Tournament of Books Round Two: HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA by Mohsin Hamid vs. A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING by Ruth Ozeki

For the first time in the tournament, you are going to be reviewing two books about which you cared relatively little. It wasn't so much the formal experimentation in structure (using second-person narration throughout, or playing fast and loose with quantum mechanics and a self-titled narrator), but more the history of both: you'd read THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST and found it okay, but not even the best novel about Pakistan published at around the same time (A CASE OF EXPLODING MANGOES, anyone?). You'd read Ruth Ozeki's previous work (MY YEAR OF MEATS and ALL OVER CREATION) and found them tediously preachy. Not only do you basically feel that to be anti-GMO (like AOC) is to be anti-science, and to be anti-middle-American-farmer (like MYoM) is to be unbearably pretentious, but the books struck too treacly a tone for you. Their characters felt unreal, the way that the Three Little Bears feel unreal.

You certainly pushed through and read both; HTGFRIRA took maybe two hours, while ATFTTB took much longer, and therefore had more to offer. HTGFRIRA read like the outline for a novel you would have enjoyed reading, probably, maybe more so if the main character had ever taken a real risk. How did he get to be a presumably shrewd businessperson while having no idea how to speak to a woman he's infatuated with? How did he end up in this marriage, with these children, without knowing anything important about his wife? How did his business partner manage to abscond with the funds he had raised to buy another company? Wouldn't that be put in escrow? Aren't there financial safeguards for this kind of thing? Was all that just a smoke and mirror plot device to get the main character finally to a place where he could maybe speak to the woman he likes without having to maintain appearances? These are the types of questions you asked yourself after reading.

The types of questions you had while reading ATFTTB were more like: Does a grown woman talking about a crowded beach actually say "I wonder if there's something else going on. This sucks. We're going to have to park and walk"? Or did the author get confused about which of her narrators was supposed to be the angst-ridden teenager and which the angst-ridden middle-ager? Are these supposed emails with a supposed Stanford psychology professor not the most fake correspondence ever written? Let me quote extensively:

In stilted English, he explained that he was originally from Tokyo and had been headhunted to work on human-computer interface design. He loved his work and had no problem with the computer end of things. His problem, he said, was the human factor. He didn’t understand human beings very well, so he’d come to the Psychology Department at Stanford to ask for help.I was astonished, but curious, too. Silicon Valley is not Tokyo, and it would be natural for him to be suffering from culture shock or having problems relating to his co-workers. “What kind of help do you want?” I asked.He sat with his head bowed, gathering his words. When he looked up, I could see the strain in his face.“I want to know, what is human conscience?”“Human consciousness?” I asked, not hearing him correctly.“No,” he said. “Con-sci-ence. When I search for this word in the English dictionary, I find that it is from Latin. Con means ‘with,’ and science means ‘knowing.’ So conscience means ‘with knowing.’ With science.”“I’ve never quite thought about it that way,” I told him. “But I’m sure you’re right.”

Oh dear Lord, you think. Spare me the Linguistics 101 crap and get to the point, no computer engineer would ever think that the best way to solve a problem is to go to the nearest university, find any professor basically at random, knock on their door, and expect they're going to engage with you on a problem of semantics. Apparently the literary world is long overdue for a novel about the realities of academia if this is the common impression of professors.

There were spots in ATFTTB that were interesting and wicked; the suicide grove/park, Naoko's torture of her classmate to get the information she needs, the idea that an entire classroom would decide to not only deny the existence of a fellow student but to hold a funeral for that student in her presence and film it and put it on YouTube. But there were parts that just felt sloppy and rushed (and you are really glad the cat didn't die, because you honestly would have had to put the book down if the cat had died.)

Here's how it seemed to you in the end: the Ruth-narrator and the Ruth-author both seem pretty open that this novel was written after having spent a long time with Ruth's mother, who had Alzheimer's and passed away. The mother, at least for Ruth-narrator, remained somewhat inscrutable; she made friends with the guy who managed the dump, enjoyed going to the "free store", seemed to reinforce some of Ruth's husband's annoying habits, and never came through as the font of maternal sagacity that Ruth obviously expected from a Female Elder, from someone to whom one was Paying Respect. Naoko's tale, then, is more wish fulfillment (see also, LIFE AFTER LIFE). Naoko's great-grandmother is not only a koan-spouting Yoda of an old lady, she's also a Buddhist nun, something of a feminist counter-culturalist, and imparts a shit-ton of cryptic wisdom and family history to Naoko before she dies. To you, at least, it is fairly obvious that this is what Ruth wishes caring for her mother had been like. That her mother had taken the time to count the moments, smell the roses, whatever, rather than being enchanted by a good deal at the dump. That she had continued to care for the world outside her in a religious and self-sacrificing way, rather than forgetting to watch the news and being more interested in the wilderness of a small, cold island. That she had saved the day and brought the family closer together while simultaneously exposing family secrets and WWII intrigue. And these wishes kind of cement your feelings about sanctimoniousness in general: that behind these self-righteous postures is just an unwillingness to engage with the world the way it actually is. An unwillingness to accept that "issues" like genetically modified foods can be manufactured controversy, and that eating American beef is not 100% bad and slovenly 100% of the time. Laziness in the same sense that explaining away the lack of an ending to Naoko's story with some poorly-explained dross about Schrodinger's Cat (again? Again? This comes up so many goddamn times in literature, try reading more than one popular science book to get a physics example to use that is not goddamn Schrodinger's Cat) is lazy.

Your winner, then, is HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA, not because it was particularly great, but because you really didn't like A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING.

Of course, this being the Tournament of Books, you are now 0 for 3, and the ToB round winner is A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING. Further exposition on its faults next week.

Read the Tournament decision here.