ToB Pre-Bracket Round: LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson vs. WOKE UP LONELY by Fiona Maazel

I love The Morning News, and I love the Tournament of Books, so shortly after the longlist was announced, I decided I would read all the books in the tournament and write my own bracket commentary. This was around new year’s.

Then I read “Tampa” so I was already off to a rocky start when the shortlist was announced. My books were not provided by Powell’s, but I did secure some of them from a lovely website with very decently priced e-books, which I can share with interested parties. As of this writing, I am still reading The Luminaries and The Good Lord Bird. But I’m going to get it done. And rather than beat around the bush, I’m going to tell you now: If I had to choose a winner of the entire tournament, I would pick The Son.

But that commentary comes later, and for now:

ToB Pre-Bracket Round: LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson vs. WOKE UP LONELY by Fiona Maazel

I’m a scientist, so I need to state my conflicts of interest before I can write my paper: Fiona Maazel is one of my favorite authors. I came into this round with a strong bias, and I still believe it shouldn’t have been the pre-bracket round—Maazel and Atkinson both deserve a fully vested bracket—but I really, really love Fiona Maazel. When I heard there was a release date for WOKE UP LONELY, I requested from my facebook friends (the personal ether) an advanced review copy for Christmas. Turns out no one I know is in with Graywolf Press, but this was a book I bought on the day it was released, and gladly. I read the first half of it twice, because I didn’t want it to be over too soon. Then I read the entire thing on a plane ride (one of the reasons I have the luxury of reading all of the ToB books is that my job puts me on an airplane for five hours a week) and I loved it. Maazel has a similar writing temperament to Amy Hempel—short, almost sarcastically witty turns of phrase, directness that conceals a great deal of artistry, and characters with unexplored depths and side plots shooting off of them like auras. WOKE UP LONELY involves a social networking cult, North Korea, chemical control of the weather, a woman who runs her own two-person CIA, and an underground economy of spas, sex clubs, and MMA fights. And each of these is a sideline to the primary story, which is about love within a family, a story told through the central couple, Thurlow Dan and Esme Haas (great names? Great names) as well as through the four operatives Esme enlists to infiltrate Dan’s mansion. Esme and Dan came together under inauspicious circumstances, and they keep coming together over and over again—when one is impersonating Kim Jong Il, when one is carrying a baby as cover for a spying operation, when one is running from the law and the only place they can be together as a family is in a radio dish in the forest—and these reunions carry less anguish than anticipation. Maazel has explored these themes before; LAST LAST CHANCE, her previous novel, also shows families breaking apart and coming together again under apocalyptic conditions. It’s a type of wish fulfillment—even under the worst conditions for life, those who are meant to be together will be together—and it also relieves the reader from the pressure of worrying that something terrible will actually happen (it will and it won’t), which brings me to LIFE AFTER LIFE.

Do I have a history with Kate Atkinson? Not particularly. I’ve read a few of her novels (WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS and STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG come to mind) and enjoyed them. I had heard a lot about LIFE AFTER LIFE before even beginning this project, and it lived up to the hype—allowing Ursula Todd to meet untimely end after untimely end and then resurrecting her to live a slightly different life each time is a novel and amusing trope that could have continued on for twice as long and remained entertaining. Ursula gets to best a rapist, a child murderer, and an abusive husband, and then she kills Hitler—wish fulfillment at its finest. A skillfully drawn cast of supporting characters, primarily family, add to her sometimes flat characterization. I still feel that I know much more about her aunt Izzie’s internal life than I do hers, for example, even as we are shown her painstaking bouts of psychoanalysis attempting to make sense of her vague understanding of her past lives. Perhaps it was intentional, but I didn’t feel that Ursula was very quick-witted; she is never excited about her perhaps mystical powers, only vaguely trepidatious. She has some of the right political feelings and some of the wrong ones—she befriends Eva Braun in a few lives, and sometimes fails to see the evil in Germany until it is too late—but for all the tedious episodes in London mid-Blitz, the primary impression I had of her character was that she is tired. Tired of being alone, tired of living through the war, tired of not understanding her memories of other times, places, and people, and tired of feeling the need to save others from fates she doesn’t quite understand. It’s a very realistic reaction, but not one that made for an exciting read. Whereas I want to spend more time with every one of WOKE UP LONELY’s characters (and to read Thurlow Dan’s writings for the Helix), I’m not interested in fleshing out a particular instance of Ursula Todd’s life. I have the true crime aficionado’s affection for seeing all the various ways she expires, but, as is quite possibly Atkinson’s intention, the expiry date is never mourned.

My winner is WOKE UP LONELY.

Unfortunately for me, the TOB continues on with LIFE AFTER LIFE, so I’ll be writing more on it next week or so.

Read the Tournament round here. 

NINE INCHES - Tom Perrotta - Short Stories

I received this book through Goodreads First Reads, and I'm still excited that I did! I loved "Little Children", "The Leftovers", and "Election", so getting a book that I was looking forward to three months ahead of schedule was a lovely present. 

Perrotta's short stories are about loss, disappointment, failure, and the people who bring these conditions upon themselves. Other reviewers have called them sad, but I'm not the best judge of that. I love to read a story and then think, ouch. 

These stories don't have twists so much as they have sinkholes. We're given a recognizable premise--a high school teacher, a football player with a concussion, a retiree with a loveless marriage--and a problem--a poor performance review, a season on the sidelines, an air compressor inconveniently in the neighbor's yard--and slowly, grievances pile up, bad decisions are made, and eventually someone does something so delightfully and painfully inappropriate that the original problem isn't solved, exactly, but becomes irrelevant in the face of the new difficulty.

The arrangement of stories in this collection also plays with the reader's expectations. The first story sets up some great problems--a stalker cop, a dead-end job, being the only one of your friends not accepted to college--but these all turn out to be straw men; the real problem is only that which the narrator brings upon himself, and it turns out that this isn't the first time he's done so. The subsequent stories continue in this vein, presenting the reader first with a very interesting problem--like the homophobic dad in "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face", whose issues with his son are left unresolved--and then swerving around it to a different, more complex problem. In this way, every wrinkle that comes up seems as if it could be the crux of the story, until one actually is. In "Kiddie Pool", we think the problem will be that the main character is caught trespassing. Then, we think he'll have a heart attack. Eventually, he's the one to discover something that casts decades of his past in doubt.

This formula of delayed expectation makes the final story in the collection, "The All-Night Party", much better than it would be alone. Will the problem stem from the teenagers sleeping together? The drunk, rejected girl? The self-important cop? The frazzled mother who hits her daughter's classmate? As it turns out...none of the above. There is no problem. As far as we know, everything turns out fine. It's quite startling.

FRIENDS WITH KIDS - a film! - Jennifer Westfeldt

These days there may be more forces conspiring to prevent women from *not* having babies--through assaults on abortion, birth control, and sexual assault laws--than those preventing women from having babies. Nevertheless, FRIENDS WITH KIDS brings us the story of Julie, who is reproductively stymied by her lack of success at dating. In the world of this film, adoption is not an option, nor is single motherhood. Julie wants to have a child with a man who will fully take on the duty of supporting her child 50%, but the only man who will support Julie's decision--Jason, her best friend since college--is a man who protests, early and often, that he has absolutely no romantic interest in her. However unrealistic these protestations sound, and look (for Jennifer Westfeldt, in a simultaneous director-producer-actress role for this film, is a pretty woman), we're made to believe them, if only by Julie's complete acceptance.

And Julie has no romantic feelings for Jason, which is somewhat easier to believe, given that Jason is self-centered, piggish, and frequently, albeit wittily, rude. What Julie sees in Jason is left mostly up to the viewer's imagination, but whether Julie can have a child with Jason is a concern swept completely aside. Not only do we leap from a single act of coitus to a hospital delivery room, but the cost, in time and money, of the care and upbringing of their offspring, Joe, is never raised as an issue. Julie and Jason's friends who live in Brooklyn offer a veiled reference to the monetary sacrifices of reproduction, but Julie's vague job--working for a philanthropist--and Jason's, as an advertising executive, seem entirely sufficient.

It may be asking too much for a romantic comedy to engage with social issues deeper than the rift between a man's desire to date young, attractive, vapid women, and a woman's desire to date a strong, competent, and mature man. Certainly the audience understands from the start what will happen to this pair, and hardly sees Megan Fox's glib dancer or Kurt, a divorced contractor, as real competition. The tension is played as equal, between Jason's relationship, which is overtly sexual and little else, and Julie's relationship with Kurt, which shies away from sex even on their couples ski retreat and is portrayed as relentlessly, solidly healthy. Disappointingly, Julie's sexuality is shown as neurotic and incidental to her passions for motherhood and dressing up, while Jason's sexuality is shown as natural and exuberant, if overweening. This is a profoundly imbalanced match, and while we can understand Julie's disapproval of Jason's new paramour as friendly concern as well as jealousy, Jason's displeasure with Julie's new relationship only sounds petty: he takes offense at her characterization of his lacking sexual prowess, but all we've heard from him is how little he wants--and wanted--to have sex with Julie in the first place. How much more interesting this juxtaposition of Julie and Jason's "new people" could have been if Jason were dating someone who wasn't inferior to either him or Julie, in education or maturity, but still had values wholly different from Julie's.

The film strays from its titular description after the first reel, focusing more on Friends With Marriages and the difficulties therein than on the actual children involved. The real work of parenting seems to be more like babysitting: getting a kid to be quiet, making him eat his breakfast, finding someone to watch him while you go on a date. Julie's concern about Joe's schooling is brought up after it has already been addressed, by her decision to move into the district of the best public school in Brooklyn. Jason has already offered to pay for private school, but Julie wants to be farther away from Jason, even if that means less control over the half of Joe's upbringing she outsources to him.

If something positive can be said about FRIENDS WITH KIDS' engagement with social issues, its acceptance of nontraditional--if rich, white, and heterosexual--family structures is admirable. Jon Hamm, taking a small detour from his role as an alcoholic, sex-obsessed asshole on MAD MEN to play an alcoholic, sex-obsessed asshole on the big screen, is concerned about what Julie and Jason will tell Joe when he's older, about his parents, his conception, and his place in their larger families. But the most obvious answer is that they'll just tell him the truth, and, as Maya Rudolph's character points out, he'll be no different from the children with two mommies, or only one parent, or any of a host of other child-rearing situations that are becoming more and more common. Joe has two rich, loving, competent parents. Whether he'll be traumatized later over being conceived out of wedlock seems incidental. If his parents' luck is any indication, he'll be unable to make any serious mistakes at all; Westfeldt leaves no second chance untaken.

Highly Personal Bookstore Review - McIntyre & Moore's - Cambridge (and Somerville) MA

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.

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.

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.

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.