ToB Pre-Bracket Round: LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson vs. WOKE UP LONELY by Fiona Maazel

I love The Morning News, and I love the Tournament of Books, so shortly after the longlist was announced, I decided I would read all the books in the tournament and write my own bracket commentary. This was around new year’s.

Then I read “Tampa” so I was already off to a rocky start when the shortlist was announced. My books were not provided by Powell’s, but I did secure some of them from a lovely website with very decently priced e-books, which I can share with interested parties. As of this writing, I am still reading The Luminaries and The Good Lord Bird. But I’m going to get it done. And rather than beat around the bush, I’m going to tell you now: If I had to choose a winner of the entire tournament, I would pick The Son.

But that commentary comes later, and for now:

ToB Pre-Bracket Round: LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson vs. WOKE UP LONELY by Fiona Maazel

I’m a scientist, so I need to state my conflicts of interest before I can write my paper: Fiona Maazel is one of my favorite authors. I came into this round with a strong bias, and I still believe it shouldn’t have been the pre-bracket round—Maazel and Atkinson both deserve a fully vested bracket—but I really, really love Fiona Maazel. When I heard there was a release date for WOKE UP LONELY, I requested from my facebook friends (the personal ether) an advanced review copy for Christmas. Turns out no one I know is in with Graywolf Press, but this was a book I bought on the day it was released, and gladly. I read the first half of it twice, because I didn’t want it to be over too soon. Then I read the entire thing on a plane ride (one of the reasons I have the luxury of reading all of the ToB books is that my job puts me on an airplane for five hours a week) and I loved it. Maazel has a similar writing temperament to Amy Hempel—short, almost sarcastically witty turns of phrase, directness that conceals a great deal of artistry, and characters with unexplored depths and side plots shooting off of them like auras. WOKE UP LONELY involves a social networking cult, North Korea, chemical control of the weather, a woman who runs her own two-person CIA, and an underground economy of spas, sex clubs, and MMA fights. And each of these is a sideline to the primary story, which is about love within a family, a story told through the central couple, Thurlow Dan and Esme Haas (great names? Great names) as well as through the four operatives Esme enlists to infiltrate Dan’s mansion. Esme and Dan came together under inauspicious circumstances, and they keep coming together over and over again—when one is impersonating Kim Jong Il, when one is carrying a baby as cover for a spying operation, when one is running from the law and the only place they can be together as a family is in a radio dish in the forest—and these reunions carry less anguish than anticipation. Maazel has explored these themes before; LAST LAST CHANCE, her previous novel, also shows families breaking apart and coming together again under apocalyptic conditions. It’s a type of wish fulfillment—even under the worst conditions for life, those who are meant to be together will be together—and it also relieves the reader from the pressure of worrying that something terrible will actually happen (it will and it won’t), which brings me to LIFE AFTER LIFE.

Do I have a history with Kate Atkinson? Not particularly. I’ve read a few of her novels (WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS and STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG come to mind) and enjoyed them. I had heard a lot about LIFE AFTER LIFE before even beginning this project, and it lived up to the hype—allowing Ursula Todd to meet untimely end after untimely end and then resurrecting her to live a slightly different life each time is a novel and amusing trope that could have continued on for twice as long and remained entertaining. Ursula gets to best a rapist, a child murderer, and an abusive husband, and then she kills Hitler—wish fulfillment at its finest. A skillfully drawn cast of supporting characters, primarily family, add to her sometimes flat characterization. I still feel that I know much more about her aunt Izzie’s internal life than I do hers, for example, even as we are shown her painstaking bouts of psychoanalysis attempting to make sense of her vague understanding of her past lives. Perhaps it was intentional, but I didn’t feel that Ursula was very quick-witted; she is never excited about her perhaps mystical powers, only vaguely trepidatious. She has some of the right political feelings and some of the wrong ones—she befriends Eva Braun in a few lives, and sometimes fails to see the evil in Germany until it is too late—but for all the tedious episodes in London mid-Blitz, the primary impression I had of her character was that she is tired. Tired of being alone, tired of living through the war, tired of not understanding her memories of other times, places, and people, and tired of feeling the need to save others from fates she doesn’t quite understand. It’s a very realistic reaction, but not one that made for an exciting read. Whereas I want to spend more time with every one of WOKE UP LONELY’s characters (and to read Thurlow Dan’s writings for the Helix), I’m not interested in fleshing out a particular instance of Ursula Todd’s life. I have the true crime aficionado’s affection for seeing all the various ways she expires, but, as is quite possibly Atkinson’s intention, the expiry date is never mourned.

My winner is WOKE UP LONELY.

Unfortunately for me, the TOB continues on with LIFE AFTER LIFE, so I’ll be writing more on it next week or so.

Read the Tournament round here.