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.