Hairstyles of the Damned

I was tipped off to Joe Meno’s Hairstyles of the Damned by Tim when my “to-read” pile was down to the felt and I needed something to take with me on a trip. Knowing that I’m some kind of punk at heart, the cover certainly made it look like a match. And judging by the general description of the book, which in my mind likened it to King Dork and others of its ilk, I was willing to invest myself in this guy — all 270 pages of it.

The book is told in the first person by Brian Oswald, and tells of the stretch between Halloween of his Junior year in high school (in 1990) and Halloween of his Senior year (in, uhm, 1991). Brian lived on the south side of Chicago, in a predominantly Irish Catholic area, and was by all accounts (including this one) your stereotypical dork. He was somewhat of an outcast, although it was never altogether clear to me whether that was voluntary or was the lot that life threw him without any say in the matter. Regardless, he recounts the events of the year in question by talking about his weird friends, his weird family, and the strange characters who populated his high school and his neigborhood. Lots of talk of cars and girls and bullies and cool kids and music.

The book is divided into three sections, each of which starts with a new Chapter One, and each of which is primarily focused on the goings-on with the newest “best” friend that Brian had latched onto at that point. The first section was focused on Gretchen, the heavy punk rock girl that he considered his best friend, spent all of his time with, and secretly lusted after. The second section was about Mike, Brian’s stoner history class project partner, and Dorie, Mike’s neighbor. The third part was Nick, the skate punk whose attitude, and whose acceptance of Brian, finally gave our protagonist a sense of self-esteem.

Unlike King Dork, in which the high school lives of our main characters are interwoven with a deeper murder mystery storyline, there really wasn’t much of a “plot” in this book. It was linear (always a plus for simple-minded folks like me), but the “story” was really not about what happened, but rather about Brian Oswald’s journey of self-discovery — his varying attempts at different lifestyles and attitudes that would make him comfortable with himself.

Not a bad book, and a pretty easy read. But this one also didn’t resonate too deeply with me, either. Not because I was never a dork, but more because my high school, and my neighborhood, and my friends, and my enemies, were just so different than those described in this book; sort of like a John Hughes film — I get it, and I laughed some, but I didn’t relate because it didn’t remind me of any of my own experiences.

(Read Tim’s review of Hairstyles.)

The Invention of Everything Else

The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt was the second book in what became an unplanned trilogy written by female authors that featured both Science and men of Questionable Psychological Soundness as focal points that I read in sequence. (The first was Rivka Galchen’s excellent Atmospheric Disturbances. For ten points and a possible bonus, can you guess the third?)

The Invention of Everything Else is a charming novel that imagines the last days of Nikola Tesla. Thomas Edison is remembered in this country as the father of electricity, but Hunt reminds us that Tesla developed the inventions that made modern electricity possible. He was also the inventor of the radio, but got screwed over by that Marconi guy.

Tesla arrived in this country when New York was lit by gas lamps, there were no cars, and two world wars had yet to take place. Needless to say, he was a witness to some fairly dramatic changes in NYC. The novel takes place in 1943 when Tesla is an old man living in a world that has been utterly transformed by his inventions. Rather than living in comfort from the proceeds of his inventions, Tesla lives alone and virtually penniless as a charity case at The New Yorker Hotel – then the tallest building in New York City. The scientist laments:

Some days I forget how completely I have been forgotten.

At The New Yorker, Tesla becomes friendly with Louisa, a maid at the hotel, whose own story is told alongside that of Tesla’s. As the reader begins to realize that Tesla may not be entirely in his right mind, it also becomes apparent that other men in Louisa’s life are battling their own demons. Through their shared stories, Samantha Hunt examines the big themes of loss, grief, transcendence, reality, the creative impulse, and the power of human connections. The Invention of Everything Else is an inventive novel that I cheerfully recommend.

The great tragedy of Tesla’s life is that he didn’t have (or want) the PR know-how or the business acumen sufficient to propel him to the fame and fortune that he justly deserved. On the plus side for Tesla, he is experiencing something of a belated comeback. David Bowie did a great job portraying Tesla in the movie The Prestige. There is also an electric car company, Tesla Motors, that may bring him some belated recognition.

Read an excerpt of the novel.

Shindig Alert

Don’t forget, Wordsmiths Books will be celebrating their one year anniversary in grand style this weekend, June 13-15. Some of the highlights:

Friday: Live music from 7-11 PM. Four bands. All awesome.

Saturday:

• Poetry Atlanta takes the stage at 2 PM
• I will be boiling crawfish on Decatur Square, which I am told is entirely legal, starting in the early evening.  Hopefully it won’t be 97 degrees while I’m standing next to a giant cauldron of boiling water.
• At 7PM the Bobbie Faye Fais Do-Do Crawfish Boil and Author Shindig officially gets under way featuring Toni McGee Causey and three other top-shelf authors.  With luck, the crawfish will be ready.

Sunday:

• I’m not much of a reality show watcher, but I am told by those int he know that Richard Blais’ appearance to sign Top Chef: The Cookbook might be a bigger deal than me boiling crawfish. 2PM.
• Even more chefs descend on The ‘smiths to sign Atlanta Cooks at 4PM.

As a bonus, Wordsmiths’ Russ has declared that if 50 people tell him that they heard about the weekend’s events via Facebook, he will eat a crawfish.  Since Russ often waxes poetic about vegetarian crab cakes, this may be a big deal.  I say whether or not you have a Facebook account, find Russ and tell him that’s where you heard the news.

See Wordsmiths for more info on all of the events.  All are free. Don’t worry, I’ll remind you.

Rory’s Reads

An enterprising soul has set up a forum to list all of the books that Rory read or discussed on The Gilmore Girls (via Largehearted Boy). If we can get someone to set up something similar for the show’s musical references and then cross-reference both collections, then I think that we’ll be onto something.

American Pastoral

I don’t know how I missed out on the novels of Philip Roth for so long. Though I’d heard references to his work, read the occasional review, listened to the Fresh Air interviews, and thought, “Hey, this guy sounds interesting. I should read some of his books,” I never got around to reading any until Shortbus loaned me her copy of The Plot Against America soon after it came out. It mesmerized me.

I didn’t go back for seconds until last month, when I picked up American Pastoral for a beach trip. I wasn’t the least bit disappointed. In the course of this deceptively complex novel (while I was reading it all seemed so matter-of fact, but I still can’t quite explain its structure and how Roth’s alter ego, the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, fits into the plot), Roth creates one of the most generous, humanistic, three-dimensional characters I can remember coming across, in Seymour “Swede” Levov.

The Swede is an all-American boy and great athlete who also happens to be a third-generation immigrant, inheritor of an industrial age family business (just as the US economy enters the post-industrial age), and father of a mass-murdering political radical. He carries way too much symbolism for one man to bear, but somehow he pulls it off. That’s The Swede for you.

I can’t get over Roth’s prodigious output over the span of forty years. So as I read this novel I couldn’t stop thinking about what Roth did to produce it. To crank these things out he must have to hole himself up for months at a time and get lost in his own fictional worlds, right? But to fill them with so much insight about the human condition and particularly American dilemmas, he has to be of the world and out in it–striking up conversations with strangers at supermarkets, mentally recording snippets of conversations from cocktail parties, devouring news–doesn’t he? How does he do it?.

Thank you TiVo

My TiVo thought that I might want to see Salman Rushdie on The Colbert Report. Yes, please.

Support Your Locals

I love this cover of The New Yorker’s fiction issue:

Have you seen the the heavy hitters included in this year’s edition? Nabokov!

Yes We Can

Today’s editorial:

Other items of interest:

• Cable and Tweed explores the Ignatius J. Reilly/Batman connection. Awesome.
• Coming to theaters this summer, Luc Sante’s The Book Collection that Devoured My Life.
• The Las Vegas Sun hosts a literary cage match.
• Speaking of the absurd – Condaleeza Rice joined the Kiss Army.

Late to the Party: A Brief Review of The Raw Shark Texts

When my birthday money came in at the beginning of May it went straight back out to the bookstore. I finally got on the Steven Hall bandwagon and grabbed a copy of The Raw Shark Texts. I was reading something else at the time (review to follow soon) and put my new book aside for a bit. This past week I finally grabbed it and started reading. By the end of the first page I was engaged, and by the end of this weekend I was unable to concentrate on anything else. Like Shaft, I considered just posting a comment about this book but comments won’t suffice for a book like this. I want to talk about it endlessly and force a copy into the hand of everyone I know who hasn’t already read it.

I may be late to the party but I’m having a great time.

If you haven’t read this book yet please call in sick for the rest of the week so you can.

Tim: Can you arrange for Hall to be back in the US for my birthday next year?

Fun Lovin’ Criminals

Confirming what many of us have known all along, Atlanta’s Criminal Records has been named the best record store in the free world. Well, duh.

Law & Order: Special Literature Unit

Teenagers arrested for vandalizing the home of Robert Frost have been sentenced to take a poetry class. Cruel and unusual indeed. The teacher hopes “to show the vandals the error of their ways, and the redemptive power of poetry.” Said the prosecutor of the tops of his rose-colored glasses:

I guess I was thinking that if these teens had a better understanding of who Robert Frost was and his contribution to our society, that they would be more respectful of other people’s property in the future and would also learn something from the experience.

Uh huh.

The Blue Star

I fell in love with Tony Earley’s work when I was in college and he published a short story titled “Charlotte” in Harpers. If you had grown up in the Atlanta suburbs, as I did, and gone to college in Chapel Hill, as I did, with a bunch of people from Charlotte, you would have come to think of Charlotteans just as I did: nouveau riche johnny-come-latelies whose hometown rolled up the sidewalks at night, had no soul, and, in general, sucked. (I knew even then, of course, that Atlantans are the last people on earth who should think of anyone else in those terms, but back then we were fixin’ to host The Olympics and were Hot Stuff. Seems like eons ago.)

“Charlotte” was, on one level, about a guy who hung around a fern bar in the city of the same name where all the regulars moaned about the good ol’ days and lamented the fact that all the professional wrestlers had decamped from their city for Ted Turner’s filthy lucre. It captured what I disliked most about Charlotte and was, at least as I recall it, very, very snarky.

Tony Earley’s novels, Jim the Boy and The Blue Star, are the exact opposite of snarky. I love them anyway. They ease right up to the edge of nostalgia and sentimentality without quite tipping over.

If my folks hadn’t moved to Atlanta I would have been something like a 7th- or 8th-generation North Carolinian, and some of my people grew up in towns very much like Earley’s Yoknapatawphic Aliceville, N.C. The funny uncles in Jim the Boy and The Blue Star remind me a lot of my funny uncles. The pride of place and intense connection to family that Earley’s Jim feels, mixed with equal parts of the sheer boredom of small-town life and desire to get away from confining surroundings, strike me viscerally, even though my experience has been a few degrees removed from the experience Earley writes about so movingly. (I’m sure that my parents moved to Atlanta at least in part because their hometown was too much like Aliceville.)

One astute reviewer of The Blue Star pointed out that in these books Earley uses the techniques and conventions of young adult fiction to explore adult themes. I wish I’d been smart enough to notice that on my own, but I think it describes these novels perfectly and helps describe the tension that the novels create without seeming to create any tension at all. In any case, I identify with Earley’s characters totally and want to see them succeed and be happy.

Speaking of tension… I don’t know what it was–I guess the pollen count in the beach house where I read The Blue Star must have been really high or some sand blew in my face or something–but if you had watched me read the last 30 pages of this book, you would have seen a 37-year-old man struggling with all his might to contain a tsunami of sniffles.

I can’t wait to see what Jim gets up to next.

The Story of a Marriage

As I’ve said before, and as I’m about to say again, Andrew Sean Greer is an incredible writer. His literary skills were in full force in both The Confessions of Max Tivoli and in The Path of Minor Planets, although his storytelling skills and his ability to develop characters were much more evident in the former.

Well, as fate would have it, I was recently in San Francisco for a conference, staying at the Westin St. Francis on Union Square, and I finished the book that I had brought with me.  So, what’s a guy to do other than head over to the nearest bookstore and look for something else to read? I was trolling through the store when the thought struck me — “I wonder if Andrew Sean Greer has come out with anything new?” I went to the “G’s”, and low and behold, there it was — The Story of a Marriage. Hardcover. Ring me up.

When I bought the book, I hadn’t even thought about the fact that Greer lives in San Francisco and that it’s a favorite locale for his tales, and this one was no exception. And as I read, I found it spooky and eerily coincidental that I was reading about many of the places I came across while I was there — Fillmore, Van Ness, Union Square, etc.

Anyway, back to our story. This book is about Pearlie Cook and her marriage to Holland Cook, both of whom hailed from the same small town in Kentucky, and whose times together when they were in Kentucky, as well as when they met again later in San Francisco, led them to be married. I won’t get into too much detail of the story, other than to say that a “mysterious stranger” appears and changes everything. Everything that happens, everything that everyone thinks about everything that’s happening, and everything that everyone thinks about everything that’s already happened.

Again, Greer is an absolute master at painting scenes with words and using metaphor to convey deep insights about the human condition. This is another one of those posts where I feel like I could quote the whole book. And the fact that I could quote the whole book makes me not want to quote any of it; I just want to tell you to read it, and to prepare yourself to be astonished at Greer’s gift not only for prose, but for crafting a deeply moving tale.

Eh, la bas!

Mark your calendars.  On Saturday June 14th, Baby Got Books is bringing Cajun goodness to Decatur Square.

Can I get an aaaaaaeeeee?

Wordsmiths Books is celebrating its first anniversary of bringing book-y love to the people. The gang will be throwing a weekend of festivities, and this is our small part in the fun. From the press release:

…7pm on Saturday June 14 and going all evening and into the night, we’re thrilled to present the BabyGotBooks.com-sponsored Bobbie Faye Fais Do-Do Crawfish Boil and Author Shindig, featuring authors JL Miles, CJ Lyons and Toni McGee Causey, whose first novel, Bobbie Faye’s Very Very Very Bad Day was one of Wordsmiths Books favorite books of 2007. In celebration of her Louisiana-based new novel, Bobbie Faye’s Kinda Sorta, Not Exactly Family Jewels, we’ll be, along with our co-sponsors from the BabyGotBooks lit blog, throwing down with a good, old-fashioned crawfish boil. Free food, free drinks, free merriment and some of the best authors to ever grace the Wordsmiths Stage. “Fais Do-Do” means Cajun party, and that’s just what we’re prepared to have. You do NOT want to miss the crazy fun and chaos of the Bobbie Faye Fais Do-Do.

There ya go. Of course, there will lots of OTHER events happening that weekend, too. Friday night will feature a full slate of bands in the store, poetry on Saturday afternoon, Richard Blais (from Bravo’s Top Chef) and other culinary artistes are in the house on Sunday.

But on Saturday evening, I’m cooking up the crawfish. In a giant pot. On the Square. More details to follow. In the meantime, make your plans, call your babysitters, etc.