Tournament of Books Round Seven: LONG DIVISION by Kiese Laymon vs. THE GOLDFINCH by Donna Tartt

"You're so long division," Shalaya Crump tells City. By which she means he "shows his work," he's process-driven and detailed. I would say that City is more homotopic (and not because of his feelings for LaVander Peeler); he splits into two journeys once he finds Long Division the novel-within-this-novel, takes two separate but fairly continuous paths, and winds up back as one boy in the present. The time travel allows City to explore different versions of himself: one where he is notorious for causing a scene at a "sentence bee", and one where he isn't; one where he has a girlfriend, and one where he has vague feelings for another boy; one where he is brave and one where he is less so; one where he is religious and one where he is just scared. City's struggle with the performance of identity is familiar and timeless; he wants to be tough but he is probably the school nerd, he wants to be considered mysterious and attractive but he is chubby and very concerned with what others think of him, he wants to be a YouTube celebrity but he doesn't want to parlay his moment of fame into a reality show appearance. He struggles with the idea that the types of culture presented in a high school english class are not "for" him or people like him, while believing that the rap lyrics written by his friend would never be accepted as a literary text. He is deeply affronted by a group of racists who kick him into the mud, but doesn't understand that in the 1940s a Jewish man would also be a target of the KKK.

City gets co-opted into the adventures of a lot of women around him, including his grandmother, Shalaya Crump, and Baize Shepard. I think I would have liked this novel a lot more if it were told from the perspective of one of them; a lot of the time City didn't understand what was going on or why, and neither did I. I also found it difficult to fall into a rhythm with the novel's dialect; either I wasn't cool enough to understand it or I just got really sick of every beverage being referred to as "drank." It's one thing to have an authentically rendered African-American dialogue (like, I don't know, THE GOOD LORD BIRD?) and another to sound like the narrator is Lil Jon.

From one coming-of-age story to another, I was probably better poised to like THE GOLDFINCH from the beginning, because Theo Decker is cultured and white and a little bit of an asshole, and so am I. Other reviews have pointed out a glaring hole in the novel that actually didn't even occur to me when I was reading it; the bomb that kills Theo's mother and leads him to steal the goldfinch painting was a pretty significant terrorist attack that doesn't seem to have many repercussions on life in New York or Theo's perception of his geopolitical reality. Regardless, Theo has more than enough to worry about. I was particularly sympathetic to his fascination with the painting, as I had seen that very painting about a year earlier at the DeYoung museum in San Francisco, in an exhibit of Dutch treasures from the Mauritius museum. I was just as taken with it as Theo was, even though it wasn't the centerpiece of the exhibition; the bird just pops, looks both realistic and impressionistic, and the painting itself is very different from what you'd normally expect of a Dutch Master. It's on a light background, the composition is very simple, and the subject seems to glow from within, rather than from a carefully considered out-of-frame light source. Is it great enough that I would take it from the wall of a bombed-out museum? Sure, maybe. Theo's action doesn't seem so bad; he's trying to protect the painting because he doesn't know if there are more bombs waiting to go off in the building. Even keeping it for a week, a month, a year, I still believe that if he had gone to turn it in he wouldn't have been in trouble; he was a kid, and a victim of a terrorist attack, and he was understandably shaken and confused.

However, for the plot to hold together, we kind of have to believe that Theo would have gone to jail for turning it in, and soon enough he will because of the various criminal elements who try to blackmail him. There are some convoluted twists and turns surrounding the ownership and importance of the painting, and the genre of the novel veers from Harry Potter-like (the part where Theo gets adopted by the kindly furniture restorer and begins his odd apprenticeship) to Mad Max (Theo and his Russian pal in a deserted exurb, doing drugs and getting beat up and escaping from Theo's dad and the loan sharks who want to kill him) to Great Gatsby (Theo getting betrothed to a girl who is Daisy Buchanan in better shoes, escaping the engagement due to her infidelity with a childhood sweetheart, drinking too much, and going to too many parties). I think the book is ambitious, and I applaud it for that. Theo's struggle to keep from turning into his father is emotionally affecting, even as the reader understands that Theo is bringing all of his troubles on himself, and the happy ending he finally finds seems like the best-case scenario for all involved. Theo does not, after all, drag an otherworldly and innocent woman into his downfall as his father did (and as he very much wants to); he doesn't alienate all of his friends and blind himself from his failures (as his father did and as we are afraid he will by the last third of the book), and he doesn't ruin something beautiful--something that it turns out he never had the ability to ruin in the first place, though he thought for so long that he did.

Round winner: THE GOLDFINCH

Read the official ToB tournament round here.

Tournament of Books Round Six: THE SON by Philipp Meyer vs. AT NIGHT WE WALK IN CIRCLES by Daniel Alarcon

This morning I scrolled to the end of the ToB judgment with my heart in my throat because I love THE SON so, so much. Luckily, it survived, and as you know from my post about the pre-bracket round, I want THE SON to go all the way. So let’s get administrative details out of the way first:

Round winner: THE SON

Really excellent runner-up, though: AT NIGHT WE WALK IN CIRCLES

I liked both of these books quite a bit (my top 4 in the tournament are THE SON, WOKE UP LONELY, THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES, and AT NIGHT WE WALK IN CIRCLES, in that order). I first heard of the Alarcon from my dad, who must have heard about it on NPR. When he and I talked about it, he was halfway through and didn’t like it, but he doesn’t read much fiction. I don’t read much Latin American fiction (though I should!) so perhaps I liked this novel even more than someone familiar with the history of Peru would have. The plot is strongly driven by motion and by events—Nelson’s travels with the theatre troupe Diciembre, the staging and rehearsals and production of The Idiot President in far-flung markets and schoolrooms, and Nelson’s subsequent captivity, at Rogelio’s house, by Ixta’s pregnancy and remoteness, and then later in Collectors. The tension continually escalates, partially because of the device of the unknown narrator—we understand that Nelson is unavailable, and possibly dead, but don’t know how, or who else might be involved. This was a novel in which I felt progressively more afraid for each of the characters; every decision and every missed opportunity, starting with Nelson’s failed attempt to get a US visa, seemed like a tightening of the noose.

Having been on a theatre tour of small and non-standard venues in England, performing a German absurdist play, I also felt strongly connected to Nelson, and to the itinerant actor’s struggles to stay involved in life at home while giving oneself over to the world of the play and the acting troupe.

Alarcon has also done a lot of research on the real-life prison communities that Collectors is based on, and the horrors he exposes in his nonfiction articles for the New Yorker deeply informed the events and descriptions in ANWWIC, making Nelson’s story real and urgent. It wasn’t a novel I would recommend to everyone without restraint, like THE SON, but I think a fan of Calvino or Saramago would enjoy it.

THE SON, though. Oh my god. This multi-narrated epic of the settling of the Texas frontier, of oil and Comanches and Mexicans and changing mores and means of employment. I have to say that when I started reading this book it came as a shock that Native Americans were ruthlessly violent. I mean…they were, certainly, but hipster revisionist history holds that they were and are only the victims of white oppressors, which of course is not the fully story. I, too, liked the Colonel’s parts (Eli McCullough’s) the most—who wouldn’t? His story is harrowing and adventurous and emotional, and he’s a humorous narrator. I didn’t realize it until relatively late in the book when, describing a German woman who was held captive by the Comanches and lied about her treatment to retain her social status, he mocks her story “She still had it, thanks to me, honor honor honor, that was all.” Until then, his story is darkly funny in parts, but we aren’t sure whether he knows it as a narrator (vs. the author ensuring it). But he DOES, and this made me love him all the more. Peter McCullough and J.A. McCullough are delightful in their own ways. J.A. delivers perceptive and biting insights into relationships, feminism, business acumen, and aging. Peter’s story is dark but redemptive, and when he finally stands up for himself and chases after what he wants, I was ecstatic. I want to see the movie of THE SON just to see Peter’s confrontation with his estranged wife. Well, and also to see the Comanche camp. And the hunting retreat where J.A. confronts being the only woman in an old boys’ club. I can’t even write coherently about this book yet because I loved it so much, but I’ll get another chance to write about it next week, and I’m so glad.    

Read the delightful official ToB review here. 

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.