You Can Make Him Like You

Friend of the blog Ben Tanzer has a new book out called You Can Make Him Like You.  I enjoy talking books over beers with Ben when he’s in Atlanta, and I think that we share the same sensibilities.  So starting from a not very objective place, you’ll have to take my word for it that You Can Make Him Like You is Tanzer’s best work yet, and I expect that it will propel him onto his largest stage to date.  Today The Next Big Book Club blog named him one of the 10 authors who deserve more recognition.  So it’s not just me feeling the love here.

You Can Make him Like You is a coming of middle-age tale about a young-at-heart Chicagoan named Keith.  He’s a not-so young Republican who is coming to grips with a world full of adult change – married life, friends with rocky marriages, beginning a family, dealing with the family that he already has – the usual adult baggage.  Keith struggles against these changes that are slowly moving him from the world that he is comfortable in towards the world of the anti-Keith, the Keith that he actually thinks that he’d like to become.  If he can figure out how to get there.

As much as Keith resists change, he is even more averse to conflict.  He imagines scenes of how he might respond to conflicts both small, imagined arguments about the comparisons of bands past their prime, and large, how he should have handled that jerk in the bar, how trysts might have turned out, things that he ought to tell his parents.   Change and potential conflict keep Keith up nights.

Keith tries to deal with his growing unease by talking about his feelings with the guys over beer.  They want him to shut up and watch the game already.  He sees a therapist but calls it quits when things begin to get sticky:

“You know,” Jeff says, “people sometimes leave therapy because they know it’s about to get harder.  Do you think that’s the case here?”

“Maybe,” I reply, “but I think I’m cool.”

Of course, he’s not cool at all. His anxiety finally bubbles over into a rambling monologue when he is called upon (while hungover) to share what he’s learned in the morning’s child safety class:

…it’s pretty intense, you want your kid to be safe, and you want to raise them in a world that is safe…I’ll admit it’s on my mind at times, all the time maybe, and you can come to a class like this…but…you can do everything right and something could still go wrong, things go wrong, you cannot control for all that, even when you’re really controlling, even when you don’t let your kid breathe and are always trying to be sure that they are always the best.

It’s like that scene in The Breakfast Club when Emilio Estevez is talking about how he wishes his knee would just give sometimes, so that he wouldn’t be expected to accomplish so much, and his dad, his fucking dad wouldn’t be endlessly riding him to win, win, win so he can earn a college scholarship…and you don’t want to be the kind of parent that who expects that, and so maybe this isn’t about safety, maybe it’s about not wanting to be that kind of parent, and father…because that’s possible, right, yeah, of course it is.”

Forget reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting, all future parents should read the chapter where Tanzer’s brilliantly and hilariously summarizes the first weeks of parenthood.   As someone who has recently lived through it, it reads as absolute truth.

Keith’s fear of letting go of fading youth while trying to gracefully grow into the realities of adulthood provides the tension of the novel. And it’s a place where most of us find ourselves at one point or another.   Keith just gets there later than most.

If you recognize that the book takes its name from a song by The Hold Steady, a small indie rock band that is HUGE among a certain demographic, then this book is definitely up your alley.  If you frequently ask yourself what you want to be when you grow up, even though that question should have been answered a decade or more ago, then you’ll find yourself nodding and laughing along with parts of this book and wriggling in discomfort at others that may hit a little too close to home.  Or maybe I’m projecting.  This is a genuinely great story, and I recommend you check it out.

Audio Bonus:

The song that inspired the title:

The Hold Steady – You Can Make Him Like You

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Keith imagines this argument:

“…what I’m thinking is how I would respond if someone asked me to takes sides in the argument regarding REM (sic) versus U2 as the super-group of the late 80′s and early 90′s.  It’s not clear to me that one has to take sides, but I’m leaning towards U2 anyway.  REM’s got nothing that can touch “Where the Streets Have No Name.”

U2 – Where the Streets Have No Name

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And I’d have to argue the other way.  Exhibit A:

R.E.M. – Begin the Begin

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Added Bonus:

Have you seen Portlandia?  Did you see the one with the “put  a bird on it” mantra for creating art?  I ask because the publisher of You Can Make Him Like You, Artistically Declined Press, has taken the bird thing and gone one better – their logo is a bird with antlers.  Need I mention that they are based in Portland?

This just in…boys still don’t read

It’s been a few months since we posted our series on Boys and Reading (start here for links to all of the posts).   Now The Washington Post has gotten in on the action with an article that ran last Friday called Sarah Pekkanen on the gender divide in children’s books by, uh, Sarah Pekkanen.  With a future reader in the house only just learning to walk, I keep reading all of these articles in an attempt to get ahead of the game.  Ms. Pekkanen’s article starts with a good overview of the issues, and, in a model of restraint, she waits until the seventh paragraph to mention a book with “fart” in the title.

The central problem raised by the article is how do we get boys comfortable and attracted to books:

Humor isn’t threatening, which is one reason that books like the “Wimpy Kid” series take off. “Boys feel far more uncertain about their reading than girls do, so they’re less likely to take a chance,” said Sullivan, who has studied the issue of boys and reading extensively. “Studies show that psychologically, boys are known for overestimating their abilities in many areas. The one area where boys consistently underestimate their abilities is in reading.”

If I was a cynical person, I’d note that the article singles out the Diary of A Wimpy Kid series in an article that was published on the same day that the new Wimpy Kid movie came out.  The author also mentions that “boys tend to recoil from an image of a girl on a book cover.”  I have no idea if that sweeping generalization is true or not.  Probably.  My unscientific observations of my pool of young readers (n=1, female, 6) shows a clear preference for Thea Stilton over Geronimo Stilton.   There you have it.

Tropic of Cancer

I was bored one day and decided to stockpile a bunch of “classics” in my Nook’s elibrary, one of which was Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.  I had heard of it, knew it was well-known for one reason or another, but didn’t know much about it beyond that when I decided to start reading it.  Had I known more about it, I might have been a bit intimidated or [gulp] afraid to give it a go, as much of the commentary on it would place it (in my mind) beside works by other authors that I’ve never had the wherewithal to even attempt (Joyce, Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace to name a few).  Thankfully my ignorance was a blessing and I forged ahead.

I’ve often criticized authors that I believe “overwrite” — showing off with adjectives and metaphor until they beat each and every scene to death and lose sight of what’s actually happening.  If Miller weren’t so ridiculously good at this, I would accuse him of the same.  But he is that good.

Tropic of Cancer is set in Paris, my favorite city in the world — that is a great way to start off on my good side.  However, this story doesn’t follow a traditional narrative arc; rather — and this is what would have scared the bejesus out of me had I known it — Miller writes with a very stream-of-consciousness style that pays more attention to the narrator’s thoughts and observations than to linking elements of the storyline together.  As Miller tells the “story” of his struggles as a writer living in Paris around 1930, which involves a rotating cast of ancillary characters and particular places in Paris, you are completely mesmerized by Miller’s ability to put down on paper such deep thoughts.  I was positively spellbound at his gift for language.

Mind you, Miller’s gift for language involves some fairly racy language.  This novel was first published in Paris in 1934 but wasn’t published in the U.S. until the 1960′s, as it was the subject of obscenity trials and the like, because Miller uses plenty of “bad words.”  Many of these words have become so commonplace in today’s vernacular that they might not raise an eyebrow, but from what I gather, he was quite the trendsetter in establishing authors’ First Amendment rights.  A further qualification — while Miller uses some terms that would be offensive in many circumstances, they are not the focus of the book; this is not a book about anatomy or sex, but rather about his life and thoughts in Paris at the time, many of which involved anatomy and sex.

Speaking of beating scenes to death, the thought of an author using four full pages to describe an “epiphany” would cause me to start preparing the slings and arrows.  But here, Miller does just that in such a descriptive and meaningful fashion that I actually tried to read the entire passage to my wife while she was in the midst of reading another book.  That didn’t go over so well, but my point is that I was so moved by Miller’s writing that I couldn’t contain myself.  I won’t ruin the surprise for those of you who haven’t read the book — I trust that you will know it when you get to it (I think it’s the crux of the book).  For those of you who’ve read and remember the book, it’s the scene when Miller goes to Miss Hamilton’s brothel with a young Hindu accomplice and reaches a new understanding about the meaning of life.

This book may not be for everybody, but I loved it.

Liz Lemon confronts the future of writing

(If you have problems seeing the embedded player above click here.

For another clip from the same show, check out Liz’s encounter with Aaron Sorkin.

Friday Links

The most ridiculous copyright lawsuit…so far.  The estate of James Joyce has launched an infringement suit against a geneticist who decided to label some proprietary genetic code by inserting a quote from Ulysses into the strand.  DNA is labeled by four letters – G,C,A, & T – that combine in  pairs. In other words, the only reason anyone knows that the infringing string of letters is code for a Joyce quote is because the geneticist said so.

McSweeney’s takes a look at the future of books:

“Feeding” your favorite authors by buying their books will make their online avatars grow less pale and grouchy. If they starve to death on your watch you will lose social networking points. Book clubs will cultivate with their favorite writers the warm, fuzzy, organic bond a trainer develops with his or her Pokémon, a process that will culminate in staged fights-to-the-death between your author and the author sponsored by another book club.

Britain’s Secretary of State of Education says that kids should read 50 books a year.  Crazy?

Timely: 50 Books Every Child Should Read

Happy 92nd Birthday, Lawrence Ferlinghetti!

Did not know that: The author of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? Ian Fleming.

As a follow-up to Barbara Friend Ish’s wonderful guest post, please check out Can Fantasy Ever Tell the Truth

For the hipster on your shopping list – the Ennui-ja Board

The Wire - by Charles Dickens

Semi-related: Steve Earle – Harry Potter fan

Guest Blogger: Barbara Friend Ish

Today we welcome guest blogger Barbara Friend Ish.  Barbara is Barbara Friend Ish is Publisher, Editor-in-Chief, and Wild-Eyed Visionary for Atlanta-based Mercury Retrograde Press, which publishes fantasy, science fiction, Interstitial and the Weird.  Her debut novel, The Shadow of the Sun, was published in February.  She is a self-described geek and is wonderful fun to cut up with at the back of the room when the book reading you’re attending drags a little. We’re thrilled that she took the time out to file this guest post.

Life in the SF/F Ghetto

I live in a ghetto. Not the kind of place in which you live because you can’t afford anything better, but rather the kind of place in which you live because other people aren’t sure it’s okay to like you.

Earlier this month, the publishing industry and readers everywhere celebrated World Book Day. BBC coverage of the events served to remind everyone with an interest in SF/F that people just aren’t comfortable with admitting they like the stuff. (Read bestselling author Stephen Hunt’s take on it here; the video itself is available here.) Hunt sums up the attitude of so many readers, as expressed by the BBC host: “Fiction has to be painful, a little like school.”

I must admit I don’t understand why we as people of intelligence and a certain amount of culture beat ourselves so relentlessly over our tastes in reading material. Maintaining that only literary fiction is worthy of our notice is no different from insisting that we must never listen to any music but classical—or, if we do, we must not admit to doing it. Pure silliness, of course. A variety of musical genres have long been accepted as not only significant parts of our culture but art in their own right. And yet our self-loathing over our tastes in reading seems to run right down to the center of the earth.

It’s particularly baffling to me that we cringe over admitting to an admiration for SF/F. Speculative literature has been called “the literature of ideas”: a just moniker, in my estimation. Of course there’s the literary equivalent of popcorn available in SF/F, just as there is in any other section of the bookstore. But SF/F is also the area of literature that offers authors the tools to create sufficient distance between the reader and the issue under examination that the reader may look at the problem with fresh eyes, unhindered by the most unconscious of prejudices. I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I don’t respect mainstream fiction; but for deep treatment of serious issues that non-academic readers can truly engage with, I turn to SF/F.

In the hands of a talented author, the themes and tropes of mere entertainment become the tools of moral inquiry. Nowhere is that more valid than in the speculative field. Stories about alien cultures allow us to explore what it means to be human, to examine our attitudes on race, gender, and similar issues. Stories of future or foreign worlds allow writers to address concerns about the role of science in society and contemporary issues like the environment, in ways that allow readers to consider without being preached at. Some of the most penetrating examinations of religion and morality being written today may be found in the Fantasy shelves of your local bookstore. A few examples: Shorn by Mercury Retrograde’s own Larissa N. Niec features a race of winged people who have become an oppressed minority, mired in self-loathing and ritually shorn of their wings. Readers share with me on a regular basis how that tale has changed their attitudes towards their own sexuality or given them fresh perspective on the politics of oppression. Isaac Asimov’s Robot stories allow us to examine our attitudes on oppression and the question of what makes humans human. Stephen Leigh’s Dark Water’s Embrace, returned to print after too long an absence, offers one of the most profound examinations of the experience of being transgendered ever written. My own The Shadow of the Sun, published last month, explores power and corruption. None of these stories would communicate their themes with even a fraction of their current strength without the use of the tools afforded them by the SF/F genre; and none of them is painful, like being in school. They sweep the reader away into experiences she would never have otherwise, and those experiences only heighten the power of the themes.

If you clicked through to Stephen Hunt’s post, you caught a taste of outrage at the disrespect SF/F endures. Many residents of the ghetto feel that way. But for my part, I’m not angry. I feel sad for the Margaret Atwoods and Jeanette Wintersons of the world, who spend their days denying their roots and trying to pass. I’m grateful I don’t awaken in the dead of night, in the grips of self-loathing for my addiction to this literature and of terror that I will be discovered as a geek.

I’m a geek. I’m a speculative fiction writer and publisher. I arise each morning in gratitude for the opportunity to help craft and bring to market some of the most powerful stories being told today. And if I do the occasional appearance in mainstream literary venues, when I go to SF/F conventions to be among my people and discuss the ideas we share with one another in these works, I come happily home.

Science!

My resolve to resist Twitter has finally been worn down.  I’ve been mostly fooling around and trying to figure out its weird conventions (I think I sorted that out) and what it is that I want to get out of it (not sure about that yet).   A big plus so far is that I’ve stumbled across bookish things that I was unlikely to discover otherwise.  I’ve also found my new favorite science writer. Ben Goldacre writes the Bad Science column for The Guardian.  Each week Goldacre takes aim at those who misrepresent science for sales, headlines, or political ends.  He appears to have his hands full.

This week’s article highlights the need for journalists to provide links to the studies that support their stories.   Goldacre cites two recent sensationalized stories that even a cursory review of the study or even the press release would show don’t say what the story claims as the authors important finding.  Great stuff.  I’ll be picking up his book Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks shortly.  Thanks, Twitter.

The Illumination

I read Tim’s review of Kevin Brockmeier’s novel The Illumination, and it sounded like a fantastic concept.  For some inexplicable reason, at a point in time, everyone in the world’s pain begins to be evidenced by a shining light.  Think about the possibilities — you can’t fake pain, you can’t hide pain, and you can see when others are in pain.  Fascinating.

And the way Brockmeier opted to write about this world seemed kind of cool, too — a journal of one-sentence-a-day mini “love notes” from a husband to his wife finds its way into a series of people’s lives.  Kind of like a metaphysical Slacker, where the narrative thread goes from person to person in pursuit of this journal.

And the book itself started out very promising — Brockmeier’s a good writer with a good sense of wordsmanship.  For example, how many different ways do you think an author could describe the light emanating from someone’s sore spot before they started getting boring or repetitive?  However, Brockmeier manages throughout the book to use metaphor and simile thoughtfully and interestingly.

But that’s where the good stuff sort of stalls.  Contrary to my expectations about how the Illumination (as it comes to be known throughout the world) would impact people’s relationships and interpersonal dynamics, and without any real “plot”, the novel really kind of wanders aimlessly through otherwise unconnected stories without any real purpose or explanation that I could divine.  I kept waiting for stuff to tie back together, or for something to surface to explain why the Illumination was happening (like the last chapter in a Stephen King book), but nothing.  No explanation.  A random event, impacting random people, for a random purpose.  Which I found wholely unsatisfying.  And unlike Slacker, where the entire point was about randomness and how little things interact and touch people, and so the depth of the characters wasn’t important, I wanted to dig into these characters but couldn’t.  By the time I began to garner interest in one, the story moved on to another one.

Last comment:  the ending was awful.  Awful, dumb, and pointless in my mind.  The icing on the cake of a book that failed to meet expectations.

Friday Links

This year is the 10th Anniversary of one of the best books about underground music I’ve ever read, Our Band Could Be Your Life.  To celebrate, a concert is being held on May 22nd at the Bowery Ballroom in NYC with current indie musicians playing the music of the bands discussed in the book.  Almost as cool - BGB is cited as a reference for the book on WikiPedia.  Nice.  I promise that I didn’t post the citation. My review is here.

Why Borders failed.

Brooklyn Vegan interviews author, musician, photographer, and all around intense guy Henry Rollins. Mr. Rollins is also featured in Our Band Could Be Your Life.

Oh, the humanity!: My brackets for this year’s Tournament of Books lie in ruins.  In the first round I managed to successfully pick two winners.  Both novels that I picked for the championship round have been eliminated.  This is why I don’t gamble.

Téa Obreht’s debut novel The Tiger’s Wife is garnering critical acclaim everywhere.  The Daily Beast interviews the young (26!) author.  Playing the role of “the Russian judge” is Salon with the lone slightly negative review – “…if Obreht narrows her focus and curtails her embellishments, her undeniable flair for storytelling could produce a magnificent novel. Until then, “The Tiger’s Wife” will seduce and confound, fascinate and exasperate.”  That’s the wrost thing that’s been written about the novel that I’ve come across.

YA Read: The Teenage Sherlock Holmes.

This won’t be controversial at all:  10 Overrated Literary Classics

Huzzah!

At long last, taco day can be enjoyed now that the border/boarder controversy has been peacefully resolved.  It only took five years to get sorted out.

For more on this homophone nightmare, read this.

Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

One of my New Year’s reading resolutions was to read more short stories this year.  Shortly after making that resolution, Charles Baxter’s Gryphon: New and Selected Stories began raking in uniformly glowing praise.  Check out reviews in the Washington Post, New York Times Book Review, and the LA Times of a sense of the accolades.  Gryphon seemed like a good place to start making good on a resolution.

To generalize a bit, Baxter’s stories center around average Midwesterners.  They are the types of stories that drop in on characters who are fully realized and are in the middle of an experience.  Generally, the story unfolds as a thin slice of life cut from a larger life that continues off the page.  The situation may or may not resolve itself.  However,  it is worthwhile to have dropped in and observed the action take place, even if only for a while.  That’s the way most of the stories work, but there were a few

Gryphon is fairly weighty for a short story collection. Coming in at over 400 pages, it contains more than twenty short stories.  Some stories were bound to be weaker than others.   In this otherwise strong collection, there were only two stories that didn’t work for me.  In the first, The Next Building I Plan to Bomb,  a man finds a piece of paper blowing around a parking lot.  The paper contains a sketch of a building with the title phrase penciled in.  He begins to obsess about the building and the threat.  No one he shows the paper can agre on the building it is, though they have a strong opinion of what structure it might be.  This goes on for a while, until suddenly the emergency brake gets yanked:

A moment later he is gone from the spot where he stood.  No doubt he has returned to his job at the bank, and that is where we must leave him.

“Where we must leave him…”!  That seems a little cheesy to me.

In the other story, Ghosts, two women are hiking when one asks the other how she cut her leg.  The cut-legged woman responds:

Roses.  I was staring at a clematis vine.  Its growth habits were unpleasing.  I held the ideal in my head so firmly that I obliterated awareness of the rest of the garden, especially the very large, known-to-be-violent rosebush between the clematis and me…Seconds later I realized that the whole front of my leg had been savagely torn.

Do you know anyone who talks that way?  Do you know them on purpose?

This is nitpicking; I realize.  In over 400 pages of short stories, the two examples that I cite are the two parts that left me flat.  That’s it. While I might prefer the more “muscular” story-telling of someone like Jim Shepard, this large collection by Charles Baxter can stand with the best short story writers.  The chorus of praise is justified, and you definitely get your money’s worth.

Quote of the Week

Having sifted through everything that I have heard about the tiger and his wife, I can tell you this much is fact: in April of 1941, without declaration or warning, the German bombs started falling over the city and did not stop for three days.

- Téa Obreht The Tiger’s Wife (taken from the short story as it appeared in The New Yorker, June 8, 2010).  The Tiger’s Wife is also now the title of a novel by Obreht that I plan to be reading immediately, if not sooner.

Friday Links

I went to see Jonathan Evison read from West of Here last night, so the first link is to myself – check out my review.

After a promising start, my Tournament of Book bracket (another link to me!) is headed rapidly into the toilet.  Today my favorite to win it all Skippy Dies lost to A Visit From the Goon Squad. (But there is a consolation prize in the post-judging commentary – “Skippy Dies is one of those multi-character, many-threaded novels that manages to hold everything together all the way through to the end. For me, it was the best book of the year, superior to Freedom.”  Exactly.)

England’s stamps are cooler than ours, for now…

ESPN the Magazine rolls out its first Fiction Issue.  Wowza…

The folks that set out to mockingly bowdlerize Huckleberry Finn by replacing “N-word” Jim with “Robot Jim” set up a Kickstarter project to get the money to publish their version.  They needed $6000 to get the project started.  They’ve raised almost $30,000.  Nice.

In other comedy gold news, check out the 2011 edition of Fahrenheit 451.  Heh…

Will all e-books eventually only be 99 cents?

The National Book Critics Circle Awards have been awarded.  Jennifer Egan won the fiction prize for A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Cory Doctorow to publishers: Durability of e-books is a feature, not  a bug to be corrected in library editions.

A round-up of “must read” long-form journalism from around the web.

The nerdiest (in a good way)  book reviews of ALL TIME.

Fun Tales From the South

Because A Yellow Watermelon by Ted Dunagan is included on the Georgia Center for the Book’s list that all Georgia kids should read, I bought it for some friends, hoping to introduce them to southern history.  Now I’ll have to buy another copy because I’m keeping this one.

Set in 1948, 12 year old Ted lives in a small town in Alabama.  One day on his way home from selling newspapers he is caught sliding down a pile of sawdust by the new worker, Jake Johnson. Ted is intrigued by Jake because he is the first black man that he has ever been near.  Ted and Jake become fast friends. Jake introduces Ted to many new things, specifically the blues, slingshots and walking sticks.

While sopping up the last of the egg yoke and jam with the reamins of my biscuit, I found myself wondering what Jake was having for breakfast, if anything. Jake was the first black person I had seen up close and talked to, tough I had observed them from a distance.

Jake tells Ted about a black boy, Poudlum Robinson, whose family isn’t having an easy time with the rich landowner in town.  Ted and Poudlum find themselves picking cotton in the same field and when they meet in the middle, rows behind the faster workers, they see no reason not to pick together.  Not easy work for Ted, Proudlum teaches him a thing or two:

About midafternoon the ground became so hot I couldn’t stand on it with my bare feet.  Poudlum taught me to scrape away the first two inches of dirt and then stand in the spot we had excavated. The ground was cooler underneath the crust…

One day Ted makes a surprising discovery about the rich man in town. Everyone knows he owns everything in town and is conspiring to steal the Robinsons’ land for the timber.  However, no one knows that he has a ditry little secret that Ted and Poudlum hope to make public.  Ted and Poudlam begin a fun, nail-biting adventure to make things right.

A Yellow Watermelon is a wonderful story about a friendship that crosses the color lines in a time when not many people were brave enough to take the leap.  It never occurred to Ted that he and his friend should be separated.  This story made me smile. My mixed 6-year old daughter and her best friend can’t fathom that once upon a time they would not have been allowed to be friends because her friend is white.

Was this story realistic? I like to think so.  My mother-in-law has spoken of her white neighbors in southern Alabama during her childhood and how kind they always were to her family.  I want to believe that people like this have always existed – even if they were the minority.  A Yellow Watermelon is a must read for all ages as it reminds us that people are just people, and we can connect with all different people, regardless of color.

West of Here

The imposing presence of Mt Olympus features prominently in Jonathan Evison’s new novel West of Here.  It isn’t a story of the Olympus of Greek mythology.  West of Here is an epic American story of the all too human adventures of the residents within the shadow of the famed mountain on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula.

The novel begins at a current day celebration of “Dam Days” in the fictional town of Port Bonita, Washington.  The imposing hydroelectric dam carved out of a mountain ravine is a symbol of the area’s progress and its hubris. Unknown to the assembled crowd, the pillar of civic pride is scheduled to come down after over a hundred years of service.  In addition to safety concerns about the stability of its pioneer-days construction, the dam also must give way for river restoration efforts to rehabilitate the vanishing local salmon stocks.

The story then veers back to the days leading up to Washington’s statehood.  The interior of the Olympic Peninsula is one of the last unexplored areas of the continent, and it is still an open question which city in the Pacific Northwest will become the economic leader of the region. The opportunities attract explorers, laborers, entrepreneurs, and free thinkers who are all banking on the promise of undiscovered country.

The story alternates between the past and the present, striking contrasts between the founders and their moribund descendants.  While the original Port Bonitans sacrifice mightily for the possibility of building a better life, their kin descend into inescapable ruts, their own vision stifled by the end of westward migration, the taming of the land diminishing their own capacity for wilderness.

In one scene, Timmon Tillman, recently released from prison, decides to set off for a Walt Whitman-inspired break from his fellow man into the relative wilderness surrounding Mt Olympus:

Where to begin his new life?  Onward!  Onward through the broad-shouldered foothills and into treeless high-country and over the divide until Timmon Tillman ceased to exist, until the past and future ceased to exist and all that remained was the difference between life and death.  By late afternoon he was exhausted. A blister had formed on his heel.

Tillman’s disappearance into a “wilderness” of worn hiking trails is further compromised by his trail of discarded Snickers wrappers, but even in this degraded Eden, basic survival cannot be taken for granted.  The fragility of man in the face of a harsh and unforgiving environment is a theme that runs throughout the novel.

The chapters that explore the founding history of Port Bonita are the strongest. Evison doesn’t overly romanticize the settlers’ lives.  The early pioneers, courageous settlers carving a life out of the wilderness, are also harsh racists with grim views of the local Native Americans and Chinese laborers. The twenty first century reader can’t miss their myopia when a local newspaperman dismisses a reporter’s conservation article as irrelevant as the region clearly has an over-abundance of everything that they will ever need.

Like its setting, West of Here gives its characters room to spread out and breath.  The epic scope is ambitious, but the skilled story teller never loses his way.  Port Bonita’s transformation from a lush idyll to a strip mall anytown is heartbreaking, but the removal of its dam holds the promise of the return of the town’s former glory and new beginning for its residents.

The novel is also gorgeous.  The publisher, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, have outdone themselves with the stunning design of this novel.  I’ll make it simple: if you buy this book on a Kindle, you lose.

Bonus: The Georgia Center for the Book presents Jonathan Evison who will be discussing West of Here tomorrow night, March 10th, 7PM, at the First Baptist church in Decatur. The event  is FREE.  I can’t wait to check it out.

Also: f you’ve found your way here via the Decatur Book Festival newsletter, welcome!  Please, stay a while and look around.  If you’re not currently receiving the Decatur Book Festival’s e-mail newsletter, what are you waiting for! Sign up here, and select the AJC DBF newsletter.  That’s it!

TOB Kicks Off

Today is the opening round of the 2011 Tournament of Books.   Do you have book fever? Here’s my completely unreadable completed bracket. Click here for a slightly more legible version. I am terrible at March Madness style predictions because I always pick who I want to win, instead of who is likely to win.  In this case, I have Skippy Dies for all the marbles.  Not likely.

Today’s match-up featured Freedom vs. Kapitoil, which I got correct.  This string of luck won’t last long.

Matilda rejects the iSwindle

Please run, don’t walk, to check out Unshelved’s brilliant cartoon take on Roald Dahl’s Matilda as a young reader with an evil, electronics-obsessed father.

Friday Links

Looks like I’m reading the next Stephen King novel, which seems to bear a passing similarity to this.

Harper Collins says that it’s e-books will self-destruct after being checked out of libraries 26 times.  The round number is supposedly derived from how long a physical book lasts in a library.   A librarian begs to differ.

The Believer magazine has published the short list for its book award. Go, Skippy!

Atlanta’s Laurel Snyder has been nominated for the American Booksellers Asssociation’s EB White Award for Penny Dreadful.  Go, Laurel!

The Guardina has launched a new childrens book section.  It looks fantastic.

Michael Lewis (The Big Short) is being sued for defamation by a gazillionaire financier who is clearly not a criminal responsible for our recent financial catastrophe.  Nope.

On a completely unrelated note, you need to check out Rolling Stone’s Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?

The least convincing trend piece of the year? All male book clubs: “Once men used to get together to watch sport and drink beer. Now they have muscled in on a female craze” and “…anecdotally male books groups are definitely on the rise.”  Yes, definitely.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox – the family opera.  Whistle, click, click.

Movie watch: Peter Guralnick’s fantastic Last Train to Memphis is reportedly headed to the big screen.

Encore Paris

Paris Was Ours is a collection of reflections of Paris by 32 writers, compiled by Penelope Rowlands.  I was excited to read all of these memories since I have many of my own from my time spent as a student at the Sorbonne in the late 1980′s.

Latest Book News on the Anthropomorphism Circuit

The Judgmental Bookseller Ostrich (via) says:

Not to be outdone, Bad Pun Raccoon adds:

(via e-mail from Dr J. Here’s more.)