THE ANTHOLOGIST - Nicholson Baker - Fiction

A poem is a rhyming piece of verse, says Paul Chowder. A poem that doesn't rhyme is a plum. And so, welcome to the lusciously illustrated cover of this novel, a gorgeous, dark plum at the bottom of a cream-colored jacket. Baker's novels encompass all the senses, and this illustrative collaboration in particular is apropos. In the bookstore, I saw it and reflexively declared "I want that."

It's Nicholson Baker, so the subject doesn't matter. This one, of course, strays a little less afield than some of his previous work, dealing as it does with poetry, rhyme and meter, and the life of a modestly successful poet with ambitious theories about scansion and notation. If you're interested in plot, there is predictably little: Paul Chowder's girlfriend has left him over his inability to complete any work, and he is still unable to finish the introduction to his forthcoming anthology of rhyming poetry, partially over concern about his own poems, and partially out of the sense that this may be his last widely-received polemic, and his last chance to make a mark on the greater literary community. He befriends his badminton-playing neighbor, drives to a few poetry readings, visits the Grolier poetry bookshop in Harvard Square (always good to see wonderful real-life bookstores pop up in fiction) and composes a few lovely minor-key tunes for the lyrics of his favorite poetry.

If you are not a singer or a sight-reader, you may miss the beauty and unexpected notes in these short phrases. I play the cello, so I was able to go back after reading and play the music for myself; if you don't have access to your own instrument, I would suggest using something like this online piano to hear Chowder's music for yourself. He sings these songs in the attic of his barn, while trying to write, and then to shorten, his introduction, and their tone is not the jolly serenade I was expecting.

Part of the joy in poetry is reading aloud, and Baker exhorts the reader to do this throughout, counting out syllables, enumerating pauses, and playing fast and loose with typography as a guide to pronunciation. If the reader hasn't been introduced to much poetry, from Poe to Mary Oliver, Baker is the ultimate guide, knowing and name-droppy and entirely lacking in condescension. Paul Chowder may have been kicked out of his teaching job, but Baker is an entertaining educator.

P.S. THE ANTHOLOGIST is also the New Yorker's October book club selection, if you are interested in more discussion.

THE SELECTED WORKS OF T.S. SPIVET - Reif Larson - Fiction

THE SELECTED WORKS OF T.S. SPIVET is a beautifully illustrated novel about a twelve-year-old boy, T.S., a map-maker, scientific illustrator, and adventurer, who is awarded a prize from the Smithsonian for his work and decides to head out to Washington DC to claim it. Not being old enough to drive, or arrange his own transportation, he hops a train with the help of a rather clever technique, and embarks on a series of adventures obviously evocative of Huck Finn. Along the way he fends off an attack by a homeless man, befriends a native american rail-jumper, and is picked up by a helpful, if racist, long-haul truck driver. Once in DC, T.S. learns to appreciate the opportunities afforded by a wondrous place like the Smithsonian, and also comes to terms with a real love for his hometown in Montana, and his distant but loving family.

The story is peppered with delicious details, quirky charaters, and of course, entrancing illustrations representing the maps T.S. creates of the places and events he experiences. For fans of vaguely metatextual work [HOUSE OF LEAVES, INFINITE JEST, even I AM AMERICA (AND SO CAN YOU)], the extra details are confetti frosting on the cake. But what of the cake? Even with the addition of two intriguing sub-plots (T.S.'s brother was killed in an accident when the boys were playing with guns; T.S.'s mother is secretly a novelist, perhaps edging out her public avocation as an entomologist) the plot is loosely spun. The characters are over-drawn in the sense of young adult fiction; they accept T.S. too easily, are too single-minded in nature, and become vehicles of fancy more than form. The conniving Smithsonian official who invites T.S. out becomes drawn into his fantasies of using T.S. to promote science to the public, and take on the insidious infiltration of creationists into the American landscape. T.S.'s father, though eventually revealed to have a modicum of caring for his son's well-being, is the quintessential tough cowboy, from his pickup truck to his hat to his "sett'n room" with its shrines to pop-culture Westernalia. And of course, everything that T.S. had dreamed about is real: hoboes do exist, and they ride the rails with the help of a telephone hotline, manned by members of the Megatherium club, a type of scientific secret society that still slinks through the halls of the majestic Smithsonian, which still inspires in T.S. the type of spirited awe that simultaneously rings true for a boy of his age and interests and also makes you wonder how piteously cruel his adolescence will be.

The question remains: who is Larson's audience? Aside from a small joke at the beginning, the book is perfectly pitched to appeal to the middle school reader. (The joke being: the Smithsonian calls for T.S., assuming he is older; he has been out shucking corn with his sister Gracie and tells the caller that he lives with Gracie. The caller assumes Gracie is his wife; he says no, we were just shucking when you called. The reader can imagine.) Comparisons to Huck Finn are natural and practically elicited; Milo of THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH also comes to mind and, in a way, Stuart Little. We learn only what T.S. learns about his parents and their relationship, the effects and possibly the causes of his brother's death, and the best ways to conduct oneself amongst adults who may not have one's best interests in mind. In the most disturbing scene, T.S. is being knifed by an insane man who believes himself to be a religious saviour; T.S. at first accepts this as his fate and his retribution for not being able to save his brother, and only fights back as a physical response to the pain. Yet, we aren't given to see T.S. as suicidal, or even very perceptive about the resonating effects of what must have been the most traumatic event in his parents' lives. His father quite obviously and excessively loved T.S.'s brother Layton more. His mother is shown to have given up a scientific career in favor of a family, and perhaps, hidden literary ambitions. But despite T.S.'s frequent references to Layton, even hiding his name in every one of his maps, he is less than perceptive about the reciprocal reactions of his parents.

Ultimately, the author that TSWoTSS reminds me of most is Nicholson Baker: not in subject matter, thank goodness, or in tone, but in the sense that it is the extraneous details, the afterthoughts and observations and attention to weft and grain, that lift the power of the story away from its plot, and elevate it beyond.

THE MAGICIANS - Lev Grossman - Fiction

Perhaps the more we write about magic, the more it stays the same. Grossman's book has been described as fanfiction about fanfiction, as it uses a fictionalized and gently lampooned version of Narnia ("Fillory") to create its own fictionalized and utterly more street-savvy version of Harry Potter. Grossman's main character, Quentin, is a nerd from Brooklyn, a high-school senior interested in magic tricks as just another way to divert his precocious and overbearing intellect. On his way to a Princeton interview with his best friends, he gets shanghaied into an entrance exam for a magical college, simultaneously breaking open and confirming his dearest inner fantasies. Then, offered acceptance after a dazzling magical feat brought on by stress and sleeplessness and utter indignation, Quentin dithers, wondering whether he has perhaps been tricked into a second-rate magical institution, a community college of sorcery rather than Magic Harvard. This guy is great!

Really, Lev's biggest accomplishment is making Quentin so real, while also giving him enough of a hero complex to lend his later journeys plausibility. Quentin has a hard time accepting the reality of his situation, looks down on some of his peers, and takes a classmate's apology for fighting him as an excuse to tell him that if he tries it again, Quentin will fucking kill him. I love a wizard from Brooklyn. I only wish that more of this side of Quentin had bled into Brakebills, his magical college; a magician who introduces other magicians to rap? A magician with street cred? Quentin is a little too bookish for that, making his relationship with his nerdy girl-magician counterpart practically inevitable, but he also makes a lot of the same mistakes that other twenty-somethings do, throwing himself into his first relationship with gusto, floundering after college and diving headfirst into drugs, making sexual mistakes, and underestimating people until it's too late.

As the novel points out, and references frequently, the people of Harry Potter, the Chronicles of Narnia, and the Lord of the Rings are ultimately too strong, too willing to undertake pain and grief, and too committed to ideals about stewardship of other worlds and quests for unknown treasure. Quentin takes his defeats hard, and legitimately so. He takes years to get over them. He goes into hiding. He gives up his gifts. In Lord of the Rings, characters give up their entire families with one scene of tears, and a few wistful remembrances. While parent/child relationships are resolutely terrible across the board at Brakebills, friendships seem to mean a lot more.

I suspect we will never tire of reading about normal children realizing their inner magical abilities and riding off into great adventures and fascinating educations. However many times and in however many ways this story has written, it continues to be entertaining, even as certain aspects (the boarding-school nature of all magical academies, for instance, and their complete isolation from the outside world) are repeated again and again. It would be great to read about a magical university completely integrated into a regular one--a special major at State U, classes enchanted to look like business classes to outsiders, where students who have to deal with living, working, and playing among the mundane world are actually studying for a Bachelor's of Sorcery. The trick of putting all your wizards in one basket is too easy, and, as Grossman points out, doesn't prepare them for the endless possibilities and paradoxical emptiness of the real world, once magicians are thrust back into it. But a school where you're the only magician on your crew team, and you have to hold yourself back from casting Oars of Quickness? The story of the young magician is the story of the outsider, the hero, the student, and the adept all at once. Even if Grossman's characters suspect that they have lived too long to go back to Fillory, the story never gets old.

MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS - Tracy Kidder - Nonfiction

Without his clinical practice, Paul Farmer believes he would be nothing. It seems that, without Paul Farmer, his clinical practice also believes it would fail. The organization he has set up, Partners in Health, is a model for third-world healthcare, an oasis in the drought- and TB-stricken central plateau of Haiti. There's not much Paul Farmer can do about the drought, though he does stigmatize the foreign city planners who proposed the dam that shut off much of central Haiti from the river that used to irrigate its plains. What he and his team can fix, though, is TB, and through a combination of begging, borrowing, and stealing, they have dramatically lowered the number and severity of instances of TB throughout the region of Haiti which they serve. He and his collaborators have also started programs in Peru and Siberia to deal with MDR-TB, multiple-drug resistant strains, and the World Health Organization has, after much prodding, accepted his criticisms and proposals for change in the way they deal with TB and MDR-TB in rural and developing areas.

A worthy life, to be sure. Farmer has also written multiple books and more than 100 articles, received an MD and a PhD in anthropology from Harvard Med, and was awarded a MacArthur genius grant. He heads many boards of directors for organizations dealing with global health. As of the writing of Mountains Beyond Mountains, Farmer had one daughter with his wife Didi, who was living in Paris finishing up her doctoral studies. This is what we know about Farmer from the book, as far as facts go. But a book with the author as a pivotal character becomes as much a work of fiction and of fact, and with a life as large and conspicuous as Paul Farmer's, it is just as important to note where Tracy Kidder has tried to spin Farmer's story.

Although Farmer's relief efforts in Haiti and his proselytizing for better global healthcare are portrayed as unambiguously good, and a little scattershot--Farmer is portrayed as being mostly unable, or unwilling, to prioritize--his personal life is given a little more glamor than it, perhaps, deserves. Much is made of Farmer's wife and children living in another country, and seeing Paul only when he is forced to delay his business activities, such as when he is injured. One is given the impression that his daughter is growing up fatherless, and his wife is being neglected. True as it may have been at the time, Farmer now lives with his family, which has grown to include two more children, another daughter and a son. Whatever we can say his responsibilities may or may not be, with regard to his family, he certainly doesn't seem to be as much of a failure as Kidder portrays. Another juicy plotline involves Ophelia Dahl, one of the five co-founders of Partners in Health. Farmer met her when she was 18, doing charity work in Haiti, and we are led to believe that they shared a great romance, which ended when Farmer proposed, and Dahl realized that Farmer was too single-mindedly dedicated to be anything more to her than a friend. Later, when Farmer meets Didi, a Haitian, Ophelia sends her well-wishes, but the tone of the narrative is that Dahl is somewhat regretful. Now, perhaps this is true, but Dahl is open about her lesbianism, and has a child with her (female) partner. It's hard for me to believe that much love was lost between Dahl and Farmer.

It also seems nearly incredible that someone as much of a whirlwind as Farmer could do as much as he has done--complicated, time-consuming endeavors like running charity organizations, writing nonfiction books about Haitian politics, teaching at Harvard Med and Brigham and Women's hospital, and working on global healthcare policy with the WHO. Farmer is shown as nearly frenetically active, and I'm not doubting his sheer ability to perform these feats; rather, I question Farmer's seeming lack of premeditation and planning. If we are to believe Kidder, a man who cannot remember to change his clothes every day is simultaneously capable of working with a multinational policy organization, drafting changes and additions to a laborious document that will lay out the steps that need to be taken by any organization dealing with tuberculosis outside of a first-world hospital. At the very least, there must be more to Farmer than meets the eye. Though we are, again, given only brief snapshots into his medical and graduate careers, in order to have been successful, he must have also been able to at least borrow an eye for detail, for taking care of loose ends, and figuring out what needs to happen when, in order to get an MD, a PhD, a functioning healthcare organization, and a TB mandate. Kidder is happy to make it seem as though Dahl runs the show from behind the scenes, but Farmer and his list-making deserve some of the credit.

LUNAR PARK - Bret Easton Ellis - Fiction

This novel is amazing.

Without knowing a thing about Ellis's prior work, LUNAR PARK succeeds as a remarkably well-thought-out thriller, segueing seamlessly from Ellis's real, sensational past to a fictionalized present, including a marriage and a move to the suburbs, after which his past literally returns to haunt him. The plot draws handily from the genre--a possessed stuffed animal, a shape-shifting house, a group of young boys going missing one by one--and puts the character of Bret right in the middle of it, an already notedly unreliable narrator in personal rehab, reacting with first disbelief, then alcohol, then absolutely numbing terror, to his personal creator and fictional creations seemingly coming to life. Sons become fathers here, boys run away and return, and family is touchingly redeemed, outside of its upper-class nuclear formation. Without attempting to draw a John Irving comparison, a primary message of this novel is the importance of a father's role.

Though as adept as Stephen King (and with the same fascination with old-model cars), Ellis depends less on outside malevolence, eventually rejecting as laughable the idea that his house might be built on a burial ground, and instead is only seriously threatened by what seems to be the work of his own hand. And while these apparitions and attacks are frightening, equally frightening is the fictional Bret's behavior toward his wife, his friends, and his addiction. In this aspect, Ellis returns to a vein that runs through his work from LESS THAN ZERO through THE INFORMERS, AMERICAN PSYCHO, and GLAMORAMA, in presenting crimes equally horrific as daily behavior. The college-age swingers and drug abusers in LESS THAN ZERO are as frightening waking up from a horrendous binge as they are kidnapping a child; Patrick Bateman's sadistic emptiness is exposed just as much in his discussions with his secretary and his long-winded explanations of his outdated and indiscriminating music taste as in his murders. In exposing the upper-class guignol that passes for suburban family life among the rich and paranoid, Ellis illustrates a horror that matches that of his private haunting.

For those readers familiar with Ellis, the novel is even more enticing, as it offers the details we think we know about Ellis (some of the same things we think we know about Chuck Palahniuk, who dives into non-fiction on occasion, to supplement the record). His public castigation for AMERICAN PSYCHO by liberal factions natonwide is the jumping-off point from the intro's factual summation of Ellis's previous crimes into its delineation of his new, fictional transgressions. In a way, this novel is an answering redeption of Ellis, who doesn't hurt a thing but in self-defense: the monster we have come to believe is behind Patrick Bateman turns out to be merely a repentant alcoholic with an uncovered familial streak. Unmasked, Ellis separates himself from The Writer--a character who resides mainly in his head--and a younger version of himself, or possibly his father, who ends up only trying to warn him of a real imposter. As everything in this work is finely wrought and twice-measured, the first sentence is "You do a very good impression of yourself." This applies both to the fictionalized Ellis in LUNAR PARK and the public figure Bret Easton Ellis, gossip column alumnus and well-known bad boy, yet somehow, the novel implies, not the real man at all.

THE FIRE GOSPEL - Michel Faber - Fiction

I was introduced to Michel Faber through his opus THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE (about Victorian-era prostitutes, not, as the title might suggest, racial segregation at Harvard.) Since reading and loving that novel, everything else he writes seems fairly tossed off, especially the more modern pieces. Unless you're David Foster Wallace, a 700+ page book is never going to be followed by something better. Now, FIRE GOSPEL isn't really supposed to be anything more than a trifle. It's Faber's contribution to something called the Myths series, famous contemporary authors reworking a myth in their own styles. Faber's is, I guess, the myth of an additional gospel--adding to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--but I had never heard of this particular "myth," so to me the story seemed rather inventive, which can only have made it better. (To get a sense of my background, or lack thereof, I had to google the names of the original gospels, and I had thought that Isaac was one of them.) The plot draws parallels to Dan Brown's work, but the Aramaic scholar protagonist, Theo, is firmly in Paul Giamatti territory. The thing is, everyone else is, too--the men who kidnap him turn out to be gay and more than a bit confused about the actual purpose of the kidnapping, and the female foils are an unsympathetic girlfriend who dumps Theo when he returns from a close call at a museum in Iraq, and an unscrupulous literary agent who takes the customer satisfaction of her publishing company's biggest star very seriously.

This--let's call it a novella--took about 45 minutes to read, and not quite as long to anticipate, even with its ambiguous ending. Money can't buy you love, religion makes people angry no matter what the message, and instant satisfaction isn't a road to fulfillment. But reading THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE is, coincidentally.

INFINITE JEST - David Foster Wallace - Fiction

As you can see, I haven't posted anything in a month, because I've been doing Infinite Summer (http://infinitesummer.org) --reading Infinite Jest cover to cover from June 21 to mid-September. As you can see, I've finished early. There comes a point in every engrossing mid- to enormous-length novel at which I am so caught up in the story that I have to finish it as soon as possible, and for me that point came about two weeks ago, when I started reading Infinite Jest whenever I could--at work, while eating breakfast, while on the bus, while walking home if that were possible. It was a combination of wanting to finish it so that I could think about it, wanting to know what happens to Hal and Don Gately and Madame Psychosis, and loving the visual of moving my two bookmarks farther and farther back. (Two: one for the regular text, and one for the footnotes.)

Infinite Jest is a novel about adolescent tennis players, recovering addicts, dysfunctional families, independent filmmakers, disabled and disfigured people, terrorists, bumbling politicians, and obsessive compulsives. It is set in the future, has about forty main characters, involves complex acronyms frequently, and gives the full chemical name and manufacturer of every drug, medicinal and recreational, mentioned in its pages. And yet, it is one of the easiest-to-read and most compelling books I've ever come across. I tried to read this book in high school, when a friend was deeply into it, and stopped after about a hundred pages, caught up in other books, sidelined by the need to keep so many names and facts and incidents in play at once.

I now think that was simply not the right time. This book is about a lot of very depressed people, and as such, probably requires at least a passing familiarity with and a fair amount of temporal distance from a form of long-term ennui that you might call depression. I'm not the addictive personality, I've never felt a residual craving for any of the capital-S Substances that I've ingested over the years, but I think that this book would be even more meaningful to someone who has been addicted, even if, as an acerbic aside mentions early on, there might as well be 12-step programs for anything which one could possibly enjoy.

Infinite Jest proposes, in a number of ways, that interaction with the outside world is imperative--a supremely entertaining video turns people into vegetative viewing-machines, drugs repeatedly close people off from their circumstances, characters frustratedly and impotently lose the ability to speak and communicate, and live radio is described as the most fascinating and affecting type of entertainment available. Hiding in other ways--hiding waste in a giant feral ditch in the northeast, hiding drugs and illicit activity from school authorities, hiding possible deformity behind a veil, hiding love or caring concern--has unfortunate effects. This isn't a terribly complicated thesis, but as any reader of Wallace's journalism will realize, Wallace needs to prove to the reader everything, and if he felt that the modern world's dependence on things for entertainment and validation was worth addressing, it makes sense that he would spend a thousand pages proving that it was so.

In order to talk about this book in any comprehensible way, I'll have to limit myself to only one topic, so I'd like to talk about the distinction between the portrayal of AA, NA, and their meetings (Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous, respectively) and the meeting of a men's-feelings-empowerment group that Hal stumbles upon by accident, hoping for a remote NA meeting. Because in the world of Infinite Jest, AA is a categorical force for good. AA helps people, one day at a time, to stay people, and resist destructive impulses which they term a disease. AA is described as incomprehensible to the novitiate, and a little like a cult, but successful and powerful, as well. The meeting that Hal goes to, though, is clearly embarassing and disturbing for him, what with its regressed men and emphasis on an "inner infant" whose needs have to be cared for from within. Here is the first contrast: AA demands that a Higher Power be invoked, anything from God to fate, which is appealed to for help, and thanked for each day of successful sobriety. The method takes away some of the fear and doubt that comes with a disease that is ultimately a disease of the brain and the will: if we believe it is instead in the charge of a Higher Power, we don't have only our fallible, disappointing selves to rely upon. The support group that Hal happens upon also regresses its participants, makes them think and act like infants again, in order to surpass some perceived childhood trauma. AA, on the other hand, demands that its participants think of themselves as adults, act like adults, and accept total responsibility for their actions. AA frowns upon any thinking that blames a person's problems on the influence or actions of others, whereas the men's support group firmly places blame on childhood experience.

But is Hal even the right person for an AA or NA program? Hal quits marijuana cold turker, and completely loses touch with himself--he is unable to think clearly, then unable to control his facial expressions, and finally, as was revealed at the very beginning of the book, unable to even speak. It seems in some ways that marijuana was holding Hal together, possibly due to the stress of having spectacularly lost his father, or the stress of being a nationally-ranked junior tennis player at a demanding academy, or the stress of having a mother who is emotionally schizoid, and carrying on a sexual relationship with his primary tennis competitor. Perhaps due to the stress of all of these, combined. Nevertheless, Hal is demonstrably better able to perform and cope WITH his Substance, rather than without it. All the stories we are told of drug addicts who have Surrendered to AA and Come In involve people who were functioning incredibly poorly Out There--Hal is functioning incredibly well, at least until he gives up the Substance. It's an interesting story for Wallace to sketch, even as he seems so celebratory of AA.