→ March 24, 2010
→ By

In a Perfect World.

Laura Kasischke’s In a Perfect World soft, ethereal prose with a distinctly dystopian vision hauntingly grounded in current reality to tell a story about grace and maternal love in difficult, unexpected circumstances. It’s a little like The Road as written by the female version of Richard Russo.

The protagonist, Jiselle Dorn, is a flight attendant who has just married a handsome pilot and widowed father of three named Mark and moved into his house with his three kids just as a virulent illness known as “the Phoenix flu” is starting to spread, killing, on page 9, Britney Spears, as well as a few other celebrities. Rather than drop us into a post-apocalyptic world as McCarthy did, Kasischke focuses on minutiae, with the relationship between Jiselle and two of Mark’s three kids – her immediate bond with his youngest child, Sam, and the animosity she faces from middle child Sara – at the center of the novel’s first half. The flu’s spread accelerates and society begins to slowly crack around the family, while Mark ends up stuck out of the country, leaving Jiselle to run his house and family and cope with large and small issues simultaneously while evaluating the choices she’s made, the factors in her life that made her make those very choices, and the evolving situation around her.

The novel ends almost mid-sentence, without clear resolutions to macro plot questions like how far and wide the epidemic spreads. The resolution resides in tiny gestures and words and little symbols of hope and grace, and I had to re-read the last few pages to grasp where Kasischke wanted to leave us while shaking off my innate desire for some sort of clear conclusion to the Phoenix flu storyline, which was, after all, just background. It’s a bold way to end a novel, risky for anyone looking for a mass-market audience that likes its chapters short, its villains villainous, and its endings neat. But because Kasischke crafted the Jiselle character so well, I empathized with her to the point that, after the second read, I got the ending by standing in the character’s place.

The one flaw in the novel mirrored Russo’s work as well. Russo has never been great at crafting female characters, and nearly all of the men in In a Perfect World are two-dimensional or worse. Mark in particular is more plot device than character, and I found it very hard to understand some of his actions toward Jiselle and his children. Outside of Mark’s son, Sam, the rest of the men seemed like props, and a potential plot thread involving neighbor Paul Temple went nowhere.

In a Perfect World was published in 2009 and I assume it was written in 2008, before the H1N1 threat emerged, making her choice to build the book around a scary communicable disease a little prescient. Beyond that, however, Kasischke touches on issues like climate change, energy costs, and distrust of government, dropping accent colors in the background rather than giving us long-winded sermons by central characters. It’s a thoughtful, compelling read if you appreciate books driven by small events and emotions rather than major turning points, and the gradual decline in the world inside the book provides more than enough narrative greed to get you to the end.

Next up: As promised, Aldous Huxley’s Island. I received both books gratis from the publisher.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 1, 2010
→ By

Straight Man.

I’ll be on Mike & Mike on Wednesday morning at 9:40 am EST, and on ESPN Radio’s Baseball Tonight that evening in the 7 pm hour. Chats are completely up in the air until the end of spring training due to conflicts with games.

—

I don’t dislike Gracie. At least I don’t dislike her when I think about her. When I’m in one place and she’s in another. It’s when she’s near enough to backhand that backhanding her always seems like a good idea.

Hank Devereaux, the narrator and title character of Richard Russo’s brilliant
Straight Man, is a serious man wholly incapable of being serious, even when the situation calls for it. A tenured professor at a small public university in west-central Pennsylvania, Devereaux holds the temporary chairmanship of the English department (a job he doesn’t really want), believes that his brightest students “have concluded that what’s most important in all educational settings is to avoid the ridicule of the less gifted,” finds himself at the center of various family crises, and desperately needs to take a good, long piss*.

*Indeed, if talk of urination or male genitalia offends you, this may not be the book for you. I also wouldn’t recommend reading this if you’re drunk and trying not to break the seal.

Russo fills Straight Man with his standard menagerie of irresponsible men, generally responsible if somewhat inscrutable women, and small-town characters, but he aims his satirical instincts squarely at liberal-arts universities and their fatuous faculty members, including a couple of grade-A wackos in Devereaux’s department. The school is under pressure from the legislature to cut costs, an annual event, but this year a persistent rumor of a mass firing in the English department has everyone edge, with even tenured professors concerned they’re about to be let go and all members convinced that Devereaux has acceded to the demands of higher-ups by drawing up a proposed list of instructors to be cut – a fear he does nothing to dispel even though the legend is false. And he manages to escalate the issue by threatening on live (and very local) television to murder a goose if he doesn’t get a budget figure from the state by the following Monday, a spontaneous (if inspired) move that, of course, has unintended consequences.

While not quite as nuanced as his prior two novels, Straight Man is the funniest of the four Russo books I’ve read. Devereaux is sarcastic, but complex, carrying the burdens of an upbringing by two parents incapable of showing much love (one of whom, his father, eventually skipped out for an affair with a graduate student) and a daughter incapable of making responsible decisions (the one truly irresponsible woman in the book) as well as the weight of a career that went neither as far nor as well as he’d hoped. Devereaux published one book twenty years earlier and it turned out to be the only book he had in him. While that doesn’t make him a failure, it hasn’t given him the confidence of a history of success to drive him forward in his academic career or make him recognize the unusual stability of his home life. It probably has, however, prevented him from growing out of his sardonic (dare I say “snarky?”) personality, which is all the better for the reader.

The one hitch in Straight Man, a minor one at that, is the lack of a really strong female character. Hank’s wife, Lily, is a little too perfect, and spends much of the book away on a job interview, giving Hank a chance to really get himself into trouble. Hank’s secretary, Rachel, appears in every Russo book in some form – the sweet, somewhat attractive, meek woman with horrible taste in men – and his mother, an aloof, haughty woman largely devoid of maternal affectins, feels a little recycled as well. None of this detracted from the book’s humor or Russo’s compassion for his central male characters one iota. I enjoyed Straight Man on multiple levels and I’d recommend it to just about everyone.

You can also see my previous reviews of three other Russo novels – Empire Falls, Nobody’s Fool, and The Risk Pool – all of which were excellent.

Next up: Toni Morrison’s Jazz.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 27, 2010
→ By

Middlesex.

My draft blog entry on Jameson Taillon is up, as is a new post with scouting reports on Rice players Anthony Rendon & Rick Hague as well as thoughts on James Paxton’s decision to withdraw from Kentucky.
—

There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich.

Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex is obsessed with the nature of our genes, or how our genes determine our nature, and understandably so, as a rare genetic mutation has left the narrator, née Calliope Stephanides, a “hermaphrodite,” or more accurately a boy born with underformed genitalia so that the doctor who gives birth to him and his parents mistake him for a girl and raise him as one until he’s fourteen. At that age, a car accident leads to the discovery of his true biological nature, a trip to a noted specialist who seems more interested in his papers than his patients, and Calliope’s decision to live out his life as the male Cal.

The novel spends more time on the history of Cal’s family and the path of the one renegade gene that affects his life, only spending the last third or so on Cal’s story. It begins in Turkey, where his Greek grandparents – who happen to be third cousins, as well as siblings – marry during their flight from the sacking of Smyrna and start a new life in Detroit amid a population of cousins and fellow Greek immigrants and a backdrop of Detroit’s brief boom and gradual decline after World War II. This family history was, to me, predictable, uninteresting, and rife with cliched characters. Cal’s cousin, Father Mike, is the worst of the lot, right down to his final act in the book; the only thing more cliched would have been if he’d molested a kid, but even without that, obvious author is obvious. The author’s antipathy toward religion made it clear that Father Mike was, and would be, one of the bad guys.

Where the book picked up in interest was when an ER doctor in Michigan discovers, if you’ll excuse the indelicacy, what exactly is between Calliope’s legs. The rapid-fire chain reaction that comes next, even with a hackneyed plot twist or two, opens up a world of questions and ambiguities that get at the heart of what the book is (or should be) about. Eugenides/Cal reject biological explanations for our nature and character, but at the same time reject the nurture argument (Cal is, after all, raised as a girl, but at fourteen decides to be a boy). In a more spiritually-minded book, I might argue this was the author’s defense of dualism, but here, I think Eugenides was really arguing for free will. We are not fully determined by our genes, our circumstances, or our upbringing, although all three are factors that contribute to our ultimate identities. We decide who we are, and we can even flout the rules laid down by our genes or our environment. Until Eugenides gets around to focusing on Calliope/Cal, however, the book drags with neither narrative greed nor clear point; I put the book down after one trip and read just twenty pages over four days before finishing it on my next flight.

I was also put off somewhat by Eugenides’ disdain for so many of his characters, even the “good” ones, other than Calliope/Cal, who is by her nature uncomfortable with himself even after his choice to live as a male. Desdemona, the traditional grandmother, is an eccentric, neurotic kook with her half-pagan spirituality and practiced martyr act. Milton, her son, is an angry, skeptical son who supposedly loves his kids but certainly shows little affection for them until Calliope disappears after her diagnosis – and it’s probably not a coincidence that at that point her older brother is also incommunicado, meaning that he chased the second AWOL child, probably because she was cushioning him from the blow of the first.

I can understand, to some degree, why the Pulitzer committee would choose Middlesex for the highest honor in American fiction. There’s certainly a modern, edgy angle to using an intersex person as the narrator and central character of a book. The biological motif is novel, and the question of nature versus nurture is ever more relevant as we hear headlines about how love, religion, altruism, and other feelings are nothing more than chemical interactions in the brain or reactions predetermined by our genes. There are two ways to read any novel: A straight read – I’d call it “superficial” but the term is too derogatory – where the reader focuses on plot and prose, and an academic read where the reader looks for meaning, metaphor, and symbolism. Middlesex is a better book in the latter vein, as it’s thought-provoking and intelligent, covering ground I haven’t seen before in a mainstream novel. Unfortunately, Eugenides’ ham-handed character development and the long buildup to the most interesting plot strand in the book made it a mediocre read for anyone who reads just for the pleasure of compelling characters or a gripping plot.

Next up: I’m almost finished with Richard Russo’s Straight Man, after which I’ll start Toni Morrison’s Jazz.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ January 10, 2010
→ By

Gilead.

Marilynne Robinson’s debut novel, Housekeeping, came out in 1980, won several major awards (including the PEN/Hemingway Award for the best debut novel of the year), eventually landed on TIME‘s list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005, and represented Robinson’s only published work of fiction for 25 years until she finally brought out her second novel, Gilead. And all that that novel ever did was win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It is as if the literary world was saying:

Dear Ms. Robinson:

It is the opinion of our community that you should write more books.

Sincerely,

All of us

Robinson’s strength, at least based on these two novels, isn’t so much her storycraft as her prose, which is just remarkable, unlike any contemporary author I’ve ever read, word-perfect and genuine and lyrical and any other florid term used to describe brilliant writing. She nails every task laid before the writer of a novel of emotions, as both of her books are, from descriptive passages to the idiom of language and even internal monologues, like this one, where the narrator, Reverend John Ames, stops to reflect on the way he’s writing this book, which is a letter to his young son in the form of a memoir:

In writing this, I notice the care it costs me not to use certain words more than I ought to. I am thinking about the word “just.” I almost wish I could have written that the sun just shone and the tree just glistened, and the water just poured out of it and the girl just laughed – when it’s used that way it does indicate a stress on the word that follows it, and also a particular pitch of the voice. … There is something real signified by that word “just” that proper language won’t acknowledge. It’s a little like the German ge-. I regret that I must deprive myself of it. It takes half the point out of telling the story.

Reverend Ames is 76 years old at the book’s outset and is dying, slowly, of a heart condition, but at the same time is the father of a seven-year-old boy thanks to a second chance at love and marriage that found him marrying a woman many years his junior who happened to wander into his church one day, an event that turned out to be love at first sight. He knows that he’s dying and wants to leave a long letter to that son so that when the child is older he has something more to remember his father by than vague memories from childhood of a feeble old man who struggled to go up the stairs to his study. Reverend Ames walks back through the stories of his father and grandfather, both preachers but of wildly different sorts and temperaments, only to have to shift gears slightly when the son of his best friend, John Ames Boughton, drifts back into town after a long absence. The younger John Ames, named for the Reverend, has been a lifelong disappointment to his own father, another preacher, and to Reverend Ames, and to many others in the small (fictional) town of Gilead, Iowa. (Gilead is, itself, a place mentioned in Genesis, and the name apparently translates to “hill of testimony,” so I presume Robinson chose it as this novel is entirely the Reverend Ames’ testimony, not just of his faith but of his life.) Boughton’s purpose in the town isn’t clear, and he makes repeated attempts to talk to Reverend Ames – generally antagonizing him – before his purpose becomes clear shortly before the end of the book. Along the way, Reverend Ames presents his thoughts on all sorts of matters theological and mundane, interspersed with personal recollections from his own life and heartfelt passages about his wife and son:

I’d never have believed I’d see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.

I tell my daughter every day, multiple times a day, how much I love her, how much it has meant to me to have her in my life, how she is the center of my universe. Anything I have ever said to her in that vein has seemed wholly inadequate. I know exactly how Reverend Ames felt when he said those words.

Robinson didn’t wait 25 years for a follow-up, publishing Home, the story of John Ames Boughton, in 2008.

Next up: I must be out of my mind, but I’m going to try to tackle James Joyce’s Ulysses. I just can’t stand seeing it on five of my “greatest” booklists without a check mark next to it, or at least the knowledge that I gave it a legitimate effort.

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

Run.

My analysis of the Halladay/Lee series of deals is up on ESPN.com. I’ll be on Sirius 210/XM 175 at 8:35 pm EST tonight.

—

Ann Patchett’s Run, the long-awaited followup to her masterpiece, Bel Canto, is, like its predecessor, a beautifully written and sensitive book, one that moves quickly despite its slow treatment of time, with most of the book’s action occurring in a 24-hour period. Unfortunately, it’s also lightweight and sentimental as Patchett overplays her political theme at the expense of any conflict in the story itself.

Run covers the Doyle family, comprising the father Bernard, an Irish-American former mayor of Boston; his two adopted African-American sons, Teddy and Tip; the unseen older biological son, Sullivan; and, for the opening chapter, the mother, Bernadette, who is dead when the story opens. Bernard, Teddy, and Tip are attending a lecture given by Jesse Jackson at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on a snowy Boston evening, after which a traffic accident turns their insular world upside down when one of them is hurt and a bystander is critically injured.

Where Bel Canto had complex three-dimensional characters, Run has simple, entirely sympathetic ones. Tip, Teddy, and the young African-American girl Kenya who witnesses the accident are all thinly drawn; they are all runners (how stereotypical) and Tip and Teddy are each monomaniacal in their personal interests. Sullivan eventually appears, and his backstory is typical and excuses just about everything in his itinerant lifestyle, even the reason why he had to flee Africa to return to Boston unannounced. The closest we get to a complex character is Tennessee Moser, the woman injured in the traffic accident, whose conversation with her dead friend – Patchett wisely leaves the question of whether this is a religious experience, a dream, or a hallucination up to the reader – was, for me, the only truly compelling passage in the book, like a brilliant short story around which Patchett built a novel.

Patchett herself says in a Q&A at the end of the paperback edition that the story is primarily about politics, not family, and in a second note she fawns a little over the then-candidate Barack Obama. Kenya is the blatantly obvious Obama symbol, from her name to her sudden appearance on the scene to the way the plot unfolds where she is the person the Doyle family has been waiting for since the death of the mother (John Kennedy, perhaps?) almost twenty years earlier to the way she spurs Tip and Teddy to greater personal heights and even helps Sullivan straighten himself out … it’s too much, another example of the completely unrealistic expectations heaped on President Obama, who could turn out to be our greatest President ever and still fall short of the hyperbole. It’s ham-handed and a little condescending, and Patchett seems to have worked so hard to craft and protect this savior-character Kenya that she left virtually no conflict in the book – there is no unsympathetic character, no one working against the protagonists, little question of where we’re ultimately going. She offers one plot twist, but it turns out to have little effect on the plot, just some symbolic value that I won’t mention here for fear of spoiling it. I’m fine with books that are full of metaphor and symbolism, but give me plot and depth, too. The result here is a quick read and a warm one, but it’s a little maudlin and lacked the richness of the soaring epic of Bel Canto.

Next up: An “entertainment” from Graham Greene, one of his later spy novels, The Human Factor.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 13, 2009
→ By

A Time to Be Born.

Dawn Powell was a commercial failure as a novelist during her lifetime, despite accolades from her peers, including Ernest Hemingway, who called her his favorite living novelist. In fact, according to the Library of America,

At Dawn Powell’s death in 1965, nearly all of her books were out of print. Surveys of American literature failed to mention her. Among well-known critics, only Powell’s friend Edmund Wilson had ever published a lengthy and serious review of her work.

Powell died a pauper and was buried in an unmarked grave in New York’s Potter’s Field after a life riddled with depression, disappointment, and alcoholism. Yet her books have been on a modest thirty-year winning streak, one that the LOA credits Gore Vidal with starting in 1981.

I first heard of Dawn Powell in the introduction to Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, a book that was successful at its printing but fell out of print more than once after the author’s death. Terry Teachout compared Dundy’s legacy of mild obscurity to Powell’s, citing Powell as similar in style as well. Powell has no acknowledged magnum opus but A Time to Be Born seems to be among the critics’ favorites from her bibliography, and it did not disappoint, as it is a funny, bitter, snarky farce.

Powell chose to build the novel around a real-life power couple of the late 1930s, the Luces, Henry (founder of TIME magazine) and his wife Clare Boothe, who receives an unflattering portrayal in the scheming, selfish Amanda Keeler, who uses her feminine wiles and ability to manipulate others to overcome her humble, unhappy childhood and tear the publisher Julian Evans away from his happy marriage, launching her social career and, simultaneously, her career as a writer and pundit. Amanda’s carefully scripted life is upset, just slightly, when a childhood friend, Vicky Haven, comes to New York and receives a token job in the Evans’ publishing empire, only to find herself used by Amanda to cover up an affair while she unwittingly falls in love with her patron’s paramour.

Vicky is the sympathetic protagonist and is well-rounded, maturing as the book goes on from meek, self-effacing wallflower to determined if clumsy adult, but Amanda is the star of the show, a Becky Sharp of interwar America, batting eyelashes and working rooms, looking down on those who, if they knew her origins, would look down on her, and dominating a husband who is just as dominant on his own turf – the workplace. Amanda’s singleminded pursuit of power and the proxy for happiness it represents is understandable given her upbringing, and Powell shows us enough of this to evoke empathy in the reader until Amanda and Vicky come into inevitable conflict.

Powell’s wit is sharp, with descriptions built on backhanded compliments or outright putdowns, but even her descriptions of ordinary events show a facility with words that amuses for the length of the book:

…Ethel said, attacking her dainty squab with a savagery that might indicate the bird had pulled a knife on her first.

Where Powell shines beyond just raw wit and vitriol is her ability to see through characters and personalities right to the bone, as in her portrayal of the man who broke Vicky’s heart and sent her from her small Ohio town to New York, the shiftless Tom turner, who tries to compensate for his lack of worldliness at a dinner party with Vicky by arguing with everyone in sight:

“You’re quite wrong there, old man,” he stated disagreeably at every remark made by the other two men. He was one of those men who betray their secret frustration in this way: taken into a handsmoe mansion they fall silent, coming slowly to an indignant mental boiling point of “This should be mine!” until out of a clear sky they start to shower insults on the innocent host. Married to a plain wife they take it as a personal grievance when they meet a single beauty, and cannot forbear pecking at the beauty with criticisms of her left thumb, her necklace, her accent, as if destruction by bits will ease the outrage of not being able to have her. Unemployed, they jeer at the stupidity of an envied friend working so hard for so little pay. In the unexpected presence of an admited or celebrated person they are reminded gallingly of their own inferior qualities and humiliate themselves by inadequate sarcasm, showing clearly how impressed they are and how irrevocably inferior they know themselves to be.

A Time to Be Born is driven forward by the question of whether Amanda will get away with her schemes or whether she’ll get what’s coming to her, as well as whether the ingenue Vicky can find at least romantic happiness if not something more in the cold city. Powell’s male characters aren’t as strong or as well-built as her women outside of Amanda’s side dish Ken Saunders, and Julian Evans could have used more depth even if he was to remain an often spineless husband beneath his manipulative wife’s thumb, although his simmering revolt provides another subplot for the increasingly complex second half of the book.

Apropos of nothing, I did get a reward for slogging through Alice Adams a few weeks ago when I came across this allusion to one of the most enduring scenes in that drab book, where Alice, at a dance sans gentleman, sits in a pair of chairs on the veranda and pretends that her beau will be back at any moment:

Her agonized Alice Adams efforts to act as if she were reserving the other seat for a most distinguished but delayed escort, spoiled that evening too for her.

Next up: Ann Patchett’s long-delayed follow-up to her amazing Bel Canto, 2007’s Run.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ November 29, 2009
→ By

Alice Adams.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS some time between 2:30 and 3 pm EST on Monday, topics TBD.

Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, making him the award’s first two-time winner as he won two of the first four given. His first award was for The Magnificent Ambersons, a much stronger book chronicling an aristocratic family’s decline at the start of the 20th century. Alice Adams, while fast-moving and loaded with a healthy amount of satiric wit, relies on character actions that rang false for me and never had the same tension or narrative greed of the earlier work.

Alice is a girl of about twenty who has struggled to make a good marriage because of her unwealthy, working-class parents. While not poor, the family can’t indulge in frivolities like new clothes for every dance or fresh corsages from the florist – hey, I said the plot was nothing special – and Alice’s romantic prospects suffer. She finds herself courted by a newcomer to town, Mr. Russell, and ends up spinning yarns for him about herself and her family for fear that the truth will drive him away, even though, of course, she only makes matters worse through her deception. Meanwhile, her shrewish mother hounds Alice’s temporarily invalid father to leave the comfortable but low-status job he has to strike out on his own by modifying or stealing a company secret that he was involved in developing, a move that puts him into inevitable conflict with the maybe-sorta-benevolent company president. Alice’s smartass brother, Walter, is in his rebellious stage, socializing with blacks and outcast whites while making increasingly shrill demands on their father for a fast sum of money.

Tarkington sprinkles the first half of the book with cutting observations that both define the characters and provide a farcical element to the drab setting and the depressing acts of those higher up in the caste system, such as his description of one of the few men in the circle to pay any attention to Alice:

They danced. Mr. Dowling should have found other forms of exercise and pastime. Nature has not designed everyone for dancing, though sometimes those she has denied are the last to discover her niggardliness. But the round young man was at least vigorous enough – too much so, when his knees collided with Alice’s – and he was too sturdy to be thrown off his feet, himself, or to allow his partner to fall when he tripped her. He held her up valiantly, and continued to beat a path through the crowd of other dancers by main force.

Unfortunately, the wit dissipates in the back half of the book, and there’s this sense of impending romantic and financial doom over the book, both through the obvious setup of the novel – I couldn’t escape the feeling that I’d read this story before – and through Alice’s vocalized expectations of an unhappy ending. The resulting structure, where Mr. Russell doesn’t appear until roughly the one-quarter mark and Mr. Adams doesn’t get out of bed till past the midpoint, is awkward and ineffective at building up a good head of steam for the plot. I read it just waiting for the other shoe to finally drop, and when it did it was incredibly predictable and tired.

Next up: The Guardian put Roald Dahl’s The BFG on its list of the hundred greatest novels ever written, which seems a bit daft, but the first half of the book has been good fun.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ November 4, 2009
→ By

Tree of Smoke.

I know the site’s been flaky today. The server is fine but WordPress is hanging up and I’ve had to have hosting company restart it twice.

I’ll be on Mike & Mike in the Morning on Wednesday at 7:40 am EST, after which, I’m going on vacation for a week, so this will probably be the last post here till Veterans’ Day. And – in case that wasn’t clear enough – there will be no Klawchat this week.

So, Tree of Smoke … 614 pages, read the whole damn thing, still have no idea what the point was, why I care about any of the characters or who the main character even was, what any of the threads had to do with each other, and why author Denis Johnson’s prose was so disjointed, mixing florid descriptions with poorly used profanity. (In fact, given that most of the novel is set in Vietnam during the war, I actually expected more profanity.) There’s no plot. Stories don’t start and end; we get the middle, sort of, and then somebody dies, and it’s over. The novel is full of allusions to the Bible, and a few references to other religions, but none of them made any sense to me on their own or in clarifying the point of the book. I thought I caught a few continuity issues in some of the subplots, but it’s possible that I was too bored to remember what was going on.

I could probably do a better job of taking this novel apart, but by the time I finished last night I wanted nothing more to do with it, and besides, this review from the Atlantic does a much, much better job than I could have hoped to do, even if I’d started the book with the intention of verbally lighting it on fire.

Anyway, I actually just finished the audiobook version of SuperFreakonomics, which was fantastic, but that review will have to wait till after the vacation. I will say that the brouhaha over the global warming chapter seems misplaced, and I’m guessing the critics haven’t read the entire chapter.

The reading list for the vacation – I probably won’t read all of these, but I have a minor phobia of running out of books – includes The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Remains of the Day, The Case of the Missing Books, Cold Comfort Farm, and And a Bottle of Rum.

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

Revolutionary Road.

I’ll be on 1080 the Fan in Portland Oregon tonight around 5:40 local time, and on AllNight with Jason Smith in the small hours. Tomorrow I’ll be on the Herd at 12:10 pm EDT. Look for my World Series preview piece on ESPN.com around midday.

—

Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, which made the TIME 100, portrays the fraying marriage of Frank and April Wheeler in mundane detail, highlighting their mutual contempt and the cruel manner in which they treat one another (and ignore their kids), until an unexpected event accelerates their downward spiral into an inevitable (and, I thought, rather predictable) climax.

The Wheelers have recently moved to a Connecticut suburb from which Frank commutes to an unchallenging, uninteresting job in Manhattan, and the move further away from city life and culture has only widened the cracks that were already appearing in their relationship. When April appears in a community theater production – which is, individually and collectively, a small disaster, a symbol of the thriving city culture they’ve abandoned for the superficial yet hollow suburbs – her contempt for her husband surfaces in her language and tone:

“Well,” he said, “the thing is, I already said we could. I mean I just saw them out there and I said we would.”
“Oh. Then would you mind going out again and saying you were mistaken? That should be simple enough.”
“Look,” he said. “Don’t start getitng this way. The point is I thought it might be fun, is all. Besides, it’s going to look kind of rude, isn’t it? I mean isn’t it?”
“You mean you won’t.” She closed her eyes. “All right, I will, then. Thanks a lot.”

Very little happens in Revolutionary Road; Frank has an affair, but it’s almost preordained, and the other significant events that have shaped the Wheelers’ lives exist only in flashbacks, until the Big Thing that leads to the book’s conclusion. The novel is instead driven forward by dialogue and Yates’ clever, meandering prose:

It looked, as John Givings had once said, like a place where people lived – a place where the difficult, intricate process of living could sometimes give rise to incredible harmonies of happiness and sometimes to near-tragic disorder, as well as to ludicrous minor interludes (“That’s All, Folks!”); a place where it was possible for whole summers to be kind of crazy, where it was possible to feel lonely and confused in many ways and for things to look pretty bleak from time to time, but where everything, in the final analysis, was going to be all right.

Yates appears to have taken his nomenclature seriously. Frank is excessively so, candid to the point of speaking against self-interest, as if his internal censor has been shut off permanently. April’s name is more ironic, as she feels like she should be in the springtime of her life but is trapped by an unwanted marriage and two children for whom she feels no affection. They live on the Revolutionary Road of the book’s title, referring both to the sexual revolution (which only accelerated after the book’s publication in 1960) and the economic revolution of postwar America, including the flight to the suburbs that ensnares the Wheelers and intensifies their alienation from each other and from society.

The ending to Revolutionary Road was, as I said above, quite predictable – Yates foreshadows the hell out of it – and I always find it hard to read about marriages of contempt and cruelty. I’m sure this relationship exists all over the place, and I have seen married couples speak to each other as Frank and April do, without love or tenderness, through gritted teeth meant to barely disguise the lack of respect, but it remains very hard to take even when it’s well-written.

Next up: I’m more than a third of the way through Tree of Smoke and I’m still not quite sure what the point of it is.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: ,
→ October 22, 2009
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The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread.

The title of Don Robertson’s The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread may make you think it’s the story of Matt Wieters, but it’s actually a remarkable coming-of-age novel set in Cleveland in 1944 on the day of the Cleveland East Ohio Gas Explosion.

The protagonist, nine-year-old Morris Bird III, decides to break with his quiet, slightly nerdy childhood routine one day to go visit a former schoolmate of his who moved to the other side of town. He comes up with a rather sophisticated plan to walk there, unwillingly taking his six-year-old sister with him, only to run into one of the largest industrial disasters in American history. What happens next, in maybe the last quarter or fifth of the book, is absolutely amazing, a brilliantly rendered portrait of heroism writ small against an unspeakably large tragedy. Robertson focuses on the little details – what Morris does, while heroic, isn’t huge or unrealistic, but still important, and Robertson imbues him with just one “super” power: the ability to think clearly in a crisis.

Robertson switches back and forth between narrative styles, from a straightforward prose/dialogue format to an almost modernist style where he shifts scenes and characters without so much as a paragraph break. These latter digressions are short, short enough that they didn’t drive me nuts, and the way he works in the creeping gas leak – as if the gas itself is just another character, wending its way through the gutters on its daily rounds – mimics the insidious nature of the threat, to which all the actors in the drama are oblivious until the explosion occurs.

Anyway, I know a few of you read this along with me, so rather than monopolize the topic, I’ll offer some discussion points. Feel free to add your own.

* Morris’ parents are little more than ciphers in the book; his father really only appears as a disembodied voice (a God symbol?) and his mother appears rather ineffectual in her brief cameos. Why?

* I thought of the red wagon as a symbol of Morris’ innocence, both for how it’s destroyed and, although this might be a bit cynical, how it’s obtained (or hard-earned).

* What’s the significance of Morris’s name? Morris, without a diminutive, is certainly a “grown-up” name. Does “Bird” just symbolize his flight across town, or is there more to it? And why would Robertson make him a “the third?”

* Am I the only one who found it odd that Edna Frost couldn’t think of an alternate spelling of Morris’ last name? It was the one off note in the book for me.

* Stephen King has apparently called Robertson one of his three greatest influences. For those of you who’ve read King’s work, did you see echoes of King in Sliced Bread?

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Up next: I finished Revolutionary Road today, and I’m starting Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke (on sale for $6.40 at amazon.com) tonight.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,