Monday, October 31, 2011
The Art of Fielding Discussion Next Week
Thursday, October 27, 2011
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?
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Chabon and Eugenides To Sign Books This Month
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.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Live Chat: The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
Saturday, September 10, 2011
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.