dustcovers

Social discourse

Tobias — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 14:44:14 +0000

....and in other argumentative news, note the heated debate over a Che Guevara-themed doormat, seen on sale in Helsinki.

mucking about in ... books.

M. — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 23:26:00 +0000

At the beginning of June, I moved into a new apartment within the city limits of the mid-sized town around which I've been orbiting for a considerable chunk of my life. With a new address came something I can't believe I never got in New York (though as an excuse I offer to those who know me my job in those years): a library card. My own! My precious!

As a result, I've been reading like a motherfucker.

No, for serious.

This month's booklist is twice the size of the last few months'. And on top of that, it's frosted with graphic novels, the likes of which I can never justify purchasing but always want to read. Imagine my glee when I discovered all the Books of Magic on the YA graphic novel shelves. Now if I can just go in with the list I made that tells me in which order they're meant to be read.

I read the third volume of Carla Speed McNeil's spectacular Finder. I read the Serenity GN, which I'm glad I didn't purchase as it seemed to exist simply to explain that the two by two hands of blue were taken care of, and that's why the Operative got sent in. Joss, I love ya, but my imagination could have taken care of that part.

But yesterday I read Warren Ellis' Orbiter.

Ellis consistently reminds me why GNs are such a vital storytelling form. It's not something I can easily put into words, but his stories are such that simple prose wouldn't be enough to properly present them. The image of a long-lost space shuttle putting down in a Kennedy Space Center that's become a tent city, the horrible chaos that presents, the very idea of a ship covered in a skin-like substance with incredibly properties ... these things can be written, certainly. But the visual does something different. It's the same with his Transmetropolitan, which all told probably adds up to several novels worth of text. Transmet, though, is hugely visual: the mad glare of Spider Jerusalem, the two-headed cat, the busy, teeming streets. This kind of visual creation is iconic. It gives us text the illustration of which we can all agree on; it gives us a sort of cinema that would never happen in the studio system.

I don't know if that makes sense, but there's something here. Toby, you want to be more eloquent than I?

First post in a while

Tobias — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 04:00:00 +0000

And it's simply to say that this sounds amazing.

The Memoir/Novel Debate, Revisited (in 2003)

Tobias — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 17:26:42 +0000

Just revisited an essay by Katie Roiphe from three years ago which contains some interesting musings on the recent novel/memoir brouhaha. Roiphe begins with the debate over the possibility that Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved contains autobiographical elements, and discusses the history of this in literature. She goes on to make a series of points that seem ever-so-slightly more relevant now:

Now it seems an actual confusion between the writer's life and the book has become more and more widespread. ... It may be that the profusion of memoirs in the late 1990s has caused reviewers to forget that there are books out there that aren't memoirs. But if a writer chooses to call her book fiction, surely the distinction should be honored. The genre does not exist as a convenient shelving system for bookstores: It means that the words on the page are, by the writer's own admission, at least part fantasy.

Houellebecq

Tobias — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 16:54:12 +0000

If you're a reader of Michel Houellebecq's work, this London Review of Books article -- reviewing his latest novel and a biography of him -- is pretty much essential.

His observations, bracing at first, seem specious and grating when repeated, in almost identical form, in novel after novel. It's frequently obvious that he is simply dressing up his personal obsessions as something more significant, or cannily repackaging popular prejudices as grand philosophical positions. On the evidence of The Possibility of an Island, his latest novel, he would be the first to admit all this.

Amazon lists a May 26, 2006 release date stateside for said novel, for what it's worth.

Subjects

Tobias — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 16:33:30 +0000

Finished Sam Lipsyte's The Subject Steve earlier this week. I'd read his novel Home Land a few months earlier, and seen him do a reading at Pete's Candy Store a few months before that. It would be tempting, at first, to write Lipsyte's work off as cynical/misanthropic dark comedy -- the sort of criticism I have of a lot of Daniel Clowes's work, for instance. While Lipsyte does put his characters through hell -- the protagonist of The Subject Steve learns that he's dying as the novel begins, and things get worse from there -- the possiblity of some form of redemption always exists.

That said, Lipsyte's work is often darkly funny, and some of the humor is indeed cringeworthy. Many of his characters exhibit contempt and compassion in equal measure, and his novels can be as emotionally bruising as they are spot-on funny.

And he knows the Garden State well, which is hard to argue with...

The Word "Chutzpah" Comes to Mind

Tobias — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 15:23:47 +0000

The Times has an update on the JT Leroy case, which includes the following.

Mr. Knoop, whose 25-year-old half sister Savannah Knoop was unmasked by The New York Times last month as the public face of JT Leroy, said that he had come forward out of concern for his son, family members and others affected by what he called an all-consuming web of deceit...

Mr. Knoop has hired a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer and said that he hopes to sell a movie about his experience.

....yeah.

Centralization

Tobias — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 15:29:04 +0000

Last night, I finished William T. Vollmann's Europe Central. This would be the fifth book of Vollmann's I've finished; none of them has been an easy read, as Vollmann is not one to shy away from the ugliness and horror summoned up by the morally wracked situations in which he places his characters. Nonetheless, Vollmann's willingness to grapple with these situations -- and the hallucinatory quality of much of his prose -- makes him a writer (for my money, at least) impossible to ignore.

Europe Central is set in Germany and the Soviet Union in the years before, after, and during World War Two, and unsparingly depicts the conditions of living under equally horrifying regimes. The best that his characters can aspire to is the status of tragic hero, and the mood that he summons up at the novel's opening is never dispersed. (Only one character shows up who isn't implicated in some way in the crimes of either regime -- the American pianist Van Cliburn -- and he only appears for a handful of pages, inscrutable, leaving the Soviet characters uncertain as to how to react.)

...and, now that I've finished it, I can finally let myself read this article on the author, which focuses on the novel in question.

Memoir Daze

steve — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 16:32:00 +0000

Just finished The Burn Journals by Brent Runyon.

It's managed to drudge up a lot of my own history, and
while mine isn't nearly as dramatic, it sure felt that way.

I feel compelled to say that I'm pretty sure all of it is true,
since the world that elected George W. Bush seems to be
so fucking concerned with the Truth when it comes to
Memoirs.

Anyway, I think it's well worth a read if you have ever
suffered from teen angst/depression, or if you know
someone who continues to fight that battle every day.

"Personally, I can't seem to get away from the quest-and-rescue narrative."

Tobias — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 20:24:23 +0000

A few weeks ago, I finished Walter Kirn's Mission to America, and enjoyed it immensely -- it's bittersweet and insightful; moving and funny; and skillfully laid out. Kirn and Stephen Metcalf discussed the book not long ago in Slate, and Kirn's discussion of the book's roots (19th century utopian movements were expected; the Hardy Boys....not so much) is fascinating. Give it a read.

BHL

Tobias — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 14:41:46 +0000

I'm an Atlantic Monthly subscriber these days. Over the last year, the magazine ran a series of essays by the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy. They've since been collected in a book called American Vertigo; in Slate, there's now a Book Club discussion on it.

Ah, the Taconics

Tobias — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 18:49:47 +0000

I'll admit that I haven't read any of Susan Orlean's work -- my mental image of her comes from the film Adaptation, in which she's a character. (Kind of.) She was recently featured in an article about her new home. Over in Slate, Timothy Noah looks over the piece , in which Orlean extols the luxury and design of her new digs, and comments that

The main thing, though, is that an inclination to state forthrightly, "I have a gorgeous multimillion-dollar house in the country and you don't," calls severely into question the journalist's ability to identify with the ordinary people about whom one is called upon, at least once in a while, to write.

Which, I'd say, speaks for itself...

Self-Referential? Yes.

Tobias — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 15:12:26 +0000

Over at my other blog, I've posted a few thoughts on a Chris Dahlen essay on Christianity in indie rock. I mention it here because Dahlen also invokes, among others, Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead. Rick Moody's "How to Be a Christian Artist" treaded upon similar ground in mid-2005, and the essays in Robinson's The Death of Adam will pretty much torpedo any preconceived notions of what might be expected from left-wing Christian politics.

Diviners' Intervention

Tobias — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 15:54:34 +0000

Finished Rick Moody's The Diviners last night.

It's a massive book, full of characters (maybe too full?), wildly ambitious, and occasionally hilarious. It's also, for the first hundred or so pages, incredibly frustrating -- as opposed to the fairly tight focus that Moody used in his past work, this novel shifts focal characters from chapter to chapter, occasionally lapsing into stylistic experiments, diary entries, and a summary of an episode of a fictitious television show (The Werewolves of Fairfield County, which is either the best Joss Whedon homage since Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners or a remarkably stinging parody of his work).

Have patience with the novel, though -- soon after that, a structure emerges, centering around the employees of a small production company called Means of Production and their friends, families, and loved ones. The novel's plot centers around the development of a miniseries called The Diviners, but includes tangents into the art world, corporate politics, psychology, and radical movements. Reading The Diviners is not unlike some of Nick Tosches's nonfiction, where elements that seem digressive turn out to be critical to the work at hand. And in the last few chapters, the full shape of Moody's structure becomes clear -- all before he finishes it off with a gut-punch of a final sentence. What seemed at first to be a trivial book, a comic novel about the entertainment industry, builds to a chilling resonance in its final section. And while I don't think The Diviners is a perfect book, its ambition and -- for lack of a better phrase -- political dimension make it a deeply relevant one.

Juggling

Tobias — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 15:35:43 +0000

In my mind -- until a better theory comes along -- I tend to classify the novels I read into two groups. In one, the plot is fairly straightforward, and the narrative's momentum becomes captivating because of the plot's inherent strengths. In the other, the author keeps the reader in suspense about what's happening -- via a series of seemingly unconnected plotlines, through a narrator who may be unreliable or withholding, through a general sense of ambiguity. The analogy I'll make here is to a juggling act: the author keeps a number of objects in the air -- often thrillingly -- but the real skill lies in collecting all these objects safely.

Samantha Hunt's The Seas falls into the "unreliable narrator" camp. Actually, that's not entirely accurate -- although it's clear from the prologue that the book's narrator perceives the world differently than most, half the pleasure of the novel is coming to understand the underlying logic behind her perceptions. It's a finely spun story, concerning the 19-year-old narrator's relationships with her mother; her father, who may or may not have died years before; and the man, much older and traumatized by his wartime experiences, with whom she's in love. Set in a seaside town in (I think) northern Maine, Hunt manages to evoke a sense of place well while remaining ambiguous. Given that the novel includes elements drawn from folklore, this ambiguity works in the context of the novel; Hunt never makes it clear whether the narrator's perception that something supernatural is taking place is real or not. Which, I daresay, works for me -- it's one thing to play with that is this magic realism or isn't it? tension, but the resolution of that question can cause a novel to fall apart. (Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl fell victim to this issue, in my opinion). Hunt manages to sustain her tone throughout, and that ultimately makes The Seas memorable.

Kate Atkinson's Case Histories comes from a slightly different camp. In it, the narration is straightforward, covering several disparate characters: an ex-cop turned private detective, a traumatized lawyer, a prudish continuing-education instructor, among others. Atkinson effortlessly creates fleshed-out, sympathetic characters, and her sense of place is terrific. And the setup of Case Histories -- a detective takes on three seemingly disconnected cases, which turn out to be more interwoven than he would have thought -- is impressive. Unfortunately -- for me, at least -- it's in the interweaving of the cases that the novel falls short. There are clearly connections: someone from one case becomes close to someone from a third, and by the end of the book, it becomes clear that Jackson, the novel's detective hero, has secrets of his own that make him uniquely sympathetic to the concerns of his clients. But there's no real "Gotcha!" moment where all of the cases converge on one point -- one of them remains, as far as I can tell, quite detached from the rest of the novel's action. And while I can recommend Case Histories on the basis of Atkinson's skills with location and character, the plotting of it wasn't what I had expected.

On the other hand, it might be that I'm looking in the wrong places with this novel. I have a strange and somewhat crackpot theory that Atkinson may be going for something else altogether with this novel -- namely, the fact that many of the characters are fairly staunch atheists. Is Atkinson's point here that the interconnectedness of events implies a higher order of things; a refutation of these characters' refutations? If so, than this is a very different beast than the "literary detective" tag might imply...