie and Fitch? at 26? in 2009? please.) and a little out of nostalgia.

That is what Ursa Major feels like.

I know basically nothing about music other than how to say, "I like this" or "I hate that" or "this sounds like that," so I don't particularly consider myself a music critic. That said, Ursa Major sounds like vintage Third Eye Blind, with the same guitar sounds we all loved back at the end of the '90s and little development out of their original favorite chords. Ursa Major isn't experimental by any stretch of the imagination; it isn't even a new direction for the band. The tracks all sound vaguely familiar, mostly because we've heard bits and pieces of them before. Jenkins is operating with all the same ingredients, but he's just mixing them around in different ways... Ursa Major, more than any other Third Eye Blind album preceding it, evokes its predecessors with every tracks. You'll hear a little bit of Blue, more than a litle bit of Out of the Vein, and the faintest whiff of the debut album.

This musical familiarity isn't a bad thing (see above) because I've always liked Third Eye Blind's sound. It's nice to know that you can buy a 3eb album and know exactly what you're getting. However, if Third Eye Blind's hasn't really branched out or developed musically since Blue, neither have they developed lyrically. I appreciated Jenkins' writing when I was a kid, but something has changed over the last twelve years: I've grown up. And Jenkins, despite his increasingly pummeled appearence, hasn't.

Jenkins' lyrics work when they're honest... his writing may not contain much lyricism, but at his best he manages to evoke a raw brutality that contrasts well with the nearly-fluffy pop rock chords. (Who can forget "Slow Motion," from Blue?) In Ursa Major, he follows through with some great lines: "Where's my super secret stupid fucking pocket where I left my bungalow keys," (from "Summer Town") and "Sometimes a blowjob's not enough/Why can't you play/A little less rough" (from "Why Can't You Be"). Still, his little-kid petulance can veer into the precious, when he asks, in "Why Can't You Be," "Why can't you be like my water pick shower massager?" I don't mind when singers like John Darnielle work in that medium (see "International Small Arms Traffic Blues" from Talahassee), but Darnielle's irony makes it work. What makes Jenkins' lyrics like these flop is his god-awful earnestness.

This earnestness is at its worst when trying to philosophize or, tragically, politicize... Jenkins has the subtlety of a sixteen year old who's just discovered the world isn't all sunshine and flowers. "About To Break," not a bad track, really, showcases some of the worst writing: "For the social worker at the needle exchange/For the soft medicated and the hard deranged/For the lesbians at the bakery/Saying, 'Do you really hate me?'"

Never before have I bought a Third Eye Blind album and actively hated a track, but I guess there's a first time for everything: "One in Ten" is really dreadful. Take, for instance, this lyrical gem: "No chance I could be her boyfriend/I'm trying to flip butch girls again/We could see what life pretends/And why don't I still call a friend?" Musically, it's inoffensive (aside from being resoundingly dull), but the tale about trying to flip a lesbian seems straight out of a college fratboy playbook. Jenkins is in his forties, and this song made me want to tell him to grow up.

Ok, all that aside, Ursa Major is still pretty great. After all, it's Third Eye Blind, right? And when you've been a fan as long as I have, lyrical miscalculations and musical repetition isn't enough to keep you from enjoying an album. Like all 3eb albums, it's great for riding in the car with the windows down... I think maybe I'll just skip Track 5.

What is the What - Dave Eggers

2009-09-17T12:27:00.006-04:00

I am almost at a loss to know how to describe Dave Eggers' novel, What is the What. My recent habit in reading books has been to approach them with as little context as possible, in order that I might have the purest initial reaction (later, of course, I read countless reviews to find out how my reaction meshes with the general dialogue about a book). With What is the What, I did just that - my initial thoughts upon beginning the novel centered upon the author (thoughts described in some detail here) and not at all upon the story.

Specifically, I had some skepticism that Dave Eggers, whose only novel I had read (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) left me sort of ambivalent about him as a writer, would be able to pull off the many demands of What is the What. I was concerned that his attempt to write a story about a Sudanese refugee in first person would fail miserably, or - worse - that it would succeed in some measure but be a hackneyed, American-white-person tale of broad platitudes and easy moralizing (see the movie Crash for more on this genre).

Thankfully, thankfully, thankfully, I was wrong. Eggers manages What is the What beautifully. It was, at times, like reading a textbook on how to convincingly and authentically write a first person narrator who is so very, very different from yourself. Eggers' answer to this sticky authorial problem is simple: compassion. Within pages, I had forgotten that Eggers was writing... or at least stopped caring. He treats Valentino Achek Deng with complete compassion and with a total lack of irony or pretension... where other authors might play with the space between their experiences and those of their central narrator, Eggers ignores that space - in fact, ignores himself completely. Though the author appears occasionally, it's only in the structural frame on which he hangs Deng's story. The novel is both remarkable and engrossing.

Eggers structures the novel around two timelines, both moving forward simultaneously. The first involves Deng's life in Sudan, from his early childhood in a Southern Sudanese village to the civil war that drives him from his village to his travels through various refugee camps and his struggle to emigrate to the United States. This backstory is told in large chunks by present-day Deng, in his mid-twenties and living in Atlanta. This present-day storyline follows the robbery of Deng's apartment and his time bound and gagged in his living room (which gives him plenty of time to tell his backstory to the reader), along with the days following the robbery and Deng's subsequent (and sudden) enlightenment. Although Eggers occasionally shifts back and forth in his timeline (largely in the present-day storyline), he keeps his two storylines relatively linear, each moving towards a prospective climax and subsequent resolution.

Deng is a beautiful character: full of verve and intelligence, but also sufficiently sobered by the tragic events he's witnessed throughout his life. Deng isn't the long-suffering but perpetually joyful character so often caricatured in refugee stories; he is hopeful but often discouraged, faithful to his god but also despairing that god might not care about him after all. I rooted for Deng and desperately wanted him to succeed, but the story is such that you never know if the good life will ever come to him.

In fact, as I approached the final chapters of the novel, I began to wonder how Eggers would resolve this novel. The novel is 500 pages of very, very terrible things happening to this character (and many of his friends), and I began inwardly to beg Eggers to give Achek Deng a break. At this point, I didn't care if Eggers finished the book with a crushing deus ex machina - I only wanted Deng to be happy.

It's a testament to Eggers' confidence and talent that he didn't stoop to such a level. The ending is incredibly satisfying, but it's not an easy ending. Rather, Eggers allows his character to realize his own internal strength, to re-energize the hope he's always held inside, and to walk forward, literally, into the sunset. What is the What ends the way I wanted The Kite Runner to end - its open endedness refuses to provide a tidy closure, but it does provide a sense of hope.

When I finally finished the novel, I discovered the obvious: that it's based on the life of the real Valentino Acheck Deng, which accounts for Eggers' uncannily realistic representation as well as the bittersweet but authentic ending. Although it could be called a memoir, Eggers is too savvy to do that... he knows that Deng's story carries more power with the structural artistic license a novel is able to provide, and he's right. Even so, the weaknesses in the novel show in the structural kinks... a bit of clumsiness in the way Deng addresses passersby, as if he's telling his story to them, a little too-easy convenience in the way he finds every opportunity to slip from present-day into his backstory. Yet even those contrivances are explained (or at least rationalized) by the character Deng's final assertions that he must tell his story to anyone he sees.

This is a type of novel most appreciated when one is able to forget the fact that it's told by anyone other than Valentino Acheck Deng, and, happily, that's the way it reads, for the most part. It's Eggers' greatest achievement, this ability to sink us so deeply in the character that we forget Deng isn't real... only to discover, finally, that he is real, in a way. It's that discovery, and the discovery that Deng battles onward, upward, and more courageously than ever before, that makes What is the What a truly uplifting novel.

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

2009-09-08T15:15:00.006-04:00

How can I have not yet read The Kite Runner, you ask? Simple: give anything (movie, book, CD) enough hype, and I'll get more and more skeptical about it as time goes on. That's how it happened with Harry Potter, which was really quite silly - I dismissed the Harry Potter books as "soft-core" fantasy, kids' lit, and wasn't compelled to read them until I was in college and saw the first movie. Similarly, the enthusiastic response of just about everyone to The Kite Runner garnered a certain amount of skepticism. I decided it was Oprah's Book Club-bait, and when it started showing up on high school reading lists, that solidified my ambivalence. I'd get around to it one day.

"One day" happened this weekend when, discovering that the second book in Asimov's Foundation trilogy was just as pedantic as the first, I was at the beach and desperate for something to read. The bookshelves at the beach house contained lots of John Grisham and Alexander McCall Smith, but the only thing I was remotely interested in reading was The Kite Runner. It screamed beach reading - in the 300-page range (easily readable in a day at the beach), floppy paperback, Oprah's Book Club-bait. Yes, The Kite Runner was what I was looking for.

And I was pleasantly surprised. As I told Husband Dan, after spending time in the genres (Sookie Stackhouse novels and Asimov) it's comforting to be in the grasp of someone who really knows how to write. And Hosseini is a beautiful, authentic writer, whose evocative descriptions of pre-Taliban Kabul are achingly poignant in the post-9/11 landscape. Having little knowledge of Kabul outside of its recent prominence on the world stage and books I've read discussing the plight of modern (e.g., recent, Taliban-y) Afghanistan, it was revelatory to read about the ethnic and cultural landscape of Afghanistan pre-political upheaval.

The Kite Runner's narrator is Amir, an Afghan in his late thirties who's lived in the United States since he was a teenager. The novel follows a fairly traditional arc: other than a brief prologue, the novel begins in Kabul in the late 1960's and follows the life of Amir. The plot is divided into three classic segments, the first of which concerns his idyllic boyhood, which he shares with his father, known to us as Baba, a prominent Kabul businessman; their servant Ali; and Ali's son Hassan, who is Amir's closest friend. Per tradition, the serenity of his boyhood is necessarily shattered by both internal and external forces, and the second segment describes Amir and Baba's immigration to the United States and the life they make for themselves there. The third act brings the story full circle, as the worldly, adult Amir must return to Taliban-bound Afghanistan on a rescue mission of sorts, where he will inevitably confront the demons of his past.

You may as well call these segments Conflict Introduction, Conflict Development, and Conflict Resolution.

Really, the juxtaposition of beautiful writing and compelling characters with nearly textbook-precise plotting make The Kite Runner a bizarre read. Hosseini, perhaps in a move indicating that he is less comfortable with plot than he is with mood and character, creates a plot so neat that it nearly undercuts the very real horrors that it contains. Amir, troubled his entire life by his betrayal of Hassan's friendship, is provided redemption in the final act when he is given the opportunity to rescue Hassan's child from a fate worse than death. I can accept this classic redemption arc; yet Hosseini layers on the symbolic parallels so heavily that it's nearly impossible to focus on the human element involved in the redemption. (At his clumsiest, Hosseini has Amir wind up with a scar on his upper lip that precisely resembles the cleft-palate scar his friend Hassan once bore. Really?)

This slavish devotion to archetypes, traditions, and motifs of Western literature is probably what made The Kite Runner an Oprah pick, and also probably what landed it on school reading lists. After all, such obvious symbolism lends itself well to both high school classroom and book-club discussion: "So what is the importance of the kite as a symbol?" ::yawn:: Yet the story itself is saturated with the wildness of a culture that is so ancient and un-Western that I found myself wishing that the structure of The Kite Runner reflected at least some of the chaos evident in a post-9/11, Bush-policy-saturated world. The tidiness of the structure and accompanying symbolism creates the sensation that the punctuation ending this gut-wrenching story is definitive when it should instead be elliptical, and it relegates what should be a very great novel about modern Afghanistan to average, book-club fare.

Two Sookie Stackhouse Novels (Living Dead in Dallas and Club Dead) - Charlaine Harris

2009-09-08T09:40:00.005-04:00

No point in separating this into two reviews: the Sookie Stackhouse novels, as they're called (the inspiration for the True Blood series on HBO), are delicious genre trash, perfectly suitable for beach reading, and ultimately disposable. The books all serve the same purpose - mildly entertaining titillation - and save for the plot differences, are largely interchangeable. I'd say there's no point in continuing once you've read one or two, but I fully intend to buy another this week to sustain me between bouts of "real" reading. They're cheap and safe, and perhaps that's the ultimate goal of any genre fiction, after all.

Here's what you need to know, if you know nothing about the books or the series (like me, two weeks ago): Sookie Stackhouse is a "barmaid" in small-town Louisiana who, like so many genre heroines these days (Twilight, anyone?), gets romantically involved with a vampire and is inevitably drawn into his shadowy, supernatural world. In Sookie's world, vampires have recently come out of the closet because of the development of synthetic blood (TrueBlood) that allows them to exist in normal society without feeding on humans. It's an interesting concept, but that's not really the point. Obvs. The novels are mixes of fantasy, horror, romance, and mystery, and Harris dances among all these genres while blithely ignoring whatever rules they have established. She uses mysteries as her plot engine, but the mysteries are hardly dire or revelatory. She uses fantasy and horror elements as her setting (e.g., vampires, shapeshifters, etc.), but since there's little to discover and/or resolve about the existence of the supernatural in American society (as the real conflict would have taken place in the preceding years, when vampires came out into society), they rarely function as more than local color. Where Harris really shows her stripes is in her use of romance motifs and erotica, the scenes of which she obviously relishes and which provide some of the more satisfying elements of the novels.

The novels' strongest aspect is its central narrator, Sookie Stackhouse, who wavers between camp and pathos, but who is undoubtedly the glue that holds together all the technical elements in play. Sookie grounds the novels in, if not true reality, at least a reality that's vaguely familiar, something that lurks just on the other side of the veil in a simpler world largely created by fiction that needs simplicity to function but that occasionally breaks through the veil to reveal authentic motivation and character. Sookie is, inevitably, a character of genre fiction and so must operate within that realm, but underneath her faux-deep-South roots, affected poor-girl persona, and seeming endless delight in fancy clothes, lie sparks of a more developed character that Harris doesn't quite have the talent to fully realize.

It is, however, refreshing, after a solid year of frenzy produced by giddy teenagers, their giddy moms, and subsequently everyone else over the Twilight series (works of pure YA genre fiction dressed up in clever marketing and buoyed by Harry Potter-esque hype), to have a female narrator who has some agency, and Harris seems to be aware of the need for Sookie to be a strong, funny narrator in order to compete with the colorful supernatural (and predominately male) characters with whom she interacts. At times, this awareness can lead to a heavy hand, as when Sookie repeatedly reminds the reader how strong she is, or how she has her own mind, no matter what her boyfriend might say, et al., yet Sookie does play the necessary role in shaping events and taking matters into her own hands.

Harris falls prey to some of the more irritating tropes of the romance genre: the sex as violence motif is obviously worked to its fullest advantage, and there's plenty of gender stereotyping, though the male characters fall prey to this more than Sookie herself. Still, Harris does draw a clear line between S&M play and true sexual violence, which is far more than I can say for Stephanie Meyer and the bizarre sexuality demonstrated throughout the Twilight novels.

Clearly it's impossible not to draw a comparison between Twilight and the Sookie Stackhouse novels, but it's only because they've enjoyed their popularity at the same time. Sookie precedes Twilight by a good few years, and though both exhibit clear (and occasionally nauseating) trends in genre fiction, at least Charlaine Harris isn't trying to be anything else. She's embraced her career as a genre writer and has kept her books mercifully clear of allegory (::cough:: Stephanie Meyers?)... and on top of it all, has written some damn diverting novels in the process. Bravo.

Vile Bodies - Evelyn Waugh

2009-09-01T12:34:00.007-04:00

Is it enough to say that reading Waugh is terribly diverting? Enough that Vile Bodies is good enough for lit class but also devilish enough for beach reading? Is it enough to simply dismiss it as a glorious, tawdry gossip novel and leave it at that? If I hadn't broken into Waugh with Brideshead Revisited, I think it might be. I could praise Vile Bodies' snappy prose and its sharp wit and then go have a cup of tea without a second thought; however, after Brideshead (tremendous novel), it's hard to let Vile Bodies get along on its own (considerable) merits without evaluating its place in Waugh's catalogue.

The plot, so to speak, involves the partying set of London society in the 1920's and features an array of characters of all ages with amusing names (Malpractice, Outrage, etc.) who bump into each other now and again and have amusing, hedonistic adventures when they do. The central character is Adam Fenwick-Symes, one of the Younger Set, an aspiring novelist engaged to be married who finds himself with money troubles when his manuscript is burned by an overzealous customs clerk. Adam is useful as a point of view character, as he stumbles into a job as a gossip writer for one of the daily papers and happens to know most of the partying folks rather well. Through him, we meet and interact with Miles Malpractice, Agatha Runcible, Simon Balcairn, Lottie who owns a hotel, Nina with the aged father, and a host of others whose names flip past with all the wit and staying power (which is to say, none) of a well-timed pun. The adventures are amusing, the repartee snappy, and the pace blisteringly fast... but I finished the book with a distinct sense of longing, rather than of satisfaction.

I suppose I shouldn't slight Vile Bodies, as this is really the kind of work for which Waugh is known: sharp satire of 1920's British society, juxtaposing the carefree mores of the younger generation with the posh aristocratic ridiculousness of the old guard. One might say that Waugh is Britain's Fitzgerald, in that both chose to deal with the follies of the idle upper class, yet Waugh's treatment is almost purely farce and lacks Fitzgerald's melancholy wistfulness. In Waugh's portrayal of the generation wars, neither youth nor age escapes with decorum; in fact, all characters come off as boobs. They're either happy, youthful, wanton boobs or callous, forgetful aged boobs, but they're boobs all the same.

All this is terribly entertaining to read, given Waugh's controlled, biting prose, his gift for sharp dialogue, and his dry turn of phrase. Throughout Vile Bodies, he delights in recurring jokes such as Adam's on-again, off-again engagement to Nina, Adam's continual quest for the "drunk major" who owes him $1,000 and then $30,000 pounds, and Nina's dotty old father who can't keep anything straight; or he pulls out all the stops for gorgeous set pieces of wickedness, such as the intrepid Miss Runcible's walk of shame from No. 10 Downing Street the morning after a party. The novel does contain its tragic moments - the downfall of Simon, the banishment of Miles, the fate of Agatha - but they are treated with such characteristic dryness that they contain no resonance, brushing lightly against the main farce and then fading into the background. All we know is that these characters are no longer a part of the story and instead of feeling sad about this, we adopt Adam and Nina's bland acceptance and go on with our lives.

Vile Bodies is undoubtedly the work of a clever genius, but without the contrast of a more serious tone (of which Waugh is most certainly capable) to ground it, the novel floats away on its own lightness.

Foundation - Isaac Asimov

2009-08-31T07:43:00.006-04:00

I first became conscious of Isaac Asimov when I was eleven or twelve, searching through the library catalogs for Star Wars novels. I must have been searching under the subject "science fiction" because Asimov's name came up again and again, to the point that I began to get irritated with him for clogging up my Star Wars search. In my head, I pronounced his name "Ayes-mov" and had not the slightest inclination to read anything he'd ever written.

For a few years now, however, I've been meaning to try some Asimov, and I'd heard Foundation was the place to start (maybe I shouldn't have started here, but one has to start somewhere, right?). And if I'm fair, though I have other Asimov books on my reading list, after Foundation, I'm not sure I really care enough to try anything else Asimov has written.

Foundation is like a summary of a historical epoch, spanning 150 years, occasionally dipping down to sample the specific characters and events that shape the history, but for the most part skimming the surface in the service of showing broader and more comprehensive themes. The novel begins with a sketch of the character Hari Seldon, who will become the seminal figure in Foundation, referenced like a god or a prophet, and details how Seldon, using his scientific discipline, psychohistory (a mixture of sociology, psychology, and economics in the service of old-fashioned fortune telling), manages to establish a colony on the edge of the galaxy, far from the center of the Empire, in the service of lessening the barbaric results of the Empire's inevitable decline.

A mouthful, yes? As soon as you've grasped that concept, Asimov skips you ahead fifty years and details the first of the "Seldon crises" as they come to be known - fore-told political crises that the established colony (the "Foundation") must face and overcome in order for the proper historical timeline (that Seldon mapped for 1,000 years into the future) to be followed. And once you've really gotten to know the characters involved in that particular crisis, Asimov once again skips forward in time, and so on throughout the course of the book.

Asimov has an odd style: talky, philosophic, and exhaustively expositive. I'm accustomed to broadly categorizing novels as either plot-based or character-based, but I'm not sure Foundation is either. Rather, it seems to be concerned primarily with the broad arcs of political and sociological change, which makes it unlike any other novel I've read but also makes it a little tiresome. Asimov teases us with characters that evoke depth and relatability, yet he never leaves them around long enough for us to fully connect, nor for them to become fully realized. He imagines situations that promise menace and suspense, and yet somehow each once is solved through wordy confrontations and whiffy capitulations.

Perhaps the main reason why Foundation fails to connect is the overriding psychohistory of it all. Its culture (and major characters) operate on a historical timeline that has been predicted 1,000 years into the future; because of this pervasive inevitability, it's difficult to muster any real sense of danger or tension. It doesn't help that Asimov's litany of powerful political figures who help confront and resolve the Seldon crises all operate within this same attitude of predestination - they all move one step ahead of their opponents, which means the book is littered with speeches wherein the characters unveil their foreknowledge and how they have, consequently, crushed their opponents' plans. It also means that, once we pick up on this propensity, we have no fear that any of the major characters are going to have anything surprising happen to them. Honestly, it makes for a dull read.

The characters, worlds, and situations Asimov imagines are tantalizing, and the philosophy that runs beneath all of it is suitably brainy and theoretical - yet the sum of the parts doesn't make much of a whole. I kept wishing he had made them all into a very different novel.

Fire to Fire - Mark Doty

2009-08-25T11:25:00.011-04:00

Lord knows, I love Mark Doty. He's one of my favorite writers, as both a poet and memoirist - he does things with words and themes that make my gut clench and my "wow" reflex pump into overdrive. And, for me, that's what poetry is about, at its deepest, most elemental core: establishing a visceral connection with a reader, pulling the reader inside a poem with nearly terrifying momentum. Doty does that to me more than almost any other contemporary poet.

I went to the bookstore looking for one of his memoirs I hadn't read but instead came away with Fire to Fire, his 2008 collection of new and collected poetry. Since the only collection of his poems I own is My Alexandria, I figured Fire to Fire would be a nice addition to the shelf and also a way to view his twenty year career retrospectively. The volume is organized with his new work first, then skips back to the beginning of his career in the late 1980's and follows his succession of volumes published up through the 1990's. In this way, it's very easy to compare most recent Doty with earliest Doty, as they fall next to each other in the organization of the volume. As must be the case with most artists, the differences are are both surprising and revealing.

My familiarity with Doty's poetry is admittedly rooted in his earlier work, when he was considered an "AIDS poet" (and I suppose still has that reputation). It must be difficult, now that I think of it, to spend your entire career laboring (and trying to live up to) a definition created in your younger days and which is in some ways no longer relevant. Though the American AIDS crisis is no less tragic now than it was in the 1980's, it's less immediate. Its definition has changed, as have its voices. Reading a recent Doty poem about the ravages of AIDS would be like watching a recent production of Rent, and Doty understands that. He is no longer the "AIDS poet," and his new poems reflect a quieter, less outraged Doty, one who has settled into contented domestic bliss but who still has a keen eye for observing the world around him.

Take, for instance, "Apparition," in which Doty describes a peacock named "Hommer" at a garden center - he relies on his knack for writing birds, asking, "is the peahen/that hard to attract,/requiring an arc of nervous gleams,/a hundred shining animals/symmetrically peering/from the dim/primeval woods?" And yet, despite the shimmering beauty of his language, Doty ends the poem with a cute wink that seems a bit too characteristic these days: "And then the epic/trombone-slide-from-Mars cry/no human throat can mime/--is that why it stops the heart?--/just before he condescends to unfurl/the archaic poem of his tail." The man writes damn good animal poetry these days, but he has a tendency, as in this case, to spoil it with a neatness that doesn't suit.

It's this new(ish) tone that left me a little disappointed. His poems are clearly still quite beautiful, quite well-observed, still containing that spark of immediacy and contemporaneousness that makes his earlier work so jarring, and yet Doty is no longer interested in shaking us out of our suburban, traditional, middle class malaise - in fact, one might argue that he has in some respects become the person he once tried to awaken. Drenched with scenes from his NYC island, Doty's poems are finished with the sheen of well-fed, well-lived upper-middle-class city-dwelling liberal placidity. Does that sound too harsh for a poet I still love very deeply? Perhaps it's only because I wish I were at that place and had found the measure of peace he seems to have found in his life... perhaps it's that my affection for him (my desire for his well-being) pushes me to excuse the limpness of his recent verse. Whatever the reason, I can't bring myself to dislike his new poems, despite their shortfalls.

Maybe the real reason is that I have his searing early verse to look forward to when I finish Fire to Fire's initial segment, selections from his first volume, Turtle, Swan, which includes the titular poem, a lyric piece with gorgeous descriptions of the animals, ending with this verse:

I only know that I do not want you

--you with your white and muscular wings

that rise and ripple beneath or above me

your magnificent neck, eyes the deep mottled autumnal colors

of polished tortoise--I do not want you ever to die.

It's in poems like these that Doty marries his facility with language to the deep, unerring themes in his early work of love and, more presently, death. These themes are evoked throughout the selections from his earlier volume, including the beautiful "Tiara," from Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, and "Grosse Fugue" from Atlantis.

Through it all, though, as I trace my way through the timeline of his oeuvre, I am waiting for, comparing all poems to his magnum opus, "Atlantis," one of the great poems of the last fifty years and one of the timeliest of the twentieth century, in which Doty marries his lyric and elegiac tones so seamlessly, evoking not only the poignant beauty of his surroundings but also the hollow specter of a disease that affected his life so acutely. A long poem in six parts, "Atlantis" appears at first glance to be a rambling meditation but is in fact a tightly controlled exploration of a slow death, utilizing Doty's usual arsenal, as well as a persistent dream narrative and his penchant for grappling with the body/spirit dichotomy. In section three, a friend describes a dream:

Michael writes to tell me his dream:
I was helping Randy out of bed,
supporting him on one side
with another friend on the other,

and as we stood him up, he stepped out
of the body I was holding and became
a shining body, brilliant light
held in the form I first knew him in.

This is what I imagine will happen,
the spirit’s release.

Michael,
when we support our friends,
one of us on either side, our arms

under the man or woman’s arms,
what is it we’re holding? Vessel,
shadow, hurrying light? All those years
I made love to a man without thinking

how little his body had to do with me;
now, diminished, he’s never been so plainly
himself—remote and unguarded,
an otherness I can’t know

the first thing about. I said,
You need to drink more water
or you’re going to turn into
an old dry leaf. And he said,

Maybe I want to be an old leaf.
In the dream Randy’s leaping into
the future, and still here; Michael’s holding him
and releasing at once. Just as Steve’s

holding Jerry, though he’s already gone,
Marie holding John, gone, Maggie holding
her John, gone, Carlos and Darren
holding another Michael, gone,

and I’m holding Wally, who’s going.
Where isn’t the question,
though we think it is;
we don’t even know where the living are,

in this raddled and unraveling “here.”
What is the body? Rain on a window,
a clear movement over whose gaze?
Husk, leaf, little boat of paper

and wood to mark the speed of the stream?
Randy and Jerry, Michael and Wally
and John: lucky we don’t have to know
what something is in order to hold it.

"Atlantis" is quintessential, perfect Doty... the form with which I will compare all other Doty poems. It's not his fault that he wrote his best work ten years ago, nor that I consider it his best work. What's lovely about Fire to Fire is that the volume pulls it all together - the pretty, the honest, and the gut-wrenching - and provides a nice platform from which to view the career of a poet who has been, and remains, an important voice in contemporary poetry.

Where the Wild Things Are - Maurice Sendak, Spike Jonze, Dave Eggers

2009-08-24T07:40:00.003-04:00

So, the news is that Dave Eggers is publishing a novelization of Where the Wild Things Are, based on his screenplay for the movie and, of course, Maurice Sendak's original concept. A taste of the novel, "Max at Sea," is published in last week's New Yorker and, truth be told, left me confused as to how on earth this novel, based on a screenplay based on a children's book, will even work.

I've never been one of Dave Eggers' legion of fans. I've followed his career more by happenstance than anything else - happened upon A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius when it first came out (enjoyed it but have no enduring memories of it), happened upon the cult of his following in successive years, happened to resist and resent the adulation he seemed to inspire in the generation preceding me (perhaps one of the reasons I've never been able to jump fully on the Eggers bandwagon), and, most recently, happened upon Away We Go, for which he wrote the screenplay with his partner, Vendela Vida, and happened to find it one of the best films of the year so far. And now Eggers has entwined his destiny with that of Wild Things, so I have to grant him some good will.

Even so, it strikes me that only a particular kind of hubris would attempt a serious novelization of Wild Things, particularly after it's already been worked into a movie (one that promises to be as inventive and entertaining as the original children's book). It's a classic case of not knowing where to stop, of stretching a good idea too far and too thin, to the point that it begins to show wear and tear. One must ask of a novelization: what more will it add to the concept? Atop the picture book and the film, how will it deepen and expand the story? These are the questions I had as I came to Eggers' piece in The New Yorker.

Those questions weren't sufficiently answered, but they were quickly replaced by other, more urgent ones. In a novel of this type (documenting a story with such a long and auspicious history), what should be the tone? The point of view? Who is the audience?--that is, does Eggers expect to reach children, nostalgic adults, or both? To his credit, Eggers does manage to capture the frustration of a pre-teen boy rather well, and his characterizations (or rather, caricatures) of Max's mother, sister, and mother's "chinless" boyfriend are deft and amusing. The tone is more inscrutable, and the intended audience obscure. It seemed a piece perfectly suited to a young audience, and yet the novel promises a length and depth that might be challenging for children (though, given Harry Potter, perhaps our literate youth are far more up to that challenge than we think).

Most confusing of all, the piece neither seemed suited for an "excerpt" (not much of an arc), nor held promise of a rich story. In other words, there was too little arc for a short piece (a la New Yorker) and far too much arc to be a feasible section of a novel. Too much happens in this one piece: Eggers expands on the picture book but not by much, which left me wondering what purpose this excerpt will serve in the novel, how much novel will far before and after it, and if it's merely a bit of publicity for the upcoming film (and novel) and is in no way reflective of the actual arc of the novel.

A book like this--having a child narrator and yet still appealing to adults--can be done, and it can be done well. (The Neverending Story strikes me as a particularly analogous example.) In this excerpt, however, Eggers retains too much of the World and not enough of the Magic, sticking almost slavishly to Sendak's depictions of the Wild Things and forgoing his own license to create. I might still buy the book (and if so, I suppose this preview piece will have had its intended effect and render my current opinions moot), but I fear it will be an Eggers product that happens, this time, to disappoint.

The People of Paper - Salvador Plascencia

2009-08-12T09:00:00.001-04:00

Little Merced. Frederico de la Fe. Saturn. Baby Nostradamus. Merced de Papel. Cameroon. Smiley. Froggy. Mechanical Tortoise. I could go on, listing the seemingly endless stream of characters that crop up in Salvador Plascencia's debut novel, The People of Paper, but it wouldn't be worth it. In the end, they all sort of blend together. It's a short book, but it takes a long time to read, sifting through a fragmented story that jumps from Mexico to Southern California to Niagara Falls to New York to Europe, and that encompasses at least twice as many characters as those listed above. A man moves his daughter from Mexico to El Monte, a flower-growing town of immigrants in Southern California, where he wages war on an unseeable, unknowable foe, shielding himself and his gang in lead houses and mourning the loss of his wife. This war trundles the novel along and provides a tentative arc on which Plascencia hangs his many and varied digressions, which include tales of lovers (and ex-lovers), of Catholic mysticism, of creation and destruction. It's a veritable pastiche of a book, and so very earnest that it's hard to dismiss outright.

Plascencia's novel is not brilliant, but it tries to be. It's not much of a novel either, though it tries to be that as well. Instead, it's an undisciplined, post-modern ramble of a book, indebted to Marquez, Borges, and Pirandello, and more than a little derivative of all three. It contains moments of beauty, and also wells of authenticity, deep pores of sadness that you feel through the pages. Plascencia writes with intuitive abandonment, leaping through points of view like a gazelle, as if afraid to light on any for too long, for fear that the delicate shards of his prose will crumble under the weight of living, breathing characters. He employs a great many post-modern tropes - non-linearity, meta-narrative, typographic experimentation - as if tasting for just the right flavor, but he never really commits to any.

A wise (but not very nice) man told me once that good poetry should be "difficult, but not obscure." The same should be said of the post-modern novel; unfortunately, all too many of them rely on obscurity to assure their reputations as masterpieces. When you peel back the trope and gimmick and wordplay, as with The People of Paper, what is left is often the quivering soul of a novel - a soul that has the potential for brilliance, transcendence, and permanence but without the muscle to will itself into being. The ideas are all there; the talent and the artistry is there as well; yet diffused through so much fragmentation, they have little effect or resonance.

That's not to say that The People of Paper is a novel (purportedly) banged out in a flurry of inspiration like a Kerouac or a Faulkner (bullshit on both counts, by the way), even though it has that effect. Rather, it occasionally reads like the tediously crafted drafts one sees in writer's workshops - those revolutionary, experimental, deeply felt submissions that reek of hours spent finding the perfect sentence. While there's nothing wrong with writing either by inspiration or by elbow-grease, relying too heavily on either contains dangerous pit-falls, and somehow The People of Paper manages to evoke the negative side-effects of both extremes.

Listen, The People of Paper is not a bad novel, nor am I surprised by its publication or its accolades. This might be a case in which I am simply the wrong audience for such a novel and that, in failing to grasp or appreciate its scope, my criticism is invalid. After all, Plasencia has written a quintessentially post-modern novel - why, then, should it be subject to the rules of traditional criticism? Nevertheless, I left it baffled and more than a little unfulfilled: blinded momentarily by its emotional affect, occasionally captivated by its verbal prowess, but ultimately left with the sense that I've just experienced a monumental exercise and that the real novel, the true novel - the one that makes full use of Plascencia's undeniable talent - has yet to be written.

My Life in France - Julia Child

2009-08-11T09:07:00.002-04:00

A few weeks ago, I enjoyed a weekend with Julie Powell's memoir, Julie and Julia, which got me excited to see the movie (released this weekend, but I'm waiting to see it with Dan). When I read the book, however, I was disappointed that it didn't include more about Julia Child's life, as the movie seems to do. Come to find out, the movie is in fact based on both Julie and Julie AND Julia Child's memoir, My Life in France, which I picked up on Saturday and spent the weekend reading.

That, coupled with last week's viewing of a few French Chef episodes PBS kindly put on their website, has convinced me that Julia Child was one of the most endearing personalities of the last century, and led one of the most delicious, joy-filled lives. Granted, I learned as a young, young person that the memoir is not necessarily the best rubric for developing an objective opinion of someone's life and work (see Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer); however, Child's memoir is filled with such effervescence and ebullience, it's impossible to believe that she was anything but the way she describes herself: loud, funny, mawkish, curious, pugnacious, irreverent, and unrelenting. She was, on television and in the pages of her book, a larger than life character, someone who attacked projects with an enviable vigor and who really enjoyed living.

I guess I expected that. What I didn't expect when I picked up her book was the effortlessness of reading it, the uncluttered, unfussy, often very funny prose (granted, she had a co-writer, Alex Prud'homme), and the deep love for France and for her friends and family that emanates from the pages. Child also had either a prodigious memory or kept copious records of her life, for when she describes memorable meals (as she does often and with great delight), she does so in the meticulous detail of someone for whom those meals made a lasting, indelible impression.

I was also delighted to read about her relationship with her husband, Paul Child, ten years her senior, and a so-called "exhibits man" for the United States government. It was his job that took them first to Paris, then to Marseille, and eventually to Germany and Norway, and its his presence in the book that really grounds it. Julia doesn't waste time or poetry lyricizing about her husband, but her deep affection for him and his for her really permeates the pages. While wading through a culture and media that insist that all romantic relationships be comprised of fire and ice, of passion, deceit, and heartbreak, it's refreshing to occasionally come across a record of a marriage based on mutual support, affection, and respect. Though one gets the feeling the Childs' relationship wasn't one of shooting stars or roses, necessarily, it certainly appeared to be a loving partnership, filled with humor and grace.

And that's really the book in a nutshell: humorous and graceful, an easy read, and a delightful one. While the derivative, Julie and Julia, was a confection, My Life in France is like Child's famous boeuf bourguignon: warm and filling, something that will stick to your ribs after a very long day.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

2009-08-10T10:59:00.002-04:00

I guess it's impossible to write a review of Phillip K. Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? without comparing it to its 1982 (loose) film adaptation, Blade Runner. In reality, the two should probably be considered completely different entities, since Blade Runner is so very, very different from the novel, as I soon discovered. Unfortunately, what makes me want to compare them is that Blade Runner is a beautiful, incredible film, and PKDick's novel is merely an average sci-fi meander.

Although initially images of Blade Runner informed my reading of the novel, they sloughed away as the world in Androids became clear: while Blade Runner's gritty, dark, glistening futuristic universe has style and dimension, Androids' world is gray and flat, covered in nuclear fall-out dust, utterly lacking in affect. It's not that Dick doesn't fully realize his universe; he's just not a writer for whom setting conveys any real value aside from its ability to situate his characters and scene. He's not interested in descriptive vistas; he's interested in plot and movement. As a result, Androids' world takes on the dull pulse of the narrator - android bounty hunter, Deckert, as in Blade Runner - and remains a peripheral aspect of the novel's feel. Compared with the movie, which is a visual feast, the novel is disappointingly spartan.

The central plot remains the same - Deckert hunts a pack of rogue androids that have emigrated from Mars - but the emotional arc and discoveries are so vastly different. Androids includes some cultural markers that are absent in the movie, such as devotion to the recently risen religion, Mercerism, in which devotees use a technological device to bond with each other over shared experiences (a cathartic form of "group think"), as well as the vast importance of living animals as currency, markers of status, and channels of empathy. It is this last element, empathy, that is the central focus of Dick's novel: it's the way Deckert distinguishes an android from a human (androids lack the human empathic response), and it's also a central cultrual concern. For those who remain on earth, finding ways of developing empathy (such as the Mercerism ritual and the owning of animals) has become an almost single-minded pursuit, informing daily life to a distracting extent.

What's ironic, of course, is that though Deckert is similarly proccupied with empathy, over the course of the novel his empathic ability decreases with every android he "retires." While Blade Runner focuses on the interaction between Deckert and the androids and the organic revelations that evolve from those intractions, Deckert's musings on the ethical implications of his retiring androids is superficial, limited to his discovery that it's harder for him to retire an attractive female android than a male android.

Part of the effect of Deckert's detachment is that the reader moves through Androids in a kind of fog, experiencing events but forming little attachment to any of the characters. It doesn't help that though retiring the androids remains the central plot mechanism of the novel, the actual events are anti-climactic and certainly don't contain the sense of menace, or the sultry mood evoked in the film. Rather, we follow Deckert through the novel and ramp up our anticipation of his encounter with the final three androids - yet his retiring of them is summary and dismissive. This is probably because it's not Dick's main goal... yet it seems clumsy to use a precious plot engine as a superficial frame on which to hang half-developed philosophizing on the nature of depression.

Which is, I think, what Android turns out to be. Deckert returns to his wife only to discover that his beloved pet goat (bought for an astronomical sum) has been murdered, and his reaction is one of detached loss. Dick has tried to write a character-driven novel set in a futuristic world, yet his facility with plot betrays him and his discomfort and clumsiness with character development is baldly apparent. Perhaps this is why Blade Runner succeeds where Android fails: the film liberated the action movie from the book's wan pages and managed to create beautiful characters in the process. The book labors in its narrator's dull perspective and provides platitudes when it should provide spectacle.

On Sarkozy and Burkas

2009-08-06T11:37:00.002-04:00

Last month when French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared that the Islamic burka was not welcome in France, I shivered. I understand Sarkozy's intent—by denouncing the burka, he is attempting to denounce the oppression of women that, for him, the burka symbolizes. It's a noble intent, and certainly we should applaud the French President for attempting to make women's rights a crucial element of his administration.

And yet, his words disturbed me. Although he is trying to advance women's rights by denouncing the burka, Sarkozy's position simultaneously undermines the very agency of a woman to make her own choices. Certainly, the burka can symbolize the oppression of women—and, really, what better poster-object for oppression than a photograph of women whisking down Afghan streets draped in that eerie blue veil… the images are powerful—yet the burka is not intrinsically oppressive. In Sarkozy's view, it's hard to imagine a woman who chooses to wear the burka, and even if we could imagine that woman, it's hard to see her choice as originating from genuine religious piety rather than from deeply imbedded oppressive social mores. For Sarkozy, this denouncement of the burka intends to erase the danger of women's choices being influenced by those oppressive social mores, but, indeed, it really erases any choice at all.

If, in fact, Sarkozy's denouncement is truly intended to "free" women from oppressive social mores, it seems logical that he should extend that same denouncement to other social mores that oppress women. The burka is the marker of an Islamic woman just as high heels, makeup, and bras are a marker of the Western woman, but are burkas really any more or less oppressive than these familiar social conventions? Just as the burka exists to affect a woman's appearance—to shield it completely—so do high heels, makeup, and bras exist to the same effect; and just as the way a burka affects appearance for the benefit of men, so do these Western conventions we all love, or love to hate.

Granted, crucial differences are that the burka is a religious convention and that it has, particularly in Afghanistan, been tied to brutal governmental regimes in which women are not given a choice in the wearing of it. I don't think anyone would disagree that this is wrong—anytime a woman's choice or agency is undermined, her human rights are being restricted. However, Sarkozy's statement does not merely denounce the use of the burka in, say, Afghanistan; rather, he denounces its presence in France, where no government requires the wearing of the burka. And so simply denouncing it in order to remove the so-called social pressures that may enter into the wearing of the burka in France (family pressures, marital pressures, religious pressures) makes no more sense than declaring that high heels, makeup, and bras are not welcome in France either (because any woman knows that often the wearing or application of these beauty conventions has nothing to do with her desires but much more to do with social convention).

The subtle (and prurient) difference, of course, is that Sarkozy would not want to see such Western conventions disappear from France because he so clearly benefits from they way they put women on display, just as men in Afghanistan clearly benefit from the way burkas shield their wives from the eyes of other men. In truth, Sarkozy's denouncement of the burka (and implicit removal of agency from women who would choose to wear it) is no less oppressive than the regimes he tries to incriminate.

I generally like Sarkozy, and I like his wife, but this whole idea is just ridiculous.

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

2009-08-04T21:48:00.004-04:00

Brideshead Revisited is a damn near perfect novel, yet I'm nearly at lost to describe it right now. It's a twentieth century tragedy, a medieval yet modern love story, a tale of agonizing guilt, of sincere religion and false atheism, a tale of loss - and yet, through all this, possessing exactly the kind of joi de vivre that a novel like Netherland (from yesterday's post) lacks.

It is, simply, both a coming-of-age and a nostalgia piece: a monumental flashback in which an officer near the end of WWII looks back on the days of his youth and the time he spent at the great estate Brideshead and with the family who inhabited it. Charles Ryder, as he's called, finds himself encamped at this very estate with his army regiment, and this proximity incites the tale that follows. He recalls his student days at Oxford, where he falls in with Sebastian Flyte, an effete young member of the British aristocracy. Sebastian introduces Charles to his family, and so for a number of years Charles becomes wrapped up in their affairs - affairs that seem both sordid and mundane, and which gallop over fifteen years and three continents.

The novel succeeds based largely on two strengths: its characters and its writing. In Charles Ryder, Waugh has created an unflappable, deeply sympathetic narrator, who - though he rarely allows himself to be thrown off balance, manages to be a true friend and unjudging ally. In Sebastian Flyte - Ryder's foil, as unhinged as Ryder is stable - Waugh paints a sensitive portrait of a tragic life: Sebastian is always engaging, whether he's parading at Oxford, or in his cups in a European hovel. Sebastian's sister Julia is inscrutable for the first half of the novel and then, suddenly, she opens to the reader just as she opens to Charles. Their mother is less monster and more well-intended matriarch; their father and brother affable, if opposite, caricatures of mid-century British aristocracy.

They're just all so damned sympathetic.

And the writing - god, the writing. Waugh is lyrical without being showy, and he saves his sharpest observations for dialogue, which manages to be both authentic and revelatory. His meditations on religion, politics, guilt, wealth, and sexuality seem right at home in the mouths of his characters... perhaps because his characters are so well drawn in the first place. And when Waugh gives Charles, Julia, and his reader the kind of fulfillment for which they've been longing, adrift on a stormy Atlantic, he is... well, masterful:

At sunset I took formal possession of her as her lover. It was no time for the sweets of luxury; they would come, in their season, with the swallow and the lime-flowers. Now on the rough water, as I was made free of her narrow loins and, it seemed now, in assuaging that fierce appetite, cast a burden which I had borne all my life, toiled under, not knowing its nature - now, while they waves still broke and thundered on the prow, the act of possession was a symbol, a rite of ancient origin and solemn meaning.

Netherland - Joseph O'Neill

2009-08-03T22:02:00.002-04:00

Netherland has been billed as the first important post-9/11 novel - important enough, in fact, to be showered with accolades, important enough that it's known to be on President Obama's reading list. I have the paperback version, a slim blue volume with a tiny New York City skyline tracing the bottom front cover. The author glowers on the back beside his many blurbs, dark, large-eyed, and disapproving.

I was afraid it might be a pretentious novel; it's not that. In fact, I can honestly say I've never read another like it, and that post-9/11 flavor might be what makes it so unique. Its narrator, Hans, a temporary New Yorker via London and, originally, the Netherlands, is as sharply intelligent and observant a narrator I've experienced in a long while. He's a little too carefully urbane, a little too magnanimous, a little too assured of his own socio-economic status. It would be easy to dislike him, but there's an authenticity in his observations, and such a vulnerable sadness, that I felt drawn to him despite his unavoidable poshness.

The novel purports to be about (and I use "about" loosely) Hans' two solo years in New York while separated from his wife and son who've moved back to London and his strange, eerie relationship with Chuck Ramkissoon, a South Asian cricketer, entrepreneur, and (possible) gangster he's met through his cricket pals. Through Chuck, Hans reacquaints himself with New York in the two years following 9/11, and at first I thought O'Neill would, through Hans, provide a revealing perspective of what it's like to be of Eastern, or Asian, descent in the wildly xenophobic Bush America. And, in part, he does, though largely through Hans' political lens. Chuck Ramkissoon is, in the end, simply a fellow traveler Hans meets along the way, and I still haven't decided whether I'm refreshed or annoyed at O'Neill's utter refusal to delve too deeply into racial complexities. He seems content to let the melting pot of Hans' New York acquaintances to spread throughout the novel without fully (or truly) acknowledging its import or effect.

The novel's structure, in fact, was what impressed me most. Effortlessly non-linear, the novel glides seamlessly from Hans' two year bachelorhood in New York (commuting to London every other weekend), to flashbacks from the years before his marriage fell apart, to even earlier recollections of his childhood in The Hague and his relationship with his mother. Yet all the while, O'Neill keeps the novel moving forward towards its anti-climactic conclusion of Hans' tenure in NY and its far more satisfying resolution of Hans' fraught relationship with his wife.

It's an odd novel, providing another example of the seemingly inexhaustible postmodern ennui, although this one seems to beg more attention simply because of the solemn tones of 9/11 that toll throughout its pages. It's Hans' (and ultimately O'Neill's) detachment that makes this a hard novel to love. There is beautiful writing, to be sure, but it lacks heart, passion, or any sense of joi de vivre... and perhaps that's the point. The most beautiful, arresting writing is not centered on New York, as most critics would have us think, but focuses instead on Hans' recollections of his childhood, of his boyish love of cricket, and of his mother.

Yet even through it all, O'Neill delivers some rare gems, among them Hans' wife's reason for wanting to restart their marriage

It was not the case that I'd heroically bowled her over (my hope) or that she'd tragically decided to settle for a reliable man (my fear). She had stayed married to me, she stated... because she felt a responsibility to see me through life, and the responsibility felt like a happy one.

... I couldn't speak. My wife's words had overwhelmed me. She had put into words--indeed into reality--exactly how I felt.

Both the End and the Beginning

2009-07-30T22:10:00.002-04:00

Tonight I watched a dog wander off down the street, most likely to die. He was sitting in my friends' yard when we left for a movie, and I had watched him for a few moments before they came out to the car. He had the look of someone who had settled, perhaps for the last time. I circled him warily, because stray dogs, even in my neighborhood, generally keep on the move. Instead of coming to greet me, he watched me but made no effort to get up. He looked very sick.

We went to the movie and figured he'd be gone when we returned. When I pulled up next to the house, we could see through my headlights that he hadn't moved. One friend tried to approach, but this time the dog took off, trotting painfully down the street in the direction of my own house. I passed him as I drove by and tried not to think about my responsibility to this stray, sick dog, and what options I had at 9:30 at night. I felt in my stomach that knotted feeling, that need, almost, to vomit.

I tried to go about my business in the house - washing dishes, taking care of my own dog, folding laundry - but my thoughts kept returning to the dog I'd just seen. I couldn't help peeking out the front door to see where he had wandered. He was passing in front of my house just then, just wandering really, as if looking for something. I watched him make his way down the street and then, as if making a conscious decision, decide to settle in the neatest, most freshly mowed lawn. He was far enough down the street that he was just a dark tumor on the grass, lit by streetlight.

He's still there. I check on him every so often, but I can't bring myself to walk down there, to approach him myself. I still have the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and the very real urge to do something, maybe to help him. At the same time, I am telling myself that he's unsafe, that a sick dog is a dangerous dog, that he clearly didn't want to be helped - after all he ran away from Dewayne. (In another side of my mind is the voice that says I can't be bothered, that were I to try to help this dog my night and my resources would be spent, and I would suffer the very real emotional consequences of tying my fate to this animal.)

So is that it? Am I simply rationalizing away the call to help a sick animal? Or am I performing the more natural - though no more noble - functions of self-preservation?

Or, though this too may be rationalizing, am I respecting the right of an animal to die in whatever manner he or she may choose - be he dog, be he human?

Maybe all of the above. All I know is that right now I just feel sad.

3. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

2008-12-09T13:00:00.002-05:00

*Note: The Harry Potter books are cheating, to which I'll fully admit. For my rationale behind why I'm reviewing them now, go here.

It is our choices... that show what we truly are, far more than our
abilities.

It's summer again in Little Whinging when we open Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and Harry is once again at his aunt and uncle's house, having a generally wretched time of it. The first few pages are deceptively repetitive; this early in the series, Rowling still seems to be writing a typical YA series, in which she has to re-introduce the central character and situation, as if for those young readers who entered the series on the second book. It's possible, I suppose, but I can't imagine ever beginning a series with the second book. A travesty. Anyway, Rowling catches the reader up to speed, reminds us that Harry is a wizard, and relates the hatred that he receives from his extended family. It is also Harry's birthday, a trope repeated from the first book and which will continue through each book of the series. The adult reader might tire of the exhaustive introduction, but Rowling gets rolling pretty quickly, and The Chamber of Secrets begins and becomes a book unto itself.

Harry is visited at his aunt and uncle's house by the strange creature, Dobby, a masochistic house-elf who tries to warn Harry of impending doom should he return to Hogwarts. Instead, Dobby succeeds in getting Harry into deep trouble with his aunt and uncle, and Harry is locked in his room for what might be eternity. Luckily, a set of Weasleys (always handy in a pinch) show up in a flying car to spirit Harry away to the Weasley household called the Burrows. Rowling seems to revel in Harry's delight at the Weasley house, and her detail in this chapter is really fantastic; Harry wants to live with the Weasleys, and so do we.

It doesn't take long for the year at Hogwarts to begin, and it's marked with various mishaps along the way. The central danger, this time, is that students keep showing up "petrified" (frozen), and it is soon revealed that the mysterious "Chamber of Secrets" has been opened. The main questions that drive the plot, thereafter, are relatively simple: What is the Chamber of Secrets? Who lives there? Who opened it? And how to stop the repeated attacks?

What's wonderful about this book is that it gives Rowling a chance to stretch her plot-legs. Where the first book, as mentioned in the last review, was relatively episodic, Chamber of Secrets carries a much more traditional plot structure, and Rowling strings it along beautifully, allowing thread after thread to join the plot until they all culminate in the final scenes down in the Chamber of Secrets. Here, too, Rowling also starts setting the groundwork for later books in the series, keenly aware of what pieces need to be established well ahead of time. She spends a great deal of time establishing the conflict between "pure-bloods" and "Muggle-borns," or "mudbloods," which is suitable considering the gradually increasing age of both her characters and her auidence.

The joy of reading these books again is partly in discovering how carefully Rowling planned the series. Lines that might otherwise be throw-aways, and objects that might only be cursory, carry much more weight in light of the events of the final books. The sword of Godric Gryffindor makes its first appearance, along with the line that only a true Gryffindor could summon the sword; Dumbledore confides that Voldemort, when he cursed Harry, transferred some of his own power to Harry; Harry warns Dobby never to try to save his life again. These are the small gems that make a re-read of these books worthwhile.

Additionally, Rowling continues to emphasize the value of intangible qualities in the battle between good and evil. In the first book, Harry was saved from Voldemort by the effect of his mother having given her life for him; in this book, Harry wins the day through loyalty. As the series progresses and Harry becomes more skilled, his victories become more complex, but Rowling maintains the idea that strength of character is the most important "skill" you can obtain. Indeed, in Chamber of Secrets, Dumbledore voices just this theme when he says that our choices and not our abilities show who we truly are.

Sure, the book isn't perfect. The framework of every book progressing over the school year begins to wear a bit, as we start to wonder when Harry, Ron, and Hermione (or the powers that be) will realize that all the exciting stuff happens the last week of school. It also seems a little neat that, once again, Harry, Ron, and Hermione all play their essential role in solving the mystery and saving the day. What's heartening, however, is the knowledge that Rowling begins to eschew these easy structural conventions as her novels and themes become more complex, and so I'm willing to put up with them, at least for the first few novels.

Next up: The Prisoner of Azkaban.

2. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

2008-12-02T14:11:00.004-05:00

*Note: The Harry Potter books are cheating, to which I'll fully admit. For my rationale behind why I'm reviewing them now, go here.

Whenever I open the first pages of the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the haunting tinkling of the movie's score tumbles out at me. Ba bum ba ba bum ba bum bum, bum ba ba bum ba bum. I've been a member of enough geeky-fangirl movements to know that devotion to the movie as much as the book, that ignoring the small difference between the text and screen, that ignoring the effect that the movie has on our imaginations - all these are kinds of sacriledge. While I can be a purist with the best of them (hellooo, Star Wars prequels), I when it comes to Harry Potter, the books and movies are irrecovcably intertwined. Since I can't ignore or change that fact, I've come to embrace it.

Which is why, when I started reading the Sorcerer's Stone the other night, I found myself delighted (once again) with how much richer are the books than the films, even the very first. Outside the restrictions of the screen, the shading of the character is so much more interesting, subtle, clever. And while I love all the movies (even the first two, widely panned Chris Columbus vehicles), I love the books even more.

We all know the story: orphaned Harry lives with his wretched aunt, uncle, and cousin in the terrifically named Little Whinging and is identifiable by way of the lightening bolt scar on his forehead. His life is pretty rotten, so imagine his surprise when he discovers that his parents were magical parents, that he is a wizard, and that he, at age eleven, has been accepted into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Much of the first book is taken up with introducing us into this new world, from the strange, whimsical names of places and people, to the various magical locations such as Diagon Alley and Hogwarts itself, to the learning of spells, to the intricacies of the game Quidditch. It stands to reason then that the first half of the book is a little light on plot and quite heavy on episode and detail; in fact, Harry and Ron Weasly don't even befriend Hermione until the half-way point, a detail I'd completely forgotten. A writer with a lesser imagination or a more tenuous grasp of language wouldn't have been able to get away with this; however, J.K. Rowling packs so many of her imaginative creations into every page, that we can't help but keep turning if only to see what she'll give us next. We're also helped along by Harry's breathless wonder: Rowling knows the power of a good protagonist, and she uses Harry shrewdly during this first half.

That Rowling is confident enough to open her series with 150 pages of (largely) exposition and discovery tells us several things. First, Rowling is well aware that she's not writing a single 300 page novel; rather, she seems to have a pretty good grasp on the expanse of the series (thousands of pages), and in that light, 150 pages of exposition seems almost paltry. Second, the sheer breadth of the world she's created is astonishing, and she simply need those 150 pages just to get it all out of her head.

Still, Rowling has enough grasp of plot to begin the threads in the first couple chapters, and though she wears those threads pretty thin after a while, the plot really gets rolling about halfway through. We discover with Harry that his parents were killed by a dark wizard who, far from being dead, seems to have re-appeared and is regaining his strength. This is tied somehow to a mysterious package being hidden at Hogwarts, and Harry, Ron, and Hermione's quest to discover what that package is, who's trying to steal it, and how to stop that someone takes up the remainder of the book. Despite the fact that the climax lands all three students in a fairly dangerous situation (as will become a trademark of the series), Rowling keeps her tone perpetually light and witty. There may be danger lurking around the corners of the story, but it's never something that can't be overcome.

This lightness of tone (and, it should be said, awareness of the book's audience) lends itself to a little too much neatness, particularly in the ending. Harry's confrontation of the nefarious Professor Quibbel smacks of the Bond villain spilling his secrets, and the wizard "obstacle course" the three students must navigate in order to find the Sorcerer's Stone seems too easy to believe. After all, if the Sorcerer's Stone is so important and valuable, one would think it would be better protected, at least such that eleven year olds couldn't get to it. But then we wouldn't have much of a story, would we?

But these are small quibbels in a vast sea of brisk storytelling and startling ingenuity. More than any of the other Harry Potter books, The Sorcerer's Stone reads like a young adult novel, as well it should. Rowling seems to have an instinct for toeing the line between children's fantasy and adult awareness; she's like the literary equivalent of Pixar. The best part, however, about finishing The Sorcerer's Stone this time was the knowledge that though this book may be finished, I still have six more Harry Potter books waiting to be read. And that's comforting.

Why Harry Potter?

2008-12-02T14:00:00.003-05:00

Full disclosure: I've read all the Harry Potter books. I've even read them all multiple times. I've seen the movies. I love Harry Potter.

Why do I love Harry Potter? Because, as someone who can never, ever have too much of a good book, I had waited my whole life for these books. As a kid, my definition of good books involved fanciful stories, elemental battles between good and evil, and a little bit of magic. And I was especially interested in fat books, in series containing multiple volumes. After all, the only thing better than a good book was a good book that lasted a long time. At ten or eleven, I could kill a two hundred page book in a day and a half; for me, the longer the book, the better.

I was a Harry Potter hater for a while, when both my mom and middle-school aged younger brother were reading them. "Soft-core fantasy," I called them, scoffing the entire way back to my well-battered copies of Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. It was Thanksgiving break when the first Harry Potter movie was released, and I grudgingly accompanied my family (even my dad, by then a H.P. devotee) to the theater, steeling myself for the kids' movie I was about to see.

What happened, of course, was that I came out of the theater a Potter lover. I read the first four books over that Thanksgiving break and feel compelled to this day to break out the Harry Potter (books and movies) around the holidays.

Having read all the books, then, why read them again and write about them? For this reason: now that we have all seven books available to us, I think it's useful to go back and read the entire series to evaluate the quality and examine the scope of J.K. Rowling' s vision. Plus, I've never done it before.

So there.

1. The Trouble with Diversity by Walter Benn Michaels

2008-11-20T10:15:00.005-05:00

It... means that in a society without any racial discrimination, there would
still have been poor people who couldn't find their way out of New Orleans.
Whereas in a society without poor people (even a racist society without poor
people), there wouldn't have been.

I picked up this book partially because of my recent obsession with the global economic repercusions of unfettered capitalism and partially because it (the book) looked rather combative. I've always been one to judge the literal book by its cover, and this one appealed to me, with its three multi-colored lambs and jarring red-fonted title. In addition to the front cover, the back cover carried loud red blurbs singing the praises of this "bracing polemic." (If you haven't noticed already, I'm also needlessly obsessed with blurbs.) So here I was, ready to find out what was wrong with diversity.

Michaels' point is actually quite simple: we (and by "we" he means everyone, liberal and conservative) spend so much time celebrating diversity, trumpeting culture, and crusading against racism and sexism that we've completely ignored the ungoing struggles between the classes. In his introduction, he brings out figures with which we've become relatively familiar, showing that the gap between those making the most money in our country and those making the least money has progressively increased over the last fifty years. Far from becoming a society less separated by material wealth, we are in fact becoming more segregated.

The problem, Michaels argues, is not simply that we're ignoring this trend but that we are using needless crusades for diversity as a means to ignore it. Chapter by chapter, he discusses race, culture, gender, and religion, showing (sometimes strongly, sometimes tenuously) that each is simply a means of 1) distracting us from the more pressing issue of economic inequality and 2) convincing us that economic equality either does not exist or can be "solved" as easily as we've solved, say, racism and sexism.

Michaels asserts that the way we've begun to solve problems of this nature involves a celebration of diversity, identity, and culture. We (as a country) recognize that one race is not intrinsically better than another or one sex or one culture is not intrinsically better, in other words saying that we are all welcome to our particular identities. The problem, he says, in applying this model to economic equality is that hardly anyone truly recognizes that being poor is as good as being rich. No one wants to stay poor. Poverty is not an identity, as race, gender, or culture may be; rather, it's an economic situation. He likens this approach to Marx's critique of religion, except that where for Marx, religion was the opiate of the masses, now culture is the opiate of the masses:

New forms of "ancient" identities are being invented every day. And the
function of all of them is to provide people with ways of thinking about
themselves that have as little as possible to do with either their material
circumstances or their political ideals.... Economically, [culture] redescribes
the material difference between people (I have more, you have less, too bad for
you) as cultural difference (I have mine, you have yours, it's all good).

When I started the book, I expected it to read very much like other books I've read recently: identify the problem by making a claim, support that claim with evidence, and then suggest solutions for the problem. Rather, Michaels uses a more classical structure of argument, building premise upon premise until he smacks you with his conclusions. Often, these conclusions are fascinating; just as often, I had to retrace the line of argument to see how he ended up where he did.

This detailed method of arguing left me wondering when he'd make his point sometimes, but what I found most interesting were the few glaring moments when Michaels really failed to support an assertion. For instance, one of his major reasons for needing to focus on economic inequality rather than racial inequality is that racism and racial inequality are things of the past, twentieth century problems. Indeed, he makes the point several times that most of us in this world are not racist, and although he takes pains to point out that even though some few individuals might be racist, our society as a whole is not. His support for this incredible statement seems to be the obsession our society has with struggling against racism - that because we are so concerned with eliminating racial inequality, racism does not exist. Meh. I don't buy it.

In the end, what makes this book unique is not its central premise (many people have identified economic inequality as a pressing issue) but the way in which it is written and the connections it attempts to make. Some of these connections are still, to me, tenuous, though well-observed. Despite enjoying the book, I felt a little bit like the victim of sophistry, if well-intentioned sophistry. Still, it's a short read (barely 200 pages), and if you've got the patience to get through Michaels nearly exhausting style of argument, it's worth a look.

The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perotta

2008-11-19T17:11:00.003-05:00

Note: This is a test-run, a re-publication of a review posted on a different blog (found here in its original format). I publish it here because as I've scoured "Best Books" lists in search of more titles to add to my list, this one kept popping up. And I feel the need to set the record straight.

Oh, Tom Perrotta. Your book, Little Children, was diverting and attractively packaged; if not well written, at least it was intriguing. It held my attention. And so when I saw that your newest paperback, The Abstinence Teacher, was available in the bookstore, I read a few pages and bought it on the promise that it might be what the blurbs promised it would be: a "truth-telling... chronicle of modern-day America." Oh, Tom Perrotta. How you fooled me. How you betrayed my trust.

At first glance, having a teacher of sex-ed match wits against a Bible-thumping, newbie Christian seemed right out of the playbook of Wife Swap, but I thought, "This is the truth-telling chronicler of modern-day America - he will find nuance and irony in this situation that Wife Swap could never find." What first glance didn't tell me, however, was that you would provide characters that so wholly and dogmatically played into type that it would be impossible to finesse nuance or denote irony. Two diametrically opposed characters who seem to have neither empathy for the positions of the other side nor a deep understanding of what their own positions mean? Of course. What else could I expect from the truth-telling chronicler of modern-day America?

I was mildly amused when you introduced me to Ruth, the sex-ed teacher who is now being forced to teach abstinence-only education after a debacle with the Bible-thumping minority in her town - the "Tabernacle folks," as they're called. Ruth is A LIBERAL, and you are very clear to point this out. She is adamantly opposed to abstinence-only education and condescending towards those who are not (not that they're any more likable - conservative religious prudes, the lot of them!); she is also adamantly opposed to RELIGION, as we discover when she objects vocally to prayers at her daughter's soccer game. Despite this, as a LIBERAL, Ruth is OPEN-MINDED, which you show through a series of dinner with her best friends: a pair of gay men. She also consents, albeit reluctantly, to allow her daughters to attend church. Good LIBERAL Ruth.

And then you introduce us to Tim, a new CHRISTIAN who is a member of the "Tabernacle folks" and the instigator of the soccer-game prayer. A recovering substance abuser (for drugs and, possibly, alcohol), Tim really needed Jesus. We know he is a CHRISTIAN because he PRAYS at soccer games, goes to CHURCH regularly, and carries a BIBLE. Tom, you tantalized me with visions of nuance when you showed that Tim is conflicted about his newfound faith - that he wants to be a good person but also really desires parts of his old life. I applauded you for this.

But, Tom, why are your characters so boring and so unlikable? Is it because neither are believable for what they are? Is it because I had the sensation that you had no real concept of what a sex ed teacher is like, that though you did your best to approximate a sex ed teacher's frame of mind and emotions, you never really got into Ruth's character's skin? Or was it because you seemed as if you'd never really tried to live the church life, only that you'd gone to church once or twice, and, as such, your portrayal of Tim ended up being flat and lifeless?

Tom, why did your sex ed teacher not know better than to mention Planned Parenthood during a class in which she was supposed to be teaching abstinence-only education? Especially given that there was a member of the "Tabernacle folks" in the room? Or why did your new Christian, Tim, have so little knowledge of what it actually means to be a Christian, even though he ostensibly attended a very conservative church?

Your writing annoyed me throughout this book, Tom, and for several reasons. First, I felt like everyone and everything was painted in broad strokes. Rich, suburban white people live in mini-mansions and drive giant SUV's and are inexplicably sad inside - those might all be true descriptors, but you need to be a little more penetrating in order to be truthful in such a portrayal. Or how about this one: all gay men are urbane, call each other "honey" and have single women as best friends? Or: all men when they get together talk about sex and porn, thereby making the Christian in their midst feel uncomfortable. Or: sin, for a Christian, comes down to sex, alcohol, and lust. Or: all Christians are boring and puritanical, or fanatical and meglomaniacal. Or: all single women only think about the last time they had sex.

It's as if Paul Haggis wrote a novel.

The second reason you annoyed me, Tom Perrotta - YOU HACK - is that you missed so many opportunities to explore nuance. For instance, rather than removing Ruth from her position as "abstinence teacher" (and thereby deus ex machina-ing her out of a main source of conflict), you could have explored the compromises she had to make in order to teach abstinence and still maintain her values. Or how she went about truly subverting the system (rather than a single instance of wearing a short skirt, or of advocating Planned Parenthood, stupidly). You could have explored the conflict Tim has when he realizes that this Christian thing might not be for him. Well, you could have explored it in a meaningful way, rather than having him simply walk out of a "Faith Keepers" meeting and spend a night away from his wife.

You could have made innumerable choices in order to create a novel that really went beneath the surface of modern suburban life, Tom; however, you chose instead to create a novel that relied not on characters but on stereotypes and not on plot but on a flat criticism of SOCIETY. Such a shitty read. You bastard.

About Cannonball Read

2008-11-19T17:04:00.004-05:00

I'm jumping on the bandwagon two months late, but better late than never. Cannonball Read was started by this fellow and a devout group of followers. His rules? 1. 200 pages. 2. No graphic novels. 3. Short story collections have to have 6 stories. 4. Post on a blog what you’ve read.

I'm a blogophile, admittedly, and at the risk of oversaturating the web with my preponderance of blogs (two of note can be found here and here), I create this one in an effort to join the crusade of those attempting to read and record 100 books over the course of the next year.

My starting date, I've determined, is November 1, 2008, only because I desperately want to write about a few books I read in the early part of this month. Did I also mention that in addition to being a blogophile, I'm a cheat?

So here we go...