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. 

Tournament of Books Round Fifteen: THE GOLDFINCH by Donna Tartt vs. THE GOOD LORD BIRD by James McBride

Zombie Round! I find that my judgment in this round, between two books I enjoyed but didn’t love, is colored by my anticipation of, and excitement for, THE GOLDFINCH—I expected more from it, and it fell short of my hopes. I hadn’t heard anything about THE GOOD LORD BIRD, on the other hand—when I first saw it I thought it was going to be about the hunt for this thought-to-be-extinct woodpecker—and so when it turned out to be funny, and educational for someone who knew next to nothing about John Brown and Harper’s Ferry, I was surprised and pleased. For that matter, the sections that those who found THE GOLDFINCH charming cite (the Las Vegas interlude, and those scenes with Boris) I didn’t find particularly amusing. I loved Popchik, and I was glad that Theo got away from New York for a while, but I certainly wouldn’t have spent time with Boris on my own. He seemed like far more of a caricature than the similarly expedient Hobie. I liked Hobie, and I would read a short story about his life, but for Theo to remain loyal to Boris while screwing Hobie over with unnecessary deceit was too painful and unmotivated for me. I can’t see why Theo would have continued to create forgeries after the initial thrill of succeeding with one, and I think it happened simply because Tartt wanted to show that Theo continued to give in to his worst impulses like his father before him, without being overly tedious with the descriptions of drugs and drugged stupor and a few pills, and some drugs hidden under the bed.

I understood Onion better, even though his lived experiences are much farther removed from mine than Theo’s life of privilege and self-doubt. Onion’s motivations were clear to me: self-preservation is something we all have in common as a species, and wanting to avoid violence, as a theme I identified in the first review round, is very relatable. Onion didn’t have much regret for his father’s death, which I found strange, but he also got swept up into half-captivity half-adventure immediately afterward, and was understandably preoccupied with learning how to please his new master (and learning that he no longer had a master, no matter how important it was to stay with John Brown’s army.)

As much as I hate to level this judgment against any novel, I think THE GOLDFINCH was too long. THE GOOD LORD BIRD had the benefit of being constrained by the timelines of an actual event, John Brown’s life, but at least it had the good sense to stay within those constraints, keep the action moving, and introduce us to a broad enough range of characters that if we grew tired of the moralizing orator we could stay interested in the double-crossing prostitute. THE GOLDFINCH kept bringing me back to the same characters, whether likeable or not, and it ended up backfiring; even if I had had enough of the Barbours, they kept coming back, and even if I thought Boris was destined for an early grave, he escaped scrape after scrape. But not even by becoming a zombie can these characters survive this round…

My winner and ToB’s: THE GOOD LORD BIRD

Read the official Tournament judgment here. 

Tournament of Books Round Fourteen: THE SON by Philipp Meyer vs. THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES by Hanya Yanagihara

Noooooooooooooo.

This round pitted two books I loved against one another, so I really couldn’t have been happy (and I would have either of these trade spots with THE GOOD LORD BIRD in a heartbeat). It confuses me that there are people who don’t like either of these books—I have never felt that I need to love a main character, or approve of him; I probably need to empathize with him, but he doesn’t have to be a good person, and I feel I was let into the hearts and minds of both of the main characters of these novels.

Why might one choose THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES over THE SON? I still remember the scenery and the islands of Ivu’ivu. I would happily go there for vacation, and its demise through colonization and predation hurt me, as though I were losing a paradise I would otherwise have had access to. The novel had a deeper understanding of, and relationship with, animals than THE SON did, despite THE SON’s explorations of hunting, of pets, of the love of horses and the use of horses, and of the Native American practices of making bowstrings and blankets from animals. The latter part of THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES became a strange Phillip Roth pastiche, with a moneyed non-traditional suburban family exploring every conformation of dysfunction. Is there ever a situation in which a single father—and one who has a career outside of the home that he is very much dedicated to—successfully raises forty adopted children in rapid succession? Is this ever not an unregulated and unsupervised orphanage? What are we to make of the adult children who come home from college to wash the dishes and thank Norton for raising them? Was that even true? We may believe in our hearts that love is more important than money, and that a teenager who can’t go to college because he can’t afford it but who has his parents’ undying love and support will go farther than one given a trust fund and completely ignored growing up. But we also have to imagine, reading this narrative, that the unimaginable gap between growing up on a tiny island—I can’t even call it rural because there’s nothing like a city near Ivu’ivu to position itself against—and growing up in a rich American suburb is only bridgeable with a great deal of privilege, and private tutors, and strongly held expectations. I would read the memoir of one of Norton’s adopted daughters with great interest.

Of course, I would also gladly read the memoir of one of Eli’s Comanche brothers, even for the scenes in which the Comanches are decimated by a disease that Eli was vaccinated against—in his previous life, the life that he has entirely rejected, his mother’s care for him that early in his life protected him in this unimaginable new life he has entirely embraced. I still don’t understand why Eli’s mother opened the door to the Comanches, as she must have known what would happen, but that scene made me feel that she was still looking out for her son, that despite her own life, and that of her daughter’s, and that of her more sensitive son, the entire McCullough trajectory had as its purpose, its fate, bringing Eli McCullough into the world and helping him tear his way through it. And the glory of this novel is that it made me believe he was worth it.

My winner: THE SON

ToB’s winner: THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES

Read the official Tournament judgment here.

Tournament of Books Round Thirteen: A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING by Ruth Ozeki vs. THE GOOD LORD BIRD by James McBride

In today’s matchup we have the cross-dressing ex-slave, Onion/Henry, who is taken along on John Brown’s road to occupying Harper’s Ferry and taking a stand against slavery, versus the bullied Japanese high-school girl, Naoko, who goes to live at her great-grandmother’s Zen Buddhist temple after her father attempts suicide. There are a number of sections of each that require the reader to suspend disbelief, and the commentary of this round touches on one of them: how does Onion maintain the illusion that he is a woman for so long, in front of so many people, in a brothel, and as the second woman in a household full of men? I also want to know how Naoko’s mother fails to realize that her only daughter has dropped out of school and become a prostitute at a maid-themed café. And why Nao’s own tsunami-inflicted death ends up being less affecting than the death of one of John Brown’s mentally disadvantaged sons. But let’s start with what we do know.

John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry was well-intentioned but poorly planned, motivated more by theological righteousness than expedience, political concern, or well-connected scheming. John Brown sabotages his own plan by moving the date of his attack around without communicating with his reinforcements, choosing a location that is very well-protected and in the midst of unfriendly territory, and believing that no matter what he does, he can’t fail, because the Lord is on his side. He doesn’t make a plan B. He barely has a plan for retreat, and comes to realize at the end that his beliefs will even carry him through imprisonment and death, because he sees himself as something of a Messiah figure. I read a New Yorker article recently about the Branch Davidians, which reminded me quite a bit of John Brown. David Koresh wasn’t fighting for human rights, but he also believed that as long as he could communicate his religious message, his subsequent capture and imprisonment would be tolerable. Does John Brown’s motivation for his failed takeover of Harper’s Ferry justify his actions? Certainly if someone tried something similar now, they would be considered a terrorist—was John Brown a terrorist? Does knowing that his heart was in the right place and that history bore out his wishes change how his siege of the armory must have felt to the people who lived and worked there? Or to the slaves who saw what he was doing and knew it would fail? To the free blacks who had to consider whether to help him in principle and potentially die or lose their freedom, or leave him to his own devices and feel complicit with the forces that moved against him? I think this is both one of the simplest questions THE GOOD LORD BIRD raises, and also one of the most interesting. Onion doesn’t join Brown’s stand out of principle, but because he realizes he has failed to uphold a promise to Brown, and doesn’t want to betray his friend. Although Onion is basically opposed to slavery, he never believes that Brown’s plan will work. He comes to Brown’s aid because Brown was a second father figure to him, and because he feels he owes Brown his loyalty, which ends up being a stronger conviction than the inherent wrongness of slavery.

In Naoko’s story, the doomed fighter is her great-uncle, a conscripted kamikaze pilot in World War Two. Although the pilot generally appreciates the life he has had in Japan, and has affection for his countrymen, he understands that the war is wrong, that the methods by which it is fought are unjust, and that the enemy is also a scared young man like him, who shouldn’t be killed for wanting to protect his country. His experiences provoke Nao first to pride, when she thinks he carried out his military mission and died a martyr, then to regret for her former feelings when she learns that he crashed his plane into the ocean, leaving his mission unfulfilled but his morality uncompromised. Her duality of feeling brings up an interesting tension that we see today, as our country embroils itself in conflict after conflict that have little bearing on the United States’ direct survival, but a large bearing on the survival of individual Americans who enlist. We want very much to be proud of servicemen and –women, while at the same time want to condemn these wars, and their collateral damage and torture and disruption of provincial Middle Eastern lives. Yet in the specifics, this brings the average person into a direct contradiction; success may involve ordering a strike against a group of militants, and that same strike may kill the militants as well as some innocent goat-tending bystanders. Were the pilot who was ordered to perform that strike instead to crash his plane into the Hindu Kush, rather than kill a fellow man who may not directly wish him ill, I doubt we would feel the way that Naoko does. But Naoko is more certain of herself and of her feelings than Onion, and does less to brook discussion; though both are reporting on events for posterity in the form of a journal or private papers, Onion has a deeper conversation with himself than Naoko does, and pushes himself farther to find the truth.

My round winner and ToB’s: THE GOOD LORD BIRD

Read the official Tournament review here. 

Tournament of Books Round Twelve: THE GOLDFINCH by Donna Tartt vs. THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES by Hanya Yanagihara

You already know where this review is going. The difficult one is going to be next week, when THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES goes up against THE SON. Oh, my heart. But, we still have a bit to talk about with respect the THE GOLDFINCH, and the ToB commentariat...

The missing plot point in THE GOLDFINCH may well have been that the Russian gangsters who steal the goldfinch painting towards the end of the novel are part of a terrorist organization that also orchestrated the bombing of the Met that killed Theo's mom. This is the conspiracy theory I choose to believe; it explains why Boris came into the story in the first place, aside from being an entertaining set piece, and it explains why we are never told more about the bombing (so as not to ruin the surprise of the latter third of the book). Maybe Hobie is in on it too. Maybe Mr. and Mrs. Barbour have inadvertently funded terrorism through their hedge funds. Any of these editions would make THE GOLDFINCH more worldly, more committed to ideals outside of the baroque sadness and inward, cringing shame of Theo Decker. But it isn't; THE GOLDFINCH is a long character study of a man falling into his own worst impulses because he believes he merits no better.

For all that commenters and judges of the ToB keep alluding to some structural flaws in THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES, I haven't seen any explicitly mentioned. Maybe when a novel is a first novel reviewers feel obliged to describe it as undercooked because they have to maintain hope that there are greater surprises awaiting them in the second novel. I just don't see it; THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES read as finely as any nth novel I've encountered, and I couldn't tell you a structural flaw. I enjoyed the biographical footnotes, I enjoyed the framing device that we are reading Norton Perina's memoirs, I enjoyed the anthropologist who disappears into the forest and is never seen again, and the feral children populating Perina's mansion of horrors. This novel is about the struggles of one man, but it reaches out again and again to bring in worldly themes. The destruction of paradises. The ills of globalization. Man's colonizing impulse over man. Our fear of our own mortality and infirmity. Society's obsession with the rites of puberty. The treatment of women in science. The treatment of young people in science. The treatment of human and animal subjects in science. I've tread these lines of argument before, but I want to stress that there's something for almost everyone in THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES--maybe nothing for someone who deeply identifies with Ruth Ozeki, but almost everyone.

One aspect of the commentary in the Tournament with regard to THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES that I take issue with is the idea that the memoirs don't read as though they could be written by a scientist, or that Perina's disregard for ethics committees makes him an idiot and not recognizably a scientist. I completely disagree on both fronts, having spend the last five years around many scientists. I believe that scientists can be adept at writing and observing, and also that they can be entirely uncaring about the welfare of their research subjects. I've seen both. And it could be that my personal experiences bias me toward loving a novel that "exposes" the dark side of the worship of scientists, but…

My winner and ToB's: THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES

Read the official tournament judgment here.

Tournament of Books Round Eleven: THE SON by Philipp Meyer vs. ELEANOR & PARK by Rainbow Rowell

Once again I scrolled right to the bottom of today's review, and was relieved to find that the righteous winner of all tournament rounds has triumphed! I really, really liked this book, you guys.

It's difficult to even compare these two novels because of the disparities in genre; even though both focus on teenagers, and to a certain extent on interracial teenage love (at least in the case of Eli and Hates Work, the Comanche girl he kind of has a relationship with) but while ELEANOR & PARK is basically a romantic comedy, THE SON is pure epic. There are parts of THE SON that are funny, as I discussed in the last review, and parts of ELEANOR & PARK that are dark and tragic, but it's hard to even imagine J.A. McCullough reading E&P or Eleanor reading THE SON.

I want to talk briefly about the dark parts of ELEANOR & PARK, and whether the choice to make the stepfather's ultimate transgression writing dirty comments on Eleanor's textbooks was the right choice. Kicking Eleanor out of the house would have been unforgivable to a reasonable parent; destroying her things and the threat of physical violence against her mother certainly should have been enough to spur Eleanor to leave. I guess I just didn't find it realistic that her stepfather would have been the one writing insults on her textbooks. He barely seems to pay attention to her, much less to her textbooks, and it does seem like he was comfortable being confrontational and directly antagonistic toward Eleanor; why would he have to result to writing on her textbooks, and in such a way that it seemed like he was trying to hide it? He didn't try to hide anything else he did to her. I feel like Rowell wanted to go someplace darker, but felt that for the sake of genre or the likability of her story, she had to stick with the crime of being threatening rather than violent.

That shying away from reality for the sake of sparing the reader is something the ToB judge identifies in a different context: the fact that E&P's relationship is chaste until the very end of their time together seems unrealistic to him, having been a teenage boy, and pretty unrealistic to me as well. I certainly knew other teenagers, when I was a teenager, who had relationships every bit as G-rated as Eleanor and Park's...but they were also religious, which E&P are not, and in the absence of an explanatory force like overwhelming moral obligations, I also find it unrealistic that they wouldn't have at least discussed their abstinence.

You know who doesn't flinch from sharing any detail or scene to spare the reader? Philipp Meyer, that's who. And it's partially because these books are pitched at different readers; there are some teenagers to whom I wouldn't recommend THE SON, and some of my relatives who might not enjoy it, and some serious types who I don't think would find E&P captivating. On the whole, though, I think there are more readers who would appreciate THE SON than E&P; THE SON has so many different types of characters, and different story lines, and a broader historical reach. E&P is a vignette. THE SON is an entire collected works.

My winner, and ToB's: THE SON

Read the official Tournament judgment here.

Tournament of Books Round Ten: THE GOOD LORD BIRD by James McBride vs. THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS by Elizabeth Gilbert

It’s interesting that these two books about abolitionists—white abolitionists driven by religious motives, denying themselves earthly luxuries for the sake of their convictions—are narrated by characters who support the abolitionists, more or less, but are leagues more self-centered and more interested in self-preservation (and self-love in one case) than in political and social causes. In THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS, Alma respects her sister’s belief, the way her sister denies herself things like lace, a large house, good food, that Alma herself would never think to give up for the sake of others. And yet Alma doesn’t seem to give slavery more than ten minutes of thought in the entire novel. Her concern with her sister’s cause is whether it will put her in danger from people who don’t agree with her practices of educating and raising black and white children together. She doesn’t really think about whether, morally or philosophically or rationally, what her sister is doing is right. She just wants to know that she won’t be in danger.

And really, Onion feels much the same. He doesn’t want to be put in danger, and stays with John Brown mostly for expediency and for lack of better options; away from John Brown he could easily be thrown back into slavery, and at least with him he has the promise of excitement. He feels deep down that slavery is wrong, but he also mentions twice that he never went hungry as a slave, and didn’t give much thought to his own bondage before John Brown violently removed him from it. He gives a lot of thought to the social structure of black people in his society—the mulatto prostitute, the muscle-bound yard enforcer, the free black people in the North who support them or forget their cause, the noble rebellion-leaders who die for the freedom they can never have—and this makes him more worthy a protagonist than Alma, who gives a lot of thought to moss societies but doesn’t seem too concerned with the society of Tahitians she encounters. How have the Tahitians accepted Christianity and the presence of missionaries within their society full-time? What does it mean that the Tahitians don’t have a strong concept of personal property? How do they treat animals? What is the role of children in this society, who never work but also seem to be some of the most resourceful? All of these issues are touched upon by description of events but never explored intellectually by Alma. Alma observes, and records, and learns to operate within this society with some effort, but doesn’t consider what it means that this society exists in the same world as her own, with its very different strictures and mores. And right when the Tahitians seem about to accept her, drawing her into their rugby game and roughhousing with her as they would one of their own, she has a personal epiphany and leaves, without giving another thought to the people she leaves behind. I touched on this in my last review, but I really don’t think that Elizabeth Gilbert thought about the inner lives and motivations and desires of the Tahitians she describes. I’m sure she did a lot of research, but the only Tahitian who comes alive off the page is Tomorrow Morning. And I think that’s a flaw in an author, using this island interlude to advance the development of only one character. Compare it to the deeply enlivened Ivu’ivu in THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES. Good lord.

I agree with the judge, here. My winner: THE GOOD LORD BIRD.

Read the official Tournament judgment here. 

Tournament of Books Round Nine: HILL WILLIAM by Scott McClanahan vs. A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING by Ruth Ozeki

I had almost forgotten about HILL WILLIAM. Animal cruelty, child abuse, homophobic attacks, and environmental destruction. Didn’t deserve to make it this far, luckily got knocked out in this round, good riddance.

What’s interesting to me about A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING this week is narrator-Ruth’s relationship with her husband, Oliver. Oliver is a little-known artist who works in the medium of plants—he is building an Eocene-era botanical garden on their island home, and believes his work will not be fully appreciated until he has been long dead and the plants have come to be a natural part of the landscape. It’s a nice idea. Ruth also describes Oliver as being a little bit obtuse, and probably having something like Aspberger’s. He can be very sensitive, and sometimes annoys Ruth, but of course she also depends on him and loves him. And the parallel I want to draw here is between Ruth and Hannah Horvath, on GIRLS.

Before you click close tab, if you haven’t seen the most recent episodes of GIRLS, Hannah and her boyfriend Adam are at the hospital visiting Hannah’s dying grandmother. At Hannah’s mother’s suggestion, Adam tells Hannah’s grandmother that he and Hannah are getting married—although they aren’t—because Hannah’s mother believes the grandmother can die happy knowing that her granddaughter is in a stable relationship. When the grandmother’s prognosis improves later, Hannah jokes to her mother about whether she and Adam will have to get married if her grandmother survives. Hannah’s mother tells her to “keep the job, not the guy” and explains that Adam is socially awkward and maybe not a good fit for Hannah; she doesn’t want Hannah to have to “socialize” Adam if they stay together. Of course, Hannah herself can be very socially awkward, and she rightly tells her mother that she doesn’t know enough about Adam to make these statements. We can tell that the judgment hurts, though. Although it’s not sensitively delivered, there’s some truth to it—saddling herself with a man who will sometimes embarrass her is a weighty choice. Their different personalities are charming now, but the charm may not last. And I wonder too whether for Ruth the charm is wearing off; she daily regrets living on their small Canadian island, and intimates that she left New York partly because Oliver loved living on the island. It makes sense that Oliver would; on the island they are part of a small community, while New York could be daunting even for a socially adjusted man. In Ruth’s case, removing Oliver from the unwanted stimuli of New York meant exiling herself; in Hannah’s case, she herself is the unwanted stimulus, and when Adam finds her dramatic personality distracting to his nascent acting career, he moves out of their shared apartment while rehearsing for his play, which is obviously traumatic for Hannah.

The simple question is, is the man worth the trouble, but of course the answer isn’t so easy for Ruth and Hannah—both desperately want to care for their partners while also resenting them for the constraints they impose on their joint lives. Naoko’s story takes this dynamic to the extreme, with a father who retreats from society and from life so completely that she and her mother are forced to change their family structure and protect Naoko’s father from himself. Naoko allows herself to resent her father for losing his job, for taking them from Sunnyvale, for becoming a shut-in and not caring enough about her and her mother to sacrifice his comfort and philosophical ideals to provide for them. But how does Naoko's mother feel, having chosen to marry a sensitive man—a man who might have needed some socializing, as evidenced by his naivete about human consciences and motivations, as well as his habit of interrupting professors unannounced to explore theories of mind—who, it turns out, did not rise to the challenge of being her partner? Will Hannah make the same realization, if Adam's Broadway career falters? 

This round's tangential Winner: A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING

Read the official tournament review here. 

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

I almost didn’t read THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read a book about an innocent native people despoiled by the predations of scientific research—I’m usually pretty pro-science, to put it lightly, and I didn’t think a novel about the Ivu’ivu and their cultural traditions would treat science as reverentially as it deserves. I was entirely wrong. First, I was wrong about whether I would be sucked into the novel—I was, deeply and immediately—and I was wrong about how Hanya Yanagihara would treat science. I suspect that Hanya intimately knows her way around the bench, although her author biography doesn’t mention it; the details of the day-to-day efforts of scientific research were accurate (and lovingly, if frustratedly) rendered, and the overall boredom, despair, sudden excitement, backstabbing, self-doubt, deceit, and unworthy-hero-worship of science that for me it took an entire PhD to discover were adeptly sketched. Moreover, although both the narrator and his biographer (and co-conspirator) are characters I despised and partially recognized in scientists I have known, I was enthralled by their story.

The lush jungle of Ivu’ivu is so delicately and wondrously described that I cannot believe its mosses and plants and sickeningly maggot-ridden fruit don’t actually exist in nature. (I want to pause to point out that something as obviously symbolic as a fruit the color and texture of human flesh that is eaten only after it has already been infested with maggots was still both believable as a real object in this world, and captivating to hear about in detail). The opa’ivu’eke was heart-breaking (it is a shy, friendly turtle who the Ivu’ivu eat for a ceremony, and who is later hunted to extinction.) The passages in which Perina returns to the island to reconcile himself to the passage of time, the wreckage wrought by the depredations of pharmaceutical companies, and the subsequent obesity and dependency of the people he had once seen as so mysterious and noble are sensitively written but quite affecting—we know there are cultures undergoing this transformation right now, and many more who have undergone it within the last fifty years. The story touches on the treatment of human and animal subjects in research, how we treat our elders and the disease of dementia, what defines the boundary between childhood and adulthood, at what point a good deed becomes overdone and then becomes an evil deed, and how we as a society reward—or even regard—someone who has done something wonderful and meritorious and also something terrible and illegal. This story comes up again and again—Woody Allen, Roman Polanski—and we don’t know how to answer it. We want to divorce the work from the crimes, the art from the allegations, but of course we can’t. We want to have a way to easily classify these men as good or bad, but we inevitably brush under the rug one side or the other of themselves. Even Perina’s team does this, when they first refuse to believe the ritual Perina has witnessed, and then decide not to write about it in Western journals. Perhaps by not bearing witness, they believe they can erase the act from record.

Ursula, on the other hand, in her life after life, bears witness to too much, without having done much on her own. Ursula is frequently the victim, and sometimes sins by omission—such as when she ends up married to a Nazi and does nothing, even as her sister back in England has been warning her of the dangers of the Reich—but in none of her many lives does she commit a heroic act, or a dastardly one. Even when faced with a brutally abusive husband, Ursula doesn’t murder him. Ursula never sets a bomb, or sells secrets, or shows much of a character flaw beyond some adultery. Ursula serves as a stand-in for the reader, a transparent looking-glass through which we can see much of the twentieth century as it unfolds in Europe—and through which we can brush up against death, and feel its cold fingers on the other side of the pane—but she doesn’t come alive for me as a character the way Norton Perina does. She doesn’t make me want to spend more time with her psyche, because her psyche exists solely for me to project my own onto it, and observe the Blitz and the flu epidemic almost first hand. Again, my winner:

THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES.

Luckily the ToB agrees with me, and WOKE UP LONELY is even leading the Zombie round! Read the official verdict by Judge John Green here. 

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.