New Year Review

What I Read in 2009

Last year I made a facebook note listing the books I read in 2008 so I figured with about twelve hours to the new year this was a good time for me to reflect on what I read in the last year. I did not read nearly as many books as I did last year or the year before, but it was still a rewarding year for literature.

What follows is a list, in chronological order, of books I finished reading during 2009. There are many titles that are left in progress or were abandoned or half-read. For the sake concision, I have only included McSweeney's (lengthy) quarterly concern and not other literary journals (such as Zoetrope) that I read during the year.

My six favorite books I read this past year are in bold and include a brief description of the book. Other notable titles have asterisks and there are some brief notes about genre for some of the entries.

01. It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken by Seth (a really beautiful graphic novel)*
02. Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon (non-fiction Christmas present)*
03. Shakespeare Wrote for Money by Nick Hornby (columns about what Hornby reads each month compiled from The Believer)*
04. The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God and Other Stories by Etgar Keret (trippy short stories)
05. The Best American Short Stories 2008 by Salman Rushdie
06. Skellig by David Almond (YA novel Hronby wrote about in his book [it's about an angel])*
07. Nothing Right by Antonya Nelson (short stories)
08. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon (great novel)*
09. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

NfU is a thrilling tale of anger with society. The narrator is a disturbed, but charming, man who despises the pretensions of the upper class around him and lashes out at the world in what is written as his ranting document.

10. McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Issue 30 (the only McSweeney's I finished cover to cover this year)
11. Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

MfB is a collection of beautifully crafted stories pondering the funnier and eerier possibilities of the human experience through science fiction and horror genre-writing. Written in gentle, lovel prose about dark, twisted subjects, the collection is a compelling argument for the ability of genre writing to probe the mysteries of existence in the same way as...

12. City of Glass by Paul Auster

CoG is a haunting exploration of the inner mechanics of the human mind and also a eflection on the purpose of literature. It has been described as a "metaphysical detective novel" but this descriptor by no means adequately explains what a trenchant, harrowing experience it is to read, especially with the other two entries in this so-called "New York Trilogy"

13. Ghosts by Paul Auster (part two of a trilogy, weakest entry)
14. The Locked Room by Paul Auster (part three, brilliant)*
15. The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon (novel)*
16. Uglies by Scott Westerfeld (YA novel, taught in my reading class)*
17. Pretties by Scott Westerfeld (its first sequel)
18. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (won the Pultizer, beautiful short stories)*
19. The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich (lovely novel)*
20. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (short stories)
21. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Another example of strong genre-writing this year. HoHH is a disturbing story fraught with tension. The reader cannot help but become psychologically disturbed as the narrator does so. Jackson's real strength here is the emotional complexity of this character, which creates a stronger sense of empathy as the heroine goes slowly mad.

22. Specials by Scott Westerfeld (second sequel)
23. How It Ended by Jay McInerney (collected short stories)
24. Nobody Move by Denis Johnson (super cool McCarthyesque novel)*
25. Love and Obstacles: Stories by Aleksandar Hemon (short stories)
26. Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut (novel)
27. The Convalescent by Jessica Anthony (wonderfully weird novel)*
28. Read Hard: Five Years of Great Writing from The Believer (excellent essays)*
29. The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon (excellent detective novel)*
30. Caricature by Daniel Clowes (graphic novel)
31. The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larson (really cool YA novel)*
32. Run by Ann Patchett (novel)
33. True Grit by Charles Portis

TG is the story of a young woman in the American frontier hell-bent on avenging her father's wrongful murder. What follows is a hysterically funny and yet gripping story of a woman wise perhaps beyond her means who is underestimated by everyone she meets.

34. The Way through Doors by Jesse Ball (metaphysically twisted novel)
35. Oracle Night by Paul Auster (novel)*
36. Couch by Benjamin Parzybok (novel)
37. Castle by J. Robert Lennon (super creepy suspense)*
38. Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem (stories)*
39. Wrong: Stories by Dennis Cooper (twisted gay stories)
40. Fever Chart by Bill Cotter (novel)
41. Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

AYR is a chilling meditation of the significance of the creature comforts of identity we use to feel secure in our lives. It is also an incredibly compelling, well-plotted, seemingly conventional contemporary thriller in the best sense of all of those terms.

42. In the Valley of Kings by Terrence Holt (excellent stories)*
43. Animal Soul by Bob Hicok (poems)
44. Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (pyschedelic detective novel)*
45. Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem (novel)*
46. Erased by Jim Krusoe (weird little novel)*
47. Altman: The Oral Biography by Mitchell Zuckoff (biography)*
48. Invisible by Paul Auster (novel)*
49. Heroes by Robert Cormier (YA novel)
50. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (novel)*
51. A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver (nonfiction)

Happy New Year, and Happy Reading!

Childhood Nemeses

A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
1843, Chapman and Hall
Heroes
by Robert Cormier
1998, Puffin


I have to admit a strong aversion to Dickens. (Perhaps the snob within me is turned off by the lack of complexity in his plots or by his archetypal characters.) So it was with some small amount of dread that I agreed to teach in my reading class his classic A Christmas Carol. My students and I spent three short weeks reading this book (appropriately enough, just before the holiday season) and contrary to my expectations, I was very much enamored with Dickens and all of his trappings.

I also ought to admit a strong attraction to Cormier's work. Two of my all-time favorite children's novels are his brilliant I Am the Cheese and The Chocolate War. His prose is emotionally fraught and his characters brooding, a combination seemingly unlikely for young adult fiction - but this is the essence of why his books are so wonderful. Cormier refuses to talk down to his audience and in doing so, he reaches them far more directly than any number of pandering novelists might.

Dickens is by no means a young adult novelist. However, it is a testament to the appeal (and simplicity) of his novels that so many of them have become co-opted for children's enjoyment (think Disney's Oliver & Company). A Christmas Carol is the best example of this, with its plethora of cinematic and theatrical adaptations. Each adaptation seems to get increasingly saccharine and, foolishly, I assumed the novel would follow in tone.

It was with no small amount of surprise that I fell in love with the book. Dickens' eye for detail is incredibly astute and as such his prose is rife with lush passages evoking Scrooge's London. The descriptions grow increasingly bright as the book progresses along with Scrooge's emotional re-birth.

I am sometimes disdainful of books whose sole purpose is to create some sort of world to inhabit for the span of the audience's involvement with the book. (This goes doubly so for film, Cameron's Avatar a perfect example of a film I am reluctant to see.) This is a large part of Dickens' purpose in A Christmas Carol and is perhaps its greatest asset. Dickens creates a full physical environment within which the reader can dwell at length, but his ability to manipulate tone and to evoke mood are equal parts of what makes London seemingly come to life in the book.

A secondary purpose of Dickens' in writing the book, I discovered as I was teaching it, was to chastise England's rich and to motivate them to enact labor reform laws. This was certainly an interesting angle to teach to my students, particularly in connection with Dickens' "rediscovery" of Christmas and the extent to which the Christmas festival was a tool he used to that end.

What makes A Christmas Carol so surprising as a children's literary archetype is that the book is thematically very adult. The book's message of goodwill toward man and to repent for past sins are attitudes intrinsic to childhood. The deeper emotional tensions of regret for those sins and desire for self-improvement are completely lost on children.

This does not impoverish my experience of reading the book, but rather improve it. The expectation of the saccharine ghost story I knew of my childhood was a delightful thing to have dashed.

Cormier's story, on the other hand, was a surprise in its disappointment. Cormier's work has always dealt with serious adolescent themes and his work causes his readers to live up to the standard of emotional empathy that his narratives set. Heroes is no exception to this statement; it is concerned with the aftermath of war and the fleeting torment of love lost.

While portions of the book are quite beautifully narrated, it seems also to be a rather single-minded work. The main character is literally and emotionally scarred from his performance in World War II and returns, disguised, to his hometown to seek revenge on a community "hero".

This dichotomy between the concept of heroism and harsh reality is the central motivating factor in the novel and every chapter pursues to some small degree elaborating on the plot context that elicits this thematic construct.

The chapters eventually begin to lag with the weight of Cormier's snail pacing. The book alternates too regularly between flash back and the present and Cormier's revelatory plot points are meticulously planted despite being an incredibly short book (barely over a hundred pages) it felt as though it were a short story aspiring to greater heights than it warranted.

Obviously, these two works make unlikely bedside-table-mates. But considering my decades-long aversion to Dickens and my hero worship of Cormier, these were revealing books with which to spend some time.

Bildungsromance

Invisible
by Paul Auster
2009, Henry Holt


Several years ago, a great friend of mine who has great taste in books bought me a copy of Paul Auster's Book of Illusions as a Christmas present.

That particular book referenced film a great deal and one of the main characters was a silent film director. The book was concerned (as it seems many of Auster's novels are) with the blurring of the line between oneself and one's art and in what ways others' art blurs our own identities. The book addresses the empathetic tendencies lovers of art have to identify themselves with a work of fiction or art.

What does this identification say about the artist's own relationship with his work, which is to be understood as an inimitable expression of self? In Book of Illusions the main character (a writer, working on translations) becomes distracted with the films of a hermit living in self-imposed seclusion from the world.

That book was the first I had read of Auster, a man I nearly revere now for the metaphysical/metafictional brilliance of his work, and I have to admit that I didn't care for it at all.

Suffice to say, my friend was quite disappointed and it was without hesitation that a year or so later I picked up a used paperback of Auster's City of Glass from a library book sale for something like a quarter. As all the books I buy at such events do, it wound up on my shelf for quite some time until I felt inspired by its relative brevity to bring it for some car reading on a road trip to South Carolina last spring.

City of Glass struck me hard. Its central conceit is a mock-noir style detective plot but Auster's exercises in genre-aping lead only to breathtakingly brilliant existential examinations. It felt so obvious to utilize gritty noir thrillers to create a harrowing attack on identity through the degeneration of a detective case, but yet it was entirely an innovation.

So thus began my fascination with Auster and it was with great pleasure that I consumed in a matter of two days his new novel, which takes the guise of a romance-laden bildungsroman to investigate the nature of self-awareness and the blurry lines between fiction and reality.

Invisible takes place alternately in 2008 and in 1967, a formative year in the life of the story's oblique hero Adam Walker. Over the course of three seasons (spring through fall) twenty-year-old Walker trysts with three different-but-the-same women and moves from New York to Paris and back again. He witnesses a brutal attack on a young man where his life was in danger and is ultimately framed for a crime he did not commit.

The novel has considerably more plot than any other of Auster's novels that I have I read. Moreover, the characters in his other works seem to operate largely in a Brechtian mode (I hesitate to use a theatrical term because it demonstrates my utter unfamiliarity with literary theory) in which the characters are representations of ideas and are used by Auster as tools to forward (or subvert) his plot.

In this story the characters, specifically Adam and his several loves, appear as fully fleshed and emotional rounded as any from the pages of, say, an E.M. Forester novel. The central focus of the novel is Adam's intellectual and emotional development into adulthood and Auster has taken this theme seriously.

Adam is a man marked by emotional fragility and intellectual insecurity which he attempts to cover by bluffing an air of intellectual and social sophistication that he does not possess. He smokes cigarettes and writes poetry self-consciously. He meets a pair of European sophisticates with whom he tries to hold his own in cultural discussions.

The pair, a meekly beautiful Parisian woman and her boisterously condescending lover, cause Adam to confront his insecurity. Adam fakes his way through some conversations and confidently asserts his intelligence when given the opportunity; when it comes, however, to more bohemian sexual matters, Adam's confidence is shaken and he fears himself proven a prude.

Adam's relationship with this older man who fancies himself his intellectual patron emphasizes how crucial these events are in Adam's moral development. Adam wishes desperately to please this man but is simultaneously repulsed by his own neediness. He emulates the man but then congratulates himself for the few minute disparities in their beliefs. Adam is attracted to his power and his confidence but is unwilling to permit himself to fully realize this attraction, preferring to hold him at an intellectual arm's length.

These emotional complexities are rarely so apparent in Auster's work. His character typically do not operate in a richly psychological mode and so it was with great surprise that I found myself so thoroughly compelled by them. Adam's lovers are all brought stunningly to life with nuanced characterizations that are striking in their realism.

Auster's prose, too, has taken a turn for the (relatively) more rich. His writing has always been incredibly robust and in some senses, lean. I was particularly taken with a passage at the two-thirds mark of the book that perfectly demonstrates the agility and simplicity of Auster's prose and yet shows the more poetic trend in this work:

Dread has become fact. Innocence has turned into guilt, and hope is a word that rhymes with despair. In every part of Paris, people are jumping out of windows. The metro is flooded with human excrement. The dead are crawling from their graves.

What is so utterly beautiful about this passage is the convergence of Adam's emotional arc and Auster's wonderful choice of setting for this arc: the upheaval in late-60s Paris. This is Adam's memoir, so is he writing from a metaphorical point of view or is he describing the turmoil (otherwise not addresses in the narrative) about him? Are his emotions coloring his description of the events or are the events providing him a context or a catalyst for his self-loathing?

The fact that one is asking so many questions about a character's state of mind in an Auster work is in itself novel; however, this is not to say that Auster has abandoned entirely his bag of meta-fictional tricks.

The narrative is encased (of course) in a larger narrative, which we only discover half-way through the novel. It turns out that part one of the novel, written in first person, are Adam's memoirs written and mailed to a colleague forty years later. The colleague is digesting the work as the actual reader is and the contextual developments of the plot are learned, frustratingly, at a distance through this additional narrator. Part two of the novel, which now seems like a flashback, is written in second person and again punctuated by the colleague's interpretation of the work.

Part three is written in third person as Adam grows increasingly unable to own up to his emotional failures. and the last portion of the book is a diary from one of Adam's lovers written once again in first person.

This development from confessional first person to objective third person follows a trajectory where Adam's colleague is discovering some curious factual inaccuracies and artistic licenses Adam has employed. This seems suggestive of the range of fiction and implies a correlative relationship between age and one's sense of guilt over one's failures of character.

Ultimately it is revealed that the Adam's colleague is publishing Adam's memoirs post-mortem and has changed all the identities to protect reputations while preserving the document's basic veracity. This is a not-unexpected trick of Auster's to once again bring to our attention our complicity in reading novels as psychological artifacts. Auster is winking at us, daring us to ponder whether or not this work is, as is suggested, a thinly disguised experience of someone he knew.

I'm not particularly interested in such useless lines of inquiry but I am once again reminded of Auster's connection between a man's life and the documents he leaves behind. Again and again, his novels are focused on men who leave written records of their lives as their sense of identity slips away or men who are obsessed by documents authored by others.

Adam's colleague is obsessed by such a document and pursues it to its natural conclusion wherein his maddening quest to create a fuller psychological picture ultimately results in his own participation in the act of creation. Adam's colleague resumes Adam's memoir from where it left off and finally writes it himself.

Auster is writing about the beauty of the spell of fiction: the intoxicating combination of one's experiences (lived and imagined) and a readership's imaginary co-authorship - how without a reader's complicity, novels fall flat.

Adam fails in his quest for adulthood and eventually shrivels into a man haunted by his past and becomes, as the novel's title suggests, invisible. Adam becomes increasingly inaccessible as the novel progresses, first by changing the authorial perspective from first to second to third person but in proving unable for his colleague to communicate with outside of tantalizingly cryptic and brief letters. Auster repeatedly reinforces that the reader cannot be satisfied by hearing Adam's story from his mouth, that we must go back to the memoir itself, his work, to experience Adam, an effort which becomes increasingly, gorgeously diluted by authorial perspective: Adam's colleague's, Auster's, our own.

Adam, Auster's first psychologically realistic character, becomes cloudier and drifts away and seems to disappear the more fervently the reader wants to connect with him. In this way, Auster creates a truly lovely, mesmerizing novel.