There's something anachronistically comfortable about the richly detailed, character-driven novel, and Zoe Heller pulls it off perfectly in THE BELIEVERS. Centered around the Litvinoffs (husband and wife Joel and Audrey, two daughters, Rosa and Karla, and adopted son Lenny, as well as numerous spouses, roommates, hangers-on, and friends) the novel cannily chooses to forsake plot for a multi-faceted exploration of issues, ranging from, of course, belief, to feminism, marriage, varying forms of anglophone culture, and race. With every viewpoint given a character to side with and a character to hate, the explorations of THE BELIEVERS are enjoyable rather than pedantic, and carried out in sparkly witty, if acerbic, dialogue.
The novel suffers slightly from having no strong male characters for the group of women to play off of (Joel is felled by a stroke in the novel's first few pages; Lenny is a resolute fuck-up and a manipulative drug addict who I still do not believe as a thirty-four-year-old; the various husbands and dates are, to a man, blase). The most charming and interesting scenes, from the point of view of pure story, show Joel as a father, making French toast for his children's breakfast while explaining the necessity of armed struggle. Another interesting exploration for the novel: how revolutionaries deal with the quotidian aspects of day-to-day life, marriage, and child-rearing. The novel wants to answer a broad and flip "not well" but where it gives us detail, it is insightful and clever.
In an interview with Heller, conducted shortly after the novel's release, she stressed her desire to make Rosa's conversion to orthodox Judaism believable. Although the state of her push-me-pull-you conversion is left ambiguous even at the novel's end (she is seen wearing a headscarf at her father's funeral, but never shied away from embracing some aspects of tradition while rejecting others) I have to say that Rosa's interest never fully came clear for me. There's the moment of divine revelation in the synagogue, when Rosa feels a deep inner sense of belonging, and comes to tears at the end of a service; there's the admiration of tradition and the desire to fully adhere to a set of strictures in order to prove her seriousness to the world; there's the convenient aspect of Rosa's self-denial of physical pleasures, and the inverse pleasure she takes in that denial. And yet. The rabbi who guides Rosa's conversion immediately jumps into the tough stuff: rejection of Darwinian evolution, subservient roles for women, adhering strictly to the Sabbath. It's never quite explained why Rosa goes straight for Orthodox Judaism rather than easing into it through one of the other flavors of Judaic belief; perhaps it's her family's nature that half measures will not do, and the most extreme point of view must be the line taken, but many of the difficulties Rosa has with the more inexplicable aspects of Orthodox belief would be easily taken care of by following a less commanding version of the religion. Rosa's response to the rabbi's nonsensical argument that evolution may not be true because the Hebrew word translated in the bible as god's "six days" may refer to any period of time is met by Rosa's equivocal thoughts that there may be something in that theory. Really? Someone as needy as Rosa when it comes to being seen as worthy by the world will have invested much more of herself in her intelligence than we see. Her rejection of scientific principles should bear a higher cost to her self-worth than it seems to.
But there's always that one character to hate. Heller has been criticized for providing no purely "relatable" characters in this novel (as though the heroine of NOTES ON A SCANDAL were relatable?) but that's simply one of the joys of the character-driven novel: seeing real people, hearing intimate conversations, and never having to meet Audrey and her family in real life. Here's to the Litvinoffs.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
AWAIT YOUR REPLY - Dan Chaon - Fiction
(Admittedly, it is hard to top the title of Chaon's previous novel, YOU REMIND ME OF ME.)
The August 2008 issue of the New Yorker ran a fascinating article about a man who calls himself the Chameleon, a Frenchman in his thirties who has impersonated teenage boys, from American runaways to Spanish orphans, for years. At its most literal definition, what the Chameleon does could be considered identity theft: though he doesn't try to extract money from the bank accounts of his identities, or falsify their passports, he does in a baser sense assert their identity as his own. The article details how for over a yeear he fooled--or perhaps didn't--an American family looking for a missing son.
Dan Chaon's novel is also concerned with identity theft, both the computer-scam and bank-account variety, and the more subtle theft of identity by a disease (schizophrenia, Hayden's diagnosis) and by circumstance: many characters are orphans, like Lucy, and one, Ryan, was given up at birth to his father's sister, and has been lied to about his real parents ever since. But Lucy and Ryan are just kids, really, enthralled by promises of restarting their lives, and rebuilding them in the image of something better. Their stories are plumbed for hidden emotional depths, but don't have much to give up: Ryan was failing out of college, after being pushed into academic success by his overbearing mother; Lucy had fallen short of her ivy league dreams, and needed to escape the small town that suffocated her. Both are essentially naive, and plunge into their sometimes immature fantasies of jet-setting and high-stakes thievery. The eventual deflation of these hopes is obvious to the reader, but realized painfully slowly by Lucy and Ryan.
The stars of the novel are Hayden and his twin brother Miles. Raised by a hypnotist/clown father and a manipulative, unforgiving mother, Miles dawdles toward obscurity while Hayden, buoyed by his rich fantasy life, escapes into his delusions and the avenues of excitement awarded him by his cunning. Described as a genius, Hayden is able to take on any identity and run any scheme--though his master plans, incuding posing as a graduate student in mathematics, embezzling from top Wall Street firms, and planting evidence that destroys the career of a hated Yale professor, are never explained, much to this reader's dismay. During the course of his impersonations, he picks up hangers-on and romantic attachments, as well as an ersatz son, who seems to fulfill a deep inner need for family and dependency, but we are not shown his most daring and improbable feats, nor are we ever allowed inside his head, to glimpse his motivations, despite being shown the intriguing detritus of his obsessions. Some are tabloid-worthy and others hint to the secrecies of successful capitalism, but Hayden's personal narrative is never explains, which hampers the flow of the overall narrative: Miles is chasing Hayden, and has been chasing him all his life, but never gets to meet him face to face. Hayden warns Miles against many things, and implies that some of his past crimes are catching up with him, but these are never confirmed, including his suspicions against the Matalov family, who run a novelty shop patronized by the boys' father. (This, one of the novels most interesting sub-plots, has a run-down Miles returning to his boyhood town, and, somewhat improbably, finding work with the Matalovs, while becoming infatuated with Mrs. Matalov's granddaughter. Hayden believes that the family wishes them harm, but aside from a possible connection to Hayden's repressed childhood memories, which Miles strongly believes to be fictional, the supposed Matalov threat is left hanging, despite vivid personal descriptions of the Matalovs and their storefront.)
Ultimately, crime does not pay. In the end of the novel's temporally-last narrative thread, Hayden-as-George Orson is apprehended in the Cote d'Ivoire, and, presumably, killed, though his traveling companion only provides us enough detail for us to understand that two Russian goons, seen throughout the novel, are inside his hotel room, and are presumably more effective than the betrayed cyber-hackers who confront Hayden-as-Jay but only end up injuring Ryan. For a genius criminal mastermind, what we see of Hayden is remarkably uncertain, nervous, and messy, perhaps even amateur. Due to a narrative interlude at the end of the novel's first section, there is a slight insinuation that perhaps Hayden has even fallen for a spam email phishing scam, although in the world of the novel, there is equal evidence for his having stolen millions of dollars from JP Morgan Chase, leading us to wonder whether Hayden is just lucky, and exactly how much skill he has at the crimes he attempts. He seems to rely overmuch on the confidence of others, while never letting Miles, seemingly his ideal business partner, catch up to him. Somewhat incomprehensibly, he also sticks to the midwest, never attempting to lose himself in a city, although the small towns he ends up in do invariably draw him attention as an outsider.
Hayden could be a genius or a kook. He could be a schizophrenic or a kid with a strange sense of humor. He could be a lost boy yearning for personal relationships without the baggage of his family history, or he could be the ultimate manipulative deviant, feigning love to gain an accomplice. He could be a successful criminal, hunted by governments and corporations, or her could be a small-time internet hacker, ultimately drawn in by the same schemes he attempts to carry out himself. Hayden seems to fall prey to identity theft, in an ironic twist that means the end of his life with Ryan, but confusingly doesn't seem to know what to do about it. He unplugs his computer, as though that will solve the problem. It seems that seeing Hayden and Miles together would reconcile the mystery, as our understanding of Hayden depends on seeing Miles, our part-time narrator, as sane, although even this is called into question in certain passages. Though the events of the novel require great suspension of disbelief, on the part of government officials, Lucy, Ryan, and Hayden's business contacts, the novel asks us to suspend our disbelief about its very conceits--and I'd like a few more details, please.
The August 2008 issue of the New Yorker ran a fascinating article about a man who calls himself the Chameleon, a Frenchman in his thirties who has impersonated teenage boys, from American runaways to Spanish orphans, for years. At its most literal definition, what the Chameleon does could be considered identity theft: though he doesn't try to extract money from the bank accounts of his identities, or falsify their passports, he does in a baser sense assert their identity as his own. The article details how for over a yeear he fooled--or perhaps didn't--an American family looking for a missing son.
Dan Chaon's novel is also concerned with identity theft, both the computer-scam and bank-account variety, and the more subtle theft of identity by a disease (schizophrenia, Hayden's diagnosis) and by circumstance: many characters are orphans, like Lucy, and one, Ryan, was given up at birth to his father's sister, and has been lied to about his real parents ever since. But Lucy and Ryan are just kids, really, enthralled by promises of restarting their lives, and rebuilding them in the image of something better. Their stories are plumbed for hidden emotional depths, but don't have much to give up: Ryan was failing out of college, after being pushed into academic success by his overbearing mother; Lucy had fallen short of her ivy league dreams, and needed to escape the small town that suffocated her. Both are essentially naive, and plunge into their sometimes immature fantasies of jet-setting and high-stakes thievery. The eventual deflation of these hopes is obvious to the reader, but realized painfully slowly by Lucy and Ryan.
The stars of the novel are Hayden and his twin brother Miles. Raised by a hypnotist/clown father and a manipulative, unforgiving mother, Miles dawdles toward obscurity while Hayden, buoyed by his rich fantasy life, escapes into his delusions and the avenues of excitement awarded him by his cunning. Described as a genius, Hayden is able to take on any identity and run any scheme--though his master plans, incuding posing as a graduate student in mathematics, embezzling from top Wall Street firms, and planting evidence that destroys the career of a hated Yale professor, are never explained, much to this reader's dismay. During the course of his impersonations, he picks up hangers-on and romantic attachments, as well as an ersatz son, who seems to fulfill a deep inner need for family and dependency, but we are not shown his most daring and improbable feats, nor are we ever allowed inside his head, to glimpse his motivations, despite being shown the intriguing detritus of his obsessions. Some are tabloid-worthy and others hint to the secrecies of successful capitalism, but Hayden's personal narrative is never explains, which hampers the flow of the overall narrative: Miles is chasing Hayden, and has been chasing him all his life, but never gets to meet him face to face. Hayden warns Miles against many things, and implies that some of his past crimes are catching up with him, but these are never confirmed, including his suspicions against the Matalov family, who run a novelty shop patronized by the boys' father. (This, one of the novels most interesting sub-plots, has a run-down Miles returning to his boyhood town, and, somewhat improbably, finding work with the Matalovs, while becoming infatuated with Mrs. Matalov's granddaughter. Hayden believes that the family wishes them harm, but aside from a possible connection to Hayden's repressed childhood memories, which Miles strongly believes to be fictional, the supposed Matalov threat is left hanging, despite vivid personal descriptions of the Matalovs and their storefront.)
Ultimately, crime does not pay. In the end of the novel's temporally-last narrative thread, Hayden-as-George Orson is apprehended in the Cote d'Ivoire, and, presumably, killed, though his traveling companion only provides us enough detail for us to understand that two Russian goons, seen throughout the novel, are inside his hotel room, and are presumably more effective than the betrayed cyber-hackers who confront Hayden-as-Jay but only end up injuring Ryan. For a genius criminal mastermind, what we see of Hayden is remarkably uncertain, nervous, and messy, perhaps even amateur. Due to a narrative interlude at the end of the novel's first section, there is a slight insinuation that perhaps Hayden has even fallen for a spam email phishing scam, although in the world of the novel, there is equal evidence for his having stolen millions of dollars from JP Morgan Chase, leading us to wonder whether Hayden is just lucky, and exactly how much skill he has at the crimes he attempts. He seems to rely overmuch on the confidence of others, while never letting Miles, seemingly his ideal business partner, catch up to him. Somewhat incomprehensibly, he also sticks to the midwest, never attempting to lose himself in a city, although the small towns he ends up in do invariably draw him attention as an outsider.
Hayden could be a genius or a kook. He could be a schizophrenic or a kid with a strange sense of humor. He could be a lost boy yearning for personal relationships without the baggage of his family history, or he could be the ultimate manipulative deviant, feigning love to gain an accomplice. He could be a successful criminal, hunted by governments and corporations, or her could be a small-time internet hacker, ultimately drawn in by the same schemes he attempts to carry out himself. Hayden seems to fall prey to identity theft, in an ironic twist that means the end of his life with Ryan, but confusingly doesn't seem to know what to do about it. He unplugs his computer, as though that will solve the problem. It seems that seeing Hayden and Miles together would reconcile the mystery, as our understanding of Hayden depends on seeing Miles, our part-time narrator, as sane, although even this is called into question in certain passages. Though the events of the novel require great suspension of disbelief, on the part of government officials, Lucy, Ryan, and Hayden's business contacts, the novel asks us to suspend our disbelief about its very conceits--and I'd like a few more details, please.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
IN DEFENSE OF FOOD - Michael Pollan - Nonfiction
A lot of what Michael Pollan will tell you, you already know. High-fructose corn syrup is bad for you. Eating too many processed foods is also bad for you. In general, the industrialization of our food supply has led to foods with fewer nutrients and more processed food-like additives, the effects of which on our health are dubious. Pollan, attempting to convert a following, lays out these arguments as though for the blind who now can see: you didn't know! You didn't know that factory farming was making fruits and vegetables less nutritious, you didn't know that eating twinkies was bad for you, you didn't know that artificial flavoring and partially hydrogenated corn syrup was fooling your body into taking in more calories than it needs. You didn't know! But, of course you did. What Michael Pollan wants to convince you is that science--food science in particular, but science more generally as well--has led you astray. By focusing on the individual aspects of food, Pollan says, the carbohydrates and proteins and fats, as well as the vitamins and anti-oxidants and minerals, we have lost sight of the bigger picture: that what we eat matters as a whole, not only to us, but to the environment from which we obtain it. Pollan then champions a return to more traditional forms of eating: a traditional diet, ANY traditional diet, he says, which is not the "Western" diet, not made of processed foods and more corn and soy than a pastured chicken could shake a feather at.
Of course, the evidence that Pollan uses to back up his claims, both for the unhealthful effects of the Western diet and the benefits of the traditional diet, are steeped in the same nutrition science he repudiates a few chapters before. Pollan is keen to point out that the narrow focus of some scientific studies fails to find a correlation between associations we "know" to be true: that eating more fat leads to heart disease, that anti-oxidants protect against cancer, and that diets low in carbohydrates lead to weight loss. Pollan says that we cannot dissociate one aspect of the food (the type of protein it contains, the amount of fats, the number of glasses of red wine) from the diet as a whole, and that synergistic effects of food and culture contribute to health in mysterious ways. No doubt this is true, but Pollan misses the point of science: science doesn't intend to tell you what is healthiest. The best science tells you is that if you eat fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight, and that's all that most people really want to know. Science is interested in finding building blocks, and then finding connections between those building blocks. And before you say that this method doesn't work, remember who told you that smoking causes cancer. Even though a number of traditional ways of living include smoking: the Native Americans, healthy though their wild-game-based diets may have been, kept smoking as an integral part of a balanced lifestyle. And focusing only on traditional ways of eating fails to take into account what is probably the most important part of a traditional way of living: it was hard work. Pollan tells us not to eat at our desks, without pointing out that the most important part of that injunction is to not be at a desk at all: the traditional way of life was bolstered by a traditional diet that took into account a lot of traditional hard labor. The healthy cultures Pollan points to are ones that needed to do a lot of physical labor, and exercised more than we are accustomed to.
Pollan is even willing to admit that a more "traditional" American diet--i.e., pre-70s--is better for us than our modern diet. He cites the moderating influence of "Mom" as the arbiter of portions and ingredients, leaving aside for a second that our move from dependence on "Mom" to dependence on every, or any, member of the family is hands down a positive accomplishment. Pollan blithely assumes that if we just remembered what our mothers cooked for us, we'd be a healtheir populace, skipping over the possibility that your mother wasn't all that healthy herself, and that if it's now a Dad who's cooking the meals, the entire family might be healthier for its modernity and sharing of responsibility. But again, there's a deeper problem with this assumption: the assumption that food choices are a solely personal concern, and that the best ways to get healthier foods are to pay more for them, and to grow them oneself. Pollan doesn't advocate any sort of protest or overthrow of the giant food corporations that are making a lot of these unhealthy choices for us. He doesn't provide any suggestions or avenues for advocacy. He doesn't even advance some of the suggestions he offers in his classes at Berkeley, such as pushing for the decoupling of the Farm Bill: unlinking subsidies for farms from subsidies for food stamps. Instead, Pollan assumes that all we need to make us a healthier society is to plant victory gardens, go to the farmer's market, and "stick to the edges of the supermarket" instead of the processed-food inner aisles. He also glosses over the idea that many families eat poorly because processed food is cheapest, and a nice filet of fish three times a week is a sizeable expense for a family of four. He admits that this is "regrettable" but then says that, on average, we spend less than 20% of our income on food anyway, and that perhaps we should increase that number, for the good of our health.
Pollan is right to be skeptical of mainstream nutrition science. As he points out, fad diets are a dime a dozen, and studies purporting to support or debunk their beneficial effects are hard to interpret and hard to believe, when longitudinal studies that could really tell us who lives longer by eating what understandably take a lifetime to complete. His main points, that we should eat more fruits and vegetables whole, and keep a close eye on what is in our food, are important and simple. However, many of his predictions smack of regressive thinking, of the wistful idea that if we returned to the 50s--to a garden in the backyard, and a Mom with enough time to tend to it and cook three meals a day from scratch--we'd be better off for it. Realistically, in achieving progress we have sacrificed some of the more basic pleasures, like enough time in the day to leisurely prepare a demi-glace, and go shopping at a farmer's market in the middle of the day. Grocery stores are open until midnight, and there's definitely a need for that. If I could only get milk on Thursdays from three to seven (the hours of my local farmer's market) I would just drink less milk. And that's what has happened. The solution is not to ask people to go out of their way to get healthy food. The solution is to demand that healthy food be put back in front of us, conveniently: in the grocery stores and the 7-11s and in every aisle, not just the perimeter. Personal efforts, like replacing lightbulbs and inflating tires, can only take us so far, and that "so far" is often only 5% of the way. We need political and legal change, and someone to lead us there: someone who, it seems, will not be Michael Pollan. He'll be too busy with his garden.
Of course, the evidence that Pollan uses to back up his claims, both for the unhealthful effects of the Western diet and the benefits of the traditional diet, are steeped in the same nutrition science he repudiates a few chapters before. Pollan is keen to point out that the narrow focus of some scientific studies fails to find a correlation between associations we "know" to be true: that eating more fat leads to heart disease, that anti-oxidants protect against cancer, and that diets low in carbohydrates lead to weight loss. Pollan says that we cannot dissociate one aspect of the food (the type of protein it contains, the amount of fats, the number of glasses of red wine) from the diet as a whole, and that synergistic effects of food and culture contribute to health in mysterious ways. No doubt this is true, but Pollan misses the point of science: science doesn't intend to tell you what is healthiest. The best science tells you is that if you eat fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight, and that's all that most people really want to know. Science is interested in finding building blocks, and then finding connections between those building blocks. And before you say that this method doesn't work, remember who told you that smoking causes cancer. Even though a number of traditional ways of living include smoking: the Native Americans, healthy though their wild-game-based diets may have been, kept smoking as an integral part of a balanced lifestyle. And focusing only on traditional ways of eating fails to take into account what is probably the most important part of a traditional way of living: it was hard work. Pollan tells us not to eat at our desks, without pointing out that the most important part of that injunction is to not be at a desk at all: the traditional way of life was bolstered by a traditional diet that took into account a lot of traditional hard labor. The healthy cultures Pollan points to are ones that needed to do a lot of physical labor, and exercised more than we are accustomed to.
Pollan is even willing to admit that a more "traditional" American diet--i.e., pre-70s--is better for us than our modern diet. He cites the moderating influence of "Mom" as the arbiter of portions and ingredients, leaving aside for a second that our move from dependence on "Mom" to dependence on every, or any, member of the family is hands down a positive accomplishment. Pollan blithely assumes that if we just remembered what our mothers cooked for us, we'd be a healtheir populace, skipping over the possibility that your mother wasn't all that healthy herself, and that if it's now a Dad who's cooking the meals, the entire family might be healthier for its modernity and sharing of responsibility. But again, there's a deeper problem with this assumption: the assumption that food choices are a solely personal concern, and that the best ways to get healthier foods are to pay more for them, and to grow them oneself. Pollan doesn't advocate any sort of protest or overthrow of the giant food corporations that are making a lot of these unhealthy choices for us. He doesn't provide any suggestions or avenues for advocacy. He doesn't even advance some of the suggestions he offers in his classes at Berkeley, such as pushing for the decoupling of the Farm Bill: unlinking subsidies for farms from subsidies for food stamps. Instead, Pollan assumes that all we need to make us a healthier society is to plant victory gardens, go to the farmer's market, and "stick to the edges of the supermarket" instead of the processed-food inner aisles. He also glosses over the idea that many families eat poorly because processed food is cheapest, and a nice filet of fish three times a week is a sizeable expense for a family of four. He admits that this is "regrettable" but then says that, on average, we spend less than 20% of our income on food anyway, and that perhaps we should increase that number, for the good of our health.
Pollan is right to be skeptical of mainstream nutrition science. As he points out, fad diets are a dime a dozen, and studies purporting to support or debunk their beneficial effects are hard to interpret and hard to believe, when longitudinal studies that could really tell us who lives longer by eating what understandably take a lifetime to complete. His main points, that we should eat more fruits and vegetables whole, and keep a close eye on what is in our food, are important and simple. However, many of his predictions smack of regressive thinking, of the wistful idea that if we returned to the 50s--to a garden in the backyard, and a Mom with enough time to tend to it and cook three meals a day from scratch--we'd be better off for it. Realistically, in achieving progress we have sacrificed some of the more basic pleasures, like enough time in the day to leisurely prepare a demi-glace, and go shopping at a farmer's market in the middle of the day. Grocery stores are open until midnight, and there's definitely a need for that. If I could only get milk on Thursdays from three to seven (the hours of my local farmer's market) I would just drink less milk. And that's what has happened. The solution is not to ask people to go out of their way to get healthy food. The solution is to demand that healthy food be put back in front of us, conveniently: in the grocery stores and the 7-11s and in every aisle, not just the perimeter. Personal efforts, like replacing lightbulbs and inflating tires, can only take us so far, and that "so far" is often only 5% of the way. We need political and legal change, and someone to lead us there: someone who, it seems, will not be Michael Pollan. He'll be too busy with his garden.
Friday, October 9, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
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 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.
Monday, September 7, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
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.
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.
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