In my college days, McIntyre & Moore's was a large, well-lit store in Davis Square that specialized in history, academic monographs, and literature that was 20 years old and mostly unheard-of. The store layout was a simple rectangle, and it was rarely filled with enough people to have two browsers in one aisle. Their discount system was 10% off a one-foot stack and 20% off a two-foot stack, as well as some kind of discount card based on purchase price that I never really used. (Presumably the percentage discount stopped at some cutoff less than ten, although I never tried to buy a ten-foot stack of books, so maybe it really would have been free.) The owner gave off the appearance of being crotchety, but this was never tested.
Now, M&M's is a dimly-fluorescently-lit basement in Porter Square, below the stationer's, with a similar stock but not nearly the chipper sense of entering into an alternate, and highly-literate, dimension of history. M&M's was never the place you'd go to for a novel (nor a literary magazine, really, despite their collection of back issues of Granta), but if you wanted a treatise on Heidegger or communism, or you needed a volume on Richard Brautigan's poetry or one of the Springer series of math textbooks, it was fun to browse in. Now it's not quite so fun to browse, which as far as I can see will only exacerbate the financial concerns that occasioned the move in the first place. Alas.
As an example of its utility during the halcyon Davis Square days, I present the case of Baudrillard. During my junior year at MIT, I took a theatre class from an impossibly hip, soft-spoken theatre professor and enfant terrible, JS (for I don't doubt he googles himself regularly.) I often found my classmates hopeless rubes, and eager to impress with my humanities erudition, on some assignment or in some email I discussed Baudrillard at length, in relation to the theatre, and potentially DHALGREN (by Samuel Delany), which we were reading at the time. JS took the bait, and wrote back to me expressing his shared appreciation of Baudrillard, and wondering whether I had a copy of AMERIQUE. I forget whether it was out of print at the time--it certainly seems to be now--but I sure as hell knew two things: one, I didn't have a copy, and two, I wanted very much to have a copy by 7pm that night, when I would have class with JS again.
So, you need an out-of-print philosophical treatise by a French postmodernist, for venial but self-serving reasons. It is 1pm and you are in Boston. Where do you go? To McIntyre & Moore's. Obviously. Post-haste. Not only did they have it, they also had a copy of THE CONSPIRACY OF ART, with its gorgeous drapey cover.
Reader, I bought both. And you know what? JS didn't care a whit; apparently whatever idea he was pursuing had changed in the six hours between his email and delivery of the object, and then later in the year he refused to let me borrow his cap pistol in a skit. Good riddance to him; at least McIntyre & Moore's is still around, in whatever guise, elevating our readerly miens.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Highly Personal Bookstore Review - Harvard Bookstore - Cambridge, MA
Reader(s), I'm trying a new format, which is the very-much-autobiographical review of a bookstore. I've been to many, many bookstores in my day, and have deeply-felt reactions to all of them, so this should become a regular thing. Enjoy.
It used to be that the Harvard Bookstore was the only worthwhile place to go. When I lived at MIT, a single block away from the Kendall T stop, itself only two stops away from the Harvard one on the red line, at night or on weekends or after a soul-deadening lecture I would have no greater desire than to go to the Harvard Bookstore and descend into the basement of used books, to pick a few and take them home.
My mother retains fragments of her father's obsessive-compulsive disorder, mostly presenting themselves in her compunctions about food preparation, green beans and mushrooms and potatoes in particular. I have even more watered-down impulses, mainly my overwhelming desire to own, and surround myself with, books. I have books crammed into bookcases, and in piles stacked on top, and in further piles colonizing the floor around them. I currently have only three bookshelves, and somewhere on the order of a thousand books; in college I was much worse, with five bookshelves and around 2500 volumes. Not all of these books were useful, or well-loved, or even read; I sold and gave away and just discarded many of them when I moved to California, and again when I moved from one apartment to another and decided I needed to face up to the stagnant tide pools of my collection. The important part, for me, was that each of them was a promise of some future moment of literary enjoyment, and most of them carried a memory of their acquisition, of the promise and splendor they seemed to represent on a shelf, and then in my hand, in a bag, and, at last, at home atop the most recent pile that represented the most pressing acquisitions.
The Harvard Bookstore was open until 11, which was the first good thing about it; part of my OCD-like book purchasing impulse is that when it comes on, it's likely to be at an hour when most bookstores and libraries are closed. The Harvard Bookstore was also, like another bookstore of lore, a clean, well-lit place for books. It has wooden bookshelves, and I believe it has green carpet, and its staff give off the air of being knowledgeable, literary people older than myself, which is a key component of the kind of adult sanctuary a bookstore can offer. The upstairs of the Harvard Bookstore, by which I mean the street level portion to which one enters, is all new books, thoughtfully curated to be sure, but of about as much interest as the stock of the local Borders or Barnes and Noble college-affiliated bookstore. (Less, actually, because the Harvard Bookstore has only one surface in the entire store upon which one might sit, a cushioned window seat that can only accommodate two people who are shopping together, and is at any given time almost certainly already occupied. The Barnes and Noble affiliate across Harvard Square, on the other hand, has armchairs, a tasteful cafe, and three floors entirely out of sight of the cashiers, where one can stretch out on the floor and contemplate the entire shelf of Nietzsche offerings, as I did on one occasion.)
The only part of the main floor of the Harvard Bookstore that I would be drawn to was the right-hand, window-flanking shelves, stemming out by the entrance and winding halfway back on the side. There were the remainders, the otherwise-new books that had been marked down drastically, and offered some hope of catching a bestseller just as it was falling off the NY Times list, but before it was dogeared and a year old and wound up downstairs on the used shelves. The remainders changed regularly enough to be interesting, but offered none of the peril of the used shelves, where the very day after having seen it, a fine edition of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy may have been snapped up by a fellow bibliophile. (Paul Auster bore a striking resemblance to my freshman-year chemistry professor, which was not the least of the reasons why I liked him.)
Heading downstairs involves a single turn of staircase, the landing of which is adorned with new or new-ish art books from the used section, which are worth a perusal. Then, upon reaching the basement, an entirely different sensory atmosphere takes hold. Here the lighting is dim-fluorescent, the wooden bookshelves are plastered with detritus from the insides of books that people have sold and left things in, and the tables are heavy with more remainders, anthologies, and cookbooks that didn't merit top-of-the-store display. The art section is for the most part very old, and tends toward the amateur, and the pre-color-printing type. The cookbook section is well-stocked, the science section less so, and the philosophy and history are always worth a look. The crowning jewel of the used section of the Harvard Bookstore is its fiction shelves, which make up the entire back (or really left-hand) wall, as well as a few shelves right to the other side of the purchasing counter (open at whimsically determined hours, and the site of such overheard caprice in buying decisions that I never tried them out with my own remaindered tomes.) The science fiction, fantasy, and mystery sections are also well-stocked, though seldom perused. There are solid sections of literary essays, literary criticism, biography, religion, sport, erotica, poetry, and drama. The film section is small and runs to Marilyn Monroe biographies and endless copies of John Irving's "My Movie Business" (John Irving's "My Bear Obsession", that's a book I'd rather read.) There is a second science section toward the back, with a fair selection for being serviced by students from two of the greatest research universities in the country, but the mathematics section is pitiful.
Prices are average for a used bookstore, being about half the cover price for a trade paperback, and sometimes alternating, for no good reason, among different issues and instances of the same title. From this description alone, the Harvard Bookstore is simply a good neighborhood used bookstore, which it is. The actual mythic power of the Harvard Bookstore stems from the shelves behind its buy counter, and the roped-off stacks of recent and as-yet-unshelved acquisitions. Off-limits to the mere patron and browser, these shelves and stacks nevertheless offer the tantalizing proposition that the volume you sought, though unavailable at the moment, is right there, buried behind yet more editions of The Lord of the Rings and Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, just sitting with its spine to the wall, waiting for another day shift, another week or two of turnover, to turn up on the shelves. (Pawing through these unreachable stacks, though physically possible and undertaken a few times, is basically useless because the prices haven't been written in on the top corners of the inside covers yet, and however simple the scheme and however basic the soft number 2 pencil script might seem, it is always somehow obvious that the ruse of attempting to add and then immediately subtract from the store's stock will be discovered to terrible consequence.) No, to the slightly compulsive bibliophile like myself, the best part of the Harvard Bookstore is the sense that there is always more, and always a reason, just out of sight, to come back.
That, and the spend-$100-get-10%-off deal, however they're phrasing it these days.
It used to be that the Harvard Bookstore was the only worthwhile place to go. When I lived at MIT, a single block away from the Kendall T stop, itself only two stops away from the Harvard one on the red line, at night or on weekends or after a soul-deadening lecture I would have no greater desire than to go to the Harvard Bookstore and descend into the basement of used books, to pick a few and take them home.
My mother retains fragments of her father's obsessive-compulsive disorder, mostly presenting themselves in her compunctions about food preparation, green beans and mushrooms and potatoes in particular. I have even more watered-down impulses, mainly my overwhelming desire to own, and surround myself with, books. I have books crammed into bookcases, and in piles stacked on top, and in further piles colonizing the floor around them. I currently have only three bookshelves, and somewhere on the order of a thousand books; in college I was much worse, with five bookshelves and around 2500 volumes. Not all of these books were useful, or well-loved, or even read; I sold and gave away and just discarded many of them when I moved to California, and again when I moved from one apartment to another and decided I needed to face up to the stagnant tide pools of my collection. The important part, for me, was that each of them was a promise of some future moment of literary enjoyment, and most of them carried a memory of their acquisition, of the promise and splendor they seemed to represent on a shelf, and then in my hand, in a bag, and, at last, at home atop the most recent pile that represented the most pressing acquisitions.
The Harvard Bookstore was open until 11, which was the first good thing about it; part of my OCD-like book purchasing impulse is that when it comes on, it's likely to be at an hour when most bookstores and libraries are closed. The Harvard Bookstore was also, like another bookstore of lore, a clean, well-lit place for books. It has wooden bookshelves, and I believe it has green carpet, and its staff give off the air of being knowledgeable, literary people older than myself, which is a key component of the kind of adult sanctuary a bookstore can offer. The upstairs of the Harvard Bookstore, by which I mean the street level portion to which one enters, is all new books, thoughtfully curated to be sure, but of about as much interest as the stock of the local Borders or Barnes and Noble college-affiliated bookstore. (Less, actually, because the Harvard Bookstore has only one surface in the entire store upon which one might sit, a cushioned window seat that can only accommodate two people who are shopping together, and is at any given time almost certainly already occupied. The Barnes and Noble affiliate across Harvard Square, on the other hand, has armchairs, a tasteful cafe, and three floors entirely out of sight of the cashiers, where one can stretch out on the floor and contemplate the entire shelf of Nietzsche offerings, as I did on one occasion.)
The only part of the main floor of the Harvard Bookstore that I would be drawn to was the right-hand, window-flanking shelves, stemming out by the entrance and winding halfway back on the side. There were the remainders, the otherwise-new books that had been marked down drastically, and offered some hope of catching a bestseller just as it was falling off the NY Times list, but before it was dogeared and a year old and wound up downstairs on the used shelves. The remainders changed regularly enough to be interesting, but offered none of the peril of the used shelves, where the very day after having seen it, a fine edition of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy may have been snapped up by a fellow bibliophile. (Paul Auster bore a striking resemblance to my freshman-year chemistry professor, which was not the least of the reasons why I liked him.)
Heading downstairs involves a single turn of staircase, the landing of which is adorned with new or new-ish art books from the used section, which are worth a perusal. Then, upon reaching the basement, an entirely different sensory atmosphere takes hold. Here the lighting is dim-fluorescent, the wooden bookshelves are plastered with detritus from the insides of books that people have sold and left things in, and the tables are heavy with more remainders, anthologies, and cookbooks that didn't merit top-of-the-store display. The art section is for the most part very old, and tends toward the amateur, and the pre-color-printing type. The cookbook section is well-stocked, the science section less so, and the philosophy and history are always worth a look. The crowning jewel of the used section of the Harvard Bookstore is its fiction shelves, which make up the entire back (or really left-hand) wall, as well as a few shelves right to the other side of the purchasing counter (open at whimsically determined hours, and the site of such overheard caprice in buying decisions that I never tried them out with my own remaindered tomes.) The science fiction, fantasy, and mystery sections are also well-stocked, though seldom perused. There are solid sections of literary essays, literary criticism, biography, religion, sport, erotica, poetry, and drama. The film section is small and runs to Marilyn Monroe biographies and endless copies of John Irving's "My Movie Business" (John Irving's "My Bear Obsession", that's a book I'd rather read.) There is a second science section toward the back, with a fair selection for being serviced by students from two of the greatest research universities in the country, but the mathematics section is pitiful.
Prices are average for a used bookstore, being about half the cover price for a trade paperback, and sometimes alternating, for no good reason, among different issues and instances of the same title. From this description alone, the Harvard Bookstore is simply a good neighborhood used bookstore, which it is. The actual mythic power of the Harvard Bookstore stems from the shelves behind its buy counter, and the roped-off stacks of recent and as-yet-unshelved acquisitions. Off-limits to the mere patron and browser, these shelves and stacks nevertheless offer the tantalizing proposition that the volume you sought, though unavailable at the moment, is right there, buried behind yet more editions of The Lord of the Rings and Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, just sitting with its spine to the wall, waiting for another day shift, another week or two of turnover, to turn up on the shelves. (Pawing through these unreachable stacks, though physically possible and undertaken a few times, is basically useless because the prices haven't been written in on the top corners of the inside covers yet, and however simple the scheme and however basic the soft number 2 pencil script might seem, it is always somehow obvious that the ruse of attempting to add and then immediately subtract from the store's stock will be discovered to terrible consequence.) No, to the slightly compulsive bibliophile like myself, the best part of the Harvard Bookstore is the sense that there is always more, and always a reason, just out of sight, to come back.
That, and the spend-$100-get-10%-off deal, however they're phrasing it these days.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
THE MILLENNIUM TRILOGY - Stieg Larsson - Fiction
The MILLENNIUM trilogy has been a publishing sensation--and, with an unfinished manuscript for a fourth book on the late Stieg Larsson's laptop, could continue to be--but it has also been a welcomed opportunity for literary critics to hail the arrival of a new, "feminist" crime fiction. Larsson's work has a powerful, ass-kicking heroine, strong female characters, and focuses on the injustices women face at the hands of men and societal forces. Crimes against women are the centerpieces of each of the three books, and the men who perpetrate these crimes are made to pay.
The retribution story is nothing new; we've seen it in films like KILL BILL, HARD CANDY, and ANTICHRIST, and in novels from WONDER WHEN YOU'LL MISS ME to more sordid "legal thrillers" like RETRIBUTION. As has been pointed out before, much of the difficulty, from a feminist perspective, is that these stories are fantasies of a woman's revenge on her rapist written by men. In effect, the characters are acting out what men believe they would do in a woman's position: they fight back with great physical strength and confidence. I think it's worth noting that both Lisbeth Salander and Monica Figuerola (Blomkvist's new love interest) are intensely athletic women who deal with dangerous men by physically overpowering and humiliating them. Monica is described as a former bodybuilder and world-class gymnast; Salander, as we know, is a boxing prodigy, a martial artist, and capable of some very gymnastic feats herself (you'll remember my disbelief, from my review of the first book, that Salander is able to dive and roll under a parked car, emerging on the other side of it, in seconds.)
Erika Berger is less physically imposing, and is sidelined in this installment, seemingly punished for placing her career ambitions over the health of Blomkvist's magazine. From the minute she starts her job as editor in chief of one of Sweden's major daily newspapers, she is plagued with harassment, and stalked by a colleague. She finds the pace grueling and unsustainable, and returns to Millennium at the trilogy's end.
In this week's New Yorker, Nora Ephron pens a parody of a "lost Stieg Larsson short story" following the news that Larsson's early work, mostly stories from when he was as young as 17, have been rediscovered by Swedish publishers. Ephron's piece pokes primarily at the predictable emotions of Larsson's characters, as well as his extraneous detail and brand placement (everyone's phone and computer is referred to by its exact brand name and model; in a time when most authors are struggling with how to deftly interweave the realities of modern life and internet communication into their stories, Stieg does a cannonball into the middle of our email-laden discourse.) Ephron doesn't particularly pick at Larsson's feminism, or lack thereof, unless one can take the fact that Nora Ephron was the author picked to write this piece as a commentary in and of itself.
It's tempting to compare Lisbeth Salander unfavorably to more nuanced heroines of crime fiction, like Clarice Starling. Lisbeth's defining traits are apathy and anger, and when stuck in the hospital, as she is for the majority of the third book, her anger has no useful outlets. She has conflicting opinions about family; she despises her father, is completely nonplussed by the existence of her half-brother or the current whereabouts of her twin sister, and yet adores and mourns her mother. Emotions seem to settle over her like shadows, and she moves in and out of them, and of relationships, as easily as the comparison implies. Salander is an utterly confusing cipher of a heroine, which would seem to be a drawback for a feminist crime thriller--until we realize that Salander isn't the heroine at all; Mikael Blomkvist is. He calls the shots, finds the scoops, rescues the girl, and puts the bad guys in jail--a pretty traditionalist crime-fiction hero, if you ask me.
The retribution story is nothing new; we've seen it in films like KILL BILL, HARD CANDY, and ANTICHRIST, and in novels from WONDER WHEN YOU'LL MISS ME to more sordid "legal thrillers" like RETRIBUTION. As has been pointed out before, much of the difficulty, from a feminist perspective, is that these stories are fantasies of a woman's revenge on her rapist written by men. In effect, the characters are acting out what men believe they would do in a woman's position: they fight back with great physical strength and confidence. I think it's worth noting that both Lisbeth Salander and Monica Figuerola (Blomkvist's new love interest) are intensely athletic women who deal with dangerous men by physically overpowering and humiliating them. Monica is described as a former bodybuilder and world-class gymnast; Salander, as we know, is a boxing prodigy, a martial artist, and capable of some very gymnastic feats herself (you'll remember my disbelief, from my review of the first book, that Salander is able to dive and roll under a parked car, emerging on the other side of it, in seconds.)
Erika Berger is less physically imposing, and is sidelined in this installment, seemingly punished for placing her career ambitions over the health of Blomkvist's magazine. From the minute she starts her job as editor in chief of one of Sweden's major daily newspapers, she is plagued with harassment, and stalked by a colleague. She finds the pace grueling and unsustainable, and returns to Millennium at the trilogy's end.
In this week's New Yorker, Nora Ephron pens a parody of a "lost Stieg Larsson short story" following the news that Larsson's early work, mostly stories from when he was as young as 17, have been rediscovered by Swedish publishers. Ephron's piece pokes primarily at the predictable emotions of Larsson's characters, as well as his extraneous detail and brand placement (everyone's phone and computer is referred to by its exact brand name and model; in a time when most authors are struggling with how to deftly interweave the realities of modern life and internet communication into their stories, Stieg does a cannonball into the middle of our email-laden discourse.) Ephron doesn't particularly pick at Larsson's feminism, or lack thereof, unless one can take the fact that Nora Ephron was the author picked to write this piece as a commentary in and of itself.
It's tempting to compare Lisbeth Salander unfavorably to more nuanced heroines of crime fiction, like Clarice Starling. Lisbeth's defining traits are apathy and anger, and when stuck in the hospital, as she is for the majority of the third book, her anger has no useful outlets. She has conflicting opinions about family; she despises her father, is completely nonplussed by the existence of her half-brother or the current whereabouts of her twin sister, and yet adores and mourns her mother. Emotions seem to settle over her like shadows, and she moves in and out of them, and of relationships, as easily as the comparison implies. Salander is an utterly confusing cipher of a heroine, which would seem to be a drawback for a feminist crime thriller--until we realize that Salander isn't the heroine at all; Mikael Blomkvist is. He calls the shots, finds the scoops, rescues the girl, and puts the bad guys in jail--a pretty traditionalist crime-fiction hero, if you ask me.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Opening the curtains
It's been a few months.
Originally, this blog came out of a new-yearish resolution to write a review of every book I read all the way through. The point of that resolution was both to catalog what I read and what I thought of it for the inevitably forgetful Future Me, and also to try and hone some type of skill as an off-the-cuff reviewer and essayist. Every review on the blog thus far was written in one draft--for good or ill, I can't say. This went well up until the end of February (as you can see) and perished in the tide of qualifying exams, as every sort of leisure activity got pushed to the periphery. (Qualifying exams for my department are like a three-hour oral exam and presentation about a proposed direction of research for the PhD. They are the subject of more worry and preparation than they're worth, but they do tend to force everyone to get their thinking in order.) I passed, of course, and then saw a folder on my desktop containing my backlog: the titles of the three books I had read during those months of preparation. And I didn't really want to write about any of them; though they weren't terrible books, I had picked them up to distract myself on the elliptical machine, and hadn't retained any lingering thoughts or angles on them. I could summarize the plot or outline, but didn't have many worthy opinions on the content, which had been an ongoing reviewing problem: what about the books that were only so-so? How could they make an interesting review? (And isn't no review at all the most damning?)
So, I'm changing the rules a bit. I'm no longer going to review every book I read, only those that make an impression. This means I probably won't have a comprehensive list of what I read, and Future Me will have to forgo it. I also may take longer with the reviews, to work on, well, editing my own work, on which I need more deliberate practice. I also intend to wax a little more autobiographical, because although I previously had faith in the functions of google to bring readers to reviews for books they were researching, I really have no readers, so there's no harm in writing to myself.
And so on.
Originally, this blog came out of a new-yearish resolution to write a review of every book I read all the way through. The point of that resolution was both to catalog what I read and what I thought of it for the inevitably forgetful Future Me, and also to try and hone some type of skill as an off-the-cuff reviewer and essayist. Every review on the blog thus far was written in one draft--for good or ill, I can't say. This went well up until the end of February (as you can see) and perished in the tide of qualifying exams, as every sort of leisure activity got pushed to the periphery. (Qualifying exams for my department are like a three-hour oral exam and presentation about a proposed direction of research for the PhD. They are the subject of more worry and preparation than they're worth, but they do tend to force everyone to get their thinking in order.) I passed, of course, and then saw a folder on my desktop containing my backlog: the titles of the three books I had read during those months of preparation. And I didn't really want to write about any of them; though they weren't terrible books, I had picked them up to distract myself on the elliptical machine, and hadn't retained any lingering thoughts or angles on them. I could summarize the plot or outline, but didn't have many worthy opinions on the content, which had been an ongoing reviewing problem: what about the books that were only so-so? How could they make an interesting review? (And isn't no review at all the most damning?)
So, I'm changing the rules a bit. I'm no longer going to review every book I read, only those that make an impression. This means I probably won't have a comprehensive list of what I read, and Future Me will have to forgo it. I also may take longer with the reviews, to work on, well, editing my own work, on which I need more deliberate practice. I also intend to wax a little more autobiographical, because although I previously had faith in the functions of google to bring readers to reviews for books they were researching, I really have no readers, so there's no harm in writing to myself.
And so on.
Monday, February 22, 2010
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE - Lucy Grealy - Memoir
If you've read Ann Patchett's memoir TRUTH AND BEAUTY, you know the Lucy Grealy story. And honestly, Patchett's is a better version, as Grealy's autobiography completely elides mention of Patchett, her best friend through college, grad school, and beyond.
It's hard to say that an autobiography by a woman who died--from complications dating back to her childhood cancer--is at all bad. It's true, it's her story; it quite adequately describes the pain and psychological effects of having cancer, losing normal facial appearance, and spending years in and out of hospitals, learning and unlearning the particular variety of helplessness that accompanies drastic surgery.
But goodness, for a book that spends so long dissecting loneliness, failing to mention the existence of a friend like Patchett seems like a grave omission. Grealy's parents are inexplicably distant, to the extent that Grealy's father's death hardly affects her, and the familial anecdotes seemed pitched and perhaps concocted to make sure that all the sympathy flows downhill, to Lucy. Her siblings are mentioned in passing, where their lack of reaction to her deformity is interesting, but it is particularly jarring to look at how much time Lucy spends, as a child and an adolescent, wondering what she would have looked like without the surgery, when she has a female twin. A twin! That is almost exactly how she would have looked, and if we're to believe the narrative, she never realized this. It just seems remarkable.
Ann Patchett wrote a postscript to this memoir, recounting a shared book tour she and Grealy embarked upon, after AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE was met with resounding success. In a transcribed question and answer, Grealy bristles at being asked how she remembered so much; she is a writer, she tells the befuddled questioner, and she made it up. I wonder, though, how much is made up, especially knowing the, shall we say, personality quirks of Grealy as depicted by Patchett. How much is for sympathy, and how much for show? Grealy is said to have joked about writing a follow-up to this memoir, a sort of "Behind the Music" explaining the "real" story. If only she had written that book the first time around.
It's hard to say that an autobiography by a woman who died--from complications dating back to her childhood cancer--is at all bad. It's true, it's her story; it quite adequately describes the pain and psychological effects of having cancer, losing normal facial appearance, and spending years in and out of hospitals, learning and unlearning the particular variety of helplessness that accompanies drastic surgery.
But goodness, for a book that spends so long dissecting loneliness, failing to mention the existence of a friend like Patchett seems like a grave omission. Grealy's parents are inexplicably distant, to the extent that Grealy's father's death hardly affects her, and the familial anecdotes seemed pitched and perhaps concocted to make sure that all the sympathy flows downhill, to Lucy. Her siblings are mentioned in passing, where their lack of reaction to her deformity is interesting, but it is particularly jarring to look at how much time Lucy spends, as a child and an adolescent, wondering what she would have looked like without the surgery, when she has a female twin. A twin! That is almost exactly how she would have looked, and if we're to believe the narrative, she never realized this. It just seems remarkable.
Ann Patchett wrote a postscript to this memoir, recounting a shared book tour she and Grealy embarked upon, after AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE was met with resounding success. In a transcribed question and answer, Grealy bristles at being asked how she remembered so much; she is a writer, she tells the befuddled questioner, and she made it up. I wonder, though, how much is made up, especially knowing the, shall we say, personality quirks of Grealy as depicted by Patchett. How much is for sympathy, and how much for show? Grealy is said to have joked about writing a follow-up to this memoir, a sort of "Behind the Music" explaining the "real" story. If only she had written that book the first time around.
Friday, February 12, 2010
POINT OMEGA - Don DeLillo - Fiction
I'm working off a huge backlog of reviews--turns out it's easier to read books than to write about them, who knew?--so I thought I would start with the best, which is conveniently the most recently released. Go, read POINT OMEGA! Even if Don DeLillo put you off with FALLING MAN (which, to be honest, I liked a lot), there's something for the old-school UNDERWORLD fan in his latest. It's been said around the internet that its length might have something to do with its appeal (my hardcover version was around 120 pages) but my favorite fiction is the kind that can be expediently and expertly condensed, and this is quite the example. It's a pint-sized thriller that seems so simple in construction, but has such graceful, economized sentences that it's worth the multi-year wait between books for something like this.
The plot is: a documentary filmmaker accompanies a sort of Donald Rumsfeld-like figure to his vacation home in the desert, hoping to convince him to star in a film project that sounds like an Errol Morris production: one man, one take, one hour, a plain wall as a backdrop, explaining the war from his experience helping to plan it. There are complications: Richard Elster, the war-planning academic, is more interested in having a companion at his desert retreat than agreeing to do any film. And time does seem to stop for both of them, in the vast heat of the desert, even when Elster's daughter arrives for a vacation, providing a welcome distraction for our narrator, Jim.
The novel is bookended by two interesting scenes of a video installation in the MoMA, describing a real piece, "24 Hour Psycho." The video consists of the film Psycho slowed down to take a full 24 hours of runtime, and the first scene of the novel takes us into the exhibit through the eyes of an obsessive sociopath who is entirely in tune--almost too much so--with the underlying meaning of the exhibit. He wishes for a woman to come into the exhibit with him, and stay for a suitable amount of time--at least half an hour--and he wishes for the exhibit to be more structured, to last all 24 hours and not admit anyone after starting, or allow anyone to leave. To take a writerly step back, the portrayal of a disturbed character is spot-on, here. The guy is creepy, and we can tell that from the first two pages alone, without anything overtly creepy having to happen. It's a perfect setup, but the beauty of it, in the one-two punch of my favorite literary technique ever, is that we forget about it by the time we get around to its relevance to the main story. Because Richard Elster's daughter was involved with a man who gave her mother the willies, in her New York life, and a few weeks after she comes to live with her father in the desert, she disappears.
The landscape comes into play here, its neverending sprawl, its deceptively long sightlines, its ability to swallow up a human, or an ill-prepared hiker, and never spit her out. When Richard and Jim come back from the grocery store to find Jessie utterly vanished, with none of her personal belongings touched, it is immediately hopeless. The desert is too big, and people too frail, as their abortive search efforts demonstrate. Jim and Richard leave without Jessie, and her disappearance is a mystery, though with a few hints, we know exactly what happened. And then, the final scene, we are back in 24 Hour Psycho,with our very own psycho of the first scene, and we see him meet Jessie. Jessie stays for half an hour. He follows Jessie out of the exhibit, and gets her carelessly relinquished phone number. And thus it starts. And we knew it all along.
Focusing on the mystery and its construction doesn't do justice to the meditative parts of the novel, the parts that focus on war and its effects, the academicization of war, and the distancing mechanisms used by its instigators. And these masterful flights of dialogue are difficult to describe simply because they are so trim and spritely. It will take you only a couple of hours to read POINT OMEGA, and there is no question that those hours will be worth it. That if it were possible to stretch the text out over 24 hours, we might never cease to find further meaning.
The plot is: a documentary filmmaker accompanies a sort of Donald Rumsfeld-like figure to his vacation home in the desert, hoping to convince him to star in a film project that sounds like an Errol Morris production: one man, one take, one hour, a plain wall as a backdrop, explaining the war from his experience helping to plan it. There are complications: Richard Elster, the war-planning academic, is more interested in having a companion at his desert retreat than agreeing to do any film. And time does seem to stop for both of them, in the vast heat of the desert, even when Elster's daughter arrives for a vacation, providing a welcome distraction for our narrator, Jim.
The novel is bookended by two interesting scenes of a video installation in the MoMA, describing a real piece, "24 Hour Psycho." The video consists of the film Psycho slowed down to take a full 24 hours of runtime, and the first scene of the novel takes us into the exhibit through the eyes of an obsessive sociopath who is entirely in tune--almost too much so--with the underlying meaning of the exhibit. He wishes for a woman to come into the exhibit with him, and stay for a suitable amount of time--at least half an hour--and he wishes for the exhibit to be more structured, to last all 24 hours and not admit anyone after starting, or allow anyone to leave. To take a writerly step back, the portrayal of a disturbed character is spot-on, here. The guy is creepy, and we can tell that from the first two pages alone, without anything overtly creepy having to happen. It's a perfect setup, but the beauty of it, in the one-two punch of my favorite literary technique ever, is that we forget about it by the time we get around to its relevance to the main story. Because Richard Elster's daughter was involved with a man who gave her mother the willies, in her New York life, and a few weeks after she comes to live with her father in the desert, she disappears.
The landscape comes into play here, its neverending sprawl, its deceptively long sightlines, its ability to swallow up a human, or an ill-prepared hiker, and never spit her out. When Richard and Jim come back from the grocery store to find Jessie utterly vanished, with none of her personal belongings touched, it is immediately hopeless. The desert is too big, and people too frail, as their abortive search efforts demonstrate. Jim and Richard leave without Jessie, and her disappearance is a mystery, though with a few hints, we know exactly what happened. And then, the final scene, we are back in 24 Hour Psycho,with our very own psycho of the first scene, and we see him meet Jessie. Jessie stays for half an hour. He follows Jessie out of the exhibit, and gets her carelessly relinquished phone number. And thus it starts. And we knew it all along.
Focusing on the mystery and its construction doesn't do justice to the meditative parts of the novel, the parts that focus on war and its effects, the academicization of war, and the distancing mechanisms used by its instigators. And these masterful flights of dialogue are difficult to describe simply because they are so trim and spritely. It will take you only a couple of hours to read POINT OMEGA, and there is no question that those hours will be worth it. That if it were possible to stretch the text out over 24 hours, we might never cease to find further meaning.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
CHRONIC CITY - Jonathan Lethem - Fiction
I was one of the few readers who enjoyed YOU DON'T LOVE ME YET, the novel preceding CHRONIC CITY in Lethem's hipster-slacker-chic oeuvre. So it is with some actual sadness that I report, after four-hundred-some pages with Perkus Tooth and Chase Insteadman, that this novel at best resembles the first draft of a passably good novel. In tone and plot points, it owes a tremendous and unacknowledged debt to Bret Easton Ellis--GLAMORAMA in particular--yet fails to get its strange and guarded characters off the ground. Everything, from the muddled mystery of an underground tiger on the loose, to Chase's astronaut fiancee, stranded on a space station, to the quest for the impossibly beautiful chaldrons, is a massive let-down. Lethem attempts reversals on the order of M. Night Shyamalan--is it real? Is it fake?--and then doubles back on himself, sometimes giving two contradictory explanations for the same mysterious phenomenon, as though writing both potential endings to a set-up and forgetting to delete one. Is the tiger a runaway drilling robot, or an actual two-story-high phantasmic tiger? Both, we're told, with equal narrative sincerity. This doesn't work. This kind of narrative disarray doesn't make these characters more interesting, or their daily stoner peregrinations any more purposeful. It leaves us with a mess of loose ends and no sense that there was a cross-stitch pattern underneath. It hampers the suspension of disbelief: halfway through this novel, it became almost stressful to read, because I wasn't sure that Lethem was actually going to be able to finish a coherent narrative. And he didn't, really. He threw a few smoke bombs, killed a character, and escaped citing the unpredictability and ineffable nature of real life.
I'm going to ruin a few of the novel's surprises, here. First of all, Chase Insteadman's fiancee, the astronaut trapped on a space station that has drifted into a field of orbiting Chinese mines? One of the only truly funny and interesting characters in the novel? Ends up being fake, a character written into a screenplay by Chase's new girlfriend Oona Laszlo, even though Oona enters the picture long after Chase supposedly receives the screenplay from a team of unknown young producers. Also, having received that screenplay, Chase somehow not only agrees to play the part but completely internalizes it, acquiring a weird form of selective amnesia about his past life such that he believes he really does have a fiancee in space. Chase does this without even realizing it. Then, Chase runs into the producers at a party, and they ask him WHAT HE THOUGHT OF THE SCREENPLAY. Even though Chase has apparently already STARTED PLAYING THE PART, so not only do they know what he thinks of the screenplay, they are EMPLOYING HIM.
This isn't clever storytelling. This is shoddy editing.
Okay, and then there are Chaldrons. Chaldrons are both holograms of vases and icons of vases in a virtual-reality game based on Second Life. They are difficult to make, although it is apparently both possible to make them if you have some skill, and impossible to make them unless you are the virtual world's creator. This isn't my misunderstanding. Both facts are presented, less than a hundred pages apart. We are told that Biller, one of Perkus Tooth's friends, has made a fortune crafting chaldrons for the virtual world and selling them on ebay. Then we are told by the mayor's personal assistant that her brother, the creator of the virtual world, made a certain finite number of chaldrons for the game, and that more chaldrons cannot be created, so their value keeps increasing. BOTH OF THESE CANNOT BE TRUE, AND THIS IS NEVER ADDRESSED. Furthermore, Chase, Perkus, and their third Musketeer Richard Abneg spend days--if not weeks, months--attempting to purchase a chaldron, believing that chaldrons are physical pieces of pottery. They try multiple times to bid for one on ebay. So, what, they never read the item description? They never read the wikipedia article on chaldrons, even though wikipedia is read and referenced by the characters? It seems highly implausible that three men could somehow not know that what they were attempting to spend thousands of dollars on was an item of currency in an online game. If the name sounds familiar, it may be because an actual chaldron is an obsolete measure of volume used for coal. The associations with "cauldron" are obvious and linguistically supported. Nevertheless, Lethem is really, really into his idea of chaldrons, and even produced a limited-edition tie-in item available through Thing Magazine: a pair of hipster glasses with text on the side-pieces. This he calls the Chaldron Optical System. Need I explain how ludicrous and annoying this is?
This review may not be adequately conveying my feelings about this book; I read it. I finished it. The first half I even found entertaining. It was the second half, as I realized that the book was on a downward arc that would never intersect with my expectations, that brought me to this point of annoyance and dismissal. I don't blame Lethem, I blame his editor, for not reigning in his tangents and forcing him to confront the inconsistencies of his text. Better luck next time.
I'm going to ruin a few of the novel's surprises, here. First of all, Chase Insteadman's fiancee, the astronaut trapped on a space station that has drifted into a field of orbiting Chinese mines? One of the only truly funny and interesting characters in the novel? Ends up being fake, a character written into a screenplay by Chase's new girlfriend Oona Laszlo, even though Oona enters the picture long after Chase supposedly receives the screenplay from a team of unknown young producers. Also, having received that screenplay, Chase somehow not only agrees to play the part but completely internalizes it, acquiring a weird form of selective amnesia about his past life such that he believes he really does have a fiancee in space. Chase does this without even realizing it. Then, Chase runs into the producers at a party, and they ask him WHAT HE THOUGHT OF THE SCREENPLAY. Even though Chase has apparently already STARTED PLAYING THE PART, so not only do they know what he thinks of the screenplay, they are EMPLOYING HIM.
This isn't clever storytelling. This is shoddy editing.
Okay, and then there are Chaldrons. Chaldrons are both holograms of vases and icons of vases in a virtual-reality game based on Second Life. They are difficult to make, although it is apparently both possible to make them if you have some skill, and impossible to make them unless you are the virtual world's creator. This isn't my misunderstanding. Both facts are presented, less than a hundred pages apart. We are told that Biller, one of Perkus Tooth's friends, has made a fortune crafting chaldrons for the virtual world and selling them on ebay. Then we are told by the mayor's personal assistant that her brother, the creator of the virtual world, made a certain finite number of chaldrons for the game, and that more chaldrons cannot be created, so their value keeps increasing. BOTH OF THESE CANNOT BE TRUE, AND THIS IS NEVER ADDRESSED. Furthermore, Chase, Perkus, and their third Musketeer Richard Abneg spend days--if not weeks, months--attempting to purchase a chaldron, believing that chaldrons are physical pieces of pottery. They try multiple times to bid for one on ebay. So, what, they never read the item description? They never read the wikipedia article on chaldrons, even though wikipedia is read and referenced by the characters? It seems highly implausible that three men could somehow not know that what they were attempting to spend thousands of dollars on was an item of currency in an online game. If the name sounds familiar, it may be because an actual chaldron is an obsolete measure of volume used for coal. The associations with "cauldron" are obvious and linguistically supported. Nevertheless, Lethem is really, really into his idea of chaldrons, and even produced a limited-edition tie-in item available through Thing Magazine: a pair of hipster glasses with text on the side-pieces. This he calls the Chaldron Optical System. Need I explain how ludicrous and annoying this is?
This review may not be adequately conveying my feelings about this book; I read it. I finished it. The first half I even found entertaining. It was the second half, as I realized that the book was on a downward arc that would never intersect with my expectations, that brought me to this point of annoyance and dismissal. I don't blame Lethem, I blame his editor, for not reigning in his tangents and forcing him to confront the inconsistencies of his text. Better luck next time.
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