Tournament of Books Round One: ADAM by Ariel Schrag vs. THE BONE CLOCKS by David Mitchell

The early rounds of the Tournament of Books are frequently home to David-and-Goliath type match-ups. It almost seems unfair to pit one cultural behemoth against another, and kindest to let a smaller novel bow out early in a decision few would argue with.

Let's get this out of the way early--I'm going with THE BONE CLOCKS, as did the ToB, and it's the obvious choice. David Mitchell is a world-builder, and entirely up to the challenge of time-hopping, genre-defying, and perspective-switching, bringing us deep into the hearts of Holly Sykes and Hugo Lamb. (Mitchell also shares the same name as one of the best comedians of all time, my top choice in a Dinner Party with Any Five People scenario, and this can't hurt his ToB chances.) The story is divided up into sections that each take place roughly ten years ahead of the previous, and the strongest of these by far are the first and last, narrated by Holly. Other reviews have pointed out that some sections drag--I'm least partial to "Crispin Hershey's Lonely Planet", the section supposed to be a parody of Martin Amis--but the same was true of CLOUD ATLAS, and Mitchell has the good sense to bookend the story with tales of survival and family that leave a lasting impression. We don't have to believe in, or fully understand, the struggle of the horologists to recognize the trope of a secret society preying on young children as sacrifices. In certain sections, the horologists and the anchorites remind me of characters from A WRINKLE IN TIME or THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH, in the way that their struggle is understandable in broad strokes. This is not a nuanced portrayal of evil; Hugo Lamb rather clearly sells his soul for power, and in doing so distinguishes himself from Holly, who wears her honesty like a uniform: with equal parts resentment and pride. Holly shows over and over that she will sacrifice herself for a child, for a family member, and for the outcasts, which makes her as neat a heroine as any commonly found in battle against time-traveling warlocks.

I'm going to describe the basic plot of ADAM to you, and let you judge for yourself whether it's a progressive or regressive novel. Adam is a rising high school senior is losing touch with his group of friends, and arranges to spend the summer in New York City with his lesbian older sister Casey. Upon meeting her and her friends, who all fall somewhere along the queer spectrum, Adam is introduced to a culture about which he has been equally curious and apprehensive since discovering his sister's orientation. After deciding that this summer he will find a redheaded girlfriend, Adam runs into a girl who meets his specifications at a party, and allows her to continue in the mistaken assumption that he is trans and 22, rather than potentially quash their nascent attraction. This lie of omission grows and continues to haunt Adam as their relationship progresses, until one night on the shores of a Michigan lake, Adam reveals to his girlfriend his true gender and age, and is completely accepted, although she has previously stated unequivocally that she would never date a cis man. Their relationship continues partway through Adam's return to California and his last year of high school, before ending in a manner common to the long-distance relationships of the young: their skype chats become a chore, and eventually she starts seeing a coworker (another cis man, it is worth noting).

Now, of course this traffics in some of the most unrealistic and pernicious assumptions about lesbians made by any straight man--that their orientation is somehow more fungible than that of straight men, that their choices and stated preferences are not absolute, and that cis men can easily pass for trans men (although in the novel each trans man's ability to pass is commented upon at length and in one case serves as a late twist that really adds nothing to the story.) It's unclear how much of these assumptions we're supposed to attribute to the author and how much to Adam, who does embody a lot of the prejudices and ignorance of a straight teenage boy confronted with gay and trans people in the flesh for the first time.

The story raises some dark issues that it skirts around (the ethicality of having sex with someone to whom you have lied about your age; the obsessive and stalker-like behavior of Ethan toward his ex-girlfriend Rachel; Casey's possibly abusive relationship with Hazel, a confusingly-motivated dominatrix and trans woman who she meets on the internet; Rachel's addiction to prescription pain-killers and Ethan's unsuccessful attempts to convince her to get treatment; some throwaway anti-Semitism centered on an unresponsive Hasidic landlord). Bringing up an array of dysfunction while avoiding realistic consequences is common in my experience with YA fiction, but the reader also expects a nod to negative outcomes that never arrives. Casey is certainly tossed around by the winds of fate and never seems to experience a happy relationship (and neither do most of the queer characters, significantly) but Adam gets the authorial pass to imagine negative consequences at every turn (his girlfriend breaking off all contact with him, a passing group of street toughs beating him up, being ridiculed by his friends or by Ethan) while never facing them. It ends up being unsatisfying, because Adam is certainly not a hero, and often makes immoral choices, notwithstanding his dithering over them. His behavior is hard to explain; he reads up extensively on trans issues but fails to notice the major issues of consent in his treatment of his girlfriend, and he experiences very disturbing dissociative anxiety attacks but is pretty blase about his girlfriend's confessed depression. When it comes to deciding between a fantastical story with a clear and admirable hero, and a realistically-based portrayal of teen angst told from the point of view of a sometime-scumbag, it's not too hard to choose the forces of good.

My winner and ToB's: THE BONE CLOCKS

Compilation Review: ADULTING - Kelly Williams Brown - Self-Help; #GIRLBOSS - Sophia Amoruso - Business; LEAN IN - Sheryl Sandberg - Business

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a young woman graduating college these days is going to receive one of these three books. There's even a version of LEAN IN marketed specifically for graduates; I don't know if it's any different from the original version, nor do I think it should be, but someone with some marketing savvy at Knopf saw an inch of desirable shelf space and slid it in. Luckily, I graduated years ago, but as nightmares of being in college and on the hook for a final in a class I forgot I signed up for are still on a primetime slot in my subconscious, it feels as though it were yesterday.

(For the record, college graduation: it rained, a sweet trouble-making boy in my dorm stayed up all night and then kissed every girl on the hall before we walked over, I brought a paperback of PSYCHO and read it while they called all the thousands of CS major names; graduate school graduation everyone got sunburned, my parents and dog and boyfriend all came and got along, we had an afterparty with cake at my apartment where guests included our cat, dog, and three baby raccoons we were fostering.)

I read LEAN IN as soon as it came out; I could have read it before it came out if I had realized that Walden Pond Books in Oakland is a stand-up institution that puts books on the shelves as soon as they arrive, regardless of their supposed release dates. I was invited to a women's leadership seminar last year at which Sheryl Sandberg spoke. She seems like an enjoyable, ambitious, and kind person to work with. (Remember how "ambitious" used to be an insult? Like in Julius Caesar, "there are those who say that Caesar was ambitious...ambition should be made of sterner stuff!" I love that speech; I've never thought of "ambitious" as an insult). I understand and agree with a lot of the criticism of LEAN IN that has been written about extensively, and well, in other venues; it doesn't offer much actionable advice for low-income or uneducated women, it doesn't touch upon the institutionalized sexism and racism that contribute to keeping women out of leadership positions, and it assumes a lot of support structures (like child care and maternity leave and bosses who are interested in your success) that many women don't have. It also assumes that the type of success you're looking for in your life is career-based and will happen within the structures of contemporary capitalism.

Keeping these limitations in mind, LEAN IN still has a lot to offer a certain type of graduate. She may have majored in business, she's fairly traditional and a go-getter, and she would love to work at one of the largest and most well-known companies in her industry. There are a lot of these women, and sometimes it helps for them to hear stories similar to their own. Sandberg was pulled along, in her career, by friends and colleagues who recognized her work ethic and her chances for success. It's success in a fairly traditional sense, but there are a lot of young people entering jobs where answering emails that come in until midnight is acceptable, and where role models in the office who have young children still travel four nights a week. Sandberg's advice to fake it till you make it and always aim for improvement and rapid growth is useful in any industry, but telling someone who is already unsatisfied with the always-on demands of work to "not be afraid to do more" and take on more responsibility is going to fall flat. There are a lot of things I love doing, and nothing I want to be forced to do for 12 hours a day five days a week. I support any book in favor of self confidence, of taking a chance, of doing something you may not feel fully qualified to do. On the other hand, LEAN IN leaves a lot of the working woman's discontents unexamined, leaving room for #GIRLBOSS.

Amoruso references LEAN IN in her own book; their search results recommend one another. I found #GIRLBOSS a reaction to LEAN IN at times, and one of the most honest business memoir's I've ever read. This is partly because Amuroso doesn't have a lot to lose; she built her online retail empire from the ground up on her own, while working as a security guard at the Academy of Art, and she can't really be fired from it. The statute of limitations is presumably up on her early shoplifting adventures, and it's refreshing to read a life story that leaves the unflattering parts in--the stealing, the hitch-hiking, getting fired from a boutique when her heart wasn't in it, and her initial forays into ebay selling through technically disallowed advertising on myspace. Even more recent examples, stories of firing employees and making fun of interview candidates, stay in the book to show the budding girl entrepreneur that she doesn't have to sand down her judgmental personality to succeed in business, she just has to be committed to doing whatever will make that business bigger. While Amuroso also advocates a boot-strappy personal-responsibility take on success, she backs it up by having a business that started from almost nothing, didn't require loans or angel investors, and now employs hundreds of people. Her path isn't fool-proof success, but it's more accessible than Sandberg's.

Amuroso goes into interesting detail on the origins of her style and business choices, from how she styled photoshoots to how she packaged items ready to ship. That kind of hands-on tip tends to be polished out of more "corporate" memoirs--I can't point to a concrete example of a business decision Sandberg had to make at Google, or how she evaluates changes to Facebook policies, for example--but they can be the most helpful to businesses starting out. 'Details matter,' says the new-business primer, but that can be vague--does it mean we have to choose the same style of black-ink pen for everyone, or does it just mean that the logo should be the same on every page of the website?--'don't put the mailing label on crooked, and no one will know it's just you in your studio apartment printing the mailing labels on an inkjet' suggests Amuroso, and it becomes a little bit clearer. A lot of any advice book is common sense, including Sandberg ('say yes to a tough project to show you're responsible and capable') and Amuroso ('make sure your LinkedIn and Facebook profiles are professional') but an advice memoir should be showing us someone to emulate implicitly, rather than explicitly, and Amuroso comes off more relatable to the young graduate.

Finally, the lowest bar of advice memoir is set by ADULTING, in which Brown spends a fair amount of time advising readers how to get along at work and an equal amount of time on how to clean and furnish one's apartment. The conceit of the book, born of Brown's blog of the same name, is charming: hundreds of little "do this, don't do that" tips that range from 'clean the pans under your stove's burners' to 'keep in touch with extended family regularly'. The audience is pretty clearly the 21-to-27-year-old who is living on her own and ready to get more serious about it. However, beyond age (which we can discern both from references to 32-year-olds as older and established professionals and from advice about how to cook basic food items), other aspects of the target audience change from chapter to chapter. Is the same reader who is told to contribute to her 401(k) also told to put a $100 bill in an envelope under her bed as an emergency fund for veterinary bills? Is the same graduate who has to be reminded to wipe up the things she spills the one also being told how to care for a grieving friend who has miscarried? Why is it reasonable that the reader will change her car's oil herself, but won't tailor her own clothes? I assume a lot of this advice comes from Brown's personal experience, which is why it's frustrating that there are so few specific anecdotes in the book (the two that come to mind are of having a debit card declined at Popeye's, and dealing with a mean coworker at a holiday party). I would be interested in hearing more about Brown's life as a reporter, but in an effort to be as generalizable as possible, she rarely goes beyond mentioning 'this happened to me.'

Writing this type of manners guide is a very Southern thing to do, so it made sense to me that the author started her reporting career in Louisiana and Mississippi. Traditional advice topics covered in ADULTING include writing thank-you letters, hosting dinner parties, and being a guest at your in-laws'. Some entries were useful (some appetizer and salad recipes), many more were less useful (no one needs to be told to pay bills on time; many people need advice on how to get the money to pay those bills on time). When I think of tips on how to be an adult that my friends have offered (and I have a number of friends whose advice on these topics I delight in) it's along less obvious lines (what to pack in your emergency preparedness kit, and where to put it, for example, as we live in earthquake-prone areas; which herbs and vegetables grow easily in pots indoors and which are always going to be so much cheaper to just buy at Trader Joe's. For the record, basil is easy to grow). I know there are some graduates just starting out who need this ABC guide to living alone and not dying, but I hope there aren't many (ADULTING made the NYT bestseller list, but perhaps young women like to read these types of guides to reassure themselves that they knew it all already).

Your graduate may need hand-me-down furniture or a gas gift card more than she needs a book of advice. But how else can you tell her what to do without sounding overbearing? Give her Sandberg if she wears a lot of button-downs, and Amuroso if she wears a lot of black; give her ADULTING if she sometimes wears a bathing suit as a shirt and starts fires in the microwave, and remember you probably won't get that furniture back intact.

WOLF IN WHITE VAN - John Darnielle - Fiction

The best way I can explain to you how to think about this book is to ask you to remember a time when you did something terrible as a teenager--a bad decision you made, or a bad set of mind that you hardly recognize now as your own. A short survey of my own mind suggests that these instances jump readily to hand. And imagine that you had to live, and are still currently living, with a reminder of that time and that mindset and that decision. Not just a tattoo of a star that you got when you were drunk and now find meaningless and a little embarrassing, but a big, inescapable reminder that indicates to everyone who meets you now who you once were. A tattoo that blatantly identifies you as part of a gang. Keloid scars on your arms from where you used to cut yourself. Sean Phillips, the narrator of WOLF IN WHITE VAN, carries an unavoidable reminder of the worst day of his life, but doesn't seem to remember, or be able to explain, what his mind was like on that day. The majority of the novel hints at what happened to Sean, explaining it in piecemeal up until the last chapter, but I don't think it's necessary to keep it a secret--Sean shot himself, attempting to kill himself, but didn't succeed. Instead, he destroyed most of his face, went through an extensive surgical reconstruction, and now lives alone on insurance payouts and a small amount of income he makes from running roleplaying games through the mail.

Sean can't really explain why he did what he did, and even the narrative of events from his day illustrates the inexplicable nature of some teenage suicides. He talked with friends, did some homework, listened to music, and then at night took a gun out from under his bed and walked to his parents' room, thinking of shooting them, before shooting himself. I didn't know why Sean thought about killing his parents--nothing about him made him seem like that kind of kid, to me--but then, he doesn't seem to understand it now himself, and feels remorse for the way his actions affected his parents. His parents hadn't really done anything to upset him. He hadn't really done anything to upset himself. It was as though an idea just slipped into his mind, and stayed there, until it was the only one left.

Subliminal messages pop up multiple places in the novel; the title is a reference to lyrics people thought they heard when they played rock and roll tapes backwards, and throughout Sean's role-playing game, characters are supposed to pick up on subtle clues to propel them toward the center of the game, a partially underground fortress in the midwest called the Trace Italian. As someone who has never gotten into role-playing games, and certainly without the patience to play one by mail, I found the conceit of Trace Italian a little mystifying. It's maybe a less social version of Dungeons and Dragons, in that you can play it by yourself, without speaking to anyone else? The idea that two players, also teenagers, would start to believe the game was real, to the extent that they traveled to the midwest and tried to literally perform their most recent move, was implausible to me. I guess the kids could have been on hallucinogens, they could have been a bit mentally unstable. I get the feeling we're supposed to view their accident (one freezes to death, the other is seriously injured) as analogous to Sean's. It wasn't the fault of the metal music Sean listened to,  or the role-playing game the kids played; it was just an idea in their still-forming teenage brains that wasn't fully evaluated. Their responsibility circuits weren't entirely on yet, and while some of us rode out that part of adolescence saying stupid things to boys, or writing terrible fan fiction on the internet, or drinking illicit beers, or shoplifting chapstick, these kids made a decision that could have cost them all their lives. We're not supposed to really feel sorry for Sean; the accident and its outcome transformed his obsession with mythical fights and quests and Conan into a detailed creative undertaking and a mildly successful entrepreneurial venture. Sean survived, and is as much of an adult as his circumstances allow him to be. In a transparent nod to the habits of childhood, he still eats candy, but is embarrassed by it and hides it from his assistant. He has empathy for people who remind him of his old self, both the kids who freeze themselves trying to follow the map of his game and the stoners outside the liquor store who ask him about his face, but he is never going to be that person again, and won't pretend to be.

WOLF IN WHITE VAN might be a morose type of coming-of-age story; rather than getting through a sadistic boarding school, or running away, or moving to a new country, Sean physically transforms himself. He destroys his present trajectory for one a lot darker, but in doing so crosses permanently over a barrier into adulthood. In his game, you can't go back to a save point to replay your turns, and you wouldn't necessarily want to; many roads lead to the Trace Italian, and you don't have to win your first battle to get there.

SUMMER HOUSE WITH SWIMMING POOL - Herman Koch - Fiction

After THE DINNER, Herman Koch has a plan: stories of families committing acts that are deeply wrong while raising their children, hating their societally-revered jobs, and underestimating their spouses. It's a great formula. Top-notch formula. Even using only one of the three can make a very successful story. Gillian Flynn did "committing acts that are deeply wrong while underestimating a spouse"; John Banville's done "committing acts that are deeply wrong while hating societally-revered job" (and a lot of other 'bad cop' thrillers), and Shirley Jackson to Stephen King have shown us "raising children while committing unspeakable acts".

For his hat trick, Koch uses Marc Schlosser, a Dutch family doctor who hates listening to his patients but distinguishes his practice by the amount of time he listens to his patients; he hates attending theatre productions and movies but his patients are primarily artists, and he is invited to many, and attends. Marc is characterized by overreaction and a false sense of social perceptiveness. He hates going to the theatre--really, really hates it, beyond all reflection of its actual tedium. He hates caring for human bodies, particularly ill ones, although he admits a certain pleasure in performing rectal exams upon the wary. He hates--really, really hates--camping, but acquiesces to it for his wife, who loves it. He also hates the smells of animals, and the way men look at women, and the way specialists condescend to family doctors. He's like the anti-Hannibal Lecter; Hannibal hated rudeness but had the intellect and the societal acumen to back it up, but Marc just hates being around people who aren't him.

Marc has an odd mentor in a disgraced medical school professor of his, who had some unorthodox ideas about the purposes of sexual desire. Probably these excerpts from the professor's lectures are meant to be shocking, but I can only imagine them being delivered by a doddering, senile lecturer being mostly ignored by his students. The professor is such an old-timey villain. He probably hates interracial couples, and the Jews.

Marc does love his daughters, Lisa and Julia, not to the extent that he would alter his vacation plans to encompass activities they would like, or do much more than smile benightedly over their hijinks with boys, until tragedy befalls them, but certainly he loves them, and overreacts to protect them, and suffers from an inability to understand how they feel about him, or what their plans are.

At the beginning of the action, Marc has been invited to the opening night of a play starring Ralph, one of his patients, and pretty much a lothario. Ralph leers at Marc's wife, and Marc suddenly gets an idea--two can play at that game! Ralph also has a wife, Judith, and Marc, who has apparently never had the idea of infidelity before and is curiously inept at it, sets his sights on her. He goes about this rather like his teenage daughters, planning an entire family vacation around hoping to run into Judith at the summer house where she and Ralph will be vacationing. As someone who used to plan her school hallway route to 'happen' to pass by the classroom of a certain boy, I'm familiar with this tactic, but it's fairly transparent, as it is immediately to Caroline, Marc's wife. Why are we staying at this horrid campground run by a man who tortures animals and is probably a serial killer, Caroline thinks. Oh, of course, because Marc said it would be nice and also because Judith and Ralph are here. Caroline is willing to give Marc the benefit of the doubt, and so the two families are drawn together, with the nice addition of a Roman Polanski duo, a Dutchman turned American film director, Stanley, and his very young model/actress girlfriend, Emmanuelle.

Ralph and Judith happen to have two sons well-matched in age to Marc's daughters, and with the full summer contingent the sexual tensions are too much for Marc to process. He apparently doesn't realize that Judith is cavorting with Stanley while also leading him on, and doesn't see Ralph's somewhat predatory attentions toward all the women present everywhere until it's too late. It really seems that Marc is coming to terms with his sexuality late in life; there's a charmingly awkward scene in which he tries to convince a leasing agent to fix the water in Ralph's summer house by hitting on her. The tenor of his "hitting on her" is "you're very pretty, please do what I want." Marc is no match in sophistication for Ralph; his only trump card is that he's a doctor, and he waits patiently to be able to play it.

The climax of the novel comes when most of the two families go down to the beach to set off fireworks. I don't recall exactly what holiday they're celebrating--they're not in the US, but it seems to be around the 4th of July--and Julia goes off with Alex, who returns to his mom and Marc crying; he has lost her. Marc searches the beach bar where she had gone with Alex, and then finds her by the shoreline, seemingly washed up onto the beach. By some markings on her legs, he concludes that she was attacked and raped. He gives her a cursory examination but begins to believe that someone with them--Ralph? Stanley? The crazy dutchman in charge of their former campground, who he ran off the road while driving to the beach? Alex himself?--is responsible. He refuses to take Julia to the cops, and the family leaves early in the morning, sneaking off unnoticed by all but Ralph's mother-in-law.

Marc settles his suspicions quickly and firmly on Ralph, based on the evidence that (a) Ralph is a pervert, (b) Ralph played a game with his daughters (and his sons) that involved pretending to pull off their bathing suit bottoms, and (c ) Ralph tried to hit on his wife, so why not. I think the evidence against Ralph is less than air-tight. I would have suspected the crazy campground Dutchman; he had the motive (revenge for running him off the road) and the opportunity (he apparently snuck down to the beach after the car accident, and would have been in the vicinity of the beach club before Marc and Judith find Alex and Julia). On the other hand, Ralph tries to divert blame in a deathbed "confession" that Alex was in on a plan to let Julia hook up with a repairman she met at the beach house; according to him she had sex with the repairman and then staged her "attack" and allowed herself to be discovered on the beach so as not to raise her parents' suspicions. This seems far-fetched; this plan, if it was one, brought much more attention to Julia than she had attracted thus far, and she had no way of knowing that her parents wouldn't take her to the police. Ralph also explains Julia's attraction to the repairman as her "liking older men" which is just not true from everything we've seen of Julia. So, is Ralph making this up to deflect suspicion? Did Alex make it up? Is Julia just a trouble-maker intent on ruining her family's vacation? None of these theories seems implausible, which is the beauty of the off-kilter worlds Koch creates. Isn't any one of us capable of the worst? And who is watching to make sure we behave?

THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P - Adelle Waldman - Fiction

The questions that come to mind when reading The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. are, is every man like this? Is he an asshole or the combination of his circumstances and his high self-regard? Who was right in his relationship with Hannah, and who was wrong? And, most importantly, am I like this?

How much can we forgive ourselves for?

Certainly our worst impulses tend toward the Nathaniel, and our best impulses tend toward imagining that everyone else doesn’t feel this way about other people, that it is us, we are wrong and sociopathic and shouldn’t evaluate our previous partners on their style of dress, or the way they kissed, or their cringing attitude whenever we met their parents.

I came across Marina Keegan’s short story “Cold Pastoral” today, and it reminded me of Nathaniel P.; in the story, Claire is in college and her not-quite-boyfriend, Brian, dies in a car accident. At the behest of his previous girlfriend, she recovers his diary and then (unadvisedly) reads it. Its excerpts sounded much like Nathaniel: he wonders whether he is still in love with his previous girlfriend, whether he really likes Claire, how things went wrong before and how they might be made right, who was hotter and who was better in bed, and whether the grass is always greener in the past. Claire gets over her discoveries (and Marina Keegan was herself killed in a car accident shortly after writing the story, making me want to write solely about centenarians who are still in love with their grad school sweethearts after all these years…), but we can say the same of Hannah. Hannah moves on. Hannah herself is not blameless in her breakup with Nathaniel; she sends him a terrible, maudlin email, and then another scathing email after he doesn’t respond to the first. But Hannah forgives herself, and we can quickly forgive her, too; she is upset and tends toward over-expressing her emotions.

Nathaniel tends toward discounting his emotions, undermining them and second-guessing them. His admiration for his quirky Israeli best friend is at times the best thing about him (he thinks) and then a second later shallow (she expresses her opinions about iced coffee as vehemently and eloquently as her opinions about love and relationships) or misguided (he watches her interactions with a waiter and her habit of brining the conversation back to the same points over and over again, and begins to hate her). It is this duplicity that we hate in ourselves and find hard to forgive in Nate’s character. We don’t want our friends to think these things behind our backs, even though undoubtedly they do. We don’t want our partners to think that we look worse than a passing stranger; we don’t even want our partners to notice the passing stranger, even if we are being less than perfectly engaging. Admitting what we actually think about other people, especially those closest to us, is unthinkable.

It seems clear that Nate doesn’t want a relationship with any of the women he meets, but also doesn’t have the willpower to say no. His friendship with Aurit is rare, and the fact of it is still surprising to him. Most of the women he meets who want to date him aren’t trying to be his friend first, and the only way he can get to know them better is to date them. Maturation through this process is a series of trials by fire. Nate hardly knows how to argue with his friends, how to express his disapproval of their behavior or even how to tell them he disagrees (a friend of his asks him to save a seat at a lecture, for example; from the beginning Nate thinks this is silly and knows he won’t do it, but goes along and even pretends to apologize to the friend when he doesn’t save the seat.) He is learning how to disagree with someone he cares for through the process of upsetting and losing everyone he is supposed to care for the most. His parents have their own particular and peculiar ways of interacting with him, which haven’t prepared him well for communicating with a girlfriend; his father is mostly oblivious to the realities of Nate’s life and Nate’s nuanced ambivalences about his choices, while his mother implicitly demands to be treated as the most important person in his life while not allowing him to criticize her or even change the subject.

As a result of never being allowed to be honest with his parents, Nate abstracts them. He loves the idea of their struggles and production of him as a successful person, and he is ashamed of their shortcomings and obliviousness. By never airing his frustrations with them and never seeing them change, Nate comes to think of his girlfriends in the same way: people he has to put up with entirely as they are, people he can evaluate in secret but never be comfortable around, people who will never truly know him but who he cannot influence in any substantive way. He can’t bring up the way Hannah’s drinking unsettles him, or the way her style of communication feels oppressive to him. He notes it, and it adds to the gap between them, a gap that Hannah feels but one that is never explained to her. Nate struggles with his own feelings and thoughts, ultimately absolving him of his guilt about them, but he never confesses them. And of course we forgive ourselves for much less than others will—self-absorption magnifies every sin—but Nate is still far from sharing his thoughts, as was Brian, and though they keep these thoughts to themselves to avoid causing discomfort, Claire and Hannah and those who come after will still be hurt by everything that was left unsaid. 

Discussed herein: Cold Pastoral (Marina Keegan) 

Tournament of Books Final Round: THE GOOD LORD BIRD by James McBride vs. LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson

Unsurprisingly, THE GOOD LORD BIRD takes home the Rooster. I was a little disappointed in the Tournament this year—not just because I think the least offensive, most broadly appealing book won, but also because I didn’t feel that I read many new ways of looking at the books that were reviewed. There are kind of two camps of book reviews, one that presupposes you’ve read the book and one that doesn’t. I usually prefer the former; I turn to reviews when I’ve just read a book, to see if there’s a new interpretation of the text that I haven’t considered. I rarely look to reviews for recommendations; a recommendation can be a list or a couple sentences and suffice for me to pick up the book.

Both THE GOOD LORD BIRD and LIFE AFTER LIFE are historical novels; a friend of mine doesn’t like reading historical fiction because she “doesn’t know if what [she’s] learning is true.” I’m interested in that point of view; it’s true of pretty much anything we read from far enough in the past (did George Washington really chop down that cherry tree? I argue there is literally no way to be sure) but it also points out the limits of historical fiction. At some point, if you’re curious enough about the events depicted, you’ll head to nonfictional source material to learn more. This is more important in THE GOOD LORD BIRD than LIFE AFTER LIFE, particularly if you’re not familiar with the characters McBride lampoons. (I am assuming that almost any reader knows that someone like Ursula didn’t shoot Hitler in a tavern, and that Eva Braun didn’t have many female friends). In that sense, I suppose THE GOOD LORD BIRD is more successful; it’s more likely to push readers to learn more, if only because the characterizations of historical figures are so funny and odd. I am interested in whether John Brown’s sons were basically as depicted, and whether any of the reinforcements on the train who were scared off by the lack of a password realized later what they had missed, and how they felt about missing it.

I’m strangely not curious at all to read anything else by McBride, though, and that’s why I still think that THE SON won this tournament. I can’t wait to get my hands on AMERICAN RUST, and I want to re-read THE SON very soon.

Read the final ToB judgments here.

Tournament of Books Round Sixteen: LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson vs. THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES by Hanya Yanagihara

Well, now I don’t care about the ToB at all. I have no dog in this fight. I guess I hope THE GOOD LORD BIRD wins, but this year’s is pretty much over for me already.

But let’s go back to a few minutes before I read the end of the review. Interestingly (?), both of these novels deal with immortality, whether author-derived or turtle-conferred. LIFE AFTER LIFE concerns Ursula, a woman growing up over the course of the twentieth century, mostly in England, who has the ability—to use a video game term—respawn after every type of death. Whether she is murdered or drowns or kills herself, she is reborn, and has many of the same experiences but avoids that particular death. She doesn’t know this about herself (and I think the novel would have been greatly more interesting had she somehow figured this out, or known it all along; what wouldn’t you do if you knew you couldn’t die?) but she has vague premonitions of having had past lives, and these premonitions push her toward an ineffective psychoanalyst. She is surrounded by a host of interesting and flawed characters, but is not herself noticeably flawed; in my previous review I held that she is only supposed to be a stand-in for the reader, and I support that interpretation still. Although the ToB reviewer thinks he will revisit this novel, I doubt that I will; like a video game, once you’ve played it all the way through in every permutation of Ursula, there’s nothing new to discover. There is nothing in Ursula to agree or disagree with, to find myself in apposition or opposition to. Ursula experiences a great many historical events, but these too hold little interest in revisiting; we know what happened and in many cases it seems inexorable. What could Ursula have done (save for the opening scene of her shooting Hitler) to change the course of WWII? Ursula never made it that far up the power ladder. At best she was Eva Braun’s best friend, and even killing Eva Braun seems unlikely to have convinced Hitler of the error of his ways. Could Ursula have done more? Sure, but we can’t fault her for what she did.

THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES, on the other hand, has at its center Abraham Norton Perina, a deeply flawed man to whom we can certainly see ourselves in opposition; there are many things Norton could have done differently, or better, from his due diligence on med school and his subsequent employment to his treatment of the native people of the island of Ivu’ivu, to his behavior as a father and as a person. Norton’s flaws are myriad, and to me some of the most interesting are his treatment of his brother, and his feelings about romantic relationships. Norton wants us to believe, at the end of the novel, that he was never loved, and could never find the type of love he truly desired. (Ursula, I want to note, has lives in which she is both loved and unloved, but the relationship that seems to mean the most to her is her relationship with her distant father. Despite the professed importance of this relationship, we don’t see many scenes of Ursula and her father sharing “quality time.”) Is Norton being truthful in these disclosures? Perhaps Norton had opportunities for love and discarded them, or deterred them with his own disdain and general personal awfulness? Why is he so upset with his brother’s homosexuality, and his brother’s long-term relationship? What does Norton find so enviable and admirable about young Ivu’ivuans that he couldn’t have found with young men from his hometown, or from his university or med school? Many readers of this novel seem incredibly willing to throw it aside, having finished it and having made their judgments of the moral unacceptability of Norton. I guess I’m interested in explaining the monster, or at least in exploring what makes him so monstrous. A lot was made of the importance of an absent or disengaged mother in WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN. A similar thesis is hesitantly proposed for Norton; his mother is sometimes catatonic and strangely unconcerned with him or his brother, and she dies when he is still rather young. Freudianly, Norton hates his father and ceases to think of him much after college. Norton finds him not sufficiently driven by success, although Norton doesn’t quite undertake his anthropology assignment as an avenue to success; Norton is floundering as he finishes up med school and might otherwise have had to return home to take up the family business. But I would still read that novel (Norton in middle America, trying to hide his awfulness behind the business of being a gentleman farmer) because Norton’s flaws and his cravenness and his lack of likability make him interesting to me. Ursula is too smooth a surface; the conceit of LIFE AFTER LIFE is interesting, but I wish it had been applied to a more meaty character.

My winner: THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES

ToB’s winner: LIFE AFTER LIFE

Read the terrible official judgment here.