Inter Alia: Authority, an Anniversary, and Book Reviewing

In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace imagines a fungus that grows on another fungus; a nuclear reaction fueled by the byproducts of nuclear reactions; and movies whose audiences watch an audience watching them. For this kind of derivative process, he invokes the adjective annular, which the O.E.D. defines as "ringlike" or circular, but which presumably shares some roots with "annul" - to make into nothing. Last week, reading John Freeman's strange piece in the online Guardian (via TEV), I felt I was in the presence of annular writing: writing about writing about writing. I wade into yet another consideration of the state of book reviewing, then, at the risk of saying nothing about nothing. Nonetheless, I'm going to take this opportunity to advance a couple of propositions I've been thinking about lately.

The first is that talk in certain quarters about crises in book reviewing, newspaper journalism, online recommendation systems, and so forth is really an extension of a conversation that's been going on for at least decades now: one about a more general crisis of authority. Ever since the wheels of modernity set to work on the fixed stars by which we navigate our culture, we've been trying to figure out what to look to instead. Technology is only just catching up with us.

Those attached to tradition have always tended to look at the democratization of information warily. For example, I learned in this week's New Yorker about Walter Lippmann, whose 1922 book Public Opinion argued that the average American "lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct." According to Eric Alterman, Lippmann proposed that crucial decisions about that world be made by

"intelligence bureaus," which would be given access to all the information they needed to judge the government's actions without concerning themselves with democratic preferences or public debate.

This sounds like a nightmare, elitism reduced ad absurdam. Yet the assumption that the dispersal of the authority once held by, say, Edmund Wilson and The New York Times must, ipso facto, produce smarter decision-making doesn't hold water either. The information superhighway may lead to enlightenment, but it offers exit-ramps to every conceivable variety of cant.

For a while now, I've had the nagging feeling that there's a third way we've been neglecting, some kind of solution to the crisis of authority. And then, in the Alterman article, I found another reason to love John Dewey. To wit:

Dewey did not dispute Lippmann's contention regarding... the public's vulnerability to manipulation. [But] the foundation of democracy to Dewey was less information than conversation. Members of a democratic society needed to cultivate what the journalism scholar James W. Carey, in describing the debate, called "certain vital habits" of democracy - the ability to discuss, deliberate on, and debate various perspectives in a manner that would move it toward consensus.

This, I think, is why book reviews play a vital, if circumscribed, role in any democracy. I'd also like to think (not coincidentally) that this is the project that we - you and I - are engaged in here at The Millions. Five years into a conversation Max started, I'm consistently impressed by the civility, acuity, and enthusiasm of those who comment on the site (as I invite you to do below). Which leads me to my second proposition: the problem with pre-modern notions of authority has always been that they're non-consensual. For all its failings, the web is one arena where authority is earned instead of inherited. And so, on the occasion of our fifth anniversary, I'd like to thank you for granting authority, in whatever measure, to us.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 10:15 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Generals and Soldiers: A Review of Rick Atkinson's Day of Battle

I've expressed my admiration for Rick Atkinson's books in the past. His Pulitzer-winning An Army at Dawn is a history of the Allied liberation of Northern Africa, told in a style that glides easily from the the humblest infantryman to the strategies of generals and presidents. He offers the reader a glimpse of what it was like on the ground, while also providing the big picture and dwelling on episodes and campaigns that are merely touched upon in broader histories and television documentaries. (Dawn also inspired me to enlist our readers' help in compiling lists of World War II fiction and nonfiction.)

As the second book in Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy, The Day of Battle picks up where Dawn left off as the triumphant Allied troops consolidate their hold on Northern Africa and look to Europe for their next move, which after much strategic horse trading between the Americans and British turns out to be an amphibious invasion of Sicily followed by an advance up the "boot" of Italy, with further amphibious landings along the way.

As it turns out, the Italian campaign was brutal and bloody, a halting effort with many stalemates along the way as the Germans dug in and the Allies time and again failed to take advantage of opportunities presented to them. In fact, among the may intriguing side plots that Atkinson covers was whether Lieutenant General Mark Clark's obsession with seeing that American soldiers - and those under his command in particular - were credited for victories undermined the mission at hand. Clark's penchant for victory parade photo ops is unnerving, though he was undoubtedly a talented general. Similarly, the complicated picture painted of Lieutenant General George S. Patton is riveting. "Few acts of corporal punishment would be more scrutinized, analyzed, and condemned than the two slapping incidents on Sicily in August 1943," Atkinson writes of the actions that would derail Patton's legacy, at least for a time, after he struck a pair of soldiers suffering from what we would now describe as post-traumatic stress disorder, who he saw as impugning the valor of more visibly wounded men. It is Atkinson's rich telling of these episodes that make his work so entertaining and instructive. Other highlights - though they were horrors for the men involved - include landing by water at Salerno as well as the grueling back and forth struggle at Cassino and the destruction of the monastery that loomed above it.

But readers with an interest in history will likely most value Atkinson's frequent use of the soldiers' own words. "'Someday I hope we shall be able to fight downhill for a change,' a captain in the 16th Infantry wrote his family." "'I'm a little tired,' an Irish Guards sergeant confessed after emerging from the hellish Moletta gullies. 'But then, I'm an old man now.'" "Another befuddled guide also led company A into a minefield. 'We walked as men do in a cow pasture,' said one man, 'placing each foot carefully on a pre-selected spot.'"

Immersed in the details of the war, it comes to seem incredibly remote from life in the present. Even when Atkinson describes what happened to various notable generals after the war, it is difficult to comprehend that they ever had lives outside of it, so total and suffocating was their experience. The same can be said of the enlisted men and the soldiers all the way up the chain of command. Perhaps Atkinson's greatest accomplishment is to induce readers now, generations removed from World War II, to marvel at the realities of the fighting and suffering that went on in many now barely remembered corners of the world.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:33 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Curiosities

• An excerpt of the lost and recently found Alexandre Dumas novel The Last Cavalier
• An assessment of poetic cliches in VQR. The surprise: some actually improve your chance of getting published.
• Jennifer Gilmore interviews the criminally underrated Max Apple.
• That novelists' strike not working out so well.
• Despite some withering condescension, Robert Gottlieb has interesting things to say about John Steinbeck.
• Penguin UK offers up some alternative storytelling techniques with its We Tell Stories site. The first is a tale by Charles Cumming told by messages inserted into Google Maps. (Thx, Mrs. Millions)
• Books cops like. (Thx, Laurie)
• The trend of the massive hyper-expensive book continues.
• Daniel Radosh points out that the New York Times has, yet again, published a trend piece on bloggers getting book deals.
• And finally... The Catalog of Unfit Toys: Finding Delight in the Defective

- Editor @ 5:05 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Millions Reaches a Milestone

Though it passed unremarked (I was on vacation), Monday was the five-year anniversary of The Millions. This blog started as something quite inconsequential. At the outset of The Millions, I would have put the chances of me sticking with it through the end of 2003, let alone for five years, at somewhere south of 5%. Making it this far is pretty astonishing.

Those of you who have been with us for a long time know that I soon settled on books as a topic, discovered other people who had blogs about books, and eventually was joined here by some incredible writers (and readers).

I used to use these annual occasions to expound upon the state of literary discourse online. In years past, there seemed to be quite a bit of excitement as individuals - talented enthusiasts and seasoned pros alike - staked out some online territory and sent their musings about things literary into the electronic ether. When the world, both readers and the mainstream press, began to take notice, it was thrilling. Certainly, we had some notable moments this past year: we talked Harry Potter, The Millions landed on NPR, and our Year in Reading set the bar high for year-end roundups (and that's just to name a few. Check out the Notable Posts on the sidebar for more.)

Nonetheless, there isn't as much to say about the state of litblogs anymore. As I've noted in the past, they really have become assimillated, if not into the mainstream of traditional book reviewing culture, then undoubtedly into the massive miasma of personal publishing all over the web, where anyone can find their favorite nook and where no one will any longer bat an eye at hundreds of cross-pollinated blogs discussing books and whatever else.

For this reason, I wasn't all that surprised to hear that the Litblog Co-op folded recently (Dan Green made the announcement). It was an idea of an earlier period (only three years ago, but things move fast these days), when there were a few independent bloggers writing about literary matters with each, to varying degrees, commanding a small but measurable and loyal audience. Pool our resources, the idea went, and we can make an impact. It started off well and garnered a good deal of press, but it was doomed from the beginning in many ways. It wasn't built to scale as the community grew, and there was no way for the hundreds of new bloggers and thousands of new readers to take meaningful part in the experiment. Combine that with the inherent challenges of managing a leaderless, decentralized group and it's a testament to the people involved that it lasted as long as it did.

I bowed out from the LBC early last year, facing too many constraints on my time and needing to cut back. Still, the end of that experiment prompts me to take stock of The Millions. Though some folks in the bookish corner of the blogosphere shy away from it, and others criticize their colleagues' ad placement but stop the presses for flashy pledge drives, I am unashamedly proud of The Millions for marching onwards towards being a legitimate literature and arts publication. In a time when many are fearful of the diminishing commercial viability of literature and the arts, it is heartening to see that The Millions has grown from a hobby into a business, albeit one that is still nascent and that is, because of the small sums involved, still very much a labor of love. While I harbor no delusions that The Millions will become a heavyweight of the blog world, the opportunity is there to keep making it better, and I find that exciting.

Before I wrap this ramble up, I want to thank our readers. We very much enjoy writing for you, and we value your intelligence, curiosity, and feedback. Thanks for another great year at The Millions.

(And thanks to Mrs. Millions for creating the nifty "5" graphic above as a birthday gift for The Millions.)

Birthdays Past: An Historic Day; The Millions Turns Two; Thanks for Three Years from The Millions, Four Years of The Millions.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:40 PM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post

 

Gladwell and Gopnik Return to Their Roots

Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik, both incisive, witty journalists, staff writers at the New Yorker, and expat Canadians, return to Toronto this weekend for a live debate Sunday afternoon at the University of Toronto's Convocation Hall.

The topic: Canada: Nation or Notion? (And as a proud and sometimes confused Canadian myself, I'm eager to learn the answer)

If you happen to be in the Toronto area, tickets can be purchased here. And I believe there are plans to air the debate, down the road, on CBC Radio.

- Andrew Saikali @ 5:27 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Adaptations and Imaginations

I've never been a big fan of film adaptations of books. If I watch the movie version and then decide to read the book, as is currently the case with American Psycho, I can't help but have an image of the actors in my head. If I read the book and then watch the film, I'm tempted to be that guy who says, "You know, the book is much better."

One time when I was interviewing a Hollywood screenwriter who had just published his first book, I asked him if he'd like to see a movie version of his novel someday. Absolutely not, he said, noting that having turned books into screenplays, he knows that by the end of the process one rarely looks like the other.

But what bothers me most is when books for children are adapted for the big screen. I'm not talking about projecting Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who! onto a movie screen. That's fine with me. The book already has colorful pictures and isn't considered a novel in the literary sense. Instead, my gripe is with, oh, say, the film version of J.K. Rowling's wildly successful Harry Potter series.

As a kid, one of the things I loved about reading was how I could create an image of what the characters looked like based on the author's description. Sure, I suppose some of those books had pictures of characters on the cover, but that's a far cry from seeing Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who plays Harry Potter, on billboards and in commercials for the movies.

Admittedly, I also am not a big fan of the Harry Potter books. I read the first installment, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, before seeing the movie, and I had no desire to find out what happened next.

I acknowledge the movies probably have spurred thousands of children to read more than they had before, but it's the kind of reading that concerns me. In the end, kids end up reading books about wildly imaginative characters while being denied the pleasure of imagining what those characters look like. That disappoints me.

Who knows, maybe most kids can easily separate the Harry Potter books from the films, especially since some of the screen adaptations allow for some creative license. I just hope the movies haven't stifled the literary imagination of young readers.

- Timothy R. Homan @ 6:41 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Quarterly Report: Tough Year Ahead

As we have every quarter for the last several, we're looking at Barnes & Noble's recent quarterly report to gauge the trends that are impacting the book industry - which books were big over the last few months and what's expected for the months ahead. With a recession threatening, Borders faltering, and some even suggesting a merger between the two big book chains, 2008 is shaping up to be a rocky year for the book retailers.

Barnes & Noble's fourth quarter (which ended on February 2nd) was slightly worse than what analysts had expected, but the stock hasn't been punished on Wall Street. Here are the highlights from CFO Joseph J. Lombardi from the March 20th, Q4 conference call (courtesy Seeking Alpha):

• "Fiction and the genres had a strong quarter, especially graphic novels and romance. Hardcover sales were driven by a host of familiar names, including Sue Grafton, Dean Koontz, Ken Follett, Stephen King, and a holdover from the spring, Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns."
• "Both John Grisham and James Patterson had two bestsellers; Grisham with Playing with Pizza and The Appeal, and Patterson with Quickie and Double Cross. Trade paper fiction was driven primarily by movie tie-ins and selections from Oprah Winfrey. Movie tie-ins included The Kite Runner, Atonement, and I Am Legend, and the Oprah recommendations for Pillars of the Earth and Love in the Time of Cholera drove the sales of those titles." Pretty amazing that Grisham's The Appeal was a bestseller when it came out only five days before the quarter ended. Meanwhile, Oprah continues to move books.
• "In non-fiction, areas of strength included biography, humor, health and diet books, as well as the continuing success of Rhonda Byrne's The Secret. Other key hardcover titles included Stephen Colbert's I Am America, Tom Brokaw's Boom!, The Dangerous Book for Boys and its sequel, The Daring Book for Girls, and Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. Non-fiction movie tie-ins also included in non-fiction were Into The Wild and Charlie Wilson's War." The continued success of The Secret is somewhat disheartening.
• Aggressive discounts associated with Barnes & Noble's membership programs continue to eat into the chain's gross margins, but interestingly, so did "bestseller markdowns associated with the seventh and final Harry Potter book," though to a lesser extent.
• In 2008, Barnes & Noble expects to face a double whammy of "recessionary pressures in this uncertain economic environment" and very challenging comparisons against the final Harry Potter book and improved hardcover sales last year.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:12 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Appearing Elsewhere

The Pacific Standard Fiction Series rolls on tonight at 7 p.m. with a reading by Colson Whitehead and Christopher Sorrentino. If you're in or near Brooklyn area and are free, it would be great to see you. The Pacific Standard website has directions.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 8:48 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Year of the Wolf Totem

Laurie Anderson is a science publicity assistant for a large Southern university.

The San Francisco Chronicle appears to be the first major U.S. newspaper to review the English translation of Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong, and gives it a "thumbs up."

This was one of my "most anticipated books of 2008" (see comments). It won the first Man Asia Literary Prize last year and was a huge seller in China after its publication in 2004, despite appearing to openly criticize Chinese policies of Mao's era. Jiang Rong is the pen name for dissident writer Lu Jiamin, but he only revealed his real name late last year, I think.

The book won't be released in the States until later this month (March 27th). Expect a flurry of reviews soon. Will Wolf Totem live up to the hype? A Guardian article described Rong's style as "full of elaborate description which slows the pace," and Publishers Weekly commented that the hero is "passive" and the secondary characters "make little impression." A London Times reviewer notes that though it contains "lush passages" the language "can be jarringly unfamiliar" and sometimes "has the hollow ring of a manifesto" ("The reader is constantly reminded that this is a work of translation.")

Wolf Totem's translator, Howard Goldblatt, has discussed the challenges of translating Wolf Totem and translating Chinese literature in general - apparently the passive voice "just runs through the Chinese language" though Goldblatt doesn't feel obligated to retain that. He did consult extensively with Riong.

According to descriptions, Wolf Totem is about replacing a thousand-year-old nomadic lifestyle with a sedentary agricultural society. A few friends of mine who have China connections insist that most Chinese see the environment in a 19th century European way - i.e. tame it and make it produce food. I'll never forget one friend's description of her China-born father's reaction to a documentary about eagles: "I wonder how that would taste," he commented - to her horror - as a magnificent raptor soared across the television screen. Another friend who has been to China is appalled at the lack of wildlife in settled areas ("No birds. No squirrels. Nothing untamed," she says).

Riong's account of wolf life in Mongolia is reportedly riveting, but appreciation for nature may not be what appeals to Chinese readers. According to Eric Abrahamsen, a translator living in Beijing, many Chinese read Wolf Totem to "study the lessons of competition and independence Jiang draws from his lupine subjects."

Why do so many Han Chinese love Wolf Totem, despite also appearing to be the villains of the story? For them is it mainly about improving business? Does the beauty of an endangered species matter less than the next meal? What does a book about freedom say to people who value order?

Update: Translator Howard Goldblatt wrote in. He won't hazard a guess as to why the Chinese like Wolf Totem, but recommends reading this article at News Guangdong, which he says "you might find... interesting and illuminating."

- Editor @ 9:17 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Spy Story: A Review of William Boyd's Restless

When I picked up Restless, I expected the usual array of smart, twisted, unfortunate and hilarious characters that traditionally abound in William Boyd novels. I was pleasantly surprised at what I saw instead.

Boyd, it seems, opted for a new genre in his last novel. Restless is a mystery that unfolds in a series of letters provided by an aging mother to a confused daughter. Ruth, a single mom and struggling PhD candidate at Oxford, is in a rut. Her inability to make decisions affecting her life and desire to be a good mother create an inescapable conflict and further plunge her to despair.

Now, imagine for a second that you are 28 years old and your mother, a frail old British woman who lives in peace tending her garden at a countryside home, sits you down and says: "I used to be a spy, someone is trying to kill me on unfinished business, you will help me get that person." That's what happens to Ruth.

And thus the reader is drawn into a historic journey beginning in the 1930s and ending in the late 1970s. Intertwined with Ruth's thesis and her professors is the beginnings of her mother Sally Gilmartin's career. And while the daughter struggles to find emotional satisfaction, the mother's emotions are being abused. Whereas Ruth battles modern day evils attacking the individual, Sally is busy spreading misinformation in New York to draw the U.S. into World War II, being chased by Nazi spies and suspecting her own comrades in the fight against Hitler and communists.

And of course there are the Boyd antics: Ruth's son Jochen's German father's brother settles in her house announced; his anarchist girl follows; a student of hers falls in love with her and she fails to handle the situation delicately, and so on. In the meantime, the young Sally is hopping from France to England, Belgium, the U.S. and Canada.

Boyd's spy world makes for a read accurately captured in the title: restless. And although I missed the absurd histrionics of the writer in his latest work, a trace of wry humor lingers in the book and the piecemeal narrative tying past and future is, simply put, entertaining and gripping. As with all other Boyd novels I read, Restless left me thinking, really, is this the end, can't I have some more, please?

- Emre Peker @ 10:43 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Borders on the Rocks

After spending a lot of time over the last week discussing Borders' new strategy to display more books face out (and thereby reduce the number of books a typical store carries), it turns out that the whole discussion may have been moot. The struggling chain had a need for more money to "remodel stores and pay for new technology," but, thanks to the rocky climate on Wall Street, Borders was initially unable to find a willing lender. Translation: without an infusion of cash, Borders was going to run out of money.

This left CEO George Jones with few options. Pershing Square, a hedge fund with investments in many large retailers and Border's largest shareholder, has agreed to "lend $42.5 million and to make an offer for some of [Borders'] international chains," according to Bloomberg. The loan comes with a huge interest rate and comes with various provisions that give the fund ever larger control over the book chain's fate. Borders has also said that it is now seeking a buyer and the company has suspended its dividend. This deal is something of a last resort for Borders, and the stock plunged nearly 30% on Friday, the biggest drop in the company's history.

So what does this mean to Borders customers and employees? It's still too early to know. the deal with Pershing staves off the possibility of Borders running out of money in the near future, and offers a life raft for the chain to get through the challenges brought on by the slowing economy. The path forward is tenuous at best; expect more developments in the coming months.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:25 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

A Conversation with Adam Mansbach

Buzz Poole, the managing editor of Mark Batty Publisher, has written for the likes of The Believer, PRINT, Village Voice and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is also the author of Madonna of the Toast, a look at the cultural ramifications of unexpected religious and secular icons. Keep up with his adventures in surprising iconography at his Madonna of the Toast blog.

I first met Adam Mansbach a few years ago, through mutual friends in Berkeley, California. Not too long thereafter, he relocated from New York City to Berkeley, where we hung out from time to time, because both of us are talkers, and we both like to talk about big, important, at times unwieldy, ideas like America, politics, writers, writing and jazz. Not too long after Mansbach moved west, I headed east, landing in New York City. The following questions are framed by the many conversations that we have had since first meeting, though they exist on the canvas of the release of Mansbach's third novel, The End of the Jews, and the forthcoming US Presidential election. Like his first two novels - Shackling Water and Angry Black White Boy - in The End of the Jews, Mansbach examines the legacies of race and religion, legacies that demand attention if there is to be any true understanding of today's America - as James Baldwin, a major influence on Mansbach, wrote about time and again.

Buzz Poole: More than most authors, your background seems like something readers want to connect to your fiction, as if to validate your work, or perhaps even dismiss it. Is this something that has ever bothered you? In looking through the promotional materials that accompany review copies of The End of the Jews, you acknowledge how your family very much impacted you as a writer. Has there been a shift in your perception of how to reconcile your life with your work in public?

Adam Mansbach: There have been a number of shifts. I think with each project the relationship is different, the goals are different, and the interface with the public is different. With my previous book, there was a very clear agenda: to try to jumpstart some dialogue about race and white privilege by discussing these crucial issues through satire, humor, and absurdity. And also to apply hip-hop aesthetics to a novel in some kind of significant way, as I've discussed at length elsewhere. I was clear on who I wanted to reach, how I wanted to do it, and my own willingness to personalize these issues by speaking publicly about my own past, my entrance into hip hop, how it shepherded my race politics, the pathology of white hip hoppers in the 1980s and 1990s, how the landscape has changed since then. Talking about myself was a way to show audiences - especially at colleges, where I do the bulk of my speaking - that talking honestly about these difficult issues can be easier, and more fun, than they thought.

The End of the Jews is a totally different kind of book, and you're right, there does seem to be an appetite for some kind of way to connect my life or my family to the plot, the characters. I don't think it's about dismissing the work, but rather enlarging it with some kind of "behind the scenes" angle - for some reason, there always seems to be an appetite for that. I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with it, because this time around it's not so interesting to me. Or maybe it is, but there's a high probability of people misunderstanding, or me failing to explain right, because it's near impossible to explain how life and fiction dovetail in this book. It requires such an involved recounting of the artistic process, the research process, the adaptive process, the speculative process. All of which played out over a five or six year period.

The funny thing is that the book itself grapples with these very issues. Some of the main conflicts involve artists cannibalizing each other's lives, and where the boundaries lie, what is art and what is exploitation and what is both - what it means, for instance, when an old man slams his grandson's novel down and says "even the parts he made up are true," and threatens to never speak to him again because he feels so violated. On top of which, he's a novelist himself, so he thinks he understands just what the kid is doing - and on top of that, his wife feels vindicated and liberated by seeing her silent pain find a kind of alternate voice in this same book. Meanwhile, the grandson is still pissed because he feels his grandfather stole some shit from him for his previous book, which is why he felt entitled to put the old man's life on blast. So for me to try to explain this book biographically ends up messy, and already people have taken liberties, like assuming Tristan Brodsky is my grandfather. Some of that is probably my fault, for even mentioning him in interviews. But the true relationship between the man - who I love as dearly as anybody on this planet - and the character is far more complicated. There are stories from my grandfather in this book verbatim - funny ones, mostly. There are wild leaps of speculation, like the relationship between Tristan and Peter Pendergast, which is a kind of ghastly, made-up version based nominally in a fact of my grandfather's life, the fact that he had a WASP mentor who made it his business to open doors for Jews professionally and socially - but he was a man my grandfather had nothing but admiration for, whereas Tristan essentially resents Peter and can't respect him.

Buzz:You credit your grandfather for the title The End of the Jews as something he whispered to you while the both of you were attending a garish bar mitzvah. What is that "end?" Is it a loss, or forgetting, of a culture's traditions? Does commercialized spectacle mark the end of reverent history, or is it just a change, an evolution, for better or worse? Is it something that can be spotted in Jews in Europe, or Israel, or is it a distinctly American issue? The fact that your character Nina is a Czech Jew raised in a family where being Jewish is a secret - in the late1980s - leads me to believe that you consider this a global condition. Why is that? Is there a kind of market-driven homogeny spreading through the west?

Adam: I have no idea. I've never been to Israel, and my travels in Europe have had nothing to do with Judaism. I thought it was a great line, and I filed it away, and eventually this turned into a book fitting, I think, of the title. I grew up very marginally connected to Jewishness - got kicked out of the So You Think You Might Be Jewish Sunday School and Grill, didn't get Bar Mitzvahed, didn't grow up with religious parents or even grandparents. So for me, it's very hard to talk about "the Jews" because it's not a monolith; I'm very resistant to that notion and even more resistant to the idea that I'd be qualified to speak for them if it were. I can speak for myself, and my characters. That being said, I think the "end" is not so much about homogeny or spectacle, but about community, about the disappearance or the active destruction of traditional forms of identity, of fitting in, of understanding yourself in relation to a tradition in an uncomplicated way - whether religion, history, art or family.

I think that for every community there are outskirts, margins. And for every person nestled comfortably in the bosom of community, there's somebody feeling alienated, ostracized, conflicted, marginal, ambiguous - regardless of who is trying to include or exclude him or her. To me, those margins are where art comes from. And to pin it more closely to this book, it's where 20th century Jewish-American literature comes from. That's where Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Mailer, and Kazin were. That's what Chaim Potok wrote about, even though he was deeply religious. So everybody in this book is conflicted and is often surprised at the ways identity, religious and otherwise, is wielded - by them, and against them. The moments at which they claim Jewishness, or refuse to. The ways in which their creativity hinges on remaining on these margins, and the critical distance the margins allow - and also the pain inherent to that. At the same time, the spirit of inquiry at the heart of the Jewish tradition - which I most connect to - is also perhaps most operative from the margins. That's the spirit that gave us a Talmud with no margins - literally no margins, because motherfuckers couldn't stop arguing and rearguing the interpretations of these esoteric, self-generated laws, so they filled the whole page.

Buzz: This book links the margins that your Jewish characters inhabit to the margins that African Americans inhabit in this country, and I guess to continue, or butcher, the metaphor, the page is America. After meeting jazz musicians in Prague your character Nina, a photographer, moves to America. Early on in her stay, one of the players tells her: "[T]he legacy of black folks in America is so profound that it functions as a metaphor for all humanity." What is that metaphor?

Adam: The metaphor is about survival, connection, and creativity in the face of systematic brutality and deliberate attempts to destroy families, communities, languages, all forms of expression and humanity.

Buzz: What works of fiction did you keep close to you while working on The End of the Jews?

Adam: The Big Book of Jewish Humor and The Joy of Yiddish were deep-background reading – not so much because there's any Yiddish or any jokes in the book, but because they helped me think about Jewish sensibilities. New York Jew by Alfred Kazin was very important. I wish I remembered who recommended that book to me so I could thank them, but all I remember is reading it on a bus between New York and Boston. I worked on this novel for a long time, and certainly I read plenty, but I guess I don't so much hold books close when I'm writing. I read much more when I'm not writing, before I start, during breaks, that kind of thing. I suppose I made an effort to read or re-read the work of artists in Tristan's age-range, especially the Jews: Bellow, Roth, Malamud. I re-read some of what he'd have read as a young man: Kafka, Fitzgerald. I'm trying to remember some other folks who made an impact on me during this time I was writing this. Denis Johnson, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Russell Banks, James Baldwin, Tobias Wolff. I'm blanking on two-dozen other books, I'm sure.

Buzz: The End of the Jews is your third novel in 6 years. What's your writing routine?

Adam: I like to work as soon as my coffee's ready in the morning, and go as long as I can. I'm working on a first draft of a new book now, and it's been so long since I've been in that position that I'm kind of reinventing my writing process. I always long for the part I'm not currently engaged in: a first draft seems like the most fun when you're editing, and when you're writing it you can't wait to get to the end and go back and start shaping. I think I'm getting much slower as I age. I used to try to write 2,000 words a day. That amount seems ludicrous to me now. I have a home office, a garage converted into a studio, which I usually write in. But I also love to work in cafes, and I think I'm more focused when I'm not at home. I tend not to be able to work well unless I know I have a nice open vista of time ahead of me: no travel for a week or two, at least. Otherwise, I can only work on short stuff - stories, journalistic pieces.

- Editor @ 9:19 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

HEADLINE BOOK PROMPTS POST POST!

To the panoply of guilty pleasures this world has to offer, I humbly add the New York Post. I'm a Daily News man myself, but really, stuck inside a stalled subway car somewhere under the East River with nothing to read but those creepy Dr. Z acne treatment ads, who cares which paper turns up on an empty seat?

When it comes to reading, tabloid journalism is the Twinky at the tip of the food pyramid, and page one is its creamy center. When confronted with the new book assembled by the staff of the NY Post, Headless Body In Topless Bar: The Best Headlines from America’s Favorite Newspaper, I couldn't help myself. Knowing that a bellyache would accompany such indulgence, I still stuffed my face.

Of course, we are in the midst of a particularly salacious period of news in the City, which makes the book a timely read, er, leaf-through. Eliot Spitzer's nightmare is a headline writer's wet dream. Have a look at some recent Post fronts (March 11th's "HO NO!" is one of our favorites). All in keeping with the paper's motto, "All the news that's fit to bury beneath a mountain of hooker photos."

Ah, but a good hooker story comes along but once in a while. Luckily the Post has mastered the touchstone of any good tabloid front page: the cringe-inducing pun. On the conviction of a cybersex impresario: "YOU'VE GOT JAIL!" On the closing of a Dunkin' Donuts for rodents: "UNDER MOUSE ARREST." On earth's encounter with a worrisome piece of interstellar matter: "KISS YOUR ASTEROID GOODBYE!" The CIA should consider reading these headlines to prisoners as a substitute for waterboarding.

Yet, like a guy with a megaphone at an otherwise urbane cocktail party, the Post does command attention. Sometimes it even gets it just right. I like the front page from June 27, 2007: a photoshopped picture of Paris Hilton hoisted aloft on the hands of a throng in Times Square with the headline "V-D DAY! PARIS LIBERATED, BIMBOS REJOICE." Then, sometimes there's just no need to dress up a headline, such as on July 30 1985: "EATEN ALIVE! GIANT TIGERS KILL PRETTY ZOO KEEPER WHO 'LOVED ALL ANIMALS.'"

A New York Magazine survey named April 15, 1983's "HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR" the greatest NY Post headline of all time. As one Post editor puts it, "How do you tell a sensational story other than sensationally?" It's ironic though, that the title of this book is its climax. Sort of like the paper itself: the cover is generally the best part.

- Noah Deutsch @ 7:30 AM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

More Rooster Fun!

Mark Sarvas is the next to weigh in on this year's Tournament of Books, deciding between Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke and Vendela Vida's Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. He spends much of the review lamenting the early loss of Robert Bolano's The Savage Detectives (as Garth did here), but he's able to momentarily put his chagrin aside to judge the two novels at hand. Since I haven't read any of these three books, I can't agree or disagree with Sarvas' assessment. I was most interested, though, in the commentary by Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner. Guilfole wonders if Sarvas' description of Vida's novel as "effective if slight" is really praise at all. He goes on to say:

To be fair to Mark, I'm now going well beyond what I think is either his conscious or even subconscious intention, but the "slight" business in this case strikes me as vaguely sexist as well, as though a book about a young woman literally searching for her identity, no matter how skillfully it is rendered, could live up to the grand (at least judging by physical size) ambitions of either Bolano's or Johnson's opuses.

Guilfoile admits he might be reading too much into Sarvas' commentary because he loved Vida's novel so much, bit it did get me wondering: Was Sarvas correct in advancing Denis Johnson's novel because it is, in his words, the "Big Literary Book"?

There's also some interesting commentary, mainly by John Warner, about how Sarvas, with the publication of his debut book, Harry, Revised, is "about to make the complicated transition from critic to novelist." A sticky (and exhilarating) situation to be in, for sure.

- Edan Lepucki @ 5:55 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Appearing Elsewhere

NY-based readers are invited to "Step Inside the Book" at a reading/party I'm doing this Friday with Alex Rose (The Musical Illusionist) and Alex Itin (Orson Whales). Alex will be working his narrative/surroundsound magic, Other Alex will be screening his multimedia books, and I'll be showing art and reading fiction from A Field Guide to the North American Family. Drinks are on the house, I'm told, so if you're free, stop by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Swing Space, at 125 Maiden Lane, between 7 and 9 p.m. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming...

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 5:46 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Obama and the Faulkner Quote

Barack Obama gave a speech today taking on the complicated history of racial relations in America. Considering the how difficult a topic this is to tackle, it was a brave move. Embedded within the speech was a quote from Faulkner, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past."

Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic ran a letter from a reader explaining why "what Obama was signaling - that his speech - and his candidacy - are about confronting history from a Faulknerian standpoint was, to me, the bravest thing he did."

This famous Faulkner quote was spoken by Gavin Stevens, "the intellectual, philosophical, and deucedly clever county attorney," according to one reviewer at the time. Stevens turns up in several works by Faulkner, including the "Snopes trilogy" (The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion) and stories collected in Go Down, Moses and Knight's Gambit.

Obama got the spirit of the quote right, though not quite the wording. It's actually simpler and more stark: "The past is never dead. It's not even past," and it refers to the way in which history seemed to haunt Southerners. The quote is taken from Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun, a book that is part prose and part play, a sequel to Sanctuary, and generally not considered one of Faulkner's best works.

Obama meant the quote in a sense that captures the spirit of Faulkner's South, that the legacy of our country's racial history is so present all around us that it can't really be considered "past." Interestingly enough, though, the phrase has been borrowed from time to time to refer to the way in which our political campaigns have a way of repeating themselves. In 2004, Robin Toner in the New York Times trotted out a variant of Faulkner's famous line - "The past, in other words, is never really dead in presidential campaigns. It's not even past." - to cap off a column describing how the Republicans used very much the same gameplan in going after John Kerry in 2004 as they did Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Perhaps more relevant to the current race was the prominent placement the quote was given by Time magazine's neocon columnist William Kristol about a year ago. His take: "For major political parties, which outlive their individual leaders and partisans, the past is never dead." He went on to posit that the ultimate nominees 2008 campaign would be in the mold of a pair of beloved, departed politicians, Robert Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. It's looking possible that Kristol will be half right in his guess that the RFK legacy will be filled by Obama; Fred Thompson as Reagan reincarnate is looking less prescient, however.

These examples, though they arise from a different context entirely, can nonetheless be contrasted with Obama's wielding of Faulkner. In what might be called an echo of the central themes of his candidacy, Obama used the Faulkner quote not in terms of the political reruns that go on cycle after cycle, but in terms of facing up to - and trying to get past - a difficult history.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:22 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Froot Loop Followup: Knowledge Products

Borders' plan to display more books face-out and, as a result, to stock fewer titles has generated quite a bit of discussion. On our own post about the plan, we received several interesting comments, but I was most intrigued by what commenter Matthew had to say:

The Froot Loops example is classic thinking from retailers who enter bookselling from another retail environment.

The next time I go down to my local chain Cerealseller to choose my cereal for this week from among the 150,000 cereals on offer Mr Froot Loop can come and offer me some buying advice.

Finally, the point of facing out is to attract attention to specific titles from the larger product range. The larger product range sells fewer copies of individual titles, but sells well by total volume... it also serves to attract serious bookbuyers and lend kudos to the bookstore.

If chains chose to employ staff with knowledge (and local control) of that enormous range then they'd have a most effective sales tool. These retail gurus need to spend less time in supermarkets and more time at beauty counters and in cell phone stores. Books are a knowledge product requiring retail guidance and salesmanship... do these guys spend as long with their Wheaties as they do with a novel?

Emphasis mine. What Matthew has so deftly put into words is something I've mulled over since my bookselling days but never quite found the right words for. I've always known that knowledgeable booksellers are a huge asset to any bookstore - I was lucky to be surrounded by many when I worked at one - but I had never fully grasped what it means to sell a "knowledge product" as opposed to a "commodity product," nor had it occured that generally products can be described as one or the other.

What's key here is the distinction between how knowledge products are sold versus commodity products. To use Matthew's example, when buying a cell phone or going to the beauty counter, you are confronted with many dozens of choices offering an array of specific features suited to a variety of specific needs - bluetooth or dry skin, for example. When it comes to breakfast cereal, you don't need the guidance as much. The product is cheaper, "wrong" choices cost less, and cereal box mascots aside, one type is generally as good as another.

Viewed in this light, it's crazy to try to sell books as a commodity product because, (and this is just a guess) out of all the retail categories out there, bookstores by far offer the widest array of products, and therefore would require the most guidance and the best systems to help customers find what they are looking for. Undoubtedly, there are many knowledgeable booksellers at chain stores, but if the chains continue to view books as commodity products, their booksellers' efforts will be futile. It's also clear why Amazon has been so hugely successful. The site is the ultimate resource for selling knowledge products, with a wealth of information at the ready for anyone looking for a book. It's possible that, thanks to the internet, the costs are simply too high for chains to go the knowledge-product route, but running in the other direction, towards Froot Loops, hardly seems the answer.

For those still interested in this issue even after all this, check out these links:

• GalleyCat wonders if face-out books will put more emphasis on cover design and follows up with further questions about the co-op payment aspect of this.
• The Stranger guesses we'll see more extremely popular and/or bad books face-out at the expense of those hidden gems.
• A dissenting opinion

- C. Max Magee @ 8:10 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Posthumous Vonnegut Collection on the Way

Kurt Vonnegut fans will be interested to know that a collection of previously unpublished non-fiction is set to be published by Penguin in April, a year after his death. From the catalog:

Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of twelve new and unpublished writings on war and peace. Written with Vonnegut's trademark rueful humor, the pieces range from a visceral nonfiction recollection of the destruction of Dresden during World War II - a piece that is as timely today as it was then - to a painfully funny story about three privates and their fantasies of the perfect first meal upon returning home from war; to a darker and more poignant story about the impossibility of shielding our children from the temptations of violence. This is a volume that says as much about the times in which we live as it does about the genius of the man who wrote it. Also included here is Vonnegut's last speech, as well as an assortment of his drawings, and an introduction by the author's son, Mark Vonnegut.

I'm also told that Mark Vonnegut's introduction, "sheds some light on their family life and Kurt's writing habits."

- C. Max Magee @ 7:34 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Curiosities

• The Economist's nifty, new(?) culture mag More Intelligent Life is putting together guides to the best critics, including those who cover books; film; dance, art, and classical music, and rock music. Scott has performed a similar exercise for book reviewers, as well.
• Polite magazine: "Where Are They Now? A visit with Encyclopedia Brown"
• The estimable New York Sun books section follows our lead in adding a review archive.
• Nextbook asks: Where have all Bernard Malamud's readers gone?
• Vroman's, a legendary Southern California independent bookstore and the employer of Millions contributor Patrick, has been named Bookseller of the Year by PW.
• Richard Russo:"My fictional Eliot [Spitzer] would be complex, would contain paradoxes. He would not be a hypocrite. My Eliot would believe with his whole heart in his crusades against the corrupt and the powerful and the privileged, even as he worked studiously to undermine his legacy. Fiction can accommodate such paradoxes, provided they're explained."
• An open letter to Steve Jobs pleading for Apple to create an iPod optimized for "a best-of-breed reading experience." (via)
• One of our most anticipated books, Jonathan Littell's novel Les Bienveillantes won't be out in English for a while yet, but a new translation into German offers an opportunity for another review to trickle out.
• There are 1,000 Places to See Before You Die and 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, but forget all that and "Read this column before you die."

- Editor @ 6:19 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Borders and the Froot Loop Gambit

A recent Wall Street Journal story (I'll summarize here if you can't access it), is reporting that Borders intends to "sharply [increase] the number of titles it displays on shelves with the covers face-out." It is hoped that this move will increase sales, but "the new approach will require a typical Borders superstore to shrink its number of titles by 5% to 10%."

The article goes on to note that "Reducing inventory goes against the grain of booksellers' efforts over the past 25 years or so. Chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble Inc., the nation's largest book retailer, became household names with superstores that stocked as many as 150,000 titles or more. The rise of Amazon.com Inc., which offers a vast selection online, made it even more important for stores to offer deep inventories." A little later, the reporter concludes, "With the book market facing unmitigated gloom, Borders has little choice but to experiment."

I've talked about chain stores and how they do and don't satisfy the avid reader: In "What Makes a Bookstore?", a golden oldie from about four years ago, I granted that "when it comes to hanging out, it's hard to beat the chains." But I relish and much prefer the relevance of a good independent bookstore, which should allow one to "walk into the bookstore and be able to grasp, based upon which books are on display and based upon conversations with staff and fellow customers, what matters at that moment both in the wider world and in the neighborhood."

In this framework, putting ever more books face-out and thinning inventory is exactly the opposite of what I want a bookstore to do. The failure of chain bookstores is that they try to make the bookstore experience like any other retail experience, placing the merchandise just so in the hopes that it will entice the shopper. Indeed, according to the WSJ, "The new display strategy is the brainchild of CEO George Jones, who says he learned when he was a buyer at Dillard's Inc. early in his career that dresses sell better when the entire garment is shown rather than hung sleeve-out." John Deighton, editor of the Journal of Consumer Research, has a similar point of view. "'Breakfast cereals are not stocked end-of-box out,' he says. 'You want to your product to be as enticing as possible. It's a little bizarre that it's taken booksellers this long to realize that the point of self-service is to make the product as tempting as possible.'"

And who knows, tests have shown that "sales of individual titles were 9% higher than at similar Borders stores." Still, further down this path lies the ultimate in bookselling vapidity, the airport bookstore, where all the books are face-out, and the desperate traveler is forced to choose between bad or worse.

As I thought about turning books into so many boxes of Froot Loops, the article left me with a final question. Many bookstore regulars may not be aware that bookstores, from chains to indies, accept what's called "co-op" from publishers. Ostensibly, this is money that is meant to help market certain titles. In practice, co-op money dictates display areas, what ends up on prominent front-of-store tables, and, yes, face out placement on shelves. The article doesn't mention co-op explicitly, but I wonder if this is another motivation for Borders. If so, putting books face-out may lead to incrementally more sales, but it may also bring in more marketing cash from publishers, and the end result is an ever more pre-packaged, market-tested, one size fits all experience for readers.

Edit: Thanks to F.S. for the correct spelling of "Froot."

- C. Max Magee @ 7:28 PM ~ comments: 14 ~ Links to this post

 

Thorny Technology: Open Access Causes Problems at the Iowa Writers Workshop

Emails are circulating among various current and former students from the famed Iowa Writers Workshop expressing concern over the University of Iowa's new "Open Access" policy with regard to theses. These include MFA theses, which, according to our own Workshop grad Edan, might typically consist of a "book-length manuscript... poems, short stories or a novel (either completed or partially completed)." She added, "I turned in a bunch of stories, and I might not have included a couple if I knew they would be made public online...they were experiments more than anything, writing by a student."

For creative writing students (and their colleagues in Iowa's creative non-fiction MFA), of primary concern is that MFA theses will be "freely available over the internet at no cost to the enduser, and can be located via search engines such as Google." In so many words, their fiction, poetry, and non-fiction will be given away for free before they have the chance to get it published, thus wrecking opportunities for remuneration and resume-building.

As is so often the case with these thorny technology issues, however, we should take care not to paint the situation with too broad a brush, otherwise we run the risk of sounding shrill and out of touch, while progress marches inexorably onward.

Lest any concerned Workshop grads think that Iowa is pulling a fast one, the history of the Open Access movement in acedemia is long and not without controversy. The Wikipedia article on the topic places the seeds of the movement as early as the 1940s, long before Google became a favorite bogeyman of those wary of technological advances. Admittedly, however, the movement really took hold at the advent of the internet, when the fruits of Open Access could be realized in full. Peter Suber, an academic who is one of the more prominent voices on Open Access, defines it in its simplest terms as follows: "Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder." In academic communities, Open Access has potentially huge importance, allowing scientists and scholars to easily gain access to the work of their colleagues. After all, scholarship in nearly all fields is built upon the work of scholars that went before.

Of course, the Iowa writers are arguing, with creative work, the calculation is different. Writers learn from reading other writers, but a novel doesn't cite previous novels explicitly. Ernest Hemingway doesn't direct his readers via footnote to Sherwood Anderson, for example. And so, the Open Access framework would appear to be flawed when it comes to theses produced by the students in the Iowa Writers Workship, as it is both irrelevant to their discipline and potentially damaging to their future careers.

At the same time, it would seem to me that the Iowa Writers Workshop, and any MFA programs that follow the same practice, do their students a disservice by deciding to call their students' culminating works, "graduate theses." In the academic world, terms like this have concrete meanings, and there are - sometimes unwritten - rules that govern their usage. Perhaps it would be too much too suggest that calling the final projects of MFAs "theses" is overcompensation by programs that have an inferiority complex when compared to the more grounded academic displines, but Iowa and other programs should be aware of these rules in the first place. There is also the ever-present argument that we are in a digital world, and aspiring writers need to think creatively about working with the openness and freedom that the internet offers, even in the face of potential copyright confusion. At the same time, and at Iowa especially, universities should be cognizant of the peculiar requirements of creative fields and strive not to do any harm to their students' futures by with blanket, unnuanced policies like the one that Iowa is attempting to force on its MFAs.

Bonus Links:

• Iowa's "First Deposit Checklist" for theses and dissertations where Open Access has become mandatory. (pdf)
• Dan Wickett digs a bit more into the details of the Iowa controversy
• Earthgoat posts some of the emails that have been circulating among Iowa alums. See the comments for subsequent emails and further discussion.
• Megan Pillow gets comments from a handful of prominent Workshop grads at HuffPost.
• Open Access backer Peter Suber offers some very useful analysis of the issue on his blog.

- C. Max Magee @ 12:42 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

The Eye of the Beholder: A Review of Charles Bock's Beautiful Children

According to John Updike's "Rules for Reviewers," critics review books, rather than reputations. Then again, most readers also expect reviewers to situate a book in its proper generic context, and here Charles Bock's debut novel presents a sort of paradox. Beautiful Children's burgeoning reputation - the unusual amount of attention it has garnered from media outlets including The New York Times and this blog - positions it as a literary novel for grownups, part of the great tradition that runs from Flaubert through Updike and down to Rick Moody (the writer to whom Bock is most often compared). In at least one respect, this claim may have merit. But at the level of several of the basic elements of fiction - plot, character, setting, prose style, themes - the book comes across as something quite different: less a novel about its titular children than a novel for them.

The story centers on - or circles around - the disappearance of 13-year-old Newell Ewing one summer night in Las Vegas. At first, we surmise that Newell has been kidnapped; later it turns out that he has run away. Specifics notwithstanding, the novel insists on the magnitude of Newell's fate by tracing its effect on other characters, much as Rutherford studied the nucleus by examining the way it scattered smaller particles. And so Beautiful Children takes on complexity, moving backward and forward through the lives of nearly a dozen characters, at times quite beautifully. The melodrama of Newell's disappearance may enforce narrative momentum, but it's the fractal structure of the novel that actually earns it. Like Donald Kaufman in the movie Adaptation, Charles Bock is "good with structure."

The problem is that he seems unsure how to fill a structure meaningfully. Inner life, in Beautiful Children, consists more of sordid backstory than of consciousness, or perhaps Bock sees the two as interchangeable terms. With the possible exception of Newell's father, his characters never rise above the level of caricature. He seems unwilling to imagine a thinking, feeling human being sinking to the depths of the novel's sleazier denizens. But our literature is full of characters who are unpalatable but alive, like Joseph Heller's Slocum, or Henry James' many schemers.

Bock's discomfort with interior life puts an added pressure on the surface details he uses to deliver characters, and here, too he falters. The strained banter of the younger characters consists largely of dated catch-phrases - for realz - and their attire, on which Bock lavishes detail, tells us little more. Beautiful Children is the sort of novel that refers to a major character only as The Girl With the Shaved Head, as though that, at this late date in history, still connotes anything.

To the extent that plot arises from human choices, the novel's characterological vacuum sucks steadily at the foundations of its story. Because Newell is so generically a pain in the ass, and because his sorrows exist mainly to serve Bock's tee-shirty themes - Modern Life is Rubbish; Growing Up is Hard - his actual disappearance, when we witness it, seems wholly unmotivated. The many events that follow from it chronologically (though they precede it in the novel) become random, the products of a counterfactual.

Bock seems to sense and to fear the moral unintelligibility his book builds toward, and attempts to salvage significance in fits of inflationary prose. As one suspicious reader's letter to the Times pointed out, Bock's grandiosity is often clumsy:

Electricity lit up Ponyboy's skeletal structure as if it were a pinball machine on a multi-ball extravaganza, and the mingling odors of brimstone and sulfur and sweat and burning skin filled Ponyboy's nostrils.

But I'm not convinced that Beautiful Children doesn't sometimes stumble into a kind of Dreiserian grandeur. And, as I learned from Charles McGrath's profile of the author, Bock came to writing rather late; his sentences may, with time, mellow into eloquence. Likewise, his gift for warping narrative time into audacious shapes seems to hint at better novels to come. On the strength of word-of-mouth, this one could have found a respectable natural audience: seventeen-year-olds eager to hear their melancholy reaffirmed, explicitly. But now, through the good offices of Random House et al, the woeful tale of Newell Ewing will have to contend with the expectations of a much larger group of readers...at least one of whom holds out hope that Bock's bestseller status won't blind him to the need to work harder to satisfy those expectations. That might be an actual tragedy.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 9:03 AM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask Not For Whom The Rooster Crows...

Apparently, Vendela Vida has bested Roberto Bolaño in the first round of The Morning News' "Tournament of Books" (via TEV). With all due respect to Elizabeth Kiem, that way lies madness. Here's why.

Ah, well. De gustibus non est disputandum.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 8:48 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Deeper into the Quicksand

Today's Elliot Spitzer scandal sent me back to the New Yorker archives, to revisit Nick Paumgarten's excellent profile, from December 10. This time around, I was struck less by the "what you see is what you get" thesis of some Spitzer intimates, than by this proposition, from an unnamed source: "Spitzer lunges. He seems not to be a person of strategy. He slipped on a banana peel, or six, and once down has thrashed around." It remains to be seen if, amid the thrashing, his newfound talent for "extracting oneself from an intractable position" holds up.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 9:24 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Staff Picks: Coen, Beatty, Egan, Gentlemen

The "staff picks" shelf in any good independent bookstore is a treasure trove of book recommendations. Unmoored from media hype and even timeliness, these books are championed by trusted fellow readers. With many bookselling alums in our ranks, we offer our own "Staff Picks" in a feature appearing irregularly.

Gates of Eden by Ethan Coen recommended by Andrew

A treat for fans of the multiple-Oscar-winning Coen brothers, and for anyone who likes to spend some time in that grey area where the darkly comic and the absurdly tragic intersect. Published ten years ago, this collection of prose from the Ethan half of the Coen brothers comes from the same delightfully twisted mind that gave us rapid-fire gangster pastiches like Miller's Crossing, and tough-talking old-time men-of-action like Michael Lerner's studio honcho in Barton Fink.

There's a story of a boxer who never manages to lay a punch and who gets caught up in a war between rival gangsters. Another tale takes us back to Minneapolis (the Coen's home town) where the Mafia have decided to set-up shop. There are some plays in this collection too, loaded with savagely funny dialogue. You can almost hear Steve Buscemi or John Goodman or John Turturro or any of the other Coen regulars sinking their chops into these characters.

The White-Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty recommended by Garth

This is one of those novels I loved so much circa my senior year of high school that I'm almost afraid to reread it, in case it's not as great as I remembered. Thumbing back through the first few chapters, I'm noticing that Beatty shares a riff-intensive prose style with Colson Whitehead and Jonathan Lethem. Unlike those writers, however, he seems more inclined to pursue satire than high art. Still, Beatty's natural emotional pallette - a kind of pissed-off innocence - and his poet's eye for the absurd, pushes his story beyond the didactic. Narrator Gunnar Kaufman may transform himself from scholarship athlete to celebrity-poet-messiah (see? I said it was satire), but he remains, underneath, someone we know and care about... especially when we ourselves are pissed-off innocents. Is it premature to recommendThe White Boy Shuffle as a graduation present?

The Keep by Jennifer Egan recommended by Edan

The Keep by Jennifer Egan manages to be both inventive and readable, character and plot driven, playful with genre conventions but also straightforward in its prose style. Egan draws you into a Gothic tale of an old, creepy castle, and the reunion of two cousins with a vicious secret between them, but it's not long before the narrator announces himself as an outsider to the story (or is he?!), pulling another, wholly different, storyline into the mix. The threads of the various plots converge marvelously at the novel's end, and you can't help but love how fun this book is - fun and smart.

The Modern Gentleman: A Guide to Essential Manners, Savvy & Vice by Phineas Mollod and Jason Tesauro recommended by Timothy

Not all self-help books are beholden to the latest new-age or pop psychology craze. In The Modern Gentleman: A Guide to Essential Manners, Savvy & Vice, authors Phineas Mollod and Jason Tesauro offer timeless, entertaining tips on how today's man can improve his wardrobe, grooming habits and love of literature, while keeping in mind his affinity for sexual intimacy, a day at the track and alcohol consumption. The book's wit is second only to its practicality, from how to host a memorable dinner party to advice on handling inquiries from a potential mate about past lovers (charts included). The Modern Gentleman also makes for lively conversation when guests spot it casually displayed among coffee table reading material.

Some choice excerpts:

Honking - When lively conversation in the cabin boils over in delight, give a medium burst to alert the heavens to such joy.

Swearing - There's a high degree of cliche among cursers. Mix and match the filthy classics to create a string of fresh phrases that highlight your keen wit and local tongue.

Hiccoughing - If at the cinema, suggest the hiccougher overstuff his mouth with buttery popcorn until breathing is labored and then insert one Milk Dud for good measure. While this procedure may prove ineffective, it is delicious.

Bow ties - Never divulge to a rogue the bow tie's true ease of knot - let's keep it between us gentlemen, shall we?

This book is both a lyrical masterpiece and a cultural gem.

- Editor @ 5:10 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Millet and Southgate Reading Tomorrow

Tomorrow, March 11, at 7 p.m., readers who find themselves in or near Brooklyn are invited to come here two of our "Year in Reading" participants, Lydia Millet and Martha Southgate, read at the Pacific Standard Fiction Series. The series (which I host) was just named "Best New Literary Event" of 2008 by New York Magazine, and this latest installment should be outstanding. Hope to see you there. (Pacific Standard is located at 82 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, between Bergen St. and St. Mark's Place, convenient to most trains).

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 10:12 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Amazon Spends Millions on Beedle the Bard

Amazon has locked down a rare piece of Harry Potter ephemera far a tidy sum.

We're incredibly excited to announce that Amazon has purchased J.K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard at an auction held by Sotheby's in London. The book of five wizarding fairy tales, referenced in the last book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is one of only seven handmade copies in existence. The purchase price was £1,950,000 [$3.93 million], and Ms. Rowling is donating the proceeds to The Children's Voice campaign, a charity she co-founded to help improve the lives of institutionalized children across Europe.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard is extensively illustrated and handwritten by the bard herself--all 157 pages of it. It's bound in brown Moroccan leather and embellished with five hand-chased hallmarked sterling silver ornaments and mounted moonstones.

Since this is a particularly difficult volume to get one's hands on, and since there are likely many curious Potter fans out there, Amazon has offered up a special review of the book, along with images from its pages. (Thanks, Laurie)

Update: Yes, it turns out this happened in December. So: old news, but new to me, and perhaps to you too.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:42 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Curiosities

• Garth, Ben, Andrew and Max appear in today's "Digest" at The Morning News. The topic is movies based on books. Also at TMN: the Tournament of Books is underway.
• Readers with an interest in sales figures for books and their drawbacks should take a look at the comments of our follow-up post on the Beautiful Children free book promotion. Several anonymous commenters, whom one suspects are probably industry insiders, have shared their insights.
• A quick but interesting interview with Paul Theroux. This summer, Theroux's Ghost Train to the Eastern Star will be published. In it, he retraces his path from The Great Railway Bazaar thirty years ago. (via)
• The National Book Critics Circle Award winners have been announced. In the fiction category, Junot Díaz took home the prize for The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. Díaz was a part of our Year in Reading in December.
• The finalists have been announced for the Kiriyama Prize, which recognizes books that "relate in some significant way to the Pacific Rim or South Asia, to a particular culture or part(s) of these regions, or to people from these regions." Among them is I Love Dollars by Zhu Wen, which was reviewed here by Ben, from which a blurb was used on the Kiriyama Prize site.
• The Stranger reminds us of our bookselling days, chasing those damn book thieves down the street.
• The Observer reports on two new bylines arriving at the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh and Ariel Levy of the New York Times and New York respectively. (via)
• Literary frauds are all over the news again, and the LA Times serves up a delightful accounting of hoaxers going all the way back to the 1700s. (via)
• We are all stereotypical readers: "The British buy books by television personalities, Americans are obsessed with self-improvement, French choices are more highbrow, the Germans like holidays while the Japanese have more eclectic tastes." (via)
• A new issue of The Quarterly Conversation is out. Among the offerings: over- and underrated books and Sam J. Miller's essay positing that short stories are far from dead, as some big names would have you think.
• Apple head honcho Steve Jobs told the New York Times in January that "people don't read anymore." The Raleigh Quarerly took umbrage and is now holding a contest that asks for submissions "featuring a main character named, uh, Steve, who reads something that transforms his life."

- Editor @ 12:39 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Appearing Elsewhere

Millions contributor Edan won second prize in StoryQuarterly's Fall 2007 fiction contest for "Animals." Congrats Edan! The story is now up on the site. You have to register (for free) to read the whole thing.

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

 

A Modest Proposal

It's come to our attention that one of this season's ballyhooed debut novelists goes by the handle Andrew Foster Altschul. Now there are a number of reasons for using the middle name - maybe he's into trochaic hexameter; maybe he's from a Spanish-speaking country; maybe he wants to avoid being confused with that other Andrew Altschul (we can sympathize). But it also occurred to us that, given the cover design for Mr. Altschul's 600-page debut, Lady Lazarus, customers who forgot to bring their glasses to the bookstore may mistake the novel for some new release by David Foster Wallace. Which, marketing-wise, could turn out to be a happy accident. If all goes well, we'd like to see marketing departments rebrand some of their top-selling authors. Coming soon to a book jacket near you:Chuck Kloster Fosterman, Wallace Foster Davidson, Robert Froster, William Faulkster, Jonathan Safran Fo(st)er, E.M. Fo'ster, J.K.F. Rowling, Kaye Foster Gibbons (author of Ellen Gibbons Foster), Alfred, Lord Fostrington, The Marquis de Fosterford, Foster Coraghessan Boyle, Foster Madox Foster, Haldor Foster Laxness, and Fabriel Fostria Farquez?

- Garth Foster Hallberg @ 12:05 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post