Baby Got Books

One of the nice things about this blog business is that occasionally I am given books that I wouldn’t have ordinarily come across on my own. The most recent such book? Shut Up, I’m Talking: And Other Diplomacy Lessons I Learned in the Israeli Government by Gregory Levey. Leavey’s memoir is hilarious. And by hilarious I mean funny, but often in an, “Oh my God, we’re all going to die” kind of way.

Levey, a Canadian, found himself adrift in his second year of law school in the US. His plan was to take a break before completing his third year of law school and join the Israeli Army. On a lark, he sends a resume to the Israeli Mission to the UN to apply for any internships that may be available. Hilarity, of a sort, ensues.

Levey finds himself hired, not as an intern, but as a speech writer for the Israeli Ambassador to the UN. The misadventures at the Embassy are hilarious, but also frightening when one factors in the whole precarious nature of the Middle East.

The memoir is written as a fish out water story, and Levey himself points out at almost every opportunity that he has absolutely no business in the jobs that he held for the Israeli government. Examples of absurd situations for a 25 year-old non-Israeli citizen to find himself in abound. Levey has to decide how Israel should vote on an UN resolution when he stumbles upon the realization that he is the only person at the UN affiliated with Israel (a country of which he is not a citizen). Result? The U.S. and Greg vote “no,” the rest of the world votes “yes.” An international incident hinges on his shaky translation of French. Etc.

Despite his own feelings about his capabilities, just as he plans to leave the UN Mission the situation escalates. At the request of Prime Minister Sharon(!), Levey moves to Israel to become an English speech writer for the PM’s office. While in Israel, Levey has a front row seat during a particularly volatile time in Israeli history. The author feels very much the outsider despite his position with the corridors of power, in no small part because of his inability to abide the rudeness of the Israeli’s themselves. In one passage, Levey notes:

…life in Israel was difficult. I was sure there were many wonderful, kind, and caring Israeli’s, but they all seemed to be on vacation. “The customer service alone is enough to make you want to start an intifada,” an American I met quipped…

I am quite sure that Levey’s book will be seen as controversial in some Jewish circles. In fact, there were passages that I read and thought, “This guy is either really brave in his honesty or else he is really, really stupid.” I don’t think that it is the latter.

The web site Very Short List, which features a daily post about things that are worth your time, came up with the following Venn diagram to describe the book:

Close enough. However, the book that Shut Up, I’m Talking reminds me of most is Dan Kennedy’s Rock On. The absurd behind the scenes look by an employee that feels completely lost and out of place in the employee of a powerful and monolithic entity is true enough for both books. Levey’s memoir carries additional weight, because - oh my God- this is a sovereign nation’s government that we’re talking about.

While the memoir is specifically about Levey’s service with Israel, I have no doubt that similar issues and absurdity exist for all countries (particularly my own). As such, Shut Up I’m Talking is a useful reminder of the inherent fallibility of governments. Shut Up is a fun, engaging, and sobering read. I recommend it to all that might find the subject matter - the fate of the world as we know it - of interest. It’s also good fun if you’ve ever found yourself over your head in the job world. Levey’s experience shows that it could have been much, much worse.

It just so happens that Gregory Levey will be reading from Shut Up, I’m Talking at Wordsmiths this Wednesday night. Quel coïncidence, no?

Check out the author’s blog.

Tony Earley’s “Jim series” (my name for the two books - not the authors) are deceptively simple. The covers suggest that these might be children’s books, and they are written in a bucolic style that masks the quiet complexity of these novels. Tony Earley seems to have effortlessly created a richly detailed world with fully developed and engaging characters.

In the first of the two books, Jim the Boy, we are introduced to Jim as an infant. His father has died unexpectedly in the fields of the family farm at a young age. Jim is raised by his mother and three bachelor uncles in the town of Aliceville in western North Carolina. If you think “Mayberry”, you’re going too cosmopolitan. Jim’s boyhood is a rural existence in the years between the first and second World Wars. As Jim begins to grow up, his world expands beyond the farm as he begins to learn about the world around him and his own family. It sounds so simple but is a surprisingly engaging read.

In the second book, The Blue Star, Jim is a senior in high school on the eve of World War II. World events are beginning to encroach on Aliceville, even as Jim struggles to come to grips with becoming the starting shortstop on his baseball team and the eternal mystery that is high school girls. The ability of Jim’s uncles to protect him from the realities of the adult world begin to wane, and Jim is faced with some tough and very adult choices. There will almost certainly be a third book in the “Jim series” to complete or extend Jim’s story. I’m looking forward to it.

While the two books can easily stand on their own, the reader will be rewarded for reading both books. The second book, The Blue Star, reveals the back story on several situations that were taken for granted in the first book. I read them both within a few weeks of each other, and I recommend that approach.

Earley’s style is warm and generous without being maudlin. Although set in the rural south, Earley avoids the gothic “things go wrong on the farm” narrative. Life isn’t always rosy, but the farm of Jim’s youth is the kind of place that actual Southerners might be able to relate to - even us city slickers.

I’ve been a fan of Don Novello for a long time, and not just because he was born and raised in my hometown of Lorain, Ohio. I, like many of you, thought he was pretty darn cool before I even knew of his impressive origins. For a long time, I knew him solely as the character he created for Saturday Night Live, Father Guido Sarducci; but I somehow came to learn that he participated in multiple ways in all kinds of funny stuff, and so I had to do some digging to see what I could get my hands on.

In addition to recordings of some pretty hilarious stand-up comedy, what I came up with was The Lazlo Letters, a compilation of correspondence that was first published in 1977, but which contains letters spanning the period from 1973 to 1977. Novello’s idea, which he executed in spectacular fashion, was to write letters to various bigwigs from the world of politics, show business, and big business, playing the part of a loyal follower, concerned citizen, or huge fan, and trying to provoke a response.

The prose and punctuation he uses in his letters, in addition to the rather zany ideas presented by them, suggest that he is somewhat of a dimwit; nonetheless, in the interests of good public relations and nondiscrimination against knuckleheads, many of the folks he wrote to actually wrote back. The staffs of President Nixon and President Ford treated these letters as legitimate, and sent personalized responses back to him. Repeatedly.

The genius of this book doesn’t really lie in its content (although there are some pretty funny exchanges documented by these letters); rather, it lies in what Novello did, how he did it, and when he did it. This started over thirty-five years ago! He was writing on what I guess was a manual typewriter, and mailing letters out for ten cents. The time and effort needed to pull off a hoax like this was incredible. And it didn’t come with the sort of immediate gratification that pranking someone on the Internet can bring. While we take the Internet for granted in this day and age, Novello was working on this at a time when you had to work pretty hard to track down information. Even finding the name and address of someone he wanted to write to must have been a chore.

I applaud Mr. Novello, albeit it a couple of decades later than he deserves, for this effort. And now I think we can safely place him up on the pedestal with the other critically acclaimed writers originally hailing from Lorain, Ohio, such as Toni Morrison and . . . uhm . . . uh . . . let me get back to you on that one.

With the success of Jill Scott’s recent album, The Real Thing, Words and Sounds Vol. 3, and her concert tour now at an end, I thought it was a good time to revisit her book of poetry. The Moments, the Minutes, the Hours gives readers a glimpse of the R&B singer as she was at the beginning of her artistic career.

Before her work with the band The Roots, Jill Scott was a spoken word artist, performing her work live at poetry readings. Of course, her beautiful voice and her experience in a Canadian production of Rent didn’t hurt when she was discovered by Amir Thompson of The Roots, who invited Scott to collaborate with the band. She contributed to the writing of the band’s song “You Got Me,” which won a Grammy in 2000.

I am a long-time fan of Scott’s music and a new devotee of her poetry. What has always affected me most about her music is the raw honesty of her lyrics. Listening to a Jill Scott song, you feel as though she’s in the room speaking to you as she would a close friend. Her poetry has the same unembellished honesty. The cadence of her poetry has a distinct lilt, carrying one word right into the next, like natural speech. Scott speaks about the issues that are so crucial to experiencing life fully – relationships, spirituality, self-identity – and brings to them a new and very personal outlook. In Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman argues that the goal of the poet is to see life and humanity as they truly are and to convey those insights honestly, without sentimentality or disingenuous decoration. Scott certainly accomplishes that.

For example, she begins a poem discussing something as seemingly banal as her experience with being potty trained and, with the concluding line, “I don’t even think of you now,” abruptly turns the poem into a sharp and biting portrayal of her relationship with the parent in question.

Jill Scott appeared on last year’s premier episode of Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry on HBO. I highly recommend checking it out on You Tube:

It’s emotionally raw and somewhere between an a cappella performance and spoken word. Clearly, Jill Scott is as much a poet as she is a singer.

Nitro’s review of Lauren Groff’s The Monster’s of Templeton was so convincing that there was little choice but to by the book at the first opportunity.   I suspect that my appreciation for the novel may be slightly less than Nitro’s but only by the thinnest margin.  Read her review for the gist of the novel, and I’ll just throw in my two cents along with some supplemental material that I’ve come across.

This is a charming book - in the least patronizing sense of that word.  It has a centuries old literary pedigree at its core, but the novel is neither twee nor precious.  The “monster” that occupies the imagination of the  town makes for some great symbolism.  There’s a lot going on in this novel.  Check it out for a nice read.

The Monsters of Templeton made me want to read all of James Fenimore Cooper’s books.  So hat’s off for that feat alone.  I also need to visit Cooperstown, NY - all the more so after Groff recently paired her book with Three Philosopher’s, which is brewed by Coopertown’s Brewery Ommegang.  Between a trip to the brewery and the Baseball Hall of Fame, I’d feel like I was one of the novel’s “Drosophila tourists”.  (Best description of tourists ever.)

I recently came across a weird trailer for the novel. It’s like Masterpiece Theater Presents: The Monsters of Templeton. And why are their accents so strange?  The cover gives the game away. It’s for the UK edition, and the actors in the trailer are apparently trying to sound American. “Marmaduke” gives them all away.

Better, by Atul Gawande, sounded like a fascinating read. On the front cover of the edition I bought, Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink (a book everybody but me liked), calls Better “a masterpiece, a series of stories set inside the four walls of a hospital that end up telling us something unforgettable about the world outside.” Truth be told, though, the real reason I picked up this book was because of the subheading under its title: “A surgeon’s notes on performance”. As a professional constantly faced with differing philosophies as to how performance should be measured and rewarded, I thought the idea of reading a “masterpiece” on the subject from someone whose performance can literally mean life or death would be worthwhile.

Let me preface this post (unless it’s too late at this point for a preface) by saying that this book didn’t really meet with my expectations; however, once again, that was because my expectations might have been a bit skewed. And although the book didn’t really talk to me about performance metrics as much as I expected, it was still a nice read.

What Gawande does in the book is break down what he believes to be three core requirements for success in a field that involves risk and responsibility (such as medicine): diligence, doing right, and ingenuity. He then builds the case for each of these through the use of anecdotes. None of these anecdotes really stands on its own as the basis for any world-changing proposition, but each of them is effectively representative of an approach or philosophy that Gawande cites it for. And I will absolutely vouch for the fact that Gawande has a very easy-to-read writing style. I doubt that he took a whole lot of writing classes while in medical school, but you wouldn’t know it from reading this work. His approach is one to challenge your thinking, not to challenge your reading ability.

Will this book change your life? Probably not. Will you regret spending the time to read it? I strongly doubt it. Will you learn a lot about some things you probably didn’t know much detail about (eradicating polio, the treatment of wounded soldiers, the Apgar score)? Absolutely.

I read a lot of Jewish lit and most of it revolves around Ashkenazi Jews (those who immigrated from Eastern Europe). I haven’t read many stories or even know many Sephardic Jews - those from Spain and the Middle East. The Man in the Sharkskin Suit is the story of a prestigious, Jewish family in Cairo in the 1940’s and 50’s who eventually flees to Brooklyn under the Nasser regime.

Lucette Lagnado, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal retells her father’s (Leon aka “Le Capitain”) life which is the opposite of the American dream. Throughout most of his life, he is a dashing, cosmopolitan entrepeneur who lives life to the fullest. He begins his day in synagogue, then goes on to wheel and deal (Lagnado never really knew how her father earned a living - just that he seemed to be some kind of high-end peddler) and then socializes with Cairo’s glitterati late into the evening. Leon is portrayed as a dashing figure, the title of the book stems from the fact that he always wore white sharkskin suits, and he is idolized by the author who becomes her father’s companion throughout most of his life.

Lagnado is the youngest of four and her father dotes on her and gives her all of the affection that he does not give towards his wife and other children. While Lagnado sees her father through rose colored glasses, she does a good job of also showing the dark side of Leon. Her parent’s had a very unhappy marriage and her other siblings had a much more strained relationship with their father. Lagnado’s mother is the least likable character in the memoir. She is a weak woman who realizes that her marriage was a mistake in the first few months and spends the next 50 years as the miserable, underdog.

With the rising tide of anti-semitism after the formation of Israel and Nasser’s rise to power in Egypt, life becomes more and more difficult for the Jews of Cairo. Finally in 1963, Leon realizes that he has no choice but to leave Cairo. The rules were very stringent about emigration and families were not allowed to leave with any money - only clothing and personal items. Jewish Services agencies around the world took responsibility for emigration of these Egyptian Jews and most settled in either Israel or America. Lagnado’s family ends up in Brooklyn via Paris penniless and with no prospects for a viable future. The remainder of the book details the hardships that they encountered including the author’s serious illness and the eventual estrangement between the other siblings and their parents.

This book is a heart-felt, personal account of a family’s tumultous life which started in the Old World and ends in the New World. What does not change throughout the memoir is Leon’s unwavering adherence to Judaism and his deep love for his daughter. I really enjoyed this book and was most fascinated by the description of Cairo in the 1940’s. I had no idea that it rivaled Paris with its nightlife and was a booming melting pot of Christian’s, Muslims, Jews, Egyptians and British who were stationed there during the war. Leon represented a time and place in history that his daughter beautifully recreated with this memoir.

Author James Meek has a new book coming out in May (more on that one in a future post). Everything that I’ve read about the upcoming book mentions that Meek’s first novel, The People’s Act of Love, is a masterpiece. Somehow, I missed it when it first came out. I decided it would be prudent to maybe begin my reading of Meek’s work with the masterpiece.  I’m glad that I did.  I love everything about this book.

The novel takes place in a small Siberian town during the Russian Revolution.  A garrison of Czech soldiers has commandeered enough of the town’s buildings and supplies to remain indefinitely.  When the soldiers left their homes five years earlier, they were part of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire.  Their homes are now in a new country that they’ve never been a part of, and the country that they’ve been fighting in and against is changing political fortunes almost daily.   Isolated as they are, they’re not sure who they’re supposed to be fighting for, which way the Russian political winds are blowing,  and if and when they might be able to return home.  The Czech commander, giving a pep talk tyo his troops, says:

Comrades.  Friends.  We have fought together for five years. We have fought for the Emperor of the Austrians against the Emperor of the Russians.  We have fought for the Emperor of the Russians against the Emperor of the Austrians.  We have fought for the White Terror of the monarchists against the Red Terror of the Bolsheviks.  We have fought with Social Revolutionaries and Cossacks against Cossacks and Social Revolutionaries.  I can say to you, with pride, that not once have we compromised our ideals.

Exactly.

The townspeople coexist with their Czech occupiers in a quiet subservience.  The natives have a deep and dark secret that they are trying to hide from the world at large.  If you tried for a million years, you would never guess their secret.  I promise.  The fascinating part is that the basic scenario - trapped Czech soldiers, town with a crazy secret - are based on actual events.

This is a fantastic novel - and I’m not just saying that because I like virtually all books either written by Russians or set in Russia.  The themes that Meek tackles are certainly relevant to our time: moral ambiguity vs moral certainty, extremism, citizenship vs identity, the fog of war.  James Meek is a journalist for The Guardian.  He was stationed in Russia for several years, which I’d assume is where he found the seeds of this book.  His journalist’s eye for detail and his beautiful writing style are a winning combination.  Do yourself a favor and spend some time in this wonderful book.

Submarine by Joe Dunthorne is not a book that I was likely to find and read on my own. It was pressed into my hands by someone who thought that I might like it. It’s a first novel by a Welsh writer that is geared towards a teen audience. I finished this book a few weeks ago, and I’m still trying to decide what I think of it.

The narrator of the book is Oliver, a 15-year old boy in Swansea, Wales. Oliver initially comes across as a completely unlikable teen. His approach to high school is based on Darwin’s survival of the fittest. He has an I will pick on you because you are weaker than me and I need to maintain my own standing so I suggest you toughen up mindset. At the beginning of the book, Oliver sets out to see a therapist (that turns out to be the wrong kind of therapist) purely to get a reaction from his father.  His relationship with his girlfriend Jordana begins when she blackmails him and seems to be based upon the fact that she would be willing to be in a relationship with him as something to do rather than mutual attraction or affection. It’s tough to care about these kids as a couple.

Eventually, Oliver begins to become a sympathetic character. To be honest, I almost bailed on the book before he became remotely likable.  Oliver has his first encounters with adult situations - e.g., his first sexual experiences, his first brush with the serious illness of someone close to him, his parent’s fracturing marriage, a too close encounter with his mother’s infidelity, etc.  Oliver’s reaction to these real life dramas is usually on the continuum of poor to very poor.

It slowly began to dawn on me that 15 year-olds are unlikable in general. They think that they are adults, but they behave unpredictably on the whims of emotion. Dunthorne’s novel is almost sadistically true to the stereotypical adolescent experience.  There are some passages in this book that make for tough reading.  Since I’m so conflicted about whether I’m glad that I read this book or not, I have a hard time offering it a recommendation to anyone else.  I hope that someone else reads it though so that we can compare notes.

Second Opinion: The LA Times reviews the book today (very positively) as well.

I was slow to get around to Joshua Ferris’ novel Then We Came to the End. I had been reluctant to read the book at first based upon the perceived “it’s The Office, but a novel!” marketing angle. The hard cover edition featured a sticky note motif that seemed to be a direct ripoff of the movie Office Space. Somehow I ignored the growing chorus of excellent reviews that the novel was collecting. Our own previous review of the book was less than stellar.

Then the novel was named a finalist for the National Book Award. When I saw that the novel had made the brackets for the Tournament of Books, I decided that I might need to read it after all. Like magic, a copy of the new paperback edition arrived in my mailbox. It was a sign.

The novel tells the story of a hotshot ad agency that is on the decline.  Having lost most of its free-spending clients in the dot com bust, layoffs are around the corner - the titular “end.” The most striking feature of the novel is that is is told in the first person plural - the “collective we” rather than the “royal we’ - with the exception of one chapter that provides the back story of the boss, which is told in the third person.  I think it was a mistake to deviate from the first person plural account.  The novel works best when it is portraying the snowball effect of office gossip, crap morale, and insecurity on the herd at the water cooler.  Giving the boss’s back story from an omniscient vantage point dilutes that doubt to the disservice of the rest of the novel - says me.

Often described as a “comic” novel, I found the book to be a very serious look at corporate America.  Sure it has funny moments, but if this book is about anything it’s about Fear - with a capital “F”.  Fear of layoffs, fear of not being able to pay the mortgage, fear of not continuing to move upward, fear of being on the outside, fear of not belonging, fear of life in the modern world, fear of dying, fear of what the guy next to you might be capable of if pushed too far - you know - FEAR.  There’s plenty of fear to go around in this novel, and it speaks to what motivates us as a society.

This is damning satire.  It’s a Big Important Novel, because it reflects our times with incredible clarity.  Whether you like the “story” is almost beside the point. If you work somewhere, I recommend that you check this one out.

Reading to the bottom bonus:  My copy of the novel was free.  In keeping with my “share the love” philosophy, I’ll happily drop my gently used copy in the mail to a good home.  If you’d like a FREE copy of Then We Came to the End, leave us a note in the comments below.  I’ll pick a winner next week.

Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto is one of my favorite novels of the last five years. Mrs. Got Books and I enjoyed that novel so much that we bought each other Patchett’s latest novel, Run, as gifts. Surprise!

Run takes place over a highly compressed time frame (a day) in which the characters lives are turned upside down as explosive revelations rock the Doyle family’s relatively staid lives. The extent of change and revelation seem to be a bit far fetched and may be part of the downfall of the novel. And then there is the premise.

Bernard Doyle, former mayor of Boston (white), finds himself a widower with three sons. Two of the boys, Tip and Teddy, are adopted African-Americans from a poor household. Whatchu talkin’ ’bout, Ann Patchett? Apparently no one on the editorial staff said, “Wait. Like Diff’rent Strokes?”

The remaining brother is a prodigal son who has just returned, unannounced, from Africa. Their dead mother is almost literally worshiped by the family - she looks just like a statue of the Virgin Mary that the boys keep in their room. Just a bunch of men getting in one another’s way in a large house, until…

One night, after seeing Jesse Jackson speak at Harvard, one of the boys is pushed out of the way of an oncoming car by a stranger who is herself hit by the SUV. The little girl (African-American) accompanying the mysterious woman seems to know an awful lot about the adopted Doyle sons. Drama!

The novel seems to hit on several themes while untangling the lives of all involved. Black children named Tip and Teddy in Boston would certainly appear to be some sort of statement about race, nature vs. nurture, liberal/democratic politics and policies, etc., but it’s hard to pull out what exactly the author is trying to say. Patchett also comments upon Catholicism, what it means to be family, economic disparity, and pride vs. belief. There’s a lot going on in this “day in the life.”

Reading back over this, it sounds like I didn’t care much for this book, which is not the case. I brought high expectations into the reading of this novel, and the author nearly met those expectations. If anything, the author tried to do too much with this novel. Sub par Patchett is still better than most.

I’ve fallen way behind on actually writing reviews of the books that I’ve read this year. There are four books that are getting pretty close to past their effective review dates (read in February). None of these is particularly new, so I’ve decided to put together a round up to get myself caught up as quickly as possible. Here we go:

First up: George Saunders Pastoralia. Saunders seems to enjoy a dedicated cult following. Whenever I see his name written on a blog anywhere, praise is sure to follow. I don’t know if Pastoralia is the best entry point for the Saunders oeuvre, but it was the first of his books that I got my mitts on. It’s a short story collection that mixes “experimental” writing with relatively straightforward narratives to great effect. I enjoyed the collection, and I’ll keep an eye out for more of Saunders fiction. His new non-fiction book, The Braindead Megaphone has gotten great reviews as well.

Neil Gaiman’s collection of short works, Fragile Things, is up next. It is a collection of short stories, poems, and a novella. I’ve read one of Gaiman’s novels (Anansi Boys) and have been meaning to get more deeply into his work for some time. This collection spans Gaiman’s career, and I don’t know that there is anything brand new here. It’s a mixed collection. Some of the work collected here is excellent, in fact many of the stories have won individual awards. It’s a nice compendium to pick up if you’re interested in checking out a breadth of the author’s work in one shot.

I followed up Neil Gaiman with more Neil Gaiman. Another of my reading goals has been to tackle the comics canon in a semi-systematic fashion. Couple that with my interest in Gaiman, and it seemed only natural to delve into the author’s career-making Sandman series with Volume 1: Preludes and Nocturnes. This is as far as I’ve gotten into the series, and it’s too soon for me to tell if the series will ultimately live up to the hype. What I’ve read so far is intriguing, and I plan to read more of the series. I’ll keep you posted.

And finally: After attending the Rob Sheffield reading way back when, my neighbor handed me Hairstyles of the Damned by Joe Meno. She thought that the author’s styles of recreating the musical past were similar and that I’d enjoy the novel. Meno has put together a book that is an excellent snapshot of the end of punk that is pitch perfect in recreating 80’s high school angst. It’s an enjoyable coming of age story about finding your own identity that has the ring of truth and awkwardness.

Phew.  I wish I had time to post on each of these separately.  C’est la guerre.

“Choke” is a term often used to describe someone who comes up short. In describing Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk (and to quote a phrase used throughout the book), “choke” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.

Palahniuk seems to be somewhat of a counterculture hero (at least according to some folks I’ve heard talk about him), whose most famous book (I think) is Fight Club (a movie a saw and just really didn’t get); he clearly knows how to write for shock value about uncomfortable and disturbing situations.

I read a blurb about Choke and decided to give it a shot. When all was said and done, I have to admit to being somewhat disappointed. I didn’t like the main character/narrator/”protagonist”, Victor Mancini; he’s just flat out unlikeable, although that might be the point. The story follows him around with flashbacks to his childhood, as he deals with a strange mother, his own sexual addiction, and some other strange characters that fill out the story. His struggle to find out who he really is becomes the reader’s struggle. And I just didn’t think it was a worthwhile struggle.

The main storyline, or so I was lead to believe by the commentary that induced me into trying this book, was supposed to be Mancini’s scam of pretending to choke in restaurants, getting saved by a good samaritan, and having that person feel a sense of responsibility for Mancini, sending him money on his birthday and otherwise helping him out. But that really was a small thread of the book. The bulk of the book was spent on his so-called sexual addition (complete with — earmuffs, youngsters — more talk of his “dog” and “white soldiers” than I felt like dealing with) and his mother, who was apparently in the final stages of Alzheimer’s while in a nursing home, and who was giving him reason to question who he thought he was.

I’ll give Palahniuk credit for sort of tying things together at the end. It wasn’t perfect, but considering how low the bar had dropped by the time I was two-thirds of the way into the book, he should get a medal for not making me want to burn the thing when I was through with it. And I guess I shouldn’t hold Palahniuk responsible for my own pre-conceived notions about what the book would be like, which were based on other people’s subjective opinions. In fact, Palahniuk starts the book with the following:

If you’re going to read this, don’t bother.

After a couple pages, you won’t want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you’re still in one piece.

Save yourself.

Maybe I should have listened. Although I made the mistake of thinking that that the narrator was going to shock or disturb me in some rewarding way, rather than thinking he was going to disappoint me with his story and some of his crude sexual references.

If you’re a Southerner, there comes a time when you may become weary of the “things go horribly wrong on the farm”-style of Southern Gothic literature. To the authors of these tales, one might even say “Nobody could do it as well as Faulkner, so why are you trying?” Or maybe I’m just projecting.

This happened to me when The Oxford American serialized John Grisham’s A Painted House. That book may be the poorest selling book in the Grisham oeuvre, but I thought that it was pretty good. Once I grudgingly started to read it.

I was given a copy of Hillary Jordan’s Mudbound, and I have to say that I was initially reluctant to give it a shot based on its general description. The novel has won the inaugural Bellwether Prize founded by Barbara Kingsolver to recognize literature of social responsibility. I wasn’t sure if that was a plus or a minus - was the book going to get all preachy on me? Once I actually started reading though, I was pleasantly surprised.

Mudbound takes place in the years following World War II. A relatively urbane woman from Memphis is forced to relocate her family on little notice when her husband suddenly decides to pick up stakes and begin farming in the Mississippi Delta. Things get off to a rocky start when the house he had purchased in the nearby town is occupied by a couple who also purchased the house from the double-dealing seller. Forced to live in an old shack on the farm itself, the family is cut off from the rest of the town (and the world) when rains cause the adjacent creek to cover the only road.

The family finds that life in the Delta is fraught with inherent hardships: the unpredictable cooperation of the elements, a razor thin margin between profit and financial ruin, unreliable medical care, institutional racism, crippling poverty, and substandard education. It’s a hardscrabble life that is not for the thin skinned or those of questionable resolve. As one character notes, “there is no room for pity on a farm.”

Mudbound takes a close look at a time of change in the Delta. For African-American service men returning from the War, the cat was out of the bag. Having experienced the (relative) equality in Europe, there was no going back to the way things were in Jim Crow South. Having received a steady wage, why return to the vagaries of farming? Having proven themselves in battle, why return to a subservient second-class citizenship in the South? For many, the reason was that the south was Home, and that’s where their families could be found.

The fish out of water farmers, post World War II realities, rural life, and a bitter old man provide the friction that ensures that - well - things aren’t going to go well on the farm. The novel takes some unexpected twists and turns. Other dark clouds in the story are cast over the book from the very beginning. Jordan proves herself to be a master story teller, especially for having converted at least one very skeptical reader. This is an epic story of Southern life that is well told, and it deserves the accolades that is has received.

Shortly after finishing the book, I was presented with the opportunity to have the author anchor the second helping of the Baby Got Books Reading Series. I jumped at the chance. When the Wayne Fishell Experience and Hope for Agoldensummer (who I just heard on Album 88 - that’s some indie street cred right there) were added to the bill, I knew that we had a very special evening lined up. I hope that you’ll join us on March 24th for what has turned out to be the very last night of operation for Wordsmiths Books in their current location. FREE. Details:

Russ has more at the Wordsmiths blog…

Having recently read Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat (both excellent by the way), I was in the mood for a good, light-hearted novel. And I found it in Lauren Groff’s debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton.

This book is set in the fictional town of Templeton, which is actually Cooperstown, NY where the author grew up. She snatched the name from James Fenimore Cooper who also wrote his books about Cooperstown but called it Templeton. She also incorporated many of the same characters in her novel that were in Cooper’s: Marmaduke Temple, Chingachgook, and Chief Uncas are just a few. As Groff states in the author’s note, “Fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.” Now only if all these fake memoirists of the past few weeks could have kept that in mind.

The book’s central character is Willie Upton who returns home to Templeton broken-hearted and pregnant after having an affair with her professor. Willie is infamous in town because she is the last descendant of the founding father of Templeton, Marmaduke Temple who settled the town in the late 1700’s. She returns home to her kookie mother who was a former hippie and had always told Willie that she was a love-child from her days living in a commune. Her mother proceeds to reveal to Willie that her father is actually a Templeton resident and is also a relative within the original Temple family. Her mother leaves it to Willie to research and discover who her father is.

With this premise, the book travels back and forth in time through the many generations of the Temple family. Even though Marmaduke Temple was a Quaker, he had dalliances with his black slave and a Native American girl both of whom bore children. This created quite a complex family tree and through Willie’s research, we learn about the many characters in her family as well as the evolution of the town of Templeton. Of course there are secrets revealed and many scandals uncovered in the course of her research. As Willie grapples with her own identity and eventually discovers who her father is, we witness her transformation from a lost, little girl to a more grounded woman.

As a backdrop throughout the story is the ginormous (I know this isn’t a word, but I always thought that it should have been) monster that has been discovered in Glimmerglass lake which the town borders. Basically, this is a type of Loch Ness monster that has lived in the lake for over 200 years and finally dies and comes to the surface to the astonishment of the citizens. The monster is a symbol of all the dark secrets of the town that had always been hidden under the surface.

Groff’s prose is wonderful and lyrical and her descriptions of the characters are rich in imagery and their individual voice. Each character is so original and authentically portrayed and her choice of words to establish their voice is never random. The book was filled with so many great characters all of whom I wish I could have met. And none more so than the “Monster.” The epilogue is actually the Monster’s voice:

On the day it dies, the Monster thinks of:

………and how it will soon see the people legs kickety-kicking up there in the bright surface and how it loves to watch the legs kickety-kick and how it always hopes the people belonging to the legs forget to go up into the air and begin to sink;……and how sometimes the little dead people would come untethered from the lakeweed the monster had tied them in so they wouldn’t go floating up into the broad air, for even when they turned purple and their flesh fell off, the monster loves them;

I had so much fun reading this book and looked forward to picking it up every day because it took me away to a mesmerizing, magical world.

This is Your Life, by John O’Farrell, was recommended to me by a law school friend of mine who’s now working as a screenwriter in L.A. I had never heard of O’Farrell or this book, but I took a flyer on it and felt rewarded within the first five minutes of reading it.

I’ll go ahead and copy more than I should from the first page, just to give you a sense of O’Farrell’s style and thinking, as he ruminates about an insect he hears:

At the window a wasp seemed to be struggling with the insect equivalent of Fermat’s last theorem. Problem: you are confronted with a half-opened window. How do you get to the other side? Wasp answer: keep head-butting the glass over and over again. ‘Aah,’ says the wasp professor, ‘you would think so, wouldn’t you? But if you repeatedly fly into the glass of the half-opened window and you find for some reason that you cannot seem to go straight through the glass, then what do you do?’ Hush falls over the wasp tutorial as their eager brains are taxed to the limit of wasp logic. Until one brilliant young wasp, the intellectual superstar of Wasp College, Cambridge, tentatively puts up his front leg, the answer slowly coming together in his insect head.

‘If . . . one . . . cannot fly straight through the glass’ — he cogitates as the lecture room falls silent, the other wasps sensing that they are in the presence of wasp genius — ‘and we have established that the window is half open . . . ‘ he continues, his brow furrowed in total concentration, ‘then surely the logical thing to do . . . would be . . . to fly repeatedly at the glass, buzzing a lot?’

The other pupils glance eagerly across at the professor to see if this pupil has hit upon the solution, but their tutor smiles knowingly and shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘The answer is that there is no solution to this conundrum. It is an impossible problem, like predicting prime numbers or putting a definitive value on pi. It is a philosophical trick question that cannot be answered.’

And so the book, the fictional story of Jimmy Conway, begins. The above is taken from the opening scene, as Conway is about to go onstage and perform stand-up comedy to a huge crowd, his performance to be televised on BBC to millions of viewers, all of whom believe him to be the best young comic in all of Great Britain; the problem is that he has never performed stand-up comedy before in his life.

The book then steps back to describe, from Conway’s standpoint, how he got to where he was. And while it’s not the most original premise in the world — someone hoaxing the public and the media into believing they are someone they are not — O’Farrell tells the tale wonderfully and with great (British) humor. My copy is filled with dog-eared pages where I had to flag a really funny insight or quote from the narrator. In fact, thinking back to my screenwriter friend that turned me on to this book (and thinking back to our procrastinating times in law school), I found the following excerpt hysterical:

I had now resolved to spend as much of the day as possible on my screenplay. Indeed, the night before I had read a whole chapter of How to Write a Screenplay and had even turned on my computer to retype the title page. ‘Avoidance is the writer’s greatest enemy,’ said the book. I decided to re-read the entire chapter on avoidance, lest I should succomb to this insidious trap.

This could be my longest post ever if I decided to pepper it with other quotes and passages, but I won’t do that. And I won’t ramble on about the plot, either. Although I think I can say, without spoiling any of the enjoyment of it, that it’s generally about the sequence of events that leads Conway into accidentally convincing the world that he’s a great stand-up comic, even though nobody’s ever seen his act, and his observations on fame and how people treat you when they think you’re somebody that you’re not.

It’s not a life-changing book, and it’s not the funniest book I’ve ever read, but it was a downright fun book to read, and it kept me rooting for Conway the whole way through. And I suspect that I’ll find myself tracking down some of O’Farrell’s other books to put in the queue.

Here’s a prediction. At the end of 2008, Lydia Millet’s novel How the Dead Dream will be a top many year-end “best of” lists.  Count on it.  It is an offbeat novel that is incredibly well written.  Run, don’t walk, to your closest independent book store.

T., as a little boy had an obsession. He loved money.

His first idol was Andrew Jackson. He knew the vertical dart between the brows, the jutting chin, the narrow mouth; he knew the windblown coif that perched atop the great man’s forehead like a bird’s nest on a lonesome crag. Jackson’s face was fixed in a somewhat neutral expression and T. spent long hours trying to decide if it suggested idle speculation or a slight annoyance.

It’s a short trip from a childhood affair with money to spending college years biding your time, making contacts, and studying business. T. succeeds by holding himself separate from his peers in almost monastic discipline in order to achieve his goals. Graduation leads naturally to incredible success in real estate. If that was all there was to the story, the novel would be a simple satire of the shallowness of the pursuit of money. Part of the genius of this novel is the way the author keeps the reader off balance.

Eventually, several things occur that highlight how empty T.’s life has actually been: he has a chance encounter in the desert with a coyote, he has a real relationship with a woman, his parents’ sudden divorce upsets his carefully curated life, and he gets a dog. Then things get weird.

T. begins to obsessively study rare and animals and breaks into zoos to spend time alone with endangered species. He reflects on the experience of being among the last of your kind, locked in a cage 1000’s of miles from your home, and separated from the few remaining others like yourself.  He joins these animals, sharing in their loneliness from the corners of their cages.  Meanwhile, T.’s real estate empire clears fragile desert land and constructs a resort on a pristine island.

The novel is never heavy handed in exploring its themes nor does it provide any homilies. Instead the novel explores the complexity of our place in the world.  Human presence in the world is both powerfully destructive and delicately ephemeral.  Nature is fragile and nature endures.  Relationships provide comfort and security, and they leave a path of destruction in their wake.  While funny in parts, How the Dead Dream is also a powerful and serious book.  I highly recommend it.

Several people have told me that Millet’s previous book, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart is even better than How the Dead Dream. I’m adding it to the stack.

Given my past rants about vampire books, you might be surprised that I voluntarily purchased Christopher Moore’s You Suck. Which is about vampires. Why did I do this to myself? I’m not sure. Maybe it was the cover, maybe it was the price, maybe it was because I got Christopher Moore confused with Michael Moore. I really don’t know. But something drew me to it.

Regardless, I pretty much liked it. Perhaps because it wasn’t a science fiction book, or worse yet, a poor attempt at a horror book. It was a book about young people in San Francisco, with lots of romantic tensions, loyalty issues, a goth girl, a gang of guys who work together at the Safeway, a couple of cops, and at least one prostitute. So the vampire side of things was just one element of an otherwise fun little adventure shared by an eclectic group of characters.

I think this one’s been posted on before, so I won’t get into the details of the story. But if you’re looking for an entertaining read that features vampires, but without all the stuff that can make vampire books suck, then this one might be right for you.

[ed: You Suck and its predecessor Bloodsucking Fiends reviewed here.]

Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road was originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine’s Funny Pages. I read the first few installment’s there, but I quit when it became clear that I was going to have to buy the book.

The book reminds me of the adventure stories for boys that were in my elementary school library as a kid. I think that’s the point. The book, as a physical object, is beautiful. The end papers are maps of the foreign lands where the adventures take place. The beginning of each chapter has an eastern motif watermark going down the outside edge of the page. Each chapter has a line drawing in the classic old-school adventure tale style. The illustrations are by Gary Gianni, artist for the comic strip Prince Valiant.

It’s all very well done.

Gentlemen of the Road will not be nominated for multiple literary awards, but it is a competent adventure story that will appeal to those that like to read stories with huns and guys with swords and chases on horseback.

This being Chabon, however, there is bound to be more to the tale. According to the Afterword, the original title of the book was to be Jews With Swords. The author laments that when he mentioned the title, people would laugh. Rather than picture the “memory of some ancient warrior Jew, like Bar Kochba or Judah Macabee,” they conjured images of “Woody Allen backing toward the nearest exit behind a…wavering rapier” or “their uncle Manny, dirk between his teeth, slacks belted at the armpits.” Chabon notes the incongruity, but says that we are all ripe for adventure whenever we leave the warmth and comfort of home. This is particularly true for Jews:

For better or worse it has been one long adventure…from the moment…when God told Abraham lech lecha: Thou shalt leave home. Thou shalt get lost. Thou shalt find slander, oppression, opportunity, escape and destruction. Thou shalt, by definition, find adventure.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by Jean-Dominique Bauby (which was recently made into a major motion picture that I have not seen yet), is essentially a memoir. But way different than most memoirs. It is a recounting of tragedy by its victim, but told with a triumphant spirit that defies the tragic end that looms. If the title hadn’t already been used, I might even refer to this book as a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

For those of you who don’t know, Bauby was 43 years old in 1995 and was the editor of French Elle magazine — a well-traveled journalist and father of two young children who had lived quite an interesting life up until December of that year, when he suffered a massive stroke that left him with “locked in syndrome”, in which he was completely paralyzed except for his left eyelid (which he could blink). But unlike most forms of paralysis, he could feel his body — he just couldn’t move it. Locked in syndrome is what gives the book its name; Bauby refers to his condition as like being locked in a clear diving bell, unable to interact with the outside world, but with his mind behaving like a butterfly, flitting freely along inside the diving bell.

Other elements of his particular condition are worth noting as well. For instance, his right ear was completely blocked, but his left ear amplified and distorted distance noises. It was like having a bionic ear that allowed him to hear the slightest distant noises, but not always in a good way. If a tv was left on, or if bells rang in the distance, it could be an ear-piercing experience that he could do nothing to stop. And the condition in general left him at fate’s mercy because he could do nothing to correct what would normally be to you or me nothing more than tedious little annoyances, such as covers bunching up under him. Let alone what happened when his catheter came loose (which happened at least once), and he became uncomfortably drenched with no way of informing his caregivers.

The book was dictated by Bauby during his stay at the Naval hospital in Berck-sur-Mer, on the French Channel coast. He dictated the book, letter by letter, to a speech therapist at the hospital, using a special alphabet layout in which the letters are arranged in order of their frequency of use in the French language; she would read off the letters in that order until Bauby would blink his left eye, signaling that she should note the letter at which he stopped her. And the book gave me chills as I read the story, thinking about it in the context in which it was transcribed.

Bauby’s wit and sense of humor are in full effect, despite his condition. He talks of taking vacations in his mind, in which he re-travels to the corners of the globe with no physical or financial restraint. He jokes about Hong Kong, a place he has never actually visited, but which was the site of a global conference hosted by Elle. In describing Hong Kong, he references the Felix Bar in the Peninsula Hotel, which was decorated by the French designer Philippe S., and he says:

The fact is, my likeness adorns the back of a chair in that lofty luxurious watering hole. I, who hate to have my photo taken, was one of dozens of Parisians whose portraits Philippe S. incorporated into the decor. That photo, of course, was taken some weeks before fate turned me into a scarecrow. I have no idea whether my chair is more or less popular than the others, but if you go there, for God’s sake don’t tell the barman what happened to me. They say the Chinese are superstitious, and if my true fate were known, not one of those charming little Chinese miniskirts would ever dare sit on me again.

Bauby also references the sinister character Noirtier de Villaforte, from Alexander Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, who was described by Dumas as a “living mummy”. In fact, Noirtier — who was slumped in a wheelchair and could communicate only by blinking his eye — was, according to Bauby, literature’s first, and so far only, case of locked in syndrome. Bauby had recently re-read that classic, and had toyed with the idea of writing a modern version of it. Only to be stricken with that rare condition that plagued one of its villains. That’s not necessarily irony, but it’s certainly tragedy.

Bauby died just two days after the French publication of his book. But we are all fortunate that he was able to muster the strength and the courage, and obtain the assistance necessary, to share his thoughts and his story before he passed away. It is a wonderful sad book.