The Best American Essays: 2007

Edited by David Foster Wallace
307pp
Read 11/22 - 11/24

If you haven't figured out that the guy blogging about his favorite books is an elitist douche, consider this: over the Thanksgiving break, while so much of America (including my own family) spends a couple days straight eating leftovers and watching nonstop football, I had pretty much the equivalent binge with this collection of contemporary essays.

Which actually made for a nice holiday. I doubt I'd've enjoyed reading a novel of comparable length over the same time; at some point boredom, familiarity, and L-tryptophan would have gotten the better of me. I don't often read any kind of anthology, but I really enjoyed this little prose Whitman's Sampler.

Not to say that it was uniformly great. I'll freely admit to skimming the latter half of one of the Iraq pieces, and the insufferable exploration of teen sex appeal. As if that's even a topic. If anything, I'd maybe sacrifice some of the collection's dazzling diversity (while acknowledging that a diverse offering is a strength in this kind of collection) in favor of a greater emphasis on "craft."

Maybe this opinion is a vestige of AP English, or the "Art of Prose" course I once took, but, aside from poetry, nowhere is the painstaking effort and deliberation of the writer made more apparent than in a well-written essay. Here, the piece about Cesar, "the dog whisperer," serves as a good example. In 15 pages, Malcom Gladwell's keen eye reduces Cesar's "presence" to its constituent gestures, he renders them in lucid prose, and then extrapolates a couple of lessons in nonverbal communication and animal psychology. In the hands of the essayist, the stuff of everyday life is plainly, nakedly exposed in such a way that we see what we'd never noticed, and the universe is revealed in the quotidian. (In one of the above-mentioned courses, I remember reading Annie Dillard's piece about coming across a frog beset by a giant water bug, watching it ruck, rumple and fall. And somewhere between that description, those lilting verbs, and the exercise of labeling paragraphs descriptive, informative, or speculative, I had a blinding revelation.)

But affecting as it is, I sadly don't often read that kind of writing today. I've never really considered why, but I'm inclined to blame my cynicism. So I'd secretly hoped that this book would provide an occasion for that sort of reading. And it sometimes was. Everything I read was good, but only a couple of writers really put me in awe of their talent. And I'm convinced there could've been more of that kind of writing. In his introduction, DFW says something about how our nation's complicity in the reelection of GWB means that he left out "descriptive pieces on ferns" in favor of screeds about how America flaunts the rules of war. Which--speaking as someone who lets liberal guilt dictate a shameful number of daily decisions--I could give a shit about political whinging when considering good writing.



I've pretty much never seen David Foster Wallace's name on something and not bought it. Not that his introduction here is spectacular: the obligatory footnotes, a stale stab at political humor (an extended "decider" joke? really?), and some unimaginative wordplay (one can almost picture the scene, a high schooler in French II: "So 'essay' means 'to try?' I'm totally gonna use that in my next English composition!").

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel

by Rebecca Goldstein, 2005
296pp
10/18/07 - 11/11/07

When I was an undergrad, I read a lot more science than I do now: popular science writing, science biographies, and philosophy of science. This, in hindsight, is one of the few ways I'll acknowledge that going to an engineering school actually molded me. Not that my own studies had anything to do with any real engineering, science or math, but my friends mostly came from the computer science and physics schools. I don't know that I was aware of it at the time, but the people I surrounded myself with shared a peculiar set of reading habits. Very few people read literature--probably a good many would have told you that fiction doesn't matter--and everyone else seemed to pick their books from this limited pool of science books. James Gleick's Chaos was ubiquitous (I still remember the student bookstore's huge yellow piles of his FSTR, when that book came out), and so many people were reading the 25th anniversary edition of Gödel, Escher, Bach, that I'd assumed it had been assigned for some freshman lit class. And so for a couple of years there I let my peers' reading habits rub off on me. I suppose that if I'd been at a liberal arts college, I'd've been reading Dante, or whatever one reads to look deep and impress girls (which might be a nutshell summation of my understanding of a liberal arts education). Obviously, my current reading preferences have turned toward literature, and postmodern fiction in particular, but I probably have more of a taste for science writing than I would've had I not gone to Georgia Tech.

My choice of this particular book was prompted by two things: I'm currently in the middle of an audiobook version of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (incidentally I don't blog about audiobooks. Nor comic books or law books), and I came across this interview with R. Goldstein.

Despite having gotten about a third to halfway through the aforementioned GEB--the usual length for that book--I could not have told you a damned thing about the Incompleteness Theorems of Kurt Gödel, aside from how to pronounce his name. Maybe. Having read this book, I'm in a somewhat better position. Six months from now I will have forgotten entirely.

To be sure, this is 99% my own fault. This kind of explicatory writing about abstruse subjects cannot be read casually, or in short bursts. Often I would pick up the book, and spend ten or fifteen minutes refreshing myself as to, say, the technical meaning of "consistency" or Euclid's fifth postulate. Had I really dedicated myself to seriously reading Goldstein's explanation of incompleteness, I would not have so often lost her train of thought.

Having spoken in defense of Goldstein's writing, I can now proceed to offer criticism, hoping that Steven Pinker will not come to my apartment to beat me up.

Right in the heart of the densest, most difficult part of the book, when Goldstein's explaining the First Incompleteness Theorem, the reader--which reader obviously came to the table hoping to wrap his head around this central piece of 20th Cent mathematics--is asked to take a pretty huge leap of faith. After performing the admirable task of making Gödel numbering clear, Goldstein tells us that Pr(x), the property of "provability", is "a formally expressibly arithmetical property, albeit one that is extremely complicated, not anything that we can explicitly give here." Really? Not even, like, a little bit? I get that this is way too much math for my little head, I really do, but a sentence like that, stuck in this kind of book, bears a whiff of prestidigitation. Goldstein is in the process of blowing my mind by telling me (I think), that so abstract a property as the provability of a proposition, given the arbitrary system of Gödel numbers, can be expressed as a function, when she then tells me I'll just have to trust her (& 20th Cent mathematics) on that one. Which, I mean, I do. But I'd really appreciate it if as great and lucid writer as Goldstein at least made an attempt at my halfway understanding that particular point.

There's a lot more to this book than just Goldstein's accessible explanation of that remote area of math, even though that's the part (pp 150-188) that readers might be most interested in. It starts with a good bit of intellectual history, describing the Wiener Kreis to set the stage for a discussion of the philosophical implications of the Incompleteness Theorems. There's a really charming part at the end, where Goldstein describes her time as a grad student at Princeton, fascinated by the luminary in her own backyard. She then briefly and respectfully moves on to Gödel's paranoid demise; unfortunately the man was so withdrawn that I doubt anyone will ever be able to credibly write at length about the no-doubt fascinating world of his inner delusions.



This book comes to us from the "Great Discoveries" imprint, a hit-or-miss series of "Great Thinkers Thinking about Great Thinkers" books. I'm a big fan of DFW's Everything & More from this line, and Incompleteness could almost be read as the sequel to that book, or the next book in modern mathematics syllabus.

Strangely, between this book and American Prometheus I am accidentally getting a history of the Institute for Advanced Studies.

Bowl of Cherries

by Millard Kaufman, 2007
326pp
10/06/07 - 10/18/07

This book smells. Not a musty old book-smell. This book had an odor more like a rank cheese, or an active young boy who has not yet acquired proper hygiene habits. The odor summoned memories of certain children's books checked out from the local branch library when I was a kid. To be fair, the scent has diminished substantially since I brought the book home, but it's still there; you don't have to bury your nose between the pages to find it.

I mention the whole odor thing because McSweeney's "Rectangulars" imprint is remarkable, not just for the quality of literature published, but for quality in every aspect of the books they print. I can only surmise that San Francisco was particularly choked by a thick haze of bad incense on the day the galley proofs came to the office.

If I were asked to hold my nose and describe Bowl of Cherries in a single word, I suppose it might be "picaresque." Which adjective is perhaps too-easily overused in summaries and book reviews. This novel's protagonist/narrator, however, is not particularly charming, and though it does move a bit around the map, the action feels lackadaisically tugged from one place to the other, with little urgent purpose dictating the movement.

Judd Breslau, the narrator, is one of these improbably gifted young men of fiction. I was reminded of Hal Incandenza, not just because of his impressive vocabulary, but also because of his brilliance coupled with lack of purpose. When Judd is drummed out of Yale at age fourteen, and is sitting in his graduate advisor's office, I half-expected him to begin screeching.

It's a little curious that Kaufman makes his narrator a teenager, given that Kaufman himself is ninety. Breslau could have been ten years older and still have been a bright and youthful character. I realize that certain themes of wasted potential & the struggle to find purpose are identified with adolescence, but perhaps Mr. Kaufman doesn't realize the extremes to which adolescence has been stretched. I.e., thirty is the new twenty-one, or whatever Parade Magazine and the rest say.

This book is best when at its most bookish. In it's impressive first few pages. Breslau's narration takes us through Mesopotamian history, from the Stone Age to present day in the space of a page or two. Elsewhere he displays a casual familiarity with history & great thinkers, effortlessly expressed with some great words (e.g., "fettle"). I was interested in reading the adventures of this young intellectual. Through most of the book, though, Breslau behaves as a pretty ordinary young man, particularly when driven by a young man's hormones.



It should be obvious by now that I have no problem discussing a book without thoroughly addressing its plot. Likewise, I have no compunction about dropping spoilers, not that this book's flashback-narrative structure leaves much room for "spoliation." I do have one comment to make about Bowl of Cherries' plot: the unexpected reemergence of the narrator's absent father at a novel's end is every bit as ineluctable as the firing of the gun introduced in a play's first act.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

by James Hogg, 1824
248pp
09/07/07 - 10/06/07

Sometimes a book takes too long. I liked this book, but spent two or three weeks wishing I was done with it. Part of this is owing to the book itself: older novels tend to go slower for me, likewise novels that are driven largely by internal, psychological action. My own circumstances contributed as well: I moved to a new town and started a new job; sometimes even people who make time for reading find that there's simply no time for reading. To be sure, I'm glad I read the book, and at no time was I willing to put it down without finishing it, but it's a shame when the reading experience is tainted by impatience like that.

When I started this book, I was on an 18th Century kick (though written in 1824, the book is set mostly in 1704), which began with Tristram Shandy, and carried me through a re-watching of Barry Lyndon, as well as a few others.

Maybe my thinking here is influenced by having recently read Tristram Shandy, but in some ways this reads more like a contemporary novel than an 18th Cent. Scottish gothic novel. There's a weird theme of "doubling" here. People repeatedly have some sort of mirror images: the main character is presented as his brother's nemesis; at the same time he is paired with a shape-shifting figure who seems to be his spiritual twin, but who assumes the form of his brother. The first hundred or so pages of the novel are told in the third-person, from a perspective sympathetic the main character's brother. Most of the book, though, is a text-within-a-text, the "confessions," which begin by re-telling the same events from the protagonist's perspective. It's as though the character was a drop of ink on a page that is folded in half vertically, then horizontally, etc.

The protagonist here, a young man named Robert Wringham, is a religious zealot of the Antinomian variety. Apparently the doctrine of predestination was the subject of heated disagreement in early Eighteenth Century Scotland; Wringham is brought up in the radical fringe of Calvinism (I'm not clear what denomination this makes him, or if it's at all analogous to any contemporary church). Which, taken to its extreme, Calvinism is a kind of scary idea. Wringham is convinced of his status as one of the Elect. To him, the notion that his earthly deeds might cost him the Salvation that was ordained before Creation is the basest heresy. Thus Wringham is lead down the path to sin and murder by the Devil, who appears to him as a strange changeling whose beliefs about predestination exceed Wringham's own.

There's probably an apt literary category to deploy here. I don't know it. But I would place this book alongside other contemplative, psychological--not necessarily existential--works as Hunger, The Stranger, and Notes from Underground. Even though there is a fair amount of plot--murder, rivalry, demons--the primary focus remains on the narrator's deliberations. What makes this book more "readable" than many such books is its sparing use of humor (e.g., Wringham, told that his supernatural Tempter is "a prince," concludes he is in the presence of Peter I of Russia), as well as the equally-understated presence of the supernatural. Hogg rather nonchalantly inserts a downright Lovecraftian incident of demonic torment in the space of a page or so, before returning to an extended exploration of the narrator's doubts and vacillations.



I suppose I'm pretty big on brand-loyalty when it comes to publishers. This is the third book I've read from the NYRB Classics line, and I've been consistently impressed. They tend to select quality books, often in some degree of neglect. Their cover designs are great, as well as the little touches: typeface, paper weight, stiffness of cover. My favorite bit is the way the inside covers are always some vivid color, coordinated to the cover design.

This book had a brief glossary of archaic Scottish dialect in the back--Hogg, though Scottish himself, made his Scottish peasants sound more caricatured than Moira MacTaggert. The inclusion of a glossary made me pleasantly nostalgic for middle school Language Arts.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

by Laurence Sterne, 1759
448pp / 526 pp
08/18/07 - 09/09/07

After reading a couple of books that weren't quite what comes to mind when people ask "So, what kind of books do you like to read?" I read this book, which I'd been meaning to read for some time.

This is one of those books that seems to often come up in discussions of other books and authors I like; if I encounter a book often enough in such contexts, I'm likely to read it. Plus the description "the post-modern novel before there was anything to be modern about" seems engineered to pique my interest.

You might recognize that quote from the 2005 movie, Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story. And here's the thing: though I realize that the better sort of readers are loathe to discuss a good book in terms of its movie adaptation, while reading this book my thoughts kept turning to the film. Specifically, although the movie purports to fail in adapting the book to the screen (instead focusing on the actors themselves), I kept marveling at how well the filmmakers translated the book to film.

When I first saw the movie, before reading the book, I was disappointed that only the first twenty minutes or so were spent depicting Tristram Shandy's plot. But then, the plot hardly happens in the book, either. Tristram Shandy sets out to tell the story of his own life, starting at conception, but due to a series of digressions and interruptions, he barely manages to tell the story of his birth. He's the most dilatory narrator since Scheherazade, if unintentionally so.

So instead of the story of an English gentleman which a reader might expect, we are instead subjected to his inane opinions, his father's preposterous theories (which remind me of DeSelby from The Third Policeman; a mini Irish Lit course focusing on Sterne, Joyce, and O'Brien would be fun), his Uncle Toby's military obsession, and a number of abortive frame stories. Again, the movie does a remarkable job of similarly frustrating the viewer's expectations.

I was surprised by the extent to which I found this book to be plainly funny. I don't expect the formal tone of an eighteenth century novel to make me laugh out loud, but this book managed to, several times.



This is probably a strong recommendation of this book: a couple of days after starting it, I had to go to a small town where I knew no one, and would most likely be killing a few evening hours hanging around my hotel room. After leaving my house, I realized that I'd left the book behind. Whereas someone who wasn't thoroughly enjoying the book he's reading might have elected to pick up a magazine, or start a new book, or hope that there was something good on TV, I instead opted to pick up a backup copy.

This plan risked disappointment. I'd had to go to three different chain bookstores before finding my first copy, and I didn't have time to shop around before leaving town. I was near the East Cobb Borders, though, which actually had three different editions of the book. (This may become my quick test of the merits of a bookstore, and by extension, the local population: how many copies of Tristram Shandy do they carry?) What's more, one of them was the Dover Thrift Edition, retailing for an even $5. Granted, Dover's sub-par printing materials don't work so well in longer books (it was a little like reading a dried-out phonebook), but I respect Dover's mission of bringing the public domain affordably into the hands of the people, and in some ways the Dover version was superior to the Barnes & Noble Essential Reading version. Having compared a few different editions, I'll say that some English Department denizen somewhere would do well to edit an Annotated Tristram Shandy.

Of course, after finally getting to my hotel room, I realized that I had internet access and the damn thing's freely available online.

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

by Richard Fariña, 1966
329pp
08/02 - 08/17

I know a girl on myspace whose "About Me" field used to list "Dislikes: the veneration of the Enlightenment, Mark Twain..." Which, though I disagree with the particular objects of her dislike, I very much identify with the sentiment, the notion of disliking the veneration of one thing or another. Surely, we all have a personal cache of things & ideas we find irksomely overrated. As for me, I dislike the veneration of the Sixties, and Beats.

This book might appear to be a contemptible exercise in Sixties-worship. It's by a friend of Bob Dylan, who married Joan Baez's sister, with whom he recorded a couple of folk albums. Its protagonist is one of those romanticized antiheroes who opts out of mainstream society in favor of jazz, hitchhiking, dope, chicks, and Eastern religion. The back cover fluff goes so far as to call this "the classic novel of the 1960s" (this despite the fact that it's set in 1958).

But even though it was Fariña's friendship with Dylan that eventually became book material, he first was college buddies with one Thomas Ruggles Pynchon. And that's the relationship I'd like to see a novel spun out of (Peter Yarrow could be written out altogether). Fariña seems to have been influenced by his friend, and what might otherwise have been a straightforward picaresque Beat novel has various seemingly Pynchonesque flourishes. Fariña's characters in particular--the gangster Giacomo Aquavitus, the drug-peddling giant Buddha--would not be out of place in a Pynchon novel.

To be fair, the Pynchon connection isn't the only way in which Been Down... transcends the clichéd Sixties narrative. Fariña's prose is great: he has an allusive, cryptic and hallucinatory stream-of-consciousness style that reminds me of a blogging friend of mine. Fariña imbues his contemporary hipster slang with almost mystic overtones; superficial notions of "cool" become profound concepts. Which might actually be precisely the kind of shallow Sixties-worship that's forgivable in a high schooler, at best.



How I Came to Read This Book: in the course of reading my last book, Warlock, I came across mention of the fact that, while at Cornell in 1958, Pynchon and Fariña started a "micro-cult" around that book. Pynchon discusses this in his introduction to Been Down..., so my purchase of this book was motivated not only by my interest in a book by Pynchon's Pal, but also in reading Pynchon's intro.
For those of you keeping score at home, the chain of associations flows thusly: NPR segment-->The Raw Shark Texts-->Warlock-->Been Down...-->postage scale-->Mrs. Palsgraf.

Warlock

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The Mezzanine

by Nicholson Baker, 1988
133pp
07/03/07 - 07/14/07

After reading four consecutive 2007 books, I plumbed the depths of history with this 1988 "novel." There's a peculiar kind of psychic reversion that occurs when reading literature from my childhood--specifically, in the infancy of my awareness of the cultural stew in which I found myself immersed (ie, age 8)--that is very much "of its time." This particular book felt like time traveling to a simpler time, even though the notion of 1988 as "a simpler time" is still a novel concept (to me, at least. I am still reluctant to acknowledge that there are people in this world for whom 1988 is a hazy memory at best).

I guess this book is a little notorious (though perhaps not as notorious as the Baker novel Monica gave Bill, which Steven King likened to "meaningless little fingernail paring") as "the many-footnoted novel about a one-story escalator ride." This is an apt nutshell insofar as the book is concerned with minute and discursive observations, with practically no action. Still, though, I take some issue with that summary: we get a pretty full account of the events of the narrator's morning, and anyway, we hear very little about the escalator ride itself.

So it's a book of meditations on some of the more minute, quotidian aspects of modern life. The narrator happens to be in the middle of a Penguin Classics paperback edition of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, a quote from which pretty much forms this books thesis: "Manifestly, no condition of life could be so well adapted for the practice of philosophy as this in which chance finds you today!" Thus the narrator, finding himself in a late-eighties office building, proceeds to philosophize thereupon.

Which makes for surprisingly compelling reading. Baker seems to have genuine reverence for the well-engineered consumer products that fill our lives, and he has an amazing knack for bringing poetry from the modern living condition. The escalators in question, for instance, are "a pair of integral signs swooping upwards between the two floors they served." This is paired with a keen, obsessive eye for detail. E.g., we're treated to the histories of milk cartons and drinking straws, and the minute little changes they've gone through during the narrator's lifetime, and he agonizes over the alternative designs eschewed by their manufacturers. The act of stapling, we are told, is a three phase act. Sociological implications of familiar brands and products are likewise commented on; CVS is "a whole chain dedicated to making available the small, expensive, highly specialized items that readied bodies for human civilization...Things were for sale whose use demanded nudity and privacy."

I, for one, would love to read a whole lot more writing in this vein. We all live in a world populated by exponentially more consumer products than people, but our primary vehicle for observation about these things (as opposed to people) seems to be bad standup. ("Airline peanuts are weird...") God knows this kind of writing is nothing new. Baker uses 133 pages to explore a few minutes of an office worker's inner life; Joyce spent several hundred pages to describe a day in Leopold Bloom's life in far less detail. Such writing has a certain evanescent appeal: though I had to consult Ulysses Annotated to read about "Plumtree's Potted Meat," I am more than familiar with, say, Kiwi shoe polish. Reading about familiar brands and products is more than just an interesting exercise in deriving meaning from the overlooked everyday world, it's comforting.


I considered going to the former Sid & Marty Krofft amusement park site (AKA, "CNN Center") to, as an homage to this book, take a ride on the world's longest freestanding escalator. I didn't get around to doing this, but I did have a few occasions to ride the Peachtree Center MARTA escalator: longest, steepest escalator in the Southeast. (Atlanta Tourism Board! Pls contact me re: proposed "Atlanta: City of Escalators" promotional campaign! This is your final notice.)

The Raw Shark Texts

by Steven Hall, 2007
428pp
06/26/07 - 07/02/07

I remember being keenly interested in this book after hearing it reviewed on some lesser NPR program (On Point, maybe?). I don't recall exactly what the critic said about the book; she may have described conceptual monster fish inhabiting thought-space, she probably mentioned the thirty page flipbook that is the climax. In any event, I got the distinct impression that I, who enjoy Grant Morrison comics and Don Barthelme's collage/stories from the sixties, would like this book. Incidentally, were you pick up the book in a store and read its dust jacket blurbs, you'd likely come away thinking of the 2000 gimmick-film Memento, which is a horribly inaccurate first impression.

The book is gimmicky, though, which can be okay sometimes. Hall likes to play games with typography--sentences are blurred and distorted, images are formed from text as in concrete poetry:

All this to serve a wild premise, something like The Meme Machine by way of Philip K. Dick: the narrator is the victim of an attack by a Ludovician, a "conceptual shark" (pictured above). If we understand the shared ideas and flow of communication among human minds to be the "waters" of human culture--the recurring use of watery images is one of the book's nicer touches--then those fertile rivers and oceans have given rise to new forms of "aquatic" life, from purely conceptual fish, up to the Ludovician, thought-nature's greatest predator, who has eaten most of the narrator's personality and left him an amnesiac blank slate. This and a handful of other great quirky ideas--personalities spanning multiple bodies, "live" texts, "chemical prosthetics" for damaged personalities, and, not least of all, Un-Space--would seem to make for a great, weird romp. Call it sci-fi, if you have to.

Disappointingly, though, this book is a fast-paced thriller. Complete with explosions, a motorcycle chase, thin characters, forced sexual tension, and a nefarious villain. Oh, how I wish I could have just read a book about a dude pursued by a thought shark, with all the head-trips that implies, without having to read about people running away from people, Da Vinci Code-style. The thrilling conclusion can stay, just leave out all other thrilling parts. Not that the book was bad, it's just that I wish I could have taken it more seriously, and I(and I suspect I'm in the majority here, at least in the majority of people who matter) have a really tough time taking an action-driven thriller seriously.


Also, I would have preferred a different title. I liked that particular pun better when it was used in The Watchmen.

The Big Eddy Club

by David Rose, 2007
350pp
Read: 05/29/07 - 06/23/07

Nonfiction! Gasp!

Why the hell do I sometimes choose to read as "pleasure reading" books that are tangentially or directly related to my daily concerns? I know that it makes sense, that I'm going to read about those topics that interest me, and this will be informed by my day-to-day life. But reading this book, I sometimes felt that I was compounding my real-world frustrations by reading about real people coping with some of the very same frustrations. Suffice to say, if you're trying to get a job in public defense in Georgia, and are finding that the state would rather not pay for such jobs, you'd really rather not read a book largely about a Georgia court's unwillingness to provide necessary funds for an indigent defendant facing the death penalty.

The book is "about" the Stocking Stranglings, a series of rape/murders down in Columbus, and the eventual legal struggle of Carlton Gary, the man convicted of those crimes. I had a deuce of a time finding this book, as it was filed under "True Crime." Which is an accurate enough label--"True Criminal Procedure" would be more apt--but located it among one of the bookstore's less reputable shelves.

So this book was out of place. Rose is a Vanity Fair writer experienced in covering criminal matters; his wife happens to be Oxford's Criminology reader. His writing style reminds me of Charlie Kaufman's line in Adaptation: "big, sprawling New Yorker crap." Rose has an incessant need to contextualize. In order to tell us about this murder trial, he must tell us about the American criminal justice system, its peculiarities in the South, and a hundred years of race-relations in Columbus, GA. This approach has its advantages; Gary's experience quickly becomes emblematic of larger issues of race and justice. But Rose's structure is a little unnerving, too. Time in this book moves not like an arrow through space, but like an inexpertly-wielded sewing needle. First we are told of Rose's first trip to Columbus, then of Columbus's earliest history, then of the crimes in the late 70s, then of Reconstruction, then the trial, which leads to an account of Gary's life, and then Rose himself enters the picture, and we follow his own investigations. To be fair, I found this least frustrating when I read larger chunks in a stretch.



You begin this book fully expecting it to end with Gary's exoneration. You, the reader, are aware that Rose is writing in 2006, describing a 1984 trial, and you figure that his account will take you through direct appeal, state & federal habeas claims, and then, in the legal-thriller movie-style dramatic ending that really does happen in criminal law, Gary's conviction would be overturned. You become especially certain of this when reading about the trial, with its shaky junk science and judicially-crippled defense team; surely, you think, in the space of twenty years some higher court will have seen the injustice here. And I bet that's what Rose's editor thought. I imagine they had Rose committed to a book five years ago, and were sure of a dramatic, and possibly highly publicized final outcome in the case by now. Instead, Rose takes you up to 2006, and announces that, as of that writing, Gary was awaiting an evidentiary hearing in the Middle District of Georgia. This is of course mildly disappointing, but the next few pages are gripping, actually. Turning from Gary's case, Rose denounces the Rehnquist Court's disengagement from criminal procedure, and laments Herbert Packer's utoptian "Due Process Model of Criminal Justice." And believe you me, whenever a dude named "Rose" starts talking about Herbert Packer, I am riveted.

Finally, Rose includes an epilogue to gloss over that last appeal, and then inform you that you can follow the ongoing legal wranglings of Carlton Gary, wrongfully convicted black man, on his publisher's website. So, in 2007 it seems we have seen the emergence of a new cop-out of an ending: "To be continued...on teh blogz!!!" (Which happens to be how Harry Potter ends, as well as the Michael Bay Transformers movie.)

No one belongs here more than you.

by Miranda July, 2007
201pp
Read: 06/06- 06/08

Miranda July's 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know blew me away. Its honest exploration of how we relate to our fellow man and our belongings; how we strive to reach out to one another; how we want to poop into the butt of someone special, who in turn will poop back into all own butts, which we then will poop back; it all struck some magic balance between quirky inventiveness and heartfelt sincerity, artifice and insight into the human soul.

I'd really hoped, then, that Miranda July's fiction would perform a similarly virtuosic feat. This seems to be the goal of many young, contemporary writers today, and I'd figured July was up to the task. I'm trying hard not to lose esteem for her. It may simply be that fiction is not her forte. She comes from a performance art background, after all, and while standing before a roomful of strangers and speaking about sex & emotions, etc. nakedly and without artifice takes a lot of courage, and is laudable in that context, it makes for some uninteresting writing. July's prose is too plain, and she is frequently concerned with improbable emotional quandaries, or the details of sexual mechanics. This wide disconnect between plain, simple words and charged, intense subject matter can be moving when mediated by flesh-and-blood human beings like actors, or July in her capacity as a performance artist. But July's straightforward, unadulterated accounts of female orgasms and dysfunctional lesbian trysts only manage to occasionally raise an eyebrow, or amused smirk. My tone is harsh, I know, when really what I mean to say is that the book is entertaining, and a light, easy read. Usually this is high praise; I'd just had higher literary aspirations on behalf of Miranda July.


I should point out that this is in fact a book of "stories." Which, I almost never read short fiction. I sometimes feel bad about this; I am almost never as happy with short stories as I am with novels, and yet I know that novels are hardly objectively "better" than short fiction. I seem to have some deep-rooted prejudice against short-fiction. I approach everything I read with an implicit set of expectations which can only be met by a novel. And thus I wind up reading short fiction only rarely. This vexes me: I know that shorter pieces actually better lend themselves to well-crafted writing, and yet I constantly eschew them in favor of their bulkier brethren. Interestingly, for a while I mostly read novels in the 500 - 800 page range. During that time, my literary expectations likewise reflected what I tended to read: I was interested in fiction of sprawling scope, and often enormous casts. This changed for mostly practical considerations: after I got to law school, I was tired of spending months on the same piece of pleasure reading. Seeking higher turnover, I turned to shorter novels, and now that's what I prefer. I doubt that I'll ever do the same for short stories, though.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

by Michael Chabon, 2007
411pp
Read: 05/01 - 06/02

I read a bit about this book when it first came out, and it seems that to discuss it, one must begin by discussing the historical quirks on which the book is premised. Briefly, then: back in 1941, there was a proposal by Harold Ickes (U.S. Secretary of the Interior; you know him from "Annie") to make a homeland for Jewish refugees in Alaska. Upon first reading this fact, it took great forbearance to not work it into every conversation of the next few days. (At dinner that night, I had to restrain myself from ham-handedly insinuating it into the conversation thus: "You say you're from Oregon? Did you know...")

So, Chabon spins an alternate history from this weird historical footnote, and filters this through a noir detective lens. Apparently this is toward Chabon's literary goal, first expounded in his introduction to that McSweeney's Thrilling Tales thing a couple of years back, of reestablishing the legitimacy of genre fiction. This may or may not be a laudable goal, but Yiddish Policemen's Union does not serve it all that well. While Chabon writes pitch-perfect detective prose, giddily describing every damned object of any significance with an overwrought simile, and the book has the arc & pace of a detective novel--short chapters, often broken in the middle of a conversation--I'm not sure that the author is entirely willing to play by the full set of established genre conventions. I blame postmodernism, but then, I see postmodernism in my morning bowl of cereal. Much as he'd love people to read detective novels, Chabon didn't seem all that interested in writing a novel where our downtrodden protagonist chases dames, puts together clues, and solves a murder.

Granted, a corpse is dutifully introduced on the first page, and the question of "whodunnit?" ostensibly provides direction right up to the book's very end (is this a legitimate detective genre convention? I felt cheated out of even a shred of denouement), but the progress is frequently interrupted with explorations of Chabon's Great Jewish North. Even the plain question of "who killed the jew in room 208?" leads, not to well-established motives of sex, money, or Los Angeles real estate speculation, but to geopolitics and messianic Zionism. This final revelation didn't sit too well with me: the Jewish detective story leads to a shady Zionist cabal? I'm pretty sure Ahmadinejad could have called that from page one.


I enjoy publicly reading books w/ snappy jackets. This one often got comments & inquiries from strangers and acquaintances. It does a fair job of capturing, without blatantly illustrating, the book's subject: the graphic artist blends hebraic and "detective" images into the Tlingit style, in a color scheme that really "pops." While it's understandable that the cover would mention "Kavalier & Clay" for commercial reasons, I was a little irked to see that unwieldy name checked even on the *spine* of the book. When my fingers peruse my books' spines on their shelves, am I really going to care else the author's written?

Incidentally, if there's anyone who should've read Kavalier & Clay, it's me. I tend to read contemporary fiction; the Dave Eggers Seal of Approval (for better or worse) goes a pretty long way with me; and I'm all about comic books. When the book came out, though, I pretty quickly got tired of the people telling me "you should read this..." Before long, the book was passé, and (for better or worse) I was reluctant to pick it up, what with new books coming out all the time.

The Various Lives of Keats & Chapman

by Flann O'Brien, 1940-1966
166pp

At some point I crossed a line from "reader interested in Flann O'Brien" (having started as "guy who read a mention of The Third Policeman in a Grant Morrison comic") to "Flann O'Brien completist." This despite the fact that I've not yet read At Swim-Two-Birds. This book, though, is pretty much limited to the O'Brien completist in your family.

Every jacket-flap bio of Flann O'Brien I've ever read, after invoking the name of Joyce, makes mention of his Irish Times column, "The Cruiskeen Lawn." I'd imagine most of O'Brien's popularity during his lifetime, in his native country, derives from that column. God knows his books weren't met with much publishing success during his life. This book collects writings from "Cruiskeen Lawn," mostly his "Keats & Chapman" stories, but also "The Brother," a one-man play posthumously adapted from others of O'Brien's "Cruiskeen Lawn" features.

I found the "Keats and Chapman" material to be a lot of fun. O'Brien employs a very simple, unlikely premise: the poet Keats, and the translator Chapman are for some reason imagined as a comic pair (Chapman is the straight man) perpetually seeking new employment or easy wealth. In a small handful of paragraphs--most of the stories are about a page--O'Brien quickly crafts an elaborate set-up for a dreadful (if often very erudite) pun. Basically, it's the last round of the BBC's "My Word." Seeing as I actually chuckle at the punchline, "Dismissus? Leave my wife out of this!", this became my bathroom reading of choice.

As for "The Brother," it's best to keep in mind the original intented audience: Irish Times readers. A lot of the humor here plays to Irishmen's sense of Irishness. I feel like my own thorough efforts at contextualizing Ulysses give me a better-than-average insight into day-to-day Irish culture, but "The Brother" seems to be an especially rarefied exercise in local flavor & dialect. It's pretty much the kind of humor I equate with the late Lewis Grizzard. At one point, O'Brien draws on his readers' familiarity with a local advertising slogan of the times. Suffice to say, this is not what you'd expect if you just finished (& loved) The Third Policeman.


This was a Bargain Book, found on a table by the front door of a Barnes & Noble for the price of $4.95. Initially I found it depressing that a book collecting material never before published in America, by one of the Great Irish Authors of the Twentieth Century, had within a couple of years of publication found its way to this dead-end of book retail, but having read the book, it makes sense. From where I stand, it's a steal at five bucks, to be sure, but the only way of moving it off the shelves seems to be deep discounting.

The Lunatic at Large

The Lunatic at Large
by J. Storer Clouston, 1899
205pp
Read: 3/30 - 04/06

This is a Late Victorian comic novel, which if you don't know, is what happens when a dapper gent is mistaken for a cad. I sometimes conceive syllabi in my mind--or at least whole Roman numeraled sections of syllabi--for high school or undergrad lit classes. Reading this book, I had the idea that assigning it would be a fun reward for a class of teenage boys who'd just slogged through Austen. Actually, a comedy depends on its context, and I probably received 90% of my understanding of the Victorian mores at play here through a high school reading of Pride & Prejudice.

The plot is as follows: a man with no recollection of his past finds himself as a patient at Clankwood Asylum, "home of the best-bred lunatics in England." Employing subterfuge and charm, he affects a daring escape. Again with the subterfuge & charm, he ingratiates himself to one Baron Rudolf von Bliztenberg. Lives lavishly at the Baron's expense, then alienates him. Returns to London, where he rediscovers his own true identity.

Now re-read the above paragraph, being careful to insert "hilarity ensues," after every sentence.

The premise is a funny one, the situations are humorous, and the dialogue is occasionally rather witty & Wildean. (The intro speaks of Clouston as being a kind of link between Wilde & Wodehouse in the English Comic Tradition. I think it'd be fair to say the dialogue owes a debt to Wilde, whereas the social lampooning anticipates Wodehouse.(NOTE: I have never read any Wodehouse whatsoever, though I am thoroughly acquainted with the proper pronunciation of his name.)) I don't have much to say beyond that: it's a funny book. It's not much else, although it may be the origin of the word "bonkers." If you find it amusing when people impersonate English priests & German nobles--particularly when hilarity proceeds to ensue--you'll enjoy this book.

A book's chapter lengths can be one of its greatest strengths. There's that quality "readability" that has nothing to do whatsoever with "literary merit." This is a highly readable book, largely because the chapters are so perfectly apportioned. Some of my favorite authors write in dense, enormous chapters. This is a book of short chapters, quickly read. Not that I hold "readable" books as superior to "good" books (many people do, often out of ignorance), but there are plenty of times when what I want is a readable book, not necessarily a good one.


This is Volume 5 of McSweeney's "Collins Library," a series of handsome clothbound editions of books that have been too long out of my print. This book was last published in the US in 1926. That this book would so fall out of publication surprises me, not because of the book's merits so much as because the book was once pretty popular: it was made into a silent film on three separate occasions. No copies of any of those films is known to survive today. It's as though some force were actively trying to suppress knowledge of the book. I have to wonder whether later editions would have been published had copies of the movie survived. There's an alternate universe where the film stock did not decay, the book stayed in publication, and Chevy Chase starred in a 1980 remake.

Mr. Palomar

Mr. Palomar
by Italo Calvino, 1983
126pp
Read: 3/27 - 3/30

I'll start with the "Index":

You'll notice that it's more of a table of contents or schemata. The book is arranged by three's: its three sections, "Mr. Palomar's Vacation," "Mr. Palomar in the City," and "The Silences of Mr. Palomar," are each divided into three subsections, each of which consists of three scenes. So, twenty-seven parts.

But observe the coordinate system on the left. Those numbers, Calvino explains, correspond to different modes of perception or experience (he's a little unclear here, and I think that the translation probably does his ideas some disservice). Roughly, 1 = Observation (particularly of aggregations), 2 = Anthropology (as well as semiotics, apparently), and 3 = Meditation. Roughly, I suppose he's trying to establish a hierarchy: one's relation to objects --> one's relation to society --> one's relation to the universal. So, for example: 1.3.3, "Mr Palomar's Vacation: Mr. Palomar Looks at the Sky: The contemplation of the stars" is two parts "meditation" to one part "observation." Or that's how it ought to work.

So the book works less like a novel than a series of essays. Mr. Palomar observes the things around him (hence the observatory reference), and he reflects on these things. In reading it, I experienced a fair deal of synchronicity, despite the unlikely objects of Mr. Palomar's observations: I read his meditation on "The loves of tortoises" just before seeing a picture of copulating turtles; "The infinite lawn" likewise resembled a friend's comments about his own lawn, and "The order squamata" reminded me of a museum exhibit I'm planning on taking a certain three year-old to.

Strangely, for a book that's so much about the interaction between ego and the outer world, we don't really get to know Mr. Palomar. Though we constantly hear his observations and meditations, the traditional avenues of characterization (interactions with other characters, seeing him make decisions) are largely closed to him. Consequently Palomar feels a bit like Mr. Magoo, a comic character whose interior life we can only intuit.


The covers of the Harcourt Brace editions of Italo Calvino all sport these rather straightforward illustrations of the book in question, all by one Shelton Walsmith. It's always kind of fun to see how he manages to capture a piece of experimental fiction in ten square inches.

The Autumn of the Patriarch

The Autumn of the Patriarch
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1975
255pp

In theory, this should have been a very difficult book to put down. It provides almost no stopping points. This book is a thick stew of run-on sentences, eschewing paragraph and sentence breaks almost entirely. In its 255 pages, the book probably has around twenty periods. This has the effect of making it seem like a much longer book than it otherwise appear.

I first picked up this book back in November. Then the new Pynchon book came out, for which I would've dropped my own mother. After finishing Pynchon, I wasn't particularly interested in getting back to this book. After a few more reads, I picked this back up in early February. I don't think it was a week before I had selected another book to distract me from this one. By the time I had finished this book, I'd also read Hunger, The King, About Alice, and "Alcestis" & "Heracleidae" on the side.

Despite my distractions, I loved this book. Garcia Marquez tells the story of a tropical dictator's life through a series of flashbacks, and a stream of consciousness that runs from consciousness to consciousness. The book is at times narrated by the General himself, sometimes by someone speaking to him, sometimes by someone speaking about him. The narration of one event creates tangents, along which the narration runs to the details of some other event--never pausing to begin a new sentence--all the while shifting among its narrators. Reading this feels like you've dropped something slippery, which you catch, only to lose your grip on and catch in a different place, where it slips away again...

There is a rhythm by which the book regularly wraps up the anecdote at hand and returns to some regularly recurring image. Every twenty pages or so we hear the General described in more or less the same terms: his elephant-like feet, his denim uniform, his hands like claws, his herniated testicle. Likewise the General's various routines are repeated periodically, like the rosary.

Amongst the established order of recurring elements, we read the story of the General's impossibly long reign, though not always narrated chronologically. He betrays a friend, he introduces an enemy among his inner circle, he pursues a beauty queen, she eludes him, his mother died, the church will not make her a saint, the church is expelled, he falls for a former nun, she marries him and gives birth to an heir, they are killed, he creates a new branch of government to hunt & torture the conspirators who killed them, he exacts revenge on the man he installed in this ministry of vengeance. He's in power for over a hundred years, during which time he is alternately portrayed as being of limitless power & cunning, a man who commands every aspect of his realm, and powerless figurehead, whose government beneath him constantly seeks to placate him and convince him he still holds real power.


I often read in my tub, during which I can never keep my hands totally dry, and consequently the edges of pages of my books lose their crispness. This book, however, was sitting on the floor when streams of water from some misdirected jacuzzi jets shot out of the tub and soaked it through. Thus it is wavy, and waterlogged, and full of character.

"Alcestis" & "Heracleidae"

"Alcestis" & "Heracleidae"
Euripides, 5th Cent. BC
about 20pp

A few years ago I was in the habit of reading Greek tragedies when I was "between" books. I read these during two different "breaks" from the same book.

I picked up "Alcestis," after Raine's book on Eliot described it as a "resurrection play" and the template for Eliot's "The Cocktail Party." The play is set in the aftermath of a neat little myth with which I wasn't familiar: Apollo, angry at Zeus for smiting his son Asclepius (poss. the awesomest figure in classical mythology), slays the Cyclopes (the Cyclopes being the ones who forge Zeus' lightning bolts). Zeus in retaliation forces Apollo to be a slave in a mortal's home. Which brings Apollo to the home of Thessalian king Admetus, where Apollo becomes the king's shepherd and is treated rather well. In gratitude, Apollo makes a deal with Destiny: Admetus can avoid his own death if he can get anyone else to substitute himself and die in his place.

Which brings us to the opening of the play. Admetus' friends and parents have refused to die in his behalf, and instead Alcestis, Admetus' wife and mother of his children, agrees to die. Apparently this is what a devoted Hellenic wife ought to do. And so she dies, and Admetus is distraught, and their kids are distraught. Enter Heracles, who's on his way to fetch some man-eating horses. Because Admetus would never dream of turning away Heracles, and because Heracles wouldn't stay chez Admetus if he knew that the master of the house was mourning his wife, Admetus conceals his house's state of mourning from Heracles. Naturally, Heracles finds out, and is so upset that he goes to Alcestis' tomb to wait for Death to come & claim her. So, off-stage, Death comes to the tomb, when Heracles beats up Death, thereby resurrecting Alcestis. Twenty five hundred years later, Superboy would punch a hole in reality.

It turns out that Euripides is Western Lit's go-to guy for the dramaticization of the life of Heracles. I'd always thought that he existed in outside of Classical Literature as handed down in epic poetry and drama; I figured we mostly knew the stories of Heracles through folklore, marble statues, and Kevin Sorbo. But Euripides wrote a few plays based on Heraclean myth, which one would have to think would pack the amphitheater way better than another damn play about Orestes.

Nor had I realized that Heracles had a full-fledged arch-nemesis in Eurystheus. The guy was a blood-relative to Heracles, and a rival for his power; it was Eurystheus who sent Heracles on his Labors. And when Heracles ascended into heaven, Eursytheus tried to wipe out his children. Which brings us to the "Heracleidae."

The sons of Heracles, under the charge of Iolaus--Heracles' own fidus Achates--have traveled from city-state to city-state seeking refuge. Every place they've gone has turned them away, swayed by Eurystheus' threat of Mycenaean force. Until the gang gets to Athens, naturally. The city must still be young, because it's under the rule of the two sons of Theseus. When reminded that they, like every Greek who could swing a club, are blood relatives of Heracles, they rebuke Eursytheus' herald and offer sanctuary to the Heraclids (dare I call them the HeraKids?). Of course the herald promises to return with Eurystheus' army, so Athens girds herself for war.

In accordance with the peculiarities of time in Greek drama, in the time it takes a servant or two to enter and exit, the Mycenaean army is outside Athens. And there's a problem. The oracle's been consulted, and she says Athens won't win unless the daughter of a noble is sacrificed. None of the nobles can bear to give up their own daughters, and no one wants to take a daughter by force. All is saved when Macaria, a virgin of suitable birth volunteers to be sacrificed, which makes her family proud. Apparently ancient Greece was rife with opportunities for the honorable act of feminine self-destruction.

So of course Athens wins, and the play really could end there, but it doesn't. Alcmene, Heracles' mom, demands the execution of Eurystheus. The chorus of Athenians politely explain that, as a captured prisoner, they don't have to kill him; to do so would go against their laws of war. To which Alcemene responds, in essence, "nuts to that!" They end up killing Eurystheus, and according to folklore, the presence of his corpse on Athenian soil protected the city from the descendants of Heracles, ie, Spartans & Argives.



I got this book pretty cheap at the WFU Library book sale. It's a volume from the Encyclopaedia Britannica "Great Books of the Western World" series, and it's got about all the Greek drama you'd ever want. In its ~650 pages I'd guess it has about 50 plays. It does this by employing small type, arranged in two columns on every page, and by abbreviating characters' names in the stage instructions. Which just strikes me as such a beautifully low-tech means of storing and compressing data. In today's world of Google & wikiwhatnot, it's easy to forget just how impressive the notion of an encyclopedia used to be: the promise of substantially all of mankind's useful knowledge, leatherbound and right there on your bookshelves. The "Great Books" series was probably an extension of this same idea: fifty volumes or so gave you every word of every primary text of the Canon of Western Literature. As a sidenote, I bet encyclopedia salesmen were pretty cool. Not only were they drifters and drunks who couldn't hold down regular employment, their peculiar realm of salesmanship required them to be conspicuously erudite. I bet they had a strategy for entering your living room and proceeding to casually make reference to all the important things you don't know but feel you should.

About Alice

About Alice
by Calvin Trillin, 2006
78pp

There seems to be this weird subgenre of memoirs and appreciations written by New Yorker-style intellectuals about their loved ones taken by cancer. I'm not just thinking about meditations on loss like Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, I'm also including posthumous collections edited and introduced by the surviving spouse, like Timothy Noah editing Marjorie Williams' The Woman at the Washington Zoo, or Sarah Dudley Plimpton writing the intro to George Plimpton's The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair (OK, so that one wasn't cancer). I tend to find these books affecting; I have this idea of this elite set of East Coast intellectuals as living somehow removed from the rest of us, ensconced in the Upper West Side, and literally above our day-to-day concerns. (I have a feeling you could have guessed this about me). So when they write about how they shared their lives with these people, authors and intellectuals like themselves, and how they miss them, I'm reminded not only that they experience good old-fashioned sentiments, families and love-lives; I'm reminded that they aren't so jaded and given to irony as to be incapable of these things, and that moreover they didn't have to give it all up to pursue a life of sophistication.

So I find it moving when a wit like Calvin Trillin publishes a slim volume to tell the world how much he loved his wife, how he went through his whole life thrilled and feeling lucky to be with her. I'm sure that everyone feels that way about his own wife must wish he could write some book that would communicate everything he loves about her, but whose writing skills are up to the task? Trillin's a gifted writer, but the reader doesn't get the privilege of falling in love with Alice the way he did. One does get the impression of having spent some time with an amazing person, though.




Sometimes, a good NPR interview renders the act of reading a particular book unnecessary. I'm pretty sure that with every page of this short book I found myself reminded of what I'd heard in a Bob Edwards interview.

The King

The King
by Donald Barthelme (1990)
158pp

I own more Don Barthelme and John Barth than I know what to do with. This is partly my fault: I am unfortunately tolerant of postmodernism, metafiction, experimental fiction, and the 1960s. This is also the product, however, of this strange phenomenon whereby you can always reliably find Barth & Barthelme paperbacks at pretty much every used bookstore I've ever been to. Generally, they are falling apart, but they'll only cost you a dollar & they tend to have pleasingly kitschy cover art. Consequently, I have around 3000 pages of (oh wow, good guess: the exact figure comes to 2989) Barth & Barthelme on my bookshelves. (And I don't even own The Sot-Weed Factor!) If this narrow band of the alphabet were representative of my entire book collection, my fiction shelves alone would have literally miles of books. (Side note. Total number of pages of Frederick Barthelme on my shelves: 0.00)

So when I picked up this Barthelme I knew that I had enjoyed his work in the past, and could reasonably anticipate what I was getting into. Ironic, since it was Barthelme's originality that initially drew me to him. Now that he's become familiar, I choose to read him because I know it'll always be an easy, though smart & entertaining, read. When I chose this particular book, I hoped to jump-start an interest in Arthurian Grail Lore that might lead me to read the copy of From Ritual to Romance that I bought a few months back.

Which brings me to this book: it's a reimagining of Arthurian Grail Lore in the context of World War II. Most assuredly, plot is not Barthelme's strength. The characters, and their basic story arcs are of course familiar, being borrowed outright from Malory. And the WWII "twist": the Grail = the atom bomb, which Arthur rejects as "not a knightly weapon." Having thus considered and yawned at the book's plot, we now consider technique, which is why you read Barthelme in the first place.

Like a lot of Barthelme, the story is told almost entirely through dialogue. The book, essentially, is a collection of dialogues interspersed with occasional sentence fragments establishing location & characters' positions. There are a handful of amusing passages of "action"--mostly clashes between knights--that are told through the artificially narrative and exclamator exchanges of peasant onlookers.

"Sir Belvedere has single-handedly taken an entire battery of 105mm howitzers! The captured gunners line up with their hands behind their heads!"
"O noble Sir Belvdere! Sir Ironside is lashing with his ancient blade as one enchafed by a fiend!"
"But Mordred, too, is doing mighty deeds! He fights extremely well for a traitorous poltroon!"

So it's amusing, in an intelligent way, which is Barthelme at his best. Incidentally, he does his best in short fiction, which he seems to know. Any Barthelme "novel" I've ever read has been a collection of dialogue-driven two- or three-page "chapters." The King, though, works better than Snow White or The Dead Father.




This edition was published by "Dalkey Archive Press," who I first encountered when I read The Dalkey Archive itself. Thus far, I'm pleased with that publisher's selection of titles.

Hunger

Hunger
by Knut Hamsun, 1890
197pp


Sometimes a reader has to go out on a limb. I'd never heard of Knut Hamsun, but for some reason pulled this book off the shelves in the course of a peripatetic conversation with Ed at the East Cobb Borders. Partly my interest was piqued by the notion of a "Twentieth Century Classic" I'd not heard of, by a Nobel Prize-winning author I was likewise ignorant of. I confess, the back-cover puffery, invoking Dostoevsky, Camus, and Kafka, may have influenced me. But the most persuasive factor really may have been the cover: the Penguin Classics' title box (as smartly appropriated by Art Brut) set against a rather striking Munch.

Hey, are you wondering why exactly you've never heard of this book & author? For one thing, you'd be shocked how many Nobel Laureates for Literature you've never heard of. Indeed, looking at the first twenty years of the award, the only names which ring any bells (OK, aside from Maeterlinck) are those of a jingoist, a proselytizer, and, in the case of Mr. Hamsun himself, a Nazi sympathizer.

So, yeah. That's why you don't hear about him so much: Nazis tend not to get taught in our public schools.

Not to preoccupy myself with Hamsun's biography, but by all rights he ought to have been an Anarchist. In 1882, he came to the United States with nothing, gravitated to Chicago, where he was a streetcar conductor, stuffing his clothes with newspaper to keep warm against the wind. And so it's obvious: European immigrant, experiencing grinding poverty in Chicago at the time of the Haymarket Riot. This is how you constructed a would-be presidential assassin in the twilight of the nineteenth century. But history had different plans for him. In 1888, German freighter captain gave him free passage back to Norway, where, instead of the familiar Norwegian variety of grinding poverty he'd fled, Hamsun found literary success & national celebrity.

But so Hamsun was imminently qualified to write Hunger. The book is pretty much as its title suggests: it's the interior monologue of a desperately poor young man in the streets of Norway. The narrator fancies himself some kind of author but is met with little success in his efforts at composition or selling his work to newspaper editors. He goes days without food, and sleeps in cheap rented hovels, when he doesn't elect to sleep outdoors. He pawns his vest, he pawns the buttons from his coat for some meager food, only to leave himself that much more exposed to the cold winds.

If it were written today, Hunger would be an Oprah's Book Club selection. The narrator is never met with any Horatio Alger success, but he maintains his scruples. Whenever fate puts a few coins into his hands--which does in fact happen; the book has a comfortable rhythm, whereby the narrator begins in a state of desperation, grows worse, and after forty pages is met with an unexpected pittance--he feels honor-bound to buy an elderly man a meal, or practice anonymous charity, or to settle his account with his landlady. But what separates Hunger from "The Waltons" is that the narrator's scruples make him a fool. It is clear that he should put aside pride and seize opportunities, act in self-interest, escape the cycle of dereliction.




Sometimes the job of matching art to text must be very difficult, and surely the person who does that job over at Penguin must be a fascinating person, as she must be exceedingly well-read, and possessing a huge mental catalogue of art history. Presented with this book, however, she must have thought, "Brooding interior monologue? Desperation? Norwegian? Slap some Munch on that puppy," before taking an early lunch.

T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot
by Craig Raine, 2006
202pp
Read: 1/19/07-1/28/07

I should start with the premise that T.S. Eliot is my absolute fave poet, ever. Perhaps I should've started with the premise that I am the kind of person to even have an absolute fave poet, ever, in this day and age.

In hindsight, I have absolutely no idea why I, at the age of 18, chose to do my AP English poetry presentation on Eliot. Nor can I recall the details of that project; I believe there was a clumsy analysis of "The Hippopotamus" and a surface-scratching ten page paper on The Wasteland. I didn't "get" the poetry then--either in sound or meaning--but I for some reason continued to adore the work of T.S. Eliot. I have no idea why. Over the next few years I read more Eliot, pretty much all of it. I wore out my cassettes with Ted Hughes reading Four Quartets--at one point broadcasting this and other poems over WREK for two hours. I read Joyce, and there got a whiff of the kind of serious literary analysis I'd need to conduct. I occasionally picked up, and put down, The Golden Bough. At one misguided point, I bloodied (my own) and tore my copy of The Wasteland: Facsimile and Transcript. A few weeks ago I was reading Selected Poems in the bathtub--it's something I do--when I was bitten by the Eliot bug all over again.

Fortuitously: I shortly thereafter read a glowing NYT review of this book, and pretty much immediately set out to buy it. I should probably tell you that I loved this book. But then, it may well be that I love reading all things Eliot.

This is not a good "first" Eliot book, if you're considering getting such a book for a young person in your life. Raine assumes you're familiar with Eliot's ouevre without bothering to catch you up to speed. When discussing particular poems, if you haven't committed them to memory, you ought to have Selected Poems at hand; Complete Poems and Plays would be handier; The Inventions of the March Hare comes into play at one point.

Not only does Raine assume his reader has already read Eliot, he assumes you've already read a bit *about* Eliot. He refers to, without really summarizing, criticisms of Eliot. He comments on poems that the average reader likely couldn't comprehend without reading someone's take on them.

But what Raine *does* have to say is pretty good. He looks out how two larger themes are explored throughout Eliot's work--one is reminded of the Joycean notion of artistic obsession--to wit: (1) "the buried life," a term Raine uses to mean both the passionate, artistic, adventurous lives most people avoid through hesitation; as well as the hidden emotions we each experience but cannot articulate or even really know; and (2) Eliot's "anti-Romantic" tendency, a rejection of bombastic emotion in poetry, in favor of an exploration of equally universal, if less artistically-explored, emotions. And he does a pretty good job of finding these themes in a variety of Eliot's poems; this approach succeeds with Eliot's shorter works, less so with the lengthier examinations of The Wasteland and Four Quartets. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if you read the first two chapters--concerned with 12 or so shorter poems--you wouldn't be at too great a loss if you skipped the chapters on the longer poems, or the plays, or the criticism.

The book avoids biography as much as possible. Raine dismisses as unfounded speculation about Eliot's marriage, sexuality, attitudes toward Judaism, etc. as unfounded, and where there's genuine ambiguity Raine begins with the proposition that Eliot could do no wrong (which much endeared him to me).

Hey, remember seventh grade Language Arts? How before beginning a novel, your teacher would assign a vocab list drawn from words found in that novel with uncommon frequency? Should you read this book, you might find yourself looking up:
- topos
- bathos
- lexis
- zeugma
- expatiate




This book is part of Oxford University Press's "Lives and Legacies" series. Generally, I'm pretty leery about these series where a publisher decides "great writers writing about great writers (or thinkers) = $$$$$!!!" (other encounters with this format include David Foster Wallace writing about Cantor for Atlas/Norton's joint "Great Discoveries series;" William T. Vollman writing about Copernicus for same series; and Robert Pinksy writing about David for Shocken's "Jewish Encounters." Results vary.) The dust jacket to this book seems to sum up the compromises & limitations inherent to such series: "Brief, erudite, and inviting..." This book, at least, was too short to go into any serious academic discussion, but it was nevertheless written for a sophisticated audience (it's put out by the people who publish the OED, after all). The format does succeed, however, inasmuch as Raine's perspective as a poet do give him some pretty neat insights as to language, and he has a great command of the stable of authors one has to discuss when discussing Eliot.

The People of Paper

The People of Paper
by Salvador Plascencia, 2005
245pp
Read: 1/11/07 - 1/19/07

Perhaps the most typographically unique book I've ever read. (If you are inclined to check out this book on the basis of the foregoing sentence alone, congratulations: we'd probably make great pals. The bad news is you've chosen a hopeless life of form over content, and are doomed to pursue an increasingly empty series of "experiments" in style, and will probably die without ever knowing true love, or any sentiment for that matter. I blame late 20th Cent society, myself.) Not that the font is at all unusual--it seems to be the same as any McSweeney's book I've ever read (Garamond Three)--but the layout of the text is stylized. The book's chapters fall into three basic types (which the table of contents quasi-helpfully designates through a system of dots and dashes): those which follow a single character's first person narration, and which are laid out in a completely traditional manner; those which alternate among the third person narration of three given characters, again with traditional text arrangement; and those which follow any number of characters.

This last type of chapter is easily identified if you happened to flip through the book: on the verso you will see one wide column under the label "SATURN," this tells the action through an omniscient narrator. Essentially. On the recto, you see two narrow columns. The left column is labeled "LITTLE MERCED" and tells the action through the first person narration of the character of that name. The right column is reserved for first person narration from any one of the book's other characters; even unnamed, seemingly background characters are given voice.

Having laid out the book's ground rules, Plascencia of course breaks them by the novel's end. In the last chapter as many as six columns (or stubs of columns) crowd the page, and they are sometimes oriented perpendicular to the page (ie, sentences run bottom-to-top). I think this last gimmick is meant to resemble troops in battle formations.

There are other, less egregious devices employed: multiple dedication & title pages; words that seem to be scratched out & whole passages obscured by large black blobs (which themselves reflect a theme of occlusion, which is also part of the story); and **SPOILER ALERT** page 139, which contains only a single italicized word, "cunt".

But before the author can even play these stylistic games, there's the pesky task of coming up with a plot, right? The story here is such that I actually found myself wishing that Plascencia'd just delivered up a "straight" narrative about these people & their lives, without all the pomo hoo-ha. (I find myself wishing that about a lot of books.) People of Paper concerns a community of Mexican immigrants united by a benign street gang and a bizarre quasi-Catholic brand of mysticism (E.g., "When a saint dies, the smell of popourri extends out to a five-mile radius."). Also, there are mechanical tortoises. Federico de la Fe, the disconsolate father of Little Merced, convinces the local flower pickers and cholos to make war on Saturn, which he claims is a tyrant and voyeur, and the reason his wife left him. The gang's "war" involves efforts to hide their lives and inner thoughts from the ringed planet. And then the metafiction kicks in.

And just as the tricks played with form are justified by their relationship with the text's content, Plascencia's metafictional acrobatics are redeemed by virtue of their raw emotional content. The author's own emotional frustrations propel the book's creation. There's actually a surprising amount of sentiment for such willfully experimental fiction. Sadness, and escaping it through futile & unhealthy means is ultimately one of the book's major themes.

Speaking of themes, I feel like I would maybe benefit from a methodical re-read. The book is rife with images and themes that scream for cataloguing and cross-indexing. If I were teaching this book to a bunch of high schoolers, I'd create a worksheet, a kind of literary device matrix. The rows would be named for the various characters, and across the top would be "honeybees," "blood," "foreskin," "flowers," "paper," "Napoleon," "lime," "Oaxacan songbirds," "self-mutilation," "cold climates," "celebrity," "colonialism," etc. Bright young kids could make note of what character encounters what theme/image on what page, maybe copying the relevant sentence, and there you'd have the book's scheme.





This was originally published as part of McSweeney's "Rectangular" series, before I began to read those books as soon as they come out. Purchasing this at Borders, I had a choice between the handsome hardback McSweeney's first edition, and the cheaper paperback edition recently put out by Harcourt. If you've ever witnessed me standing before the wall of yogurt at the grocery store, using a spiral-bound notebook to calculate exactly which brand costs least per ounce that particular week, you've probably guessed which edition I ended up buying. Oddly, this choice actually affects the body of the book: the author is at one point accused of selling his personal experiences for "fourteen dollars and the vanity of your name on the book cover." I suppose the text originally said "twenty-two ninety-five and the vanity..."

The Dalkey Archive

The Dalkey Archive
by Flann O'Brien, 1964
204pp
Read: 12/30/06-01/03/07

This is probably the only book I've read with a cover blurb from James Joyce. Not about Joyce, not likening O'Brien to Joyce (though there are plenty such blurbs, most notably from Anthony Burgess), but a genuine bit of Joyceana, a quote in which Joyce himself calls O'Brien "A real writer, with the true comic spirit."

I picked up this book because I enjoyed The Third Policeman. I first heard about O'Brien in a conversation (in Dublin, June 16, 2002) in which someone said he really didn't understand why O'Brien was so frequently compared to Joyce, outside of their both being Irish. Which came to be my own opinion after reading Third Policeman. Whereas Joyce is the height of modernism, O'Brien is most definitely post-modern. While, yes, Joyce's otherwise intellectually dense writing is tempered by a sense of humor, O'Brien seemed to be going for intellectual yucks. After reading Dalkey Archive, however, it is clear: O'Brien got down on his knees & begged to be mentioned in the same breath as Joyce.

It seems to me that, whatever other experiences formed O'Brien as a writer, a sincere worship of Joyce's works was one of them. (Which, for the record, was the only rational course of action for a young writer in Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century.) O'Brien went to the same college as Joyce, having forged an interview with John Joyce for his college application. And The Dalkey Archive, set a few years after Joyce's death, features him as one of its characters, to great comic effect if you yourself happen to be a fan.

And that's what this book mostly goes for: comic effect. There's a point early on in which St. Augustine talks theology, and while that part is funny, it's especially erudite, kind of like a postmodern The Temptation of St. Anthony. I wish that O'Brien, having established a device for introducing historical personages and having offbeat conversations with them, had continued to do so. But he pretty much goes on to recycle some material from Third Policeman (though he'd written that book a couple of years earlier, it wouldn't be published until after his death, a couple of years later), throws Joyce into the mix, makes a few jokes about the Jesuit Society, and calls it quits. Smart and entertaining and quick, in equal parts, but if you've never read any O'Brien you'll want to start with The Third Policeman.




The copy I read happened to be published by "Dalkey Archive Press," which seems to be what Illinois State University chose to name its publishing arm. For some reason. Reading this book had a feeling of in some way coming full circle. The Joyce character talks about going to the Parisian bookshop of Sylvia Beach. I first bought Third Policeman at Shakespeare & Co., though that copy is now probably in Pittsburgh, I think, where I have never been. A real shame, since it was an edition you can't get in the States.