→ May 2, 2009
→ By

First Among Sequels.

I’ve said many times that i’m a huge Jasper Fforde fan, but I tend to save his books for long flights because they make the time pass so much more quickly. I’d been saving the fifth Thursday Next novel (technically the sixth, but The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco is no longer available) First Among Sequels for over a year and finally tackled it this week, knocking it off in about four hours of active reading time. Fforde, after saying he was done with Thursday Next and banging out a Nursery Crimes novel, is back in top form.

First is, as the title implies, the beginning of a second tetralogy involving Thursday Next, the literary detective who has the ability to jump from our world to BookWorld, the parallel universe of books – all books, in fact, organized in clusters like galaxies in our universe. Fforde has expanded the range of subjects he’s either satirizing or borrowing, including international politics, global warming (England has a “stupidity surplus,” and one proposal is to buy offsets in particularly stupidly-run countries), reality television, tax policy, and astrophysics. At the same time, he continues to show and even improve on the breadth of books folded into his novel, with a meeting in a tea room from Summer Lightning, an escape through the core containment center (that’ll make sense when you read it) of Cold Comfort Farm, a potentially fatal change to an Agatha Christie novel, and conversation with two crickets (one the main cricket, the other his stunt double) from Pinocchio. Thursday takes on a trainee Jurisfiction agent and has to deal with corruption (as usual) in both BookWorld and in England. And there’s some carpeting to be done as well.

There is, however, a more serious streak to First than there was in any of his six prior books in this and the Nursery Crimes series. Fforde’s alternate-history timeline starts to mirror ours in an uncomfortable way, with declining book readership caused by shrinking reader attention spans and the concomitant rise of increasingly inane reality television shows. (The always popular Name That Fruit looks intellectual by comparison.) He also uses the emotional connections we develop with books and with characters to underpin a key plot twist, thus advancing an argument that books provide us with an experience that is hard, if not impossible, to achieve through other means.

Oh, and various entities try to kill Thursday throughout the book, and one of those plot lines isn’t resolved and (I imagine) will roll through the next three books in the series.

First is a glorious jumble of plot lines and twists with the usual mixture of literary rumor, bad puns (such as the researcher Anne Wirthlass), and snark (Harry Potter’s name comes up in one of the better gags). If you haven’t read any of the series before, go back to The Eyre Affair to start – and really, before you do that, you should probably take a spin through Jane Eyre (or, at worst, just rent one of the many film adaptations), since knowing that plot will make the key twist in Fforde’s book about eight times funnier.

Next up: I’m reading a collection of Chekhov’s short stories while also listening to an audio version of The Reader.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 30, 2009
→ By

Light in August.

Quick admin notes: Chat today at 1 pm (just for an hour). I’ll be on WHB in Kansas City with Rany Jazayerli at 7:30 CDT tonight. I’m trying to work out a hit time for our Chicago affiliate for tomorrow night as well.

On to more important matters…

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.

William Faulkner is best known for a quartet of books that dot all of the greatest-books lists to which I look for reading suggestions; The Sound and the Fury is his most acclaimed, but Light in August isn’t far behind, appearing at #57 on the Modern Library 100, #65 on the Radcliffe Course’s 100, and on the (unranked) TIME 100, as well as on the honorable mentions (the “Second 100”) in the Novel 100. So, as a Faulkner fan, I’m disappointed to report that I didn’t love it the way I loved Sound, Absalom, Absalom!, or his final novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Reivers.

Light in August is a story of isolation and the oppression of history, set in Faulkner’s usual spot of Yoknapatawpha County in northern Mississippi. Although the novel has several foci, the main charater for much of the book is Joe Christmas, a man of mysterious origins and unclear ancestry whose life has been marked by rejection and alienation. The book begins with the story of Lena, a young and naive woman, eight months pregnant, who walks and hitches her way from Alabama to Mississippi in search of the jackass who knocked her up and skipped town; when she arrives in the town of Jefferson, it is just after her paramour and Joe have been mixed up in a horrible crime, after which Faulkner jumps backward repeatedly in time to unfold Joe’s story in stages, from his brief time in an orphanage to his upbringing in a very strict household to, eventually, the circumstances of his birth. Joe himself suffers from a lack of identity because of his darker complexion and the possibility that he is part black, which in the south in the 1920s was (apparently) a major problem. Joe finds himself unaccepted by either the white or black communities and settles, by default, for a life of solitude until he meets a woman who is, if possible, more isolated than he is.

Christmas himself is about as clear a Christ figure as you’ll find in literature. (Thomas C. Foster’s book How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines, in addition to just being a fun read, has a whole chapter on Christ figures and how to spot them.) Christmas’ initials match those of Christ, he appears at the orphanage on Christmas Day (hence the name), he is 33 years old at the time of his death, and his parentage is unclear and the subject of much rumor and speculation. He’s not Jesus, of course – he’s selfish and a survivalist and angry at everyone – but the allusions are there, and Christmas himself wonders (indirectly) about whether God has forsaken him.

Most of the book’s main characters are on the run from history. Christmas is running from an ethnicity and upbringing he didn’t choose, and it is as if his story was written for him once he was born and rejected by his mother’s family. Jefferson’s disgraced minister, Reverend Hightower, has been haunted since birth by visions of a grandfather who was killed in battle before the Reverend was born, almost as if he is that grandfather reincarnated, and his inability (or unwillingness) to carve out his own path instead of chasing ghosts from the Civil War doom his marriage, his ministry, and ultimately his happiness. Lena is the only character running toward something, but she’s running toward a man who doesn’t want her (or their baby) and ignoring forks in her road that could give her stability, if not actual happiness.

The prose example I used above is, to me, classic Faulkner, a circular style where the author bends language to his will and gives abstract concepts physical form. Sound and Absalom are difficult but rewarding reads because of this prose style, but August is largely written in a more traditional style that robs the book of some of the color and complexity of Faulkner’s other works. I also found Christmas – described by one critic whose name appears lost to the sands of time as “the loneliest character” in literature – unsympathetic despite all of the hardships he endures and the fact that he starts life in an 0-2 count; although he fights at the drop of a hat, there is no fight in him, only a cold survival instinct, which may be realistic for someone who comes from a childhood devoid of love or affection but doesn’t make for a great central character.

Next up: Jasper Fforde’s First Among Sequels, book five (well, six, if you count The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco) in the Thursday Next series.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ April 13, 2009
→ By

The Thirty-Nine Steps.

I’m in the midst of the wakes/funeral after a death in my wife’s family, so my moderation of comments and responses to them may be sporadic and arbitrary for the next few days.

The blog post on Borchering and Washington is up on the draft blog. I think video of Washington will be up tomorrow.

John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps is on the Guardian 100 and served as the inspiration for the excellent early Hitchcock film of the same name, although Hitchcock, as was his wont, rewrote a good chunk of the plot, including the meaning of the title phrase, so if you’ve seen the film much of the book will still be new to you. It’s a straight-up spy story with an emphasis on action: The protagonist finds himself privy to an international plot and by the start of the second chapter is on the lam from both the authorities and the nefarious plotters seeking to destabilize Europe and spark a world war.

The book runs a brief 106 pages and the narrator is in almost constant motion; when he’s not on the move, he’s hiding or planning his next move or both. The double pursuit ups the stakes and almost guarantees that he’ll be in danger, but also increases the need for him to engage in some serious social engineering to find food and shelter as he dances around Scotland trying to evade his pursuers.

I’m not sure how it landed on a list of the greatest novels of all time – it’s good, but it’s just a spy/adventure novel and doesn’t even have the distinction of being the first work in that genre (Erskine Childers’ lone novel, The Riddle of the Sands, holds that honor). It’s a good airplane read or just the solution for a dreary day, as an unnamed man quoted in the book’s introduction put it: “It was one of those days when the only thing to do was read John Buchan.”

Next up: Nonfiction – William Easterley’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 11, 2009
→ By

Lonesome Dove.

Winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is a broad epic of the American West covering the hardships – many self-inflicted – of settlers and would-be settlers moving into the western plains. The focus is on a pair of former Texas Rangers – the original kind – leading a cattle drive from southern Texas all the way to the unsettled territory of Montana, with each of a half-dozen major characters getting his or her own storyline.

McMurtry’s great skill is in that ability to splinter the story without destroying the narrative greed of the novel. As a new major character is introduced, McMurtry carves out a new plot line, although they all eventually intersect and not always in credible ways. Each of the major characters is deep and complex and given adequate “page time” to give the reader the full sense of the man or woman – particularly Gus McCrae, who would probably make my list of the top 20 protagonists in any novels I’ve read, with a shot at the top 10 – and even the secondary characters were three-dimensional with perhaps the lone exception of the biggest villain, the murdering Native American named Blue Duck.

Lonesome Dove is mammoth – I think it’s the third-longest novel I’ve ever read* – but the variety of storylines and significant quantity of dialogue kept it moving. Where the novel was light, for me, was in what I usually call literary value. When reading most books I can pick up on themes or metaphors without really trying; my wife, an English major in college, always tells me that if you have to work that hard to find them, they’re probably not there at all. Without that, Lonesome Dove felt more like great popular fiction than great literature, which isn’t a bad thing, but it makes it hard for me to rank the book as highly as some of my favorite novels, which had the same evocative prose and intriguing characters as Dove but add more weight from the themes they tackle.

*My best guess at the longest novels I’ve read, going by pages since word counts aren’t available for some of the titles:

1. Don Quixote – originally published as two books, now sold as one; over 1000 pages
2. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – over 1000 pages
3. Lonesome Dove – roughly 940 pages
4. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling – 860 pages of tiny print
5. The Pickwick Papers – 840 pages of not-much-larger print
6. Vanity Fair – over 800 pages
7. The Sot-Weed Factor – around 750 pages
8. Anna Karenina – over 700 pages
9. The Woman in White – around 650 pages
10. The Three Musketeers – around 650 pages

Oddly enough, all of those books that I had read before assembling the Klaw 100 are on the list, and all ten will probably be on the next iteration.

Part of why McCrae was my favorite character was his slight obsession with food, not the least his ten-year-old sourdough biscuit starter. One wonders how cowboys lived so long on diets that would make the food Nazis at CSPI have aneurysms, but reading about them certainly put me in the mood for southern breakfasts.

Since I have nothing else intelligent to say on this novel, I’ll just move along and mention that I’m following up one of the longest novels I’ve read with one of the shortest, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps.

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

The City and the Mountains.

José Maria de Eça de Queirós is, according to several sources (including Encyclopedia Britannica and novelist Jose Saramago), considered Portugal’s greatest novelist, yet his works are apparently just now becoming available in English. He introduced realism to Portuguese literature and idolized Flaubert and Balzac while earning comparisons to Zola.

His novel The City and the Mountains, published in Portugal a year after his death and recently translated by Margaret Jull Costa, is a fable wrapped in a paean to natural and rural living. The story revolves around the narrator’s lifelong friend, Jacinto, who lives in luxury in Paris surrounded by high society and machines designed to make his life easier, yet who is miserable and dying of ennui until a chance occurrence recalls him to his ancestral home in the fictional countryside town of Tormes, Portugal.

The novel begins in in Paris (the City) and ends in Tormes (the Mountains), moving from a satire of the decadent and spiritually bankrupt Paris of the late 1800s to the pure, honest, yet feudal society of the still-agrarian Portuguese country. Jacinto’s life in Paris is one of misadventure more than adventure, especially as his machines malfunction, leading him to try to acquire bigger and more complex machines to replace them. Eça de Quierós lampoons the opulence and conspicuous consumption of Parisian society with depictions of over-the-top parties and empty-headed aristocrats as Jacinto drifts unwittingly into soul-crushing despair. Even the religion of the wealthy city-dwellers is perfunctory and perhaps faithless, more concerned with status and the religious hierarchy than questions of piety and charity.

Yet a chance event in Tormes beckons him home, a trip for which he tries to pack as many of his earthly possessions, fearing (ironically) boredom in the isolated hillside town where his family estate lies. After the comic misadventures of the multi-day train trip with the narrator, Zé Fernandes, they arrive in Tormes and Jacinto gradually rediscovers himself, according to Zé:

I forthrightly compared him to an etiolated plant that had been shriveling up in the darkness, among rugs and silks, but which, once placed outside in the wind and the sun and watered profusely, grows green again, bursts into flower and does honor to Mother Nature! … In the City, his eyes had grown crepuscular, as if averted from the World; now, though, there danced in them a noon-tide light, resolute and generous, content to drink in the beauty of things. Even his moustache had grown curly.

Yet Tormes isn’t quite the paradise Jacinto first believes it to be, as the income disparity that was hidden from view in Paris is out in the open on his family’s vast estate. Jacinto himself decides to take on the role of social reformer in the face of opposition from the caretakers, standing in as symbols of the old way of life. It is, in many ways, a call to action to readers who have lost their spirits in the great cities of the time: return to the country, to nature, to your faith, and to your humanity. Even if the setting is dated, the disconnect with nature and the emotional desolation of city life is more than ever a part of our society (and I say that as an unabashed fan in many ways of great cities).

Eça de Queirós litters the book with direct and indirect allusions to literary works, particularly Don Quixote (also a tale of two friends on a quest) and Homer’s The Odyssey (also a quest, one where the main character, like Jacinto, returns at the end to the place of his birth). The two main characters read and re-read these works, and Zé does comment on the parallels between their quest and those of the stories they read, but Eça de Queirós imbues his characters’ quest with a more urgent meaning while still bringing much of the comic brilliance of Cervantes, perhaps even more impressively since he doesn’t get to use the obvious dim-bulb jokes on which Cervantes could rely.

I was talking to We’ve Got Heart’s Kristen H. about the book, and she brought up The Alchemist. I found The City and the Mountains to be a better book overall, with a stronger plot and much better prose, while also offering a powerful message, one with both mundane and spiritual elements.

Next up: Our friend Joe Posnanski’s The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America, still just $5.99 hardcover at amazon.com.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ March 21, 2009
→ By

Tropic of Cancer.

I hated this book. It’s not a novel, certainly; filling 300 pages with f-bombs and see-you-next-Tuesdays without regard for plot or character does not a novel make. There is one sequence, covering about 3% of the book, that might actually be called a plot, but the rest is the self-serving and often vile ramblings of Miller’s alter-ego narrator. I’m a little Homer Simpsonish in that I like stories. When I pick up a novel, I want a story. Miller didn’t bother with one. Somehow it still made the TIME, Modern Library (#50), and Radcliffe (#84) 100s.

And since there’s little more to say on that front, here’s the Klaw anti-10, the ten books I’ve read through and hated the most.

10. A Death in the Family, James Agee.

Reviewed in December of 2007. Depressing, but also incoherent and distant.

9. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon

I know many of you loved it. I found it simplistic and totally derivative of the first book of The Sound and the Fury, and was put off by the diatribes Haddon put into the protagonist’s mouth. And it was boring. Other than that it rocked.

8. The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos.

Reviewed in January. Other than occasionally making me hungry with its descriptions of Cuban food, the book has nothing to recommend it. It’s definitely in the Miller tradition of sex-as-bodily-function writing, but I’m pretty sure Hijuelos was trying to be lascivious, whereas Miller was just writing whatever words he vomited out of his brain.

7. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

Difficult prose, the merest shadow of a plot, and a completely bizarre and long tangent on the specific physical characteristics of hell. I know I’m eventually going to crater and read Ulysses, but let’s just say starting Joyce with Portrait because it was short was a Pedroia-esque error on my part.

6. The Sportswriter, Richard Ford

I would guess that of the TIME 100, this book is the most-read among BBWAA members, most of whom have told me they liked it. I found the title character to be insipid and immature and self-justifying and I wanted to smack him for about 300 pages. Grow up already.

5. Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin

Perhaps the only major work of African-American literature that I didn’t like – and oh boy did I not like it. It was never clear to me what the book was about; there was brutality, but to what end? I also felt no connection or empathy with the main character, John, which made the whole exercise seem like a waste of time.

4. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

More plot than Joyce or Miller, which is saying little. Three parts, the middle being the shortest and containing all of the significant events. I don’t love Hemingway’s sparse prose but it’s ambrosia compared to Woolf’s.

3. Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence

Another utterly pointless book, also banned or criticized for obscenity. The introduction to the edition of Tropic of Cancer that I read argues that Miller is the only author to write properly about sex, saying that Lawrence and James Joyce had “too much religion in their veins.” I have to say I found neither depiction of sex all that compelling, but at least Lawrence has the tension that arises from a set of externally-imposed sexual mores coming into contact with the physical and emotional nature of sex. Miller wrote about sex as a bodily function; getting laid was like taking a dump, more reminiscent of the random sex of Jonathan Swift’s Houyhnhnms than anything approaching erotica. Anyway, Women in Love is primarily notable for nothing much of anything happening until someone dies in a skiing accident, after which the book mercifully ends.

2. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller.

Suck. QED.

1. Moby Dick, Herman Melville

If this is the Great American Novel, everyone should just put away their typewriters and go home. They chase a whale that may or may not exist. There are extended passages that seem to be straight out of a 19th century whaleopedia. They chase some more. That’s pretty much the book, and the prose is maddeningly slow. Yet it was #5 on the Novel 100 and will come up in any discussion of great novels in the English language. My wife was an English major but never read the book for any class; she asked one of her college professors if she should read it, knowing it was considered a classic, and he gave an emphatic, “No.” He was probably later denied tenure for literary apostasy.

That list includes four books on the Novel 100 and five on the TIME 100, so even those rankings haven’t been fully reliable as my reading lists.

Next up: The City and the Mountains by Jose Maria Eça de Queirós, which I am already reading and enjoying.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ March 8, 2009
→ By

A Simple Story.

This has nothing to do with the book, but this Guardian review of six new flavors of Walker’s potato chips is pretty funny.

Anyway, the title of Elizabeth Inchbald’s 1790 novel A Simple Story is, one assumes intentionally, ironic, as the story is not simple, and isn’t even a story; it is, in fact, two stories in four volumes, the first two of which constituted a first draft of the novel that was never published. The first part is a somewhat classic if oddly set romance of the period, mixing serious material with witty banter, but the second part is a dramatic statement on social mores of the day, especially those that pertained to women’s roles and treatment.

The two halves of the novel do read like separate books, joined only by the common male lead, Mr. Dorriforth. The first half tells of the frustrated romance between Dorriforth and his ward, the orphaned Miss Milner, an intelligent, witty girl whose lack of any real education leaves her somewhat ill-prepared for the world of manners and rules into which she is thrust. The dialogue in this first half (Miss Milner: “As my guardian, I certainly did obey him; and I could obey him as a husband; but as a lover I will not.”) is clever and unusually quick for a novel of that time, but I didn’t find the story that compelling; if Inchbald had published those two volumes alone as a novel, the title might have fit better but the book would have been unlikely to meet with commercial success.

The second half is set sixteen years after their ill-fated marriage; the now Lady Elmwood and her daughter, Matilda, have been cast out of the manor, and Lord Elmwood (Dorriforth) refuses to so much as see his daughter because of his ire at his wife. The barely-contained – and sometimes uncontained – rage of Dorriforth burns the pages, while Inchbald tells a second story of male/female relations in late 18th-century England, casting the male as the villain without making him evil or one-dimensional. The subservient positions in which women are placed and the roles their upbringings played in placing them there are openly questioned, themes that have lost most of their relevance but were probably topical at the time the book was published.

Inchbald is perhaps better known today for writing the play, Lovers’ Vows, performed by Fanny Price and her wacko relations in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, which makes A Simple Story interesting for its likely influence on Austen and perhaps the Brontë sisters. The witty dialogue between Miss Milner and Dorriforth in the first part is reminiscent of Austen’s wittier works like Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, while Lord Elmwood seems a clear prototype for the dark, brooding male protagonists in Jane Eyre and (more strongly) in Wuthering Heights. On the other hand, if you’ve read Austen and either Brontë and didn’t care for them, I can’t see you enjoying A Simple Story either.

Next up: Henry Miller’s, um, profane Tropic of Cancer.

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

American Pastoral.

Before I get to the book, I’ve got two new draft blog entries up, one on Purke, Coffey, and Grichuk, the other on Graham, Cole, Wilson, and Berry. And, of course, Jason Churchill continues to churn out daily updates on top picks’ performances.

Stand in awe not of Communism, my idiot child, but of ordinary, everyday loneliness. On May Day go out and march with your friends to its greater glory the superpower of superpowers, the force that overwhelms all. Put your money on it, bet on it, worship it – bow down in submission not to Karl Marx, my stuttering, angry, idiot child, not to Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-Tung – bow down to the great god Loneliness!

Philip Roth’s American Pastoral – winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, #99 on the Guardian 100, and part of the TIME 100 – tells the story of Seymour “Swede” Levov, a star high school athlete whose perfect, seemingly worry-free life is shattered when his daughter and only child, the ironically-named Merry, commits an act of domestic terrorism that takes a life and slowly tears Swede’s world apart. American Pastoral is one of Roth’s “Zuckerman novels,” featuring his alter ego, grumpy author Nathan Zuckerman, although it is a blessing that Zuckerman disappears as an active character after about 75 pages. The novel then shifts to of metafiction – it is not Swede’s actual story, but Zuckerman’s reimagining of Swede’s story based on a handful of details he got from Swede and later from Swede’s brother Jerry. This aspect is particularly unsatisfying; unlike, say, McEwan’s bait-and-switch novel Atonement*, we’re in on the gag all along, but the question of whether we’re reading Swede’s “actual” story or what Roth wants (consciously or subconsciously) Swede’s story to be hangs over the entire work.

*Oddly enough, the TIME 100 includes at least four works of metafiction – the two I’ve mentioned, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, and Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. Only the last one was a fully-realized and satisfying work of fiction, which may be because it didn’t take its interior novel very seriously – the line between reality and fiction was deliberately blurred and the work is more farce than Serious Novel.

If Roth succeeded at anything, it was creating a deeply disturbing work of fiction. Other than the thought of one’s death, nothing hits at one’s emotional core as much as a thought of the destruction, gradual or acute, of one’s family. Merry appears to be just another angry teenager until she throws a bomb, and even in hindsight there was no clear warning to her parents that she was even capable of such an act of abject violence. Swede’s idyll is destroyed in between the time he goes to sleep one night and wakes up the next, and the devastation is compounded by the fact that Merry disappears immediately after the bombing. One thing that you can’t fully understand until you have a child is just how completely your emotions are wrapped up in that child. No matter what Merry did, Swede can not sever himself emotionally from her. She is his daughter, and his only child at that, and even if reuniting with her meant she would have to go to jail, he is emotionally determined to find her and, metaphorically and physically, bring her home.

Unfortunately, Swede’s emotional determination is an isolated character trait, as, for whatever reason, Zuckerman (Roth) did not imbue him with decisiveness. Swede confronts a couple of inflection points in the novel, simple and I would say obvious choices, and time and again he chooses inaction. There’s one scene towards the novel’s end where Swede has his best chance to piece something of his life back together – like a torn labrum, it will never be the same again, but it can be partially repaired – and, channeling Bill James on Jeff Bagwell, he passes. I found this not only maddening but beyond belief: There’s no way. I could not put myself into Swede’s shoes in that situation and choose “none of the above.” And I doubt many fathers, if any, would choose it either.

Swede’s failure to take any of the “right” choices means that the story lacks closure. We know from early on what has happened to Swede, and we have a pretty good idea of what ultimately happened to Merry (although whether Swede was telling the literal truth there may be open to debate). What we don’t get is the interim – Zuckerman focuses on the five or six years between the bombing and the start of the breakdown of Swede’s marriage, but doesn’t tell us what happened to Merry, who on earth Rita Cohen was, how exactly Swede’s marriage broke apart (did we see the triggering event? Did they hang on and fake it for a few more years), how he ended up with his second wife and three sons and whether or not that gave him any peace or happiness or proved inadequate to fill the gaping void left by the departure of his daughter from his life … we get none of these answers. I’m not saying every question needs a firm resolution, but Roth leaves us with more frayed ends than an overwashed head of hair.

The decision to focus on Swede over Merry is part plot contrivance, since Zuckerman knows Swede but never met Merry, but when Merry has a chance to say her piece, Zucker-Roth shifts to summary mode. We get pages upon pages of description of the manufacturing of ladies’ gloves and the history of the manufacturing of ladies’ gloves – was Roth momentarily possessed by the spirit of Herman Melville? – but of Merry’s life on the run we get a few paragraphs. The autobiography of Merry Levov could be – would be – a hell of a book. But I sure learned a lot about gloves, or the attitude of early 1970s couples towards Deep Throat, or the history of Bill Orcutt’s family.

I don’t know if Roth has ever addressed this, but in many ways Swede Levov resembles Rabbit Angstrom. He’s not an agent of his own destruction the way that Rabbit is, but they have similar backstories – star high school athletes who never quite live down that early fame and promise but who carry their sports-related nicknames through life, who marry against the wishes of their domineering fathers, and whose family lives come apart at the seams as we watch and as they fail to take basic steps to preserve them. Rabbit runs, while Swede stammers. In the end, it’s kind of the same thing.

Had Roth not wasted the first 75-odd pages on that annoying little Zucker – thus sparing us his self-centered Donnie Downer act – and rounded out the Swede story a little more, it would have been a clear Klaw 100 entry. Once the narration shifted, the pace picked up dramatically around the handful of tangents into glove manufacturing and Orcutt family genealogy, and he created one very compelling (if flawed – but is the flaw Roth’s, Zuckerman’s, or Swede’s?) character in whom most readers, particularly parents, should find some sympathetic or familiar trait. If anything, the book ended 75 pages too soon, and I wish Roth had expended the energy he blew on Zuckerman’s prostate on filling in some of the blank spots on the Levov family canvas.

Apropos of nothing other than its presence in the book, I did learn one unusual new word: uxorious, meaning excessively fond of or submissive to a wife. I’ll have a hard time working that into a Draft Blog entry.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 28, 2009
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The Simple Art of Murder.

Playing catchup on the reading list a bit here … Raymond Chandler, one of my favorite authors in any genre, wasn’t an especially prolific writer; he published nothing until he was in his forties and his total output was seven completed novels and (according to this Chandler bibliography) 25 short stories, some of which he expanded into novels years after they were published in pulp magazines. The Simple Art of Murder includes eight of his short stories as well as his famous essay from Atlantic Monthly that gave the collection its title. That essay is a spirited defense of the detective story as a literary art form while also serving as a criticism of the degeneration of the genre through what Chandler seems to have considered hack writing, including contrived plot details and unrealistic motives.

The short stories seemed to lack the crisp writing and brisk pacing of the Chandler novels I’ve read, but the constant change of detective characters and milieus means that if you like the genre at all, you’ll probably find a story in the collection that hits all the high notes for you. It’s more a matter of taste than quality, but I enjoyed “Pearls Are a Nuisance” with its main detective’s stilted language and light parody of bad detective stories, and the closing story, “Nevada Gas,” which had a faster pace, higher stakes, and a slightly more intricate plot than any of the other stories. None of them can match The Big Sleep or The Long Goodbye for character or tension, so if you’re new to Chandler I’d recommend you start with those novels and save Murder for later.

Worth checking out: The Raymond Chandler fansite I mentioned above is the best resource I’ve seen on his works. You can read the full text of the essay “The Simple Art of Murder.”

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ February 20, 2009
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Catch-22.

I’m going to bet that of all the books on the Klaw 100, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is one of the five most-read among dish readers. The book, which appears on several greatest-books lists (it’s #7 on the Modern Library 100, #15 on the Radcliffe 100, #74 on the Guardian 100, and on the TIME 100) certainly seems like a book that many of us read during our high school or college years, whether or not it was assigned reading, simply because it was so damn funny and its status as one of the “it” books of its era never fully went away, the same way Catcher in the Rye has maintained its cachet after forty years*.

*I’m going to steal a page from JoePo today and insert some asides. I was accused in chat in a question I didn’t post of being “anti-cliché” because I didn’t like Catcher. I don’t really know how those two things are connected – neither Salinger nor his novel seem clichéd to me – but, more to the point, is anyone actually pro-cliché? Romance-novel publishers? Slasher-film producers? Actually, a few mainstream sportswriters come to mind so I’ll stop here.

Catch-22 is now one of only a handful of novels I’ve read twice, a list that also includes Pride and Prejudice (didn’t like it in high school, read Emma as an adult and loved it, re-read P&P and realized I’d missed all the wit the first time), Things Fall Apart (first read it at 13, didn’t get the point at all), and The Great Gatsby (just because). I think Catch-22 earns the prize for the longest gap between readings – I first read it in the fall of 1989*, which means it’s been an almost-unthinkable almost twenty years since my first trip through the dystopian anti-war masterpiece.

*I can tell I’m going to beat this gimmick into the ground. I first read Catch-22 by choice, but as it turned out, it was an assigned book during that same school year in AP Lit. We actually had a choice of three novels – this one, Slaughterhouse-Five, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next – and while I eventually read all three, I took the easy route and wrote my paper on Catch-22.

The funny part of this story is that that class, taught by Mrs. Glynn, was a substantial learning experience for me beyond the books we were supposed to read. I skipped several of the books assigned in that class, including Tess of the d’Urbervilles (rented the movie, then read the book in 2005 and loved it) and An American Tragedy (800+ pages of tiny print and I know the SOB gets it in the end, I’m all set with that, used the Cliffs Notes), and consistently scored 5’s on the papers, which Mrs. Glynn graded on the AP scale. Catch-22 was one of only two books I really read word for word and cover to cover in that class, the other being Ellison’s Invisible Man. Unfortunately, while the paper was in Mrs. Glynn’s hands, she overheard me bragging to a classmate that I hadn’t read the majority of books in her class, and sure enough, on that paper, I got a 3. The lesson I took was that it doesn’t actually matter whether you do the work as long as you act like you did and present it well. I sleepwalked through college on this newfound confidence, only really working hard in math and foreign-language classes. There may also have been a lesson in my AP Lit experience in the value of keeping my mouth shut, a lesson I have never learned and promise you all that I never will.

My memory of Catch-22 was that it was a hilarious, often absurd anti-war romp, almost like an angrier, funnier Vonnegut. I remembered anecdotes, like Nately’s whore, Milo the entrepreneur, and cracks about flies in someone’s eyes. What I didn’t remember – or perhaps didn’t realize the first time through – was that it is a profoundly cynical book, satirizing and savaging more than just war, with democracy, capitalism, government, religion, and often just plain ol’ humanity all taking it on the chin and ending up bleeding on the floor. The plot is pretty thin; the novel itself is more a meandering collecting of anecdotes told in a nonlinear fashion, an effective technique for humor that left me often confused as to the order of events*, although to read and enjoy this book you don’t really need to worry too much about sequence.

*Well, except for when someone was killed – that sort of cleared things up a bit.

In fact, I’d argue that even considering the book’s deft wordplay and ironic humor, the book’s greatest comedy comes from Heller’s scene-shifting gimmick: In the middle of dialogue between two people about a third person, Heller will jump to the third person discussing the same subject without any transition whatsoever. The quotes themselves are usually funny, but the momentary disorientation – hey, he wasn’t in the room a moment ago – increases the humor.

I’ve read one of Heller’s other novels, the unusual God Knows, a sort of deathbed memoir of King David of Israel. It too uses a nonlinear storytelling device, but lacks the humor of Catch-22, and I haven’t felt compelled to read anything else by Heller.*

*From Heller’s obituary in the New York Times: “When an interviewer told Mr. Heller that he had never written anything as good as Catch-22, the author shot back, ‘Who has?'”

Next up: A collection of Raymond Chandler’s short stories, The Simple Art of Murder.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,