BookFox

Requiem for a Book Review

The title of this post might be overstated. The Los Angeles Times book review isn't deep sixed, it's just shrinking by a huge margin. But in three days, on July 27, the LA Times will issue its final standalone book review section. The loss of a standalone section is a huge blow to Los Angeles' rising literary cachet, and, as Steve Wasserman and other former book editors point in their letter of protest, a grave blow to the prestige of the Times.

Mark Sarvas makes an impassioned plea to pump up the online coverage. No, more than that. He suggests: "Rather than calving the book pages yet again, and grafting the limp remains onto Calendar's derriere, let's fold the print Book Review entirely. Stop it cold. Spare it further indignities. And take the budget of that hard copy review - including all physical costs (printing, a share of distribution) - and use those funds (with perhaps a bump if you're really committed) to create a web-only Book Review." I completely agree with him that the future of book reviewing is online, and that book reviewing sections should devote more funds to online activities (video, podcasts, more reviews -- with hyperlinks).

But unfortunately, in the current model of newspaper governance, it seems that authority comes from print and online receives a trickle down. In other words, the print/online relationship is not even symbiotic, but parasitic -- print as host and online as parasite. The amount of funds devoted to online coverage of a topic is almost always inferior to the print funds. This is changing, of course, but in the way that newspapers currently organize their funds, they are still primarily a print medium, most likely because the financial conduits still run with the physical page. So I wish the powers that be at the Times would be as visionary as Mark, dreaming up new modes of book coverage, but as it stands, I think if someone axed all book reviewing, some other part of the paper (celebrity coverage?) would snatch up the funds and we'd be left with a huge vacuum of coverage. Of course, we're getting a vacuum anyway.

Also, by axing a print section and going all online, we're losing a demographic, an older demographic that still reads in print. All my book reviewing sources come from online -- if anything, to the younger set, book reviews on the printed page feel a bit antiquated, a throwback like black and white television and Cold War bomb drills. But a significant proportion of readers -- as attested to by any independent bookstore worker who hears where people read about books -- still stick with tradition and read print. I don't want any readers disenfranchised, whatever medium they prefer. So given the loss of cultural prestige that comes from cutting the print review, as well as the demographic loss, and the necessity of a print section becomes all too clear.

Scott Esposito brings up the effect of this collapse on other literary outlets, specifically his own publication, The Quarterly Conversation. It's natural that the rapid demise of book coverage in newspapers will force readers to shift elsewhere for news (of course, some readers won't make that shift, and just pay less attention to books, continuing the downward cultural spiral of literature, but that's neither here nor there). Scott ends up mentioning that he's recently started paying contributors of TQC, which is wonderful, because this all ends up at money. Of course, I remember talking to Judith Freeman when she was writing a book review for the Los Angeles Times, and she said the money in book reviewing is so poor (even for a major outlet) in comparison to the time spent (reading all the author's previous works) that it never makes financial sense to review books. It's more about prestige and intelligent interaction with the literary world. Well, that's what we're left with. And may other literary institutions pick up the slack where the LA Times has left a gaping hole.

Nam Le: "The Boat"

So Nam Le's short story collection "The Boat" comes out today, and after reading it over the past month, it seems he's going to give Chris Adrian competition for best debut of 2008 (yes, I know Adrian's published before, but "A Better Angel" is his first collection). Le's got geographical range, that's for sure, both personally -- born in Vietnam, grew up in Australia, studied in the U.S. -- and in his fiction, which takes place in Iowa, Japan, Iran, Columbia, Vietnam. Aside from geography, there's also a wide range of genre. The first story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," is a self-referential story with a character named Nam Le trying to write a story at Iowa, and deals with the nature and responsibilities of storytelling, while "Cartagena," involving child-assassins and grenades, takes on the mantle of an action tale, and the third story, "Meeting Elise," transitions into more of a domestic tale of an estranged father's relationship with his musical prodigy daughter.

The only place where the collection falters a bit is in the center, in the near-novella "Halflead Bay." The pace slows down in this story as Le addresses the domestic realm, of small-time exchanges against bullies and a teenage love interest, and this pales against the more ambitious stories surrounding it. But the collection as a whole has this big-hearted, adventurous spirit that isn't afraid to foray into territory with geopolitical repercussions.

There's a New York Times dinner-interview with him, and Luna Park also has a interview, more Q & A style.

Roddy Doyle Review

Sorry for the slow posting here this week -- I've been swamped with other writing projects. Hope at least that the links from Monday kept everyone busy. As for today, go over to The Short Review, which is, as its name suggests, concerned only with short story collections, and also the host of my review of Roddy Doyle's The Deportees and other Stories.

Review of the Short Story Reviews

It's lovely that the NYTBR reviewed Max Apple's collection of stories, A Jew in Home Depot, the first collection he's published in twenty years, but just strange that the review is coming out now, nearly four months after the book was released (The LA Times review, written by Tod Goldberg, came out in late November). Perhaps something to do with the collection being published by a university press? (John Hopkins University Press)

LA Times offered a single-paragraph review of Naomi Benaron's Love Letters From a Fat Man.

The nervous, tender-hearted stories in "Love Letters From a Fat Man" are often set in that netherworld humans inhabit after loss -- that strange, weightless, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other place that is a buffer between the painful present and the next chapter.

The Guardian has a paragraph review of Sunstroke by Tessa Hadley, which I reviewed in my last post.

Lastly, The Globe (via Kate) has two reviews of short story collections: A Grave in the Air by Stephen Henighan and Incidental Music by Carol Matthews. Here's part of the review of the former:

A Grave in the Air is a collection of eight stories set amid political events in Eastern and Central Europe, spanning the half-century between Nazi Germany and the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s. The narrative voices are wide-ranging, from a Polish chambermaid's ruminations about the cultural cost of exile, to a Hungarian immigrant's alienation from the anglo elite of Montreal.

Tessa Hadley - Sunstroke

I decided to read Tessa Hadley's collection Sunstroke and other Stories mainly because it had been nominated for the Short Story Prize. Hadley’s a Welsh writer that writes short stories of manners, usually with female protagonists, and always concerned about interpersonal interactions in domestic environments. Most of the stories in this collection share a theme of sexual misconduct, often of adultery, but also of sexual activity between people of vastly different ages. For instance, in the title story adultery is threatened with a stolen kiss; in the following story, "Mother's Son," a son confesses to his mother that he's slept with someone other than his wife; in "Phosphorescence" an older married woman flirts with a thirteen-year-old boy. These activities are very deftly commented on by the other events in the story -- a minor case of sunstroke seems to offer a metaphorical explanation of the momentary lack of judgment when kissing a friend's husband, or the stench of a rotten egg symbolizes a man's inability to stay faithful to his wife.

It's appropriate, given this focus on the overstepping of sexual boundaries, that Hadley has many wise things to say on gender. She devotes a line, or a paragraph, to limning out the differences in how men and women think about work, or how a woman might imagine a man feeling about sex in comparison to her own feelings. This excerpt is from the end of "The Enemy," which tries to set up the value of the protagonists quiet actions of cleaning as equal, worthwhile, and necessary in contrast to her male friend's activities that fomented revolution (literally).

In her thirties she had resented furiously this disproportion between the time spent cooking and eating; it had seemed to her characteristic of women's work, exploitative and invisible and without lasting results. She had even given up cooking for a while. These days she felt about it differently. The disproportion seemed part of the right rhythm of all pleasure: a long, difficult and testing preparation for the few moments' consummation . . . In her tasks around the flat -- polishing furniture, bleaching dishclothes, vacuuming, taking cutting from her geraniums, ironing towels and putting them away in the airing cupboard -- she was aware that her mother and grandmother had done these same things before her, working alone in quiet rooms, or with the radio for company. In truth she had had a stormy relationship with her parents, and used to think of her mother's domesticated life as thwarted and wasted. But she had learned to love the invisible work, the life that fell away and left no traces.

All in all, Sunstroke is an excellent read, although I would have suspected, if someone had described the book to me, that it wasn't quite right for me -- issues of domesticity in upper-class Britain just doesn't set off the alarm bells of a "must read" in my head. Nonetheless, she manages to keep me reading through the quiet stories by offering acute psychological perceptions, and entertain me with ones like "Buckets of Blood," which details the aftermath of a botched abortion. If you'd like to read it before the contest results are announced, you have until Feb. 27th.

I'm working on getting my hands on copies of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam and Like You'd Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard, the other two collections nominated. When I do, I'll let you know.

Update: Here's an essay by Hadley on reading short stories.

Beowulf

So earlier tonight I found myself reading poetry to Mrs. BookFox, only it wasn't exactly love poetry:

Unhallowed wight,
grim and greedy, he grasped betimes,
wrathful, reckless, from resting-places,
thirty of the thanes, and thence he rushed
fain of his fell spoil, faring homeward,
laden with slaughter, his lair to seek.
Then at the dawning, as day was breaking,
the might of Grendel to men was known;
then after wassail was wail uplifted.

We had gone to see Beowulf - and in 3-D, no less, with those fancy glasses, which I wore on top of my regular glasses - and I just had to separate the fanciful Hollywood tale from the original. So that was how I found myself reading forty-three chapters of Beowulf until after midnight (only excerpts of which I read out loud to Mrs. BookFox).

The movie holds rather true to the original - at least through the first half. Then it devolves into a soap opera connection between the Kings, Grendel/mother and the dragon. It does keep in some of the religious references that the Christian poet overlaid on the pagan tale (albeit heavyhandedly and somewhat anachronistically). And it creates ex nihilo a part for Beowulf's wife, who isn't even mentioned in the poem (obviously in order to hook the female demographic). But completely gone is the complex inter-relationship between the two clans, the Geats and the Thanes.

I'm not complaining, mind you. Because I know that staying true to the original would not make it a decent movie - I had no expectation that it should or would follow the original, I just enjoy knowing the difference and analyzing the difference. After all, the copy we have now was viewed through the lens of a Christian writing to Christian contemporaries, which obviously affected how the pagan tale was told, so I find it completely appropriate that this third degree away from the "original" (which was what? oral or written?) is changed once again to conform to the time and audience.

All that said, while I enjoyed the 3-D effects, that was probably the best part of the film. The use of live-action actors transformed into animation is a poor technique if actors don't want to look like they're acting through a bad plastic mask. Grendel looked like a pumpkin head at Halloween put on a child's body and Angelina Jolie looked too much like Angelina Jolie. It took a lot more brain power to read the poem, but I derived pleasures from it that I certainly couldn't get through a theater experience with the smell of fake butter in my nostrils and the grandfather behind me gasping every time a sword or severed limb protruded from the screen. One of those pleasures is feeling smarter, I admit. Another is discussing the poem with my brother, a Beowulf purist who harbors a penchant for ridiculously masculine tales that involve strong men defeating giants (he treats stories like Beowulf as instruction manuals for life).

I admit: in writing for this site and completing an MFA program, I'm often focused on the books coming out this year, a focus eliding even 20th century classics, much less the geriatric members of the canon (sorry King of the Geats - you're a geriatric now). So I suppose it's nice to have an excuse to go back and read Beowulf, which I haven't read since high school or college, I forget which. I'm reminded of an interview with a professor who argued we're almost doing a disservice to youths to make them read classics at such an early age, because there is so much that they can't connect to yet. Give them a decade, have them come back and read it on their own, and it will resonate with the force of an earthquake. I think I agree with that. I have no memory of reading Beowulf the first time, but this time around I love it, hyphenated metonyms and all. It's just so nice to hear the language as I read it, to hear the alliterative translation and the rhythm. No word yet on how Mrs. BookFox took it, but I enjoyed myself quite a bit.   

New Essay Collection by Umberto Eco

I've always been a fan of Umberto Eco, and not only of his fiction (of which my favorite is The Name of the Rose). Eco's essays, thoughts on popular culture as filtered through his semiotic lens, are always good for re-conceptualizing the way we view everyday items. For instance, I've used his essay "Lumbar Thought," in which Eco examines how the clothing we wear impacts the way that we think, in several of my English composition classes, in order to force my students to think about the possible repercussions of how they dress. Eco's semiotic analysis is similar to what Roland Barthes does in collections like Mythologies, but I think Eco does it with more panache.

All of that to say that good old Umberto is coming out with a new collection of essays entitled On Ugliness (isn't that a much better title than On Beauty, which he also wrote?). There's an excerpt in the L.A. Times.

There's also a review in The Village Voice.

The Bookaholics' Guide to Book Blogs

So I just received my copy of the Bookaholics' Guide to Book Blogs, and naturally looked for myself. There I was - BookFox, in the index - except with the wrong http address. It's www.thejohnfox.com, not www.bookfox.com. Thanks for fact checking that one. But I shouldn't worry about it, I told myself, I mean people will just Google me after www.bookfox.com leads to a labyrinthine page of Chinese symbols.

Right. Then I looked up the BookFox section in the body of the book, pages 36 and 37. Okay, good, I'm described as sassy sounding and cunning and deftly deploying light hearted sarcasm, great, great - and then they say young woman. ?!?!? Young woman?! I'm a man, baby! (think Austin Powers). And who says I'm young? (Okay, relatively speaking, but how would they know?) You would have thought the picture (I do look masculine, last I checked) or the posts about getting married to a woman (although I suppose in some states there could be ambiguity) or the web address (JOHNfox.com, not JUANITAfox.com, or some other feminine derivative) would have tipped them off.

Okay, so then they quote from me. Good quote - I'm funny, I'm insightful, blah, blah, that is, at least on the first block quote. The second block quote - no idea who wrote that. But it certainly wasn't me. I check - oh, the first half is a quote from Gwyn Topham, writing for the Guardian, and then the last paragraph belongs to Condalmo. Wow - they not only misattributed one quote to me, but two! How impressive!

What's the upshot? Someone has to take another crack at this and do it right. For one, it has to be electronic, because this book can only be written with hyperlinks. For two, the authors have to actually know something about the blogosphere. When I first read Ed Champion's evaluation of the book, I actually thought: maybe he's being too harsh, maybe I should take a look myself. Well, I've taken a look. And Ed's absolutely right. The book's an ugly attempt to survey an emerging medium. If I weren’t such a sassy, cunning, light-hearted sarcastic woman, I'd have even harsher words.

Steve Erickson: Review of Zeroville

Steve Erickson's books are not, usually, an easy read. Or the reading itself isn't difficult, it's just the understanding part. He'll employ unorthodox typography with the frequency of Mark Danielewski and use a Haruki Murakami-esque technique of channeling the narrative into the hyper-personal psychic journey of the hero. The result is always intellectually delightful to read, if not the type of novel you'd want to have to dissect, part-by-part, explaining the pieces and their contribution to the whole.

In Zeroville, an ex-seminarian student named Vikar, identified as a cineautistic, has a shaved head with a tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor (and assaults anyone who misidentifies them). He is anti-drug, doesn't understand comedies, has a penchant for violence, and falls in love with a woman named Soledad Paladin. Above all, he's a genius at editing and understanding film sequence - or rather, that film has no sequence, no proper time - and that genius leads him to start tracking down the single frames from a reoccurring dream he's had since childhood.

The book's structure consists of a series of numbered sections - a reference to movie frames, or scenes - which climb to 227 before falling down the back side of the book down to zero. It's not unusual for Erickson to play with structure in his books - in Our Ecstatic Days he had a separate narrative running through a single line two-thirds of the way down the page, and in Tours of the Black Clock he has 164 short chapters. Contrary to expectation, the brief sections (some even don't reach sentence length) don't create discontinuity in the narrative, rather, they offer a steadily escalating structure to the book that makes the story feel more unified.

Zeroville is more accessible than his last book, Our Ecstatic Days, but shares the same emotional heart, as both are about the death of a child. Except in Zeroville, it's a variation on a theme, with the narrator waxing Kierkegaardian about the necessity of fathers (Abraham, God the father, Vikar's father) to kill their children. Along other religious lines, Vikar has replaced the authority of religion with the authority of cinema. In a model of a church he created, Vikar has replaced the altar with a cinema screen. Even to pay his respects to the dead, he goes not to the graveyard but to the movie theater. All these replacements of religion with cinema serve as a rather damning portrait of the deification of film, certainly an apt representation of contemporary culture.

Appropriately enough, the rifts on cinematic knowledge are Midrash-like in their detail and complexity of interpretation - and there are quite a few. Long-winded diatribes debating over the finer meanings of the song about the dog in Now, Voyager, homage to Mogambo, The Long Goodbye, and Heiress; summaries of half a dozen films from around the world - The Lady Eve, a few unnamed Japanese films. Zeroville is, on a fundamental level, a love song to film, to the history of film in all its artful incarnations. The reader who catches the many allusions and references will be reading a much richer, funnier novel, but it doesn't take an encyclopedic knowledge of film to enjoy the story.

As is common for Erickson, the novel traffics across the geography of Los Angeles - PCH to Zuma, Sunset, Laurel Canyon - and even imagines disasters such as an earthquake triggering a tidal wave down a Santa Clarita valley. The geography is recognizable and yet not - all the places are seen through a nightmarish, dreamy filter. In addition, there are interludes in Spain and France - other command centers for cinema - which contain stories that are no less entertaining for being narrative sidebars.

Zeroville is one of Erickson's most accomplished works to date, a dangerous, sexy romp through the history of film and one man's savant-like obsession with the meaning of film. There's not any novel like it, because no one writes like he does. In fact, the highest praise I can offer to Erickson is that in every book it seems like he's broken the emergency-stop of his imagination and let a meltdown occur, and we all get to the watch the highly dangerous but highly fascinating fallout.

Benjamin Percy: Refreshing

I once heard a senior editor at a publishing house say that book reviews, even in major newspapers and magazines, have a negligible impact on a book's sales (and went on to cite figures that showed hardly a hump in sales numbers, much less a spike, in the week after the review). That's myopic and ill-calculated. It ignores how people gain knowledge about an author and their long-term buying habits. For instance, virtually no single review will make me buy a book - but if I read a review and then read two blogs and read an interview, all within a certain time frame, then I'm propelled to buy the book. And if I don't buy it at that point - for any number of reasons - then three or six or nine months down the road, or maybe even a year or three later, when browsing online or in a store, I might pick it up. It's all about the confluence of multiple sources that mentally lock in an author's name for future reference. Reviews happen to be one of those sources.

That said, I've recently experienced a kind of confluence with the short story writer Benjamin Percy. Poets and Writers has an article (not available online) that profiles him in quite a favorable light, and the LA Times just reviewed his new collection "Refresh, Refresh." On that wave I read Bookslut's very recent interview with him (he has a blue-collar ruggedness which is quite endearing).

Apparently, his stories involve hyper-masculinity and (the latest one, at least) the fall-out on families from the Iraq War. Also, throw in some weird caves and meteor holes. Here's an excerpt, just so I can hook you like I've been hooked:

Many years ago a meteor came screeching down from space and left behind a crater five thousand feet wide and three hundred feet deep. Hole in the Ground is frequented during the winter by the daredevil sledders among us, and during the summer by bearded geologists from OSU interested in the metal fragments strewn across its bottom. I dangled my feet over the edge of the crater and leaned back on my elbows and took in the sky—no moon, only stars—just a little lighter black than a crow. Every few minutes a star seemed to come unstuck, streaking through the night in a bright flash that burned into nothingness. In the near distance the grayish green glow of Tumalo dampened the sky—a reminder of how close we came, fifty years ago, to oblivion. A chunk of space ice or a solar wind at just the right moment could have jogged the meteor sideways, and rather than landing here, it could have landed there, at the intersection of Main and Farwell. No Dairy Queen, no Tumalo High, no 2nd Battalion. It didn’t take much imagination to realize how something can drop out the sky and change everything.

Read the rest of the excerpt at the publisher's site, Graywolf Press.

Gina Nahai - Caspain Rain

V.S. Naipaul, in Among the Believers, takes a whistlestop tour through the Middle East, writing about the tension between the dynamic societies of the West, embracing new and revolutionary technology, and the static Islamic societies, holding onto tradition. That basic tension is present in Gina Nahai's new novel, Caspain Rain, only in sociological form. The novel, although it tells an intergenerational story, focuses on a progressive young woman trapped in an Islamic marriage to a man who is in love with another woman. The woman is infected with Western sensibilities - she wants to work outside the home, not to be a housewife, she wants to ignore the class gap between herself and her husband's relatives and friends - but social mores restrict her.

It is, through and through, a sad novel, though not a hopeless one. There are upswells of progress, but these are mostly transient gains. Nahai unswervingly depicts Iranian society in all of its bickering, class-snobby, ugliness - the prohibitions against dance, the refuge-taking Nazi's, the Jews trying to gain traction in an Arab society - but also shows a protagonist gamely fighting against these things. It is the size of the fight which redeems the depressing conditions of the novel.

Caspain Rain felt like part The Awakening, with a deeply unhappy woman trapped inside a marriage, and part The Unbearable Lightness of Being, with a woman refusing to leave her husband or be cowed by his unfaithfulness. Add in a heavy dose of Iranian society - even a Muslim/Zoroastrian feud (where else would you find that, eh?) - and the reader gets an excellence portrait of the condition of an oppressed woman in an Islamic state.

For an excerpt, head over to Nahai's website.

New Quarterly Conversation

I'll make this brief and direct: Go visit the Fall issue of The Quarterly Conversation - I believe that it's issue number nine - where you can find wonderful essays on things ranging from James Wood to prisons to a whole slate of book reviews.

Diary of a Bad Year

So J.M. Coetzee's new novel is out - but only in Holland. They've had it for the last few weeks while we poor slobs here in the U.S. have to sit on our hands for another few months, until October 23rd. The Literary Saloon alerted me to the first English language review of Diary of a Bad Year. The reviewer praises it, but be prepared for a thorough discussion of the metafictional elements in Coetzee's oeuvre. Check out the triptych structure described in this excerpt from the review:

Indeed, in the course of Diary of a Bad Year, JC becomes exquisitely alert to what he calls “the impostures of authorship”. Having been asked by a German publisher to contribute a run of essays to a book on “what is wrong with today’s world”, he sets about recording his opinions on a dictaphone tape – JC, whose handwriting is deteriorating due to a loss of fine muscular control, is suffering from Parkinson’s disease. His assumptions about the world, and his magisterial writerly stance, are, however, undermined by his encounters with Anya, the exotic young Filipino-Australian woman he meets in the laundry room of their apartment building, lusts after, and swiftly enlists as his typist. Anya not only types up the great man’s thoughts, but takes it on herself to “fix them up too here and there where I can”, generating a subtle, ongoing comedy of conflicting perspectives, as well as some cruder malapropisms thanks to her undiscriminating use of her computer’s spellcheck function (in her typescript Brezhnev’s generals sit “somewhere in the urinals”). The three layers of the text – JC’s philosophical essays, his heightened reflections on his meetings with Anya, and Anya’s own more sceptical version of their unfolding relationship – are presented in exactly the same order each time on successive pages, so that the novel resembles one of those segmented children’s books in which you end up with the head of a gorilla, the torso of a policeman and the legs of a ballerina (it is possible to read the different narratives discretely from start to finish, but not advisable, as each ligament of this hybrid is held in a weirdly elegant tension with the rest).

No one belongs here more than you. Stories by Miranda July

No one belongs here more than me. That’s what I kept telling myself while staring at the bright and shiny cover. Really, it was shiny. I could just about see my nose in the binding. An appeal to the reader—look I want you to read this book so much that I will show you how much you belong with this book. Except that the one I found was yellow. Actually, this was lucky for Miranda July, because if they only had the pink ones, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up.

You see, when I was about five or six my aunt gave me my first bike, and because it wasn’t new, she wanted to paint it for me—and asked what color I liked. I don’t remember my reasons at the time, but pink was my favorite color. Maybe it was because of the Pink Panther cartoons. Maybe it was because He-Man, when he was Prince Adam, wore a pinkish doublet. Maybe I am just trying to come up with a rationalization now. Whatever it was, I wanted a pink bike. In fact, I would have been even happier with a pink room. My aunt told me “boys don’t like pink,” which I didn’t understand, but took as some innate inferiority within myself. Eventually, we settled on a red and white bike and a green room. Ever since, I have been avoiding the color pink as recompense for my deep social faults. You won’t trick me again, pink!

But I am getting ahead of myself—I am the sneaky very last guest blogger that waited until everyone else posted to take over. And now I have. My name is Brent, and I went to school with the BookFox, before graduating in May. Mostly, I write short stories. My blog can be found here. I will also be launching a very cool literary podcast in August, which I will formally announce later, as BookFox permits.

Before I left you for my two tangents, I was auditioning Miranda July in the bookstore. I was auditioning her in Border’s for 20% off. The 20% off was key, because I am on a strict, post-graduate studies budget. I had heard July’s name mentioned several times before—once, here on BookFox, and once in the New Yorker. In fact, July had two pieces in the summer fiction issue, getting more play than the other they’re-so-hot-right-now writers in the issue, like Dave Eggers, Edwidge Danticat, Gary Shteyngart, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Charles D’Ambrosio. Also, the month was July, which had to help.

Her success is quite remarkable, given that she is essentially a beginning writer. However, this is a little misleading, since she previously made a name for herself as a filmmaker and performance artist. July’s directorial debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know, made an indie splash at Sundance in 2005, winning the jury prize. So this collection is, in some ways, building from that success. The first story that I read, “The Swim Team,” won me over, and I bought the book at Borders. The piece was only six pages, a length that July handles extremely well. It characterizes the best of the collection: intimate, sharing a secret withheld from everyone but the reader, and immediate, written in simple language that somehow emphasizes every moment. Raymond Carver is the absolute standard of everyday diction that feels fresh and significant (e.g. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”). July is good at this too, and her imagery is often striking, as in “The Shared Patio,” where the narrator falls asleep while leaning on her neighbor, who has just had an epileptic seizure, or in “The Birthmark,” where a woman has a birthmark from her face removed, but begins to question her new identity. Her metaphors are well-crafted and beautiful and she writes amazing short shorts.

Sometimes, however, when she removes herself from the brilliant discoveries in everyday life and becomes more abstract, her language feels forced, (“This Person," “Making Love in 2003”), as if she is trying too hard to make sacred mounds out of what are, in fact, molehills. In reading this collection, I had a similar reaction as when I watched her film—that her characters, rendered beautifully through striking images, fall too easily, and perhaps without just cause, into the role of passive victim. In “The Boy from Lam Kien,” the narrator observes, “I was getting depressed and this was my own fault.” This phrase describes the vast majority of July’s characters—unable to enjoy life, because they are “rushing” through it and “are never satisfied” with what they have (“The Man on the Stairs”). I almost wished that her characters, even for a moment, could slow down enough to enjoy something, to be genuinely happy. At the end I wanted to shout, “it doesn’t have to be this way.” But I didn’t. I just closed the book.

The website for the book is also interactive and pretty cool, you should check it out. I also think you should know that July is not her given name, but since everyone loves the summer, perhaps people are more likely to love her. I am now considering changing my name to Brent Saturday.

Reading Roberto Bolano in Chile

Mucho gracias to my witty and wonderful guest posters. I will just briefly interrupt their reign of wisdom to weigh in with another Dispatch From Abroad, this time with my promised post about Roberto Bolano.

I have been reading Bolano in Chile, simply because he´s Chilean and I wanted my reading to match my travels. Everyone has been raving about his latest novel to be translated, The Savage Detectives, which I have yet to read, but I´ve been reading Last Evenings on Earth, his collection of short stories that came out in English in 2006. What´s nice about reading an author in their country of origin is that certain Chilean details leap out at me that wouldn´t be as resonant while reading in California. For instance, in the very first story in the collection, Sensini, which is about a young writer developing a relationship with an older writer as they both try to win literary contests, Bolano writes: ¨When the winners were announced I was working as a vendor in a handcrafts market where absolutely no one was selling anything handcrafted.¨ Ever since I arrived in Chile I´ve been wandering through these markets that target tourists with fat wallets and poor sense of taste, and I immediately understand the cynical, wry tone of the narrator. Also, Bolano drops a number of cities into his stories, like Conception and Los Angeles (the Chilean Los Angeles), and since I just stopped at one and drove through the other, I have a much better sense of the distances characters are traveling and the type of cities they are passing through. There´s something else about reading a book in place where it´s set that´s more intangible: the collective psychology of the natives. There´s still a shadow from Pinochet that hangs over the older residents, a kind of suspicion toward the government and a knee-jerk conformism that hangs around like a habit. It reminds me of when I spent a few months in Spain, because the older residents had lived under the reign of Franco while the younger ones had only known the new government. (Caveat - of course a good portion of the stories are set in Spain and Mexico, not only Chile, but I just imagine those settings.)

As far as the stories themselves, Bolano usually has writers as protagonists: journalists, writing teachers, poets (lots of poets), critics, short story writers. This prevalent use of writers might be considered precious or autobiographical, but by dealing with their doubts and fears and by connecting the lot of writers to a particularly oppressive moment in Chilean history, Bolano manages to sidestep the bromide of a writer writing about writers. And in all of these stories, the political environment is looming in the foreground, sometimes subtly, in the case of Chilean expats in Spain (their mere presence in Spain grounds the story in the historical fact that they had to run for their lives), and sometimes more explicitly, as a character in Sensini searches for his son who has ¨disappeared¨.

The most striking feature of all of the stories is Bolano´s ability to shoehorn a novel into short story length. The novelistic length of some of these stories - which can span five years or twenty - means that the narrative flies by, sometimes dwelling only briefly on a scene, just enough of a description to orient the reader before plunging onward to a summarization of the next few months. Whole lifetime shifts are covered. The use of time is encouraging, if only to prove that the one of the cornerstone pieces of advice frequently given to novice writers - to write in scenes - could really restrict some storytellers. Of course, Bolano often uses scenes. But the ratio of his scenes to the rapid sweep of time is much higher  than many writers. Ultimately, the effect of these grand narratives in tiny spaces is to make the story bloom even larger in the reader´s mind.

To those of you who have already read The Savage Detectives, I´d be interested to know how Bolano treats time in his novels. If he continued at the same pace, he´d be writing a novel with the scope of A Hundred Years of Solitude.

The Collected Stories: Leonard Michaels

Hello. This is Greg Rock. Third and last to arrive in the string of guest bloggers for the John Fox. I am a fiction writer and screenwriter based in Los Angeles.

The last book I bought was The Collected Stories: by Leonard Michaels.

Discovering Leonard Michaels, after he was first recommended by a writing professor, was sort of a revelation. To generalize or compare the man to other post-war Jewish authors is wrong but inevitable. Unfortunately, compared to contemporaries like Philip Roth, most people don’t know him or his work. I will say that like Bernard Malamud, an obvious influence, Michaels wrote mainly short stories and became an acknowledged master of the form. Born in 1933, he was a first-generation Americans born to Immigrant parents, grew up on the Lower East Side, and spoke Yiddish until he entered elementary school.

Fortunately this recently released collection is the first to gather Leonard Michael’s two major short story collections “Going Places” (1969) and “I Would Have Saved Them If I Could” (1975) in one place. Both of these collection earned Michaels high praise from fellow writers (Susan Sontag, Charles Baxter, Larry McMurty) who considered him one of the best prose stylists of his generation. And in my opinion they aren’t wrong. Michaels writes great sentences that function, as great literary art should, like a pistol whip to the face.

A young man, kicked out of his girlfriend’s parents house, wandering naked through New York City street
(City Boy.)

“I flicked the cigarette into the gutter and suddenly I knew why. I didn’t love her. Slender legs. I didn’t.”

Or a middle-aged man getting anonymously jerked off on the subway (Getting Lucky.)

“Fingers squeezed goodbye, replaced him, zipped up, slipped away.”

Or contemplating escape from one’s conservative and fearful family (Murderers.)

"I wanted proximity to darkness, strangeness. Who doesn’t?”

Hard to think of anyone else constructing such incredible prose from such strange moments.

Divisadero: Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje's latest book Divisadero, as the name implies, is a divided book. In the first half, three character's stories are told: two sisters and the hired hand Coop at the ranch. The first chapter, set in rural California, involves these characters in a tragedy, and each of the character's stories is spun out separately in subsequent chapters. But halfway through the book, just at the point when I was deeply invested in the characters' lives, the narrative swivels onto another set of people. These characters are connected thematically to the first crowd, and there are gossamer threads of storyline links, but emotionally, I had to start over, and read the second half as if another novella. It's a testament to Ondaatje's swift ability to suck the reader into rapprochement with his characters that I become quickly involved in the second half, set in France.

I can't help but love Ondaatje's meditations throughout the book on the significance and possibility of biography - or, more simply, the character's past. For all of these characters, their past haunts them, and in some ways determines their choices in the present. With most characters, Ondaatje's shifts time to relate seminal moments in their past, and everyone seems to harbor some hard kernel of pain, lodged inside them since their childhood, that irritates them in the present. This preoccupation with the stages of biography is exemplified by a character we first know as Liebard, who changes his name to Astolphe, and who had changed his name with frequency throughout his life to reflect different periods, as in this excerpt: "He spent the first day imagining moments from his past when he could have been Astolphe, when he might have behaved and participated with more ease and subtlety just for having the epaulette of such a name. It led to the kind of biographical reconsideration a man might make when looking at photographs of a wife or lover in an earlier time, in her teens or twenties, which always brought the wish to have known her then."

I was put off by only one section - the second section, where Coop learns how to cheat at Texas Hold 'Em. The rage of Texas Hold 'Em has worn a bit thin, from too much television time and the bandwagon hop from the film industry, and the topic felt out of place in such a novel where improbable and seductive affairs flowered without even a hint of relationship cliché. Thankfully, the poker playing wasn't a major facet of the novel, only a brief spell in a fragmented work where the characters lives shone with a brief, yet unresolved, luminosity.

Those are some of my initial thoughts - truncated from what I wanted to write, but at least true in their brevity. No matter what my opinion of the book, all you English Patient fans will ratchet up the sales, but I say go ahead. Also, sorry for the slow posting this week - I've been busy with fiction writing and syllabus creation for composition classes. Will try to be more engaging the next two weeks, before my summer jaunt to South America.

Another Atheist Diatribe

Even though The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins was generally panned by critics (not just by Marilynne Robinson, although her dismantling in the pages of Harper's was certainly one of the most thorough), his book sold quite well. Perhaps riding on the swell of attention Dawkin's book received, now we have a book of the same stripe by Christopher Hitchens, with the hard-to-ignore title of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. If you got the stab at Muslim creed in the first part, the subtitle is there to make sure you know that all religions will be taken to task, and yes, "everything" does include a historical run-down of religion's faults and mistakes.

In The Washington Post, Stephen Prothero reviews God is Not Great, and his complaints seem to echo some of the problems critics like Terry Eagleton and Marilynne Robinson had with Richard Dawkins' book: shoddy logic attempting to explain away secular misdeeds, a vast ignorance of religious belief systems, an arrogant rhetorical stance that demeans rather than reasons, and the inability to separate inauthentic and authentic religious belief systems.

Here's an excerpt from Prothero's review:

As should be obvious to any reasonable person -- unlike Hitchens I do not exclude believers from this category -- horrors and good deeds are performed by believers and non-believers alike. But in Hitchens's Manichaean world, religion does little good and secularism hardly any evil. Indeed, Hitchens arrives at the conclusion that the secular murderousness of Stalin's purges wasn't really secular at all, since, as he quotes George Orwell, "a totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy." And in North Korea today, what has gone awry is not communism but Confucianism.

Just from the excerpts that I've read from Hitchen's book, it seems that the reason I avoid books of this type is the same reason I avoid fundamentalist tracts, talk radio and FOX news. It is the style of arguing that offends me, not the content. The style is one of arguing vehemently, but without balance - unmitigated dogma spilling to the page. If I were to categorize it as a speech act, it would fall somewhere between a rant and a diatribe. I find far too much of that type of discourse to want to subject myself to more of it.

Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead

Over at the Litblog Co-op, they're discussing Alan DeNiro's collection of short stories Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead. Later on in the week they'll interview Alan, but for now there is some discussion about the wide range of literary journals where his work has appeared (from One Story to Electric Velocipede), as well as a strange selection from his poetry chapbook The Black Hare. When I talked to Carolyn at Pinky's Paperhaus (who nominated the book) about this collection, she said that her professor and fellow students hated the book. Which is terrible, because the stories are so brave and adventurous. The stories are so risk-taking that you would never want to workshop them. A workshop would probably harvest hundreds of well-meaning bits of advice that dull the edges and sand off the idiosyncrasies. Personally, I like the stories just as weird as they are. Just to put the stories in the context of a genre, they would fit with the short stories of Aimee Bender or Kelly Link, but that's only a ballpark analogy - Alan's actual voice and subject matter are completely different.

The Children of Hurin: J.R.R. Tolkien

So yes, I admit, I'm a sucker for Tolkien (maybe it's the triple initials). I read the trilogy plus the prequel The Hobbit back in fourth grade, though I haven't read all of them every year since then, like my brother has. And Tolkien's most recent posthumous offering, The Children of Hurin, which was compiled and edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien, doesn't offer a story on the level of the Lord of the Rings - it reads much more like The Silmarillion. Vast sweeps of historical time are covered in a paragraph, a style that evokes both Norse mythological story telling and the Old Testament Hebrew narratives. And the book borrows from an amalgam of Greek mythology: Zeus and Hera, as well as Oedipus. The story is compelling, once you get past stilted diction like "worsted" and "fey" and begin to fall under the familiar spell of lembas and Balrogs. And it has such lovely topics like suicide, incest, torture, curses, spells, swords with histories, bravery, and lots of dying - you know, the type of topics you'd expect from mythology.

One notable difference between this story and, say, the Hobbit, is that while writing this tale, Tolkien's conception of dragons was more Eastern - more like a snake with a soft belly - as well as the dragon in this book is able to talk and has considerable psychological power, wielded through his eyes (very Medusa-like). If that doesn't win you over, then surely the illustrations will (which in the book are a mix of black & white and color, with the color ones the only worthy ones).

My Diverse Week in Books

Last week I wasn't very busy posting, but I was busy reading. I read three books - the first a collection of short stories by Alice Munro called Runaway. It's easy to see why she receives such acclaim as a writer - it's because she pens such classic stories, ones that transcend her Canadian place and that seem rather timeless. One theme that drew these short stories together was old culture values clashing with new cultural values. Younger characters spar with older characters over moral conundrums, and, in many stories, thirty pages will contain a vast sweep of time - from the protagonist as an adolescent to a geriatric - and their own values will have aged. I could feel, as I read, that this was from an older writer, one looking back on her life, and telling stories of her friends and contemporaries. Since I spend so much of my time reading younger authors - short stories of my colleagues, up-and-coming hotshots - I recognize that what they often lack is the ability to portray older people convincingly. And yes, I tire of reading too many stories about teenagers and twenty-somethings. So, in a way, it was refreshing to read a work like this, yet at the same time (and paradoxically, I know), I relate more to the sex-suffused stories of Mary Gaitskill or to the sophisticated urban tales of Deborah Eisenberg.

The second book I read was by an up-and-comer: Alex Mindt. Male of the Species is his first collection of short stories, and a good balance after Munro: she primarily dealt with women, he with men, specifically fathers. The fiction that leads off this collection, "Sabor a Mi", won a 2006 Pushcart Prize, and several others were published in Missouri Review. Mindt's best talent is in channeling the voice of the immigrant - whether they be Mexican or Chinese. In narration as well as dialogue, he manages to capture the rhythms of speech, the broken phrases, the difficult of speaking in a language not your own. The concepts of many of the stories were intriguing as well - the young black performance artist who burns a cross on his front lawn, and the high school teacher who continues to fail the star running back despite death threats on his family. What I found frustrating was that his portrayal of female voices was not as spot-on - I couldn't tell they were female, and they didn't seem to be distinguishable from his male voices. But all in all, a good debut.

The last book I read this week I never would have read if one of my book club members hadn't chosen it. Arthur Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon in 1940, and it's the story of a Russian man who has been imprisoned by the new-guard communists. I read it in one sitting, late at night, even though I should have gone to bed about halfway through, but I couldn't stop because I love stories inside closed parameters, whether it be a floating hospital or a sanatorium or a prison (don't psychoanalyze me on this one). It's painful to read of the mechanized, emotionless obedience of the new-guard communists as they interrogate the old-guard protagonist, but all the psychological stratagems and subterfuge during the series of interrogations reveals much about Stalin-era Russia.   

Tooth and Claw

T.C. Boyle is a remarkably entertaining writer, and I don't mean that pjoratively at all - no nasty connotations like only entertaining, or entertaining to the detriment of style or plot. No, he just writes stories that are word/plot candy, and I stay up late gorging myself on them. Last night I was reading Tooth and Claw, his latest collection of short fiction (although the man is so prolific, he probably has two more books coming out of the chute - I don't know how he puts out a book every single year, and teaches, and spends time with his family). Once I list a couple of the short stories summaries, you'll realize two things: that Boyle writes about everywhere, everyone, and everything - he is, in essence, unlimited in his short story scope - and that the premises are very high concept - you could nearly sell a screenplay off one of them.

-An ardent sunscreen proponent who also wants to put dark glasses on all humans and animals
-A woman who "becomes" a dog in order to study them - Interspersed with the story of two wolf children
-A man wins an African lynx in a Bar game, tries to keep it in his apartment
-Radio announcer breaks the world record for the most days without sleep

Boyle's often praised for his short story abilities, and sometimes this praise includes the caveat that he's more of a short story writer than a novelist, which is misleading. He's quite a good novelist - look at Drop City or the Tortilla Curtain - but sometimes a novel misfires - I found the pacing far too slow in The Inner Circle. That said, he rarely writes a short story that is unlikeable. Or rather, at least with a short story, you don't have to stay with it very long, so if it's not your favorite topic things won't drag. His talent with short stories is to take a interesting premise and write a tight, fast-moving narrative to propel it along. That's what makes his stories entertaining (if you want a heavy dose of them, buy his 704 page collected work: T.C. Boyle Stories).

To end this post, I'd like to weigh in on the MFA discussions that crop up perenially by mentioning that I studied under Boyle. He teaches ungraduate and graduate writing workshops at USC, and the way that he conducts the class helps avoid some of the pitfalls of workshops. Often in posts I find people complaining about fellow workshoppers - how a workshop takes all the energy out of a story - and they're right (Here's my rule - never listen to 80% of the people reading your story. Determining who comprises the 20% is the hard part). But writers don't complain often about professors, who set the tone for the critique. A misleading professor gives you advice on their version of the story, or how to change the story to reflect their narrative sensibilities, while a good one works with the premise you've created. Good ole Coraghessan (the C. in T.C.) isn't invasive, and he doesn't try to shape your story into the one he would like to tell. He's remarkable hands-off, often deferring judgment to the class, but when he does offer advice, at least in my experience, he's trying to smooth out the arc of the piece presented, not trying to radically alter it.

So, if you find a professor who works with your stories and practice the 80% rule, your work shouldn't take on "workshopped" characteristics.

The Dead Fish Museum

In an era marked by the short story's loss of cultural heft, Charles D'Abrosio's collection of stories makes that loss seem tragic.

The name of this short story collection by Charles D'Abrosio is taken from the title story, in which an immigrant wife can't pronounce the word refrigerator, so she calls it the dead fish museum. Clever and a good hook (pun intended), but more than that, the theme of fish extends over the whole book. Characters often fish, usually for salmon, and the catch or non-catch determines the course of the story. Not only are fish a theme, but on the cover, each word is set on a typewriter key (referencing a story starring a typewriter mechanic) and the word "Dead" in the title is italicized, which serves as a second theme: the lifeless psychology of the protagonists.

D'Abrosio writes of orphans and Catholics, and sometimes orphaned Catholics. He covers the down-and-out painter who's moonlighting on set design for a porn shoot, an insurance seller at a family reunion whose wife is cheating on him, the couple doing a charity scam in corn country. Although there's occasionally a snapshot of a hopeful moment, the narrative is shorn of all sentimentality. D'Abrosio keeps it raw, rarely letting his characters glimpse any form of redemption, and many of the characters seem so empty they probably wouldn't accept change even in light of their grim circumstances.

These short stories slant toward the long side - not Deborah Eisenberg long, but lengthy - and six of the eight originally appeared in The New Yorker. Each one ends at an unexpected spot. Not that the endings don't make sense in hindsight and resonate emotionally, just that before the last page is turned it's impossible to predict the end of the text. They don't climax and slide into the dénouement as much as seize a previous element in the story and twist it to provide closure. For instance, and while giving away as little as possible, a gun mentioned in the opening of one story disappears at the end. A family torn by arguments and betrayals is captured in a single moment of unification. And deep in the wilderness on a camping trip, a trio of characters shouts across the lake, the reoccurring echo representing the millions of others in existential crises much like their own.

Seeing is Blindness: Jose Saramago

The longtime readers of this blog know that I like the Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, and I especially like his novel Blindness. In the book, an epidemic of blindness sweeps the nation, and a band of travelers have to survive under quarantine. However, the sequel, Seeing, published in English in 2006, garnered rather unfavorable reviews, so I didn't buy it until recently. I bought it and read it because I had recently visited several countries with oppressive governments and listened to the type of grumbling that leads to uprisings. I thought that since Seeing dealt explicitly with governmental oppression, perhaps it would resonate more with me after my travels. It didn't.

The premise of Seeing is that all the people in an unnamed country go to the polls and leave the ballots blank. This is, in essence, a rejection of government itself, and the POV hovers on all the flummoxed ministers of the state. At least, the POV stays there for the first few chapters until it shifts to the leader of the town council, and then shifts to a police superintendent. Occasionally the POV flits off to anther character momentarily, and while this POV shifting is not an activity that I would universally condemn, it's one that certainly (in this case) lessens the emotional punch because I can't track with a single character and identify with them.

What makes this sequel crumple under scrutiny is the afflictions that plague most sequels. It depends too much on characters created in the original. And not only depends on them, but uses them without further character development, uses them as props to aid the story. The second half of the novel brings back the whole cast of Blindness, but only as the objects of an investigation - they don't really get to do anything.

Also, the themes smoothly developed in Blindness (oppression by the government, inhumanity of human nature, the restructuring of society) are hammered in Seeing. Saramago tries too hard to make you get his point, pounding away with dialogue and sharp observations by the collective narrator. The history of blindness, mentioned as happening four years ago in Seeing, was left for the reader to extrapolate meaning from in the original, but here in the sequel, there are multiple passages that explicitly link the plague of blindness with the plague of blank ballots. As if that wasn't enough, he also introduces the meta-fictional tool of talking directly to the reader, to show that telling the story alone isn't good enough to communicate his ideas (not that I have anything against metafiction, but I am disconcerted by essays inside stories).

There's a fine line between telling a moving fable that communicates an idea (a "novel of ideas") and offering a political tract (a "thesis novel"). With this sequel, Saramago's gone from the former to the latter. Another European writer has stepped on both sides of this divide: Italo Calvino. I love the mysterious, haunting qualities of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, which resists the impulse to lecture or admonish, but find that his political short stories, such as the Numbers in the Dark collection, might as well be written in the form of a manifesto. It's as though both of these writers occasionally forget their professions as writers and step into an alternative career path as indoctrinators. They're much more entertaining when they simply remember to tell their stories.

As far as new stories, Saramago published the novel As Intermitencias da Morte in 2005. The first line: “The next day no one died.” No word yet on the English title or publication date, but judging from the rate of Blindness and Seeing, it should come out late 2007 or early 2008. This blurb from adnkronos tells a bit more:

Portuguese writer Jose' Saramago, Nobel prize winner for literature in 1998, will contemporarily launch his new novel in six European and South American nations in the next month of October. The first edition of the book, entitled in Portuguese ''As intermitencias da morte'' [The Intermittence of Death], will be published in Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Portugal and Italy (in this case translated by Einaudi). This is the first time that a work by Saramago appears simultaneously: previous works have appeared in Portuguese with translations starting months later.

William T. Vollmann and the Principles of Review

I did not appreciate William T. Vollmann’s review of Anthony Swofford's Exit A in the New York Times Book Review yesterday. It's not that I believe he was wrong about the strengths of Swofford's first book, Jarhead, or even that he was wrong about the weaknesses of Swofford's first novel Exit A. It's because I found the tone of the review to be excessively harsh for a first novel. In my Manual of Book Reviewing Principles (yes, I just made that up), I think it's necessary to reserve different level of harshness for authors in various stages of their careers. For a literary great, if a no-holds-barred takedown is necessary, then so be it. The same goes for a mid-career author, perhaps with employing a pinch more carefulness. But a first time novelist (Jarhead was nonfiction) should be handled with kid gloves. Of course there are flaws in the novel, and Vollmann does the reader a service by pointing out how serious they are, but few first novelists come out of the gate at a sprint (If they do, they are often feted for it). More often, it does take a few novels, as Vollmann points out at the end of the article, to achieve a measure of literary competence, much less greatness.

Now I don't mean that a review of Swofford should be saccharine or cloyingly nice or even avoid saying harsh things. I appreciate a bad review because it tells me not to buy the book (as well as performing the pedagogical task of judging and analyzing types of literary flaws). And since Vollmann obviously didn't like Exit A, I don't mean that he should write empty praises. But his review, through and through, is ruthlessly demeaning (other than the compliments he pays to Jarhead). It's a scarring, eviscerating, decapitation. I think there is some way to express a strong dislike for a novel without a employing such a harsh tone. Ultimately, it's not the content of his complaints that bothers me as much as the dismissive tone in which it is conveyed.

I do appreciate the match-up: Well-established author reviewing beginning author. What I appreciate less is the obverse: beginning author reviewing established author. But both of these unequal match-ups can have their flaws. For the beginning author who is reviewing an established author, the danger is that the beginner critiques the wrong things, misses the point. For the well-established author reviewing the beginning author, the danger is that the review comes from such a high place (with a retrousse nose) that the review feels dismissive.

Vollmann says he "hate[s] to write reviews like this." I believe him. I believe that he was compelled by the poor execution of the prose and the flat characters to deliver a verdict that characterizes the novel as poor quality. But the way and extent to which he did it made first time novelists everywhere cringe over their computers.

Wendell Berry's New Book

The irony of writing about Wendell Berry on a computer, especially for a blog, doesn't escape me. Since Berry refuses to own a computer, and has widely (and trenchantly) written about the negative repercussions of technology, there is almost a note of friction simply by covering him in such a technological medium. Nonetheless, it's time to talk about him because he just released a new title, Andy Catlett: Early Travels, his sixth novel set in Port Williams.

I've read little of Berry's fiction, but a lot of his essays, and I have to say I enjoyed his essays more. Since I was introduced to him by way of his essays, it was interesting to read his fiction later and see his ideas of the world embodied in concrete stories. As far as his essays, I've spent a few years teaching various essays of his, especially Feminism, the Body, and the Machine, and students either see him as visionary or moronic, both reactions that mean he's imprinted himself on them.

Berry has been claimed, to some degree, by the Christian community as a writer of their own, because of his familiarity with Christian culture and knowledge of the Bible, but I think he stands a bit outside the Christian camp. What I mean is that he utters a rather prophetic message, or at least the best we can get in these days. As a prophet, he doesn't fit into neat societal grooves. A prophet is always a loner. Despite his religious convictions, or rather because of them, he's had no problem vilifying the Christian community for their complacence in permitting and even condoning environmental degradation. On that note, the richness and complexity of his view of the world is refreshing, albeit uncomfortably challenging. We all need to be challenged though, as iron sharpens iron. Berry's done that for me.

If you're new to Wendell Berry, I would suggest starting with this collection of his essays: The Art of the Commonplace

There aren't many reviews online that I've found of Andy Catlett (readers - any suggestions?) but here's a link to a brief synopsis.

Haruki Murakami: Hear the Wind Sing

One of my Loyal Readers, knowing of my penchant for all things Murakami, was able to procure an English copy of Hear the Wind Sing from a drugstore in Tokyo. The novella is perfectly pocket-sized, at four by six inches, and extremely slim, with 127 pages - a format I would like to see more in the States as a way to encourage portable reading. Hear the Wind Sing, along with Pinball 1973, are two early Murakami novels that aren't available in English, so I consider myself lucky to have a copy of one of them (and if anyone wants to send me Pinball 1973, I will reciprocate with all the publicity love I can muster).

When given the novella, I was looking forward to seeing what Murakami themes were present at a nascent stage of his writing career. Since so many of his other novels have shared themes (classical music, cats, coincidence that is actually fate), I wondered if many of these were already formed when he was just beginning to publish, or whether he had progressively developed them as he'd grown as a writer.

One aspect of Murakami that has certainly not changed over the years - although he certainly has refined it - is his tendency to use animals in his stories. The animal that appears most frequently is a cat - in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a search for a missing cat launches the protagonist on a neighborhood odyssey, while in Kafka on the Shore, a character is cat-telepathic. That's not to say that other animals don't drop into the story, just that a single animal often plays a pivotal role in the narrative and it's often a cat. Even his book titles reflect the preoccupation with animals, with mentions of birds, sheep, and elephants.

When Murakami wrote Hear the Wind Sing, it seemed he had latched onto the notion that animals were key for his fiction, because he gave us a virtual menagerie, but hadn't quite decided that for narrative reasons it might be better to give a single animal a key and recurrent role. So this story moves through someone writing about elephants, a car crashing near a monkey cage, lyrics about giraffes, a story of a man-eating leopard, a psychologist's parable about a rabbit and a billy goat, a cow painted on a car hood, a character named The Rat, and the biologist protagonist who dissects cats. Those are just the main references, and all in 127 very small pages.

There are also a number of similarities with Murakami's later work that don't need excessive explanation: The protagonist is identical to most of Murakami's later protagonists - male, rather isolated, laconic, operating on cruise control, and jobless. The girl that becomes the protagonist's girlfriend has a twin - a familiar motif to the doppelganger-happy Murakami. There is even a couple-page bit on Martian wells on that transport you through time, which will be familiar to readers of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles