metachronistic

In late August 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, destroying the levees designed to protect the city, flooding 80% of it, and killing 1,464 people. City of Refuge, written by the author of Why New Orleans Matters and a resident of the city, is a fictional retelling of the disaster and it’s aftermath. It’s an emotional story, well written, and does a good job of making New Orleans and the devastation of Katrina real. Read next to Dave Egger’s Zeitoun, it’s hard to imagine how the maintenance of the levees, emergency response, and relief efforts could have been worse. Thankfully, book mostly stays clear from making political arguments or assigning blame, focusing mainly on how two different families cope with the destruction of the city they lived in.

I enjoyed it—learning more about the disaster and the rhythms and flavor of the city itself—but I wouldn’t recommend it except for readers interested in another perspective on Katrina.

After my disappointment that Skippy Dies was eliminated from The Morning News Tournament of Books, I decided I should read the book that beat it, and which eventually won in the final round by a one-vote margin, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, just out in paperback. After beating Skippy, Goon Squad was beaten by Franzen’s heavyweight, but came back in the zombie round and eventually met Freedom (again) in the finals.

Some of the comments from judges choosing Goon Squad:

• Sarah Manguso: Franzen made me weep for lost love, but Egan reminded me that death is coming.
• Jennifer Weiner: Egan gets my vote, because if Franzen takes the prize, then the terrorists win (and because even if he doesn’t, you know the Los Angeles Times will run his picture anyhow).
• Anthony Doerr: Which of these two books might help, to borrow Zadie’s Smith’s clause, “shake the novel out of its present complacency?” Egan’s.
• Michele Filgate: There’s no comparison. Egan’s novel is innovative and playful, while simultaneously smart and captivating.
• Andrew Womack: For me, this decision comes down to pacing, and Franzen is the Pink Floyd to Egan’s Sex Pistols; by the end of Freedom I couldn’t take another meandering guitar solo, while I was dazzled by how much Goon Squad packed into such a compact space.

Jennifer Egan (on hearing she won):

• A rooster will fit perfectly into our Brooklyn landscape…our sons will be thrilled; our two cats, even more so.

I just finished it, and I was blown away. I wasn’t expecting to like it much: a “novel” of connected short stories, ho hum. An entire chapter done using a piece of software implicated in the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster (PowerPoint), yetch. But the way the stories weave through time and from one character’s viewpoint to another, never so obvious as to touch the same scene twice, but covering such a wide swath of time was amazing. For me, it wasn’t until the last chapter, which takes place at some point in the 2020’s, that the collective effective of the stories really came together into a very real feeling for the things we gain and (mostly) lose in our lives; the way our decisions combine to make a life.

The final contest in the Tournament really was a fitting one—both Egan and Franzen are attempting to describe modern life in America (as cliché as that sounds). Franzen does this by filling his book with the full lives of his three main characters. Egan does it by sprinkling her chapters with short bursts from a wide range of related characters, varying perspective, time, age, and narrative style in each. The challenge for Franzen is how to tell the full story of three people without the reader growing sick of them. The challenge for Egan is getting us to actually care about the characters in the short time we spend with them, or at the very least be willing to listen to what they have to say.

She succeeds, spectacularly.

Jenson’s yawn pretty much summarizes my feeling about this book. The main character has convinced himself he needs to murder someone to avoid stabbing his child with an ice pick. He carefully plans how he’d do this but when he gets a prostitute who will serve as victim, she’s as damaged as he is. Much of the story concerns the back and forth as these two damaged individuals try to figure out what is going on with the other. My problem was that I really felt no investment in any of the characters and the whole premise seemed really unlikely.

One good thing: the book was short.

I just finished Swamplandia!, the first novel by one of The New Yorker’s 20 under 40 list (the author, Karen Russell was born in, gaak!, 1981) about a family of alligator wrestlers in the Thousand Islands region of Florida. Despite that description, it’s a lot less Geek Love, and a lot more non-traditional Bildungsroman. I enjoyed the book, particularly how convincingly the environments of the characters were drawn. The details, sights, sounds and smells of the Florida swamps and jungles, and the unpleasant realities of a low-income job at an amusement park (or really anywhere else):

…the hours contracted or accordioned outward depending on several variables that Kiwi had catalogued: difficulty of task, boredom of task, degree to which task humiliates me personally.

The main character is the girl Ava, who narrates her half of the story in the first person, but I found I enjoyed Kiwi and his struggles on the mainland more. Once the story got going (which for me, was when all the characters had left Swamplandia!) I ripped through it in a couple days.

I hadn’t realized how much southern Florida had been destroyed by a variety of ill-advised Army Core of Engineers projects and non-native species introductions. This book, and Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country (which I read in 2009) really makes you appreciate what the place must have been like before humans got around to messing around with it.

I probably should have mentioned this sooner, but my favorite literary event is going on right now: The Morning News Tournament of Books. It’s a tournament-style “competition” where pairs of books from the previous year are stacked against each other, and a literary judge decides between them. It’s always entertaining reading, both in what the judges have to say about each of the books they review and ultimately decide between, and in the commentary at the bottom. Last year’s winner was Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, a book I read last year and highly recommend.

My favorite in this year’s competition is Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies. Alas, it met it’s match yesterday: Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. I’m hoping Skippy shows up again in the “Zombie Round,” where losers that may have been unfairly judged get another opportunity to get back into the contest.

Reading what the judge had to say, and the comments, it’s clear that Egan’s book certainly deserved to win as much as Murray’s. Here’s one such comment from John Warner (Anthony Doerr was the judge):

Her books are just very alive down to the sentence level, inventive and surprising, even when you’re braced against them as with the PowerPoint story, which I also approach with a sneer, but was won over by, kind of like my attitude towards Katy Perry, and Jennifer Egan managed to do it without shooting fireworks out of her breasts. (As far as I know.)

But Warner has this to say about Skippy Dies:

Skippy Dies is one of those multi-character, many-threaded novels that manages to hold everything together all the way through to the end. For me, it was the best book of the year, superior to Freedom … The dialogue among the students is the funniest and sharpest I’ve read in years. My investment with the characters is deep and lasting. The title is no spoiler, since the titular character is killed off in the first paragraph. (It’s like Gallagher smashing the watermelons first.) As we go back in time and get to know Skippy and his friends, the heart breaks a little as his inevitable death approaches. Reading it, I got the feeling that Paul Murray put everything he had in the book. No withholding whatsoever.

As it turns out, my favorite book of last year, The Instructions wasn’t in the contest. So I’m still rooting for Skippy Dies.

I’ve read a lot of Ian McEwan over the years, and it’s impressive how different his stories are, and how precise and well written they are. On Chesil Beach is a horror of a story where a single moment is fully visualized and expertly drawn, and when it, ahem, comes, you know that things will never be the same for the characters. I guess this is McEwan’s expertise: visualizing characters suddenly drawn into situations so far from their expectation that you never quite know how they will react.

In this case, one wonders if the outcome of the story would be different if the time or place were different? I should hope that a more modern sensibility, more open dialog about intimacy, perhaps even premarital sexual investigation, would prevent the sort of misunderstanding that’s at the center of this book.

Anyway, I enjoyed it, but I wasn’t as blown away as many of the reviewers were. I do like, oddly enough, what People magazine wrote about the book:

No one can unpack a single frozen moment better than McEwan.

Very true.

Montana 1948 is a book published by Milkweed Editions, a non-profit press that attempts to “nurture and publish transformative literature.” I’m not sure what that means, but this is the second Milkweed National Fiction Award winner that I’ve read (The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck is the other). It’s a short little book told from the first person perspective of an adult recounting events that happened when he was twelve. It’s a simple story about family, small towns, and how each of the characters react to acts of violence against Native Americans in their community.

The main character maintains some distance from the events that take place—“I felt a contentment outside human society that I couldn’t feel within it.”—and so he allows the reader to draw their own conclusions about what drives the other characters to do what they do. The author is very good at evoking the feel of the time and place of the story. An enjoyable read.

It’s a good looking book too, with a slightly shorter and wider page size than is typical, and a nice thick shiny cover. It’s typeset in Perpetua, which is a font I like, but I felt like the italics were too small for the body text (see the image below). I’m not sure how this would happen unless it’s an intentional feature of the font set. It looked funny to me.

Finished Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Bad Girl this morning. This is apparently a rewrite of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Never having read Flaubert, I wouldn’t have recognized the similarities, but I doubt if I’d enjoy that book as much as The Bad Girl. Lydia Davis just re-translated it into English (“the English translation it deserves”, according to Kathryn Harrison in the New York Times), so maybe it’s worth a read.

The book is written from the first-person perspective of Ricardo Somocurcio, covering his entire life. As the bad girl disappears and reappears, she throws his life into chaos, ecstasy, and ruin each time. He’s unable to overcome his love for her, regardless of the depths she plumbs in her quest to make a life for herself and escape the poverty of her family. It isn’t the most compelling plot, but Somocurcio tells a very entertaining tale, and anyone who has experienced the ways that love defeats reason will understand what he goes through. It’s also something of a guilty pleasure to witness how the bad girl uses her power over Somocurcio (and the other men she exploits) to get what she wants, and observe the train wreck when she moves on.

I only highlighted one line in the book. I don’t think it characterizes the message of the book, but perhaps one of them: “In this life things rarely happen the way we little pissants plan them.” I wonder what word was actually used in the Spanish original, and translated into pissant here?

Good book. I’ll be reading more Vargas Llosa in the future, starting with The War of the End of the World, which is considered to be his best novel.

Thus far in 2011 I’ve read three books. I finished Paul Auster’s Invisible, and read Girl Factory by Jim Krusoe on New Year’s Day. I read a few raves of the Auster book, and I’d put it in a very long list of his better books. Maybe not in the top five, but one not to miss if you like his writing. Girl Factory was excellent. After I finished it, I wrote to myself: “Highly entertaining, and the main character had a great voice. New favorite book of 2011, one day into it.” Two weeks later and I’ll stick to that opinion.

The book I just finished, while watching the Bears thrash the Seahawks, was Tana French’s Faithful Place. I can’t remember why I picked it up, but I probably should have known by the style of the dust jacket that it wouldn’t be quite my taste. It’s in the crime genre, and was a little too filled with the stock and trade of that category for me. Even so, the characters are spectacularly well fleshed out, and the sense of place was great. I don’t know anything about the lower class rowhouses of Dublin where the action takes place, but I had no trouble filling the blanks from her detailed descriptions.

Anyway, it wasn’t really my thing, but if you enjoy literate crime fiction, this is a book I can recommend.

It’s been a few years since I stopped discussing the books I’ve been reading, and I think I should get back to it again. I find it’s good to write a little (even if it’s just a sentence or two) about what I’ve read; when I don’t, I find that I don’t really think much about what I’ve read. I’m not a particularly critical reader, and I don’t expect that everything I read will need to mean something, but without consideration, many of the books I’ve read just fade into a blurry outline, and eventually disappear from memory altogether.

I’ll start by trying to recollect what I can about the books I read last year. Looking at the list on the right side of the page, it’s pretty easy to put the books into three categories: the best, the next, and the rest.

One comment before getting to the list. I like reading books on paper, rather than electronically, and I like owning the objects themselves. That some publishers (McSweeney’s, Two Dollar Radio, Tin House, for example) actually pay attention to the quality of their books means something to me, and I’m more inclined to buy a book that is typeset well, has a sewn binding, and has attractive cover art, than the crappy “Perfect” binding and shiny raised-print dust jacket that’s typical of most hardcover and paperback books these days. Maybe if companies focused on a quality product, consumers would be more likely to actually buy the thing instead of flocking to a digital version?

The best

The Instructions, Adam Levin

This one is a clear number one for me. It probably isn’t the best book I’ve ever read or anything, but there was so much to like in this book that it’s flaws are easily forgiven. The story, characters, and the way Levin slowly introduces us to the language and mind of 10-year old, possible messiah, Gurion ben-Judah Maccabe was pure pleasure. For example, he’s always talking about “chinning the air” at someone. Whenever I’d come to that phrase in the book, I’d almost involuntarily nod my head the way you greet a friend (or smile at a cat). Gurion’s friendships and the way boys fight and make friends felt real; the love story between Gurion and Eliza June Watermark was touching and painful. And brief descriptions like this:

I chugged my coffee, leaving only one sip. I liked to drink the last sip while I stepped off the train, then victory-spike it into the garbage barrel at the station = I am finished with this part of the day!

Not only is that a great image, but I like how Levin uses the equals sign to relate the actual (left side) with it’s meaning (the right side of the equation). There are a lot of conventions like this that build up through the book.

For me, the primary weakness of the book was the ending. I had a hard time understanding exactly what it was supposed to mean, not just to me, but to the characters. It wasn’t clear why this is the path they’d chosen, or what they’d hoped to accomplish. It’s not unlikely that I missed the signs earlier in the book (it’s over 1,000 pages…); and a second reading would help. But, it’s a minor complaint. It’s hard to know what Levin should have done with all the magic he’d created in the first 900 pages of the book that precede the Gurionic War.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell

An odd story about an odd time and place: a man-made island in Nagasaki Harbor where the Dutch East India Company traded with Japan at the end of the 18th century, and the unusual mixture of modern and ancient culture. Part love story, part ninja adventure, part bureaucratic intrigue, I really enjoyed inhabiting the world of this book. Mitchell has become one of my favorite writers, and historical fiction really suits him (although it’s possible I’m saying that because I really enjoy historical fiction). I thought the last page of the book was stunning. Pure poetry.

Freedom, Jonathan Franzen

It was pretty hard to miss this book this year, and I felt like it lived up to the hype. From the very first page, the descriptions of the characters, their motivations, and the society we live in was spot on, and often hilarious. The book is the classic love triangle story between Patty, Walter and Richard, spanning their lives, hopes, dreams, and failures. I can’t recall much of a plot, but the story is the characters, and I didn’t find my mind wandering at all.

Skippy Dies, Paul Murray

Another story about a boy, but this one dies in the first few pages, and the rest of the novel recounts how and why he wound up on the floor of the doughnut shop with his friend. Like The Instructions it’s got a love story and conflict, but it deals much more with the pains of adolescence and the failed dreams of adulthood. Great book.

Half a Life, Darren Strauss

When Darren Strauss was 18 he hit and killed a classmate with his car. This book is about how that affected the rest of his life, and how he eventually came to terms with it. I thought it was amazing.

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

Did I mention that I like historical fiction? Wolf Hall treads over familiar ground, King Henry the Eighth and the English reformation, but told from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell. Mantel’s Cromwell is a compelling character; an intellectual in a court of fools, a common man among Lords and Royals, and someone dedicated to his family rather than what his children can bring him. It’s also very interesting to compare the story (and man) presented here with the more common variant (see The Tudors, for example) where Thomas More is the moral hero and Cromwell is the back room dealer working only for his own financial wealth.

My only complaint is that the story isn’t finished. I can’t wait for the next volume.

The next

Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami

This is the book that made Murakami so popular in Japan. It’s a love story, but with the usual mystery and magic of Murakami, and is certainly the most erotic of the books of his that I’ve read. Like everything else I’ve read from him: fantastic.

Six Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl

The buzz about this book when it came out seemed to be focused primarily on how attractive the author is. Whatever. Great book, and an incredible character in Blue. Observers wonder whether her second novel, due out in August, could possibly be as good without Blue.

Juliet, Naked, Nick Hornby
Bad Marie, Marcy Dermansky
Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart
Stoner, John Williams
Talk Talk, T.C. Boyle
The Pesthouse, Jim Crace
Dance Dance Dance Haruki Murakami

A group of books I enjoyed, but don’t remember well enough to make specific comments on them.

The rest

I’m running out of steam here, so for these, check out the listing on the right side of the page (assuming you’re actually at my blog). The only books I can’t recommend with reservations on that list are The Orange Eats Creeps, American Psycho, and Everything is Illuminated. They just didn’t do it for me, and in the case of American Psycho, I wound up skimming much of the second half of it. Once you’ve forced yourself to listen to Bateman’s banal conversations about clothes and watch him rape and murder someone, why would you want to subject yourself to any more of that? Not to mention an entire chapter on how great Phil Collins is. Yetch. I realize this is satire, but please!