→ April 23, 2013
→ By

52 Loaves.

I’ve got a new Insider column up on possible demotions/promotions, looking at whether there’s any sense in those moves. I also recorded an extremely fun episode of Behind the Dish today, featuring Michael Schur of Parks & Recreation and FJM fame.

William Alexander’s 52 Loaves: One Man’s Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning, and a Perfect Crust is a peculiar mix of memoir, baking how-to, and experiential non-fiction (“I did this weird/crazy thing so I could write a book about it”) that never quite hits on any of those areas until its final passage, where Alexander’s quixotic efforts to bake the perfect loaf of French country bread lands him in the disused bakery at a French monastery, teaching one of the brothers how to bake bread. It’s poorly written and just as poorly organized, yet when Alexander finally steps back and lets an actual story unfold, it makes the aggravation of the first 200-odd pages worthwhile.

Alexander’s quest to replicate a bread he’d tasted some years earlier leads to a resolution to bake a loaf of this style of bread, known as pain de campagne, every weekend for a full year (hence the title). This bread has a few key characteristics – a hard, crispy crust that shatters (in a good way) when you bite into it, and a moist crumb with plenty of air holes, sometimes a little large and irregularly shaped. It’s normally made with a levain, a wild yeast starter that can be years or decades old, and includes a blend of white and whole wheat flours. Alexander starts out from a recipe, struggles with it, and then goes out in search of expert opinions and better tools, even growing his own wheat and attempting to build an earthen oven in his backyard, while consulting people like the esteemed Peter Reinhart, whose books I regularly extol on this blog.

Alexander is fine when he’s describing these educational endeavors, from trips to grain mills and bakeries to phone and email conversations with bakers, but he’s in the book himself far too much, unfortunate as he’s not an interesting character and shares way, way too much information (especially about his sex life with his wife, who I assume has since castrated him for doing so). He’s also just not a good writer at all, verbose when he needs to be terse, and desperately unfunny, as in this description of a brief conversation with his wife:

“It was Julia’s idea,” I said clumsily.
“Julia?”
As Ricky Ricardo used to say, “Lu-ceee, you got a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.”
Let’s start with Julia.
I’m referring of course, to the late Julia Child.

That’s about as hackneyed a phrase as you’ll find, followed by three mentions of “Julia” before he tells us which Julia … except that in a book about food, there’s only one Julia anyway, so why play coy?

Eventually, his bread-baking improves to the point where he’s at least churning out solid loaves, albeit not exactly up to his own high standards, so Alexander starts reaching out to monasteries in Europe in search of one that still bakes its own breads in-house. That search leads him to one that has a bakery, including a wood-fired oven, but hasn’t used it in some time; that monastery agrees to let Alexander, an agnostic, come bake in their ovens for a week or so if he agrees to teach one of the brothers how to do it so they can restart the tradition after he leaves. Alexander’s experiences there, building unexpected bonds with his protege and others in the monastery, while himself pondering some big questions (without coming to any real conclusions or experiencing a conversion), is so compelling and so well-written that it felt like it came from the pen of a different writer. The forced jocularity of the first three-fourths of the book disappears when there’s something significant at stake – he has to teach this novice how to bake this one kind of bread in a matter of a few days, using unfamiliar equipment while conforming to the monastery’s rigid schedule of prayer and services. And Alexander’s own reaction to that schedule, even attending some of the services himself and sharing meals with the brothers, gives us a much more mature picture of the man than his puerile jokes about rebuffing his wife’s advances because he needs to feed the starter do.

52 Loaves includes recipes at the end, including his method of developing and growing a levain (starter) as well as the unique recipe he developed for the monastery, adapting to the ingredients available there. (There are some differences between our flours and those you can buy in Europe, another informative section that showed Alexander can educate his readers when he wants to do so.) I have used a starter, and kept one going for about two years in Boston, but don’t bake enough bread to justify the work involved in keeping one, since the Arizona summers are so hot that we don’t want to run the oven at those temperatures for long periods of time. When the urge to bake bread strikes, I use a biga, a sort of overnight starter that begins with ¼ tsp of commercial, active yeast, allowing it to develop overnight in the fridge to get some of the flavor you’d get with a wild yeast starter – an inferior substitute, but not one most people (myself included) are that likely to notice.

Next up: In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World by Ian Stewart, presumably not the third baseman.

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→ April 20, 2013
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Infinite Jest.

Today’s Klawchat was heavy on draft questions. I also have a new draft blog post up on UNC third baseman Colin Moran, and a post up on Wil Myers, Jake Odorizzi, and other Durham and Charlotte prospects.

It took just over two weeks, but I finished David Foster Wallace’s sprawling magnum opus Infinite Jest, all 1079 pages of its madness and hysteria. It’s a work of tremendous intelligence, a novel that wants to challenge you to follow its undulations and hairpin turns, and yet a work of great empathy as well with its well-considered meditations on subjects like mental illness or addiction recovery. I doubt I can do this book justice in a blog post, given its depth and breadth, and the sheer number of things I liked or disliked about it.

The plot itself is intricate, looped and non-linear, at times deliberately involuted and interrupted by footnotes that have, unfortunately, become one of the book’s hallmarks. The main plot threads involve Hal Incandenza, a tennis prodigy and heavy marijuana user who has lost the ability to feel emotions; Don Gately, a recovering drug addict and thief who is now one of the staffers at the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (yes, that’s the name); and a mysterious film made by Hal’s father that causes viewers to enter a catatonic state where they lose interest in anything else other than watching the film again. The film loosely ties the first two storylines together, although Wallace avoids any kind of full integration or catharsis, and I’ve read a very compelling argument by the late Aaron Swartz that the book’s actual end is in the beginning. (Smashing Pumpkins would approve.)

The plot strands themselves may not be the point, or at least not the ultimate point, of Infinite Jest, but as springboards for Wallace to provide us with lengthy ruminations on subjects as wide-ranging as depression, addiction, popular culture, environmentalism, and, of course, tennis. Hal lives and studies at the Enfield Tennis Academy founded by his father and his mother, highly dysfunctional individuals who had, until Hal’s father’s suicide, a highly dysfunctional marriage. Hal’s older brother, Orin, wasn’t so hot at tennis but found a calling as an NFL punter, and appears in several passages in which he starts to think he’s being followed by wheelchair-bound fans, unaware that they are in fact a group of wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatists who are trying to find a master copy of Incandenza père‘s film. The tennis academy and the halfway house both contain assemblies of colorful side characters, fleshed out in impressive detail over the course of the book (so while the book is too damn long, at least most of the real estate is properly utilized), and are eventually connected by the woman who hosts a radio program at MIT while using the pseudonym “Madame Psychosis,” who also appeared in the mysterious film that the Quebecois separatists are after.

Why are Quebecois separatists so central to the book? Infinite Jest is set in the not-too-distant but clearly dystopian future, where the northern part of New England has become the continent’s garbage dump, about which the Quebecois are none too pleased. That and the seeimingly draconian terms under which Canada entered the new Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N., alluding to this guy) have spurred a number of separatist movements, including the ruthless, violent terrorists on wheels who are after James Incandenza’s film. It’s a bizarre sideplot in a strange book, although the presence of some shadowy force bent on mass destruction is necessary for the central gambit of the Entertainment, the nickname for the film the separatists are hunting.

Speaking of mass destruction, one of the book’s best scenes, filmed by friend of the dish Michael Schur in his video for The Decemberists’ “Calamity Song,” is the game of Eschaton played by the main characters at the tennis academy. Named for a formal term for the religious concept of the “end times,” the game simulates a worldwide military conflict where players represent various nuclear states and stage attacks by hitting tennis balls (lobs, to be specific) at opponents’ targets. The game played in the book devolves into a mess of recriminations and missiles fired at other players, with comically violent results.

The various digressions on more serious subjects, like mental illness and addiction, veer from what we traditionally want or expect in a novel, at least an American novel – it harkens more to the traditions of 19th-century Russian literature than anything more recent. His description of depression, starting on page 695, is absolutely remarkable, describing it as “a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it … a nausea of the cells and soul … lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed.” Much of what Wallace writes about addiction, both in discussion of the addict characters’ experiences and the mind-numbing effects of the mysterious film, foreshadowed more recent advances in our understanding of the neurology of addiction, and why addiction may be best treated as a physical disease rather than a mental or intellectual failure.

Wallace apparently had a prodigious vocabulary – I wrote down about 50 words that I didn’t know but that were common enough to appear in my Kindle’s dictionary (or that weren’t Wallace neologisms) – and also seemed to love wordplay and literary allusions. The book’s title comes from a line in Hamlet, during the title character’s eulogy for Yorick, and Hal is the novel’s Hamlet, the son of a father who took his own life and a faithless mother whose love for her son lacks any actual emotion. This might be a stretch, but I thought Hal’s name might also refer to the antipsychotic drug Haldol, used to treat schizophrenia, given Wallace’s deep knowledge of pharmaceuticals. The pun involved in O.N.A.N.’s name is obvious, as are James Orin Incandenza’s ironic initials (he was a depressive and alcoholic who took his own life). Madame Psychosis is a play on the Greek word “metempsychosis,” meaning transmigration of the soul, while her real name, Joelle van Dyne, sounds like a play on the word “anodyne,” meaning a painkiller or analgesic. Wallace shows an odd obsession with the curvature of characters’ spines, even naming a character Otis Lord (a play on “lordosis,” the inward curvature of the spine at the lower part of your back). He names a town in Arizona “Erythema,” which is actually a skin condition involving red patches on the skin. Many characters, especially the teenagers in the tennis academy, engage in wordplay in their dialogue*, and Wallace makes up his own words and phrases as he goes along, like “novocaine of the soul,” which I assume inspired the Eels song by that name. It doesn’t necessarily make the novel better, but as someone who just loves language and seeing others stretch it and bend it in unusual ways, I found this one of my favorite aspects of the book.

*My favorite is the prank call Hal receives, where another character says, “Mr. Incredenza, this is the Enfield Raw Sewage Commission, and quite frankly we’ve had enough shit out of you.”

Then there was my least favorite aspect, the footnotes, a clear exercise in intellectual masturbation that not only interrupts the novel’s minimal narrative linearity but serves far too often as a way for Wallace to show off. Footnotes can be used well for the sake of humor, as in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell or the early Thursday Next novels (where literary characters communicated via footnoterphone), but here they are just Wallace wanking. You can’t get twenty pages into this book without realizing how brilliant Wallace must have been, so why would he try so hard to impress us with these abstruse or esoteric notes? Or, why didn’t anyone discourage him from doing so? Nearly 400 of these notes, some of them lasting several pages and often bearing notes of their own, occupied 12% of the pages in the electronic version I read. That’s an abuse of authorial privilege. The one footnote that was legitimately funny – J.O.I.’s filmography – went on far too long.

I also found Wallace’s vision of the future a distraction from the rest of the book. To raise revenues, the government of O.N.A.N. has sold off naming rights to the years, so we get the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment and the Year of Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems for Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic). Aside from the fact that I got a giggle from saying “Yushityu” in my head, this isn’t terribly funny the first time around, and gives little or nothing to the reader in the way of a forecast for or description of this future era. The characters’ quotidian lives are largely unchanged from today – Wallace’s vision of downloadable video content isn’t far off from how we view content via Netflix or iTunes right now – and much of this dystopian stuff is about as relevant to the plot as wallpaper. Again, Wallace shows off his creativity, but someone should have helped him edit this down to size.

Most of the book takes place in Boston, in the fictional town of Enfield that sounds a lot like Brighton, which means that current and former Boston residents get a few bonuses in the book. My favorite was the description of Bread & Circus, a high-end grocery chain bought some time ago by Whole Foods:

Bread & Circus is a socially hyperresponsible overpriced grocery full of the Cambridge Green Party granola-crunchers, and everything’s like microbiotic and fertilized only with organic genuine llama-shit, etc.

Other than Enfield itself, Wallace used real place names, street names, even a church in Brighton (St. Columbkill’s) that I used to pass every time I went to see a game at Boston College. It’s nice to know that even in his alternate-history version of Boston’s future, Storow Drive is still a nightmare.

Where Infinite Jest succeeded over Gravity’s Rainbow and The Recognitions, two fairly obvious influences, is in readability. As long as the book is, as long as Wallace’s paragraphs and sentences can be, there was never a point where I got bogged down in the prose or story, and never a point where I felt like I had to force myself to continue reading. The writing is bright if not crisp, the imagery is strong, there is a lot of humor within the book’s thousand pages, and the characters are so well-developed that even a tangential story will pull you along. I can’t think of another book that has so many characters crafted with this kind of care and given this kind of screen time to tell their backstories or to play a significant role in the novel’s plot. I was never as invested in either of those other two novels, which were similarly long, intelligent, and wilfully abstruse, as I was in Infinite Jest.

This also concludes my journey through the All-TIME 100 Novels list.

Next up: William Alexander’s bread-baking memoir: 52 Loaves: One Man’s Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning, and a Perfect Crust.

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→ April 19, 2013
→ By

Atlanta, Lexington, Charleston, Durham eats.

My updated ranking of the top 50 prospects for this year’s Rule 4 Draft is up now for Insiders.

I returned to Richard Blais’ The Spence on my second run through Atlanta – this time I paid – and happened to hit them on the first day of a new menu, with a handful of new highlights. I ordered a salt cod and potato dish that took the standard bacalao formula and instead whipped the salt cod into the potatoes, mellowing their flavor (I like it, but it is on the fishy end of the spectrum). The pork terrine is still on the menu, but the jam served with it seems to change weekly – my week had celery and rhubarb in it and was superb, sweet and tangy to balance the mustard/salty flavor of the terrine. The pasta contained porcini in the dough as well as in the dish, not as good as the English-pea cavatappi (which was unreal) but strong in its own right, with that earthy, almost meaty flavor coming through in each bite. For dessert, the chocolate-peanut dish with roasted banana ice cream was weird in a good way – it looked like nothing, just blocks of milk chocolate with various crumbs and a small scoop of the ice cream, but if you took every element together it was like a rich, extremely luxurious adult candy bar. I also had another Sailor’s Crutch, their gin-lemon-falernum-soda concoction that is among my new favorite cocktails.

Before the game that night, I ate at Tasty China in Marietta, apparently another outpost of the infamous DC-area chef Peter Chang, who specializes in Szechuan cuisine and has a habit of disappearing from the scene for months at a time. I tried his place in Charlottesville two years ago and was blown away, figuratively but also literally by the spice level of his food. Tasty China, on the other hand, was a little bit of a disappointment, even though I asked the server for a recommendation. I ended up with a tea-smoked crispy duck, half a duck to be specific, that tasted great but was on the dry side, since it came with no sauce or other flavoring besides the smoke. The food there may be amazing and authentic but I didn’t get that experience.

Moving up the coast to South Carolina, I took a recommendation from J.C. Bradbury to try Shealy’s BBQ in Leesville, right next to Lexington where I was seeing Nick Ciuffo. The Q itself was nothing special – their pulled pork is shredded and served in sauce – but the fried chicken was something else. The food is served buffet-style, one price, all you can eat, and while I do not look kindly on all-you-can-eat places, the fried chicken was worth the whole experience, even the relatively boring sides that weren’t all that hot. Just go and get some chicken and cornbread and everything else will work itself out.

In Charleston, I ended up returning to Husk, but this time at at the Bar at Husk, in the carriage house next door. The menu there only has a few small items, but one is their well-reviewed burger, which might be the best burger I’ve ever had, even though it’s served very simply, with just a few toppings. It’s apparently chef Sean Brock’s ode to In-n-Out, with two fairly thin patties, but comprising brisket, chuck, and hickory-smoked bacon ground together. (That article says it’s 100% chuck now, but the bartender who took my order said it includes brisket.) I omitted the American cheese, because no matter what Sean Brock says that stuff is nasty. I left the rest alone – white onion, pickles, and Brock’s sauce, which includes mayo, ketchup, and mustard, all served on a squishy brioche-like bun. It’s a thing of beauty.

My next trip took me to North Carolina, with three new spots as well as a few old favorites. I spent a night in Hickory, where local eats are somewhat limited, but did have an adequate “jerk” chicken sandwich and local beer at the Olde Hickory Tap Room, which serves its full menu till 11 pm and a limited menu till 2 am, key if you’re there to see the Crawdads. The jerk chicken is a half-pound breast, butterflied and glazed with a sweet and slightly spicy jerk-ish sauce, served with mayo, lettuce, and tomato on a very good but too thinly-sliced sourdough bread. The Irish roasted root vegetable side is a little meager but definitely superior to the standard fries or chips. It’s a very broad menu, which isn’t always a great sign, but if you’re trying to avoid chain restaurants in Hickory it’s at least extensive enough that you’ll find something worth your time.

In Durham, I tried two new spots, including Mateo Tapas, owned by the same folks behind Vin Rouge (which has this bacon jam that is among the best things I have ever eaten anywhere … and yes, I went again this trip). Mateo’s lunch tapas menu focuses on the basics, mostly authentic items, just prepared a little more American style. For example, their boquerones (white anchovies) taste fresh and clean with olive oil and salt but are served filleted rather than whole. Their Spanish tortilla, a dish of olive-oil poached potatoes molded into a frittata-like cake with several eggs, has a thin chorizo-mayonnaise on top that gave the dish some needed spice. The gambas, shrimp cooked in garlicky olive oil, was probably the most traditionally-prepared dish I ordered, while the least was the grilled bread with three spreads – butternut-romesco, green olive, and beet, with the olive by far my favorite, while the beet was too sweet and the romesco a little plain. Given the quality of the food the prices were very reasonable, with those four plates more than a meal for me and a total of around $30 including tax and tip. Like most tapas places, though, it’s probably a better experience and value with a crowd.

I can also recommend a very new (ten days old, I believe) ice cream parlor right in downtown Durham called, appropriately enough, The Parlour. Run by the brother and sister-in-law of longtime reader and occasional dish commenter Daphne, The Parlour makes some insanely high-quality ice cream, low-overrun, very creamy, with a small number of flavors that showcase a lot of creativity. The salted butter caramel might be a little cliché, but it tasted just like real, homemade caramel sauce that you might eat with a tablespoon when your wife isn’t looking. (Not that I’ve ever done that.) The chocolate espresso stout cake was rich chocolate ice cream, not as dark as I like it but not very sweet, with bits of the cake swirled in the ice cream. I crushed two scoops and could have gone for more if I had been insane.

As for other spots in Durham, I returned to Rue Cler and Nanataco from my last trip, as well as Vin Rouge from a previous visit. I branched out a little, trying the braised beef tongue and smoked hog jowl tacos at Nanataco and a special duck confit salad at Vin Rouge, all worth having again. Vin Rouge does everything in-house, smoking their own meats and making their own bread (at another of their restaurants), while sourcing most things locally – just the kind of restaurant I love to support, as long as the food is amazing.

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→ April 14, 2013
→ By

Top songs of 2013, so far.

I’ve got a new post up on some Yankees and Giants prospects in A-ball, including Jose Vicente Campos, and a draft blog post on Jacksonville RHP Chris Anderson. I’ll write up my look at prep catcher Nick Ciuffo later this week.

So far 2013 is shaping up to be a pretty good year for music, or at least the kind of music I tend to like. I don’t want to do a ranking this early in the year, but I’ve heard so many great songs already that I also didn’t want to wait until the midpoint or until December to start talking about them. I discuss my favorite song of the year first, but after that they’re not in any real order.

Everything Everything – “Cough Cough.” (video)The best song I’ve heard this year, first brought to my attention in January by reader Paul Boyé (aka @Phrontiersman), who said he thought their new album would fit my taste in music and absolutely nailed it. (The song provided the epigram at the start of my most recent Klawchat, too.) Everything Everything remind me of alt-J in their high level of experimentalism, with unusual song structures and frequent key and tempo changes, but where alt-J is meditative and minimalist, Everything Everything is effusive and layered. “Cough Cough” is the best track of the five on their U.S. EP release*, but I also love “Kemosabe” (video), slower-paced but just as dramatic, and “MY KZ UR BF” (video), a track from their first album featuring off-beat lyrics (literally and figuratively) and transitions from tumbling verses to the catchier chorus. I love how “Undrowned” references (and rhymes) Falklands and Balkans. Even “Torso of the Week” has its moments, something that can happen when you don’t limit each song to a single hook or motif. If you generally like my music recs – like alt-J or Of Monsters & Men – you should buy this EP.

* Is anything more anachronistic in the world of media than staggered release dates for music? Isn’t that just inviting piracy? I could sort of understand it in the era of physical releases, but we’re way past that point. The idea of the album itself is nearly dead (and, I still maintain, a violation of anti-trust laws prohibiting bundling), and making the songs available for digital downloads bears very little cost to the label.

Little Green Cars – “Harper Lee.” (a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHwMDr6dMHI >video) This Irish quintet  will inevitably get comps to Mumford & Sons, because that’s who everyone with an acoustic guitar and a harmony gets compared to these days, but I hear far more of the Decemberists here, mixed with a dose of the Mamas and the Papas.

Leagues – “You Belong Here” and “Spotlight.” (video) The latter track is the one getting airplay on XM right now, but the former is strong as well, and it’s free on amazon right now. Their music has sunny vocal lines, Motown elements underneath, with a hard edge to the guitar sound, giving the whole package a retro 60s/70s feel. This feels to me like the band everyone pretends the Black Keys are.

Wavves – “Sail To The Sun.” (video) I received a promotional download of their new album when it came out, and have been pleasantly surprised by its mix of melodic post-punk tracks like this one or “Demon to Lean On” and atmospheric tracks like “Everything is My Fault.” I prefer the faster-paced songs myself, but a full album of that would get old very quickly, and they’re smart to keep the punk-lite tracks on the short side.

The Mowgli’s – “San Francisco.” (video) Shame on America if we don’t make this the feel-good cross-over hit of the summer. It’s a shout-along piece of alt-pop silliness that seems destined to be overplayed before we hit Labor Day, and I mean that as a compliment. I picked up their entire EP, which is on sale for $4 on amazon; this is by far the best track, with “The Great Divide” and “Slowly, Slowly” also worth a listen, bearing the same everyone-sing-real-loud approach, but not nearly as hooky as this one.

San Cisco – “Awkward.” (video)I say it’s brilliant; my wife says it’s annoying and I need to stop singing it around the house. A call-and-response track about a first date where the two participants came away with rather different impressions of how it went, it’s the rare humorous song that can survive past the point where you’ve grown tired of the joke.

The 1975 – “Chocolate.” (video) I don’t love the Mancunian singer’s affected vocal style, but the catchiness of the pizzicato lick that drives the song and the “we’re never gonna quit” chorus (later clarified with “if you don’t stop smokin’ it,” undermining the song’s apparent exhortation to persevere). It’s getting airtime on alternative stations, but this is a straight-up pop song by a band that just isn’t mainstream yet.

The Neighbourhood – “Female Robbery.” (video) A little overplayed on XMU/Alt Nation, this one reminds me of a lot of the alternative tracks coming from Britain in the mid-90s that blended electronic elements with deliveries that were half-sung, half-rapped – Moloko, White Town, Space, etc.

Suede – “Barriers.” (video) A strong comeback track from the Britpop darlings of the early ’90s, fueled by a plaintive six-note guitar riff replayed through most of the song. I loved their first album, and the first track off their second album (after the departure of guitarist Bernard Butler), but after that they seemed to lose their aptitude for crafting post-glam pop masterpieces and disappeared from my view. Even if it’s just this one song, it’s good to see a glimpse of the old Suede again. (Also, this needs to be Brett Anderson’s warmup music, right?)

Foals – “Inhaler.” (video) I guess Foals’ typical music is less heavy and more dance-oriented, but the loud, dense guitar riff during and behind the chorus sold me on this one right away. Even the sharply picked lines before that seem menacing, foreshadowing the giant crunch that comes once the song hits the bridge.

Lemaitre – “Iron Pyrite.” (video) Self-described “discodudes” from Norway, using a ’70s-style funk riff (I assume it’s a sample) over a modern drum track, made successful by the staccato-picked guitar line that repeats throughout the song. I received a promo download of their EP as well, but this was the only track that stood out to me.

CHVRCHES – “The Mother We Share.” (video) A Scottish electropop group, CHVRCHES won a prize for the best “developing” non-U.S. act at SXSW this year, with this track and “Recover” both seeing some airplay on XM now.

Royal Teeth – “Wild.” (video) Released last summer, but just receiving airplay over the last few months, it’s got a great Foster the People/Naked and Famous vibe to it, with two vocalists over a pseudo African/tribal beat.

PAPA – “Put Me to Work.” (video) Another SXSW hit, PAPA, featuring the former drummer for Girls, tries to blend the sounds of early British punk acts (notably the Clash) and Americana/rock artists like Bruce Springsteen, with some hints of folk and R&B as well. I heard a little of the Hold Steady here, but like this better than anything I’ve heard from THS … and I won’t even get into how I’m not a Springsteen fan.

Young Rebel Set – “Measure of A Man.” (video) I tweeted a link to this song’s video the other day, suggesting it as a track Mumford and Sons fans would likely enjoy. The song was first released in the UK in 2011 but didn’t come to my ears until it appeared on a promotional sampler I got about a month ago, so I guess it’s getting a second push stateside. It could easily have come off either of Mumford’s albums, aside from the vocal style, which is more Irish-drinking-song than Mumford’s British-country-howl.

I’m also looking forward to new albums from Phoenix (April 22nd), Fitz and the Tantrums (May 7th), and, all on June 4th, Queens of the Stone Age, Rogue Wave, and Portugal. The Man. All that before the All-Star Break adds up to a pretty strong year.

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→ April 13, 2013
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The Imperfectionists.

I’m still slogging my way through David Foster Wallace’s leviathanic novel Infinite Jest, but before I cracked this one open (figuratively, as I acceded to the ease of tackling this three-pound tome on an e-reader), I read Tom Richman’s marvelous 2011 debut novel, The Imperfectionists. Reminiscent in form of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011, Rachman’s book is exponentially better in every aspect, from execution to prose to characterization, and should have won the prize over Egan’s book in a rout.

The Imperfectionists revolves around the staff of an English-language newspaper published in Rome, a paper that is dying the slow death of print as the Internet erodes its business model underneath its presses. (This paper hasn’t even established a Web presence, so backwards are its operations.) The staff of Americans comprises the motley crew you’d expect to find in such an ensemble novel, as in Then We Came to the End, with Rachman giving each character his or her own short story within the novel, while connecting everyone across the stories, jumping around slightly in time or place, so that the result is a richly textured work that provides insight into everyone – and into people in general – by looking at each character through several lenses and at varying distances.

Rachman’s style won me over through its incisive internal monologues, often the most cliched writing in any book. His dialogue is spectacular as well, but when he moves the voice into a character’s head, he might make you uncomfortable with how accurate and honest the writing feels, rarely if ever lapsing into the kind of overwrought nonsense that might make you want to pull a Pat Solitano and put a book through a window. His characters are mostly compelling, all sympathetic to enough of an extent that you want to hear what happens, yet all flawed in believable ways, especially around fidelity, which is the book’s dominant (but not sole) theme. Rachman adds interstitial passages on the history of the newspaper, from its founding to its demise, and crafts a subtle parallel between that rise and fall and the cycles of human relationships.

The strongest of those parallels develops around the subject of betrayal, as Rachman depicts relationships that unravel due to affairs, that survive in spite of them, or that struggle to stay true. The sense of loyalty that held the newspaper together while its wealthy founder/patron and, later, his son, keep the publication afloat morphs into a sense of betrayal as ownership declines to further subsidize the mounting losses, leading to staff cutbacks and eventually the paper’s closure. He crafts other stories around the death of a staffer’s child (for me, by far the hardest to read) or the inner emotional turmoil of the least-liked member of the staff, the subject of derisive comments in previous stories who becomes simultaneously an object of sympathy and pity as you understand why she is who she is.

The one thing The Imperfectionists lacks is a real conclusion, at least in the traditional sense of the structure of the novel: Each story is self-contained, with some kind of climax and resolution, but the novel as a whole does not have a single, linear plot, with just a brief epilogue attached to provide some kind of closure for readers invested in specific characters. I thought the novel would have stood alone without that appendage, as Rachman’s skill in crafting characters made further revelations unnecessary – I completed each story feeling as if I had learned what there was to learn about the character at its heart. It’s a remarkable book that deserves your attention.

Next up … well, let’s just say that the book I’m reading how is giving me the howling fantods.

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→ April 10, 2013
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42.

This week’s episode of Behind the Dish includes my conversation with John C. McGinley, who plays broadcaster Red Barber in 42 and was a fantastic guest. I also have a new column up discussing recent outings from three young NL starters – Jose Fernandez, Matt Harvey, and Julio Teheran.

The Jackie Robinson biopic 42, opening nationwide on Friday, is a superficial, Hollywood-ized version of the part of Robinson’s life from the Dodgers’ decision to add a black player to their organization until the end of his first season in the majors. A complicated person going through an emotional trial largely unthinkable to viewers today, Robinson is reduced in this film to an intense, brooding, slightly reluctant hero, on screen to be worshiped rather than admired for his strengths and his flaws.

The movie limits itself mostly to two years, 1946 and 1947, and simplifies the story to one where the Dodgers quickly identify Robinson as the player to help them break the color bar, let him dominate the International League for a year (taking just moderate abuse from white players and fans), and bring him up to the majors for a perfunctory tour of the racists of the National League. At nearly every step, Robinson responds to the abuse, mostly verbal with a few attempts to injure him, on the field, always providing the well-timed homer or the easy stolen base to shut up, even for a moment, his antagonists.

Only once do we see Robinson truly respond to the torrent of hate from whites, combined with the weight of expectations from blacks, in the way we’d expect any human being to respond, giving the film its pivotal scene and the one point where Robinson felt like a real person, rather than a two-dimensional character descended from Mt. Olympus. The movie needed that scene, as a catharsis for any empathetic viewers who could only imagine the pressure building up inside Robinson, as he isn’t allowed to respond to taunts or humiliations except with his abilities on the field. What 42 also needed, but didn’t get, was smaller instances of Robinson facing the frustrations – days when he might have gone 0-for-4, failed to come up big in a critical situation, and merely empowered the bigots who said he didn’t belong on the field with white players. Instead, we get trivial scenes of domestic bliss, powered by the beautiful Nicole Behairie in a wasted role as Robinson’s wife Rachel.

Even the process of getting Robinson to the big leagues is far too easy. Branch Rickey’s decision is shown as impetuous, and the internal debate within the Dodgers’ front office (which never seems to include the actual owner of the team) is minimal. The trio of executives select Robinson from a stack of folders on players with scouting reports and biographical information, but we never see the Dodgers actually scout anyone – eventually one of the executives tracks down Robinson’s Negro League team, coincidentally right after he has emerged from a whites-only bathroom at a gas station, and summons him to Brooklyn. The year in Montreal is barely shown, and the decision to promote Robinson to the majors is a formality. While 42 doesn’t make it look easy for Robinson, it does make the journey look a lot smoother than it actually was, an emphasis on Robinson himself that detracts from the magnitude of what he accomplished in reality.

Two aspects of the movie stood out as reasons to see it despite its weaknesses. One was the array of strong performances in leading and secondary roles. Chadwick Boseman (Robinson) does his best with limited material, as he can’t display more than two or three emotions over the course of the entire film, but has a strong enough on-screen presence to command scenes where he sits at the center – except, of course, when Harrison Ford, playing Branch Rickey, is in the room. Ford shocked me with his portrayal of Rickey, one because the script itself did a strong job of depicting Rickey as less than perfect, but also because Ford, even when blustering as Rickey blustered, didn’t chew up entire scenes – he dialed back enough for everyone else, even Boseman, to maintain a presence on the sceen. (We also didn’t get quite enough of Rickey’s motivations for breaking baseball’s unofficial but fifty-year-old color bar; the anecdote he tells Robinson near the end of the film was likely true, appearing in every Rickey biography I’ve read, but the movie doesn’t give the detail that makes the story even more compelling.) Alan Tudyk (Wash from Firefly) is frighteningly effective as the racial-epithet-spewing manager Ben Chapman, whose treatment of Robinson on the field may have led to the early end of his managing career, while McGinley hits his accented, staccato Red Barber impersonation to the point where I wouldn’t have recognized McGinley’s voice if I hadn’t seen him on screen. I wish Leo Durocher had stuck around in the story longer (in reality, that is) so we could have seen more of Christopher Meloni in that role, and thought Andre Holland was largely wasted in a one-note role as sportswriter Wendell Smith, where they made him look less like a writer of the ’40s than like he was about to break into the chorus of “Jerk Out.”

I also thought the baseball within the film was depicted reasonably well, particularly the visuals – creating fields and crowd scenes that looked somewhat appropriate for the time (although, like the entire film, everything is far too bright and clean). The movie relies heavily on apocryphal incidents, like the time Pee Wee Reese may or may not have put his arm around Robinson on the field in Cincinnati and practically read his teammate his eulogy while everyone else waits around for them to finish. The actual movements of players passed the eye test, however, perhaps in part because the extras included a number of former pro players, including one name in particular that jumped out at me during the closing credits. Even the stolen base sequences, which had to be the hardest to film, were good enough for the big screen – not perfect, but I doubt most viewers will be bothered by the catchers’ arm actions or the timing of Robinson’s jumps.

I could see 42 becoming a popular film because of the appeal of Robinson as an American hero – a veteran who destroyed one of the most visible examples of segregation in America, an achievement with tremendous symbolic value that presaged the civil rights movement of the two decades that followed it. But canonizing Robinson was unnecessary; a film that depicted Robinson as angry, frustrated, and flawed would not reduce his myth in the least. It is easier to believe in heroes who are human. The script of 42 tells us twice that Robinson may have been superhuman, and that lionization diminishes his legacy, and us in the process.

* I haven’t read Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Spring Training, but came across it when researching the epilogue’s claim about Ed Charles (which this book apparently confirms). If any of you have read it, I’d like to hear whether it’s worthwhile, as the description on amazon implies that it has more of the ugly details of Robinson’s trials in that first year.

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→ April 4, 2013
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Atlanta eats, 2013 edition.

I’ve got a new draft blog post up on likely top ten pick Austin Meadows of Grayson High School. Also, if you missed my review of dinner at The Spence, Top Chef All-Stars winner Richard Blais’ newest venture, you should head there first. I was still thinking about that meal two days later.

I did have another memorable dinner in Atlanta, at Decatur’s Cakes & Ale, which has twice made Bon Appetit‘s list of the ten best new restaurants in the country (they bent the rules and listed it again in 2012 when C&A opened a new location with a bakery attached). The name is accurate, as they sell both cakes and ales, but the standouts on their menu involve local produce, factoring heavily in every dish.

After a helpful chat with the server, I went with three smaller plates instead of a single entree, paying a few dollars more (maybe $3-5 more) but getting more variety and I think more food overall. The menu changes frequently, so these items may not be available a few weeks from this review. First up was the house-cured lardo on crostini with browned broccolini, mirin, and a side salad of tatsoi, a green leafy member of the Brassica family with a mustardy flavor. The lardo was indulgent, of course, infused into the bread by the heat of the latter, but balanced with the acidity of the mirin and slight sweetness of the caramelized, crispy bits of the baby broccoli. I could have done without the tatsoi salad, however, which was also very acidic and more than the plate required, but the crostini were unforgettable right down to the golden color where the lardo had melted into the bread.

Next up was a verdant spring salad of baby golden beets, sliced radishes, kohlrabi matchsticks, shaved celery, frisee, and sliced almonds, tossed with a rhubarb vinaigrette and served over creamy fromage blanc (a white farmer’s cheese). Hugh Acheson would have approved of this salad: it had texture, it had color, it had sweet and bitter elements, and it had a light tang from the dressing. I doubt I’ve ever eaten a salad faster and it certainly didn’t advertise itself as “health food,” even though it was an antioxidant bomb.

The third small plate was the polenta verde with roasted asparagus, a fried egg, and a small salad of frisee, roasted (I assume) shiitake mushrooms, and pancetta. The polenta was rich and creamy but still had some tooth to it, and could have stood as a side item on its own. The asparagus spears were cooked perfectly, tender but not mushy or stringy, and played well with the polenta and the salad. The one disappointment was the sunnyside-up egg, which was overcooked; the yolk was congealed underneath and didn’t run, which meant no sauce for the asparagus. It’s harder to poach eggs to order than fry them, but a poached egg would make this dish more cohesive. You can bury me in that polenta verde, though.

I mentioned to the server that “I was told there was cake,” which produced a dessert menu featuring an item called Coffee & cream: a layered torte of devil’s food cake, espresso-chocolate mousse, and praline crunch underneath, served with a smear of dark chocolate fudge sauce. This dessert could have been designed especially for me – rich, dark, slightly bitter underneath the sweetness, featuring two of my favorite flavors, chocolate and coffee, together. The hazelnut gelato on the side was nice but unnecessary as a potential obstacle between me and the chocolate.

I should also mention the solid cocktail menu, featuring the Welcome Wagon – Gosling’s Black Seal dark rum from Bermuda, Aperol (a low-alcohol amargo similar to Campari), aquavit, lemon bitters, and ginger ale. It sounds like a lot of alcohol, but the flavors worked well together for a warm, rounded punch. I also tried a local beer, a red rye ale that I believe was from Terrapin Brewery in Athens, although from their site I’m not sure if that was the Mosaic or another offering.

Moving away from fine dining to Q, I had the chance to meet a friend at Fox Brothers BBQ, not far from Cakes & Ale’s location in Decatur. Fox Brothers’ menu is straightforward Q, but to their credit there’s some attention paid to seasonal items – they won’t serve fried okra out of season, for example. The chicken fried ribs starter was a new thing for me – just what it sounds like, smoked ribs, cut up and deep fried. They were surprisingly un-greasy, probably fried very fast at a very high temperature, and of course, very, very delicious. At the server’s suggestion I got the sliced brisket plate with tater tots and collard greens. The meat was a little dry but had a powerful smoke flavor, as much as any brisket I’ve ever tried, even though the smoke ring itself was small. The point of smoked meat is to taste the smoke as well as the meat, so Fox Brothers hit on that. The sides were solid, and I mostly had to stop eating them because this was an absurd amount of food. It’s good Q for anywhere, but in Atlanta, which seems to be a Q desert, this was superb.

And if you find yourself in Sylvester, Georgia, down in Worth County south of Macon and west of I-75, I can recommend Fat Boy for some solid Q as well, with very good “chipped” (shredded) pork at really reasonable prices. I’d skip the fried okra there, though, as it clearly came from a freezer bag. Several sites suggested Pap’s in Sylvester for fried chicken, but it appears to be abandoned and the phone has been disconnected.

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→ April 3, 2013
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Reno eats.

I was only in Reno long enough for two meals, leaving first thing the morning after the game at the University of Nevada (which I wrote about here), and was a little disappointed that a city where gambling and tourism are the two main industries didn’t have more to offer food-wise. I’m still in Atlanta till tomorrow and will have another food post up on that shortly. In the meantime, check out this week’s episode of my Behind the Dish podcast.

The better of the two meals I had was a reader suggestion, Campo, an Italian restaurant on Sierra that offers pastas, thin-crust pizzas, and house-made charcuterie, using lots of locally-sourced ingredients, so very much my kind of restaurant. They boast of accreditation from the authority in Naples that awards the “VPN” (Vera Pizza Napoletana) badge, but I’d say this is more evidence of how dubious that term is. Campo’s pizza is fine, but not terribly authentic – the crust is by far the best part, thin with the right amount of charring around the edges (but not underneath), probably a little less airy on the rim than it should have been but otherwise boasting good texture. I went with the basic margherita pizza, which had far too much sauce and somewhat too little cheese; the sauce tasted very sweet, like it was made with overripe tomatoes, and the cheese was moisture-reduced rather than truly fresh mozzarella. The server must have thought I was an oddball for scraping so much of the sauce off the pizza, and one of the slices actually had no cheese on it at all – just sauce on dough. The charcuterie was more interesting and even the “small” plate ($12) was generous, featuring mortadella, prosciutto crudo, prosciutto cotto, pork rillette, a hard salami with a name I didn’t catch, a few cubes of pecorino romano, mustard (which he referred to as “our” mustard, so I assume it didn’t come from a jar), and a few pickles, including green beans and garlic. Everything was good, with the prosciuttos and the rillette particular standouts; the worst thing I could say was that the salami was tough because of how thickly it was sliced. I found it the absence of any prosciutto on the pizza options on the menu to be odd, and, since I just ate them together instead, the saltiness helped balance out the sweetness of the sauce. If I end up in Reno another time, I’d try Campo again but would give the pastas a shot rather than another pizza. I do recommend it.

Burger Me is apparently owned by the group behind Campo, and earned mention from Esquire for serving, in their opinion, the best burger in America, as well as showing up on “Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives.” I ordered the specific burger that Esquire cited, a bison burger with BBQ sauce and jalapenos, but it just wasn’t anything special: a high-quality burger that was too lean and didn’t have big flavor except from the peppers. The fries were also ordinary – please, people, if you’re going to open a gourmet burger place, the fries are not a damn afterthought. It’s so easy to just hand-cut the fries in back – In-n-Out seems to have no problem doing this – and when I get cheap fries that went from freezer to fryer at a burger place that is trying to sell me on their quality, I want to hire Lionel Hutz and sue them for fraud. I’d skip this stop

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→ April 2, 2013
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Richard Blais’ The Spence.

I have a new draft blog post up for Insiders on Clint Frazier, and the new episode of my Behind the Dish podcast is also up.

I had one of the best culinary experiences of my life at Richard Blais’ The Spence, located right near Georgia Tech’s campus (and, amusingly, very close to The Varsity). Chef Blais appeared with me on an episode of the Baseball Today podcast last year and we’ve kept in touch since then, so when I mentioned to him I was coming to Atlanta, he set up a tasting menu of sorts for me for Monday night. (I missed Richard by about a half an hour, but as I was walking out, I bumped into another former Top Chef contestant and fellow sports fan, Eli Kirshtein.)

Needless to say, this was a lot of food, but there wasn’t a mediocre dish among the set. The menu featured a lot of the playfulness that characterized Blais’ cooking on Top Chef, especially messing around with textures and presenting foods in unexpected forms, and the flavors were consistently balanced yet powerful.

I can’t even get to the menu items without mentioning the bread – parker house rolls, incredibly light, served with homemade coconut butter with flaked sea salt. I could have licked the board clean of the butter. It seemed foolish to eat bread when I knew a lot of food was coming, but I couldn’t let that butter leave the table alive.

The Spence’s menu has three main parts: Small starters, somewhat larger starters, and full entrees. I got two of the small starters, Blais’ take on oysters and “pearls” as well as fried olives stuffed with cheddarwurst. The oysters were absurd, in a citrus/cucumber juice/vermouth bath with little pearls of frozen horseradish and crème fraiche. (I’m doing most of this from memory, so my apologies if I get an ingredient wrong.) I’ve mentioned before that I’ve long had a fear of raw oysters, since Long Island had a major pollution problem when I was growing up there, but this is the second time I’ve had them at a high-end restaurant and I see the appeal now. The texture was perfect and there was plenty of acid to balance out the mellow saltiness of the mollusk, with those late bursts of heat as the horseradish pearls melted. It comes on a bed of smoked sea salt as well if you want more of a briny/salty flavor, although I thought the oysters were perfect as is. The fried green olives were very briny, so they balanced out the oysters well, although I concede green olives aren’t my favorite color (Kalamata uber alles).

Next up was the bone marrow, served with bread crumbs, finely diced tuna tartare (brunoise style), and two fried quail eggs, along with grilled bread to carry the load. I’ve never met a bone marrow dish I didn’t like, and this was perfectly cooked, just to the point where I could start to spread it on the bread but without losing its texture entirely, and the cold tuna, providing the fresh ocean flavor, gave little hints of contrast to the heavy, earthy flavor of the marrow. Quail eggs are very trendy right now – really all non-chicken eggs seem to be – and here their main advantage was that they fit perfectly on the marrow bone.

The dish that had me laughing out loud was a beet-cured kampachi crudo with freeze-dried horseradish and chicharrones – the kampachi was sliced thinly and shaped like roses on the plate, which worked beautifully with their pink flesh and with the surrounding leaves on the plate. I love crudo fish dishes, so this was right in my wheelhouse, and the beet cure just imparted a hint of flavor to the fish without masking the flavor of the fish itself. The horseradish was sprinkled on the plate like snow, so I would drag the fish in it a little (kind of like dipping your sashimi in soy sace), while the chicharrones, which looked like chunks of puffed rice, were too big to incorporate into the main bite. This was my favorite dish of the night, for what that’s worth.

Then came the pork terrine, another item I’ve learned to appreciate over the last year or so, served with a celery root jam, spicy mustard, and pickled zucchini, plus some more grilled bread. The jam was the star, sweet, lightly acidic, with a hint of spice – ginger, I think – with a texture like what you’d expect if you candied celery root and pureed it. It was a little tricky to assemble the dish with the pork, jam, mustard, and pickle all in one bite, but the balance of savory, sweet, tart, and spicy was spot on.

I got to try both of the pasta dishes, the english pea cavatappi with bacon, peas, and a little mint gremolata, as well as the squid-ink pasta with a pork meatball and a very light tomato/black pepper sauce. I could eat that cavatappi all day – I adore fresh English peas (even growing them in our backyard garden and shelling them with my daughter), which pair beautifully with cured pork, and the pasta just exploded with the flavor of the legumes. The squid-ink pasta was overshadowed a little by the perfect meatball on top, and the sauce was very black peppery, but it was perfectly al dente and I admit my inner kid thinks black pasta is very cool.

The one item I tried off the entrees section was the duck, which I would have ordered if I had had the choice anyway. It’s served sliced with blood orange slices, bok choy, and a puree that I believe contained both charred eggplant and a little chocolate. Duck, orange, and bitter greens is another classic combination, but the puree on the side was the twist, giving a smoky/bitter component that balanced the sweetness of the duck and the orange sauce. I did find the duck slices varied a little in how they were cooked, and since I’m an oddball who prefers his duck a little more cooked than most people do (I just don’t like meats cooked rare, because they taste “cold” to me), this worked out well as I could attack the more cooked slices first. I do want to know what they do with the duck legs though – could there be a confit dish coming on a future menu?

The server suggested the fried brussels sprouts side dish, which comes with fried green beans and a Thai vinagrette. The vegetables are fried plain, without breading, so they’re naturally sweet from all of the caramelized sugars on the exterior; the dressing is just lightly spicy and provides a dark, acidic note to balance out the sweetness.

Andrea Litvin, the Spence’s pastry chef, came out herself to deliver the dessert, the carrot cake, served in little cork-sized pieces with frozen dollops of crème fraiche, tiny meringes, violet leaves (from her own garden) and shaved drived carrot strips. It’s very typical of everything I ate at the Spence in that it looked unexpected, but there was a familiarity to the flavors when you got all of the components in a single bite. I don’t love carrot cake but this was moist and dense and not cloyingly sweet, and the frozen crème fraiche pastilles were amazing, a bright contrast to the richness of the cake. Litvin was also kind enough to answer some questions about making French macarons, my current bugbear in the kitchen as I can’t seem to get enough height on them. She’s up for the Food and Wine Best New Pastry Chef honor in the east region, and you can (and should!) vote for her here.

And finally, I nursed a cocktail through most the meal – the Sailor’s Crutch, containing dry gin, lemon juice, falernum syrup, and soda. I’m a dedicated rum drinker, but I could happily consume a Sailor’s Crutch a day and give up the demon spirit for a long time.

Full disclosure – they wouldn’t let me pay for the meal, and much of the staff came by to chat, so this was an extraordinary experience on many levels. I did see the prices, and I think it’s reasonable for the kind of food they’re serving, comparable to what I’d pay in Phoenix (at Citizen Public House or crudo) and less than I’d pay in New York or LA. Everything I had was wonderful, so I’d recommend it highly even if I had paid full fare.

I should also mention that I bought Blais’ new cookbook, Try This at Home: Recipes from My Head to Your Plate, about a month ago and have had great success with it so far. I need to try more recipes for a full review, but the sweet potato gnocchi were a big hit, even with my daughter who otherwise doesn’t like sweet potatoes.

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→ March 31, 2013
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Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry.

My last spring training dispatch, on Cubs prospect Pierce Johnson and Giants prospects Adalberto Mejia and Mac Williamson, went up this morning for Insiders.

B.S. Johnson was an avant-garde writer who wrote poetry, plays, and novels that earned minimal recognition during his brief lifetime – he killed himself in 1973 at age 40 – but have since acquired a substantial following among academics and fans of absurdist and post-modern fiction. I hadn’t heard of Johnson at all until finding a passage that discussed his works, specifically the use of metafictional techniques in Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, in James Wood’s How Fiction Works about a year ago. Christie Malry is bizarre, a portrait of the sociopath as a young figment of the author’s imagination, an heir to James Joyce and Flann O’Brien and a forerunner of Jasper Fforde.

Christie Malry is an 18-year-old narcissist and malcontent who believes that the world is out to do him harm, even in such clearly impersonal acts as putting up a building where he might want to walk if the sidewalk were a little wider. His first job at a bank, which he takes to be closer to the money, bores him, but he eventually discovers accounting and the system of double-entry bookkeeping developed in the late 1400s by the Franciscan frier Luca Pacioli, whose book on the subject is quoted several times in Johnson’s work. Malry decides to create a general ledger of his life, counting assaults against him as debits and undertaking acts of terrorism against society, starting with hoax bomb threats and escalating from there, as a way of balancing the books.

Johnson’s approach to the book has the air of calculated carelessness, such as when he says that the death toll from Malry’s biggest attack was just over twenty thousand, because “this was the first figure that came to hand as it is roughly the number of words of which the novel consists so far.” Johnson engages in dialogues with Malry, and has other characters lament their own use as pawns in the novel to further the plot without any significant development – especially Malry’s mother, who tells her back story to explain some of Malry’s behavior and then dies because she has exhausted her purpose. The arbitrary values Malry assigns to various slights are much higher than the value he places on the death of another person, which is just over a pound a head. Malry’s girlfriend is only named the Shrike, the name of a family of birds often called “butcher birds” because they impale insects on plant spikes or thorns as a form of food storage.

Johnson’s suicide shortly after the book’s publication means we won’t get a full explanation of some of the thematic questions in the book, one of which, for me, revolves around the recurring element of food. Most of the scenes revolving around Malry and other characters eating depict it as merely an act of sustenance, but Malry’s accounting job for a firm that handles catering and mass-production of processed sweets, leading him to the idea of using poison as a weapon to balance the ledger, which, reflecting my own philosophy on the subject, struck me as an unsubtle jab at the unhealthfulness of processed foods.

The novel does have a serious theme beneath its absurdist surface. Malry’s actions reflect a general refusal to live in society – a repudiation of the social contract from someone who was given no choice about participating in it in the first place. In a world of limited choice, Malry makes one of the only choices he feels like he can make, and one of the only ways he can reject the existing order. He did not opt in, and he believes this is the only way he can opt out. Because he feels no empathy, and places no value on any life but his own, he has no compunction about the growing tolls of his “credits,” but even so discovers that he can never quite balance the ledger and even these acts of terror don’t remove him from the system. Is life meaningless? A zero-sum game? Or do we all end our days with a pile of bad debt that we must write off without ever balancing our books? Johnson avoids answers but shines while asking the questions.

Next up: Tom Rachman’s 2011 novel The Imperfectionists, recommended by a reader right after its publication, which so far has been nearly perfect.

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