Chabon and Whitehead

In the last several weeks, I have had the great opportunity to meet both Michael Chabon and Colson Whitehead. Chabon was in Oxford, speaking to the University of Mississippi, and held a very informal book signing at Off Square books. I say informal because for a writer of his stature, there was very little pomp surrounding the event. He walked into the store, sat down, and started singing books. There were only about 15 or so people waiting for him; I assumed quite a few more people would be at his speaking event, which was held at the university later that evening. What was really nice about this event was how relaxed it was. I was second in line. He signed my prized copy of Kavalier and Clay, I told him how much I loved his work, and he posed for a picture with me. I am not much for revealing my heart to my heroes (I am not one for “This books saved my life!”), so when it was over, I really felt the hour and ten-minute drive had been worth it.

The Colson Whitehead event was a nice surprise. Michael and I were in NYC, and stopped in to a small independent bookstore for a cup of coffee. I went on a book-buying splurge, spending well over $100 in twenty minutes. One of the six books I picked up was Whitehead’s newest novel, Zone One. I have only read The Intuitionist by Whitehead, but love his musings in Twitter. It just so happened that Whitehead was speaking that evening, and we made plans to come back to be apart of it. He talked for near twenty minutes, giving an acerbic speech that touched on his career, his thin-walled home, and Donna Summer’s “McAuthur Park.” He answered a few questions, and then got to signing. The line moved fast, and I got my copy autographed quickly. It was a simple event, and perfect for the evening.

1Q84

Haruki Murakami's magnum opus 1Q84 hits shelves this week. It is undoubtedly the literary event of the year, and clocking it at nearly 1,000 pages, one that I am sure will initially sell well, but not one people will actually read from cover to cover. It is a publishing rule of thumb that short stories and long books aren’t great cash cows. People seem like their books to be 300-500 pages, something that can be read in more than a day but less than a week. Investing in a long book can be a scary thing. Reading a novel is like taking in a roommate; you don’t want to just let anyone roam around your dirty closets and liqueur cabinet. A long novel takes time, takes effort, requires stamina, and if you have been burned once before (It, anyone?), not something you are eager to have in bed with you. I sat for hours reading Roberto Bolano’s 2666, determined to finish it, even in the face of a boredom so profound I thought of reading Dickens. I made it through the novel’s famously torturous fourth section, which reads like a police report. After each gruesome murder I became desensitized to the violence Bolano, and shifted into a restless mode, scanning each page for plot, skipping over the repetitive parts. Could I skip ahead and if I do can does that count as finishing the novel? Would I be missing something? Would anyone really care? As I asked myself these questions, I realized the end of my reading experience with Bolano was near. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I finished the section, put the book down, and started something else. So, I am interested: What long or “tough” books have you attempted but never finished? When do you realize it is time to give up?

Chabon and Eugenides To Sign Books This Month

Two Pulitzer Prize winners will be in the MidSouth this month to sign books. Michael Chabon, whose Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the prestigious award in 2001, and Jeffery Eugenides, winner for Middlesex in 2003, will both be at Square Books in Oxford. Chabon will be signing his works on Tuesday, October 11, at 5pm. Chabon, who does not have a new work out, will be in town to speak as a part of the University of Mississippi's English Department Lecture Series, according to Square Book's website. Eugenides will be here Friday, October 28th to sign his latest novel, The Marriage Plot, which will be released next Tuesday. The author will speak at Bondurant Hall at 4:30, with signing at Off Square Books at 5:30. I have to admit to a giddy excitement to see both of these guys, whose works are some of my favorites. I will give a full report after each event, hopefully with pictures.

Delicious Reads

In Sunday’s “Food and Drink” edition of the New York Times Magazine, book critic Dwight Garner was posed with the question “What is the best novel about food?” His answer? The Belly of Paris, by Emile Zola. The novel, he says, “makes you feel as if Mario Batali had taken his sensual Manhattan emporium, Eataly, and tipped it sideways, slowly burying you under its contents.” (He also cited the saffron stew preparation in Ian McEwan’s Saturday.) But even though food is such an important part of our daily lives, it does not always make for the stuff of exciting literature. Great fiction writing about food is a rare thing: a writer not only needs to convincingly describe the dish he or she is writing about, but also tie that dish into the larger narrative in a meaningful way. For my money, the “Best Food Novel” prize goes to Michael Cunningham’s 1993 novel The Hours. In that novel (which I will admit I admired but did not love), the character of Laura Brown, a housewife in 1949 Los Angeles, begins an ordinary yet important day of her life by trying to bake a birthday cake for her young son, Richie. The cake itself is nothing special, just a white-cake with vanilla frosting. But for Laura, who alternates between resentment towards her husband and son for taking her away from her morning’s reading, and a fierce, all-consuming love for the two men who fill her life, the cake is to be proof to herself that she is the wife and mother she is supposed to be. This is high-stakes cake-baking, and Laura’s preparation takes on the suspense of a thriller. Cunningham writes these scenes with such intensity that the reader cannot help but sympathize with Laura, even as she contemplates abandoning her life all together. The book’s themes of depression and isolation make it clear what success or failure of the cake will eventually mean for Laura’s life; even though we realize that her problems won’t go away with a perfect cake, we can’t help but wish for Laura’s even hand as she ices the frosting over it. In the hands of a skillful writer such as Cunningham, a simple act of baking takes on the full weight of a lifetime of questioned decisions and eventual disappointments.

Live Chat: The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach

I am excited to announce Solitary Pleasure's first live book chat, featuring a discussion of Chad Harbach's highly praised baseball-themed first novel, The Art of Fielding. Check back in this spot on Monday, November 7th, at 7pm, for what I hope to be the first of a monthly online book discussion. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times calls The Art of Fielding "a magical, melancholy story about friendship and coming of age that marks the debut of an immensely talented writer." And what better way to kick off the new baseball season than with a book about the America's favorite pastime. (Everyone knows what a sports fanatic I am.) So pick up the book, get reading, and be here the first Monday of November!

The Hundred Brothers, by Donald Atrim

Doug, the narrator of Donald Antrim’s darkly comic and utterly strange 1997 novel, The Hundred Brothers, is obsessed with blood lineage. In his spare time, he studies genealogy and traces his bloodline in an investigation to uncover “blood’s congenital inheritances, particularly in connection with insane monarchs.” He also searches for the histories of all the other “Dougs” who have come before him. The first recorded Doug, he tells us, died during birth in 1729. Following Dougs haven’t fared much better. One fell from a roof, while another drowned in a boating accident. Antrim’s Doug is determined to make up for the failing of his predecessors. But it is not the other Dougs of history, however, that this Doug should be worried with convincing of his worth. It is his own brothers, all 99 of them, each of whom seems on a path to stop Doug in all of his brilliance. The adult males of The Hundred Brothers quite literal title haze each other in a way that only blood relatives can, and it is this surreal fraternity who pose Doug the biggest threat. The brothers punch the weakest of their clan, argue violently over seating arrangements at the dinner table, and taunt each other over long held and mostly football related grievances, which translates to they simple act the way men do when there are not women looking.

To say that The Hundred Brothers is an unusual novel is an understatement. In his introduction to the newly released paperback version, Jonathan Franzen calls it “probably the strangest novel ever published by an American,” and there is evidence of this claim on every page of the slim novel. From the first, sprawling sentence (which ingeniously introduces the reader to each of the title’s hundred brothers), to its final psychotic tribal ceremony that closes novel, Antrim manages to do the truly outrageous, which is to convince the reader that every surreal moment is entirely plausible. The novel’s plot is remarkably simple: A family of brothers gathers together in their father’s slowly decaying grand library to find and dispose of “the old fucker’s” ashes. The novel takes place over the course of a single increasingly chaotic evening, and never ventures out of the decaying library where the novel is set. There is only a vague and slightly frightening mention of the outside world and no real referent to the time period. And there are no women to be found in this growling man-world, just the brothers and their alternating positions of love and hate for each other. Yet by keeping the plot and focus simple, Antrim is able to introduce the reader to a cast of 99 men (one of the brothers does not show), each of whom, however momentarily, comes alive in the course of the novel’s long and drunken night.

Antrim’s brothers, like any large group, vary in age and interest. Some of the men are presented as fully formed individuals, and it is a testament to Antrim’s skill as a writer that he is able to do so in such a succinct manner. There is Virgil, the meek younger brother, prone to panic attacks. There is Barry, the doctor of the bunch, who could make a practice based solely on his relative. There is Hiram, the oldest, of whom all the other brothers are frightened. There are also those whom we only see as nameless groups: the married men who seem to congregate near the porn, the football team intent on winning the next game, and the ones who gather in the dark, furtively cruising the library’s stacks for anonymous sex.

And then there is Doug, the novel’s tour guide through this singularly odd fraternity. Doug begins the novel as an acute observer of his brothers’ behavior, but grows increasingly unstable as the night gets longer. Anyone who has ever gathered in dread for family reunion can sympathize with Doug, who stays above the fray early in the novel, coolly describing the bizarre rituals we put ourselves through in the presence of those people we call family. But as Doug begins to interact with his brothers, he begins to fall prey to the patterns of intimacy: the long-held grievances, the buried emotions, and the moods and states of mind that are “no longer perceivable as moods, but as routine personality traits, shared attributes” than only families can hold. In the end, Doug slowly begins to succumb to his brothers and their shared history, decaying much like the library they are gathered in. “I’m not crazy,” he tells us early in the novel, in a statement reminiscent of most Poe’s heroes. But in the face of his multitude of brothers, even the best of defenses fails him. His introspections, that keep him insulated from familial lunacy, become lost in the presence of his brothers, and bleeds into true insanity. Nothing brings out our inner-freak like being trapped with those who know us the most, even for a single night, and The Hundred Brothers serves as a torturously comic reminder of this fact. Doug shouldn’t be worried, though. Much like the monarch he descends from, the craziness is in the blood.

Three for August

The Influencing Machine, by Brooke Gladstone.

Brooke Gladstone knows a thing or two about the news business. As cohost and managing editor of NPR’s “On The Media,” Gladstone is one of the finest reporters on the media there is. Her weekly show covers everything from video gaming to presidential reporting, and is able to pack into an hour more insight on current events than many daily news outlets are able to in pages and pages of reporting. So it comes as no surprise that her new book, The Influencing Machine, which she wrote with illustrator Josh Neufeld, deftly cracks open our commonly held assumptions about that loud, pervasive beast we call the media. When news outlets turn the focus to their own profession, the result is usually a high-minded affair. One needs to look no further than the frenzy over the recent News of World scandal to see just how important the media takes itself. In most reporting on reporting, the filter on what is happening becomes so amped up as to feel removed from the actual events. Gladstone’s book is able to sidestep this problem in a creative way: The Influencing Machine is illustrated in the style of a graphic novel, much like Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. In doing this, Gladstone is able to make her claim that we as consumers of media influence the media as much as they influence us in a fun yet serious style. Neufeld’s beautiful illustrations help to bring Gladstone’s radio-primed voice alive on the page. Complex and often tough issues, such as objectivity and media bias, are illuminated in the hands of Gladstone and Neufeld. The Influencing Machine is a jaunty read, a textbook primer for savvy media lovers who like their news to come from ink-and-paper as well as the iPad, but have a healthy skepticism of both.

Ten Thousand Saints, by Eleanor Henderson

The first chapter of Eleanor Henderson’s dazzling debut novel begins in a small Vermont town on New Year’s Eve in 1987 with two teenage boys getting stoned under the bleachers of their high school football field, and ends with the accidental death of one of them from huffing turpentine off a pair of stolen Victoria Secret panties after a keg party. (Nothing is revealed here that the reader does not know from the opening lines of the novel.) The boys, who live to smoke pot, listen to the Misfits, and lose their “V-card,” are the kind social outcasts that can be found on the periphery of any high school movie. In Hollywood, these kids are coded by their hair, their joints, and a penchant for their “Duuuude”-ish comic relief. In Henderson’s novel, however, they are the protagonists, and they are devastatingly real. Jude Keffy-Horn, the novel’s main character, is the kind of young white male that sleeps his way through classes at any high school across America. He is aimless, horny, and wears his identity in the form of a pentagram inked onto his Converse high-tops. Following the death of his friend (whom Jude affectionately refers to as “fag”), Jude trades one way of life for another. Ten Thousand Saints follows him from a small town drugged-out youth to the newly formed straight edge community of New York City. Henderson uses the drug/alcohol/meat free straight edge community as a blistering metaphor for an adolescents search for identity, which can frustratingly bounce from one extreme to another, sometimes in the course of the same day. Henderson’s acute attention to details makes the novel seem fresh and original, even when her occasionally melodramatic plot feels overburdened. But it is Henderson’s real-eyed love for her characters, the title’s highly flawed “saints,” that makes this novel stand out.

The Passage, by Justin Cronin

On paper The Passage has a lot going against it. It sounds (and looks) like a religious novel, something close to one of those Left Behind series. It is over 700 pages. And it is about, of all things, vampires. But damn if Justin Cronin’s third novel is not a rocking good read. The post-apocalyptic thriller about survivors of a government-generated vampire plague had me hooked for a good two weeks earlier this summer. A huge success when it was published last year, the paperback makes for perfect summer reading. Cronin, a PEN/Faulkner nominated writer, doesn’t dwell too much on his supernatural creatures, but instead uses them to focus in his sprawling cast of human characters. At the novel’s center is Amy, a mysterious young girl who upsets the Memphis Zoo’s polar bears, survives a nuclear explosion, and battles vampires only to…well, let’s just say she is important to the plot, so as not to spoil anything. Cronin novel spans 100 years, and hits its stride once he destroys the world we know and zeros in on an expertly created desert colony of survivors, whose new laws and customs reflect the horrific world they inhabit. The Passage is occasionally too long (I could have done without the last 100 pages or so, which only seems to set up the next novel in the projected trilogy) and some of the many characters are a little too thin. But Cronin’s imaginative plot makes up for these quibbles. The Passage is often rightly compared with Stephen King’s The Stand, but is closer in spirit with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, only with better punctuation!