Welcome Noah

As you've probably noticed from the new byline attached to the review of Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land that I posted earlier today, we've been joined by a new contributor at The Millions. Noah is an old friend of mine whose book reviews have appeared in a handful of publications, and I'm glad to have him aboard.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:07 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Lay of the Land by Richard Ford: A Review by Noah Deutsch

Frank Bascombe, the narrator of Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land, must be the most eloquent real estate agent on God's green earth. Indeed, he once was a writer, as those who have read the other two Bascombe books, The Sportswriter (1986) and Independence Day (1995), will recall. The latter garnered Ford some impressive hardware, both the Pulitzer and Pen/Faulkner awards, and put Frank Bascombe on the literary map. So, The Lay of the Land is like a delicate piece of urban planning, with Ford endeavoring to expand on the Bascombe legacy while avoiding the pitfalls of largess and sprawl.

What is the Bascombe legacy, after all? It's a question that Bascombe himself is forced to confront from the first pages of The Lay of the Land, because he is now 55 years old and has recently had radioactive BBs fired into his cancerous prostate. The prospect of death from within is all the more troubling because it is from within, exclusively, that Frank Bascombe's life on the page has been recounted, with solipsistic alacrity. A great part of the Bascombe legacy, then, is his voice, honed to near perfection over the course of three books: funny with a sardonic edge, searching and unsure, eschewing lapidary truths, reveling in life's persistent ambiguities. Wives, ex-wives, and other women have passed before his eyes, children, too, both dead and living; great professional successes and profound failures have been endured, all recounted by this voice, which in the end (and it is probably the end: Ford has said that this is the last of the Bascombe books), and like many great literary voices, is both unique, and, somehow, universal.

What emerges is a struggle to separate the permanent from the protean. Frank Bascombe has now entered into what he calls life's "permanent period," where the forks in the road have all been taken, and what's left is to sort out what it all means, and, simply, how, or even if, he will be remembered: "But very little about me, I realized - except what I'd already done, said, eaten, etc. - seemed written in stone, and all of that meant almost nothing about what I might do. I had my history, okay, but not really much of a regular character, at least not an inner essence I or anyone could use as a predictor. And something, I felt, needed to be done about that."

It's soulful stuff, with a definite Eastern orientation - the enduring quality of the soul - hinted at during Frank's often humorous interactions with his business partner, a Tibetan with the unlikely name Mike Mahoney (make money?), who has given Frank a book on the teachings of the Dalai Lama, but who also displays a framed picture of Ronald Reagan above his desk.

Frank has fled the formerly idyllic township of Haddam, New Jersey, now a phantasmagoria of suburban development gone awry, for the seaside calm of the Shore. His house faces East to the open ocean, from whence he, and all others, came. Haddam is a not so shining example of change, as it's now devoid of the less-spoiled innocence of the Shore, bloated, a mockery (The place where his ex-wife lives. In his own, old house no less.) And Frank, as a purveyor of land, is in as good a position as any to make observations about Haddam, though he sometimes sounds like he's dictating a real estate primer. The implication is that, unlike that of the human character once it has reached the permanent period, the lay of the land, that which is observable, ownable, is in a constant state of flux. Uncertainty reigns over the American landscape. It is, finally, The Year 2000, and, after the great millennial let-down, the country must now watch the disputed presidential election play out (Frank voted for Gore, the apparent loser.)

And perhaps the economic boom of the last decade is ready to go bust? And perhaps other storm clouds are brewing, misfortune of a different sort set to make landfall in the not-too-distant future? It is a deep source of interest, setting the book at this pivotal time in American history, and Ford evokes the turmoil skillfully, the problems inherent to "progress" as described by an older and undeniably crankier Frank Bascombe, with just enough veiled reference to future events to make the narrative seem retroactively prescient without being (too) smug.

But, with a nod to almost every aspect of modern American life that you can name, the book is ultimately about death. And one cannot discuss America and death without discussing violence, too. Surprisingly, violence plays an important part in the narrative. As a device, its presence seems meant to allow Frank to cross that last hurdle, to allow the lay of the land around him, so troubling at times, fraught with worry and doubt and misfortune, to fall away, his body just an ephemeral shell, his essence, his greater consciousness, which is all that the reader has had all along, taking finally its proper place as all that is permanent.

Frank Bascombe has always been obsessed with the notion of "disappearing into your life." It is a condition borne in on an existential riptide that sucks men into obscurity, nothing to show for themselves at the End save for the mundane details: the family, the career, the political affiliations, the kind of car you drove (a Chevy Suburban, in Frank's case, one of many little ironies from the sometimes impish Ford). These contours in life's landscape, this glorious topography, is not mundane when lived, of course, only when surveyed from a distance, a process for which Frank Bascombe has a singular talent. He recognizes that this territory has been negotiated before in past American lives, where second acts are hard to come by, if for no other reason than because it is damn near impossible to lower the curtain on the first.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:11 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Seeking Tales of Vonnegut

Biographer Charles Shields has already put this request out on many book blogs, but since he asked, I thought I'd share it here, as well:

This past June, I published Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. Now I'm beginning work on the first authorized biography - the first biography at all, actually - of Kurt Vonnegut. I'd like to hear from any of your readers about their experiences with Vonnegut, either personally or with his novels.

Shields can be reached at Cjs1994@earthlink.net. As a big Vonnegut fan, I'll be looking forward to this one.

Related: Some reactions to Shields' book on Harper Lee.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:35 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Remembering Bebe Moore Campbell

Yesterday, I was watching the headlines as I often do, and I was shocked to see the obituary for Bebe Moore Campbell, author of Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, 72 Hour Hold, and many other books, come across the wires. She died, at 56, from complications of brain cancer. Campbell was a well-known writer, but that is not how I came to know her. For a year, when I lived in Los Angeles, she was my landlord.

I first met her as the stern Mrs. Gordon - her full name was Elizabeth Bebe Moore Campbell Gordon - when she showed my friend Derek and I a hillside apartment in Silverlake. This upscale nook of the neighborhood was beyond our means - I was working at a bookstore and Derek was helping out on indie film sets - but her price turned out to be just barely in our budget. In the end, it was worth it for the fantastic westward facing view that on the rare smog-free day provided a glimpse of the ocean and for the walk down the hill to Spaceland, a venue where we saw many of our favorite bands.

Campbell's daughter lived upstairs - it was a bilevel duplex - and this arrangement gave us a glimpse into Campbell's life. It is odd, in these situations, how well you can come to know people without knowing them as friends, or even acquaintances. It wouldn't be fair to get into all the details here, but we came to learn, in the odd communication beyond mailing in our monthly rent and in the overheard voices that cannot be avoided when one shares a building with someone else, of the challenges in Campbell's life.

After a year, I got engaged to Mrs. Millions and moved out. Derek stayed on through two more roommates before leaving Los Angeles. I've never read Campbell's books, but the obits in the New York Times, Washington Post, and from the AP describe their importance and her place as "a best-selling novelist known for her empathetic treatment of the difficult, intertwined and occasionally surprising relationship between the races." I'll remember her as my landlord Mrs. Gordon, but for more, Tayari Jones remembers her as Bebe Moore Campbell, the writer.

Update: Richard Prince pens a more substantial obituary of Campbell.

Related: Campbell wasn't my only literary landlord.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:45 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Dave Eggers Waffles

Dave Eggers, as you may have heard, was tapped to write a new introduction to the 10th anniversary edition of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. The piece glows with praise for the gigantic novel, as one might expect (since such intros are, in many cases, packaging to sell the novel.) However, as The Rake has discovered, this isn't the only time that Eggers has written about Infinite Jest. He was, in a 1996 review, very disparaging of the book. Perhaps Eggers has changed his mind about Infinite Jest, or perhaps the offer to write the intro was simply too tempting to turn down. As ever, I'm willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, but this smacks of opportunism.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:34 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Jonathan Safran Foer is a Dog Person

As an urban dog owner I greatly enjoyed Jonathan Safran Foer's article in the New York Times about the trials and tribulations of having a dog in a city. This op-ed piece is an argument against a plan to eliminate "off leash" hours in city parks. As someone who has many times appreciated the ability to let his dog "off leash" in parks in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia, I agree with Foer. I also enjoyed his musings on what it means for us (as in humanity) to have this desire to bring animals into unfriendly environs like cities. Kudos, as well, to Foer for letting his guard down in this piece in a way that many other writers might not have. (via Gwenda)

- C. Max Magee @ 7:23 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Curious Travel Books Plumb the Arcane and Imaginary

Travel guides are often utilitarian. The prose alternates between bubbly praise for "must see" attractions or "hidden gems" and parental tones of warning admonishing would be tourists to stay out of areas too dangerous for sore thumbs from overseas. Even though some books cater to the upscale, spare-no-expense traveler and others to the off-the-beaten-path adventure seeker, they are almost always highly formulaic, making them perfect fodder for satirists and clever take-offs.

Take, for example, the Lonely Planet guide to Micronations, which takes us to homemade nations like The Principality of Sealand, the Northern Forest Archipelago, and the Kingdom of Romkerhall. These nations, which often exist only in the minds of their inhabitants, are unlikely to become tourist destinations, but the stories of people who have tried to remove themselves from our planet-wide system of independent states are interesting nonetheless.

A less informative and more jocular take on the travel guide comes from the Chronicle Books Jetlag Travel Guides which instruct readers on the peculiarities of places like San Sombrero: A Land of Carnivals, Cocktails and Coups, Phaic Tan: Sunstroke on a Shoestring, and Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry. Though the books lean heavily on the humor of stereotypes, they also wring plenty of laughs out of the many pitfalls of traveling.

More of a fake atlas than a fake travel book, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places provides information on locales that definitively do not exist yet are rich enough in detail and lore to be treated as though they do. "They range from the orc-ridden wastes of Tolkien's Middle-earth to the languorous shores of Homer's Island of the Lotus-Eaters." A good companion to this one might be You Are Here, whose description says "maps need not just show continents and oceans: there are maps to heaven and hell; to happiness and despair; maps of moods, matrimony, and mythological places. There are maps to popular culture, from Gulliver's Island to Gilligan's Island."

Then there are the travel books that were created in all seriousness but which recent geopolitical events have made absurd, like the Bradt Travel Guide to Iraq, which, no joke, was a big seller at the bookstore where I worked in the few months after the American invasion. The Bradt Travel Guide to North Korea would be another good one for the truly adventurous traveler.

Update:In the comments, j. godsey points us to another clever travel book, the Moon Handbooks guide to the Moon

- C. Max Magee @ 4:45 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Penguin's Blank Slate

Penguin, well-known for classics with sophisticated packaging, has decided to cede creative control to its readers with a new slate of books that feature "naked front covers... printed on art-quality paper." Penguin announced the initiative on its blog and they have already posted some reader-designed covers in a gallery on its site. So far, the books are only available from the UK, and the titles that come with blank covers are:

• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Magic Tales by Jacob Grimm
• The Waves by Virginia Woolf
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• Emma by Jane Austen

- C. Max Magee @ 3:29 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Google Books Finds Forgotten Plagiarists

At Slate, Paul Collins points out that Google Book Search heralds a new era of outing plagiarists. The searchable database of many thousands of books is a boon to researchers, but it also greatly eases the discovery of co-opted passages. Collins mentions a couple of examples and posits that "given the popularity of plagiarism-seeking software services for academics, it may be only a matter of time before some enterprising scholar yokes Google Book Search and plagiarism-detection software together into a massive literary dragnet, scooping out hundreds of years' worth of plagiarists - giants and forgotten hacks alike - who have all escaped detection until now." He also predicts that "in the next decade at least one major literary work [will get] busted."

- C. Max Magee @ 3:03 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Inside the Writer's Brain

Check out these mind boggling photos of author Will Self's writing room with post-its, maps, and notes covering nearly every surface. This is how one might try to portray the writer's mind in three-dimensional space. (via texts & pretexts)

- C. Max Magee @ 2:48 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Going the Distance

In Elmira, NY, six high school students banded together to break the Guinness Book of Records marathon reading record. Says the AP:

They whizzed through more than 20 beloved children's books, including the six-volume Harry Potter series, seven Goosebumps thrillers and Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia. They wrapped up their epic, 128-hour performance on the school auditorium stage with Oh, the Places You'll Go, a Dr. Seuss classic.

Meanwhile, in Albany, other long-distance readers, among them William Kennedy and Andy Rooney, joined forces for a 24-hour reading of Moby Dick, as part of "Why Melville Matters Now" weekend at the Albany Academies school.

- C. Max Magee @ 2:25 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson: A Review

With One Good Turn, Kate Atkinson returns to Jackson Brodie, the hero of her last novel, Case Histories. However, where Case Histories was dark and brooding, dwelling on and in the troubled pasts of many of the book's characters, One Good Turn is antic and madcap.

It should come as no surprise then that the book's original title was A Jolly Murder Mystery, as Atkinson drops us into the middle of the famously whimsical Edinburgh Fringe Festival, "the world's largest arts festival." The festival, however, is not integral to the murder mystery that unfolds, instead the crowds, actors (Brodie's girlfriend among them), and air of frivolity all serve as a foil to the dour Brodie, who, having inherited a large sum of money, has since the last book moved to France where he seems to do little more than sit around in his pool and wish that he were still a cop.

One Good Turn, of course, gives him a chance to do just that when he first witnesses a road rage incident in the crowded streets of Edinburgh and then later sees (or thinks he sees) the floating body of a girl off nearby Cramond Island. These two incidents thrust us into the book's cast of characters, among them Gloria, the wife of the crooked real estate developer Graham Hatter; Louise, a single mother and hardworking Edinburgh cop; and most memorably Martin Canning (aka Alex Blake), who pseudonymously writes flighty, but popular, novels about a squeaky clean girl detective. Odd Martin steals the show in this novel with his quirky fastidiousness, self-loathing, and dreams of a soft-focus sexless marriage.

Thrown into this mix is a mysterious man with a gun and a house cleaning service named Favors whose pink-clad maids maybe don't just clean houses. Much of this book's mystery is devoted to untangling the story's threads, though what we learn at the end cleverly turns the whole book on its head.

One Good Turn doesn't carry the weight of its predecessor, and seems almost unabashedly a confection, but in this respect it doesn't disappoint. The book is a breeze, and indeed a "jolly good" time.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:25 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Quick Links

• A teacher's charming poem in which he winds the imaginative grammar and spelling of his students into a feast of clever words. (via)
• A cornucopia of palindromes. "Rot can rob a born actor" and many, many more. And don't miss the Palindrome Drama at the end of the page.
• Stephen Schenkenberg looks at how people find his blog... "how+do+you+construct+buried+alive+escape+tunnel" ???
• The 13-number ISBN is the book industry's Y2K. For more details, see my post from 2004.
• Ed plumbs bad Amazon reviews, a never-ending ending font of humor.

- C. Max Magee @ 5:47 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Ngugi wa Thiong'o Victim of Racism at San Francisco Hotel

Exiled Kenyan Novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o was in San Francisco promoting his novel Wizard of the Crow and staying at the Hotel Vitale. According to a report in a Kenyan paper, the author was sitting in a common area of the hotel and was confronted by a hotel employee who said, "This place is for guests of the hotel. You must leave."

The worker would hear none of the professor's explanation that he was a guest. He insisted that he must leave immediately.

After it was established that indeed Ngugi was a distinguished guest of the hotel, the management apologised by offering some complimentary whisky.

The incident is being talked about in other corners of the Web but has yet to be picked up by any US papers. The hotel is already trying to cover its tracks by saying that it was the action of an individual who "under review, as is the hotel's diversity training program," according to an email reprinted at this hotel review site (scroll down).

At the blog Black Looks, where another email from hotel management has been reprinted (scroll down to the comments), demands are being made for a public apology in "to be placed in a Bay Area newspaper, no later than the end of this month."

It seems likely that this was indeed the isolated stupidity of one person at the hotel. The hotel itself, meanwhile, is now in serious backpedaling mode. It just goes to show that even in what is considered one of the more "enlightened" cities in the world, we haven't made as much progress as we think.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:20 AM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Quarterly Report: Book Industry Trends

As I did three months ago, I once again delved into Barnes & Noble's quarterly conference call to get some insight into the latest book industry trends. Here are the highlights:

• CFO Joseph Lombardi is cautious but guardedly optimistic about sales in the all-important fourth quarter, saying that "the hardcover book business has improved" but there have been "some recent mixed retail sales reports."
• Following a slow second quarter, the third quarter saw a turnaround in sales. CEO Steve Riggio said that the increase in sales began with Bob Dylan's new CD, Modern Times.
• Diane Setterfield's The 13th Tale was "one of the most successful new hardcovers... The wonderful ghostly tale was our number one bestseller the first day it went on sale, and the book went on to break all previous Barnes & Noble sales records for a first-time novelist. Almost 60 days after publication, the book is still one of our top-selling titles, due to its word-of-mouth appeal."
• Fiction bestsellers for the quarter were Mitch Albom's For One More Day, Stephen King's Lisey's Story, Nicholas Sparks' Dear John, David Baldacci's The Collectors, and "rising fiction star" Vince Flynn's Act of Treason.
• On the nonfiction side, the bestsellers were John Grisham's The Innocent Man, Bob Woodward's State of Denial, Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck, and Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion
• Looking at the fourth quarter, "Among the season's best gift books, the standout is clearly Annie Leibovitz's A Photographer's Life, but Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook is off to a great start, as is the magnificent coffee table book called Rainforest."
• In October, Barnes & Noble upped its discounts for shoppers who belong to its member program. The company expects this to help sales, but its inability to say just how the numbers might work out made investors nervous, the issue being that this plan could put a serious dent in the bookseller's profit margin.
• Having said that, Barnes & Noble also noted that "margins continue to benefit from lower purchasing from book wholesalers, increased sales of our own publications, and an overall more efficient supply chain." - i.e. those books published by Barnes & Noble are quite lucrative for the company.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:52 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

National Book Award Winners Announced

The winners of the 2006 National Book Awards have been announced. A year after William T. Vollmann won the fiction award it has gone to Richard Powers for The Echo Maker (excerpt), marking a shift in focus (though perhaps not yet a "trend") toward honoring some of the names on the leading edge of American fiction. The New York Times, in its writeup, mentions that "as in recent years, the fiction category raised eyebrows in the publishing industry for its lack of commercially known nominees in a year of big-name authors," but I don't recall hearing much rumbling about the nominees. If anything, as I wrote when the nominees were announced, this year's nominees "satisfyingly occupy the sweet spot between obscurity and being, well, too obvious." And if one looks at the bodies of work of the five nominees, as well as their literary reputations, Powers was certainly deserving of this plaudit. Judging on his book alone, from what I've heard, he is a worthy winner, as well.

In nonfiction, the award went to Timothy Egan for The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (excerpt) taking on a very important topic in American history that hasn't gotten much attention from the writers of popular history. The Young People's Literature award was given to M.T. Anderson for The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party (excerpt), sparing us the possibility of an angry backlash against those darn graphic novels. And for Poetry, the award was given to Nathaniel Mackey for Splay Anthem (poem).

- C. Max Magee @ 7:19 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

More NaNoWriMo

Sloganeering rightly takes me to task for my sloppy framing of the NaNoWriMo debate - primarily the fact that I make no attempt to present the opposite point of view - and does it for me by pointing to Websnark's pro-NaNoWriMo post from a year ago.

Clearly some people find NaNoWriMo useful (or at least fun) or it wouldn't still be around, but I question the idea that it's good for aspiring writers. Websnark presents four reasons why NaNoWriMo is an instructive exercise. The first three touch on the idea that if you want to be a writer, you have to stop being lazy and/or afraid and you have to write every day. This is undoubtedly true, and at the very least NaNoWriMo shows people how hard this really is, though I have my doubts that very many people continue to write every day on December 1 and beyond, which is the point, right? Essentially, I'm not convinced that there's an easy trick to learning how to write every day, or even that it can be taught at all.

Websnark's last reason for liking NaNoWriMo is that "There are worse reasons to form a community than creativity," and that is about the best defense of NaNoWriMo that I can come up with as well. There certainly worse, less productive things one could do with one's time, and NaNoWriMo makes a solitary, often grueling endeavor fun and social, if only for one month out of the year. But, then, if writing weren't solitary and grueling, we'd all have novels out.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:41 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Chabon Leaves the Internet

Michael Chabon's official Web site doesn't get much attention from the author. He'll post longer items from time to time as well as the occasional cryptic note about the various projects he's working on. Chabon has now, however, decided to pack it in with this Web site business:

Lately I have been suffering from Repetitive Strain Injury that makes typing a chore and clicking an agony. As I have been spending less time online I have found that I've lost interest in the web as a whole, and in my site in particular. I'm tired of having to maintain www.michaelchabon.com, but I hate that it gets stale, and so quickly. Yet I don't feel comfortable with or have any interest in getting somebody else to do it for me. So I've decided, not without regret, to take it down, a little at a time, starting with the posting of my monthly Details column.

On the other hand, Chabon's new novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union will be arriving in May.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:06 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The NaNoWriMo Backlash

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a group project which encourages participants "to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30" - (they couldn't have picked a month with 31 days?). The quality of work produced by such speedwriting is questionable at best, I'd guess, but people seem to have fun doing it, just like some people seem to have fun climbing Mount Everest or participating in eating contests. The NaNoWriMo community also employs a lot of slap on the back, "you can do it!" type of encouragement, and the Web site lets you track your progress along with the other writers participating. I can think of many, many better ways to spend one's time (and there are probably many, many better ways to write a novel), but NaNoWriMo is harmless, if a bit irritating if you stray too close to the frenzied participants.

Perhaps there have always been NaNoWriMo haters (it started in 1999), but I don't recall having seen NaNoWriMo haters before this year (although that may have more to do with my studied averting of the eyes from the NaNoWriMo frenzy). However, this year I happened upon Eric Rosenfield's anti-NaNoWriMo post, which lays out a few reasons to hate the endeavor, calling it "nothing if not oblivious to the absurdity of its own project." The Rake has also jumped in to explain why NaNoWriMo is like eating so many shrimp.

In the end, though, hating NaNoWriMo is both too easy and pretty fruitless, like hating hippie music or "blue collar comedy." It will always have its devotees, but the appeal of it probably doesn't make sense to most people.

Update: More NaNoWriMo

- C. Max Magee @ 7:27 AM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post

 

Amazing Grace by Garth Risk Hallberg

A Review of Dave Eggers' What is the What

On paper, Edward P. Jones and Dave Eggers seem to have little in common. The former grew up poor in predominantly African-American Northeast D.C., made his critical reputation with a collection of deceptively understated short stories, and even after a National Book Award nomination, continued to labor in relative penury and obscurity. The latter grew up in an affluent Chicago suburb and found commercial success early, with a memoir that placed the Dave Eggers voice - inventive, flashy, ironic - front and center. And yet this literary season has found the two stars aligning in the literary firmament. First, in August, Eggers penned an appreciative and thoughtful Sunday Times review of Jones' new collection All Aunt Hagar's Children - a book which, at least superficially, could not be more different than Eggers' recent collection How We Are Hungry. Then, two weeks ago, Eggers published a novel embodying the very qualities he praised to in Jones' work: "its sweep, its humanity, the unvarnished perfection of its prose and [a] steady and unerring" narrative force. And though it may surprise critics of McSweeney's to hear it, What is the What is the finest American novel I have read since The Known World.

The novel is a gently fictionalized autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, a living casualty of the ongoing Sudanese civil war. Having fled from his ruined boyhood village on foot, Deng grew up in U.N.-run camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. He settled in Atlanta in 2001, and after a series of setbacks began looking for a writer who might help him tell his story. As stories go, this one is dramatic and wrenching prima facie, and in a two-part article for The Believer, Eggers gave it respectful, even tentative journalistic treatment. But, sensing that this approach placed barriers of "objectivity" between the audience from the material, he decided, boldly and correctly (with apologies to La Kakutani) to recast Deng's story as first-person fiction.

The urgency and earnestness of Deng's voice seem to have provided the necessary pressure to render Eggers' prose crystalline:

The moon was high when the movement in the grass began and the moon had begun to fall and dim when the shuffling finally stopped. The lion was a simple black silhouette, broad shoulders, its thick legs outstretched, its mouth open. It jumped from the grass, knocked a boy from his feet. I could not see this part, my vision obscured by the line of boys in front of me. I heard a brief wail. Then I saw the lion clearly again as it trotted to the other side of the path, the boy neatly in its jaws. The animal and its prey disappeared into the high grass and the wailing stopped in a moment. The first boy's name was Ariath.

This paragraph alone would be an extraordinary act of self-effacement for a writer given to flourishes, and an extraordinary act of trust on the part of Deng. That they sustain this voice for 475 pages is something like a miracle. The writer speaks from inside his narrator - from his heart, from his gut, from his intellect. And the distance between audience and subject narrows until we feel that we, too, are Valentino Achak Deng, in all of his complexity and contradiction.

Because imperfect as a human being, he makes a perfect protagonist. He is whip-smart yet perpetually naive, generous and selfish, strong and weak, courageous and timid, full of both faith and doubt. In other words, he is a lot like the Dave Eggers of that other fictionalized autobiography, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius... not because Eggers has played ventriloquist, but because he has tapped into something universal. In the course of the novel, Achak becomes as real to us as we are to ourselves, and we feel his every loss and triumph as though they were our own.

The first half of the book concerns the destruction of the tranquil Dinka homeland in Southern Sudan by agents of the Islamic government in Khartoum and his harrowing walk across the country in the company of thousands of other "Lost Boys." The novel grounds every historical exigency in the dramatic interactions of rounded characters. If the expectation of a simple story of good vs. evil (and some of the political nuances) gets confounded in the process, we can appreciate more fully the quiet heroism of children who talk each other out of suicide, of young teachers who lead groups of boys through minefields and crocodile-infested rivers, of villagers who risk the disapproval of their elders by sharing their food with these unwanted boys. And though it feels inappropriate to render an aesthetic judgment on Deng's experience, his quest for safety generates a narrative force to rival anything in Lord of the Rings. The difference is that there are no invisibility cloaks or magic breads here.

Things get quieter in the second half, as Deng finds some measure of safety in the refugee camps. But his earlier struggles resonate poignantly in his attempts to contact the father he hasn't heard from in a decade, and especially in a visit to the relatively prosperous and stable capital city of Kenya. Without ever editorializing, What is the What reminds us of the brutality the world's millions of impoverished children face daily; how decadent something as simple as a grocery store can look to those who are living on U.N. rice. And calamity continues to bedevil Deng as he waits to be relocated to the U.S. - which will prove to be no promised land.

In a rare instance of overt artistic license, Eggers uses the invasion and robbery of Deng's apartment in Atlanta as a frame for his novel. We return periodically to scenes of Deng being assaulted in his apartment, or filing a police report, or waiting to be treated for his injuries in the ER. His internal monologues - his memories of Africa - are directed at the various characters he meets along the way. For the most part, this device works just fine. We are deprived of the solace of seeing Deng as exotic, someone "over there"; rather, his struggles are ours... and the injustices he faces in America are the ones we perpetrate every day with our impatience, our pettiness, our indifference. And Deng himself is guilty of these human failings. Occasionally, though, Eggers seems to overreach in his transitions between the fictional present and the fictional past, and to milk the robbery too aggressively for suspense. In almost every other particular, however, What is the What's formal features merge perfectly with its moral authority, until it is impossible to speak of artistic "choices." It is equally difficult to analyze the rich relationship the reader develops with Mr. Deng. Like The Known World, and like Deng's life, the book just is. And that's about the highest praise I can think of.

Eggers has been a fixture on the American literary scene for long enough that it's easy to forget he's in his mid-thirties. Like his near-contemporaries Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace, he has occasionally suffered in his writing from a kind of IQ overload, an analysis-paralysis. His second book (and first novel), You Shall Know Our Velocity was not an unqualified success, and some readers have been rubbed the wrong way by the antic quality of his fiction. They may be tempted to write off What is the What, rather than read it. But its large-heartedness is an antidote to such small-mindedness. It takes us deep inside a person we will never forget and heralds the arrival of a writer who has found himself by looking beyond himself, and who has learned the difference between intelligence and wisdom.

(All proceeds from What is the What go to aiding the Sudanese in Sudan and America.)

- C. Max Magee @ 7:51 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

IMPAC Award Longlist Madness

Of all the many literary awards out there, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is the most egalitarian, international, and exhaustive in scope. This year, 169 libraries in 45 countries nominated 138 novels. All of the books must have been published in English or in translation in 2005. Libraries can nominate up to three books each. Taken as a whole, the literary proclivities of various countries become evident, and a few titles recur again and again, revealing which books have made a global impact on readers. Here are this year's highlights

Overall favorites: books that were nominated by at least five libraries.

• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (one in Canada and five in the US)
• Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden (all six in Canada)
• Saturday by Ian McEwan (one each in England, Germany, Greece, New Zealand and Russia)
• The Accidental by Ali Smith (one each in Belgium, Brazil, England, Ireland and Scotland)
• The Kreutzer Sonata by Margriet De Moor (all five in The Netherlands)
• The Sea by John Banville (two in Ireland and one each in the US, Hungary and Czech Republic)

You can also look at the list and see which books are favorites in different countries. Aside from Three Day Road in Canada and The Kreutzer Sonata in The Netherlands, several books were nominated by multiple libraries in the same country. Here's a few:

• In South Africa, Gem Squash Tokoloshe by Rachel Zadok
• In New Zealand, Blindsight by Maurice Gee
• In the US, Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala and March by Geraldine Brooks
• In Australia, The Secret River by Kate Grenville

There were also several countries with only one library nominating just one book. Here are a few of those:

• From Pakistan, Broken Verses by Kamila Shamsie
• From Malaysia, The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw
• From Spain, Cold Skin by Albert Sanchez Pinol
• From Suriname, Circle of Love by Soecy Gummels

The shortlist will be announced on April 4, 2007 and the winner on June 14, 2007.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:45 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

America's Expensive Novel Habit

In the New Yorker, Ian Frazier shares some stories about how the modern novel is threatening to bring down the American economy.

Right now, it's costing me forty-five dollars to fill up my 4Runner, which is about two novels. Tough decisions are going to have to be made. I'm used to having a newly released hardcover on the dash of my vehicle, another in the back seat for the kids. At home, we've got a novel in each bedroom, two in the family room, one in the laundry room for my wife when she's down there, and a novella in the john. We go through a couple of dozen novels in a year without even noticing. I hate to say it, but this can't go on.

- C. Max Magee @ 4:49 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Rough Times for Bible Salesmen

Three months ago, after HarperCollins parent News Corp reported fiscal fourth quarter earnings, I noted comments from HarperCollins' CEO Jane Friedman regarding sales of religious books. "Religious publishing is in a lot of trouble" was the pull quote. More recently, I pointed to the latest hot publishing trend, books about atheism, signalling something of a backlash against the religiosity that has pervaded our culture in recent years.

News Corp reported its fiscal first quarter numbers this week, and once again the Publishers Lunch newsletter went back to Friedman to get her thoughts on HarperCollins' performance (no link since it's only available by email). This time her language seemed even stronger on this topic:

As she noted last quarter, Friedman observes, "I've got big softness in Zondervan [HarperCollins' Christian imprint] -- and that is something we're going to have to be watching all year... It's not getting better." She reports that spiritual books are "going steadily upward," like the books published by Harper San Francisco, but "there's a softness in the bible business" and "this is the most disturbing news, since that's our staple."

With the Republicans so recently trounced in the elections, one has to wonder if the cultural enthusiasm for the type of Christianity that yields these sorts of books is waning (and indeed if earlier sales softness was a predictor of what would happen with the elections.)

- C. Max Magee @ 11:04 PM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

Too Many Viggos

Hunky Viggo Mortenson (of Lord of the Rings fame) was a big draw when he made appearances at the bookstore where I used to work. He's got some dedicated fans who love the fact that he's an actor and a poet and an artist. If you look at an Amazon search for his name, his many books of poetry and art come up. But, as the New York Times recently noted, there's another Viggo Mortenson, a Danish professor who has written a book about theology, much to the chagrin of wayward Viggo fans who end up picking up his book, Theology and the Religions: A Dialogue (note the angry customer reviews.)

BookFinder.com Journal notes the article and discusses the frustration of running an online book database and dealing with multiple authors who share the same name.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:57 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

AbeBooks Blog

AbeBooks has a new blog: Reading Copy. Lots of good stuff there. (via)

- C. Max Magee @ 10:56 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Tracking Amazon Rankings

Those oft-quoted Amazon sales rankings don't really tell you much. They just give a snapshot of how a book is selling at a particular moment. TitleZ can track how a book's ranking moves over time. There's some debate about how much those rankings really tell you, but this is a fun toy nonetheless. (via)

- C. Max Magee @ 10:43 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Firmin Week

If you haven't been there already, it's not too late to check out the LBC's discussion of Firmin by Sam Savage, our Autumn Read This! selection. Also, don't miss the post from author Savage. By the way, I highly recommend this tale of a literary rat. Firmin is among the few animal protagonists who is neither moralistic nor an allegory, he's just a sentient rat living in a bookstore near Boston's decrepit Scollay Square.

Update: If you hurry, you can still get in on the Firmin giveaway going on at the LBC right now.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:08 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

The Corey Vilhauer Book of the Month Club: November 2006

It's official. I'm done!

This month, I finally finished my Penguin Pockets 70th Anniversary Box Set. I read nearly every page over a broken, two-month period (the first month - my Millions debut - can be found here). It was a difficult, grueling battle, but I made it through with only a few bruises and just one small paper cut. And now, as I had always hoped, I have a full awareness of all things "literature." I'm ready to start teaching World Lit at Harvard.

Well, actually, I'm not. In fact, I've given myself an even greater test: I'm giving myself three years to fully comprehend at least one title from the classic authors I've (until now) completely missed.

But that's the future. This is the present. Revel with me as I celebrate this accomplishment!

Choosing one of these selections as the "book of the month" turned out to be more difficult than actually reading them. I read 36 books this month: part of a classic (the very long, very complicated, incredibly wordy and not entirely pleasant A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens) and 35 54-page Pocket Penguins. That's a lot of books to filter through.

Obviously, I can't choose any of the books that I didn't really fully read or any of the books that I quickly skimmed through on my way to another selection. Yeah, that's right. Sometimes I cheated. You can't blame me - this entire collection features a wide array of genres: poetry (skimmed), history (primarily rooted in World War II, most of which I read, but honestly didn't read fully and skimmed), biography (Churchill's and Percy's biographies were skimmed, Selassie's outright skipped after the first ten pages) and memoir (many were skipped after a few pages). I couldn't possibly do it all without screaming.

This left me with about 20-25 works of fiction that I enjoyed at varying degrees.

What I found is that this entire 70-book collection is really a celebration of the short story. When condensing an author into 54 pages, a publisher can only choose the shortest of selections. A majority of the time, this means a selection of short stories. When "true" short stories weren't chosen, we find excerpts or expurgated chapters instead. Regardless of its original form, it's a short story all the same. I was blind to it through the first 35 books, but this time it was all I could think of.

Throughout the second half of my Anniversary travels, I marveled at how so many authors could sum up a literary career into just 54 pages - how they could completely buck the novel's tradition and contain their words concisely into these Penguin selections.

So with that in mind, I needed to choose one book - the one book that captures everything that short stories are to me: emotion, curiosity and mystery; ultimately, thought-provoking literature that drives me to read on and devour the next short story while still feeling the heat of the previous one.

Enter Melissa Bank's The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine. The Book of the Month.

I have found that most short story writing involves a quick slice of life, one that reveals only as much as needed, leaving the reader a chance to fill in the gaping holes. A great short story fills those holes without much effort, using the power of its passages as an assumed backbone, driving characters together not through writing, but through the normal constraints of society and culture.

Bank's title story does a great job of doing this. In it we find a young woman - an assistant editor who is not entirely sure of her own talents - struggling with two relationships; a love/hate connection with her on-again-off-again boyfriend and a wait-and-see connection with her father, a once strong man who is dying from leukemia.

The emotion is there - this is a young woman who doesn't know what to do in life. We've all been there, obviously; unsure of our place, wondering if we chose the right life, the right partner, or the right career. In this case, we find a woman who is being overwhelmed through every aspect of life - at work, with an older boyfriend, and with her father's sickness. She feels pulled in every direction, forced to accept her position editing books (a job that is quite below her position) and to accept the criticism from an older man - her personal father figure. All the while, her actual father is sick - very sick.

The curiosity is there. Where did these people meet? Why has she made these decisions, and why does she continue to stick by them? How will her father end up, and will her boyfriend be there to support her. Is he drinking again?

Is she safe with herself?

As good as Bank's story was, it all kept bringing me back to the style as a whole - the short story as a concept and viable literary interest. Short stories are designed to view a small, minute portion of life and weigh it against society. They're created to leave a suspenseful impression, one that makes you wish you could know the rest of the story and one that - for just a few seconds - leaves you considering just writing the story yourself.

Often times, this is exactly what happens. In your mind, you have the ability to fill in the holes, to create biographies based on the hints an author leaves behind. There's no better writing prompt than a short story. And it seems sometimes like there's no harder piece of literature to actually compose.

It is said that poetry is literature condensed. It gives each word an incredible weight that cannot be reproduced in prose (lest it become too weighty and difficult). Short stories take the weight away from the words and give it to the moment. Each second of a shortened piece of literature means the world. It is intensely analyzed and purposefully constructed. For me, it's the most perfect form of writing.

So let's hear it for short stories, eh? Let's hear it for Lorrie Moore, for David Sedaris, and for Lewis Thomas. A round of applause for Ian McEwan, for Will Self, and for David Foster Wallace. And let's not let the brevity of a short story ruin the weight of its moment in the spotlight.

Corey Vilhauer - Black Marks on Wood Pulp
CVBoMC Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, June, July, Aug, Sept, Oct

- C. Max Magee @ 7:52 AM ~ comments: 8 ~ Links to this post

 

"This Election Season..." by Garth Risk Hallberg

Faced with a stark choice - where to buy books in New York congressional district 8 - I have decided to endorse my new employer, the Housing Works Used Bookstore & Cafe. As any American who's attended a reading or browsed the shelves at HWUBC's SoHo location knows, the store is a home away from home for bibliophiles. Better still, all of the store's profits go to Housing Works, a nonprofit that supports homeless New Yorkers living with HIV. Recently, Housing Works has entered the online book business. So this election season, if you want a candidate who will protect your pocketbook while working for social change, look no further than the Housing Works page at half.com. I'm Garth Risk Hallberg, and I approved this message.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:02 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

On the Ground in Philadelphia

We got back late last night from Los Angeles (where we had attended the wedding of two great friends), and are now wading through stacks of boxes in our still freshly moved into apartment in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, it turns out that when you go on vacation two days after moving, you don't return to find all of your things miraculously unpacked and where you want them to be.

However, after a few days of catch up (and thanks to the resourcefulness of Mrs. Millions) we should eventually approach normalcy. As for the digital realm, I still have many emails to respond to and my Bloglines "unread items" number in the thousands, but regular posting will ramp up again here over the next couple of days.

In the meantime, I noticed that Philadelphia announced its 2007 One Book, One City selection this week Carlos Eire's Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, a National Book Award winning memoir. It tells the tale of Eire's boyhood uprooting from Cuba and the subsequent "rootlessness" of his life in the United States. The selection puts the focus on our country's immigration issues, though the question of Cuba has been less "hot button" of late. I, for one, prefer to "One Book" programs select fiction as I think there is something more special about a whole city reading a novel together. And anyway (though I read as much non-fiction as fiction), fiction is more in need of support from our public institutions. However, some consolation can be found in the fact that Waiting for Snow in Havana is literary and not just topical.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:57 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post