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The New York Times released its famous Notable Books list this week, meaning that 100 paperback copies of novels can slap it on the top of their covers to boost sales. This is the first year that I have really been locked into the book review community to any real degree, so it wasn’t all that surprising to see most of these books listed. Of the books listed, I have read nine, am in the middle of a tenth, and have an eleventh that I probably will use in my thesis so it’ll be finished before the New Year. 
I really like that the books aren’t listed in a hierarchy, but alphabetically, which probably eliminates some of the bickering. I also enjoy looking at the various publishers represented. I’ve always wondered why we as readers aren’t more brand-conscious when we read. Even though noted book jacket designer Chip Kidd claimed that you should be able to predict whether you will enjoy a book or not based on your enjoyment of previous titles by the same publisher, I haven’t found myself even really noticing. It would be interesting for someone to run a comparison between books and other entertainment industries where people are more conscious of the brands they buy, e.g. comic books or music.
The lack of a hierarchy brings something else to mind. Though I failed to note this when pondering Amazon.com’s Best of 2008 a couple of weeks ago, there has to be a bit of cynicism over someone who stands to profit off the sales of books directly to be ranking them. I’d never heard of #1 selection Philip Hensher before, much less his book The Northern Clemency, and from reports I read few others had either. What would be the point of Amazon selecting a bestseller for that coveted spot? If it’s already selling, it doesn’t need a boost. However, a good novel by a foreigner who no one has heard of could use a leg up, and the fact that Amazon offers it for sale only a click away makes it difficult to regard their list as credible.
The Times also released its Notable Children’s Books of 2008; the list is eight books long. I’m not suggesting that another hundred should be selected, but not even two more to make it a nice, round number? Dwight Garner is able to list well over ten gift books ‘worth buying a coffee table for,’ so it would lead one to believe that children’s literature is undervalued by the paper (which is also obvious in seeing how it is covered by the Review). Of the eight books, three are listed for children who are likely preliterate, while five more are novels targeted at the young adult audience. No delineation between the two are made, though at every bookstore I go to they are categorized and displayed in separate places.
As I continue to read more YA literature, one of my agendas is to see how and why certain books are categorized that way. As William Gibson said, novels are called novels because they are meant to provide a novel experience (ideally). But in genre, you are sort of buying a guarantee that you are going to have the same experience again and again. But the books listed here, as well as the YA books I’ve read recently, don’t fit this mold at all; they aren’t a genre. It’s all marketing, trying to catch that Harry Potter crowd. And I’m not even really looking at the sort of books that are aimed at preteen girls, which would further confound your expectations if using Gibson’s model.
It’s not that I have some ax to grind; I just want to understand why these books are being classified this way and how the books are treated once they have the classification. I don’t mind rules being broken for a good reason, but right now it doesn’t seem that there are any rules at all.
ETA: After some brief but sadly overlooked research, I found that Amazon named Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns its best book of 2007 and Joan Didion's fantastic The Year of Magical Thinking the best book of 2005. Both of these books sold incredibly well before being named, so perhaps it was a bit unfair for me to criticize Amazon's selection of Hensher's novel as a ploy to boost sales.
I’ve now read three collections of Cynthia Ozick’s fiction, and it isn’t hard to find things to admire: sly humor, impressive stylistic mechanics, and an engagement with serious themes come to mind. Other than an essay or two though, I am not familiar with her nonfiction, and it seems this is the way she is often judged. However, it is her careful and deliberate use of the sentence to convey meanings both immediately apparent and deeply concealed that cause me to rate her new collection Dictation as one of the best books I’ve read this year.
Though the four long stories seem to be fairly dissimilar, there is the overarching comment on the natur
e of truth and authenticity in all of humanity but especially channeled through these characters who exist in the world of ideas.
The title story tells of the secret friendship between the two typists who work for Joseph Conrad and Henry James. Ozick is a James devotee, writing her master’s thesis on his later novels. Theodora Bosanquet, the secretary for James, describes her the intimacy of her relationship with the writer by calling herself ‘blessed to listen to the breathings, and the silences, and the sighs, and the pacings,’ finding herself closer to him than any other person for she witnesses firsthand his deliberations and process. Lilian Hallowes does the same work for Conrad, falling in love with him in the process.
Each woman believes her boss is the best writer of the age, and this debate allows for some charming conversation. Yet Theodora wants more. She wants to live forever as James’s amanuensis, but live both in plain sight and hidden at the same time. She can’t do it alone, needing a ‘secret sharer,’ none other than Lilian. Ozick blends history with invention, taking time to note that she is not beholden to history itself. Licenses have been taken, which are noted at the end of the story in a footnote and commented on: ‘Never mind, says Fiction; what fun, laughs Transgression; so what? Mocks Dream.’
‘Actors’ focuses on an aging actor who plays bit parts and was trained in the Method school. He is at odds with himself over the necessity to appease his wife (who is herself a crossword writer delivering cross words to her husband) and their financial situation by taking a Lear-like role in a production meant to revive the histrionics of the Old Yiddish theater. In ‘At Fumicaro,’ a Catholic journalist travels to Italy in the 1930s and finds himself attracted to the pregnant young maid of his cabin. This mix of sex and sin reminds one of an older writer like Graham Greene with the setting, but works the least well of the four stories.
‘What Happened to the Baby?’ sees the narrator’s uncle Simon create a new language called GNU, which attracts all sorts of left-wing students in the NYC that one imagines Ozick grew up in. As the story progresses, the narrator finds out the circumstances that led to her uncle’s quest for the universal human language, his hatred for Esperanto, and answers the title question. Her revelation has shook me since I read it yesterday evening: ‘Lies, illusion, deception, she said—was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?’
That sentence could serve as a thematic link for the entire book, with each story following essentially the same trajectory. Comedic beginnings grow increasingly darker and end with pathos.
Ozick is a deliberate writer, claiming that she cannot proceed to a new sentence until the one before is perfect, making her a one-draft writer who must figure everything out for she can’t go back a drop in something to foreshadow a later event if the story leads her that way. It is a bit of an odd style, I suppose, though I have read that other writers like Tim O’Brien and Zadie Smith do it as well. Yet that care is evident in the powerful works that make up Dictation, and I am quite excited that I have so much more Ozick to read in the future.
Paul Auster’s newest novel, Man in the Dark, has a lot in common with his one just prior, Travels in the Scriptorium. Both are old men that spend the entire narrative in a single room. Each novel is fairly brief, coming in at under 200 pages. And there are some links between the two, most noticeably the mention of Mr. Blank in this book, w
ho is the protagonist of the first.
August Brill’s life has been shattered. His wife of many years is dead, his leg crushed in a car accident that has left him relatively immobile. He now lives with his grown daughter and her daughter, a young woman named Katya whose boyfriend has recently died. Brill can’t sleep at night, and rather than remember painful things, he imagines stories to pass the nights.
His creation is Owen Brick, a young magician who wakes up in an alternate world where 9/11 never happened and much of New England has seceded from the US because of the 2000 election debacle causing a civil war. He is recruited by the local militia and ordered to return to his own reality and kill the man who is creating the war: August Brill.
In typical Auster fashion, these narratives weave together and provide insight into the minds of both men. Brick returns to his regular life thinking that there is no possible way that Brill is a real person, but he finds a website full of his writings proving that not to be the case. Meanwhile, Brill muses that he hadn’t intended to place himself in the story in such a manner, but since the creator was in fact himself, he saw no reason to separate himself further from the narration.
This last fact proves quite interesting, for in some ways one wonders why Auster didn’t just place himself in the role of Brill. It’s something he’s done before in the New York Trilogy, and there are a lot of parallels between Auster and Mr. Blank in Scriptorium as well. Anyone familiar with his work is used to this sort of narrative trickery, and I for one find it quite fascinating. Though the plot of Man in the Dark doesn’t go in the direction I had assumed it would, it may be more powerful because of it. I don’t want to get too far into the climax so as not to spoil the book for anyone else.
Auster, a professed liberal, also uses this novel as a commentary on the state of the US over the past eight years. His belief is that Republicans stole the election of 2000, and that had the American people refused to go along with those decisions many things might not have happened. High on the list: 9/11. It’s not tat the world Brick wakes up in, a sort of parallel universe, is better than the one we live in today; in many ways, it’s not. But what I think Auster is hinting at is that the world we live in is the alternate universe. In the real universe, Al Gore is now completing his second term.
Always a polarizing presence on the book review scene, Auster seems to get over on his harsh critics here as well. Brill was a book reviewer his entire adult life, yet he never has the desire or capability to really write a book of his own. I’m thinking that his dismissive take on his own work may be a sort of tongue in cheek jab at critics in general.
Man in the Dark is a good Auster novel, though not a great one. Though highly political, especially compared to previous works, at heart this is just a story about a man trying to help the women in his life: his daughter and granddaughter.
The third and final book in the much-hyped Destiny trilogy, David Mack’s Lost Souls is the tightest and best done of the three. There isn’t much extraneous material here, and he does an adequate job of resolving the each of the storylines. However, the overall narrative was disappointing and unfulfilling, marking a new and unexciting direction for the future of ST novels.
As I predicted in my review of Mere Mortals, I pretty much knew where this book was going before I re
ad it. The plot threads are so visible that any fool could tug on them slightly and see where they were going to end up. The Caeliar dispatched of the Borg. Hernandez had more to do with the resolution of the galactic crisis than any of the main characters. And as the thousands of Borg ships begin to attack known worlds, the only casualties seem to be a bunch of book-only characters that no one was using anyway and a bunch of third-rate planets that are more names than places.
The most interesting section was the flashback to the Caeliar and human survivors of Mantilis. Though they didn’t seem to be thrown back even close to far enough to account for the rapid expansion of the Borg, Mack led the reader on an interesting journey even though we all knew where it was heading in the end. I was a bit disappointed that though we saw the birth of the Borg, we didn’t really see what made them evolve from merely using the catoms of the Caeliar to more obvious machinery that we recognize them with today.
Just like the lack of meaningful destruction on a planetary scale, any ships that might resonate with a reader are likewise spared. Voyager is the only ship out of dozens that survives the initial Borg attack, and it’s just damaged enough to not have a meaningful role to play here. Klag’s Gorkon is severely disabled, though it too seems to have escaped any lasting damage. And the da Vinci seems to now be under the command of Captain Gomez, and it managed to elude the Borg by vanishing a planet.
Riker seems to have no purpose I this book at all. After delivering Hernandez to Dax and Picard, he basically just sits around and chastises himself for leaving his away team and serves as a sounding board for Picard. Mack writes the sort of emotional scenes that remind one of Christopher Bennett, with Picard’s big emotional discussion with Riker making the reader cringe with its earnestness. Why it is so hard to realize that people tend to lie to themselves and ferociously defend their actions I’ll never know. But it seems the case that in the current ST fiction, characters quickly realize what is wrong with them and magically get better. That’s merely the beginning of the journey, not the whole thing, and it is insulting to read that complex characters like Picard have such unbelievable epiphanies.
Mack also has a tendency to write that characters have ‘Eurasian features’ or know perfect English aside from saying ‘ya’ and ‘nein’ for ‘yes’ and ‘no’. I’m not sure what Eurasian features are; it tends to seem a racist description to me. And painting foreigners as too ethnic to remember simple words in English but know how to say ‘trilateral hyperfusion’ is idiotic. Hell, I know the words for ‘yes and no’ in half a dozen languages, none of which I can speak fluently.
But the biggest issue I have with this trilogy is that for something intended to shake up the status quo, it does anything but. If the Federation is supposed to be truly decimated, then eradicate Earth, or at least Vulcan. Don’t wipe out Deneva. Kill characters that actually mean something to the readers; the biggest death in the trilogy was Owen Paris. And if you are presenting the Borg attack to end all Borg attacks, maybe you should explain why they didn’t just come with 7000 ships fifteen years ago.
It seems the series was merely an editorial mandate for a future direction for the post-Nemesis fiction: tear down the Federation so that we can tell stories about rebuilding. But a huge problem here is that there was already a situation that begged for rebuilding after the Dominion War, and it wasn’t exploited at all. Couple this with the unbelievable pace in which situations that would normally take years or decades have been resolved in mere months, such as the integration of Bajor into the Federation, and its hard to believe that the fallout from Destiny will handled in a reasonable manner.
My recommendation to shake up the line: editorial change. The primary editor of the series, Margaret Clark, has consistently made poor storytelling decisions and shown poor oversight for coordinating projects. If you want to take a bold new direction, take a note from college football and fire the head coach.
I was already planning to read M.T. Anderson’s Feed when my friend Steve Mollmann gave it such effusive praise last month, so I was doubly motivated to pick it up over the weekend. And it furthers my look at young adult fiction, somewhat of an ongoing theme here. Anyway, the book is a cautionary tale combining cyberpunk and teenage culture. At some point in the future, brains are wired into the internet near birth, which creates a streaming ‘feed’ of audio, video, and text that act as a sort of secondary consciousness to all those equipped. 
Anderson tells the story through Titus, a teenager from an affluent family whose friends are shallow stereotypes of typical idiotic teenagers. They follow fashion trends that change by the hour, alter their bodies in disgusting ways because supposedly it is in vogue. When the group of friends goes to the moon for spring break, Titus meets Violet, a girl who is home-schooled and didn’t receive her feed until she was seven, much later than is typical. It’s never clear just why Violet would be interested in Titus at all; he’s not particularly bright, and the only stated reason is that he wants to be dumb but isn’t. That’s a typical teenager stereotype too, and not a very interesting one.
While they are on the moon, the group is hacked and their feeds crash. The absence of the feed gives Anderson the chance to begin to grind in his real purpose for the book: a cry against consumerism. When their feeds are restored, Violet realizes that the feed is really just big business’s way of getting them to buy stuff, an elaborate marketing tool. While the idea that the internet is being used to homogenize the public in order to make them easier to market to is an alarming one, it also isn’t terribly original. Anderson does a good job getting his message across, but only Violet emerges as a more than one-dimensional character.
Anderson puts the world of Feed in greater context by references to the hatred of the rest of the world toward America because of its consuming ways. The planet is a ecological nightmare, with trees being cut down to make way for air factories, and people including our characters getting lesions that are suggested to be from radiation poisoning. Again, not terribly original.
Chapters often end with a sort of blast from the feed represented with text to try to create reader/character identification by allowing one to experience what it must be like. However, the text presented is so unlike the feed as described that such identification is nearly impossible.
Anderson’s novel isn’t necessarily bad, it just is sadly predictable. This may be a prime example to refute my original thesis that there was little to distinguish young adult books from those intended for an adult audience; there’s just no way that a book with such a narrow and transparent agenda would have received the same accolades had it been marketed to a broader audience.
At the beginning of Thomas M. DeFrank’s book, he describes his interview with soon to be Vice President Gerald Ford. Throughout, Ford smoked a pipe. He also apparently was a big drinker. Ten pages into Write It When I’m Gone and the only unelected president in history is about ten times more interesting that I first thought.
DeFrank was part of the press that followed Ford on Air Force Two and then through his time in the W
hite House. The two were fairly close, and beginning in 1991 he conducted interviews to only be published after Ford’s death. Supposedly, Ford would be open to discussing anything without reservations since he wouldn’t see any of it in print, but as anyone with half a brain would know, he protected his legacy as much as the next guy.
Ford always hated Reagan after the latter challenged him for the nomination in 1976, and occasionally he’d let something slip, though not anything of note. The big story in this book was his unreported conversation with President Clinton during his impeachment. The Administration wanted Ford’s support, but he wouldn’t budge unless Clinton admitted publicly that he was wrong. Didn’t happen, Ford stayed on his couch, end of story.
Personally, I’ve always though Ford made a horrible decision when he pardoned Nixon. In his inaugural address, he claimed that the national nightmare was over and that the process was proof that the American people were still in charge of the nation. But by pardoning Nixon, he took the will of the people, as demonstrated by the support for the judicial system, out of their hands, and set a precedent that presidents wouldn’t actually be accountable for their crimes.
DeFrank quotes Ford: ‘Younger people today who were not living or not old enough to know have no comprehension of the tension and bitterness that existed through the US.’ As one of those people, I’ll concede the point. But I have to really question whether or not his decision was really a solution or merely a way to treat a symptom.
I try not to be very political in this space, but the analogy to President Bush is fairly clear. Though people on the left have been calling for Bush and others to be prosecuted for breaking the law and lying to the public, facts that the president has acknowledged himself, popular opinion doesn’t seem to support such a move. Yet right and wrong aren’t determined by popular opinion (theoretically), so in fact the Justice Department, acting as the prosecutorial arm of the American people, is bound to exercise its power.
However, in all honesty, I don’t think that Bush going to prison would be good for the nation at the present time. President-Elect Obama has the chance to take the country in a new direction, and getting bogged down in hearing after hearing over the Bush Administration scandals would take awy from the things he might be able to achieve. That said, I have to question my own sentiments, for my historical perspective is hard on Ford for having the same opinion (though of course he actually had power to do something about his).
Write It When I’m Gone is an entertaining, if unfulfilling, look at the person Gerald Ford was. At times DeFrank’s obvious affection for the man makes any sort of objective point of view impossible, yet despite this one feels it isn’t all that unfair. Ford seemed to be a good person, the sort of person that might not be the most interesting, but would almost certainly be he most kind and loyal. It doesn’t live up to its billing, but I didn’t find it a waste of time either.
Apparently, The Guardian, a British newspaper, periodically performs a service for its readers by digesting a book into a couple of hundred words while putting a humorous slant on the whole thing. I’m just learning about this now, but I find the idea amusing.
This week John Crace writes about Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers. Here is a quote:
Out-li-er, noun
1: a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from others in the sample.
2: yet another attempt to cash in by presenting a whole load of seemingly counterintuitive facts to tell you something you basically already knew.
I’ve enjoyed Gladwell’s first two books, and I also look forward to his periodic articles in the New Yorker where he is a staff writer. In fact, I am reasonably certain that I have already read most of Outliers in the magazine. That said, I do think that definition #2 is a fair assessment of his work.
But what bothers me is in these types of attacks on Gladwell, that he is unoriginal are misguided. As he himself points out in a recent article by New York magazine, the role of a journalist is parasitic: one doesn’t have a career without leeching off others. The man isn’t an academic; he’s a journalist. There is a difference.
Maybe his books aren’t revolutionary, but the man can freaking write. You can’t put these books down. He is able to spin a yarn in a way that few others can, making something like innovations in jarred pasta sauce fascinating. How many other authors could we say the same for?
Gladwell and the authors of Freakonomics have spurred a whole genre of people trying to replicate their success. So far as I’ve seen, all the other books have failed not because the subject matter wasn’t original, but because they weren’t able to frame the material in an interesting and compelling way. Dan Ariely’s book on behavioral economics wasn’t well written nor did I learn anything from it, but because it was based on his own experiments I am supposed to value it over something that has at least one of those categories in its favor?
As Steven Levitt, the University of Chicago economics professor behind Freakonomics, has said, good writing that excites people will get you farther than boring stuff, no matter the depth of the subject matter. In other words, presentation is just as important as content, perhaps even more so. And that’s what Gladwell has, and for what he is doing with his books, I think it is more than enough.
