Tea Obreht's The Tigers Wife

It seems we only have room in media for one writer per year. It is a hard and fast quota, and rarely deviated from, and has little regard for the quality of their work. Last year it was Jonathan Franzen, as much for his rightly hailed Freedom as for the controversy over its praising. Steig Larsson came the year before him. JK Rowling actually took three years, shutting out almost everyone else except for literary villain James Frey. This year will undoubtedly be looked at as the year of Tea Obreht, who, while not quite making magazine covers, has been the center of much literary attention. Earlier this month, Obreht was awarded The Orange Prize for her extraordinary first novel, The Tiger’s Wife, capping off a year of acclaim and wild press coverage. The Orange Prize celebrates “excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing from throughout the world,” as has previously been given to such major talents as Marilynn Robinson and Zadie Smith, who, incidentally, was the writer of 2000. Obreht’s award is not only notable because she is a first-time novelist, but for her age. She is currently 25 and the youngest writer to have won the award, which only adds to her allure as a new story. Zadie Smith makes for fine fellow-award-winning company with Obreht. Smith experienced massive acclaim leading up to and following the publication of her first novel, White Teeth, and was hailed as the a great talent to watch at the age of 21. Obreht, who also made news last year as one of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40,” has received a near unprecedented amount of attention, much of it before her novel’s publication. While the hype for the “Next Big Thing” usually follows a predictable rise and fall course, beginning with lauds and ending with a fizz-out of disappointment (Smith’s The Autograph Man was met with skepticism and poor reviews, but was quickly reversed after her luminous On Beauty), Obreht is the real deal. Her novel, about a young Balkan woman’s search for the cause of her grandfather’s death, mixes the horror of a war torn country with magical realism, an initially eye-rolling concept. Anyone who suffered through Jonathan Safron Foer’s Extremly Loud and Incredibly Close knows the dangers of getting invested in such a precocious concept, and can be forgiven for ignoring the attention The Tiger’s Wife has received. What sets Obreht’s novel apart, however, is the remarkable maturity of her writing. Obrech packs her novel with zoos, stories within stories, escaped tigers, and an immortal figure known as “the deathless man,” but never once does the novel feel cloying. Obreht is a story-teller at heart, but exudes such command and control over her prose as to never allow that story-teller’s impulse for the fantastical to take over. Her novel is grounded in its weight, and the magical elements she conjures serves the novel’s story, and not the other way around, a trap another “20 under 40” writer, Karen Russel, got caught in earlier this year with her also-hyped debut Swamplandia! Russel’s novel is the story of a young Florida alligator wrestler who is trying to keep her family’s dying amusement park alive. Like The Tiger’s Wife, there are elements of the fantastic, such as the ghost-human love story that centers the novel. But while the novel is charming and Russel is a fine writer, Swamplandia! fails not because Russel is unable to handle the magic realism she describes in the Florida Everglades, but because those elements push the novels’ already quirky premise over the edge into near absurdity. (A review in Bookforum called Swamplandia! a “YA novel disguised as literary fiction,” a statement that must have been fun to write, but grossly unfair and elitist.) That absurdity is nowhere present in The Tiger’s Wife. The reader wholly accepts Obreht’s fictional plot of land, and the dead and undead that lie therein. She is so successful in this regard that complaining about the novel’s several small structural flaws seems irrelevant. It is easy to forgive the small quibbles after becoming so deeply entrenched in Obreht’s elegant and masterful voice. The Tiger’s Wife is beautifully constructed, layering its rich theme of the stories we tell ourselves to survive with perfect tone. Obreht knows character, and is able to earn our sympathies for even the cruelest of characters. She captures the joys and sorrows of each of her characters so exquisitely that it can be easy for the reader to find sympathy with even the most heartless of characters, such as Luka the Butcher, an abusive husband at the center of the novel. Luka’s story, one of many in a novel of individual stories, is the clearest example of Obreht’s talent. Deviating from the main plot of the story, the butcher’s section is rich, heartbreaking, but not too much of spectacle as to become a distraction. Each of her characters are given tremendous care, and nowhere does the novel feel overburdened with excess, something a lesser writer would not be able to accomplish. Did I mention she was 24? Other writers may make news this year, but The Tiger’s Wife is a novel to truly celebrate.

When Superheroes Attack

The summer assault begins quietly, in early spring. A vague logo on a poster outside of a theater, a flash of movement and color on the television during sweeps week. And then, before anyone has a chance duck, flee, or seek refuge, the superheroes are everywhere. Flying over buildings, swinging through the air on webs, using their green lanterns and iron jet packs to make sure everyone knows without a doubt someone spectacular will be there to save the world every other hour at any Multiplex one can find, all in glorious IMAX/3D. Superheroes seem to thrive in the heat like exotic plants, wary of the cool and prestige of fall and winter. They cover soda cans and beach blankets, give a person double miles on Amex cards. Thrill rides are named in their honor, rides which can only be enjoyed in sun-drenched logo-print t-shirts and caps. Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Captain America, the Hulk, Thor, Green Goblin, Green Lantern, all the X-Men (along with a few X-Women) and tons and tons of other brightly suited lunatics dominate the summer movies, on a super mission to gather your money, time, and most importantly, your undivided attention. And like all good summer fun, these superheroes, who can fly and glow and upturn streets of cars without abandon, are utterly weightless. Their wisdom is meaningless. (“With great power comes great responsibility.”) Their actions inconsequential. Their faces interchangeable. (“Who is playing Batman this time?”) And we eat them up to the sum of billions and billions of dollars.

“It is too hot to think,” is the message we send with our entertainment money. “Dazzle us and leave us be,” we demand. And not just with movies. Our television hours are dedicated to endless amounts of talent competitions and reality feuds. Our music tastes veer to silly pop and endless jams. And our book tastes become simply horrendous, “beach reads” with the nutritional value of styrofoam. I will admit to being excited about the latest Batman. I cannot get enough of Nene Leakes and all her “Real” Atlanta housewives. And Gaga is on a endless loop on my iPhone. But I draw the line a summer reading. Leisure time is not where I need to catch up on the latest adventures of a vampire heroines who fall for the boy next door, or vampire heroes who struggle with their inner lust for square-mouthed girl in gym class. Keep your Austen Zombies and your Bin Laden-tracking-CIA agents off of my Kindle, away from my nightstand, out of my beach bag. Give me something with depth, I demand, something that will keep my brain from turning into mush after being stomped on by too many psychopaths in spandex and eye masks.

So, here you go, a summer reading list to get anyone through the KABOOM and POW of the summer’s heat, brain intact:

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. By Peter Biskind

Biskind, arguably one of Hollywood’s greatest chroniclers, interviewed almost everyone who is anyone in Hollywood for this book, which tells the story of the artistic rise of American cinema in the 1970s. Starting with Dennis Hopper’s Easy Riders and Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, Biskind takes the reader on a cocaine-fueled run through the greats of the era, including Coppola’s The Godfather, Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Altman’s Nashville, and Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show. More than just a behind the scenes look at the making of these films, Easy Riders offers anecdotes and analysis, enough gossip to send you to confession, and a true understanding of how mainstream American cinema, for at least a brief moment, found the perfect way to blend art and entertainment. With a fall just as spectacular as its rise (Popeye, anyone?), Easy Riders is film school disguised as a Vanity Fair article, and just as epic as any movie produced in that era.

Super Sad True Love Story. By Gary Shteyngart.

Set in a future New York in which everyone’s actions, credit score, and “hotness” are cached by an iPhone-like device called an apparati, Shteyngart’s novel, the tale of sad Russian Jew Lenny Abramov and his even sadder Juliet, twenty-four-year-old Korean American Eunice Park, is as thrilling and scary as anything Mr. Orwell ever dreamed up. Told through Lenny’s hand-written journal and Eunice’s text conversations, Super Sad gives us a future without books that will make one think twice about that Kindle. What sets this book apart, though, from other bleak and desolate visions of the future is the way Shetyngart infuses his novel with as much heart and emotion as he does with dystopian dread. The novel is as super sad as the title suggest, but also incredibly soulful and even moving. (Watch the hilarious "trailer" in the link above.)

The Orchid Thief. By Susan Orlean.

The New Yorker’s Susan Orlean’s nonfiction romp through the Florida everglades in search of the elusive Ghost Orchid with dreamer/schemer (and criminal) John Laroche is packed full of history, obsession, and strange delight. Based on her essay “Orchid Fever,” The Orchid Thief tells a tale that is so off-kilter, yet intoxicating, it almost seems unreal. In Laroche, Orlean has found the ultimate real life character, a man whose obsessions for beauty leads him to ignore everything from the law to his own health. And the deeper he gets into his obsession, the more believable he becomes, thanks to Orlean’s clear and simple writing. An added bonus to the book is the equally wondrous film version, Adaptation, a movie as strange and unique as Laroche himself.

Flannery. By Brad Gooch.

Brad Gooch’s fully-fleshed biography of Flannery O’Connor presents a fascinating portrait of one of America’s finest writers, peacocks and all. While at times it is a little too comprehensive, Gooch is clearly enamored by his subject, and paints her as not the troubled artist one might expect from her fiction, but as an approachable yet devout individual. Most illuminating is her time spent at the prestigious Iwoa Writer’s Workshop, and her secretive (to us only) correspondence with Betty Hester, long rumored to be Flannery’s lover. (Gooch easily dispels this rumor.) Even if her life does not live up to the eruptions of violence that populate her most famous short stories, the view into Flannery’s life is invaluable for any fan.

The Keep. By Jennifer Egan.

The Keep, Jennifer Egan’s gothic third novel, centers on Danny, a New York hipster who flees his life after being chased by mobsters. Addicted to technology, Danny disappears into an Eastern European castle at the request of his wealthy cousin, who is rebuilding the place. Cut off from all technology, Danny thinks he has found the perfect escape. The cousins, of course, share a secret past, which may or may not come back to haunt poor Danny. As tawdry as this sounds, Egan, one of the most experimental mainstream writer working today, knowingly pulls it off with a twist that sounds gimmicky on paper, but works amazingly well in the novel. (Think her Powerpoint Prestnetation in A Visit From the Good Squad, only more meta.) To say too much would ruin the surprise, which is half of the fun of the novel. A perfect vacation read.

Infinite Jest. By David Foster Wallace.

Wallace’s behemoth of a novel, published in 1996, and chocked full of endnotes, roving hamsters and one mind-blowing film, is a full summer’s worth of reading. In fact, clocking in at well over 1,000 pages, it works best in pieces. I read it two summers ago, carrying it around like a totem. It is frustrating, exhilarating, even boring for long stretches, but utterly valuable. Its scope, like its plot, cannot be easily summarized, nor should it be. And while it sometimes feels like work, it is immensely readable, unlike, say, Delillo’s Underworld. If completing it seems like a daunting task, there is even a reading schedule online for support. Read it for nothing else to say you have at a dinner party.

There you go, a full summer of reading, no vampires or superheroes needed. You will not be sorry for reading any of these books. What am I reading this summer? Justin Cronin’s The Passage, an apocalyptic story of a young woman battling government engineered…vampires. Sorry, it is summer. I need an escape.

The End Is Here: Oprah's Final Day

When I get home today from school, I will follow a familiar routine. After changing out of my work clothes, and sorting through the mail, I will make a small snack that hopefully will not to turn into a full-on meal. Clothes will be laid out for the next day. Sometimes, if I am feeling frisky, the dishes will be done. And finally, around, 4pm, after all these and other familiar habits are finished, I will settle down on the couch for my favorite part of the afternoon, something I have been indulging in since I got home from school in the 5^th grade: I will watch The Oprah Winfrey Show. This day will be slightly different, however, because as all of the world surely knows by now, today is Oprah’s final show. After 25 years of exciting car give aways, butter colored couch jumping, and exuberant yelling of celebrity names; after 25 years of “Ah Ha! Moments” and discovering tons of “Favorite Things” that beforehand were unneeded, but suddenly made life totally and utterly unlivable without; and really after 25 of tears and tears and tears, tears that came from lives touched by tragedy and grace, abuse confessions, and surprise reunions, putting many of us into the now certainly patented “ugly cry,” Oprah is saying goodbye to afternoon television, or in Oprah-speak, having her final “Farewell.” Needless to say, my life will not be the same.

I am a dedicated member of Oprah’s flock and look to her for nothing short of enlightenment. I follow every word she says. I subscribe to her magazine, admiring each of her covers. I think Suzy Orman is fabulous and James Frey is an asshole. Under religion, my Facebook status reads “Whatever Oprah Says.” I will occasionally try to resize women’s bra for them. I even watch OWN. Oprah had me at “JOHN TRAVOLTAAAAA!” and I am not saying this because she gave me a Kindle. She is the real deal, the closest thing to a religion many of us children who have been raised by television have.

Oprah is many things. She is at any moment a therapist/philanthropist/girlfriend. But to me, Oprah is a reader. I do a lot that Oprah suggest, but without a doubt I read what she tells me to, including A New Earth. (I did not, I am happy to say, read The Secret, but only after watching a clip from the accompanying video on an internet satire show.) Her Book Club will stand as one of her greatest accomplishments. In this time of click and refresh news, where shorter and quicker is better, Oprah’s successful promotion of quality books is a phenomenon, an achievement I don’t believe any other celebrity of note could pull off. (“Lady Gaga’s Book Club” anyone?) While her club might have started off lite, and is often classified under the degrading term of “ChickLit,” she has a track record of picking some of the countries finest writers for her club: Toni Morrison (Paradise, Song of Solomon, Sula), Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections, Freedom), Cormac McCarty (The Road) and Jeffery Eugenides (Middlesex) have all made appearances. Even dead ones occasionally have shown up, such as John Steinbeck and Carson McCullers (East of Eden and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, respectively). And anyone who can put Anna Karenina on the NYT Bestseller’s List deserves sainthood.

What I know for sure is this: Oprah has made a difference in millions of readers’ lives. She has inspired people who might never pick up a book to give it a try. She actively promotes reading, something usually relegated to library cafeteria posters. If she were only to be judged for just this one little accomplishment, her mission to get her audience to “Live Your Best Life” has been achieved. For this, Oprah, you have my deepest gratitude. I look forward to our final afternoon together.

The Grapes of Wrath

I recently finished Steinbeck’s classic The Grapes of Wrath for the second time, a reading experience that was as fine as any one I have had. Like most people my age, I first read the story of the Joad “fambly,” migrant workers looking for food and work during the Great Depression, as required reading in high school. To put it mildly, I did was not as attentive a reader as I pride myself to be now. In fact, even though I vividly remember Rose Of Sharon’s “mysterious smile” from the novel’s ending, I cannot honestly say I even finished it. My copy from that time bears distinct weathering of a devoured novel on the first 510 or so pages, and then seems untouched for the last 60, as if the reader lost interest or disappeared. The novel has always stuck in my memory though. The story of the Joad family’s journey from dust-laden Oklahoma to a California filled with so much hope yet peopled with so much despair remains as haunting and powerful today as ever. I held onto my copy knowing someday I would return to it, something I rarely do. I am glad that I did. Even knowing the novel’s ending could not diminish its power upon reading it again. Steinbeck’s lyrical humanism is raw, honest, painful to sit through, yet ultimately incredibly moving. The novel is big, weighing in at almost 600 pages, and a loud call to arms for a people who are failed by their land, country, and even their own family. But Grapes finds its greatest strengths in it small, quiet moments. Steinbeck peppers each section of the Joad’s journey with lyrical chapters that describe everything from a turtle crossing the highway to tractors coldly taking over people’s farmland like a plague of locusts. Steinbeck is able to use the sections to introduce his broader themes, and them intimately demonstrates them with the actions and perils of the Joad family. One cannot leave the novel without feeling the ravishes of the Great Depression and the following displacement and migration of so many workers, as well as the helplessness of all those involved. And yet for all its pain, the novel is not entirely hopeless. Things get bad for the Joads, but the novel never drown in despair. Describing group of workers he has seen on the road, the novel’s fallen preacher Jim Casey collects much of the acute loss of faith many on road to work have felt. “But,” he adds, just when his followers want to give up, “when they’re all workin’ together, not one fella for another fella, but one fella kind of harnessed to the whole shebang—that’s right, that’s holy.”

Coming Attractions

Wonderful news! Jeffery Eugenides, whose outstanding novel Middelsex won the Pulitzer in 2002, will be releasing a new book this fall. The Marriage Plot: A Novel will be available on October 11, 2011. Amazon offers this description:

Madeleine Hanna was the dutiful English major who didn't get the memo. While everyone else in the early 1980s was reading Derrida, she was happily absorbed with Jane Austen and George Eliot: purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. Madeleine was the girl who dressed a little too nicely for the taste of her more Bohemian friends, the perfect girlfriend whose college love life, despite her good looks, hadn't lived up to expectations.

But now, in the spring of her senior year, Madeleine has enrolled in a semiotics course "to see what all the fuss is about," and, for reasons that have nothing to do with school, life and literature will never be the same. Not after she falls in love with Leonard Morton—charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Oregon boy—who is possessed of seemingly inexhaustible energy and introduces her to the ecstasies of immediate experience. And certainly not after Mitchell Grammaticus—devotee of Patti Smith and Thomas Merton—resurfaces in her life, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.

The triangle in this amazing and delicious novel about a generation beginning to grow up is age-old, and completely fresh and surprising. With devastating wit, irony, and an abiding understanding of and love for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides resuscitates the original energies of the novel while creating a story so contemporary that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.

Carson McCullers and the Ballad of the Sad Cafe

My book club has been reading southern writers recently, including William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury), Flannery O’Connor (Wise Blood), and my favorite, Carson McCullers (The Ballad of the Sad Café). I have read many of the works by each of these before; in the case of O’Connor and McCullers, I have read all of their fiction, as well as several biographies of each. Rereading McCullers was a particularly gratifying experience. I was so enamored by her in high school (10^th grade), where I devoured everything I could. I hold my reading of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter as one of the more formative experiences of my life: I had always been a reader up until that point, but that book made me a believer. Her writing was so precise and spoke so directly to me that I believed I found had a kindred. As anyone who has ever survived the awkwardness of adolescence can testify, making a connection, being accepted, or just simply being understood can make months of unbearable confusion seem passable, even meaningful. Carson did that for me, and for that, I will always be grateful.

And yet, as an adult I have not gone back to McCullers. Carson’s works meant so much to me at such a significant point in time that I have been hesitant to reread her because I am scared to see that meaning diminished in some way. I don’t want to look back at her work and have that impact scarred. More than anything, as someone who also found great meaning in the works of Anne Rice and Tori Amos (oh, the delicious anguish!), I don’t want to be embarrassed by my taste or adolescent passions.

Luckily, rereading Ballad I didn’t cringe once. If anything, I was able to appreciate it more this time, no longer under the spell of raging hormones and sexual anxiety. The story of cross-eyed Miss Amelia, Cousin Lymon the hunchback, and dangerous Marvin Macy, and their triangle of unrequited love still holds the magnificent power it had in its initial release in 1943. McCullers graceful prose packs such beauty and yet remains wholly unsentimental, a feat many modern writers could learn a thing or two from. She captures the pain of loving someone without knowing love in return, and earns the tear it brings. Take this moment, when Miss Amelia, owner of her small southern town’s one café, realizes the person she has fallen for, a hunchback, loves not her, but her ex-husband, the ex-con Marvin Macy:

There were times when Miss Amelia seemed to go into a sort of trance. And the cause of these trances was usually known and understood. For Miss Amelia was a fine doctor, and did not grind up swamp roots and other untried ingredients and give them to the first patient who came along; whenever she invented a new medicine she always tried it out first on herself. She would swallow an enormous dose and spend the following day walking thoughtfully back and forth from the café to the brick privy. Often, when there was a sudden keen gripe, she would stand quite still, her queer eyes staring down at the ground and her fists clenched; she was trying to decide which organ was being worked upon, and what misery the new medicine might be most likely to cure. And now as she watched the hunchback and Marvin Macy, her face wore this same expression, tense with reckoning some inward pain, although she had taken no new medicine that day. (pg. 236, Collected Short Stories of Carson McCullers)

Passages like this one affirm McCullers’ strength as a storyteller. This beautiful paragraph, so exact in its telling, is a mixture of whimsical sadness and southern gothic that defines the best of McCullers’s works. It is a true marvel. Novellas such Ballad are usually called “gems” and this is no exception. Rereading this passage, I remembered why I connected so much with McCullers and her beautiful sad creatures that love and long and dream of snow. She is the real deal, and even the sad creature that I was at the age of 15 could see that. What a wonder she is, and I am so thankful to have been introduced to her at such an impressionable age. It will not take me a half a decade to read her again.

The Sound and the Fury: Reading Difficult Books

I finished reading Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury yesterday, a task that was not as challenging as I first imagined it to be. Other than proximity, I have not really come into contact with Faulkner, other than As I Lay Dying, and “A Rose for Emily,” both of which I read in high school and enjoyed. Living in Memphis, I would say that Faulkner is this region’s literary equivalent to Elvis. I get so accustomed to hearing about Elvis that it is easy to forget he was an actual artist, and not the cartoon that gets paraded around the city on a daily basis. Faulkner is the looming figure over this region. His works are celebrated and referenced, taught in courses dedicated solely to his name. His house is a tourist attraction in Oxford. Several local bookstores even have an entire Faulkner section. But I would question if more people know of Faulkner than have actually read Faulkner. While there are tons of references in the area pointing to the Nobel Prize winner, his actual works are small, challenging, and difficult to navigate, none more so than the opening chapter of The Sound and the Fury.

As has been well documented, Benjy, whom the back cover calls a “manchild”, narrates the first chapter of the novel. What the blurb fails to mention is that Benjy is severely mentally handicapped, and his narration is a direct reflection of that mental state. Faulker uses a variety of techniques to reflect this state, none of which make it easy for a reader to follow. The narration starts, stops, jumps back and forth in time. There are no visual clues to help us follow these jumps. While it first appears that italics punctuate each shift in time, Faulkner does not stick with this style. He ignores punctuation, does not identify speakers, and even worse, packs the opening with so much of the novel’s history that it is nearly impossible for the reader to fully comprehend what is taking place in the narrative with extensive rereading. Faulkner is not for the weak, and this first chapter, which I could not navigate without consulting a reference work, is not for the casual reader.

I will easily admit that I shy away from difficult books. My reading time is limited as it is, and I do not want to spend all of it struggling through a work I may or may not enjoy. I read Faulkner as a part of a book club, and I am glad that I did. However, I am not sure that I would call the book pleasurable; I could admire, even marvel, at the book’s style, but found myself so worked up on the simple level of content (what is happening?) that I could not take much enjoyment out of it. The book demands a second or even third reading, and this is not something I am interested in doing. I don’t think of this as a sign of weakness, however. For me, Faulkner failed not in his style, but in his content. The plot of the novel does not hold up to the style. The tragedy of the Compsons, if you can call it that, is not so grand as it is…(please don’t hate me) dull. I can invest in difficult books if I am rewarded on some level, but I could not find myself caring about any of the characters or their conflicts. A difficult book needs not only to challenge, but engage and reward, and in this regard, The Sound and the Fury underwhelms.

I remember feeling the same way the first time I read As I Lay Dying. The shifting perspective fascinated me, and I admired the way Faulkner was able to use a metaphor so distinctly (“My mother is a fish.”). But in the end, I did not care about the Bundren family. It was not until I reread the novel that I was able to appreciate its humor, its style, and its tragedy. I think of that novel and I want to reread it. Perhaps it is not my time with The Sound and the Fury.