Tournament of Books Round Five: THE LOWLAND by Jhumpa Lahiri vs. ELEANOR & PARK by Rainbow Rowell

When I told a friend I was reading THE LOWLAND by Jhumpa Lahiri, she nodded with recognition and told me, “I loved THE INTERPRETER OF MALADIES.” And I thought about it, but I didn’t correct her because I wasn’t entirely sure. So I have that mark against me: I can’t always tell apart our modern Indian female novelists.

When I picked up ELEANOR & PARK it took me a couple of days to realize that the author is named after a sushi favorite. I don’t think this affected my enjoyment of the book. I love sushi.

Both of these novels deal with the significance of small intimacies and sweeping acts of love. Eleanor and Park are at that age where falling in love is immersive, cataclysmically important, and confusingly pixelated into individual moments of connection: liking the same song, holding hands on the bus, sharing earbuds. The novel’s descriptions of how these moments feel were resonant and delicate, and the overarching plot almost didn’t matter—Eleanor has an evil stepfather, a host of pesky younger siblings, and a downtrodden, ineffective mother. Park’s father is ex-military and wishes his son were more macho; his mom a Korean immigrant who runs a beauty salon out of their garage and supports Park’s experimentation with eyeliner. It’s not that these characters were stereotypes, but their importance to the story was obviously secondary to the importance of Eleanor and Park’s budding relationship, and nascent self-confidence driven by reliance on one another. There are three models of co-dependency in the relationships in this book, and like Goldilocks, one is too little, one is not enough, and one is just right. I’m glad that young adults are reading this book, because Park and Eleanor’s relationship is healthy and kind, supportive and daring and charming and funny. Like THE FAULT IN OUR STARS of last year’s ToB, this is a teen couple that makes me like teen couples, and it was a pleasure to read.

THE LOWLAND is so, so beautifully written. Reading it felt like sinking into a nostalgic memory, and following these characters’ lives from young childhood to old age gave a rich, and very real, sense of their lives. The sensory descriptions of neighborhoods—a swampland-adjacent cul-de-sac in India, seaside Providence, Rhode Island, and a co-op in Brooklyn—were each so lovingly and particularly described that they took on the grandeur of Paris or Bora Bora.

This loving care paid to places and objects (books, furniture, food, paintings) is parceled out more parsimoniously to characters. These characters desert each other at pivotal moments—Udayan by not warning his young bride of the danger that he is in, and the danger he puts her in to further his political gang; Gauri by leaving Subhash, and her daughter, as soon as she has achieved her educational goals. The reader is invited both to understand Gauri and to despise her; she is borne along by a tide of male expectations for her as a wife, a mother, an Indian woman, and a student, and finally seizes the opportunity to remake her life as she wants it to be, even without romance and family, but she also treats her new husband and her daughter in the most painfully dismissive way possible, from the start, even as Subhash is giving her more opportunity than she could have imagined as a young college student. Bela’s confrontation with her mother over Subhash’s divorce papers is realistically harrowing. Gauri’s subsequent despair-fueled visit to India shows even more vividly the ways in which she has defined herself, and her world—in apposition to India, retaining comfort in its culture and her memories, but in a position that India would not permit a woman to be. If ELEANOR & PARK is about co-dependency in relationships, THE LOWLAND is about the internal and external limits to a person’s satisfaction with independence.

My winner: THE LOWLAND

ToB winner: ELEANOR & PARK

Yet again we disagree, Rooster. Next week I’ll get into what I see as the unrealized possibilities of E&P as a novel. Read the official ToB judgment here. 

Tournament of Books Round Four: THE DINNER by Herman Koch vs. THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS by Elizabeth Gilbert

Both of these books fell short of my expectations. THE DINNER went too far into an unrealistic portrait of criminal insanity. THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS was maybe slightly a bit paternalistic and plodding and unremittingly accepting of mediocrity.

Let’s just say that I saw the announcement of an upcoming novel by Herman Koch and I wanted to read it; I have no desire to read EAT, PRAY, LOVE or whatever Elizabeth Gilbert writes next. That said, THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS might be a better book. It’s more ambitious as a story, and probably more successful at taking the reader where Gilbert wants her to go. It’s just that I am more interested in Koch’s promise as an author than in Gilbert’s. I feel like this book was Gilbert giving it her all. I think Koch spent some time with an interesting idea and just didn’t hold himself back at the end from taking it all the way to a slightly illogical conclusion.

Here’s what I mean; I believe that boys like the boys in THE DINNER might find it entertaining to harangue a homeless woman. They might find it funny to set her belongings on fire, and might accidentally set her on fire in the process. They might then be sort of scared and fascinated, and fail to put her out. She might die. They might then both lie about it to their parents and talk about it on social media to their friends. They might threaten their step-brother to keep the secret safe from the police. All this seems plausible. Might they then go so far as to kill the step-brother to avoid jail? Sure, maybe. Might their mother cover for them? Their father? Yes, absolutely. Might their father, Paul, brutally assault his son’s school principal, in his office, in the middle of the day, with witnesses, and get away with it? No, absolutely not.

Then are we supposed to believe that Paul is an unreliable narrator given to flights of fancy, possibly caused by his genetic predisposition toward violence? Well, maybe, but that throws the entire premise of the novel—that these events happened and Paul is relating them faithfully, and we are supposed to be horrified both by the events and by Paul’s equanimity in their telling—into question. If Paul is unreliable, did his sons really commit this crime, or does he just imagine they did because they were out on the same night as the crime occurred and they won’t share their YouTube passwords with him? If Paul is unreliable, is his wife really supporting him in his criminality, or is he imagining she is because it allows him to avoid thinking that the person he cares most about might think he needs to change? Paul can’t be unreliable. So we have to imagine that in this Holland, Paul never attracts police attention. Claire does, for doing basically the same thing that Paul did. I believe everything but this. I believe that Paul would have been arrested for assaulting the principal. It’s a small point to belabor, but it ruined the novel for me—as did the extremely, er, powerful amniocentesis—and I can’t quite get over it.

THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS, on the other hand, is a novel about a woman, Alma, who is very highly qualified to be a scientist, and yet fails to push herself to achieve. Anything, basically. Ever. She chooses a field of study particularly because it is under-studied and no one cares about it. She publishes two books on moss. When her father dies, she realizes that she hasn’t ever left her hometown, and decides to follow her deceased ex-husband to Tahiti. Here is where the novel swerves into an odd ignoble-savages interlude that I’m going to fall slightly short of calling racist. Certainly the only people Alma feels are worthy of talking to are the white pastor, and his adopted Tahitian son who has accepted Western ways and converted to Christianity. Then she independently comes upon the theory of evolution. And writes it up into a pamphlet, and then sits on it. Doesn’t publish it. Gets scooped not only by Darwin but by Alfred Wallace, also. I was just upset throughout this story that Alma had so much promise, and just refused to fulfill it. She refuses to fulfill herself in other ways, too; all she wants her entire life is to sleep with a man, and she just never makes it happen. Do we need to talk about the binding closet? The binding closet is not a fair exchange for a fulfilling relationship with another human being, which Alma never finds. Not that there are a lot of human beings around deserving; Alma is roundly chastised by her nurse (and basically by Gilbert) for ignoring her sister and her sister’s abolitionist family. Well, her sister never spoke to her, is basically a Puritan, and has consigned herself to an unhappy relationship for the sake of pissing off the whites in their town and educating young black children. To be honest, I don’t blame Alma for not being BFFs with Prudence. Prudence never made the effort.

THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS does show a remarkable curiosity about, and admiration for, the natural world. As a scientist, I liked it. I was interested in mosses by the end of it, or at least more interested than I had been from the beginning. I was just disappointed in Alma. And I suppose she might be disappointed in herself, too.

Book winner: THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS

Overall author potential winner: THE DINNER

The ToB and I agree on this one, and we will revisit the binding closet next week.

Read the official Rooster judgment here. 

Tournament of Books Round Three: THE TUNER OF SILENCES by Mia Couto vs. THE GOOD LORD BIRD by James McBride

THE TUNER OF SILENCES had a lot stacked against it from the beginning. It’s the only book in the Tournament in translation (originally in Portuguese); it’s about an African boy in Mozambique, and I read about half of it before realizing that Mia Couto was a man, not a woman, which definitely made the second half of it read differently than the first had. (“How interesting,” I thought, “a book told from the perspective of a boy who has never seen a woman before, written by a woman!” Then, later, “Oh. No, then.”) The premise is a bit confusing, and actually remained confusing for me throughout. The narrator’s mother dies when the narrator is quite young, and the narrator’s father moves himself, the narrator (Mwanito), the narrator’s older brother, an ex-soldier/current manservant, and possibly the boys’ uncle to a very remote game preserve, where they create a little homestead and the narrator’s father leads him to believe that they are the post-apocalyptic last remaining settlers of the world. The boys’ uncle brings them supplies regularly, which presumably he is then getting by plundering the ruined towns still standing, or by trading with whatever diseased and zombiefied locals remain, I’m not sure. In reality, the boys’ father has been driven to madness by his wife’s death (and, prior to her death, her gang rape), and is now both devoutly religious and totally nuts. He has replaced the boys’ mother with a donkey, and refuses to let the boys read or write.

To me, the premise of the book is sad and terrifying, but the plot is driven by the mystery of what actually happened to the boys’ mother Alma, and what a Portuguese woman is doing when she suddenly appears in their camp. The narrator’s survival is not seriously called into question, but the resolutions of the mysteries of these two women occur very late in the story and were, to me at least, unsatisfying. To me, the interesting part of a story about a child raised in deprived conditions is (a) how does the child escape those conditions, and (b) how does the child then adjust to regular life. Mwanito’s escape is kind of a deus ex machina, and his subsequent adjustment to regular life is quite easy, and occurs late in the narrative. The novel seemed less concerned with plot and more concerned with experimentation around language, religiosity, and expressions of sorrow. There are hints of magical realism. Parts of the narrative read like folklore. These aspects did not endear me to the novel, but for a certain reader, they might.

The premise of THE GOOD LORD BIRD, on the other hand, is quite interesting—a first-hand account of John Brown’s abolitionist battle at Harper’s Ferry. Told from the perspective of a slave nicknamed Onion whom John Brown freed, misgendered, and kind of condemned to living as a girl for a couple of years (though, if the introductory chapter is to be believed, Onion continued to dress as a woman for much, much longer). Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman make cameos. Even to a less-than-keen student of American history, this premise is interesting, and the story itself is interesting even when it departs briefly from the story of John Brown. 

There are many anti-heroes in THE GOOD LORD BIRD, not least of which the narrator, Onion, who weathers many a remark that he is only concerned with saving his own skin. The narrative makes the good point that a slave probably has good reason to not have many more pressing concerns than personal survival. I kind of loved the book for that alone—acknowledging that John Brown and Frederick Douglass performed great acts and were very important to American history, while simultaneously acknowledging that a lot of slaves and free blacks weren’t particularly grateful for their actions at the time. It puts more agency into the hands of Onion and the rest of John Brown’s army, and gives the reader an interesting view into what it would mean to be nonviolent during a time when violence was so common, expected, and celebrated. The best reason I found in the story for Onion’s cross-dressing was that his experiences with men, and with manhood, are all of violence, shooting and death and dying. Even a female character, upon being led to the gallows, exhorts her fellow prisoner to “be a man.” John Brown’s son is told to “die like a man,” and he does; others escape the battle unharmed by not fighting, but are thought to be cowardly. Onion’s personal philosophy rejects violence, but he has trouble articulating this philosophy, even to himself, and so falls back on an identity in which he can be brave without being violent.

It’s a nice message. It wasn’t my favorite book of the Tournament, by far, but I liked it well enough. This round’s winner, then: THE GOOD LORD BIRD.

And, this is the first round in which I and the Tournament agree! Read the official ToB judgment here. 

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.

Tournament of Books Round One - HILL WILLIAM by Scott McClanahan vs. THE LUMINARIES by Eleanor Catton

At the previous round, on Monday, I had not yet started THE LUMINARIES. I read HILL WILLIAM a week prior; I ordered it from Amazon and finished it in about an hour and a half. I had three days to read THE LUMINARIES, and I managed it, but just barely--as you can see by the lateness of this post. I think it speaks highly of THE LUMINARIES that it held my attention and continuously entreated me to keep reading it, these past three days--it's a remarkably well-wrought story, with an intriguing, vast, complex plot. In some ways, it's a mystery, with a man who has disappeared, fortunes that have been stolen, a man who has died under suspicious circumstances, illegitimate children, ladies of the night, and opium dens. It's a very interesting piece of historical fiction about an era and circumstances which I had literally never before considered, the gold rush in New Zealand. It contains some elements of the supernatural; Anna and Emery are in a sense in spiritual possession of each other's bodies, a fact made most evident by Anna's sudden acquisition of literacy, a scene that gave me actual goosebumps.

It's an incredibly cinematic novel--each scene is self-contained, and the fadings in and out between characters' perspectives have the steady ebb and flow and persistence of a tide of narrative. There is a character for every temperament to champion, and excellent intertwined parables of crime and punishment, the distinction between honesty and loyalty, morality and respectability, artifice and artlessness, addiction and abstention.

HILL WILLIAM, by contrast, has a small cast of small-minded characters who behave inscrutably and abominably. It seems as though McClanahan writes his characters solely to provoke. Their motivations are insensible and their insights as simplistic as the example given in the ToB judgment--the hills are either graves or pregnant bellies? The hills, in McClanahan's Appalachia, are being razed for profit, and a dead infant is being mourned as though it were still alive in the hospital. Neither graves nor babies seem to hold much reverence for the narrator. I don't mean to disparage "shock fiction", to purloin a term--I love Chuck Palahniuk, I love Ryu Murakami, I love Irvine Welsh. McClanahan's shock just seems lazy, in a way. There's something darkly funny about his homophobic characters' actions, and something just inarticulate about the vague intimations of sexual abuse suffered by many.

There is nothing at all inarticulate about any of Eleanor Catton's characters, even those for whom English is not quite a mastered skill. I would read THE LUMINARIES again, all its hundreds of pages. I already can't bother to give HILL WILLIAM a second thought.

My winner: THE LUMINARIES.
ToB round winner: HILL WILLIAM. Maybe I will have to look it over again.

I'm zero for two, guys. Holding out hope for the Zombie round.

Read the ToB round judgment here.

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.