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.