→ July 3, 2009
→ By

Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game.

Recent radio: My first-ever appearance on the BS Report; today’s hit on our Seattle affiliate; yesterday’s hit on Mike and Mike in the Morning (complete with goofy custom song).

I’ll be on KTAR Phoenix tonight at 7:10 pm local time, and on ESPN 1000 in Chicago at 9:40 pm local time.

Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game is the second book in William Kennedy’s Albany cycle, which started with Legs (which I didn’t like) and continues with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed. Legs was a fictionalized story of bootlegger Legs Diamond’s rise and fall in the Albany underworld, but the use of a real person limited Kennedy’s ability to craft an actual plot, leaving him instead to fit his words around actual events. In Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Kennedy can create something from whole cloth – the story of the title character’s unwilling involvement in a major Albany kidnapping, his fall from grace, and his surprising redemption.

Although the setting is the 1930s, evoking thoughts of hard-boiled detective novels, Kennedy’s style is more expansive than the typical dry hard-boiled writer’s, from longer sentences to allusions to music, novels, and poetry, such as this passage where one character, a playwright, quotes Yeats:

Young people rode together in the summer in open carriages. They held hands and walked around the spectacular Moses fountain. Martin’s father stood at the edge of these visions, watching. This is no country for old men, his father said. I prefer, said Edward Daugherty, to be with the poet, a golden bird on a golden bough, singing of what is past.

The passage is a memory of Martin Daugherty, a friend of Billy’s and the second protagonist in two plot lines that intertwine throughout the book. Martin’s is more introspective and sentimental, while Billy’s has more action, relatively speaking, although the bulk of the big action takes place off-screen. Both characters face existential questions, revolving around family, both real and the constructed “family” of the McCall crime organization.

Kennedy’s prose is strong, and was markedly improved over that of Legs. He provides just enough imagery to set the scene and evokes that hard-boiled feel with text that’s one step above sparse. Billy Phelan’s also has more comic elements, and Kennedy is certainly not above a bit of slapstick or even bathroom humor, including the book’s funniest passage, one that has nothing to do with the main plot:

And Cottrell and Leonard and the mannequins in the window. Two bums broke that window one night, drunked up on zodiac juice, everybody’s bar dregs, beer, whiskey, wine, that old Lumberg kept in a can and then bottled and sold to the John bums for six bucks a gallon. When the cops caught up with the bums, one of them was dead and the other was screwing the mannequin through a hole cut in its crotch.

After fighting my way through Legs, I tore through this book, and was even satisfied by the unconventional (and slightly ironic) ending.

Next up: Back to the TIME 100 with Henry Green’s Loving, part of a three-book volume that includes his earlier novels Living and Party Going.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ July 1, 2009
→ By

The Old Man and the Sea.

Podcast links – I was on The Herd yesterday and Baseball Tonight last night. Still working on last night’s Fan 590 Toronto hit, and the Mike & Mike hit should be up later today.

It would be fairly easy to write a note about Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea that is actually longer than the book itself, but I’ll resist the urge. I don’t care for Hemingway, having read three of his novels before tackling this novella (#32 on the Radcliffe 100 and winner of the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Really Short Books of Five-Word Sentences Fiction); his prose style is detached, and I can’t relate to the casual nihilism of many of his main characters. The Old Man and the Sea differs from the other Hemingway novels I’ve read in the latter respect, since it’s more of a fable than a novel, and the title character dares to hope.

The main question around the novella seems to be the symbolic value of the sea and/or the giant fish that the old man catches. These were some possibilities that occurred to me as I read the book:

* The fish represents happiness: You can catch it and hold it for a short period of time, but like all else in life and this world, it will pass. This would mean that Our Lady Peace had it slightly wrong, since happiness would indeed be a fish you can catch, but not one you can keep.

* The fish represents man: King of his little universe until some higher force (fate, God, two-headed aliens with probes … okay, the last one might be a stretch) intervenes. And subjects him to a humiliating, painful decline. This is Hemingway we’re discussing, so you can’t rule that out.

* The sea represents life or fate: Pretty obvious. Man struggling against a force beyond his control and beyond his ability to perceive it, refusing to surrender or accept inevitable defeat.

* The fish and the sea together represent the upper and lower bounds on man’s life. Man can tame or defeat some aspects of his world, but ultimately there is an upper bound on our existence.

We read A Farewell to Arms in AP Lit – I was so pissed at the ending that I threw the book across the room – but never Old Man, which seems to be unusual given how many people tell me they read it in school. Hemingway strikes me as an author best read in an academic setting because his works lend themselves so well to this kind of simple literary analysis. I don’t enjoy his prose, and his stories and characters don’t grip me the way that Fitzgerald’s or Faulkner’s do.

Next up: The second book in William Kennedy’s Albany cycle, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game. I can already tell you it’s better than Legs.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ June 27, 2009
→ By

Ghost.

I have a new post up with some notes on non-Bryce-Harper players I saw at the Tournament of Stars this week.

River Ave Blues looked at the final mock drafts of the major draft analysts, and they ranked mine as the most accurate.

I’m holding the review of Word Freak for now, as Stefan agreed to a brief Q&A about the book and his current Scrabble habits and I’m waiting for the response.

—

Alan Lightman’s slim, quick-reading 2007 novel Ghost revolves around a very ordinary man, David Kurzweil, whose life is turned upside down when he sees something out of the corner of his eye that he can’t identify or explain. He ends up at the center of a public controversy over the existence of the supernatural, turning his life upside down as he struggles to decide what exactly he saw, and what it might mean.

The ostensible subject of the book is that battle between faith and skepticism, and Lightman – the first professor to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities at MIT – limits the phony dialogue and extended narrative digressions that can easily ruin a book like this, instead creating a raft of secondary characters to represent many different views on the subject. (Oddly enough, the one role he omits is the traditionalist – at no point does David seek counsel from clergy of any faith.) Lightman also cleverly confounds any attempt by his characters to provide a clear resolution to the question, as proving or disproving the existence of the supernatural is not his aim.

I think the book’s ultimate theme – or perhaps moral – is that, in the small view, it doesn’t matter whether David’s experience represented a genuine contact with the supernatural, but whether he fully believes in it himself. David doesn’t see any meaning in life, so he lives a life without meaning. He has a job that, at the time he takes it and even at the time that he sees whatever he sees, is just a job. His love life is in shambles, with a divorce that he hasn’t emotionally accepted after eight years and a girlfriend to whom he can’t fully connect. As he finds himself forced to defend what he saw from skeptics and from co-opters, his personality begins to emerge from a hibernation that may have started when his father died when David was still a child. He has shied away from real relationships for at least the eight years since the divorce, and perhaps for longer (the marriage did fail, after all), and suddenly is forced to deal with people and to define himself along the way. Whether the supernatural exists is not Lightman’s question; he’s exploring what would happen to an ordinary man placed into an extraordinary situation that has the potential to change his life in either direction.

Next up: One of those books that people can’t believe I haven’t read previously – Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: ,
→ June 25, 2009
→ By

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

Klawchat Thursday 1 pm EDT.

Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World came before his magnum opus (and top-ten entry on the Klaw 100) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and having read the latter book first, I can see HBW as a buildup to the later masterwork, where Murakami was still honing his storycraft. The voice is unmistakably his, as is the raucuously inventive plot, but it’s less cohesive than TWUBC or the similarly amazing Kafka on the Shore.

HBW tells two stories in alternating chapters, with the connection only becoming apparently at or just after the book’s midpoint. The main storyline revolves around a narrator who is a Calcutec, a person responsible for encrypting data in his brain, which has been surgically altered to allow for separate, independent access of the two halves of the cerebrum (?). He’s called in for a special, top-secret project by a mysterious hermit-like possibly-mad scientist who knows more than he lets on.

The second storyline is mysterious, as the narrator has just arrived in a strange Town where time exists but moves on forever – not in an infinite loop, where time repeats, but with neither beginning nor end, to say nothing of purpose. People in the Town have no names, no identities beyond their assigned roles, and no feelings. The Town is walled – by a Wall, of course – and there is no way out, although the narrator is never explicitly described as a prisoner and seems to be a VIP of sorts. Its nature is deliberately vague, and only becomes clear after Murakami connects the two plots.

Unfortunately, Murakami appears to have started with the idea of writing one novel and decided midstream to write a different one. In the first half of the book, it appears that the narrator is going to be sucked into an underworld battle between factions fighting over what appears to be control of critical data that he has been encrypting. He’s threatened and injured, goes on the lam … and that plot line ends there, with no return or hint of resolution, and it’s never quite clear what his assailants were after or what they decided to do in the day and a half that follows the assault.

Murakami’s easy, almost conversational style – like having a conversation with a slightly crazy person – and gift for creating memorable side characters was already in full effect in HBW, so it’s an enjoyable read, and he creates plenty of tension to propel the reader through the book. He goes off on an explanatory tangent mid-book, where he has to explain to the reader some bit of science or (in this case) mock science so that the overall plot will make sense, and it’s a jarring interruption to the flow of the story and the prose; it’s a crutch of a weak or inexperienced writer, and Murakami didn’t use it in either of the two books by him that I’d previously read.

If you haven’t read Murakami before, I’d strongly recommend The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle over HBW. Wind-Up Bird is, on its surface, the story of a man whose wife disappears under odd circumstances, sending him on a quest not just to find her, but to find himself. This type of introspective journey forms a part of the ultimate uber-plot in HBW, but it’s incomplete and not as all-consuming as Wind-Up Bird, a book that possesses your mind as the dream of a deep slumber. HWB is best for Murakami completists.

Next up: Alan Lightman’s Ghost.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ June 15, 2009
→ By

Gone with the Wind.

Gone with the Wind is a five-lister, appearing on the TIME 100 and the Bloomsbury 100, ranking 100th on the Novel 100 and 26th on the Radcliffe 100, and winning the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1937. It is a sweeping epic of the South just before, during, and for years after the Civil War, with an emphasis on both the war’s effects on that region and specifically on the war’s effects on women and their role(s) in society. If you haven’t read the book or seen the film, you probably have the same impression that I did of the story, that it is primarily an ill-fated romance between Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, which ends with their famous exchange:

Scarlett: Rhett, Rhett… Rhett, if you go, where shall I go? What shall I do?
Rhett Butler: Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

As it turns out, their romance is but one of many plot lines underpinning the book, which is much more about Scarlett than it is about Rhett … and the lines above were modified from their original form in the book, where Scarlett says to Rhett after he has made it clear that they’re through, “All I know is that you do not love me and you are going away! Oh, my darling, if you go, what shall I do?” To this, Rhett responds with a hundred-word soliloquy that ends with, “I wish I could care what you do or where you go, but I can’t. My dear, I don’t give a damn,” with the last few words said “lightly but softly.” I’m not sure which is better – the film version is punchier, but feels less authentic – but the difference in effect is striking.

Scarlett herself is a fascinating character and very well developed, or at least becomes so as the book progresses, and it’s a neat trick by Mitchell to flesh the character out without changing Scarlett’s fundamental selfishness or immaturity through a thousand pages* and a series of life events worthy of a month of General Hospital. Scarlett is more anti-heroine than heroine, but she is definitely between the two poles; despite the character flaws mentioned above and an insatiable desire to earn what might today be called “screw-you money,” she is a raging survivalist and refuses to give up hope even in hopeless situations. Her determination, perseverance, and work ethic save her and members of her family – although whether she cares about them is another matter – from death, starvation, homelessness, rape, and poverty, depending on which trial she’s facing, and she’s admirable for that sheer force of will and her view that dwelling on a past that’s gone or on the reasons why she won’t succeed at something is just a waste of time.

*So I found a site that has word counts for a lot of famous novels, and it turns out that GWTW is the longest book I’ve ever read. The revised list:

1. Gone With the Wind (418053 words)
2. Don Quixote (390883)
3. Lonesome Dove (365712)
4. Anna Karenina (349736)
5. Tom Jones (345139)
6. Jonathan Strange (308931)
7. Vanity Fair (296401)
8. The Pickwick Papers (274718)
9. The Woman in White (244859)

Two books I presume would be next on the list, The Woman in White and The Sot-Weed Factor, didn’t have word counts listed, but I pulled The Woman in White from gutenberg.org. This is probably of interest to no one but me, although I think it’s odd that I’ve read two of the top three in the last three months and five of the top nine (or six of ten) in the last fifteen months. Maybe I’m getting over that fear of long books?

The main problem I had with GWTW may be connected to how well-formed Scarlett is. Mitchell, according to what I’ve since read about the book (including Daniel Burt’s essay in The Novel 100, which is one of his best), was determined to tell the story of southern women in the postbellum south and how they were expected to fill contradictory roles. To that end, Mitchell created two characters, Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes, who symbolize the two main cultural forces acting on southern women in that time period. Butler represents modernity, a break with the past and with the societal and moral strictures that held women out of the workforce, in the home, and pumping out babies. Wilkes represents the past, but a past that, by the novel’s end, no longer exists – a genteel, aristocratic southern society that was based on slavery and the subjugation of a “white trash” underclass that was largely swept under the rugs of the well-heeled. Scarlett should choose Rhett and let go of her idealized Ashley, but by the time she develops enough self-awareness to see this, it’s too late.

Yet Rhett and Ashley are so busy serving as symbols for the future (or for a future) and the past that they don’t work well as independent characters. Ashley is a simpering dandy with the initiative of a sea cucumber; he makes an expected marriage and has no useful skill or knowledge, since his plan is to live off his family’s wealth and holdings, all of which are destroyed in the war, leaving him an empty shell of a character for Mitchell to kick around when it suits her.

Rhett is far more complex than Ashley, and is constantly operating from unclear motives, which he lays bare (unconvincingly) in the book’s final pages. He’s an amoral opportunist who believes in nothing but his own pleasure and personal gain, yet makes irrational sacrifices that would appear to further neither of his aims. He loves Scarlett and eventually excoriates her for destroying their chance at happiness, without acknowledging that his derision, his neglect, and his recklessness all might place a little responsibility at his feet. His words are usually perfect, so perfect that he’s clearly a fictional character, yet when he is trying to convince his wife to forget the specter of Ashley and love him, he’s verbally abusive and can’t understand why his plan isn’t working. The final confrontation between Rhett and Scarlett, after yet another tragic death of someone close to them, has Rhett saying powerful, horrifying words about the death of love and the inability to erase the past, but his own role in the past is immaterial to him. He is reduced to a prop, like lighting designed to show Scarlett in an unattractive way.

Was Mitchell so locked in to developing her heroine that she left her male characters all half-formed or even caricatures? Was she unable to gross the gender chasm and create a compelling male character? With only one other completed novel during her lifetime, which she wrote as an adolescent, we’ll never get the answer to this. Reasons aside, that flaw keeps the book from greatness. It’s a shame that she didn’t flesh Rhett Butler out more fully, because he is interesting – an intelligent scoundrel who flummoxes Scarlett in their endless bickering:

(Rhett) “Still tied to momma’s apronstrings.”
(Scarlett) “Oh, you have the nastiest way of making virtues sound stupid.”
“But virtues are stupid.”

It’s also worth mentioning to anyone who does decide to tackle this book that it is full of language that today is considered highly offensive, mostly directed at blacks. There’s dialogue from whites towards blacks using plenty of n- and d-words, there’s also narrative text including those same words, but black characters’ dialogue is all written in the mocking style of “An’ den he say, Tell Miss Scarlett ter res’ easy. Ah’ll steal her a hawse outer de ahmy crall effen dey’s ary one lef’.” White characters in the book would have spoken English with a heavy Georgian accent as well, but Mitchell didn’t see fit to alter their dialogue to reflect the regional pronunciation; using stunted spelling for the words from slaves’ mouths serves to establish them as inferior persons within the book. Perhaps in a book of 300 pages, I could have overlooked it, but in 400,000-plus words, that type of language grates.

Next up: Nonfiction, just for a break – Stefan Fatsis’ Word Freak, about the rather odd subculture of competitive Scrabble.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ June 5, 2009
→ By

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

I recorded a half-dozen draft preview videos for ESPNEWS and the dot-com; the first two are on Steven Strasburg and the top hitters in the draft. Today’s chat transcript is here. Deadspin had a good post today on the Austin Wood/Mike Belfiore debacle, which quoted me, which is what made it a good post in the first place.

—

After the dual endorsement given by the two critics behind the TIME 100, I expected to love Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but I didn’t. I liked it, and I can see glimmers of brilliance in it, but the core story just didn’t grab me or propel me forward.

Oscar Wao is a Latino geek in New Jersey caught between his ethnic identity and his inner dork, a lover of sci-fi magazines and role-playing games who speaks in his own stilted vernacular and can not, for the life of him, get laid. His life is brief and not really all that wondrous, although it is pretty crazy, a sort of hysterical realism along the lines of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. The narrative breaks several times to shift narrators and jumps back once to tell the story of Oscar’s grandparents, particularly his grandfather, an educated man jailed over an apparent trifle by the brutal Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Indeed, Trujillo might be even more of a main character in this book than Oscar is, as the murderous tyrant appears in the subtext even in the present day, and the history of the Dominican Republic seems to parallel (imperfectly) Oscar’s story.

Díaz has a definite gift for language (Beli tried her hardest but she couldn’t spin bomb-grade plutonium from the light-grade uranium of her days) and reading his prose is frequently like tap-dancing on the edge of a deep crevasse – exciting, confusing, frightening, but, assuming you survive, something you’re not likely to forget any time soon. But ultimately, the story revolves around a character who’s not that compelling: Oscar is a geek and unlucky in love and life, but he’s not sympathetic – he’s almost robotic, and naïve only works on my sympathies for a little while, after which I start to wonder how a character who is allegedly quite smart can also be so dense. Diaz’s verbal gymnastics, his cleverness, and the intermittent humor all make Oscar Wao worth reading, but a tighter story and a central character who’s more human could have made this a masterpiece.

Next up: I’ve got about 360 pages left in Gone with the Wind.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ May 17, 2009
→ By

So Big.

You’re probably not familiar with the name Edna Ferber – I wasn’t until I saw it on the list of winners of the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel – but you’ve probably heard of her work by way of the movies. She wrote the novels behind the films Showboat, Cimarron, Saratoga Trunk, and Giant, the last perhaps more notorious for being James Dean’s last work than for anything else. So Big, the novel that won Ferber the Pulitzer, has been adapted three times for the big screen but, by all accounts, never successfully, and given its leisurely pace and deep characterizations, I’m not terribly surprised.

So Big is the story of a mother and a son, starting from the mother’s sudden thrusting into the world after her father’s sudden (and somewhat comical) death and running into the son’s late twenties and early thirties. The mother, Selina Peake, is admonished by her father that life is an adventure if you get after it, but lets life lead her along until she’s forced to take the reins, after which she shows herself as a woman of spirit and initiative:

Youth was gone, but she had health, courage; a boy of nine; twenty-five acres of wornout farm land; dwelling and out-houses in a bad state of repair; and a gay adventuresome spirit that was never to die, though it led her into curious places and she often found, at the end, only a trackless waste from which she had to retrace her steps painfully. But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.*

*I’m about 90% certain I read a passage similar to this one that used almost identical wording at the end in Lonesome Dove, used to describe Clara, but of course, I didn’t write down the page number and I’m not likely to find it by skimming through a 900-page book. If any of you choose to tackle that tome in the future, keep an eye out a phrase like “Life has no weapons against a woman like that.”

Selina, widowed with her young son Dirk (nicknamed “Sobig” after the “How big is baby?” game played with him as an infant), takes over the family farm and, with the help of the novel’s one substantial coincidence, carves out a living and eventually a life for the two of them, making Dirk’s well-being her driving force, ensuring that he receives an education and can start life with the advantages she lacked. It is, along those lines, a bit of a love story in the way that Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is – a parent, alone, who will do anything for his/her son.

Somewhere past the novel’s midpoint, the focus shifts from Selina to the adult Dirk, first in college, then in his aimless early adulthood both in work and in his personal life. He starts out in a career he likes but finds no success, then in a career in which he finds success but no pleasure. He is good-looking and inadvertently charming, but almost apathetic towards women, with no interest in the type of woman he “should” be seeing:

The Farnham girl was a nice girl. She was the kind of girl one should fall in love with and doesn’t. The Farnham girl was one of the many well-bred Chicago girls of her day and class. Fine, honest, clear-headed, frank, capable, good-looking in an indefinite and unarresting sort of way. Hair-coloured hair, good teeth, good enough eyes, clear skin; sensible medium hands and feet … Her hand met yours firmly – and it was just a hand. At the contact no current darted through you, sending its shaft with a little zing to your heart.

It’s a pleasant read with dry wit like that of the passage about (I found “hair-coloured hair” rather clever) and an incredibly compelling and well-drawn character in Selina, for whom one must root as she faces adversity, although her one big low moment ends prematurely with the aforementioned coincidence (you could even call it a deus ex machina). Dirk is less compelling, by design, although it slows the book’s final third considerably until he meets someone who, more than anything, is spirited like his mother. The book also slowed a bit for me for the unclear theme – what are we looking at here: Selina’s trials? The rise of an independent woman? Her dedication to her son? Her son’s lack of lust for life? The rural/urban divide of Chicago in the early years of the 20th century? I couldn’t tell you; all of the above are present, none is dominant. I like my novels to be about something; this was about many things, but perhaps it was about too many things for a novel so short.

Next up: From the seventh winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel to the second-most recent winner of its successor award, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Filed Under: Literature, Media Tagged With: , ,
→ May 14, 2009
→ By

Bullet-point Wednesday.

  • I’ve got an actual news story up on ESPN.com on the NCAA’s most recent beatdown in the Andy Oliver case. One lawyer to whom I spoke about yesterday’s ruling said that “No good lawyer would allow his client to send out that memo if it was subject to the February ruling that Judge Tone issued. It’s reckless and arrogant and risks even more ire from the considerable amount the court has already shown the NCAA.”
  • I’m assuming most of you have already seen my ranking of the top 100 prospects in this draft. It’s going to change between now and June 9th; I’m already thinking 11-13 should be Wheeler, Purke, Green. Anyway, 39 players currently have reports, and I’m hoping to get that to 50 by Sunday.
  • Klawbaiters, your fines are now due. Our first project is on Globalgiving.com, which I mentioned in the review of White Man’s Burden. The project’s goal is to help 250 disabled Kenyan children attend school. You can send your fines here; I kicked it off with a $50 donation, which should cover the times I’ve been successfully baited by you.
  • I did finish that book of Chekhov’s short stories, and I have to say, I was underwhelmed. He’s considered one of the greatest short story writers ever, if not the greatest, but I don’t understand why – the writing was good, but the stories weren’t compelling, and most of them were fundamentally the same – stories of poor Russians struggling in the post-serfdom era under the de facto caste system and their own idiocy. If one of you lit hounds can set me straight on this, I’d appreciate it.
  • Current book is Edna Ferber’s So Big, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1925. It was already on my shelf when I mailed out some Mother’s Day cards my daughter had painted and had to go buy 83-cent stamps … and as it turns out, the 83-cent stamp in use today features Edna Ferber. I figured that was a sign that I should read it next.
Filed Under: Literature, Sports Tagged With: , , ,
→ May 5, 2009
→ By

The TIME 100 Q&A.

Quick admin notes: NYC 1050 AM hit moved back to 9:25 pm tonight. Podcast of my chat with Jeff Erickson is available here. Tentatively scheduled to appear on 101 ESPN in St. Louis Wednesday at 1:20 pm CDT.

I’m working my way through a half-dozen greatest books lists, from the Novel 100 to the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel/Fiction winners, but I think the most successful one for introducing me to books I liked or loved has been the TIME magazine list of the 100 greatest English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005. (Details on all the lists I use are on the FAQ.) On a whim, I contacted Lev Grossman, one of the two critics behind the TIME 100, and he and co-conspirator Richard Lacayo agreed to answer some questions I had about their list. Lacayo wrote about the process behind the list’s construction when it first appeared, and that essay may be useful background for those of you unfamiliar with the list itself.

Lev, you mentioned in your first response to me that you didn’t care for Tropic of Cancer, yet it’s on the list. How much did literary influence or academic value weigh against readability or trivial things like plot?

LG: I wasn’t that interested in academic value. I’ve spent some time in academia, and I feel like I have a good sense of what that’s good for it, and what it isn’t. As for readability, I’m a major backer of it. It was the fashion in the earlier part of the 20th to write very challengingly and elliptically and occasionally boringly. Which was a mode that was appropriate to its time. But not all those works are still worth the tremendous trouble they put the reader through.

I am however very interested in literary influence — works that changed the literary landscape through their sheer force and power and visionary newness. I’ll forgive a book a lot I would say I weighed those heavily.

RL: That was my pick, and one that I re-read for the list to make sure I still liked it. As I mentioned in that essay I wrote to introduce the list and explain how we made it, we didn’t agree on every title, and we decided not to, because we thought it would be more interesting for the list to include non-consensus choices. As for Tropic, I love the shaggy dog quality of that book. I don’t care whether it goes anyplace in particular. That willingness to blow off the “responsibility” to provide much of a plot is part of Miller’s personal ethic. The book is a demonstration of its own philosophy.

I was aware of the book’s history as the object of a landmark obscenity trial in the U.S., but it didn’t play any part in my judgment. And as for academic value – is Miller much read in “the academy”?

Unlike most lists of this ilk, yours was unranked. Why? If you had to choose a top 5 from your 100, what would it include?

LG: Oh, you know how it is. Lists are arbitrary enough as it is, without bringing ranking into it. You start splitting hairs, comparing apples and oranges … it started to seem absurd.

Top 5, off the top of my head?

Brideshead Revisited
Mrs. Dalloway
The Sound and the Fury
The Sun Also Rises
The Great Gatsby

RL: I just don’t think that’s possible. There’s no rational unit of measurement. You can do that with a poll of numerous critics by counting up which titles got the most votes, the way Sight and Sound magazine does every ten years with the greatest films. But I couldn’t claim with a straight face that Pale Fire is 22.5% better than Appointment in Samarra.

But if I had to pick a top five, it would probably be To the Lighthouse, Pale Fire, The Crying of Lot 49, 1984, Midnight’s Children but ask me a year from now and I might choose five others.

Your list was limited to novels first published in English. Why exclude works from other languages as long as they were eventually published in English? Did you consider, at the time or afterwards, creating a parallel list so that Franz Kafka and Gabriel Garcia Marquez could be similarly recognized?

LG: We did consider creating a parallel list. But the body of work was just too vast — how could we pretend to have read all of world literature, even in translation? We needed ways to narrow the field. That was one.

RL: We weren’t belittling “foreign” literature by not including it. We were paying it our respects. We felt we could not plausibly tell readers we had sifted the fiction of every nation. There’s simply too much of it – French, Japanese, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Latin American. Halldor Laxness may have won the Nobel Prize, but never made it on to my bookshelf. Lev and I both have English lit. degrees and have been reading for decades and were comfortable claiming to know enough of the range of English language work to make what we hoped were useful evaluations of it.

Also, I can never find the umlaut on my keyboard.

The Modern Library’s list, which covered the entire 20th century, was criticized for its lack of female and minority authors. Did you consider the authors’ genders or ethnicities at all in assembling the list? Should those be factors?

LG: I think it’s worth considering those things, along with everything else. There is a subjective dimension to the idea of ‘literary value,’ a big one, and Richard and I were conscious that the people making this list were two white men. We did our best to ensure that a broad range of points of view was represented.

RL: Lev speaks for both of us when he says we were aware that we were both white men drawing up this list, but I didn’t find it necessary to worry about that too much. For starters there were always going to be plenty of women on the list. Virginia Woolf is one of my favorite writers. Likewise Muriel Spark. Beloved? Death Comes for the Archbishop? These are no-brainers. In the end I think there are 19 titles by women.

Similarly with black authors, You don’t put Invisible Man on the list to be “correct”. You put it there because it’s so obviously brilliant. James Baldwin? Zadie Smith? We didn’t have to go searching for them. The only book by an African-American writer that I picked up because I hadn’t been introduced to it before and felt I needed to know it was Their Eyes Were Watching God, which I loved. Along with Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates that book was the fun discovery of this whole process for me. (Re-reading Portnoy’s Complaint was also a nice surprise. I had forgotten how good it was. Not just funny. Good in many ways.)

As I mention in that introductory text, there were writers who almost made the cut but didn’t quite — Dawn Powell is in that category for me. And as I also there, there are a number of women writers whose greatest work is in stories, not novels. Flannery O’Connor is a genius, but her novel, Wise Blood, doesn’t do it for me. Likewise Annie Proulx, The Shipping News notwithstanding, who once said to me herself that she considered stories her real forte. Close Range is my idea of a masterpiece, but it’s a story collection. Karen Blixen, Katherine Anne Porter, Shirley Jackson, Eudora Welty – same thing.

What I didn’t do was include a book simply because it represented any kind of social or political breakthrough. I love Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man, about a gay man living in California after the death of his lover. It was published in 1964 and really is a breakthrough book in terms of introducing a gay character who’s not troubled by his own sexuality, just carrying on with his life. But good as it is, as a book it doesn’t measure up for me to The Berlin Stories.

If I had an agenda of any kind it may have been British novels of the 20s, 30s and 40s. I like Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, the novels of Aldous Huxley beyond just Brave New World. Waugh. Graham Greene. It’s not the Masterpiece Theatre aspect, it’s just something about the ease with which they practice the conventions of novel.

Richard wrote at the time that you agreed on roughly 80 titles more or less off the bat. What book that made the list sparked the biggest disagreement? How about one that missed?

LG: It’s been a while since we formulated the list, and I’m trying to remember. Richard is a staunch Pynchonian, which I definitely am not — I’m sure I rolled my eyes at putting two Pynchon novels on the list. But I did it quietly. Likewise I expected resistance to some of the science fiction entries on the list — Dick, Gibson, Stephenson — but got none. Likewise the YA novel (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret) and the graphic novel (Watchmen). I wish I had stories for you about shouting matches and fisticuffs, but it was a pretty civilized process. I think Richard’s essay has all the dirt there is in it.

RL: Not to sugar coat the thing, but there weren’t that many, partly because we had this agreement that there would be titles we just wouldn’t agree on. Lev likes graphic novels. It would never occur to me to put Watchmen on the list but he loves it. Meanwhile, I really enjoy a lot of what you might call classic modernist writers, the ones who play around with the conventions of the novel, from Woolf to Pynchon. That stuff bores some people, including sometimes Lev. It’s ice cream to me. As he mentioned to you, I would have put a third Pynchon title on (V.), but there wasn’t room. (And I’m not somebody who pats Pynchon on the head for everything he does. I pretty much panned his last book in the magazine.

Have you reconsidered – or regretted – any of the entries since the list was published?

LG: I haven’t.

RL: Only the books there weren’t room for, but that’s list making for you. As mentioned, Dawn Powell. Elizabeth Hardwick’s novel Sleepless Nights. Maybe The Wapshot Chronicle by (John) Cheever. E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel. (Saul) Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift.

Are there any works published since 2005 that you would place on a revised list?

LG: Yes, one. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

RL: Oscar Wao, definitely.

KL: It’s on my to-be-read shelf and just moved up in the queue after that response.

Did you consider other lists or awards, such as Pulitzer Prizes, as criteria for inclusion or even as “bonus points” for specific books?

LG: We really didn’t. I’ve sat on enough awards committees to know how arbitrary they are. I don’t give them much weight.

RL: Did we care whether a book had won prizes? Not at all. The Nobel didn’t get Patrick White on the list. And The Pulitzer has gone to many dreary books.

*KL: Concur.

One inclusion that confused me at the time that I read it was Watchmen, which is really a short story stretched to novel length by illustrations. To me, it offers none of the complexity of even a short novel like Red Harvest. Tell me about the decision to include a graphic novel in a list of prose works.

LG: There are plenty of things to complain about in Watchmen, but a lack of complexity? I couldn’t disagree more! I’m a great believer in the power and importance of graphic novels — or comic books, as I prefer to call them — and I think they’re one of the most exciting things to happen to the novel in the 20th Century. To me the list would have had a hole in it without them.

I’ll throw some titles at you that I thought should have made the list or at least been considered. Tell me whether they came up at all, and if so, why they didn’t make the cut.

Cry the Beloved Country
Tender is the Night
A Confederacy of Dunces
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Empire Falls
The Dud Avocado

LG: Now we’re really going to expose the ugly underbelly of subjectivity in this list. A Confederacy of Dunces – I’ve always felt this book was rather heavy-handed and unfunny and hence over-rated. I know it’s beloved by many, and I’m buying myself some serious ire by saying that, but if there’s one rule I have as a critic, it’s never lie. And I couldn’t in all honesty put that book on the list, because I just don’t feel it’s great.

Tender is the Night was a tougher decision, it’s a beautiful novel with reams of great writing in it, but I think ultimately it’s slightly overstuffed and ungainly and melodramatic, especially when you put it next to the jewel-like perfection that is The Great Gatsby, which I think is better suited to represent Fitzgerald on the list.

I could go on slagging the classic works you’ve listed, but you get the general idea. I’ll just add that, to my shame, I had never read or heard of The Dud Avocado. There’s that ugly underbelly I was talking about.

RL: I read Cry the Beloved Country long ago, but wasn’t moved to re-visit it. I like Confederacy, but wasn’t in love with it. Tender is the Night was on my short list – an adolescent favorite, adolescents love doom. But Fitzgerald’s problem is that he wrote one book so perfect it makes everything else he wrote look a bit dim, even the good things.

The Dud Avocado – I’ll have to go looking for that one.

Awesome stuff. I’ll even forgive you for trashing Tender is the Night, which is my favorite novel by an American author. My readers will enjoy you taking me to task over Watchmen, although I stand my ground – it was thinner than a sheet of phyllo dough.

Thank you both for your answers and for the great list.

Filed Under: Literature, Media, TIME 100, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ May 3, 2009
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The Reader.

Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader – the basis for the film that starred Kate Winslet getting “repeatedly naked,” according to Bill Simmons – is an impressively complex work given its length, around 220 pages. It is nominally the story of Michael Berg, who is fifteen when the story opens, and Hannah Schmitz, who is more than twice that age; the two end up in an intense sexual relationship, one that echoes the relationship of Lolita but that is told from the younger participant’s perspective. (Of course, older man/younger girl is significantly more scandalous than older woman/younger guy, which further pushes this issue into the background.) Hannah breaks the relationship off suddenly, disappearing from Michael’s life without warning, only to reappear years later in a substantial coincidence as Michael finds himself assigned by a college class to cover a war-crimes trial in which Hannah is a participant. Michael realizes that he knows something about Hannah that would exonerate her of the worst of the charges – it won’t take you that long to figure it out – and his choices from that point forward dictate the course of the rest of Hannah’s life, much as her choices with him when they were lovers dictate the course of the rest of his life.

My theory of the book is that Schlink was not referring to Michael or Hannah with the title “The Reader,” but is referring to us. In the first part of the novel, he gives us the affair, one that despite Michael’s youth and a heavy reliance on sex with little conversation is not scandalous and is even presented positively. Hannah is mysterious and moody but appears to be hiding some secret pain. Michael is young and innocent but cares deeply for Hannah. There are a few hints of the age imbalance, but the net for Michael is give to us as positive. Schlink is just setting us up, however; the sympathetic characters of part one are not so sympathetic after all – Hannah was a guard in the SS and is accused of complicity, if not outright responsibility, in the deaths of hundreds of female Jewish prisoners; Michael, ruined emotionally by the teenage dalliance with Hannah, can’t take simple steps to help Hannah or simply make her life in prison a little better, much less offer her any sort of absolution for breaking off a relationship that, ultimately, was wrong. Did Michael have an obligation to come forward during Hannah’s trial with his exculpatory evidence – or to at least confront Hannah about it? Why would Hannah refuse to set aside her shame to avoid a horrible fate – did she want to go to prison, to seek absolution through the justice system because the dead could not absolve her? Hannah’s choices are particularly mysterious, since she rarely speaks to Michael when they’re together and has but a handful of lines of dialogue after part one. In a short novel, Schlink presents moral dilemmas while also challenging us to reconsider our loyalties to the two main characters. Why are those two sympathetic in part one, when ultimately, we know so little about them, and some of what we know is less flattering than we believed at first glance? Is the responsibility on the author to reveal everything at once, or on the reader to consider all possibilities before drawing conclusions or developing attachments to specific characters?

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,