→ June 17, 2022
→ By

The Netanyahus.

Joshua Cohen won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his short novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, which fictionalizes a real event involving Benjamin Netanyahu and his father, the Zionist historian Benzion Netanyahu, visiting Cornell University and the esteemed literary scholar Harold Bloom. This is a travesty; in a year with several better books (at least two by Black authors), the selection of such an unfunny, narrow work for the highest honor in American literature undermines the award and robs more deserving books of attention.

The book is narrated as a memory by a professor from Corbindale College in upstate New York, a badly disguised stand-in for Cornell, who is chosen to be on the committee to interview the senior Netanyahu for a faculty position because he’s the only Jewish professor in the department. They expect Benzion to show up alone, but instead, he brings his wife and three unruly children – Benji, the middle one; Yonatan, who would later die a hero in the raid on Entebbe; and Iddo, who’d later become a physician, author, playwright. Benzion doesn’t actually reach Corbindale until the middle of the novel, so the first half is the sort of insular follies that made Netflix’s The Chair a modest hit among academics, as well as a portrait of the casual anti-Semitism of the late 1960s. Then the Netanyahus show up and trash everything, including the novel itself.

The entire family, in the book at least, sucks. The father is an intellectual, a strong Zionist who makes compelling arguments on the pages, but he’s also a selfish asshole. His wife is worse, and invites her entire family to stay with the protagonist, whose wife wants no part of this (nor should she). The two older boys are assholes, not just in the way that most teenaged boys are, but with a spectacular lack of self-awareness. I suppose Iddo is the least offensive of the bunch, but the point is that these are deeply unlikeable, one-dimensional characters who suffocate the last half of the novel with their presence, and add nothing to it.

Cohen’s writing is insufferably pretentious, right down to his frequent, deliberate choices of uselessly esoteric vocabulary words. Writing of a character “knowing at some chthonic lake-depth that …” is pointless, just a way to send the reader to the dictionary to show off your own linguistic prowess. (It means “relating to the underworld.” “Abyssal” would have worked better here, or just saying “knowing at the deepest level of his subconscious,” which uses words any middle school student could understand.) Another passage goes “logopoeic, propaedeutic,” using words only an academic might know and love – more on that in a moment. “Nugatory” does not, in fact, refer to the center of your 3 Musketeers bar, but is the rare word that describes itself: of no value or importance. In other words, worthless. The word Cohen needed was “worthless,” but he chose the more difficult one. The entire book is like this, and it is a work of supreme arrogance.

So why the heck did it win the Pulitzer? It’s not actually funny. The story is small and unremarkable, and the themes are fairly narrow. But it is a book about academia, and about Harold Bloom. At least 30% of the Pulitzer Prize Board for 2022 comprises current professors or Deans. The majority of the Board are current or former writers who would probably all be familiar with Bloom’s work. This is a book for them and about them. It’s The Artist and Argo telling Hollywood that movies are important. The Netanyahus puts a fancypants college at the center of its narrative, and takes one of the great critics and historians of literature and makes him the protagonist. The Board probably couldn’t resist. I can’t think of another explanation – I’ve read all of the Pulitzer winners, and this is the worst choice in at least 25 years. I found nothing at all redeeming in The Netanyahus except that it’s short. There were so many better books right in front of them – Hell of a Book won the National Book Award for Fiction and The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, so they weren’t obscure, and both were miles and miles better than this thing. Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This made the Booker Prize shortlist, and it’s better and far more relevant to our current moment. Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle and Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby were better. And that’s just among novels I read. I know it’s just a prize that doesn’t make the novels considered any better or worse, but these awards drive sales, and I’d rather see a better book get that big sales bump than this nonsense.

Next up: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, a Booker Prize winner from 2004.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 22, 2017
→ By

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

Michael Chabon won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001 with his sprawling novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a story about comic books, magicians, Jewish mysticism, homophobia, fascism, and a few other themes, one that garnered universal praise but that I thought could have used some serious editing. That experience steered me away from Chabon, figuring if I couldn’t love his acknowledged masterwork then I probably just wasn’t a fan, until I picked up his Hugo Award winner The Yiddish Policemen’s Union earlier this year in a used bookstore. It’s still very much Chabon’s voice, but the story here is so much more focused and the side characters more developed, which spurred my “hot take” tweet the other day that I preferred this novel to his magnum opus.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is set in an alternate timeline where the real-life proposal to create a homeland in Alaska for displaced Jews went through, and where the state of Israel was overrun by Arab attackers, so that the city of Sitka – population in our timeline: about 9000 – is a bustling metropolis of over two million people, mostly Jewish refugees and their descendants. (For comparison’s sake, the entire state of Alaska has fewer than 750,000 people right now.) This protectorate comes with an expiration date, like the United Kingdom’s agreement in Hong Kong or our agreement in Panama, where the autonomy of the local Jewish population over their municipal affairs will end two months after the time in which the story takes place, with the fate of all of these Jews unknown. They may lose their citizenship, and will certainly lose their socioeconomic status, with federal agents lurking, ready to come in and throw the Jews out.

Set against this backdrop is an old-fashioned noir detective novel, one that begins with a dead junkie in the flophouse where alcoholic cop Meyer Landsman lives (and drinks). The junkie has been shot in the head, execution-style, but left behind some very strange clues, including a miniature chessboard left in the middle of a difficult problem and Jewish prayer strings (tzitzit) that the victim appears to have used to tie off when shooting heroin. The victim turns out to be someone fairly significant in the local underworld, which spins Landsman and his partner, the half-Jewish/half-Tlingit Berko Shemets, into a traditional hard-boiled detective storyline where they bounce in a sort of circle around the same handful of suspects and sources to try to unravel the core mystery. Of course, Landsman gets knocked out, kidnapped, nearly killled, and drunk over the course of the novel, because Chabon is at least true to the form to which he’s paying homage.

Chabon creates a fun cast of eccentrics to populate this novel – which was also true of Kavalier and Clay – even though he has to cut them all from the same basic cloth. They’re all exiles facing the potential end of their safe haven, all brought up in the same semi-closed community, all coping with the same existential doubts. Even those who’ve spent time outside of the enclave, such as Meyer’s ex-wife and now boss Bina, share the same core experiences and are facing the same sort of countdown-to-extinction questions. Chabon gives them surprising depth given the limitations he’s placed on himself with this setting.

He also wrote a cracking good plot; at the end of the day, detective fiction lives and dies by two things, the main character and the story, so while Chabon’s prose can be spectacular, it’s lipstick on a pig if the story isn’t good. I was drawn into the story fairly quickly, and he manages to peel back the layers in a way that feels realistic, while also infusing just enough of a conspiracy to keep the reader guessing – and to give some meaning to the general sense of the Sitka population that the world is really out to get the city’s Jews.

The characters in the book are all supposed to be speaking Yiddish, with a glossary at the end of the book for Yiddish terms that Chabon chose to keep or that lack an easy translation, a detail that makes sense for the setting but that gave the book the only real distraction, especially when Chabon would tell us that a certain character had switched to English or, on one or two occasions, Hebrew. It fits the setting – a refugee population moving en masse like that wouldn’t just adopt a new tongue – but detracted slightly from the flow of the story.

As for the ending … I don’t think Chabon intended to satisfy the reader here, because this isn’t a traditional hard-boiled detective novel, but an updated one that respects the tradition, and because the conclusion here has to mimic the fate of the Sitka population. They’re not getting the resolution they deserve, so the readers should at least be left with some ambiguity to reflect it. With the rest of the story as tightly woven and written as it is, that’s a compromise I can easily accept as a reader.

Next up: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Hugo winner Mirror Dance, part of the Vorkosigan series; I read and enjoyed The Vor Game in November but skipped the review because I was on vacation.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
→ May 30, 2016
→ By

For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.

My friend Samantha has been touting the work of Nathan Englander for a while now, and I finally cracked open his first collection of short stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, last week. Even though the subject matter couldn’t be more foreign to me – many of the stories revolve around Hasidim, adherents of an ultra-orthodox sect of Judaism – Englander’s prose and his insight into human emotions are uncanny, especially given his age when he wrote many of these stories. He deftly blends humor into stories that get at serious questions like spirituality, gender equality, and finding hope in the hopeless.

The nine stories within the collection all encompass Jewish themes or characters, but range from World War II to a modern Hasidic community in New York and the aftermath of a bombing in Tel Aviv. The first story, “The Twenty-Seventh Man,” evokes the Night of the Murdered Poets with a story of the roundup of 27 Jewish writers in the postwar Soviet Union, a number that should have been 26 but mistakenly includes a shut-in writer whose work has never seen the light of day. “The Tumblers” reads like a fable, telling of the Jewish residents of a European city’s ghetto who are deported to a concentration camp but manage, however briefly, to stave off their fates by pretending to be a traveling circus of acrobats, a tragicomic story because you know it can’t really end well, but the individual moments are light even in extreme darkness.

My personal favorite in the collection, “The Gilgul of Park Avenue,” takes the concept of the gilgul, a belief of Jewish mysticism of the transmigration of a Jewish soul from one body to another, and turns it into a story that is by turns a slapstick comedy and a serious look at what happens in a marriage when the two partners have divergent spiritual beliefs. A nonbelieving Christian experiences an epiphany while riding in the back of a taxi in Manhattan: He realizes, or perhaps it just hits him, that he’s Jewish. And it’s not just a lark, as he rather quickly becomes orthodox, keeping kosher, adopting various rituals, seeking the advice of a sort of iconoclast rabbi who also believes in this doctrine of transmigration. The wife, however, is not having it, and tries to get her husband’s psychiatrist to talk sense into him, culminating in a painful, awkward dinner with the four of them (eating kosher) where Englander refuses to give us a true resolution, because there isn’t one: when two people disagree on such a fundamental issue, one that in this case would pervade most of their mundane lives as well as their spiritual ones, there’s no easy answer.

“Reb Kringle” is just what you’d expect – a Jewish man who bears a strong resemblance to Santa Claus reluctantly plays the part every December, until he meets the child who causes his hidden self to rebel against the subterfuge … and yet his overreaction doesn’t negate the truth of the injustice the child faces. The closing story, “In This Way We Are Wise,” goes in the other direction, ditching the comedy of the earlier stories to look at how ordinary people can survive living in an environment where terror is banal, ten brief pages that walk one survivor through the immediate aftermath of yet another cafe bombing in Israel.

Englander’s great gift is the intense realism of his dialogue – the spoken words, and the interior thoughts – of each of these characters, who seem so very normal because Englander can paint them quickly with broad strokes that hit the canvas with precise edges. The mentally ill Jewish father of “Reunion” could be a clown, or a nut, but in fact is a very regular guy with some sort of mania that is destroying his family. The central character in “Gilgul” is also run-of-the-mill, but even when what he says – like announcing to the taxi driver, “Jewish, right here in your cab” – is absurd, the voice, the scene, the specific words make it plausible. Englander’s fiction reads like fact because he writes people as people are.

Next up: More short stories, this time Edith Pearlman’s Honeydew.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ January 9, 2013
→ By

Catching up on recent reads.

For a variety of reasons, I fell behind on book reviews in December, so I’m cheating a little with an omnibus post on everything I read between Thanksgiving and New Year’s that I haven’t written up yet, aside from the usual Wodehouse/Christie/Stout stuff I generally don’t cover here. I had pretty mixed feelings on all of these works except the one non-fiction title, which is probably part of why I procrastinated on the reviews – it’s easier to write something quickly when you know which way you’re leaning from the start, but these books had enough positives and negatives to keep me from coming down on either side.

* The longest book I read in that span, and the one most deserving of a longer writeup, is Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, part of the TIME 100 and #81 on the Modern Library 100. Tabbed “the great American novel” by Martin Amis, praised by authors from Amis to his father Kingsley to Salman Rushdie to Christopher Hitchens, Augie March is an ambitious, expansive story of its title character’s growth from an impoverished Chicago childhood through one money-chasing scheme after another, including various brushes with the law and materialistic women. It starts slowly, hits a promising note for several hundred pages, and then ends with a gigantic whimper that ruined an otherwise enjoyable serious yet comical read for me.

Augie’s odyssey of self-discovery while he’s trying to make a buck – or a pile of bucks – draws him into various webs of fascinating side characters, a panoply identified by Hitchens as Dickensian, but one I think comes from the broader tradition of picaresque novels (to which Dickens contributed in The Pickwick Papers) and that continues through postmodern works like Ulysses and The Recognitions and later writers like Dawn Powell, Haruki Murakami, and Richard Russo. Augie March even has the peripatetic thread that defines the picaresque novel, even though Augie’s adventures, like his brief but disastrous time in the Navy, rarely encompass the high ambitions of classic picaresque characters.

Augie himself straddles the line between hero and antihero – he’s the protagonist and quite likeable despite his highly fungible morality, in part because he’s got the rags-to-riches vibe about him and in part because he entertains us through one peculiar situation after another – creating a curious ambiguity about Bellow’s point. If this is to be the great American novel, what exactly is Bellow telling us about the American experience? Is the key to the American Dream a refusal to commit oneself to anything – an education, a career, a marriage? Or is he saying the American Dream is an illusion that we can pursue but never catch? I think Bellow was posing the questions without attempting to provide any answers, which works from a thematic perspective but left the conclusion of the plot so open that I felt like I was reading an unfinished work, like The Good Soldier Svejk or Dead Souls.

* I wanted to like Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, since I think Lolita is one of the best novels I’ve ever read, and while I didn’t enjoy Pale Fire I do recognize how clever it is and that I might not fully appreciate its humor. But Pnin, the story of a fish-out-of-water Russian professor at a fictional university in upstate New York, suffers from Pale Fire‘s problem even more deeply: The target of its parodic efforts is too obscure for the average reader to appreciate. Where Pale Fire satirized technical and literary analysis of poetry, Pnin takes aim at the ivory towers of academic life at private universities, which is probably hilarious if you’re a professor or a grad student but largely went right by me as someone who sleepwalked through college by doing the minimum amount of work required for most of my classes.

* Abbe Provost’s 1731 novel Manon Lescaut seemed to be stalking me over the last two months, so I had to read it – it appears on Daniel Burt’s revised version of the The Novel 100, then was the subject of allusions in at least two other books I read that time, including Augie March and I think Nicole Krauss’ History of Love as well. Manon Lescaut follows the Chevalier des Grieux as he ruins himself over his obsession with the title character, a young, beautiful, and entirely materialistic woman who throws the Chevalier overboard every time he runs out of money. The two engage in multiple schemes to defraud wealthier men who fall in love (or lust, really) with Manon at first sight, and eventually end up sent to the French colony at New Orleans, where the pattern repeats itself with a less fortunate conclusion. Its controversial status at the time would be lost on any reader today over the age of 12, but its depiction of sexual obsession mixed with several early examples of suspense writing (before either genre really existed in its own right) made it a quick and intense read. Plus now I get the references.

* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is another short novel of obsession, also appearing on the Novel 100, this one telling the tale of a man who is so in love with a woman who is betrothed to someone else that he eventually takes his own life. Told through the letters Werther writes to his friend, I found the deterioration of Werther’s mind as his depression deepens to be far more interesting than the pseudo-romantic aspect of a man so in love with another woman that he’d rather die than live without her. He just needed a good therapist. It was by far the shortest novel I had left on the Novel 100 and brought my total read on that list to 80, so it was worth the two hours or less I spent on it.

* Zadie Smith’s On Beauty reimagines E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End (which I read and didn’t care for that much) in a serious comic novel around a conflict of race rather than class, set in a New England college town in the early 2000s. Smith also sends up the conflict between conservative and liberal academic ideologies (or theologies, more accurately) in one of the subplots that, much like that of Pnin, ended up missing the mark for me, although I could at least recognize glimpses of my alma mater in some of the satire. The novel’s greatest strength is the way Smith defines so many individual characters, especially those of the Belsey family, headed by a white father and an African-American mother and whose children are searching for racial, religious, and cultural identities while their parents try to recover from their father’s inability to keep it in his pants. I couldn’t help but compare On Beauty, which has some brilliant dialogue along with the deep characterizations and is often quite funny, to Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, which produced very mixed feelings in me when I first read it and didn’t fully appreciate (as I think I do now) how Smith was trying to stretch the boundaries of realistic fiction to tell a broad and expansive story. On Beauty, paying homage to a classic work of British literature, feels restrained by the confines of its inspiration when Smith’s imagination is a huge part of why her writing is so appealing, leaving it a good novel, a funny yet smart one that reads quickly, but a slightly unsatisfying one because I know she can do more than this.

* Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World tells the history of that somewhat mundane, unrespected fish, which had a substantial impact on the growth of civilization in Europe and in North America, and which was one of humanity’s first warnings (duly ignored) that we could exhaust a seemingly endless natural resource. Kurlansky’s book Salt turned a similar trick, taking a topic that seemed inherently uninteresting and finding interesting facts and anecdotes to allow him to make the story readable. Cod actually has a stronger narrative thread because Kurlansky can trace the fish’s rise in popularity and commercial value as well as its role in international relations, climaxing in the sudden collapse of cod stocks and the uncertain ending around the fish’s future as a species and a food source. We’re really good at overfishing, because technology has allowed us to catch more fish (as well as species we didn’t intend to catch) which has in turn made fish too cheap to consume. Kurlansky didn’t focus enough on this issue for my tastes, although Cod was published in 1997 when overfishing was seen as more of a fringe environmentalist concern, before celebrity chefs embraced sustainability and began preaching it to the masses.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
→ December 4, 2012
→ By

The History of Love.

I’ve been a little busy down here in Nashville, with Insider posts on the Dan Haren signing, the Joakim Soria signing, and the Mike Napoli signing. My latest video with Boog and Jerry covers Shane Victorino and Giancarlo Stanton.

–

Nicole Krauss’ novel, The History of Love, is ambitious for its subject matter – three intertwining plot lines around a Holocaust survivor, a mysterious author, and a young girl named for the main character in the author’s lone novel – and for how much it crams into a book of scarcely over 200 pages. The survivor, Leo Gorsky, and the girl, Alma, receive substantial time on the book’s pages, as Gorsky walks us through his past and through his mundane days as he nears and fears the end of his life, while the precocious Alma, still missing her dead father, seeks salve in the mystery behind the book, also called “The History of Love,” that gave her her name, powered her father’s love for her mother, and somehow ties all three storylines together.

Gorsky’s story is the sad one that gets the entire novel moving; he lost his family to Nazi invaders in his Polish village, and lost the love of his life when they were separated during his flight across Europe during the War, eventually landing in America and finding work as a locksmith alongside his cousin. Gorsky lives a lonely existence with no apparent purpose beyond living another day, bantering with his longtime friend, Bruno, who lives upstairs and with whom he has a pact to check on each other every day so that neither should die alone in his apartment and remain undiscovered for days. Alma, living in the same city, records her thoughts in a diary with a style that reminded me of Flavia de Luce, both her matter-of-fact delivery and her insatiable curiosity in areas that grab her interest. Her father, depicted as a wonderful, caring father and husband, died of pancreatic cancer, leaving Alma’s mother in a deep depression and setting her brother, Bird, on a path 180 degrees from Alma’s, exploring spirituality and mysticism where Alma believes only in science and art.

By focusing solely on these three characters, with a small allowance later for the author of the titular novel, Krauss infuses them all with tremendous depth without skimping on story. Leo could have been a joke of a character whose story is so awful that the reader wants to disown him rather than accept that one man could be so spited by the universe, but Krauss gives him enough will to live and cleverness that he inspires real empathy and support, even though we know his ultimate pain is just a permanent feature. Alma’s a little harder to love because Krauss has implanted some disjointed adult sentiments in her, but the girl’s obsessions with things like how to survive in the wild are both adorable and poignant because they represent gossamer connections to the father she barely recalls. The novel’s end dances on the precipice of bathos – but never quite falls over it into the crevasse of claptrap. Krauss doesn’t go for the big, shocking revelation at the end, but gradually reveals the connections between the three stories (some foreseeable, one very much not) as the book progresses, which helps eliminate any shock value around the ending and allows the moment of the final connection to evoke more genuine emotions on the reader’s end.

I’ve generally been disappointed by Jewish-American literature because of how foreign the Jewish-American cultural experience is to me, not so much in secular aspects but in philosophical ones; I’ve connected more with African-American literature because of its tendency to try to identify cause for hope even in the worst tragedies, whereas many great works of Jewish-American fiction find reasons for despair or at least fatalism in the slightest signs of misfortune. (There are, of course, exceptions in both camps.) Krauss breaks the paradigm by finding hope in hopelessness, giving us solace even where atonement is impossible and the time is too late for real hope, and finding meaning in seemingly meaningless acts. Leo gets a bit of unexpected closure at the end of his life, a point where anything of that kind is welcome because his expectations have long since died, while Alma grows emotionally during the quest for the author’s true story and why it is so important to her mother and to the mysterious man who’s been asking her mother to translate the book from Polish at a substantial cost. It’s a remarkable novel that’s funny, touching, sweet, and sorrowful, without being too much of any of those things.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ May 30, 2011
→ By

The Fixer.

New mock draft is up. Updated top 25 pro prospects list goes up on Tuesday, followed by another projected first round on Friday.

Free Brandon Belt.

–

”So sleep now, without fear for your life, and if you should ever manage to get out of prison, keep in mind that the purpose of freedom is to create it for others.”

Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1967, a bit surprising given the award’s focus on works that deal with the American experience. The Fixer is a fictionalized account of the arrest and trial of Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Russian Jew falsely accused of the murder of a young Ukrainian boy for the purposes of some arcane blood ritual. Malamud indicated that Bok was also inspired by the Dreyfuss and Vanzetti affairs, but the case in his novel is undeniably Beilis’.

The fixer of the title is Yakov Bok, a Jewish carpenter who leaves the countryside for the city of Kiev after his wife leaves him for another man. While in Kiev, he finds a job working for an anti-Semitic factory owner, with an apartment included in a district forbidden to Jews. When the boy’s corpse is discovered, Bok – who had once chased the boy out of the factory’s brickyard – becomes an unlikely suspect given the accusations because he’s alienated from God and his own religion, but he finds himself steamrolled in a Kafka-esque legal process designed to produce a confession or a guilty verdict.

While in prison for the remainder of the book – the novel ends as Bok heads for his long-delayed trial – the fixer endures numerous physical and psychological torments, but finds or develops an inner strength that previous to his arrest he lacked or simply didn’t know he had. Even through attempts to dehumanize him and force him to confess, he retains some vestige of freedom by choosing not to submit – the only choice he’s allowed in the unconscionable conditions of his imprisonment. That becomes his victory even before the ultimate victory of an acquittal. (Beilis was acquitted amid an international outcry over his arrest and trial; Dreyfuss was also exonerated after Émile Zola’s famous “J’accuse!” editorial. Vanzetti and his co-conspirator Sacco were executed, although their guilt is still in question; shortly before Malamud wrote The Fixer, historian Francis Russell published a major book on the case called Tragedy in Dedham that concluded that Vanzetti was innocent.)

Malamud’s work covered not just anti-Semitism but prejudice, injustice, corruption, and mob mentality in the midst of the U.S. civil rights movement and barely two decades after the end of the Holocaust while also exploring how the human spirit can survive in unbearable circumstances. Bok himself is harsh and unlikable during the brief period before his arrest, but becomes sympathetic because of the cartoonishly evil nature of his captors. (His one ally of sorts is eliminated far too soon from the novel’s pages, making most of the book’s second half even bleaker than the first.) But despite the often graphic descriptions of Bok’s life in solitary confinement and the faint hope of any redemption or rescue, The Fixer was compelling because of its bigger themes, ones that probably apply just as well in Bosnia or Rwanda or even today in the Middle East. Malamud’s irreligious Jew stands in for every oppressed people throughout human history.

Incidentally, Beilis himself wrote a memoir of his imprisonment and trial called The Story of My Sufferings that appears to be long out of print and probably in the public domain. I imagine it’s a difficult read, but I hope its historical significance encourages some e-book publisher to put it out there in electronic form.

Next up: I won’t have much time to read this week, so I picked Graham Greene’s brief “entertainment” The Captain and the Enemy.

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

American Pastoral.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 20, 2009
→ By

Catch-22.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
→ January 9, 2009
→ By

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001, is a clever, sprawling novel about two young cousins who become almost overnight sensations in the world of comic books, helping to launch the genre’s golden age leading into World War II.

Kavalier & Clay tells the story of Josef Kavalier, a Jewish refugee from Prague who flees the Nazis in a most unusual fashion, and Sammy Klayman (who adopts the nom de plume of Sam Clay), his American cousin with whom he goes to live. Sammy has a knack for storycraft but isn’t much for art, while Josef, in addition to being an experienced magician, is a skilled and meticulous artist. Seeing the success of Superman, the two cook up a new superhero, The Escapist, and convince Sammy’s novelty-selling employer to publish a comic book as a way to sell more useless gadgets to kids. The Escapist is a success, but after a few years of glory, the two cousins’ lives take rather sudden turns for the worse.

Chabon’s mind and typewriter appear to ignore boundaries and guidelines, resulting in a book that often lacks direction and needed cuts both to its prose and to its scope. There’s an entire section, depicting Joe’s time serving in Antarctica during the war, that is superfluous and insanely over the top (Joe survives carbon monoxide poisoning that kills almost everyone in the camp, then survives a plane crash, then survives being shot … come on). The major plot events are usually out of the blue; the first chunk of the novel revolves almost entirely around the development and publishing of the cousins’ comic books, with side stories about their two romantic entanglements, when, roughly two-thirds of the way through the book, Chabon suddenly shifts direction, hitting each cousin with a separate, shocking, tragic event, and turning the book dark as if he’d switched off all the lights.

The prose suffers similarly from the lack of editing. His vocabulary is immense, including a handful of Chabon neologisms, but he uses a number of words that will be unfamiliar to the majority of readers and would have been better replaced by more common terms. Does he really need to describe an after-lunch event as “post-prandial?” Why would he add the last two words to the sentence, “Lit thus from behind by a brimming window, Josef Kavalier seemed to shine, to incandesce.” Why refer to the “ordinary wailing and termagancy of the dogs” instead of referring to their temper or peevishness or (if he wanted to use a fancy word) choler? These words may all be perfectly cromulent, but it doesn’t mean they were the best words for Chabon to use in his prose. He’s clearly a man in command of the language – referring to an expanse of Antarctic water as “this grievous sea,” calling a dictionary simply “the unabridged” – but his verbal brake pads appear to be worn through.

The first two-thirds of the novel, before it turns dark, is witty. Chabon is deft at writing quick dialogue and providing dry, almost Wodehouse-ish observations (“He drank an extremely cheap brand of rye called Brass Lamp. Sammy claimed that it was not rye at all but actual lamp oil, as Deasey was strongly near-sighted.), adding the occasional flourish of grin-inducing detail, as in the footnote that tells us that the compendium of one character’s pulp-fiction works was found a half-century later in an IKEA store “serving as a dignified-looking stage property on a floor-model ‘Hjörp’ wall unit.” But those occasional footnotes are another symbol of Chabon’s expansive vision and unwillingness to narrow his scope for the novel’s own good; whereas the miraculous Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is fully committed to the novel-cum-historical-document approach, with copious footnotes and consistent use of fictional reference works, Chabon is a footnote dilettante and gives only splotches of fictional history as it suits him.

Kavalier doesn’t fare well in comparison to Jonathan Strange beyond their different approaches to adding realistic historical notes and details. Susanna Clarke created two flawed but compelling main characters, putting them in partnership and then in conflict, giving the reader incentives both to support and oppose each character in response to individual thoughts and actions. Neither Kavalier nor Clay is as fully-formed as Strange or Norrell; Sammy’s character, in particular, is only briefly explained by an odd chapter about his odder father, and Clay’s homosexuality is there almost as a plot convenience, with little exploration at all of the conflicts a gay (and mostly closeted) man would have faced in that time. Sammy is gay because it allows Chabon to mess with him twice in crucial plot points that wouldn’t have worked if he was straight. When he’s finally outed, the consequences are almost nil, which doesn’t seem remotely realistic for the time period.

Kavalier is worth reading for Chabon’s sheer vision – he researched his topic thoroughly and created a paean to the golden age of comics that also covers the Holocaust – and some of the book’s more successful inventive ploys, but the disjointed story and incomplete characters left me disappointed and unaffected at the close.

Next up: Another Pulitzer winner, the oddly out-of-print The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, by Oscar Hijuelos. About a quarter of the way through it, I’m not impressed, although I’ll save the biting commentary for the writeup.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ September 6, 2008
→ By

Call It Sleep.

I’ve said before that I don’t really get Jewish-American literature, and Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep – on the TIME 100 and #67 on The Novel 100 – now joins that list. It is apparently considered one of the best, if not the best, depictions of the Jewish immigrant experience in America. There was, somewhere, a central theme or concept in this book that flew right over my head, which left me with a slow, difficult-to-read novel with very little plot until the very end of the book.

The protagonist is David Schearl, a perpetually terrified boy who, after arriving as an infant in the prologue, is eight years old at the start of the first section and eleven at the end. He has a vivid imagination, usually for the worse, is afraid of everything, and engages in incoherent internal monologues whose style I imagine is ripped straight from Ulysses. (They were reminiscent of Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, which supposedly took the technique from Joyce’s novel.) His father is a violent man who can’t keep a job because he does things like attack co-workers with an axe. His mother coddles him and tries to protect him from his father. His aunt comes to live with them for a few months, runs her mouth (not without justification), and ends up feuding with David’s father.

I look for a consistent plot to carry me through any novel, but Call It Sleep offers the thinnest of threads. In the final 60-70 pages, Roth finally gives us a story, a question about David’s parentage and the true pasts of both of his parents, leading to a confrontation and an accident that may have had some deeper symbolic meaning, but again, it was lost on me. While we’re waiting for something to happen, we have chapter upon chapter of David’s time in Hebrew school, or hanging around the other Jewish kids in his neighborhood. As a slice of life in a short story, it would be interesting, but as a novel, it’s a weak foundation. It might be that my own life experiences are too far away from those of the protagonists in novels like Call It Sleep, Herzog, or Portnoy’s Complaint for me to relate to them and to understand the central themes, but then again, I’ve had no problem with African-American classics, and I doubt that I am more in tune with Milkman Dead or Bigger Thomas than I am with David Schearl or Alexander Portnoy.

Next up: I’m halfway through Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity!, a reader suggestion from probably a year ago.

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