In my college days, McIntyre & Moore's was a large, well-lit store in Davis Square that specialized in history, academic monographs, and literature that was 20 years old and mostly unheard-of. The store layout was a simple rectangle, and it was rarely filled with enough people to have two browsers in one aisle. Their discount system was 10% off a one-foot stack and 20% off a two-foot stack, as well as some kind of discount card based on purchase price that I never really used. (Presumably the percentage discount stopped at some cutoff less than ten, although I never tried to buy a ten-foot stack of books, so maybe it really would have been free.) The owner gave off the appearance of being crotchety, but this was never tested.
Now, M&M's is a dimly-fluorescently-lit basement in Porter Square, below the stationer's, with a similar stock but not nearly the chipper sense of entering into an alternate, and highly-literate, dimension of history. M&M's was never the place you'd go to for a novel (nor a literary magazine, really, despite their collection of back issues of Granta), but if you wanted a treatise on Heidegger or communism, or you needed a volume on Richard Brautigan's poetry or one of the Springer series of math textbooks, it was fun to browse in. Now it's not quite so fun to browse, which as far as I can see will only exacerbate the financial concerns that occasioned the move in the first place. Alas.
As an example of its utility during the halcyon Davis Square days, I present the case of Baudrillard. During my junior year at MIT, I took a theatre class from an impossibly hip, soft-spoken theatre professor and enfant terrible, JS (for I don't doubt he googles himself regularly.) I often found my classmates hopeless rubes, and eager to impress with my humanities erudition, on some assignment or in some email I discussed Baudrillard at length, in relation to the theatre, and potentially DHALGREN (by Samuel Delany), which we were reading at the time. JS took the bait, and wrote back to me expressing his shared appreciation of Baudrillard, and wondering whether I had a copy of AMERIQUE. I forget whether it was out of print at the time--it certainly seems to be now--but I sure as hell knew two things: one, I didn't have a copy, and two, I wanted very much to have a copy by 7pm that night, when I would have class with JS again.
So, you need an out-of-print philosophical treatise by a French postmodernist, for venial but self-serving reasons. It is 1pm and you are in Boston. Where do you go? To McIntyre & Moore's. Obviously. Post-haste. Not only did they have it, they also had a copy of THE CONSPIRACY OF ART, with its gorgeous drapey cover.
Reader, I bought both. And you know what? JS didn't care a whit; apparently whatever idea he was pursuing had changed in the six hours between his email and delivery of the object, and then later in the year he refused to let me borrow his cap pistol in a skit. Good riddance to him; at least McIntyre & Moore's is still around, in whatever guise, elevating our readerly miens.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Highly Personal Bookstore Review - Harvard Bookstore - Cambridge, MA
Reader(s), I'm trying a new format, which is the very-much-autobiographical review of a bookstore. I've been to many, many bookstores in my day, and have deeply-felt reactions to all of them, so this should become a regular thing. Enjoy.
It used to be that the Harvard Bookstore was the only worthwhile place to go. When I lived at MIT, a single block away from the Kendall T stop, itself only two stops away from the Harvard one on the red line, at night or on weekends or after a soul-deadening lecture I would have no greater desire than to go to the Harvard Bookstore and descend into the basement of used books, to pick a few and take them home.
My mother retains fragments of her father's obsessive-compulsive disorder, mostly presenting themselves in her compunctions about food preparation, green beans and mushrooms and potatoes in particular. I have even more watered-down impulses, mainly my overwhelming desire to own, and surround myself with, books. I have books crammed into bookcases, and in piles stacked on top, and in further piles colonizing the floor around them. I currently have only three bookshelves, and somewhere on the order of a thousand books; in college I was much worse, with five bookshelves and around 2500 volumes. Not all of these books were useful, or well-loved, or even read; I sold and gave away and just discarded many of them when I moved to California, and again when I moved from one apartment to another and decided I needed to face up to the stagnant tide pools of my collection. The important part, for me, was that each of them was a promise of some future moment of literary enjoyment, and most of them carried a memory of their acquisition, of the promise and splendor they seemed to represent on a shelf, and then in my hand, in a bag, and, at last, at home atop the most recent pile that represented the most pressing acquisitions.
The Harvard Bookstore was open until 11, which was the first good thing about it; part of my OCD-like book purchasing impulse is that when it comes on, it's likely to be at an hour when most bookstores and libraries are closed. The Harvard Bookstore was also, like another bookstore of lore, a clean, well-lit place for books. It has wooden bookshelves, and I believe it has green carpet, and its staff give off the air of being knowledgeable, literary people older than myself, which is a key component of the kind of adult sanctuary a bookstore can offer. The upstairs of the Harvard Bookstore, by which I mean the street level portion to which one enters, is all new books, thoughtfully curated to be sure, but of about as much interest as the stock of the local Borders or Barnes and Noble college-affiliated bookstore. (Less, actually, because the Harvard Bookstore has only one surface in the entire store upon which one might sit, a cushioned window seat that can only accommodate two people who are shopping together, and is at any given time almost certainly already occupied. The Barnes and Noble affiliate across Harvard Square, on the other hand, has armchairs, a tasteful cafe, and three floors entirely out of sight of the cashiers, where one can stretch out on the floor and contemplate the entire shelf of Nietzsche offerings, as I did on one occasion.)
The only part of the main floor of the Harvard Bookstore that I would be drawn to was the right-hand, window-flanking shelves, stemming out by the entrance and winding halfway back on the side. There were the remainders, the otherwise-new books that had been marked down drastically, and offered some hope of catching a bestseller just as it was falling off the NY Times list, but before it was dogeared and a year old and wound up downstairs on the used shelves. The remainders changed regularly enough to be interesting, but offered none of the peril of the used shelves, where the very day after having seen it, a fine edition of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy may have been snapped up by a fellow bibliophile. (Paul Auster bore a striking resemblance to my freshman-year chemistry professor, which was not the least of the reasons why I liked him.)
Heading downstairs involves a single turn of staircase, the landing of which is adorned with new or new-ish art books from the used section, which are worth a perusal. Then, upon reaching the basement, an entirely different sensory atmosphere takes hold. Here the lighting is dim-fluorescent, the wooden bookshelves are plastered with detritus from the insides of books that people have sold and left things in, and the tables are heavy with more remainders, anthologies, and cookbooks that didn't merit top-of-the-store display. The art section is for the most part very old, and tends toward the amateur, and the pre-color-printing type. The cookbook section is well-stocked, the science section less so, and the philosophy and history are always worth a look. The crowning jewel of the used section of the Harvard Bookstore is its fiction shelves, which make up the entire back (or really left-hand) wall, as well as a few shelves right to the other side of the purchasing counter (open at whimsically determined hours, and the site of such overheard caprice in buying decisions that I never tried them out with my own remaindered tomes.) The science fiction, fantasy, and mystery sections are also well-stocked, though seldom perused. There are solid sections of literary essays, literary criticism, biography, religion, sport, erotica, poetry, and drama. The film section is small and runs to Marilyn Monroe biographies and endless copies of John Irving's "My Movie Business" (John Irving's "My Bear Obsession", that's a book I'd rather read.) There is a second science section toward the back, with a fair selection for being serviced by students from two of the greatest research universities in the country, but the mathematics section is pitiful.
Prices are average for a used bookstore, being about half the cover price for a trade paperback, and sometimes alternating, for no good reason, among different issues and instances of the same title. From this description alone, the Harvard Bookstore is simply a good neighborhood used bookstore, which it is. The actual mythic power of the Harvard Bookstore stems from the shelves behind its buy counter, and the roped-off stacks of recent and as-yet-unshelved acquisitions. Off-limits to the mere patron and browser, these shelves and stacks nevertheless offer the tantalizing proposition that the volume you sought, though unavailable at the moment, is right there, buried behind yet more editions of The Lord of the Rings and Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, just sitting with its spine to the wall, waiting for another day shift, another week or two of turnover, to turn up on the shelves. (Pawing through these unreachable stacks, though physically possible and undertaken a few times, is basically useless because the prices haven't been written in on the top corners of the inside covers yet, and however simple the scheme and however basic the soft number 2 pencil script might seem, it is always somehow obvious that the ruse of attempting to add and then immediately subtract from the store's stock will be discovered to terrible consequence.) No, to the slightly compulsive bibliophile like myself, the best part of the Harvard Bookstore is the sense that there is always more, and always a reason, just out of sight, to come back.
That, and the spend-$100-get-10%-off deal, however they're phrasing it these days.
It used to be that the Harvard Bookstore was the only worthwhile place to go. When I lived at MIT, a single block away from the Kendall T stop, itself only two stops away from the Harvard one on the red line, at night or on weekends or after a soul-deadening lecture I would have no greater desire than to go to the Harvard Bookstore and descend into the basement of used books, to pick a few and take them home.
My mother retains fragments of her father's obsessive-compulsive disorder, mostly presenting themselves in her compunctions about food preparation, green beans and mushrooms and potatoes in particular. I have even more watered-down impulses, mainly my overwhelming desire to own, and surround myself with, books. I have books crammed into bookcases, and in piles stacked on top, and in further piles colonizing the floor around them. I currently have only three bookshelves, and somewhere on the order of a thousand books; in college I was much worse, with five bookshelves and around 2500 volumes. Not all of these books were useful, or well-loved, or even read; I sold and gave away and just discarded many of them when I moved to California, and again when I moved from one apartment to another and decided I needed to face up to the stagnant tide pools of my collection. The important part, for me, was that each of them was a promise of some future moment of literary enjoyment, and most of them carried a memory of their acquisition, of the promise and splendor they seemed to represent on a shelf, and then in my hand, in a bag, and, at last, at home atop the most recent pile that represented the most pressing acquisitions.
The Harvard Bookstore was open until 11, which was the first good thing about it; part of my OCD-like book purchasing impulse is that when it comes on, it's likely to be at an hour when most bookstores and libraries are closed. The Harvard Bookstore was also, like another bookstore of lore, a clean, well-lit place for books. It has wooden bookshelves, and I believe it has green carpet, and its staff give off the air of being knowledgeable, literary people older than myself, which is a key component of the kind of adult sanctuary a bookstore can offer. The upstairs of the Harvard Bookstore, by which I mean the street level portion to which one enters, is all new books, thoughtfully curated to be sure, but of about as much interest as the stock of the local Borders or Barnes and Noble college-affiliated bookstore. (Less, actually, because the Harvard Bookstore has only one surface in the entire store upon which one might sit, a cushioned window seat that can only accommodate two people who are shopping together, and is at any given time almost certainly already occupied. The Barnes and Noble affiliate across Harvard Square, on the other hand, has armchairs, a tasteful cafe, and three floors entirely out of sight of the cashiers, where one can stretch out on the floor and contemplate the entire shelf of Nietzsche offerings, as I did on one occasion.)
The only part of the main floor of the Harvard Bookstore that I would be drawn to was the right-hand, window-flanking shelves, stemming out by the entrance and winding halfway back on the side. There were the remainders, the otherwise-new books that had been marked down drastically, and offered some hope of catching a bestseller just as it was falling off the NY Times list, but before it was dogeared and a year old and wound up downstairs on the used shelves. The remainders changed regularly enough to be interesting, but offered none of the peril of the used shelves, where the very day after having seen it, a fine edition of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy may have been snapped up by a fellow bibliophile. (Paul Auster bore a striking resemblance to my freshman-year chemistry professor, which was not the least of the reasons why I liked him.)
Heading downstairs involves a single turn of staircase, the landing of which is adorned with new or new-ish art books from the used section, which are worth a perusal. Then, upon reaching the basement, an entirely different sensory atmosphere takes hold. Here the lighting is dim-fluorescent, the wooden bookshelves are plastered with detritus from the insides of books that people have sold and left things in, and the tables are heavy with more remainders, anthologies, and cookbooks that didn't merit top-of-the-store display. The art section is for the most part very old, and tends toward the amateur, and the pre-color-printing type. The cookbook section is well-stocked, the science section less so, and the philosophy and history are always worth a look. The crowning jewel of the used section of the Harvard Bookstore is its fiction shelves, which make up the entire back (or really left-hand) wall, as well as a few shelves right to the other side of the purchasing counter (open at whimsically determined hours, and the site of such overheard caprice in buying decisions that I never tried them out with my own remaindered tomes.) The science fiction, fantasy, and mystery sections are also well-stocked, though seldom perused. There are solid sections of literary essays, literary criticism, biography, religion, sport, erotica, poetry, and drama. The film section is small and runs to Marilyn Monroe biographies and endless copies of John Irving's "My Movie Business" (John Irving's "My Bear Obsession", that's a book I'd rather read.) There is a second science section toward the back, with a fair selection for being serviced by students from two of the greatest research universities in the country, but the mathematics section is pitiful.
Prices are average for a used bookstore, being about half the cover price for a trade paperback, and sometimes alternating, for no good reason, among different issues and instances of the same title. From this description alone, the Harvard Bookstore is simply a good neighborhood used bookstore, which it is. The actual mythic power of the Harvard Bookstore stems from the shelves behind its buy counter, and the roped-off stacks of recent and as-yet-unshelved acquisitions. Off-limits to the mere patron and browser, these shelves and stacks nevertheless offer the tantalizing proposition that the volume you sought, though unavailable at the moment, is right there, buried behind yet more editions of The Lord of the Rings and Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, just sitting with its spine to the wall, waiting for another day shift, another week or two of turnover, to turn up on the shelves. (Pawing through these unreachable stacks, though physically possible and undertaken a few times, is basically useless because the prices haven't been written in on the top corners of the inside covers yet, and however simple the scheme and however basic the soft number 2 pencil script might seem, it is always somehow obvious that the ruse of attempting to add and then immediately subtract from the store's stock will be discovered to terrible consequence.) No, to the slightly compulsive bibliophile like myself, the best part of the Harvard Bookstore is the sense that there is always more, and always a reason, just out of sight, to come back.
That, and the spend-$100-get-10%-off deal, however they're phrasing it these days.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
THE MILLENNIUM TRILOGY - Stieg Larsson - Fiction
The MILLENNIUM trilogy has been a publishing sensation--and, with an unfinished manuscript for a fourth book on the late Stieg Larsson's laptop, could continue to be--but it has also been a welcomed opportunity for literary critics to hail the arrival of a new, "feminist" crime fiction. Larsson's work has a powerful, ass-kicking heroine, strong female characters, and focuses on the injustices women face at the hands of men and societal forces. Crimes against women are the centerpieces of each of the three books, and the men who perpetrate these crimes are made to pay.
The retribution story is nothing new; we've seen it in films like KILL BILL, HARD CANDY, and ANTICHRIST, and in novels from WONDER WHEN YOU'LL MISS ME to more sordid "legal thrillers" like RETRIBUTION. As has been pointed out before, much of the difficulty, from a feminist perspective, is that these stories are fantasies of a woman's revenge on her rapist written by men. In effect, the characters are acting out what men believe they would do in a woman's position: they fight back with great physical strength and confidence. I think it's worth noting that both Lisbeth Salander and Monica Figuerola (Blomkvist's new love interest) are intensely athletic women who deal with dangerous men by physically overpowering and humiliating them. Monica is described as a former bodybuilder and world-class gymnast; Salander, as we know, is a boxing prodigy, a martial artist, and capable of some very gymnastic feats herself (you'll remember my disbelief, from my review of the first book, that Salander is able to dive and roll under a parked car, emerging on the other side of it, in seconds.)
Erika Berger is less physically imposing, and is sidelined in this installment, seemingly punished for placing her career ambitions over the health of Blomkvist's magazine. From the minute she starts her job as editor in chief of one of Sweden's major daily newspapers, she is plagued with harassment, and stalked by a colleague. She finds the pace grueling and unsustainable, and returns to Millennium at the trilogy's end.
In this week's New Yorker, Nora Ephron pens a parody of a "lost Stieg Larsson short story" following the news that Larsson's early work, mostly stories from when he was as young as 17, have been rediscovered by Swedish publishers. Ephron's piece pokes primarily at the predictable emotions of Larsson's characters, as well as his extraneous detail and brand placement (everyone's phone and computer is referred to by its exact brand name and model; in a time when most authors are struggling with how to deftly interweave the realities of modern life and internet communication into their stories, Stieg does a cannonball into the middle of our email-laden discourse.) Ephron doesn't particularly pick at Larsson's feminism, or lack thereof, unless one can take the fact that Nora Ephron was the author picked to write this piece as a commentary in and of itself.
It's tempting to compare Lisbeth Salander unfavorably to more nuanced heroines of crime fiction, like Clarice Starling. Lisbeth's defining traits are apathy and anger, and when stuck in the hospital, as she is for the majority of the third book, her anger has no useful outlets. She has conflicting opinions about family; she despises her father, is completely nonplussed by the existence of her half-brother or the current whereabouts of her twin sister, and yet adores and mourns her mother. Emotions seem to settle over her like shadows, and she moves in and out of them, and of relationships, as easily as the comparison implies. Salander is an utterly confusing cipher of a heroine, which would seem to be a drawback for a feminist crime thriller--until we realize that Salander isn't the heroine at all; Mikael Blomkvist is. He calls the shots, finds the scoops, rescues the girl, and puts the bad guys in jail--a pretty traditionalist crime-fiction hero, if you ask me.
The retribution story is nothing new; we've seen it in films like KILL BILL, HARD CANDY, and ANTICHRIST, and in novels from WONDER WHEN YOU'LL MISS ME to more sordid "legal thrillers" like RETRIBUTION. As has been pointed out before, much of the difficulty, from a feminist perspective, is that these stories are fantasies of a woman's revenge on her rapist written by men. In effect, the characters are acting out what men believe they would do in a woman's position: they fight back with great physical strength and confidence. I think it's worth noting that both Lisbeth Salander and Monica Figuerola (Blomkvist's new love interest) are intensely athletic women who deal with dangerous men by physically overpowering and humiliating them. Monica is described as a former bodybuilder and world-class gymnast; Salander, as we know, is a boxing prodigy, a martial artist, and capable of some very gymnastic feats herself (you'll remember my disbelief, from my review of the first book, that Salander is able to dive and roll under a parked car, emerging on the other side of it, in seconds.)
Erika Berger is less physically imposing, and is sidelined in this installment, seemingly punished for placing her career ambitions over the health of Blomkvist's magazine. From the minute she starts her job as editor in chief of one of Sweden's major daily newspapers, she is plagued with harassment, and stalked by a colleague. She finds the pace grueling and unsustainable, and returns to Millennium at the trilogy's end.
In this week's New Yorker, Nora Ephron pens a parody of a "lost Stieg Larsson short story" following the news that Larsson's early work, mostly stories from when he was as young as 17, have been rediscovered by Swedish publishers. Ephron's piece pokes primarily at the predictable emotions of Larsson's characters, as well as his extraneous detail and brand placement (everyone's phone and computer is referred to by its exact brand name and model; in a time when most authors are struggling with how to deftly interweave the realities of modern life and internet communication into their stories, Stieg does a cannonball into the middle of our email-laden discourse.) Ephron doesn't particularly pick at Larsson's feminism, or lack thereof, unless one can take the fact that Nora Ephron was the author picked to write this piece as a commentary in and of itself.
It's tempting to compare Lisbeth Salander unfavorably to more nuanced heroines of crime fiction, like Clarice Starling. Lisbeth's defining traits are apathy and anger, and when stuck in the hospital, as she is for the majority of the third book, her anger has no useful outlets. She has conflicting opinions about family; she despises her father, is completely nonplussed by the existence of her half-brother or the current whereabouts of her twin sister, and yet adores and mourns her mother. Emotions seem to settle over her like shadows, and she moves in and out of them, and of relationships, as easily as the comparison implies. Salander is an utterly confusing cipher of a heroine, which would seem to be a drawback for a feminist crime thriller--until we realize that Salander isn't the heroine at all; Mikael Blomkvist is. He calls the shots, finds the scoops, rescues the girl, and puts the bad guys in jail--a pretty traditionalist crime-fiction hero, if you ask me.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Opening the curtains
It's been a few months.
Originally, this blog came out of a new-yearish resolution to write a review of every book I read all the way through. The point of that resolution was both to catalog what I read and what I thought of it for the inevitably forgetful Future Me, and also to try and hone some type of skill as an off-the-cuff reviewer and essayist. Every review on the blog thus far was written in one draft--for good or ill, I can't say. This went well up until the end of February (as you can see) and perished in the tide of qualifying exams, as every sort of leisure activity got pushed to the periphery. (Qualifying exams for my department are like a three-hour oral exam and presentation about a proposed direction of research for the PhD. They are the subject of more worry and preparation than they're worth, but they do tend to force everyone to get their thinking in order.) I passed, of course, and then saw a folder on my desktop containing my backlog: the titles of the three books I had read during those months of preparation. And I didn't really want to write about any of them; though they weren't terrible books, I had picked them up to distract myself on the elliptical machine, and hadn't retained any lingering thoughts or angles on them. I could summarize the plot or outline, but didn't have many worthy opinions on the content, which had been an ongoing reviewing problem: what about the books that were only so-so? How could they make an interesting review? (And isn't no review at all the most damning?)
So, I'm changing the rules a bit. I'm no longer going to review every book I read, only those that make an impression. This means I probably won't have a comprehensive list of what I read, and Future Me will have to forgo it. I also may take longer with the reviews, to work on, well, editing my own work, on which I need more deliberate practice. I also intend to wax a little more autobiographical, because although I previously had faith in the functions of google to bring readers to reviews for books they were researching, I really have no readers, so there's no harm in writing to myself.
And so on.
Originally, this blog came out of a new-yearish resolution to write a review of every book I read all the way through. The point of that resolution was both to catalog what I read and what I thought of it for the inevitably forgetful Future Me, and also to try and hone some type of skill as an off-the-cuff reviewer and essayist. Every review on the blog thus far was written in one draft--for good or ill, I can't say. This went well up until the end of February (as you can see) and perished in the tide of qualifying exams, as every sort of leisure activity got pushed to the periphery. (Qualifying exams for my department are like a three-hour oral exam and presentation about a proposed direction of research for the PhD. They are the subject of more worry and preparation than they're worth, but they do tend to force everyone to get their thinking in order.) I passed, of course, and then saw a folder on my desktop containing my backlog: the titles of the three books I had read during those months of preparation. And I didn't really want to write about any of them; though they weren't terrible books, I had picked them up to distract myself on the elliptical machine, and hadn't retained any lingering thoughts or angles on them. I could summarize the plot or outline, but didn't have many worthy opinions on the content, which had been an ongoing reviewing problem: what about the books that were only so-so? How could they make an interesting review? (And isn't no review at all the most damning?)
So, I'm changing the rules a bit. I'm no longer going to review every book I read, only those that make an impression. This means I probably won't have a comprehensive list of what I read, and Future Me will have to forgo it. I also may take longer with the reviews, to work on, well, editing my own work, on which I need more deliberate practice. I also intend to wax a little more autobiographical, because although I previously had faith in the functions of google to bring readers to reviews for books they were researching, I really have no readers, so there's no harm in writing to myself.
And so on.
Monday, February 22, 2010
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE - Lucy Grealy - Memoir
If you've read Ann Patchett's memoir TRUTH AND BEAUTY, you know the Lucy Grealy story. And honestly, Patchett's is a better version, as Grealy's autobiography completely elides mention of Patchett, her best friend through college, grad school, and beyond.
It's hard to say that an autobiography by a woman who died--from complications dating back to her childhood cancer--is at all bad. It's true, it's her story; it quite adequately describes the pain and psychological effects of having cancer, losing normal facial appearance, and spending years in and out of hospitals, learning and unlearning the particular variety of helplessness that accompanies drastic surgery.
But goodness, for a book that spends so long dissecting loneliness, failing to mention the existence of a friend like Patchett seems like a grave omission. Grealy's parents are inexplicably distant, to the extent that Grealy's father's death hardly affects her, and the familial anecdotes seemed pitched and perhaps concocted to make sure that all the sympathy flows downhill, to Lucy. Her siblings are mentioned in passing, where their lack of reaction to her deformity is interesting, but it is particularly jarring to look at how much time Lucy spends, as a child and an adolescent, wondering what she would have looked like without the surgery, when she has a female twin. A twin! That is almost exactly how she would have looked, and if we're to believe the narrative, she never realized this. It just seems remarkable.
Ann Patchett wrote a postscript to this memoir, recounting a shared book tour she and Grealy embarked upon, after AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE was met with resounding success. In a transcribed question and answer, Grealy bristles at being asked how she remembered so much; she is a writer, she tells the befuddled questioner, and she made it up. I wonder, though, how much is made up, especially knowing the, shall we say, personality quirks of Grealy as depicted by Patchett. How much is for sympathy, and how much for show? Grealy is said to have joked about writing a follow-up to this memoir, a sort of "Behind the Music" explaining the "real" story. If only she had written that book the first time around.
It's hard to say that an autobiography by a woman who died--from complications dating back to her childhood cancer--is at all bad. It's true, it's her story; it quite adequately describes the pain and psychological effects of having cancer, losing normal facial appearance, and spending years in and out of hospitals, learning and unlearning the particular variety of helplessness that accompanies drastic surgery.
But goodness, for a book that spends so long dissecting loneliness, failing to mention the existence of a friend like Patchett seems like a grave omission. Grealy's parents are inexplicably distant, to the extent that Grealy's father's death hardly affects her, and the familial anecdotes seemed pitched and perhaps concocted to make sure that all the sympathy flows downhill, to Lucy. Her siblings are mentioned in passing, where their lack of reaction to her deformity is interesting, but it is particularly jarring to look at how much time Lucy spends, as a child and an adolescent, wondering what she would have looked like without the surgery, when she has a female twin. A twin! That is almost exactly how she would have looked, and if we're to believe the narrative, she never realized this. It just seems remarkable.
Ann Patchett wrote a postscript to this memoir, recounting a shared book tour she and Grealy embarked upon, after AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE was met with resounding success. In a transcribed question and answer, Grealy bristles at being asked how she remembered so much; she is a writer, she tells the befuddled questioner, and she made it up. I wonder, though, how much is made up, especially knowing the, shall we say, personality quirks of Grealy as depicted by Patchett. How much is for sympathy, and how much for show? Grealy is said to have joked about writing a follow-up to this memoir, a sort of "Behind the Music" explaining the "real" story. If only she had written that book the first time around.
Friday, February 12, 2010
POINT OMEGA - Don DeLillo - Fiction
I'm working off a huge backlog of reviews--turns out it's easier to read books than to write about them, who knew?--so I thought I would start with the best, which is conveniently the most recently released. Go, read POINT OMEGA! Even if Don DeLillo put you off with FALLING MAN (which, to be honest, I liked a lot), there's something for the old-school UNDERWORLD fan in his latest. It's been said around the internet that its length might have something to do with its appeal (my hardcover version was around 120 pages) but my favorite fiction is the kind that can be expediently and expertly condensed, and this is quite the example. It's a pint-sized thriller that seems so simple in construction, but has such graceful, economized sentences that it's worth the multi-year wait between books for something like this.
The plot is: a documentary filmmaker accompanies a sort of Donald Rumsfeld-like figure to his vacation home in the desert, hoping to convince him to star in a film project that sounds like an Errol Morris production: one man, one take, one hour, a plain wall as a backdrop, explaining the war from his experience helping to plan it. There are complications: Richard Elster, the war-planning academic, is more interested in having a companion at his desert retreat than agreeing to do any film. And time does seem to stop for both of them, in the vast heat of the desert, even when Elster's daughter arrives for a vacation, providing a welcome distraction for our narrator, Jim.
The novel is bookended by two interesting scenes of a video installation in the MoMA, describing a real piece, "24 Hour Psycho." The video consists of the film Psycho slowed down to take a full 24 hours of runtime, and the first scene of the novel takes us into the exhibit through the eyes of an obsessive sociopath who is entirely in tune--almost too much so--with the underlying meaning of the exhibit. He wishes for a woman to come into the exhibit with him, and stay for a suitable amount of time--at least half an hour--and he wishes for the exhibit to be more structured, to last all 24 hours and not admit anyone after starting, or allow anyone to leave. To take a writerly step back, the portrayal of a disturbed character is spot-on, here. The guy is creepy, and we can tell that from the first two pages alone, without anything overtly creepy having to happen. It's a perfect setup, but the beauty of it, in the one-two punch of my favorite literary technique ever, is that we forget about it by the time we get around to its relevance to the main story. Because Richard Elster's daughter was involved with a man who gave her mother the willies, in her New York life, and a few weeks after she comes to live with her father in the desert, she disappears.
The landscape comes into play here, its neverending sprawl, its deceptively long sightlines, its ability to swallow up a human, or an ill-prepared hiker, and never spit her out. When Richard and Jim come back from the grocery store to find Jessie utterly vanished, with none of her personal belongings touched, it is immediately hopeless. The desert is too big, and people too frail, as their abortive search efforts demonstrate. Jim and Richard leave without Jessie, and her disappearance is a mystery, though with a few hints, we know exactly what happened. And then, the final scene, we are back in 24 Hour Psycho,with our very own psycho of the first scene, and we see him meet Jessie. Jessie stays for half an hour. He follows Jessie out of the exhibit, and gets her carelessly relinquished phone number. And thus it starts. And we knew it all along.
Focusing on the mystery and its construction doesn't do justice to the meditative parts of the novel, the parts that focus on war and its effects, the academicization of war, and the distancing mechanisms used by its instigators. And these masterful flights of dialogue are difficult to describe simply because they are so trim and spritely. It will take you only a couple of hours to read POINT OMEGA, and there is no question that those hours will be worth it. That if it were possible to stretch the text out over 24 hours, we might never cease to find further meaning.
The plot is: a documentary filmmaker accompanies a sort of Donald Rumsfeld-like figure to his vacation home in the desert, hoping to convince him to star in a film project that sounds like an Errol Morris production: one man, one take, one hour, a plain wall as a backdrop, explaining the war from his experience helping to plan it. There are complications: Richard Elster, the war-planning academic, is more interested in having a companion at his desert retreat than agreeing to do any film. And time does seem to stop for both of them, in the vast heat of the desert, even when Elster's daughter arrives for a vacation, providing a welcome distraction for our narrator, Jim.
The novel is bookended by two interesting scenes of a video installation in the MoMA, describing a real piece, "24 Hour Psycho." The video consists of the film Psycho slowed down to take a full 24 hours of runtime, and the first scene of the novel takes us into the exhibit through the eyes of an obsessive sociopath who is entirely in tune--almost too much so--with the underlying meaning of the exhibit. He wishes for a woman to come into the exhibit with him, and stay for a suitable amount of time--at least half an hour--and he wishes for the exhibit to be more structured, to last all 24 hours and not admit anyone after starting, or allow anyone to leave. To take a writerly step back, the portrayal of a disturbed character is spot-on, here. The guy is creepy, and we can tell that from the first two pages alone, without anything overtly creepy having to happen. It's a perfect setup, but the beauty of it, in the one-two punch of my favorite literary technique ever, is that we forget about it by the time we get around to its relevance to the main story. Because Richard Elster's daughter was involved with a man who gave her mother the willies, in her New York life, and a few weeks after she comes to live with her father in the desert, she disappears.
The landscape comes into play here, its neverending sprawl, its deceptively long sightlines, its ability to swallow up a human, or an ill-prepared hiker, and never spit her out. When Richard and Jim come back from the grocery store to find Jessie utterly vanished, with none of her personal belongings touched, it is immediately hopeless. The desert is too big, and people too frail, as their abortive search efforts demonstrate. Jim and Richard leave without Jessie, and her disappearance is a mystery, though with a few hints, we know exactly what happened. And then, the final scene, we are back in 24 Hour Psycho,with our very own psycho of the first scene, and we see him meet Jessie. Jessie stays for half an hour. He follows Jessie out of the exhibit, and gets her carelessly relinquished phone number. And thus it starts. And we knew it all along.
Focusing on the mystery and its construction doesn't do justice to the meditative parts of the novel, the parts that focus on war and its effects, the academicization of war, and the distancing mechanisms used by its instigators. And these masterful flights of dialogue are difficult to describe simply because they are so trim and spritely. It will take you only a couple of hours to read POINT OMEGA, and there is no question that those hours will be worth it. That if it were possible to stretch the text out over 24 hours, we might never cease to find further meaning.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
CHRONIC CITY - Jonathan Lethem - Fiction
I was one of the few readers who enjoyed YOU DON'T LOVE ME YET, the novel preceding CHRONIC CITY in Lethem's hipster-slacker-chic oeuvre. So it is with some actual sadness that I report, after four-hundred-some pages with Perkus Tooth and Chase Insteadman, that this novel at best resembles the first draft of a passably good novel. In tone and plot points, it owes a tremendous and unacknowledged debt to Bret Easton Ellis--GLAMORAMA in particular--yet fails to get its strange and guarded characters off the ground. Everything, from the muddled mystery of an underground tiger on the loose, to Chase's astronaut fiancee, stranded on a space station, to the quest for the impossibly beautiful chaldrons, is a massive let-down. Lethem attempts reversals on the order of M. Night Shyamalan--is it real? Is it fake?--and then doubles back on himself, sometimes giving two contradictory explanations for the same mysterious phenomenon, as though writing both potential endings to a set-up and forgetting to delete one. Is the tiger a runaway drilling robot, or an actual two-story-high phantasmic tiger? Both, we're told, with equal narrative sincerity. This doesn't work. This kind of narrative disarray doesn't make these characters more interesting, or their daily stoner peregrinations any more purposeful. It leaves us with a mess of loose ends and no sense that there was a cross-stitch pattern underneath. It hampers the suspension of disbelief: halfway through this novel, it became almost stressful to read, because I wasn't sure that Lethem was actually going to be able to finish a coherent narrative. And he didn't, really. He threw a few smoke bombs, killed a character, and escaped citing the unpredictability and ineffable nature of real life.
I'm going to ruin a few of the novel's surprises, here. First of all, Chase Insteadman's fiancee, the astronaut trapped on a space station that has drifted into a field of orbiting Chinese mines? One of the only truly funny and interesting characters in the novel? Ends up being fake, a character written into a screenplay by Chase's new girlfriend Oona Laszlo, even though Oona enters the picture long after Chase supposedly receives the screenplay from a team of unknown young producers. Also, having received that screenplay, Chase somehow not only agrees to play the part but completely internalizes it, acquiring a weird form of selective amnesia about his past life such that he believes he really does have a fiancee in space. Chase does this without even realizing it. Then, Chase runs into the producers at a party, and they ask him WHAT HE THOUGHT OF THE SCREENPLAY. Even though Chase has apparently already STARTED PLAYING THE PART, so not only do they know what he thinks of the screenplay, they are EMPLOYING HIM.
This isn't clever storytelling. This is shoddy editing.
Okay, and then there are Chaldrons. Chaldrons are both holograms of vases and icons of vases in a virtual-reality game based on Second Life. They are difficult to make, although it is apparently both possible to make them if you have some skill, and impossible to make them unless you are the virtual world's creator. This isn't my misunderstanding. Both facts are presented, less than a hundred pages apart. We are told that Biller, one of Perkus Tooth's friends, has made a fortune crafting chaldrons for the virtual world and selling them on ebay. Then we are told by the mayor's personal assistant that her brother, the creator of the virtual world, made a certain finite number of chaldrons for the game, and that more chaldrons cannot be created, so their value keeps increasing. BOTH OF THESE CANNOT BE TRUE, AND THIS IS NEVER ADDRESSED. Furthermore, Chase, Perkus, and their third Musketeer Richard Abneg spend days--if not weeks, months--attempting to purchase a chaldron, believing that chaldrons are physical pieces of pottery. They try multiple times to bid for one on ebay. So, what, they never read the item description? They never read the wikipedia article on chaldrons, even though wikipedia is read and referenced by the characters? It seems highly implausible that three men could somehow not know that what they were attempting to spend thousands of dollars on was an item of currency in an online game. If the name sounds familiar, it may be because an actual chaldron is an obsolete measure of volume used for coal. The associations with "cauldron" are obvious and linguistically supported. Nevertheless, Lethem is really, really into his idea of chaldrons, and even produced a limited-edition tie-in item available through Thing Magazine: a pair of hipster glasses with text on the side-pieces. This he calls the Chaldron Optical System. Need I explain how ludicrous and annoying this is?
This review may not be adequately conveying my feelings about this book; I read it. I finished it. The first half I even found entertaining. It was the second half, as I realized that the book was on a downward arc that would never intersect with my expectations, that brought me to this point of annoyance and dismissal. I don't blame Lethem, I blame his editor, for not reigning in his tangents and forcing him to confront the inconsistencies of his text. Better luck next time.
I'm going to ruin a few of the novel's surprises, here. First of all, Chase Insteadman's fiancee, the astronaut trapped on a space station that has drifted into a field of orbiting Chinese mines? One of the only truly funny and interesting characters in the novel? Ends up being fake, a character written into a screenplay by Chase's new girlfriend Oona Laszlo, even though Oona enters the picture long after Chase supposedly receives the screenplay from a team of unknown young producers. Also, having received that screenplay, Chase somehow not only agrees to play the part but completely internalizes it, acquiring a weird form of selective amnesia about his past life such that he believes he really does have a fiancee in space. Chase does this without even realizing it. Then, Chase runs into the producers at a party, and they ask him WHAT HE THOUGHT OF THE SCREENPLAY. Even though Chase has apparently already STARTED PLAYING THE PART, so not only do they know what he thinks of the screenplay, they are EMPLOYING HIM.
This isn't clever storytelling. This is shoddy editing.
Okay, and then there are Chaldrons. Chaldrons are both holograms of vases and icons of vases in a virtual-reality game based on Second Life. They are difficult to make, although it is apparently both possible to make them if you have some skill, and impossible to make them unless you are the virtual world's creator. This isn't my misunderstanding. Both facts are presented, less than a hundred pages apart. We are told that Biller, one of Perkus Tooth's friends, has made a fortune crafting chaldrons for the virtual world and selling them on ebay. Then we are told by the mayor's personal assistant that her brother, the creator of the virtual world, made a certain finite number of chaldrons for the game, and that more chaldrons cannot be created, so their value keeps increasing. BOTH OF THESE CANNOT BE TRUE, AND THIS IS NEVER ADDRESSED. Furthermore, Chase, Perkus, and their third Musketeer Richard Abneg spend days--if not weeks, months--attempting to purchase a chaldron, believing that chaldrons are physical pieces of pottery. They try multiple times to bid for one on ebay. So, what, they never read the item description? They never read the wikipedia article on chaldrons, even though wikipedia is read and referenced by the characters? It seems highly implausible that three men could somehow not know that what they were attempting to spend thousands of dollars on was an item of currency in an online game. If the name sounds familiar, it may be because an actual chaldron is an obsolete measure of volume used for coal. The associations with "cauldron" are obvious and linguistically supported. Nevertheless, Lethem is really, really into his idea of chaldrons, and even produced a limited-edition tie-in item available through Thing Magazine: a pair of hipster glasses with text on the side-pieces. This he calls the Chaldron Optical System. Need I explain how ludicrous and annoying this is?
This review may not be adequately conveying my feelings about this book; I read it. I finished it. The first half I even found entertaining. It was the second half, as I realized that the book was on a downward arc that would never intersect with my expectations, that brought me to this point of annoyance and dismissal. I don't blame Lethem, I blame his editor, for not reigning in his tangents and forcing him to confront the inconsistencies of his text. Better luck next time.
Monday, January 25, 2010
THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE - Stieg Larsson - Fiction
Last time I reviewed THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, the first installment in Stieg Larsson's Millennium series, I was unsure whether the series would live up to the hopes of its author, as a feminist and female-forward (if such a term exists) mystery. Its heroine, Lisbeth Salander, is certainly problematic, and I was ambivalent in the truest sense of the word about her relationship with Mikael Blomkvist, journalist and do-gooder and seemingly infallible man. Luckily, the second volume doesn't reprise their relationship; Lisbeth moves in with her lesbian lover Mimmi, and is on the lam for most of the novel. It does, however, deepen my concern and confusion about the book's feminism, and what it means to be a feminist mystery novel.
After reading an illuminating discussion with YA author Maggie Stiefvater about what makes a strong heroine, I'm even more troubled by Lisbeth. Already, in the first book, we know that Lisbeth is skinny, short, and boyish. She is often mistaken for a child of twelve. She is quite possibly a psychopath, with strong emotional reactions and an aversion to authority and the police; she does not make friends easily, and is very blunt. In this novel, we are frequently told that Lisbeth is "moral" but has "her own morals" and that these sometimes deviate from the norm. Lisbeth herself deviates from the norm in her choices of sexual partners, body modifications, and style of dress. Thankfully, these are not portrayed as negative choices, but are clearly and repeatedly "othered" and marked as different. Throughout the narrative focusing on the police manhunt for Salander, her and Mimmi's sexual proclivities are focused on to an offensive extent by the local police. Luckily, this fixation is portrayed in a negative and salacious light, and all of the heroes trust that Salander is innocent or the victim of circumstances, and will be cleared once more facts come to light.
Salander is not a particularly good role model. Her distrust of authority forces her to take matters into her own hands, sometimes dangerously. She fails to inform others of her plans even when they put her life at risk. She takes stupid chances. She resorts to physical violence frequently. She never shows fear, even when it would do her good. She steals. She burns bridges like a pyromaniac. She is so powerfully offended by mistreatment that she would rather dig herself deeper into terrible situations than lose some of her pride by cooperating. She is not a particularly caring romantic partner. She doesn't understand the concept of job security, and only holds on to her jobs because her employers are fond of her, or intrigued by her oddness. She betrays her friends' trust, and like every cliche of a jilted woman, reads her ex-lover's email.
This is not to say that Salander is not a "real" character or not deserving of respect; she is powerfully intelligent and talented, superhumanly strong, and fairly adept at intuition. (Sometimes the powers attributed to her are downright supernatural: when chased by a man easily three times her size, Salander escapes him by dropping to the curb, rolling underneath a parked sedan, and coming up on the other side in a fighting stance, in a matter of seconds. Go outside and look at any Toyota parked by the side of the road, and tell me how it is remotely possible for a human being to execute a barrel roll under the chassis of a car and come out the other side in seconds, ready to tussle.) Salander's emotional difficulties don't make her less of a feminist heroine, or less believable as a woman. THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE gets some negatives for giving Salander breast implants and fixating on them, implying that they make her feel like a woman in some fundamental way she lacked without them, but the novel gets positives for the initial chapters, in which Salander spends her time on the beach reading complex mathematical texts and making forays into Fermat's last theorem (already solved, of course, but Lisbeth doesn't want to cheat and look at the answer.) In fact the first two chapters are quite interesting and neat; Salander is vacation on an island hit by a hurricane, which gives her the opportunity to rescue her younger native-islander lover and save a vacationing woman from her husband's murderous impulses; the husband dies, being swept away by the storm, and Salander manages to be an unobtrusive hero, while she ponders her math and lives off of her stolen fortune. Inexplicably, these plot points are completely dropped for the rest of the novel; we never hear more about the woman Salander saves or her new love interest, and next we see her, she has returned to Sweden.
Of course, she needs to be in Sweden if she's going to get wrapped up in Mikael Blomkvist's latest journalistic endeavors, because once again, the series seems to be told from the tunnel-vision of Blomkvist's world. Salander plays a major role in the events that unfold, but these events are motivated by Mikael's muck-raking instincts. A brief mention of the Berger-Blomkvist-Salander love triangle: one of the most awkward elements of the novel is the lack of communication between Mikael and Erika. For two people who have been lovers for most of their lives, and refuse to compromise their relationship for nearly anything, they do not talk. Mikael won't tell Erika about his lingering feelings for Lisbeth, Erika won't tell Mikael about her job offer at a rival newspaper, which she intends to take, and they certainly aren't going to talk about their relationship, and what the continuous interruptions of Lisbeth Salander mean for its longevity. It seems obvious that Mikael's pet project is becoming more of a live-in obsession, but this rift between Mikael and Erika is left to rub awkwardly against the plot-line whenever the two come into the same scene.
Here's the thing: Salander is great to root for. She is nearly infallible (only succumbing at the end to overwhelming emotion, which makes her forget her training as a security systems analyst, and wander right into a fairly obvious surveillance trap, and the wrong end of her father's gun.) Sure, it's a bit sticky at the end, with Salander being tortured and shot by her father, who badly abused her mother, leaving her brain-damaged; it's also awkward that the primary villain we see throughout turns out to be Salander's half-brother, a man as immune to pain as Salander herself is to fear. It is even more awkward that Mimmi is abducted by this man, and has to be rescued by a boxer ex machina, inexplicably defeating by force the very man who cannot feel pain--isn't there a more clever way to deal with such a monster than a kick to the nuts?--but nevertheless, the plot is exciting, Lisbeth's derring-do is exhilarating, and it's somewhat refreshing to see a female main character who insists on going it on her own, without help from even the most obvious sources.
Yet, there's something troubling about the way in which Lisbeth's strength is uniformly defined in terms of masculine definitions of "strong." Lisbeth is a physical powerhouse, despite being small and, well, boyish. She's a computer whiz who's bad at feelings and bad at romantic relationships. She loves fast motorcycles and tropical islands. She's a female James Bond, without any of Daniel Craig's remorse. And sure, there's a part of me that loves to see that, to see a woman kicking ass--but let's draw the obvious comparison, with Trinity from the Matrix. Trinity was a motorcycle-revving ass-kicker in tight black leather and a punk sensibility. She was technologically adept. And yet, she was even more powerful because she was afraid, afraid that Neo wouldn't be the one, that the ship wouldn't survive its squidlet attack--but she tried anyway. She believed in her shipmates and honestly loved them, mourned their deaths and threw herself behind the long odds on their quest. Salander wouldn't have been on the Nebuchadnezzar because she can't get along with people, and if someone told her she wasn't the One, there's no way she would have self-sacrificed for some other One. Somehow, this seems like a problem.
There's also something a little over-the-top about the way that Salander's past, and her entanglement with the Swedish medico-legal system toys with her psyche and allows her disenfranchisement to fuel the entire storyline. We're led to believe that Salander hates men who hates women, and so would have fallen afoul of the traffickers and hit-men targeted in Millennium's expose, but really, she has personal reasons for all of her grudges, and makes new ones throughout her murder-suspect ordeal. She hates the traffickers because they are run by her father. She hates the police and the psychiatrists because they were paid off by associates of her father to keep her in custody so she couldn't reveal anyone's identity. Any sense of problems larger than herself, social injustices, or connections with other women are simply absent--and that's what keeps me from labeling Lisbeth Salander a feminist heroine.
After reading an illuminating discussion with YA author Maggie Stiefvater about what makes a strong heroine, I'm even more troubled by Lisbeth. Already, in the first book, we know that Lisbeth is skinny, short, and boyish. She is often mistaken for a child of twelve. She is quite possibly a psychopath, with strong emotional reactions and an aversion to authority and the police; she does not make friends easily, and is very blunt. In this novel, we are frequently told that Lisbeth is "moral" but has "her own morals" and that these sometimes deviate from the norm. Lisbeth herself deviates from the norm in her choices of sexual partners, body modifications, and style of dress. Thankfully, these are not portrayed as negative choices, but are clearly and repeatedly "othered" and marked as different. Throughout the narrative focusing on the police manhunt for Salander, her and Mimmi's sexual proclivities are focused on to an offensive extent by the local police. Luckily, this fixation is portrayed in a negative and salacious light, and all of the heroes trust that Salander is innocent or the victim of circumstances, and will be cleared once more facts come to light.
Salander is not a particularly good role model. Her distrust of authority forces her to take matters into her own hands, sometimes dangerously. She fails to inform others of her plans even when they put her life at risk. She takes stupid chances. She resorts to physical violence frequently. She never shows fear, even when it would do her good. She steals. She burns bridges like a pyromaniac. She is so powerfully offended by mistreatment that she would rather dig herself deeper into terrible situations than lose some of her pride by cooperating. She is not a particularly caring romantic partner. She doesn't understand the concept of job security, and only holds on to her jobs because her employers are fond of her, or intrigued by her oddness. She betrays her friends' trust, and like every cliche of a jilted woman, reads her ex-lover's email.
This is not to say that Salander is not a "real" character or not deserving of respect; she is powerfully intelligent and talented, superhumanly strong, and fairly adept at intuition. (Sometimes the powers attributed to her are downright supernatural: when chased by a man easily three times her size, Salander escapes him by dropping to the curb, rolling underneath a parked sedan, and coming up on the other side in a fighting stance, in a matter of seconds. Go outside and look at any Toyota parked by the side of the road, and tell me how it is remotely possible for a human being to execute a barrel roll under the chassis of a car and come out the other side in seconds, ready to tussle.) Salander's emotional difficulties don't make her less of a feminist heroine, or less believable as a woman. THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE gets some negatives for giving Salander breast implants and fixating on them, implying that they make her feel like a woman in some fundamental way she lacked without them, but the novel gets positives for the initial chapters, in which Salander spends her time on the beach reading complex mathematical texts and making forays into Fermat's last theorem (already solved, of course, but Lisbeth doesn't want to cheat and look at the answer.) In fact the first two chapters are quite interesting and neat; Salander is vacation on an island hit by a hurricane, which gives her the opportunity to rescue her younger native-islander lover and save a vacationing woman from her husband's murderous impulses; the husband dies, being swept away by the storm, and Salander manages to be an unobtrusive hero, while she ponders her math and lives off of her stolen fortune. Inexplicably, these plot points are completely dropped for the rest of the novel; we never hear more about the woman Salander saves or her new love interest, and next we see her, she has returned to Sweden.
Of course, she needs to be in Sweden if she's going to get wrapped up in Mikael Blomkvist's latest journalistic endeavors, because once again, the series seems to be told from the tunnel-vision of Blomkvist's world. Salander plays a major role in the events that unfold, but these events are motivated by Mikael's muck-raking instincts. A brief mention of the Berger-Blomkvist-Salander love triangle: one of the most awkward elements of the novel is the lack of communication between Mikael and Erika. For two people who have been lovers for most of their lives, and refuse to compromise their relationship for nearly anything, they do not talk. Mikael won't tell Erika about his lingering feelings for Lisbeth, Erika won't tell Mikael about her job offer at a rival newspaper, which she intends to take, and they certainly aren't going to talk about their relationship, and what the continuous interruptions of Lisbeth Salander mean for its longevity. It seems obvious that Mikael's pet project is becoming more of a live-in obsession, but this rift between Mikael and Erika is left to rub awkwardly against the plot-line whenever the two come into the same scene.
Here's the thing: Salander is great to root for. She is nearly infallible (only succumbing at the end to overwhelming emotion, which makes her forget her training as a security systems analyst, and wander right into a fairly obvious surveillance trap, and the wrong end of her father's gun.) Sure, it's a bit sticky at the end, with Salander being tortured and shot by her father, who badly abused her mother, leaving her brain-damaged; it's also awkward that the primary villain we see throughout turns out to be Salander's half-brother, a man as immune to pain as Salander herself is to fear. It is even more awkward that Mimmi is abducted by this man, and has to be rescued by a boxer ex machina, inexplicably defeating by force the very man who cannot feel pain--isn't there a more clever way to deal with such a monster than a kick to the nuts?--but nevertheless, the plot is exciting, Lisbeth's derring-do is exhilarating, and it's somewhat refreshing to see a female main character who insists on going it on her own, without help from even the most obvious sources.
Yet, there's something troubling about the way in which Lisbeth's strength is uniformly defined in terms of masculine definitions of "strong." Lisbeth is a physical powerhouse, despite being small and, well, boyish. She's a computer whiz who's bad at feelings and bad at romantic relationships. She loves fast motorcycles and tropical islands. She's a female James Bond, without any of Daniel Craig's remorse. And sure, there's a part of me that loves to see that, to see a woman kicking ass--but let's draw the obvious comparison, with Trinity from the Matrix. Trinity was a motorcycle-revving ass-kicker in tight black leather and a punk sensibility. She was technologically adept. And yet, she was even more powerful because she was afraid, afraid that Neo wouldn't be the one, that the ship wouldn't survive its squidlet attack--but she tried anyway. She believed in her shipmates and honestly loved them, mourned their deaths and threw herself behind the long odds on their quest. Salander wouldn't have been on the Nebuchadnezzar because she can't get along with people, and if someone told her she wasn't the One, there's no way she would have self-sacrificed for some other One. Somehow, this seems like a problem.
There's also something a little over-the-top about the way that Salander's past, and her entanglement with the Swedish medico-legal system toys with her psyche and allows her disenfranchisement to fuel the entire storyline. We're led to believe that Salander hates men who hates women, and so would have fallen afoul of the traffickers and hit-men targeted in Millennium's expose, but really, she has personal reasons for all of her grudges, and makes new ones throughout her murder-suspect ordeal. She hates the traffickers because they are run by her father. She hates the police and the psychiatrists because they were paid off by associates of her father to keep her in custody so she couldn't reveal anyone's identity. Any sense of problems larger than herself, social injustices, or connections with other women are simply absent--and that's what keeps me from labeling Lisbeth Salander a feminist heroine.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
LOGICOMIX - Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou - Graphic Novel
There isn't much competition in the class of graphic novels about mathematics. Even so, LOGICOMIX is a meta-graphic novel about mathematics, which is rather unnecessary--the interludes in which the storytellers, inkers, artists, and mathematician consultants gather around and pontificate about various directions for their loose biography of Bertrand Russell seem stagy and coy, whereas the lives of the mathematicians themselves are sometimes tossed off too quickly and incidentally. The mathematics needs room to breathe, and tossing off years like calendar pages to show the agony that went into Russell and Whitehead's magnum opus unavoidably compresses the scope of their achievements.
The conceit of the work is that Russell, a logician-cum-pacifist, is giving a speech on logic at a university beset by pacifist protestors. Russell convinces them to hear his speech before he will agree to lend his support to their cause, and his speech becomes an oral history of his life and mathematical journey, even delving into his marital difficulties and alienating childhood. The university audience is almost completely forgotten, as the major players of twentieth-century mathematics are brought onstage to allude to their discoveries and provide fascinating and tortured mannikins who stalk the page with their madnesses and mathematical miracles in tow.
What these mathematical miracles really are is hard to say, as the format makes it particularly difficult to go into the mathematics with any depth. (At the same time as this reading, I was also in the midst of David Foster Wallace's book on infinity, which has many of the same players but much more room for academic complexity, which was greatly appreciated.) But, I have to consider audience, and it's true that many readers will be glad that the nuts and bolts of proofs are left out of the speech bubbles. Had I been reading this at twelve, I would undoubtedly have been excited and prompted to seek out the original texts referenced, which would have been a great boon for a budding mathematician. Providing this impetus may be the primary goal for LOGICOMIX in which case its mission is admirable, and I believe it would succeed.
But while the mathematics is glossed over in parts, the salacious bits are also handled with kid gloves and packed away quickly. Russell's parents' polyamory, Russell's love for Whitehead's younger wife, the man's own four wives, and his agonizing courtship of Alys, his first wife, and brushed over; Russell's family's bouts with schizophrenia are oft-mentioned but shown in-scene only twice. Russell's own son was schizophrenic, and his granddaughter burned herself alive; for all the time that LOGICOMIX's creators spend mulling over the themes of madness, they could have gussied up the story with a little more of this flashy human interest. Life isn't all mathematicians' conferences and invited university lectures.
The conceit of the work is that Russell, a logician-cum-pacifist, is giving a speech on logic at a university beset by pacifist protestors. Russell convinces them to hear his speech before he will agree to lend his support to their cause, and his speech becomes an oral history of his life and mathematical journey, even delving into his marital difficulties and alienating childhood. The university audience is almost completely forgotten, as the major players of twentieth-century mathematics are brought onstage to allude to their discoveries and provide fascinating and tortured mannikins who stalk the page with their madnesses and mathematical miracles in tow.
What these mathematical miracles really are is hard to say, as the format makes it particularly difficult to go into the mathematics with any depth. (At the same time as this reading, I was also in the midst of David Foster Wallace's book on infinity, which has many of the same players but much more room for academic complexity, which was greatly appreciated.) But, I have to consider audience, and it's true that many readers will be glad that the nuts and bolts of proofs are left out of the speech bubbles. Had I been reading this at twelve, I would undoubtedly have been excited and prompted to seek out the original texts referenced, which would have been a great boon for a budding mathematician. Providing this impetus may be the primary goal for LOGICOMIX in which case its mission is admirable, and I believe it would succeed.
But while the mathematics is glossed over in parts, the salacious bits are also handled with kid gloves and packed away quickly. Russell's parents' polyamory, Russell's love for Whitehead's younger wife, the man's own four wives, and his agonizing courtship of Alys, his first wife, and brushed over; Russell's family's bouts with schizophrenia are oft-mentioned but shown in-scene only twice. Russell's own son was schizophrenic, and his granddaughter burned herself alive; for all the time that LOGICOMIX's creators spend mulling over the themes of madness, they could have gussied up the story with a little more of this flashy human interest. Life isn't all mathematicians' conferences and invited university lectures.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
THE CHECKLIST MANIFESTO - Atul Gawande - Nonfiction
How are great ideas spread? Judging by the progress of social media over the past five years, you might say that facebook and twitter are the easiest ways to get a message out. But Atul Gawande is going back to the grand tradition of the pamphlet--or, in this case, the slim (less than 200 pages) manual for change. Gawande's causes in the past have been the medical education of the public, and the promotion of better surgical standards and practices, and here he hews close to his beaten path, championing the cause of, as he says, "the humble checklist." As an aid to surgical improvement, it might easily be overlooked, but his carefully compiled and cross-checked statistics make a convincing case for its indispensability at the operating table.
Checklists, as Gawande notes in a number of chapters, are used successfully to govern many of the complicated procedures we engage in as a society. On airplanes (and space shuttles), in construction projects, restaurant kitchens, and disaster response, checklists are already used with great success and acceptance. Surgery, however, doesn't have a good system in place for making sure that commonplace errors--errors which, crucial to Gawande's position as the WHO's point man for safe surgery worldwide, happen no matter where the surgery is taking place, or who is performing it--are discussed and prevented. Gawande shares some horror stories in his introduction, contributed by a friend of his working at a hospital in San Francisco. In one case, a patient was given an accidental overdose of a common supplement, and it stopped his heart on the operating table. In another case, a man's stab wound was dangerously ignored because doctors assumed it was caused by a short-bladed knife, when it was in fact caused by a bayonet-wielding halloween partier. In other, more commonly discussed cases, surgical tools or sponges are accidentally left inside patients, patients are given the wrong procedure, or given surgery on the wrong side of the body, or proper preparation is not carried out, and blood supplies or crash carts are not available. Anyone who has ever planned a birthday party or organized an international trip will know that the easiest way not to forget something is to write it down--and cross it off. And, Gawande proposes, this is exactly what medicine needs to do: come up with a short, simple checklist, to be implemented at three stages during the surgical procedure, involving simple checks and announcements of information meant to streamline and verify the operation.
This is not exactly reinventing the wheel, and clinical trials at individual hospitals, as well as WHO's Gawande-led efforts worldwide, have shown the efficacy of such a checklist. In fact, the people Gawande blames for impeding the implementation of surgical checklists are surgeons themselves. According to the author, one of the most renowned surgeons in the country, surgeons are pompous and proud, slow to change and easy to offend. Tell a surgeon that his quality of surgery will improve by using a checklist that asks everyone to agree upon what procedure will be performed, what the patient's medical details are, and whether the blood bank has been informed of the surgery, among other items, is apparently akin to asking a professional baseball player to confirm, before each game, that he intends to run the bases counter-clockwise. And yet, although baseball players never run the wrong way, the sheer amount of information that a doctor must keep in his head at once ensures that mistakes do happen, tools are left inside sutured incisions, and checklists can, and do, save lives. Gawande admits that even he was reluctant to use the checklist, thinking that his surgeries could hardly be better, but saw significant improvements when he did, and in all likelihood avoided killing a patient when an improbable mistake required immediate access to extra liters of blood.
The descriptions of all these near-death experiences deliver more chills per minute than a Stephen King novel, and Gawande knows exactly what he's doing. By tapping into our emotional responses to his idea, he is taking a checklist from a bureaucratic time-wasting device to an essential upgrade in life-saving technology: exactly what hospital administrators need to believe, and surgeons need to demand. A number of countries have already instituted checklists in every hospital, at every surgery, although the U.S. has not--perhaps something to ask for in healthcare reform?--and it would be good advice to ask your surgeon, if you can, whether he intends to use a checklist for your surgery…and to strongly suggest that he or she does.
Checklists, as Gawande notes in a number of chapters, are used successfully to govern many of the complicated procedures we engage in as a society. On airplanes (and space shuttles), in construction projects, restaurant kitchens, and disaster response, checklists are already used with great success and acceptance. Surgery, however, doesn't have a good system in place for making sure that commonplace errors--errors which, crucial to Gawande's position as the WHO's point man for safe surgery worldwide, happen no matter where the surgery is taking place, or who is performing it--are discussed and prevented. Gawande shares some horror stories in his introduction, contributed by a friend of his working at a hospital in San Francisco. In one case, a patient was given an accidental overdose of a common supplement, and it stopped his heart on the operating table. In another case, a man's stab wound was dangerously ignored because doctors assumed it was caused by a short-bladed knife, when it was in fact caused by a bayonet-wielding halloween partier. In other, more commonly discussed cases, surgical tools or sponges are accidentally left inside patients, patients are given the wrong procedure, or given surgery on the wrong side of the body, or proper preparation is not carried out, and blood supplies or crash carts are not available. Anyone who has ever planned a birthday party or organized an international trip will know that the easiest way not to forget something is to write it down--and cross it off. And, Gawande proposes, this is exactly what medicine needs to do: come up with a short, simple checklist, to be implemented at three stages during the surgical procedure, involving simple checks and announcements of information meant to streamline and verify the operation.
This is not exactly reinventing the wheel, and clinical trials at individual hospitals, as well as WHO's Gawande-led efforts worldwide, have shown the efficacy of such a checklist. In fact, the people Gawande blames for impeding the implementation of surgical checklists are surgeons themselves. According to the author, one of the most renowned surgeons in the country, surgeons are pompous and proud, slow to change and easy to offend. Tell a surgeon that his quality of surgery will improve by using a checklist that asks everyone to agree upon what procedure will be performed, what the patient's medical details are, and whether the blood bank has been informed of the surgery, among other items, is apparently akin to asking a professional baseball player to confirm, before each game, that he intends to run the bases counter-clockwise. And yet, although baseball players never run the wrong way, the sheer amount of information that a doctor must keep in his head at once ensures that mistakes do happen, tools are left inside sutured incisions, and checklists can, and do, save lives. Gawande admits that even he was reluctant to use the checklist, thinking that his surgeries could hardly be better, but saw significant improvements when he did, and in all likelihood avoided killing a patient when an improbable mistake required immediate access to extra liters of blood.
The descriptions of all these near-death experiences deliver more chills per minute than a Stephen King novel, and Gawande knows exactly what he's doing. By tapping into our emotional responses to his idea, he is taking a checklist from a bureaucratic time-wasting device to an essential upgrade in life-saving technology: exactly what hospital administrators need to believe, and surgeons need to demand. A number of countries have already instituted checklists in every hospital, at every surgery, although the U.S. has not--perhaps something to ask for in healthcare reform?--and it would be good advice to ask your surgeon, if you can, whether he intends to use a checklist for your surgery…and to strongly suggest that he or she does.
Friday, January 15, 2010
THE GLASS CASTLE - Jeannette Walls - Nonfiction
There are a lot of opportunities to lay blame in THE GLASS CASTLE, Walls's memoir recounting her inconceivably impoverished childhood. At the center are Walls's parents, by all accounts two psychopaths with no business having children who nevertheless had four; her mother a delusional narcissist and her father a megalomaniacal alcoholic, Jeannette and her siblings come off remarkably normal and mentally unscathed.
We might blame Jeannette's maternal grandmother, a relatively sane older woman in possession of a large amount of land in Texas and a home in Arizona, for not doing more to curb her daughter's downward spiral, or her grandchildren's maltreatment, beyond feeding them when they came to visit, and introducing them to the only stable home they would live in for their entire childhoods. We might blame Jeannette's friends and neighbors, the people who encountered the family in its peripatetic journey across the lower half of the U.S., and failed to intervene or contact authorities. However, the one encounter Jeannette remembers having with a bureaucrat from child services ends in a detente and is never followed up, leading us to another receptacle of blame: the authorities who would allow a family such as this to exist, to allow children to live in an unheated home with no electricity or running water, sleeping in cardboard boxes and wearing tarps as blankets to avoid the leaking ceiling.
We could blame Jeannette's teachers, who offered a few opportunities to her and her sisters and brother, but never truly seemed to grasp the magnitude of their recurring familial tragedy. We might blame everyone who came into contact with Jeannette's father, Rex Walls, recognized his alcoholism and mental illness, but did nothing to have him committed. We might blame Jeannette and her siblings themselves, for not running away, calling the police on their parents, or cutting off their parents' sources of funds for good--especially when those funds were earned by the children and stolen by the parents.
Each of these failures is individually unconscionable, and snowballs into such a compendium of monstrosity as has never been encountered in the history of a successful Park Avenue resident and MSNBC correspondent. The fact that Jeannette and her siblings were able to rise from rags to riches is less a story of an American Dream fulfilled, and more a proof of the existence of psychotically capricious luck. Jeannette's story should not be inspirational, it should be prohibitory: just as Kitty Genovese's tale would not have been heartwarming had she survived her attack, so should this extended tale of crimes against children be read not as a success story but as a warning, to be a better guardian of one's community, and to remember that poverty is not an indication of saintliness, but of the existence of underlying evil.
We might blame Jeannette's maternal grandmother, a relatively sane older woman in possession of a large amount of land in Texas and a home in Arizona, for not doing more to curb her daughter's downward spiral, or her grandchildren's maltreatment, beyond feeding them when they came to visit, and introducing them to the only stable home they would live in for their entire childhoods. We might blame Jeannette's friends and neighbors, the people who encountered the family in its peripatetic journey across the lower half of the U.S., and failed to intervene or contact authorities. However, the one encounter Jeannette remembers having with a bureaucrat from child services ends in a detente and is never followed up, leading us to another receptacle of blame: the authorities who would allow a family such as this to exist, to allow children to live in an unheated home with no electricity or running water, sleeping in cardboard boxes and wearing tarps as blankets to avoid the leaking ceiling.
We could blame Jeannette's teachers, who offered a few opportunities to her and her sisters and brother, but never truly seemed to grasp the magnitude of their recurring familial tragedy. We might blame everyone who came into contact with Jeannette's father, Rex Walls, recognized his alcoholism and mental illness, but did nothing to have him committed. We might blame Jeannette and her siblings themselves, for not running away, calling the police on their parents, or cutting off their parents' sources of funds for good--especially when those funds were earned by the children and stolen by the parents.
Each of these failures is individually unconscionable, and snowballs into such a compendium of monstrosity as has never been encountered in the history of a successful Park Avenue resident and MSNBC correspondent. The fact that Jeannette and her siblings were able to rise from rags to riches is less a story of an American Dream fulfilled, and more a proof of the existence of psychotically capricious luck. Jeannette's story should not be inspirational, it should be prohibitory: just as Kitty Genovese's tale would not have been heartwarming had she survived her attack, so should this extended tale of crimes against children be read not as a success story but as a warning, to be a better guardian of one's community, and to remember that poverty is not an indication of saintliness, but of the existence of underlying evil.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
ZEITOUN - Dave Eggers - Nonfiction
When I initially saw this book in stores, its illustrated tri-tone cover, inviting and off-beat packaging, and authorial affiliations had convinced me that this was going to be a very McSweeney's book--a hipster account of a quirky family (they're Muslims! they're entrepreneurs!) who survived the Katrina disaster and lived to tell a personal tale about New Orleans during the hurricane. Nothing on the cover or the flap blurbs gave me any real indication that the book was recounting an immediate and horrible case of social injustice, in which immoral authorities took advantage of a crisis situation to institute martial law and imprison innocent people indefinitely. And for all the book's power, for all the rage and sorrow it inspired in me, the fact that this book is not marketed as a piece of social justice reporting every bit as relevant as Alex Kotlowitz's explorations of inner-city slums, is a failure. This story needs to be heard, and it needs to be heard by exactly the type of people who haven't seen an issue of McSweeney's, and aren't going to know beforehand about Dave Eggers's Voice of Witness project.
The Zeitouns are a prototypical American family, even in their foreignness--Abdulrahman Zeitoun is from Syria and his wife, Kathy, is American; both are Muslim and raising four children, three daughters and a son from Kathy's first marriage. Kathy and Abdulrahman own and manage a painting and contracting business, and the family is prosperous and well-liked. Abdulrahman grew up around the sea, taking risks and learning trades, and it is in his nature to be obstinate, so when others begin evacuating New Orleans, he chooses to stay behind and secure the business and the rental buildings he manages, while Kathy and the children take shelter with Kathy's relatives in Baton Rouge.
Then, the storm hits. Abdulrahman is cut off from communication, electricity, and transport aside from a canoe he bought on a whim years ago. Nevertheless, he enjoys the peacefulness of a city partially submerged, and begins taking daily reconnaissance trips around the neighborhood, rescuing people trapped in flooded houses, bringing food to dogs left behind during evacuations, and scouting conditions. One of his rental properties still has working phone service, so he calls Kathy from the house every day at noon, along with his family in Syria and abroad, who are hearing reports of the devastation on the news.
Until, that is, one day when he fails to contact Kathy. By this time, Kathy's religious disagreements with her family have provoked her to take her children and escape further, to her best friend's home in Arizona. Both Kathy and her best friend are converted Muslims, and Kathy feels more accepted there. While waiting more than a week for any contact from her husband, Kathy fields the increasingly worried phone calls of Abdulrahman's relatives overseas, and tries any way she can to find a means of communication with the waterlogged city of New Orleans. Eventually, she hears from a traveling evangelist that Abdulrahman is in a jail outside New Orleans, for seemingly no reason.
The shift back to Abdulrahman's perspective marks the beginning of an enraging and deeply affecting story of one man's prejudicially-motivated arrest from inside a building he owns, his imprisonment at the hands of heartless guards in an outdoor asphalt-floored cage, his inability to place a phone call or receive medical attention, and his completely dehumanizing treatment at the hands of prison guards at multiple penal institutions. I deeply hope that everyone involved in Abdulrahman's treatment has been fired and court-martialed, and it is an understatement to say that reading this story makes me ashamed of my country's judicial system. As is seemingly always the case, people will perform ridiculously cruel acts when no one is looking, or when they can claim that they were just following orders, and it takes an extreme amount of strength to even try to move past descriptions of prisoners being maced at random, denied lawyers and means of communication, placed in overcrowded cells and given inadequate meals, and stolen from at every opportunity. It is frankly amazing, given the events recorded, that Abdulrahman even was released from prison, and the fact that he was able to rebuild his business and establish a fund meant to prevent his ordeal from happening again is amazing.
The two downsides to the narrative's focus on Abdulrahman personally are that his children's opinions and views are never consulted, and that the frequent mentions of Kathy's religion and her commitment to it come off as faintly perplexing, because we are given her perspective and justifications only sparingly. We understand that she is committed to her religion and values it over her family in Baton Rouge, but we don't particularly know why. Also interesting to me would have been a deeper explanation of how closely the Zeitouns' relationship mirrors that of more traditional Muslims in the Middle East, and to what extent they force their children to participate in the religion, but that mainly speaks to my interests in religious freedom, and distaste of forcing religion on children and minors. These concerns pale in comparison with the absolute necessity for more people to hear Abdulrahman's story, and Dave Eggers accomplishes the retelling sparely and masterfully, pushing me to finish the entire second half of the book in one sitting, entrancing me as effectively as if it were a thriller. In fact, it's more of a horror story.
The Zeitouns are a prototypical American family, even in their foreignness--Abdulrahman Zeitoun is from Syria and his wife, Kathy, is American; both are Muslim and raising four children, three daughters and a son from Kathy's first marriage. Kathy and Abdulrahman own and manage a painting and contracting business, and the family is prosperous and well-liked. Abdulrahman grew up around the sea, taking risks and learning trades, and it is in his nature to be obstinate, so when others begin evacuating New Orleans, he chooses to stay behind and secure the business and the rental buildings he manages, while Kathy and the children take shelter with Kathy's relatives in Baton Rouge.
Then, the storm hits. Abdulrahman is cut off from communication, electricity, and transport aside from a canoe he bought on a whim years ago. Nevertheless, he enjoys the peacefulness of a city partially submerged, and begins taking daily reconnaissance trips around the neighborhood, rescuing people trapped in flooded houses, bringing food to dogs left behind during evacuations, and scouting conditions. One of his rental properties still has working phone service, so he calls Kathy from the house every day at noon, along with his family in Syria and abroad, who are hearing reports of the devastation on the news.
Until, that is, one day when he fails to contact Kathy. By this time, Kathy's religious disagreements with her family have provoked her to take her children and escape further, to her best friend's home in Arizona. Both Kathy and her best friend are converted Muslims, and Kathy feels more accepted there. While waiting more than a week for any contact from her husband, Kathy fields the increasingly worried phone calls of Abdulrahman's relatives overseas, and tries any way she can to find a means of communication with the waterlogged city of New Orleans. Eventually, she hears from a traveling evangelist that Abdulrahman is in a jail outside New Orleans, for seemingly no reason.
The shift back to Abdulrahman's perspective marks the beginning of an enraging and deeply affecting story of one man's prejudicially-motivated arrest from inside a building he owns, his imprisonment at the hands of heartless guards in an outdoor asphalt-floored cage, his inability to place a phone call or receive medical attention, and his completely dehumanizing treatment at the hands of prison guards at multiple penal institutions. I deeply hope that everyone involved in Abdulrahman's treatment has been fired and court-martialed, and it is an understatement to say that reading this story makes me ashamed of my country's judicial system. As is seemingly always the case, people will perform ridiculously cruel acts when no one is looking, or when they can claim that they were just following orders, and it takes an extreme amount of strength to even try to move past descriptions of prisoners being maced at random, denied lawyers and means of communication, placed in overcrowded cells and given inadequate meals, and stolen from at every opportunity. It is frankly amazing, given the events recorded, that Abdulrahman even was released from prison, and the fact that he was able to rebuild his business and establish a fund meant to prevent his ordeal from happening again is amazing.
The two downsides to the narrative's focus on Abdulrahman personally are that his children's opinions and views are never consulted, and that the frequent mentions of Kathy's religion and her commitment to it come off as faintly perplexing, because we are given her perspective and justifications only sparingly. We understand that she is committed to her religion and values it over her family in Baton Rouge, but we don't particularly know why. Also interesting to me would have been a deeper explanation of how closely the Zeitouns' relationship mirrors that of more traditional Muslims in the Middle East, and to what extent they force their children to participate in the religion, but that mainly speaks to my interests in religious freedom, and distaste of forcing religion on children and minors. These concerns pale in comparison with the absolute necessity for more people to hear Abdulrahman's story, and Dave Eggers accomplishes the retelling sparely and masterfully, pushing me to finish the entire second half of the book in one sitting, entrancing me as effectively as if it were a thriller. In fact, it's more of a horror story.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
CHERRY - Mary Karr - Nonfiction
Oh, Mary Karr. Upon hearing of the release of her most recent memoir, LIT, I decided to revisit her first two memoirs (or perhaps, the first two installments of an ongoing memoir), CHERRY and THE LIAR'S CLUB. The library chose to give me CHERRY first, which was ironic because I used to own a copy of CHERRY, but gave it away when I confused it with BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA and thought I had already read it. As it turns out, CHERRY isn't the child-abuse and sexual molestation story that BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA is, although it does foreshadow (backshadow?) an earlier childhood sexual assault which is presumably detailed in THE LIAR'S CLUB. CHERRY glances over Mary's childhood, and focuses primarily on her pubescent life, from the time she enters middle school to her leaving home for California after high school.
Karr's adolescence is entertaining enough, containing the sorts of remembered details and specific conversations that one doubts actually persist with anyone through decades of life, and most likely reflect a biased recollection; given this personal bias, it is commendable how disagreeable Mary often comes off. Initially, her escapades are relatable and sympathetic. She and her sister look for their depressed mother when she fails to return home one night; Mary fantasizes over a boy in her class who seems, as they do at that age, impossibly perfect; Mary befriends an older girl in the neighborhood who is equally spirited, and then has to come to terms with her friend's desertion upon entering high school and becoming involved with more grown-up pursuits (here represented by being a candy striper.)
Then Mary goes to high school, and all hell breaks loose--or rather, doesn't. Despite run-ins with the predatorily deranged principal, and an overnight lockup after being arrested with a group of teens carrying marijuana, Mary remains mostly unscathed, and spends her time lounging in her best friend's living room, reading novels and thinking of poetry. In fact, the dreamy picture such a literarily-minded young woman conjures has to be somewhat rose-tinted by memory; Mary is an indifferent student who spends all her time with drug addicts, going surfing along the Texan gulf coast, and skinny-dipping further inland. She is left to her own devices (her parents' explicit parenting philosophy being that whatever she is physically capable of doing, she is old enough to do) and miraculously this seems to work out. It is astonishing how lax her parents are about her activities, as reflected in the introductory scene of Mary's departure, in which her father spends about five minutes thinking about the fact that he may never see his daughter again, and then goes back to watching a game show. We get the sense that her parents have problems of their own; Mary's mother is going back to college for the degree she always wanted, but is plagued by depression and is unhappy in her marriage, while Mary's father seems continually misunderstood and sidelined in her family's dramatic existence. In the midst of this, Mary is preoccupied with LSD.
Mary's story never quite comes full circle; we know that she and a group of friends leave for California, but the last scene we are given in the otherwise chronological narrative is of her and a different set of friends visiting a bar so far on the wrong side of the tracks that it may well be served by a different rail line. The bar is predominately African-American, ambiguously gendered, drugged-up, and full of a sort of incoherently sketched menace that really doesn't make sense, given the drugged-up and ambiguously sexual nature of Mary's previous pursuits. Yet, this trip to the bar and the successful extrication of themselves from it at the end of the night has the importance of a battle to Mary, who recounts it through her best friend's window, insisting that the moral of the story is "there's no place like home." Of course, Mary leaves home shortly after, so the lesson may be lost, as many other lessons seem to be, including that very brief jail stint, and the spectacle of her mother, educated but failing to find her own way.
I don't read much memoir, but Mary Karr has certainly made an impact on the genre. Her childhood skates the edge of being exploitatively bad (see Dorothy Allison, above), and manages to provide some redeeming life lessons in pluck, perseverance, and family, which do the reader the favor of being lightly handled. And yet, on the outskirts of this memoir are issues of privilege hinted at but not addressed: why are Mary and her friends so uncomfortable in the bar? Why does Mary get out of jail with a slap on the wrist, and not wonder or inquire as to the punishments of the friends she was brought in with? Why does Mary seem so oblivious to her best friend's dire financial circumstances, when I can certainly remember being well aware of these issues at a much younger age? Perhaps these omissions foreshadow the stumbling blocks in LIT, which describes the road from Mary's ambition of being a poet and memoirist to her realization of these very occupations.
Karr's adolescence is entertaining enough, containing the sorts of remembered details and specific conversations that one doubts actually persist with anyone through decades of life, and most likely reflect a biased recollection; given this personal bias, it is commendable how disagreeable Mary often comes off. Initially, her escapades are relatable and sympathetic. She and her sister look for their depressed mother when she fails to return home one night; Mary fantasizes over a boy in her class who seems, as they do at that age, impossibly perfect; Mary befriends an older girl in the neighborhood who is equally spirited, and then has to come to terms with her friend's desertion upon entering high school and becoming involved with more grown-up pursuits (here represented by being a candy striper.)
Then Mary goes to high school, and all hell breaks loose--or rather, doesn't. Despite run-ins with the predatorily deranged principal, and an overnight lockup after being arrested with a group of teens carrying marijuana, Mary remains mostly unscathed, and spends her time lounging in her best friend's living room, reading novels and thinking of poetry. In fact, the dreamy picture such a literarily-minded young woman conjures has to be somewhat rose-tinted by memory; Mary is an indifferent student who spends all her time with drug addicts, going surfing along the Texan gulf coast, and skinny-dipping further inland. She is left to her own devices (her parents' explicit parenting philosophy being that whatever she is physically capable of doing, she is old enough to do) and miraculously this seems to work out. It is astonishing how lax her parents are about her activities, as reflected in the introductory scene of Mary's departure, in which her father spends about five minutes thinking about the fact that he may never see his daughter again, and then goes back to watching a game show. We get the sense that her parents have problems of their own; Mary's mother is going back to college for the degree she always wanted, but is plagued by depression and is unhappy in her marriage, while Mary's father seems continually misunderstood and sidelined in her family's dramatic existence. In the midst of this, Mary is preoccupied with LSD.
Mary's story never quite comes full circle; we know that she and a group of friends leave for California, but the last scene we are given in the otherwise chronological narrative is of her and a different set of friends visiting a bar so far on the wrong side of the tracks that it may well be served by a different rail line. The bar is predominately African-American, ambiguously gendered, drugged-up, and full of a sort of incoherently sketched menace that really doesn't make sense, given the drugged-up and ambiguously sexual nature of Mary's previous pursuits. Yet, this trip to the bar and the successful extrication of themselves from it at the end of the night has the importance of a battle to Mary, who recounts it through her best friend's window, insisting that the moral of the story is "there's no place like home." Of course, Mary leaves home shortly after, so the lesson may be lost, as many other lessons seem to be, including that very brief jail stint, and the spectacle of her mother, educated but failing to find her own way.
I don't read much memoir, but Mary Karr has certainly made an impact on the genre. Her childhood skates the edge of being exploitatively bad (see Dorothy Allison, above), and manages to provide some redeeming life lessons in pluck, perseverance, and family, which do the reader the favor of being lightly handled. And yet, on the outskirts of this memoir are issues of privilege hinted at but not addressed: why are Mary and her friends so uncomfortable in the bar? Why does Mary get out of jail with a slap on the wrist, and not wonder or inquire as to the punishments of the friends she was brought in with? Why does Mary seem so oblivious to her best friend's dire financial circumstances, when I can certainly remember being well aware of these issues at a much younger age? Perhaps these omissions foreshadow the stumbling blocks in LIT, which describes the road from Mary's ambition of being a poet and memoirist to her realization of these very occupations.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
THE BOOKSHOP - Penelope Fitzgerald - Fiction
When a book is recommended to you on the basis of its near-total lack of plot and exemplary attention to personal detail, you probably know whether you're going to like it or not. This is one of those books. (I was astonished to find that my classmate Angelene hates Nicholson Baker's MEZZANINE for exactly those reasons, the reasons for which I love it.) Penelope Fitzgerald's protagonist, Florence Green, is a middle-aged woman who lives in a remote seaside town in England. She worked in a bookshop as a clerk when she was younger, and finding herself unemployed, decides she is of an age to start her own bookshop, moving to a large, sodden old fisherman's house that has long stood empty, and transforming the downstairs into the town's first bookshop. The problem is, the town's reigning matriarch has pipe dreams of an Arts Centre (to serve, it seems, not much purpose; she recruits members of her family to lobby for it, and a lazy but locally situated BBC correspondent to be in charge of running it, but has no plans of her own for the type or timbre of art to go therein.)
This is the entirety of the action: Green takes two steps forward and one step back, then stagnates, then loses everything as her rival's machinations catch up with her, and she is hounded by child labor authorities for letting a ten-year-old girl help her with the stock, hounded by real estate authorities after a law passes allowing local governments to reclaim old buildings of historic importance, and hounded by her paternalistic attorney and bank manager, who are frothing at the mouth to see her fail. Her ambitions are not too great, but she loses track of who her enemies are, and allows herself to feel a measure of pride, and is ultimately brought down by pettiness. A local elder, perhaps more respected than the plotting matriarch, makes last-minute efforts to support Florence and argue her case, but he is, in a short and supremely depressing scene, struck dead immediately after delivering his message.
THE BOOKSHOP is entirely unsentimental, which works in its favor, for in a book this size, this many depressing events would be entirely overwhelming if rendered with emotion. Instead, the events are relayed with a flat, almost deadpan tone that greatly suits their increasingly desperate irony, and inherent condemnation of human character. This is a book that in length resembles post-modernism, and in scope and attention to detail resembles the best of nineteenth-century fiction. Another reader dubbed it "Edith Wharton in East Anglia" and I entirely agree.
This is the entirety of the action: Green takes two steps forward and one step back, then stagnates, then loses everything as her rival's machinations catch up with her, and she is hounded by child labor authorities for letting a ten-year-old girl help her with the stock, hounded by real estate authorities after a law passes allowing local governments to reclaim old buildings of historic importance, and hounded by her paternalistic attorney and bank manager, who are frothing at the mouth to see her fail. Her ambitions are not too great, but she loses track of who her enemies are, and allows herself to feel a measure of pride, and is ultimately brought down by pettiness. A local elder, perhaps more respected than the plotting matriarch, makes last-minute efforts to support Florence and argue her case, but he is, in a short and supremely depressing scene, struck dead immediately after delivering his message.
THE BOOKSHOP is entirely unsentimental, which works in its favor, for in a book this size, this many depressing events would be entirely overwhelming if rendered with emotion. Instead, the events are relayed with a flat, almost deadpan tone that greatly suits their increasingly desperate irony, and inherent condemnation of human character. This is a book that in length resembles post-modernism, and in scope and attention to detail resembles the best of nineteenth-century fiction. Another reader dubbed it "Edith Wharton in East Anglia" and I entirely agree.
Friday, January 1, 2010
INHERENT VICE - Thomas Pynchon - Fiction
In 2001, TIME magazine named Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth the best American novelists of the century (or was it the best living American novelist, or the best "contemporary" American novelist? Something of that flavor) and I, being 13 at the time and skeptical but literarily promiscuous, decided to read more of them. I was already familiar with Roth from the likes of PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT and I MARRIED A COMMUNIST, but I hadn't come across Pynchon. (Perhaps the author's famously reclusive nature had something to do with it, but more likely, none of the places I was going for literary recommendations were apt to suggest V or MASON AND DIXON.) I started with THE CRYING OF LOT 49, and richly appreciated the entendre-laden character names, otherworldly plot contrivances (the shadow postal service!) and story-lines that dipped in and out of coherence, set among swarthy Californian climes. On a superficial level, Pynchon was obviously penning a send-up of the hardboiled detective novel, but as in every Pynchon novel, there were a skyscraper's worth of levels, and this was just one.
Even after the heady experiences of reading VINELAND and GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, I still think that THE CRYING OF LOT 49 is Pynchon's best novel, and in many ways INHERENT VICE revisits the same territory, with its private-eye central character, Doc Sportello, a missing real-estate mogul, a hippie band, a shadowy syndicate-type organization, and a crazy boutique doctor. (Notably, the novel's publicity is updated; Pynchon recorded the voice-over for a video introduction to the book [YouTube video here] in which he puts on a slight accent for his first-person narration as Doc Sportello himself.)
The plot is, as always, multi-threaded and fascinating despite indications that it is not trying too hard in the suspense bracket. Doc Sportello is an easy-going hippie, familiar with all sorts of illegal substances, but a sometime-accomplice of the local LAPD, and something closer to a frenemy to Bigfoot Bjornsen, the detective who sometimes runs him in on possession charges, and sometimes turns to him for advice. Doc is supported by a cast of hippies and hippie hangers-on, including such throwaway jokes as a paranoid stoner neighbor named Denis (rhymes with penis) and a lawyer companion named Sauncho. Don Quixote isn't a bad comparison for this detective, who ends up chasing leads into the desert (well, Las Vegas) even as it turns out that his involvement is itself a setup, and the original crime of kidnapping was something closer to the work of a federal protection program.
It isn't exactly worth recounting the entire cast of characters and their elaborate connections to one another; it suffices to say that discovering this web through the narrative is enjoyable and teeters just short of being difficult to keep in mind all at once. Pynchon has a well-known affinity for the hippie movement, and accordingly his portrayal of Doc is likable and recognizable. Despite being something similar to Kakutani derisively labels "Pynchon Lite," by which I assume she means readable and accessible, INHERENT VICE is an excellent introduction to Pynchon, despite being his most recent work. For any thirteen-year-olds out there who may be about to give Pynchon a try, I'd recommend it.
Even after the heady experiences of reading VINELAND and GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, I still think that THE CRYING OF LOT 49 is Pynchon's best novel, and in many ways INHERENT VICE revisits the same territory, with its private-eye central character, Doc Sportello, a missing real-estate mogul, a hippie band, a shadowy syndicate-type organization, and a crazy boutique doctor. (Notably, the novel's publicity is updated; Pynchon recorded the voice-over for a video introduction to the book [YouTube video here] in which he puts on a slight accent for his first-person narration as Doc Sportello himself.)
The plot is, as always, multi-threaded and fascinating despite indications that it is not trying too hard in the suspense bracket. Doc Sportello is an easy-going hippie, familiar with all sorts of illegal substances, but a sometime-accomplice of the local LAPD, and something closer to a frenemy to Bigfoot Bjornsen, the detective who sometimes runs him in on possession charges, and sometimes turns to him for advice. Doc is supported by a cast of hippies and hippie hangers-on, including such throwaway jokes as a paranoid stoner neighbor named Denis (rhymes with penis) and a lawyer companion named Sauncho. Don Quixote isn't a bad comparison for this detective, who ends up chasing leads into the desert (well, Las Vegas) even as it turns out that his involvement is itself a setup, and the original crime of kidnapping was something closer to the work of a federal protection program.
It isn't exactly worth recounting the entire cast of characters and their elaborate connections to one another; it suffices to say that discovering this web through the narrative is enjoyable and teeters just short of being difficult to keep in mind all at once. Pynchon has a well-known affinity for the hippie movement, and accordingly his portrayal of Doc is likable and recognizable. Despite being something similar to Kakutani derisively labels "Pynchon Lite," by which I assume she means readable and accessible, INHERENT VICE is an excellent introduction to Pynchon, despite being his most recent work. For any thirteen-year-olds out there who may be about to give Pynchon a try, I'd recommend it.
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