The Daily Sabbatical

You heard it here first: More Than It Hurts You will be nominated for the National Book Award this year.  It reminds me of no book more than The Corrections, which despite the Franzen backlash is a masterpiece.   Strauss might not have attained the perfect touch Franzen achieved in that novel, but More Than It Hurts You shares its general profile and spirit, while also being an unpredictable page turner.

The story centers around a possible case of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.  If you aren’t a Law and Order: SVU addict, then  you might not know that MSbP is a rare disorder in which a parent, usually a mother, intentionally induces an illness in her child.  Possible motivations differ–the mother might enjoy the attention she receives in a crisis, she might want to galvanize the family around the child’s sickness, or her motivations might not be evident at all.  In Strauss’ novel, the mother in question is Dori Goldin, who is accused of harming her son Zack.  Her accuser, Darlene Stokes, is a young, successful black pediatrician with a child of her own.  The novel is essentially a story of these two families, and the way their very different pasts play into their present turbulent conflict.

Dori and Josh Goldin are to all appearances an alpha couple, the face of a perfect family.  Dori is an ex-phlebotomist become full time mother, and Josh is an ad saleman who works his charm like a corporate Jedi.  Cracks only appear in the facade when their infant Zack “codes” when in the emergency room–for no obvious reason.  In comes Darleen Stokes who finds Dori’s behavior suspicious and Zack’s near fatality inexplicable.  Stokes is a second generation single mother who has, through the determination of her mother and her own intelligence and abition, become the head of pediatrics at a prominant hospital.  Her accusation against the Goldins leads Josh to employ a sharp, if not particularly scrupulous, lawyer…and so it begins: a legal battle, a media firestorm, and a personal trial for all involved.

If you’re thinking this won’t be a stress-free read, you’re right.  No one in the story is perfect, and in general their imperfections are subtle enough that we can relate to them.  And it’s no fun imagining oneself being swept up into the circus of slants and spins that surrounds these characters.  Nevertheless, the novel isn’t burdensome to read.  It pulls more like a thriller than a social novel, and it sparks thought as it’s doing so.  That’s a tough trick.

Strauss is not quite on the echelon of a Roth, but that this even merits saying is a compliment to his ability.  He still has a few pecadillos that can become annoying.  Clever little metaphors are a little too abundant, and there are elements of the plot–like Stokes’ father, the ex-con–that don’t seem to fully pull their weight.  Nevertheless, I’ll probably read everything this guy has written–Chang and Eng, and The Real McCoy–and I will look forward to watch his trajectory.  I predict it’s upward.

Graham Greene was never a show off.  He was not the sort of writer that shot off flares with every sentence or attempted to change the way language worked.  He is best known, in fact, as a writer of suspenseful, twisting tales of intrigue with a sprinkling of wry humour and subtle irony.  He was, however, a master, a complete, undeniable master, and for proof look no further than The Power and the Glory.

Published in 1940, The Power was the pinnacle of the novels most influenced by his Catholicism, a creed he adopted in his early twenties.  The novel follows a priest moving through the shadows in Tabasco in the 30s when the redshirts were in power.  Catholicism and religion in general is being stamped out, and most other priests have either fled, broken their vows, or died at the firing line.  Our unnamed protagonist is not a glorified picture of piety, however.  He is a “whiskey priest,” dualing with the bottle and haunted by his bastard child, the fruit of his misdeeds.  He is a torn man, convinced of his unworthiness but dedicated to his mission which is itself a cloudy affair.  His duty is to continue his flight, but his inclination is to lay down and die.

Despite the religious themes driving the novel, Greene is never heavy handed.  The priest’s plight stems from his belief in a power that transcends the world, but his existence is humblingly human and his anguish is undeniably mortal.  The Power and the Glory could have been penned as easily by a non-believer.  It feels, in fact, like a Cormac McCarthy novel perhaps spliced with something by Mario Vargos Llosa.

Most importantly, the writing here is superb:

The squad of police made their way back to the station.  They walked raggedly with rifles slung anyhow: ends of cotton where buttons should have been: a puttee slipping down over the ankle: small men with black secret Indian eyes.  The little plaza on the hill-top was lighted with globes strung together in threes and joined by trailing overhead wires.  The Treasury, the Presidencia, a dentist’s, the prison–a low white colonaded building which dated back three hundred years–and then the steep street down past the back wall of a ruined church: whichever way you went you came ultimately wo water and to river.  Pink classical facades peeled off and showed the mud beneath, and the mud slowly reverted to mud.  Round the plaza the evening went on–women in one direction, men in the other; young me in red shirts milled boisterously round the gaseosa stalls.

So starts chapter two.  Great rhythm–the repetition of mud alone makes the paragraph.  If you haven’t read Greene, this would be one to put on your list.

It’s both exciting and depressing to read an excellent debut novel by some twenty-one year old punk.  It is outright distressing, though, that someone so young should demonstrate such an insider’s acquaintance with the seamy world the book depicts.

On the cover of my edition, Irvine Welsh compares the book to Less than Zero, and that’s apt–perhaps if you splice it with Welsh’s own Trainspotting and the controversial movie Kids.  The novel is written from the perspective of a handful of kids in low-middle class Britain where the same old decisions and insecurities that have always plagued adolescence have to occur in a violent and drug infused sprawl.  Our hero is somewhat pathetic obsessive/compulsive Adam, who has an irresistable fancy–stoked at a distance–for the pill-popping hottie, Eve.  His attraction to Eve teases him out of his abusive home and into her chaotic world for which he is singularly unprepared.  Though she fakes it well, Eve, of course–being only fifteen–isn’t ready for it either.  In fact, if there is an underlying theme of the book, it might be that no one–including the snake Gaz–is ready for this garden.  (Oh yeah:  the “apples” are drugs.  Just to complete the symbolism.  In actuality, this symbolism is not overplayed.  In fact, densely, it was a while before I got it.)

Though Apples is a blast to read–not least because of Milward’s ability to drop into slang driven voices and disordered adolescent minds–it is pretty painful.  You’ve got overdoses, broken faces, rapes and infanticides, and the first-person narrative doesn’t allow any distance from any of it.  The narrative approach also doesn’t let the reader hate any of the characters–except perhaps the snake.  You can regret their decisions or lament their innocence, you can cringe at the way their naivete permits a flood of heartbreak and pain, but their sins are understandable for all that.  Despite its rough edges, the book brims with heart.

We’ll be hearing a lot more for Richard Milward, assuming he doesn’t live anything like the life of his characters.  He’s convinced me that a 21 year old can write a splendid novel with wisdom and perspective, and that’s no small feat.

I would feel remiss if I went without mentioning the passing of writer David Foster Wallace who ended his own life one week ago today.  When I was an undergrad at Iowa, my friends and I treasured his collection Girl with Curious Hair, and when Infinite Jest came out, we were the first ones lined up at Prairie Lights to claim our copies.  (I recall, actually, taking back my copy because I was unhappy with the glue job on the binding.  I wanted it to be that perfect.)  In recent years, I admit to have fallen off the bandwagon, but a good friend of mine has written a reminiscence for the Observer UK that has brought it all back to me.  (Look for Joshua Ferris’ piece in the next day or so.) 
We saw in DFW a DeLillo for our generation.  He was the first guy anywhere close to our age who began to point in a new direction.  I can’t say for sure, but my guess is that without him, we would have no Dave Eggers, no McSweeney’s , and for all its differences from the DFW style we might not have The Corrections.  For all his genius, though, it’s my opinion that Wallace never really reached the true zenith of his talent–not because of his lack of accomplishment, but because his every line was so roaring with energy and potential that expectations were impossibly high.  One wonders whether or not Wallace felt the same.
I recall something DFW said to Josh in 96.  He said he felt like everyone he knew was sad–that sadness seemed to be a sort of earmark of his generation.  (My own words.)  The odd thing was, he didn’t seem sad.  He was pleasant, funny, and despite some awkwardness he seemed pretty comfortable in his own skin.  (I get most of this from his reading in IC–my own contact amounted to little more than asking him to sign my books.)  His prose was electric–how could he be sad?  But really, it is impossible to read his work now without seeing it. 
We’ve really lost someone great.  My heart goes out to his family, because they have obviously lost the most.  But all of us have lost something as well, perhaps more than we’ll ever know.

I bought this book on the strength of the dustjacket blurbs.  Thom Jones, Dan Chaon, Julie Orringer, Kevin Brockmeier, Adam Johnson and Peter Orner all write as if this is the debut novel we’ve all been waiting for.  It also promised to be a genre bender of the sort that has increasingly gained in popularity (in no small part, I think, due to the encouragement of writers like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem.)  A young cop with rich brat high-school friends patrols the cemetery garrison of San Francisco and finds himself waging a war against a band of dead criminals.  Ok, cool enough.  Brett Easton Ellis meets Raymond Chandler meets Stephen King.  Sounds great if author Doug Dorst can pull it off and all blurbs point to the fact that he does.

He doesn’t.  It’s not that Dorst is a poor writer.  He’s clearly talented, and he has the makings of some very good work here.  As it stands, however, the book seems like a patchwork of false starts and unfulfilled promises.  There are simply too many narrative strands here that don’t get fully woven into the tale and that set expectations that don’t get met.  The ghost story remains temptingly in the background, and never really gets, um, fleshed out.  Our hero, Mike Mercer, has problems in his relationships to just about everyone, and while this is really the central theme of the novel, there’s little sense that he is discovering anything interesting about himself or others in the process.  We know he is estranged from his father, for example, and the old man appears to be in the neighborhood, or so we have it from the testimony of Mercer’s friends, but nothing happens.  It completely drops, only to be alluded to in the unsatisfying wrap-up as one of many things which will be resolved by the good will and bonhomie that constitutes the novel’s ending.

Writing a genre crosser is dicey, because genre’s bring along expectations.  In crime novels, we want to get to the crime, and it can feel distracting if we are burdened with too much romance, and in horror stories (which this doesn’t pretend to be, really) we want the creeps, so character development can actually get in the way.  It’s like porn with a plot: yes, yes, we know there is a mystery on the estate, but let’s get back to the butler and the chambermaid!  Genre-blending can be done, but it’s damned difficult and Alive in Necropolis doesn’t hit it.

So, why all these blurbs?  After several pages I realized: I know Chaon and Jones have Iowa Writers’ Workshop ties.  What about Dorst?  Yep: from the workshop.  The same with Orringer, Brockmeier, and Peter Orner. So, five out of six of the book’s blurbs are from the workshop at Iowa!  C’mon, guys!  So, a word to the wise: when reading book blurbs, keep an eye out for home cooking.

It’s a dicey thing to criticize a Nobel Prize winner, but I find myself even more loath to take a position contrary to that of Harold Bloom.  Nevertheless, here I go:  Portuguese Laureate Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness is a flawed work that has its gripping moments and images but that nevertheless falls far short of greatness.

Blindness tells the story of a city/country/world whose population is stricken with a contagious form of blindness.  The reader follows the first handful of people who lose their sight as they are quarantined and then as the basic structure of society is decimated by the disorder.  The saving grace for this group, known only by descriptions since names are said to be of no use to the blind (?), is the wife of an opthamologist who mysteriously remains unafflicted.  Her sight is a blessing to the blind, but a curse to her as she essentially becomes the last caretaker in the world.  She is also a blessing to the reader, for it is only really through her that we can legitimately gain a view into the ruin that the world has become.  And the world has become quite a mess.  Electricity, plumbing, and anything else that depends upon human monitoring and engineering soon sputters out, leaving a misery of sanitation disasters, food shortages, and illnesses.  Our initial victims only survive by hanging together and by relying on the vision of the opthamologist’s wife.

This is rich material, and might be rewarding for those who delight in allegories.  Unfortunately, I think allegories are best confined to short stories or novellas.  There’s a reason why The Metamorphosis is Kafka’s most read work:  it is simply better than any of his novels.  Can anyone imagine how disasterous it would have been had Kafka decided to expand that classic story until it ate up several hundred pages?

Despite the fact that Blindness reads as, and is often taken as, an allegory, I’ll be damned if I can say what it is an allegory for.  The last few sentences provide a hint: “Why did we become blind, I don’t know, perhaps one day we’ll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes I do, I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.”  Get that?  So, the blindness in the novel is a metaphor for…our unwillingness to really observe the situation around us?  Ok, so how does the rabid contagion fit into that?  Why did people go blind when they did, and why did they lose their blindness when they did?  And what was it about the wife that she didn’t go blind?  Perhaps I am being dense, but I see no good answers to these questions.

Perhaps, then, it is not an allegory.  Perhaps we should take Blindness on its face, as a tale of an optico-apocalypse.  (Say that ten times fast.)  Fine, but then there are some implausibilities that need explaining.  The government’s harsh reaction seems dubious, as does their unwillingness to provide crucial medical supplies to the inmates.  Also implausible is the apathy of so many of the quarantined people in the face of oppression by their less honorable fellow inmates.  I also found myself very doubtful that Saramago has captured the mentality of the suddenly blind.  At one point, for example, the doctor asks a group of people to raise their hands in a vote–and he quickly realizes what a silly idea that is.  I seriously doubt this sort of forgetfulness would afflict someone who was really blind.  (And this is not the only instance of this sort of thing in the novel.)  No one uses sticks, canes, or anything of the sort, allegedly because it doesn’t make sense given the chaos surrounding them.  Like many explanations offered within the text for the novel’s pecadillos, this one makes no sense.

Then there is the writing style.  No names, rather arbitrary use of punctuation, and a narrator that is impossible to locate.  My first thought was that the lack of names and punctuation was meant to engender in the reader the same sense of disorientation that the blind might feel.  While that’s still my best guess, I’m disheartened to learn that Saramago uses these devices in most of his novels, which makes one doubt that it is a content specific device.  Besides, these devices disorient in precisely the way blind people are not disoriented.  The blind have the sounds of voices, and one imagines names and the like are all the more important.  (Visual descriptions, however, such as “the woman with dark glasses” are useless.)   The narrator is meanwhile all over the map, from all perspectives and none, which might sound clever but in fact strikes one as a result of a lack of writerly discipline.  (This sort of narration is doable, but it cannot be done randomly, which is the way it appears here.)

Finally, the characters and the narrator have a sporadic penchant for stale cliches and unprofound abstractions, all presented as poignant philosophy.  I buy neither the reality of the business–that normal people would speak as they do–nor the conceit that these occasional proclamations or questions are the least bit profound.

Now that I’ve ripped on the old man, let me say that I don’t think the book is a complete failure.  It is not a bad book.  It does a splendid job of showing how frightening such a world would be, and how dependent we all are on something so fragile that we take for granted.  Saramago does think of some dire consequences of mass blindness that would not come to a pedestrian mind, and he offers a plethora of images (ironically) that will stick with the reader long after the novel ends.  It combines many of the powerful elements of both Camus’ The Plague and McCarthy’s The Road, and for that reason alone it is worthy of praise.  In the end, though, I don’t think it touches the hem of either one of those great and, not incidentally, more concise novels.

That’s holding Saramago to a high standard, though.

But he did win the Nobel Prize.

If you read many book reviews or book blogs, you’ve no doubt been exposed to the hype surrounding Joseph O’Neil’s Booker-listed novel. If it’s not the most positively reviewed book of the year, it has to be close. Sadly, I cannot disagree with the consensus. Netherland may not win the Booker—indeed, my vote still goes to Sebastian Barry—but it will put O’Neil firmly among the list of top young writers.

Though O’Neil is a strange breed of European mutt—born in Ireland, raised in Holland, schooled in England—he has generated one of the best books about New York City that I have read in recent years. The story is narrated by Hans van den Broek, a Hollander who is living in Manhattan after establishing a career and a young family in England. To all appearances, van den Broek takes the stage to tell us about the mysterious death of Chuck Ramkissoon, an energetic and charismatic man hailing from Trinidad-Tobago. This somewhat traditional plot conceit, a sort of whodunit, provides a false backbone for the novel, however, and anyone expecting a story in the classic fashion will be disappointed.

The brilliance of Netherland comes in the way the narration departs from the traditional linear styles. Perhaps because he is adrift in a sort of depression caused by the one, two punch of September 11^th and his estrangement from his wife and son, Van den Broek is a very distractible narrator. He seems unable to keep his attention from being swept into the various eddies of his mind, shifting it across times and situations. The effect is not jarring—the segues are always smooth—but it could frustrate a reader determined to reach point G from point F without making stops at B, H, X, and A along the way. Such frustration would be unfortunate, however, since it is these stops that explode the novel into a multidimensionality that could not otherwise be attained. We get an intimate sense of Hans’ distress over his marriage, his sense of homelessness, the state of NYC in the years following the fall of the towers, and the way a game like cricket can provide the stitching that holds a life together when all else gives way.

Though van den Broek has a wandering mind, he has moments of clarity about his situation that are all the more striking for their contrast with his Hamlet-like paralysis.

…if I was indeed embracing an American lot, then I was doing so unprogrammatically, even unknowingly. Perhaps the relevant truth—and it’s one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I’m sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me—is that we find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you’re paying attention you’ll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.

These moments of insight are so crystalline, that one wonders, at moments, how someone so perspicacious can seem so rudderless. That, though, is the paradox of an intelligent person’s depression.

If I still side with The Secret Scripture over Netherland for the Booker, it is only because the former is such a perfectly bound package of a novel that it cannot be overlooked. But perhaps in so favoring it, I am missing Netherland’s greatest accomplishment: that its rough edges are precisely what are appropriate for the psyche of its narrator.

Man, this novel must be H-O-T.

Thanks to Boing Boing for this one.

John Banville, whose Booker Prize winning novel The Sea had critics speaking of an Irish Nabokov, has started churning out noirish mysteries under the name of Benjamin Black. Christine Falls is his first foray into genre fiction, and its success has been undeniable: it has probably gathered him more readers than all of his more literary books combined. It is far from his best book, however, and I suspect his pen name reminds us that it is not to be judged in the same class. The quality of its language is, to be sure, several orders above that of most genre fiction, and its characters are, for the most part, quite compelling. Nevertheless, the true literary writer’s coyness and unwillingness to cater to the reader shows in a lack of snap and suspense that ultimately keeps Christine Falls from comparing to the best of the genre.
The plot starts rolling when Quirke, a pathologist with a fondness for the bottle, discovers that the records of a young woman’s death have been falsified and that someone has apparently absconded with her newborn child. His curiousity leads him to discover that the circumstances of her death were far from regular, and that his own adopted family might be deeply involved. In the end, Quirke feels his way through the tangles of two mysteries–the one of the dead girl and her child, and the other the complicated thicket of secrets that constitutes his own family life.
Quirke is a satisfying protagonist who will no doubt serve Banville/Black well in the future. (He has already made a reappearance in Black’s The Silver Swan, and more will surely come.) If the plot is ultimately a little weak (and less than mysterious–I felt the most interesting parts of the solution were guessable at a very early stage), the characters are not. My suspicion is that Banville will only get better at this game, and that now that the foundations are laid we can start getting to work with some real mysteries. I’ll keep reading, but I’ll also keep preferring Banville to Black.

Thanks to the panicky reactions of University of Texas professor Denise Spellberg, outrage about a novel depicting the life of Mohammed’s child bride Aisha has led Random House to nix its publication. I’m so pleased to see that Texas can now claim to be home to idiotic religious zealots of more than one stripe.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal today, Spellberg was asked to read the book for a possible endorsement. But:

But Ms. Spellberg wasn’t a fan of Ms. Jones’s book. On
April 30, Shahed Amanullah, a guest lecturer in Ms. Spellberg’s classes
and the editor of a popular Muslim Web site, got a frantic call from
her. “She was upset,” Mr. Amanullah recalls. He says Ms. Spellberg told
him the novel “made fun of Muslims and their history,” and asked him to
warn Muslims.

In an interview, Ms. Spellberg told me the novel is a
“very ugly, stupid piece of work.” The novel, for example, includes a
scene on the night when Muhammad consummated his marriage with Aisha:
“the pain of consummation soon melted away. Muhammad was so gentle. I
hardly felt the scorpion’s sting. To be in his arms, skin to skin, was
the bliss I had longed for all my life.” Says Ms. Spellberg: “I walked
through a metal detector to see ‘Last Temptation of Christ,’” the
controversial 1980s film adaptation of a novel that depicted a
relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. “I don’t have a problem
with historical fiction. I do have a problem with the deliberate
misinterpretation of history. You can’t play with a sacred history and
turn it into soft core pornography.”

This is absurd. It is a little hard to tell whether the quoted section of the novel was cited by Spellberg as one of the offensive parts or not, but it hardly matters. This is an example of an academic betraying the very intellectual freedoms the academy stands for. I’m sickened.