→ March 5, 2019
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Asymmetry.

Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry is one of the best, most immersive, cleverest new novels I’ve read in the past year, at least since Lincoln in the Bardo and possibly back to In the Light of What We Know. Built around a single, interconnected narrative in three highly asymmetrical parts, it takes a fictionalized account of Halliday’s affair with the much older writer Philip Roth and spins it into a dazzling, textured story that gives her stand-in character an agency not typically seen in these stories and uses the relationship as the platform to show the development of her writing voice.

The first part, the longest of the three, is called “Folly” and tells the story of how Alice, an editor at a New York publishing house, met the Pulitzer-winning author Ezra, and began an affair that is itself asymmetrical. He’s older, successful, world-weary, and confident in his writing voice; she’s younger, new to the publishing world, naive in some ways (but not totally or hopelessly so), and a would-be writer who has yet to develop her own voice or even find confidence that she’s a worthy enough talent to be published. Their relationship is sweet and grounded in reality, with descriptions of the mundane far more than the tawdry, like Alice picking up very specific foods Ezra loves or medicines he needs, and dialogue that reveals layers of their relationship even through the minutiae of the topics. It doesn’t hurt that Ezra loves the Red Sox and makes Alice into a fan, which then becomes a running theme through the book as the seasons pass and the Sox win their first World Series in 86 years during their affair. What could be weird or even inappropriate never seems such because Alice never loses her autonomy or sense of self within the relationship, even standing up for herself a few times, and often the balance in the relationship shifts in the other direction, as her youth and greater ease in the world giver her an advantage over the less physically able and less flexible Ezra.

The second part, “Madness,” details the Kafkaesque trial of Amar, a dual citizen of the United States and Iraq who gets caught in the purgatory of the UK’s equivalent of homeland security as he tries to make a stopover in London on his way to see his brother in Iraq by way of Istanbul. Amar is powerless in this situation, despite possessing two passports, a valid air ticket, and specific reasons for the stopover and the trip; the power rests entirely in the hands of his tormentors, who demur and delay until they finally decide they’re not going to allow him to leave the airport to legally enter England to visit his friend Alastair. The connection between these two stories is only made clear in the third part, although in hindsight you can see how Halliday presaged it; and even then it’s merely in passing, but that link also gives the first part a new level of significance beyond retelling a May-November romance story that we’ve heard before.

The third part is an interview with Ezra on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs program that functions as an extended epilogue and really ties the room together, although I don’t think it stands that well on its own except as an amusing trifle. It provides a coda for the first part, and an explanation for the relevance of the second part, while also giving us more of Ezra Booker, who is himself a wonderful character – an old man with a young spirit, a speaker who’s light on his feet, and, by this time, Alice’s ex-lover but someone who’s obviously tracked her career with pride.

The novel is also a treasure of literary allusions, both to other works – I doubt Alice’s name is any sort of a coincidence, as so much of the dialogue between her and Ezra is reminiscent of what Lewis Carroll’s protagonist may have found through her looking glass – and to real-world literary events, including Roth/Booker’s desire for a Nobel Prize that never came. Ezra gives Alice books to read on all sorts of subjects, the way an older writer might mentor a younger one, but also buys her expensive (albeit practical) gifts, further exacerbating the asymmetry of their relationship. Nothing is balanced in Halliday’s telling, nor is it any more balanced in reality.

The ultimate question Halliday seems to ask in Asymmetry is whether any of us can truly see the world through the eyes of another person. Ezra has done so through his books, or so Alice believes, but his characters – and Roth’s alter ego Zuckerman – share his perspective on the world, whereas Alice wants to write the character of someone who could not differ from her in a more fundamental way. So much of what we see is merely the way our brains interpret the motions of particles or radio waves, and thus each of us sees a different picture as we move through the same world. Halliday takes that aspect of physics (is the title a wink to supersymmetry?) and asks whether any of us can truly understand the views and experiences of another, even when we seem to walk the same path. It’s a gorgeous debut that can’t answer that question but will linger on your palate long after you finish.

Next up: Iraj Pezeshkzad’s novel My Uncle Napoleon.

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→ December 30, 2017
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Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

I’d only read one Salman Rushdie novel prior to this month, tackling Midnight’s Children back in 2010; I found it a somewhat difficult read, but brimming with imagination, big themes, and incredible prose and wordplay. What I didn’t know until very recently was that he wrote a children’s novel called Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which appeared on the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels ever written. It’s quite wonderful, featuring more of the wordplay and creativity that marked Midnight’s Children, reminding me in many ways of The Phantom Tollbooth, one of the best children’s novels I’ve ever read (twice, in fact, once on my own and again to my daughter), and the works of Roald Dahl.

Haroun Khalifa is the young son of Rashid, a storyteller who suddenly loses his gift of narration when his wife leaves him, leaving the two of them without any means of support and Rashid without his identity. When Rashid fails to deliver at a speaking engagement, he and Haroun are whisked off to the Valley of K for his next assignment, speaking for the politician Snooty Buttoo – there are a lot of Butts in this book – only for Haroun to discover that his father has lost his ability to weave stories because Iff the Water Genie is trying to sever Rashid’s imagination. This leads Haroun to learn about the Sea of Stories, the plot by the evil Khattam-Shud to poison it and block its source, and the impending war between the Kingdoms of Chup and Gup that will determine the fate of the Sea.

Rushdie makes Haroun the hero of his own story in the tradition of children in literature who have to do something to save one or both of their parents. Haroun faces difficult choices and shows courage in the face of great odds, standing up to the various otherworldly creatures trying to steal his father’s gift or kill Haroun’s new friends from Gup or sew the lips of the Princess Batcheat shut. (He gets no help from the vacuous Prince Bolo, the antithesis of the typical prince-hero character, generally saying and doing the wrong thing or just showing no awareness of what’s happening around him.)

The text itself is replete with puns, references to Hindustani words or Indian historical figures, and even pop culture references. Iff and the Butts work for the Walrus, who employs technicians named the Eggheads, a reference I trust I don’t have to explain. Butt the Hoopoe certainly sounds like a nod to the British glam-rockers Mott the Hoople. Many names allude to characters in the stories of One Thousand and One Nights, including Haroun al-Rashid, a real-life Caliph of Baghdad who appears in many of those tales. General Kitab’s name means “book” in Arabic and Hindustani, and his army comprises numerous Pages. And the fish with multiple mouths, or maws, are referred to as Plentimaws … and there are Plentimaw fish in the Sea. (The book also has a brief appendix where Rushdie explains many of the character and place names.)

It’s also hard to avoid the likelihood that Rushdie wrote this as a reaction to the fatwa issued against him by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran after the publication of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and the general controversy over a portion of the book that some Muslims deemed blasphemous. In the wake of its release, at least ten countries banned the book in some form, including his native India, while many U.S. bookstores declined to sell it. There were also multiple bombings of bookstores and newspapers in the U.S. and in the United Kingdom related to the book’s sale, while the Archbishop of Canterbury called for an expansion of England’s Blasphemy Act to cover offenses against Islam. (That law was repealed entirely in 2008.) Haroun may be just a children’s novel, but it’s probably also a parable about censorship and the threat to the marketplace of ideas, showing how a society might suffer in a world without stories.

Haroun is better for slightly older kids, because the vocabulary would likely be too demanding for children below fifth grade or so, although the story itself would mostly be appropriate – Haroun’s mother runs off with another man near the beginning, but eventually returns without any real comment – and easy for any child to follow. I could see younger kids being disturbed by the threats to sew the Princess’ mouth shut, although Rushdie softens that possibility by having other characters complain about how awful her singing voice is. It’s a book for younger readers, though, so Haroun saves the day, no mouths are sewn shut, and Rashid eventually regains his talent for weaving stories. The beauty of this book is the journey, the literal one Haroun takes to this other world – I haven’t even mentioned the earth’s second moon, Kahani, which you might not have noticed because it moves by a Process Too Complicated to Explain – and the one on which Rushdie takes the reader, with puns and gags flying so fast that you might miss them on your first read. It’s a delight and a testament to Rushdie’s boundless imagination.

Next up: I’m many books behind in my reviews, but right now I’m reading Kat Kinsman’s memoir Hi, Anxiety: Life with a Bad Case of Nerves.

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→ October 30, 2013
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Middlemarch.

This week’s Behind the Dish podcast reunited me with my old Baseball Today co-host Eric Karabell. And you all thought I died when I went over that waterfall with Bias Cat, didn’t you?

George Eliot’s Middlemarch appears on the Bloomsbury 100 and ranks 9th on Daniel Burt’s Novel 100, but after my intense dislike of her novel Mill on the Floss*, I expected a similarly arduous read, with slow prose and distant, even odious characters. Middlemarch feels like the work of a different author, however, less bleak and moralistic, with stronger, better-rounded characters (and a few jerks), and every bit as pointed a perspective on the restrictive nature of Victorian society, especially regarding the rights of women.

* Not to be confused with Millon de Floss, one of the great biographer-stalkers of his time.

Middlemarch weaves several related stories together, all centered in the fictional English town of the title, revolving around idealistic young characters whose desires go beyond the traditional spouse-seeking of English literature prior to the 1860s. It begins with Dorothea Brooke, destined to be the semi-tragic heroine of the novel’s first major plot, as she rejects a suitor nearer her age and emotional temperament to marry the dour, chauvinistic theologian Edward Casaubon, a blowhard who is the first of the novel’s many comic side characters. Dorothea’s other suitor, Sir James Chettam, marries Dorothea’s sister in what becomes a far happier marriage. Edward refuses to induct Dorothea into his intellectual life, perhaps because it is nearly bankrupt, leaving her bored and unhappy until his early death, at which point an absurd codicil to his will forbids her to take up with Edward’s distant cousin, Will Ladislaw, who is a far better emotional match for Dorothea.

Middlemarch is also home to the Vincy siblings, Rosamund and Fred, a financially irresponsible pair who have very different aims in romance: Fred wants to marry Mary Garth, with whom he’s been in love for years, while Rosamund sinks her claws into the young doctor Tertius Lydgate, because she sees him as a path to upward mobility. Fred’s ability to marry is hampered by his dissolution, which leads him to bankrupt himself and nearly do the same to Mary’s father, while Rosamund manipulates the idealistic Lydgate, who doesn’t plan on marrying because it would interfere with his professional endeavors, into a betrothal he didn’t desire.

Eliot takes the usual themes of marriage and inheritance as the starting point for deeper explorations of character and societal mores than contemporary novels typically explored, helping usher in an era of fiction where independent women were increasingly found as central characters and where their lower standing in a male-dominated culture was fodder for entire novels. Dorothea begins as a high-minded, emotionally immature woman who reaches for some ill-defined goal in marrying the old pedant Casaubon, only to realize she’s grasped at a cloud and lost her independence without any intellectual gain. Fred has to be shamed into a life of industry and diligence, in a career that seemed beneath him, to have any chance to marry the woman he loves. Lydgate’s match with Rosamund turns out to be disastrous, as her extravagance nearly bankrupts him, his researches grind to a halt, and he’s caught up in a scandal involving the local squire Bulstrode, who makes ill use of the doctor to try to hide his own mistakes. While some characters face consequences for their own sins, others find their lives constrained by the need to keep up appearances, or by the effects of gossip about untoward appearances. Even in the epilogue, Eliot grants most of her characters middling outcomes, where financial success and happiness are mutually exclusive; Dorothea may at least fare the best, as she can find happiness even in an imperfect situation, telling Ladislaw that “if we had lost our own chief good, other people’s good would remain, and that is worth trying for,” marking why she stands above the rest as the novel’s real protagonist and most empathetic character.

As much as Dorothea stands at Middlemarch‘s moral center, Lydgate struck me as the most fascinating character because of the small window he provides into Eliot’s own views on the rise of science and research in English society and culture. Lydgate arrives in Middlemarch intending to work as a doctor to fund his researches, bringing ideas for reform and for greater service to those unable to afford proper medical care to a small town with decidedly staid ideas on what a doctor should do and say. The obstacles he encounters from the town’s aged, established medics slow his practice significantly, even when he has some success in treating difficult cases, but it is the marriage to the dim-witted, materialistic Rosamund that destroys his intellectual curiosity, because he can no longer devote time to research or volunteer work because he has to pay the debts she has accumulated. Coming from a male author, this might read as misogynistic, but Eliot imbues all of her characters, male and female, with strengths and defects, so even the venal Rosamund is multi-dimensional, while the reader cannot exonerate Lydgate of blame in his own downfall. (It’s also hard to accuse Eliot of anti-feminism when she has Mary say, “Husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.”

Middlemarch might be the most-praised novel ever written in the English language. Virginia Woolf referred to it as “the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” A.S. Byatt used that quote in her 2007 review, saying it was possible to argue – seriously, can you get more wishy-washy? – that Middlemarch is “the greatest English novel.” Daniel Burt’s top 100 only lists two English-language novels ahead of it – the abysmal Moby Dick and the abstruse Ulysses, the latter by an author who’d abandon English entirely in his next novel, Finnegan’s Wake. Eliot’s prose is far more pleasant to read than Melville’s and easier to digest than Joyce’s, with incisive wit (as in the “husbands” comment above) or profound renditions of human emotions:

When the commonplace “We must all die” transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness “I must die – and soon,” then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.

Writers who craft realistic characters typically exhibit this understanding of emotion and thought, whether the feelings depicted are negative (fear of mortality) or positive. Eliot can drift from compassion to disdain – Mary, the novel’s most insightful speaker, points out that “selfish people always think their own discomfort of more importance than anything in the world,” which is undeniable – over the course of a few pages, but there is always the sense that she reveres character, even if she doesn’t always revere her specific characters. I don’t share Woolf’s and Byatt’s veneration of Middlemarch, as the Lydgate/Rosamund thread tended to meander and Rosamund was the least compelling character in the book, but it is a marvelous novel, a broad study of many brilliantly rendered characters, and a lesson in integrating multiple storylines into a single narrative.

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→ October 23, 2013
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The Return of the Native.

I was assigned two books in my Lit class in my senior year of high school on which I bailed after 20 or 25 pages, reading the Cliffs’ Notes for one and watching the movie for the other. I eventually read both books in full as an adult, as both are on the Novel 100 and, to be honest, it bugged me that I’d never made a more serious attempt to finish them. One of them was Theodore Dry … er, Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which amounted to 200 pages of shit in an 800-page novel. The other was Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which is one of my favorite novels ever written, a tragedy as well but a work of consummate beauty in prose and characterization, as well as the best example I have encountered of the use of irony in a serious novel.

The Bloomsbury 100 includes a second Hardy title, The Return of the Native, which doesn’t quite hit the heights of Tess but also doesn’t inspire the same frustrated outrage that that other novel does. Native instead focuses on the interconnections between a number of flawed characters in a tiny English hamlet, and how tiny choices create avalanches of consequences for all of them, with an ending that, in veritable Hardy-esque style, leaves no one truly happy.

The native of the book’s title is Clym Yeobright, a former resident who has found success in the Parisian diamond trade, but finds the work unfulfilling and has returned to Egdon Heath to embark on a scheme to educate the children of the poor. By the time Clym enters the scene, we have already met the other characters and seen their entanglements: Thomasin Yeobright, Clym’s cousin, is betrothed to the unstable Damon Wildeve, who himself is still in love with the local maiden Eustacia Vye, who had had an affair with Wildeve but generally disdains all of the local residents as beneath her. Thomasin returns home to Egdon Heath from a marriage ceremony with Damon that didn’t come off, as Wildeve lacked the proper license, by way of the reddleman (a traveling seller of the pigment red ochre) Diggory Venn, who also carries a torch for Thomasin. When Wildeve and Thomasin do marry, Eustacia throws herself at Clym, hoping he’ll enable her escape from Egdon Heath when he returns to Paris, unaware that he has no plans to do so. When Wildeve and Eustacia both find themselves in unhappy marriages, their liaison is rekindled, leading the four down a path into tragedy.

For a man somewhat estranged from his church, Hardy reflects a strongly moralistic worldview in his writing, more so here than in Tess, where he directs more of his ire at the chauvinistic Victorian environment that condemns his title character to a life of misery. Native takes more of a balanced approach to its subject, combining a frank look at sexual politics and the essence of human emotions with a plot where nature dooms the least morally sound characters over the more innocent ones. Hardy’s language makes it clear that Eustacia is the wicked seductress and Wildeve the feckless lover and husband, with Thomasin in particular receiving treatment as the victim of their maneuvers.

Basde on a small sample of two novels, Hardy might be my favorite writer of prose after the incomparable F. Scott Fitzgerald, as Hardy’s poet self pops up repeatedly in the text of his novels. He refers to the “black fraternization” of the “obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land” to describe the desolate scene off the moors near Egdon Heath, and describes Eustacia examining her own dismal situation by thinking “what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.” Clym, after the last of his tragedies in the novel, declines to appear at an event for fear he “might be too much like the skull at the banquet,” which is a hell of a lot better than referring to something in a punchbowl. Eustacia says “I’d give the wrinkled half of my life!” to live in a cosmopolitan place where she could live like a lady, a throwaway phrase that becomes more meaningful when her life is in danger later in the book.

Hardy, always full of sunshine, has time to refer to Clym’s loss of innocence as

the stage in a youngman’s life when the grimness of the general human situation first becomes clear; and the realization of this causes ambition to halt awhile.

And he mirrors my own thoughts on the rising tide of darkness as autumn closes:

Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of man when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout Nature. It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness aganist that fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery, and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.

Of course, I doubt Hardy meant I should light my Weber kettle grill in response to the shortened days, but that’s the best I’ve got.

Two final side notes on The Return of the Native:

* A 1994 TV movie adaptation starred two then-unknown actors as Damon and Eustacia: Clive Owen and Catherine Zeta-Jones. I think it’d be worth seeing on that basis alone.

* I can’t hear the name of this novel without thinking of this sketch.

Next up: I’ve been lax at writing up books lately, but I’ve gotten through Middlemarch and Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, as well as David Goodis’ noir novel The Wounded and the Slain, and am now on the non-fiction The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor Macgregor And The Most Audacious Fraud In History by David Sinclair. If anyone has a particular interest in either of those classic novels, drop a line in the comments.

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→ April 20, 2013
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Infinite Jest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ March 12, 2013
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Blood, Bones & Butter.

A little admin stuff first – my new weekly podcast for ESPN, Behind the Dish, debuted today, featuring an interview with Astros GM Jeff Luhnow and a conversation with fellow writer Joe Sheehan. I appreciate the support of all of you who listened to Baseball Today and mourned its end, so I hope you’ll tune in to the new show. It should be up on iTunes today (there’s a technical problem on their end, I’m told). Spread the word.

Also, I have new posts for Insiders on Jeff Samardzija, David Holmberg, and other Cubs and Dbacks and on Yordano Ventura, Brandon Belt, Tyler Skaggs, and more.

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Gabrielle Hamilton is a self-taught and, in her words, “reluctant,” chef who achieved great acclaim for her tiny New York restaurant Prune and the honest, rustic fare she has served there for the past fourteen years, eventually winning the James Beard Award as NYC’s best chef in 2001. Her brilliantly written memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, is a masterpiece of the memoir genre, a perfect emulsion of food writing and autobiography that will make your mouth water with descriptions of food yet never shies away from critical introspection.

One central thread, Hamilton’s own relationship with food and, by extension, how much that relationship tied to her relationships with friends and family, runs through the entire book, but rather than giving a single story, Hamilton splits her memoir into a sort of triptych: one section on her childhood and adolescence, one on her stop-and-go path into a career in food (with a detour to Michigan for a master’s in creative writing), and one on her unfulfilling marriage to an Italian doctor, Michele. Food is everywhere in the book, yet the book isn’t about food. It is about Hamilton’s peculiar life, with her passion for cooking a recurring character in every episode.

Hamilton’s path to culinary stardom was accidental, but also extremely odd, not something you’d ever recommend to a would-be chef. Her offbeat family imploded when her French-born mother suddenly demanded a divorce from Gabrielle’s set-designer/artist father, ushering in a period when Gabrielle was largely left without parental supervision, a tragicomic setup that led her both into the kind of libertine behavior you’d expect from a 13-year-old without adults around and into a lifetime of extreme self-reliance. She began working in restaurants and bars, as a dishwasher or a server, and eventually working insane hours for catering outfits in New York, learning how to cook as she went rather than at culinary school. Her disdain for fussy, pretentious food gives her an opportunity for some hilarious rants; her own culinary ethos is about as far from a “chef’s tasting menu” as you can get. Instead, she waxes more romantic when describing an Italian sandwich she purchased at a pork shop in Brooklyn (unnamed, sadly) or the fresh seasonal vegetables she finds during annual visits to her mother-in-law in Rome and Puglia. Even in the final section, which details her latent disaffection with her marriage, one that wasn’t founded on love and never grew into anything more than friendly co-parenting, Hamilton still uses food as the foundation for the exploration of her own emotions.

While Hamilton infuses nearly every page with her passion for food, it’s her clear yet highly evocative writing style that sets Blood, Bones & Butter apart. She can express so much in just a few sentences, as in this passage, describing the scene at a coffee place in Grand Central Station:

I hate hating women but double-skim half-decaf vanilla latte embarrasses me. I ordered a plain filtered coffee, as if I were apologizing on behalf of my gender, and when I dug through my heavy purse to pay for it I discovered in my bag a diaper, a resealable jar of apricot puree, and one of Marco’s socks, which had somehow in the general loss of boundary and private real estate that is Motherhood, made its way in there.

That second sentence there is a thing of beauty, its odd punctuation contributing to its sense of barely contained chaos, all while we get Hamilton’s scorn for overly prissy fake coffee drinks and her exasperation at the loss of self that comes with the addition of one or more kids. When Hamilton describes her experiences in catering kitchens, or takes you through Michele’s family estate in Italy, or talks about the large family meals that bookend the story – the giant lamb roasts her father organized when she was a kid, and the family meal with her now ex-in-laws that appears in the epilogue-cum-“reader’s guide” – you can hear the sizzle of the meat as it cooks. If she’s as good of a chef as she is of a writer, Prune must be amazing.

One stray thought on the book: in a passage about women’s roles and struggles in a professional kitchen, Hamilton offers this thought:

If anything, I have come to love the men who also feel that the kitchen is abetter place when women are allowed to work in it, the men who feel that if any part of society is abused, that it demeans the rest of society.

Emphasis mine there, because that summarizes quite nicely why I will block people on Twitter who use the r-word, or a gay-bashing epithet like the word for a bundle of sticks, and it explains why I find team nicknames like Indians or Braves or that odious one that plays football in Washington so offensive. Intent to demean is not required for something to demean. Simply creating a division that sets one part of the population as “other” is demeaning. We do not name sports teams after Italians or Jews or African-Americans, after lesbians or Sikhs or the disabled, yet we think nothing of naming sports teams after Native Americans, or using words that are obvious proxies for them. (Would you see the implicit racism in a sports team called the Atlanta Slaves?) Hamilton’s praise for men who want women in their kitchens and treated as equals says much about her character, and what kind of co-worker and boss she must be, especially in an industry that often adulates alpha males with domineering personalities.

Next up: Lev Grossman’s The Magician King, the sequel to his 2009 novel The Magicians, which I reviewed that August.

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→ December 1, 2012
→ By

A Sport and a Pastime.

James Salter’s novel A Sport and a Pastime is the book to buy for any miserable wretch in your life who thinks Fifty Shades of Grey is quality erotica. Salter’s book earned notoriety when it was published in 1967 for its explicit descriptions of imagined sex scenes between its two protagonists, the American ne’er-do-well Philip Dean and the young Frenchwoman Anne-Marie, scenes that have lost their power to scandalize readers but retain some of their shock value because of the contrast between those descriptions and the mundane passages that surround them. A Sport and a Pastime remains an erotic novel, but its greatness lies in its incisive, almost heartless look at the vacuous nature of any relationship built exclusively on sexual attraction.

Philip and Anne-Marie don’t even connect until the book is about a quarter of the way over, after various descriptions of the dissolute lives of American expats in France in the 1950s, many still capitalizing on the popularity earned by soldiers who helped liberate the country after World War II. Philip is the son of a wealthy crtiic and a mother who took her own life; he’s a Yale dropout who was bored by school yet able to learn anything he liked. He’s bumming around Europe and seeking excitement by driving too fast when he drops in on the narrator for a few days, which turns into a longer stay when he encounters the dim-witted Anne-Marie, pretty, seemingly innocent, with frequent bouts of bad breath. They embark on an affair, relayed by the narrator,

Yet their relationship is fundamentally an empty one, doomed from the start to die when Philip’s sexual infatuation with Anne-Marie fades. The early equilibrium starts to shift, and Anne-Marie finds herself increasingly obsequious in bed because she cannot hold Philip’s attention any other way. Philip, meanwhile, uses her to play out some of his sexual fantasies, but as they become more adventurous in bed, graduating from trying new positions to fellatio to anal sex (all of which must have been extremely shocking to see in print forty-five years ago), each new trick holds his attention for less time than the previous one. (While Anne-Marie performs oral sex on Philip, he never returns the favor, another sign of their relationship’s imbalance.) When his money runs out, he’s first willing to try anything to keep the sex coming, even selling his plane ticket home for cash, but eventually he chooses not to beg his sister or father for more money and lies to Anne-Marie that their separation will only be temporary, even though it’s clear she’ll never hear from him again. Anne-Marie’s mother warns her that she’s being used, but the girl is oblivious, thinking, incorrectly, that she can convert Philip’s lust into love. It spoils nothing to say that she can’t.

The unnamed narrator admits that much of what he’s telling readers is his own speculation on what the couple are doing when he’s not with them, in or out of the bedroom, raises a host of questions around why he would invent or even provide the details he does give us. He’s clearly jealous of his friend Philip’s success with women, but the jealousy doesn’t have any homoerotic overtones – nor does he seem to be jealous of Philip’s success specifically with Anne-Marie, to whom the narrator is attracted but in a distant, almost clinical way. His primary romantic interest in the novel is a divorcee closer to his own age (34), but he describes her and his half-hearted courtship of her in far less detail than he gives Philip and Anne-Marie, choosing instead to live vicariously through the younger, more charming man. The explicit descriptions of Philip’s sexcapades with Anne-Marie, possibly invented by the narrator, may show the narrator’s own fear that his time as a ladies’ man, if he ever was one at all, is passing him by, leaving nubile girls like Anne-Marie, far too young for him anyway, out of reach. Or maybe he’s just a pervert.

I’m not offended by literary depictions of sex – I’m much more likely to find them embarrasingly funny, as they often read like the imaginings of a teenaged boy who hasn’t lost his virginity yet – but Salter’s word choice for Anne-Marie’s ladybits was unfortunate (even if deliberate), because of the extreme negative connotations of that word. Some of the content in the book may be vulgar, but the c-word isn’t vulgar – it’s vile, reducing a woman to her anatomy with a term that is also one of the worst insults anyone can hurl. Perhaps Salter intended to use it to show that for Philip, Anne-Marie is little more than a sex object, reducing her to her genitalia; the way Philip uses her, or that the narrator says Philip uses her, indicates a clear lack of interest in her beyond the bedroom. Or perhaps the narrator intends to reduce both Anne-Marie and Philip to their sex organs, because their relationship wasn’t based on anything more.

If you’re not perturbed by sexually explicit content in a serious work of literature, A Sport and a Pastime is absolutely worth reading, as the parts between the naughty parts are thoughtful and starkly written, as if Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller collaborated while only using their best qualities as writers. Mrs. Shinn, however, would not approve.

Next review: Nicole Krauss’ 2005 novel The History of Love, which was short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2006, losing to another book I read on my trip, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.

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→ June 9, 2012
→ By

Ray Bradbury + the Saturday five.

Ray Bradbury died this week at the age of 91, leaving behind an enormous legacy in literature, one that I fear will be excessively defined as a canon of science fiction, rather than merely of great writing.

My favorite Bradbury novel is the gothic horror story Something Wicked This Way Comes, which I ranked at #28 on my list of the best novels I’ve ever read. It’s a brilliant thriller, one that relies on implied fear rather than graphic violence, but it is also a wonderfully written work that includes one of my favorite lines in all of the novels I’ve ever read:

He laughed, then stopped.
For he though he heard a soft tread
Off in the subterranean vaults.
But it was only his laughter
walking back
through the deep stacks
on panther feet.

That last sentence has stuck with me for over a decade since I first read the novel. Not only is the idea of walking “on panther feet” a phenomenal, evocative image, but there’s poetry in the sentence itself: The rhyme between “back” and “stacks;” the assonance with those two words, “laughter,” and “panther;” the way the sound recedes as you read (or say) the sentence, almost like the words are descending a staircase away from you. It’s just one line in a 200-page book, not even a critical line in the story, but it’s one bit of evidence that Bradbury was more than just a great writer of speculative fiction – he was a great writer of prose.

To the links…

First, my own content:

* American League draft recaps.
* National League draft recaps.
* My day one recap.
* My June 5th chat, which took place during rounds 2 and 3.
* Where each team’s top drafted prospect ranks in their farm system.
* Podcasts: Thursday and Tuesday, plus my Tuesday hit with Colin Cowherd.

And from others…

* Why It’s Ethical to Eat Meat, by Michael Ruhlman. I’m on board with all of this except the quotes from the farmer about the animals being “good with it.” If they had that kind of cognitive ability, we wouldn’t eat them at all, right?

* The New Neuroscience of Choking, by the superb Jonah Lehrer. I have two main problems with applying that study to the question of whether clutch or un-clutch players exist in MLB. The larger one is that the subjects were not highly trained since youth to perform the task they were then asked to perform with the reward promised to them. The smaller one is that my longtime argument about choking isn’t really addressed here – that players who are unable to perform under pressure would likely be weeded out long before reaching the majors, because pressure situations exist at all levels of baseball, and merely playing baseball at all in front of a crowd, knowing that your career hinges to some extent on your performances in front of scouts and your statistics, is in and of itself a pressure situation. That stance, of which I believe Occam would approve, is fully compatible with the study’s findings.

* To Grow A Craft Beer Business, The Secret’s In The Water, from NPR. Have they stepped up their coverage of food/drink subjects, or was I just behind the curve in noticing it?

* Cuisines Mastered as Acquired Tastes. Are non-native chefs who learn “ethnic” cuisines somehow at an advantage because they are more willing – or able – to think outside of the box?

* McSweeney’s Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do. Very witty but with some useful tips in here … including some I should probably try myself.

* Bonus link: An interesting infographic on how healthful, local food creates jobs. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the report and data behind it, though.

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→ April 30, 2011
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Home & A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

My latest top 50 ranking for this year’s Rule 4 Draft is up. I’ll also be back on College Baseball Live this Thursday night at 7 pm EDT and on the postgame show as well.

—

The old man nodded. “Maybe I’m finding out I’m not such a good man as I thought I was. Now that I don’t have the strength – patience takes a lot out of you. Hope, too.”
Jack said, “I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then when it’s gone, it’s like there’s nothing left of you at all. Except–” he shrugged and laughed “–what you can’t be rid of.”

She’s only written three books, but Marilynne Robinson has to be in any discussion of the best living American novelists, and there is no living writer whose prose I’d rather read. Saying a writer writes “from the heart” can be like saying a player “sees the ball well,” but Robinson produces some of the most moving, heartfelt scenes and passages I’ve ever seen and does so without the excess of sentiment or cloying language that could turn a book with a similar setup into mass-market chick lit.

Home, currently on sale for $10 through that amazon link, is the parallel novel to Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead. (It’s worth mentioning that Robinson’s three novels have each won a major award – Housekeeping won the PEN/Faulkner award for the best debut novel of its year and Home won the Orange Prize for the best English novel written by a female author.) Gilead was a series of notes or journal entries from an older priest named Ames who, nearing his death, wishes to leave a testament for his young son. That journal also showed scenes of his complex relationship with his friend and fellow preacher Robert Boughton and Boughton’s prodigal son Jack, named for Ames, who returns to Gilead after a twenty-year absence. That return is the subject of Home, as Jack, a lifelong alcoholic who didn’t even come back for his mother’s funeral, shows up carrying two decades’ worth of secrets and memories, with arguably four decades’ worth of loneliness and sorry as well. His timing is propitious, with his father’s health declining even more rapidly than Ames’, and Jack’s sister, Glory, living at home again after a disastrous courtship that has left her resigned to spinsterhood.

Despite the presence of just three characters for most of the book, with everyone else accounting for maybe 10% of the dialogue and whatever passes for action in a Robinson novel (she has never in three books resorted to plot twists or other tricks of the trade to spice up the story), Home is Robinson’s most complex work. The developing relationship between Jack and Glory, separated by enough years that they were never close as children, is one side of a highway where the other direction contains the gradual yet accelerating deterioration of the relationship between Jack and the dying father who has confused decades of worry over his wayward son with decades of love; it’s not clear that anyone was or is capable of helping Jack, who has what would today most likely be diagnosed as depression, but Boughton, already starting to lose control of his emotions in the earliest stages of dementia, faces the crushing disappointment of seeing the failure and tragedy of Jack’s life incarnate, in his kitchen or his living room. And yet Jack, first welcomed and then rebuked by his own father, draws closer to the old man and to his sister … but never so close that he can make the place he refers to as “home” his actual home, instead revisiting the childhood feeling that he wished he lived there in spirit rather than simply in body.

That dualism symbolizes one of Robinson’s central themes, the gulf between our spiritual selves (or souls) and our corporeal existence. Robinson writes honestly of religion, or more specifically of religiosity, as her many religious characters are neither caricatured nor placed on pedestals; religion is simply intrinsic to their lives, and Home is suffused with conflicts between religious tenets and human behavior, as well as the doubts that have plagued Jack for his entire life, further isolating him (although it was far from the main reason) from a family of believers.

And part of Robinson’s gift is that she can write about religion without creating an overtly religious novel. Home is very much about life on earth, about the weight of memories, about choices gone awry in the distant past with ramifications in the present day. Glory’s broken engagement has left her back at home, unemployed, and without romantic prospects; one of the most heart-rending scenes comes near the book’s end as she remembers her own daydreams about her own future family, about children that will probably never exist, a warmth and happiness that she feels is now permanently denied to her. (I don’t believe the characters’ ages are mentioned, but Glory is probably in her early 30s, and I suppose in a small Midwestern town in the 1950s this would make her marriage prospects fairly slim.) Jack, meanwhile, slowly exposes layers of his sorrow to Glory, but not to his father, a permanent barrier to the old man understanding his son; the woman who helped Jack get back on his feet and remain at least partially sober for the past ten years is now denied to him, a severance that seems to have driven him back to Gilead and, in his mind, has cut him off from salvation in this life or any other. Unfolding these relationships in a way that gets at the heart of family dynamics, of loneliness, of regret, and of the ultimate comfort of home without ever relying on unrealistic plot twists to force characters into false corners is more evidence of Robinson’s mastery of language and of character. She went 25 years between her first and second novels but just three years between Gilead and Home; I can only hope the gap before her next novel is as short as the last.

–

Flannery O’Conner’s first short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, is even more theologically-minded than Robinson’s work, combining stories about the meaning of faith, salvation, and what it might mean to be “good.” The stories are largely twisted, even macabre, as in the title story where an escaped convict wipes out an entire family so O’Conner can show us the difference between saying you’re a good person (or, more specifically, a good Christian) and actually being one. O’Conner dreams up killers and con artists, thieves and rascals, putting “good” people in bad situations to see how they might react.

Aside from the notable title story, the most interesting to me was the longest story in the book, “The Displaced Person,” about a rather high-minded Southern widow named Mrs. McIntyre who takes in, under some duress, a family of Jewish refugees from Poland who fled the Nazis. Her ignorance of conditions in Europe at the time is particularly stark to us now, given the passage of time and our deeper understanding of the extent of the genocide and the horrible conditions in and outside of the camps for Jews. But her lack of charity and her unusually defined ideas on race/origin stood out for her post hoc construction of ethnic identities; even as the Jewish husband works harder, without complaint, than anyone else she’s ever had on her farm, she is appalled to find him trying to bring over relatives trapped in German death camps and potentially marry them off to black workers on the farm. The priest who organized the placement of the refugees is no help, as he’s a single-minded, simpering man who sees Mrs. McIntyre only as a shell, as a person to be saved and as a settlement place for the refugee family but not as an individual, an oversight that leads to the story’s ultimate tragedy. That climax is one of the strongest depictions I’ve seen of the banality of evil, a phrase which, not coincidentally, was coined to describe the complicity of German citizens with the Nazi’s plans for extermination of Jews and other minorities.

Anyway, the title of this collection inspired me to create my second Tumblr post.

Next up: Haruki Murakami’s English-language debut novel, A Wild Sheep Chase.

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→ December 15, 2010
→ By

The Little Sister.

I’m back at mental_floss today with an article about the designing of the game Dominion, based on an email exchange I had with designer Donald X. Vaccarino.

—

“Do you drink, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Well, now that you mention it–”
“I don’t think I’d care to employ a detective that uses liquor in any form. I don’t even approve of tobacco.”
“Would it be all right if I peeled an orange?”

Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe isn’t just hard-boiled – he’s dry, sarcastic, self-effacing, and mercurial, making him one of the most compelling protagonists I’ve found in any novel in any genre. Consigning Chander’s novels to the detective-fiction bin does him a great disservice, as his greatness is in his mastery of the language; not only is the prose itself readable and rich with metaphor, but it becomes the tool by which Chandler creates well-rounded characters through a handful of seemingly effortless lines.

I understand that The Big Sleep is considered Chandler’s best work, and it is phenomenal … but there’s little to no difference between that and Farewell, My Lovely, or the work I just finished over the weekend, The Little Sister. They’re all superb, all following the basic Chandler template of putting Marlowe in a situation where the line between solving the case and saving his life is blurry.

In The Little Sister the titular character – quoted above – shows up in Marlowe’s office, asking the gumshoe to help find her older brother, who has disappeared in Bay City not long after leaving his family in Manhattan, Kansas. Marlowe takes the case against his better judgment (S.O.P. for him), even though he believes the girl is holding back information. With a modest amount of investigating, Marlowe ends up in the middle of a blackmail scheme, a dope ring, and a lot of questionable identities – something Chandler creates in his usual economical way, with just a handful of new characters outside of a few corpses.

I picked the wrong time to read The Little Sister by starting it on day one of the winter meetings, which left me very little time to actually read the book until the meetings ended on Thursday – frustrating when it’s a book you never want to put down in the first place. I found it moved more quickly than The Big Sleep, but the plot was a little less complex – it was relatively easy to figure out what most of the characters were up to, and I say that as someone who almost never figures things out in books – so the question of which is the better book is one of personal taste. (It’s possible that The Big Sleep enjoys its status at the top of Chandler’s canon because of its film adaptation, directed by Howard Hawks with Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe.) No matter where you start, though, if you haven’t given Chandler at least one shot, I can’t recommend his work highly enough.

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