Friday, December 31, 2010

New Year Review 2

What I Read in 2010

Another year has come to a close, and again I find myself saddened that the list of books I read this year is shorter than the preceding year (albeit by only a handful).

What follows is a list of books I completed in 2010. My six favorite are in bold with little summaries, although you will also find links to most of the blog entries on the books as well.

01. Making Your Own Days by Kenneth Koch (poetry manual)
02. McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Issue 31 (literary magazine)
03. McSweeney's Book of Poets Picking Poets (interesting poetry anthology)
04. Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop by Adam Bradley (explication of poetic rap lyrics)
05. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (epic YA novel, part one)*
06. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene (novel)
07. Norwood by Charles Portis (funny novel)*
08. The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman (epic YA novel, part two)
09. Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me by Craig Seligman (nonfiction critical study)
10. Point Omega by Don DeLillo (novel)
11. Home Land by Sam Lipsyte (novel)
12. Illness As Metaphor by Susan Sontag (essays about illness in culture)
13. Ravens by George Dawes Green (thriller)
14. Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever by Justin Taylor (short stories)
15. This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson (nonfiction about revolutionizing library systems)
16. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang by Pauline Kael (film criticism)

KKBB is a collection of essays by the venerable Ms. Kael on cinema. Though she writes almost exclusively about a period in the early through late 60s, her writing is exuberant and precise and her perspectives on trends in cinema eerily prefigure the contemporary cinematic landscape. While KKBB would be most rewarding for fellow cinema buffs, Kael's writing is a masterclass in wit, concision and clarity.

17. The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (exhaustingly long Victorian novel)
18. Model Home by Eric Puchner (novel)
19. One D.O.A., One on the Way by Mary Robison (short story-esque novel)
20. Ghosts of Wyoming by Alison Hagy (short stories)
21. Chicken with Plums by Marianne Sajrapi (graphic novel about a musician)
22. A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (novel)
23. Tinkers by Paul Harding (novel, Pulitzer Prize winner)*
24. Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving (novel)
25. Irish Girl by Tim Johnston (short stories)
26. Buffalo Lockjaw by Greg Ames (novel)
27. The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee by Sarah Silverman (memoirish thing)
28. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman (gospel-style novel)*
29. The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman (short storyish novel)*
30. Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler (noir)

FML (not to be confused with the other, more popular acronym of the same name) is a tour-de-force of balls-to-the-wall writing. Chandler invents a good many brilliant, confusing, exciting figures of speech and his writing reads like nothing you've read before. Nothing that doesn't steal heavily from Chandler, that is.

31. Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis (novel)
32. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (novella)
33. Three Delays by Charlie Smith (novel)
34. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (novel)*
35. Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet (sucky short stories)
36. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender (novel)

Bender speaks to me like few of her peers do, albeit in tongues. TPSOLC is a beautifully weird, elusive and elliptical novel about what it means to feel too much, what it means to be overcome by the difficulty of simply being. It struck a chord for me that I'm still feeling echoes of several months later.

37. The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter (novel)
*38. Citrus County by John Brandon (novel)

A terrifying little book about the capacity for wrongdoing that lives in each of us. Brandon makes the quiet, frustrating struggle to overcome inner evil heroic in an unexpected way and he earned every bit of my admiration for his refusal to pander with easy answers to problematic lives. A disturbing, beautiful little book.

39. As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem (novel)
40. All My Friends Are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman (short storyish novel)
41. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace (essays)

Perhaps the most personally influential thing I read in 2010. I am in love with DFW. Nuff said.

43. Cell by Stephen King (thriller)
44. The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan (nonfiction about evolution from a botanical standpoint)*

I didn't blog on this one, and I'm not sure why as it was one of my favorites I read this year. Pollan examines the history (sociological, botanical, evolutionary) of four different plants: the apple, the potato, the tulip and marijuana in an attempt to suss out the meaning of the incredibly diverse and remarkable pleasures life offers man. On its surface, it reads like a polemic against the development of monocultures, but at heart it is an ode to evolution and human culture, and the beautiful dance between the two through the guise of artificial selection and biodiversity.

45. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (novel)
46. X'ed Out by Charles Burns (graphic novel)
47. You Were Wrong by Matthew Sharpe (novel)
48. Fear Street Saga #1: The Betrayal by R.L. Stine (YA novel, part one)
49. Fear Street Saga #2: The Secret by R.L. Stine (YA novel, part two)
50. Fear Street Saga #3: The Burning by R. L. Stine (YA novel, part three)

By far my favorite book to blog on this year was Stephen King's Cell, which proves my theory that it's easier to write about something I hate than something I love. And I am especially proud of my title for the blog entry on Jess Walter's novel about a financial guru turned pot dealer: Stocks and Bongs.

Also of note this year were two wonderfully written guest blog entries:
GB1: Geek Love by Katherine Dunn reviewed by extrachrisb
GB2: Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart reviewed by MB

Happy New Year and happy reading!

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Bloglette: You Were Wrong

You Were Wrong
by Matthew Sharpe
2010, Bloomsbury

This is going to be a short entry, in part because I returned the book to the library and can't quote and in part because I read it a while ago (and as my computer has been broken for awhile, I've been relatively unable to blog).

You Were Wrong is a very funny, short love story about a high school math teacher who falls in love with his step-sister (unbeknownst to him, naturally). The main character is a buffoonish intellectual who has trouble process information at socially normal speeds. He lives in his dead mother's house with her last husband, an egocentric windbag whom our hero attempts, inexplicably, to kill.

Sharpe writes these incredibly precise little characters who are quite fun to read but then does little from the deus ex machina perspective with his creations. It's as though they are little wind-up toys that we spend three quarters of the book winding, only to watch them scramble about and get stuck on the carpet in its last act.

The plot is largely unimportant and is a little confusing, given how little of it there is.

Sharpe's prose is witty and, well, sharp. He often made me laugh out loud. The dialogue is verbose but its verbosity and the reader's subsequent entanglement in it are delightful in the same way it is to watch Donald O'Connor do a pratfall.

Sunday, December 26, 2010

Rebel without a Cause

Freedom
by Jonathan Franzen

2010, Farrar, Straus and Giroux


Several years ago, I became very enamored with The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen's previous novel (also about a dysfunctional Midwestern family). I told everyone I knew to read it, bought copies for numerous people as Christmas presents. I even extolled its pleasures to my AP English teacher, who in turn replied, "Oh, I read that. I couldn't get past the scatological stuff," referring to one character's tendency to store his feces for later examination. No matter, I was seventeen and scatology was just one of those strange obsessions of adults I took for granted as being normal and highbrow, like analysis in Woody Allen movies.

Perhaps the motivation behind this love had more than a little bit to do with Franzen's rather public scuffle with Oprah, in which he insisted he did not feel comfortable with his novel being sold with the Oprah stamp of approval. To my adolescent mind, these were admirable words akin to a giant fuck you to The Man. Franzen was daring for flirting with conventional success
and then shrugging it off, regardless of the consequences.

The idea that Oprah could so easily commoditize literature, that bastion of noncommercial artistic expression, bothered me a great deal at the time. To a certain extent it still does. Franzen's actions, which seemed to so perfectly express a certain punk rock throwing of abandon into the wind, were inspiring for a seventeen year old boy prone to hero worship. The event, I hoped, would call into question all of our quietly, deeply ingrained attitudes towards art-as-capitalistic-product. Why did we buy what we buy? Who controls the taste of a culture? Who decides what ideas take precedence?

Franzen seemed to me to be shrugging off what must be intense pressure from his publishers to play the game of airport giftshop novels. Without any fear of retaliation, he insisted on bucking the system, rejecting the pre-formed systems of cultural consumption, of corporate cross-promotion creating value for art.

That Franzen's literary punk rock maneuvers did not seem at all to match the tenor of his prose did not bother me much then. The Corrections was a stately, largely traditional novel about familial tension and subsequent emotional burdens and not at all the sort of post-modern trailblazing tome a la Chuck Palahniuk, et al I might have otherwise expected.

When Franzen this summer published his new novel, his first since The Corrections, memories of the Oprah fiasco and the media brushfire it set came rushing back to mind. Franzen was the first living novelist to grace the cover of Time in ten years, Obama left a bookstore on Martha's Vineyard with a copy in hand several days before its publication, and - yes, inevitably - Freedom was selected as Ms. Winfrey's newest book club choice.

Wasn't this the same author who had earlier rejected the big O's stamp of approval in favor of dignity? of taking a stand on the pressures of consumer culture? of deferring to one woman's judgment in determining which book to read?

Befuddled and curious, I approached Freedom with no small amount of trepidation. I had an inkling that (maybe this is just the hindsight talking) Franzen's writing, so important to my formative literary forays, would not stand up to adult scrutiny. I was right.

Freedom betrays a definitively adolescent mindset. It portrays a world populated by seemingly complicated figures on their surface who are not fleshed out underneath. Franzen's rough sentimentality takes the place of true empathy, largely because he does not understand his own characters to care about them. When they prove too unwieldy for his abilities, he abandons them.

The novel is about a Midwestern family who is embroiled in political, sexual, and interpersonal drama throughout the course of their lives. There's Patty, the would-be lesbian by way of Martha Stewart drunken homemaker, Walter, the idealistic but mild-mannered father who gets into bed with corporations in order to preserve wildlife, and their son Joey, who is as precocious sexually as he is socially.

Early portions of the novel (the only really good parts) describe Patty's childhood in the voice of her "memoir" (written at the behest of her therapist). In Patty's story, she is described as the athletic, self-sufficient offspring of upper class snobs. Most of her memoir is spent describing her high school rape and its subsequent impact on her sexual life, her friendship with an infatuated drug addict in college, and her crush on a punk rock musician through whom she eventually meets her future husband.

The Patty of these pages is richly complex in emotion and Franzen chose well the therapist-approved memoir gimmick because of the nostalgic, bittersweet scrim through which we can view her life.

But as the novel reverts to conventional third-person omniscient narrator mode, and thus away from Patty's close emotional perspective, it loses its sense of her strongly defined character. Franzen misplaces his sense of her inner life and she becomes cold and removed, not in any significant way, but the way in which one might employ a cliche to resolve writer's block. Patty's emotional turmoil manifests itself in suburban bitchery and nightly wine binges. Her character arc shows little imagination and fails to live up to the promise of the first hundred pages (ostensibly a sixth) of the novel.

Patty's characterization is not the only troublesome entity in Freedom. The aforementioned collegiate object of her affection, a punk rock singer, features heavily as a narrative tool in the deus ex machina mode. When Franzen requires marital discontent, he simply conjures up once again the increasingly haggard and seemingly never-evolving rock star character who, in his later years, has discovered conventional success in some sort of a Wilco type alt-country band.

While I enjoyed reading the parts with this character (in part, I think, because his character arc is unconventional simply in its prominent static nature), Franzen struggles to correctly evoke the voice of a relatively uneducated character.

Consider this passage, for example:

His feeling of having crashed did not consist of envy, exactly, or even entirely of having outlived himself. It was more like despair about the world's splinteredness. The nation was fighting ugly ground wars in two countries, the planet was heating up like a toaster oven, and here at the 9:30, all around him, were hundreds of kids in the mold of the banana-bread-baking Sarah, with their sweet yearnings, their innocent entitlement - to what? To emotion. To unadulterated worship of a superspecial band. To being left to themselves to ritually repudiate, for an hour or two on a Saturday night, the cynicism and anger of their elders. They seemed, as Jessica had suggested at the meeting earlier, to bear malice toward nobody. Katz could see it in their clothing, which bespoke none of the rage and disaffection of the crowds he'd been part of as a youngster.

This is fine writing, no doubt, but it calls to question the issue of authority here. Is this Franzen's voice? or the musician's? Ideally, it would be a balance of both wherein the musician's perspective is filtered through Franzen's voice. A good author gives voice to emotions his characters would have trouble enunciating. But here it seems that Franzen's voice has overtaken his character's, allowing his diction and rhythm to dictate the tone of the passage.

While this creates an obvious and, to some extent, necessary level of cohesiveness, it prevents Franzen's characters from fully expressing their individual natures. Ultimately, after six hundred pages, all the characters sound like Franzen and not at all like themselves. This is not problematic except in the case of employing a close omniscient third person - in other words, using the narrator to give voice to an inner monologue of sorts - as Franzen does throughout the novel.

The lasting impression is that Franzen is unable to give a unique voice to his characters and his prose ultimately sounds like just that: prosaic, almost clinical.

If Franzen's talents do not lie in his prose-making or his character development, than surely he must rely on plot to carry his novel. But that too proves not to sustain the weight of extensive scrutiny. The narrative arc follows the fairly predictable line of Patty and her husband's marriage, divorce and re-marriage. For six hundred pages, relatively little happens.

In one of the more off-putting sections of the novel, Franzen, who is narrating over the shoulder of the precocious son Joey, describes the 20 year old's attempt to cheat on his wife. He follows a girl to Argentina, where he intends to sleep with her, but before his departure he masturbates with his wedding ring in his mouth. He swallows it.

When it comes time to perform the infidelity, he becomes impotent and embarrasses himself by falling asleep in bed with the deed left undone. In the morning, he finds he has overcome the previous night's impotence and attempts once again to seduce his bedmate. Before he is able, though, he discovers he must move his bowels and after he runs to the bathroom, Franzen writes the following scene, in which he must retrieve his wedding ring from his feces.

The oldest turd was dark and firm and noduled, the ones from deeper inside him were paler and already dissolving a little. Although he, like all people, secretly enjoyed the smell of his own farts, the smell of his shit was something else. It was bad as to seem evil in a moral way. He poked one of the softer turds with the fork, trying to rotate it and examine its underside, but it bent and began to crumble, clouding the water brown, and he saw that this business of a fork had been a wishful fantasy. The water would soon be too turbid to see a ring through, and if the ring broke free of its enveloping matter it would sink to the bottom and possibly go down the drain. He had no choice but lift out each turd and run it through his fingers, and he had to do this quickly, before things got too waterlogged.

So yeah.

That's disgusting.

It was around this point, with the intermixing of sex and shit, that I started to check out a little bit. Franzen seemed to me to betray an overwhelming adolescent mindset. While the above passage is truly disgusting, it also one of the most imaginative movements in the novel, which I think reveals more than a bit about Franzen.

At the novel's end, the absence of sufficient character development collapsed whatever remnants of interest I had in its resolution. Patty and her husband, who have not spoken for ten years following a bitter divorce, are reunited in a way that emphasizes Franzen's fundamental lack of understanding of his own characters, and perhaps by extension, the adult psyche. One day Patty shows up at her ex-husband's door and when he does not speak to her, she sits mute own his stoop in a snowstorm and literally freezes.

Her husband finally caves and brings her into the house and then they happily remarry and the novel ends. At no point is there a sense of catharsis narratively or psychologically. The characters simply do nothing. And yet this resolves their conflict.

Neither proves to be a realistic, emotionally round character, because Franzen lacks the imagination to supply a resolution to his own novel in which his characters must change or at least accept some culpability in their own inherent shittiness as people. Franzen is not sure why they would reunite or how they would go about it if they did, so he resolves their relationship through an act of such inertia that it makes the novel;s emotional entropy obvious in retrospect.

I am no longer the same seventeen year old boy who was so easily impressed by Franzen's finger-flipping at Oprah. What seemed heroic in a countercultural fashion then seems as adolescent now as my hero-worship.

Still, I tried to approach Freedom from a neutral perspective, one that might re-kindle my admiration, if not for Franzen himself as a trail-blazing literary rogue, than of his prose.

Unsurprisingly, I was unable to get past the scatological stuff.