#29: Tinkers

Tinkers gave me pause as to judging a book by its awards. My edition of Paul Harding's short novel, his first, sports a "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize" label on the front cover; I will think twice before purchasing a book based solely on such public acclaim.

This book is a classic example of the type of writing that one either embraces or shrugs at, likely with little gray area comprising the remainder. Harding has a way with words, and particularly with describing intricate details of pedestrian items. "The hair on my neck prickled from nape to crown, as if a current were passing through it, and as the current leapt off of the top of my head and if I had my back to the trees, I would feel the actual wind start up the back of my neck and ruffle my hair and the water and the grass and spin the swallows in its choral voice stirring all of the old unnamable sorrows in our throats, where our voices caught and failed on the scales of the old forgotten songs."

If you're thinking this sounds like another recent Pulitzer Prize winner, Cormac McCarthy, it's because it does. In All the Pretty Horses and The Road, McCarthy takes special delight in the bending of the grass, the hue of the twilight sky, and the trembling manes of all those pretty horses. Harding follows suit here, although to his credit he hasn't entirely neglected his punctuation or the rules of grammar in the process.

In this case, as in The Road, the central relationship is that between a father and son, although this, for the most part, is where the similarities end. Tinkers is less apocalyptic than introspective, and its setting is as mundane as The Road's is grandiose. Beginning with the simple sentence, "George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died," Harding paints a dreary image of creeping death, interspersed with winding memories of a childhood past. As George drifts in and out of consciousness, it is his father he recalls: Howard, a man tortured by sudden seizures, who, after years of indignity and humiliation, walks away from his family for Philadelphia, and a new start.

Paradoxically, while Harding takes special care to paint elaborate portrayals of material items, it is the conspicuous absence of explicitly denoted thoughts that affords the understated Tinkers its emotive impact. However, the plodding cadence of the writing gradually renders the novel viscerally unappealing. Perhaps this is to be expected of a book whose main character specializes in repairing clocks: the tick-tock of passing time is more celebrated here than dreaded. But as it pertains to reading a novel, award-winning or otherwise, I prefer my time to fly by unnoticed.

#28: The Lotus Eaters

The Lotus Eaters is Tatjana Soli's first novel, but you wouldn't know that from reading it. Much like her protagonist, the American photojournalist Helen Adams, Soli possesses a rare survival instinct in perhaps the only area as treacherous as Vietnam in the 1970s: the world of publishing in the digital age. For the most part, she even manages to steer clear of the worst authorial minefields -- there's little in the way of deus ex machinas here -- a feat made all the more impressive by the pervasive cliches endemic to war novels.

It is not just Soli that deftly avoids danger. Her creations do much the same. Adams, her colleague and lover, Linh, and even, well, her other colleague and lover, Sam Darrow, specialize as much in danger as they do in photography, a fact that hardly goes unnoticed by any of them. "We're in the business of war," Darrow boasts at a dinner of photojournalists one night. "The cool thing for us is that when this one's done, there's always another one...The war doesn't ever have to end for us."

And, mostly, it does not. The country and the war, working in tandem, swallow up countless people; they are all Vietnam's involuntary subjects, even as they struggle to maintain the rapidly disintegrating notion of self-determination. At the end, as Saigon fell to the Viet Cong, the pungent odor of finality was more terrifying to Adams than the inexorable violence itself: "Ten years ago it had seemed the war would never end, and now all she could think was, More time, give us more time."

The conflict's pornographic hold on Adams was but a reflection of the same transformation, years before, in Darrow. "Welcome to our splendid little war," he had said upon meeting Adams, but by then he had long since forfeited the right to use the possessive to describe a force that so clearly controlled him. His obsession with the perfect shot -- shooting for hours in blazing heat, or wandering, seemingly oblivious, into the line of fire with camera in tow -- became an all-consuming object. With his biological family back home relegated to a bit role, Darrow found camaraderie and even intimacy in the words and passions of people who, if not inheriting his fate, at least shared his proximity to history.

Helen Adams was just such a person. As a female war correspondent, with each word and action eliciting a close scrutiny to which her male counterparts were never subjected, she found herself simultaneously navigating the darkest recesses of human destruction and repeatedly proving her mettle in a man's world. Eventually, with the North Vietnamese closing in, these two paths coalesce in increasingly desperate attempts to satisfy the addiction to violence, even as its manifestation spills over the nation's borders into Cambodia. For Helen, as for Darrow and Linh, war was an end unto itself. "'The good ol' days are gone,'" a soldier tells her, just two months after she arrives in Vietnam. But it was not until the war's waning moments an eternity later, with those "good ol' days" tucked well into the past, that the wreckage of this incomprehensible human tragedy reached its long-awaited hour of reflection.

#27: The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse

In The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, author Steven D. Smith discusses a practice he dubs "smuggling." He explains the term thusly: "Our modern secular vocabulary purports to render inadmissible notions such as those that animated premodern moral discourse...But if our deepest convictions rely on such notions, and if these convictions lose their sense and substance when divorced from such notions, then perhaps we have little choice except to smuggle such notions in the conversation -- to introduce them incognito under some sort of secular disguise."

Smith then purports to debunk classic modern examples of jurisprudence or governing philosophy as embodying just this sort of intellectual hijacking, or smuggling. Stating that "conversations in the secular cage could not proceed very far without smuggling," Smith then attempts to display how these logical implications play out in real-life applications.

Shining an inquisitive light on some of our more revered (e.g. the harm principle) and controversial (e.g. end-of-life decisions) principles, Smith works to show the ways in which their public expression has been abbreviated by the conspicuous lack of transcendental foundations (be they religiously based or otherwise). Unfortunately, while these embodiments of his theory are convincing at times, Smith is noticeably reticent to provide any neat solutions. In the book's last paragraph, he alludes to their absence, writing, "And so, in the end, it seems that the only general prescription that can be offered is, once again, the seemingly bland recommendation of...openness."

Openness in the lexicon of Smith means to allow those "inadmissible notions" to join their logical conclusions in the realm of public dialogue. However, even as he argues for their inclusion, he appears reluctant to embrace this broader conversation wholeheartedly. "There is a risk that a more open conversation may be acrimonious," Smith acknowledges. "Even so, that sort of conversation is ultimately more respectful of the participants. More respectful and also, potentially, more productive and substantial: that is because we will be talking about what we really believe."

Whether Smith is right remains to be seen. The left and the right appear to be diverging more quickly now than ever before, and this political dichotomy is only one of many fault lines dotting the mottled landscape of public conversation. Openness as a societal antibiotic, or as an unnecessarily opened can of worms? Let the debate begin, Smith would say, but at the very least let us be honest about how we choose our sides.

#26: If You Follow Me

There's plenty of internalizing taking place within the pages of Malena Watrous' If You Follow Me. Some of it is explicit, and at other times implied. But it's always there, lurking beneath the placid surface. If this is already starting to sound like a lifeless addition to the all-is-not-bliss-in-domestic-paradise genre, take a deeper look. In fact, all is not bliss here either -- the rare worthwhile novel is -- but the cast, a twenty-something lesbian couple, and the setting, rural Japan, help Watrous avoid fiction's most egregious cliches.

Marina is a twenty-something recent wanderer who, on something suspiciously like a lark, decided to follow her lover to East Asia for a year of teaching abroad. Her father's suicide, looming like an omnipresent monster in her recent past, was the catalyst that brought her and Carolyn together: they met in a bereavement group during senior year in college, where Marina mentally characterized her soon-to-be girlfriend as "tough and spiky, with a rod in her tongue and buzzed hair that moved through a Kool-Aid spectrum." Carolyn, for her part, was still grieving her loss, at age twelve, of her mother to cancer, and had been attending the bereavement group since freshman year.

The two were an unlikely pair to begin with; a year of living abroad together, then, was a monumental risk. And yet, Marina remembers, "when she asked if I'd consider moving to Japan with her, I didn't hesitate before saying yes...I couldn't go back to San Francisco," with all its childhood memories of her fading father and the stark reality of a mother trying desperately to move on.

Marina's sojourn in Japan is kicked off with a letter from her mentor, Hiroshi Miyoshi, a native son who has been handed the unfortunate task of keeping a close eye on the two Americans and facilitating their acclimation to Japanese social mores. Succumbing to bouts of self-consciousness, Miyoshi prefers to communicate disapproval of Marina's (frequent and unintentional) breaches of etiquette through handwritten letters written in rudimentary English; these missives provide the bulk of the laughs in what is often a deeply introspective story.

Miyoshi's inaugural letter scolds Marina on her ignorance of "gomi law," that maddeningly esoteric set of rules governing trash disposal. "Dear Miss Marina how are you? I'm fine thank you. A reason for this letter is: recently you attempt to throw away battery and jar and some kind of mushroom spaghetti and so forth, all together in one bin. Please don't try 'it wasn't me.' We Japanese seldom eat  Gorgonzola cheese!"

Time passes. The clock ticks and tocks. First, there is Marina and Carolyn fighting. Then there is Joe, a cheeky British fellow and the only person in Japan who knows that his two female acquaintances are not just friends, but intimate as well. Throw in a minor television celebrity, a unique cast of small-town Japanese friends (notably Noriko and Keiko), and a shifting relationship with Miyoshi, and one can see that Marina is due for some noticeable life changes.

What those changes entail impacts different people in different ways. Some of these changes are gradual, and others more sudden. Frustratingly, many of them fail to grab the reader's attention (at least mine) and hold it for the time necessary to make these metamorphoses feel significant. It is not so much that If You Follow Me is not a tale worth reading, but one gets the sense that it could have been shortened without much loss. Malena Watrous hits high marks for complexity, but mostly forgets the value of brevity.

Subway culture and the panhandler

I lived for nine years in Boston, Massachusetts. It is a town of crooked one-way streets, Irish bars, and, perhaps most ubiquitously, innumerable homeless people. Living in and amongst those same streets and watering holes, Boston's displaced roam freely, their casual insouciance unperturbed by the occasional disapproving policeman or irritable bench neighbor. The city, while perhaps not embracing them, at least affords them a generous measure of nomadic self-determination, and for that reason Boston remains a favorite sanctuary for the housing-challenged.

This is not to say these hardy men and women are without want. When their cash flow devolves into a steady trickle downstream, our homeless friends take to the subway -- the T, as it is known -- and, in the spirit of of the First Amendment, brazenly wield their vocal chords to great effect in pursuit of, if not happiness itself, its closest approximation as embodied by a fast-food meal or a bottle of Jim Beam. This commonly takes the form of a bleating voice in which the plaintive tones of defeat can clearly be heard: "Can you spare some change?"

It is more a statement than a question, even as its last syllable hangs desperately in the air, an unresolved dissonance calling for resolution. The sincerity is as evident as the tact is lacking: money is needed. Whether for drugs or food, alcohol or medicine, we neither know nor care; they are here, among us, and the choice is ours. We toss a bill or two their way, or we do not. We look away, avert our eyes. We do not remember them, nor they us; strangers passing in the night, all.



New York's subway system is home to investment bankers, Mexican accordion players, and apathetic Upper West Siders. Broadway houses the nation's finest productions, but the real theater, unfolding in stuttered moments, performs for free somewhere between 96th Street and Park Place on the 2 line. Here the homeless traipse through subway cars, plying their craft as they wedge their way through the tired ranks of the gainfully employed.

The last time I shared a New York subway car with a panhandler, I felt as if I were listening to a sales pitch. I was. While a bit melodramatic for my taste, one cannot argue with the $2.25 price of admission. Words such as "interim" and "requisite" filled the air, as New Yorkers turned back to their New Yorker in silence. One is constantly under the impression of having seen this particular solicitor before, perhaps on the same train line. The pleas for money are theatrical (and thus memorable), recalling a failed actor blandly reciting lines that have long since lost all meaning. They inevitably begin with some variation of "I'm sorry, and I don't mean to disturb you," but of course they do. Trust has left the building, or at the very least the subway car, and empathy along with it. I do not drop money into the hat.

I'm not sure why Boston and New York diverge in this way, nor will I ever, most likely. It is merely one of the myriad aspects in which the compressed millions that comprise our modern cities coalesce into collective entities of their own. Somehow, these cities of random individuals gain distinctive, differentiated, holistic identities; somehow homeless culture becomes but one among countless mirrors reflecting these. Personally, I can respect the Bostonian directness, a challenge to the general public to lend a helping hand. I feel no such affinity for the New Yorker, who, borrowing the cadence of a stage voice and the persuasive technique of a politician, alienates me before completing a sentence. Like everything related to Boston and New York (especially as felt by a Bostonian), one of the two must be superior. Somewhere, a master panhandler is crafting the perfect pitch, and waiting for its debut in the city.

The midpoint recap

Twenty-five books down, twenty-five to go. (This excludes the two bonuses: xkcd and The Bro Code.) Right now I'm a little ahead of schedule but my pace is slowing, so the second half of the year will be interesting. I'm having nightmares about hunkering down in a dank basement, reading some horribly written novel, while the rest of the world celebrates New Year's Eve. I'm determined not to let this happen. Finished by Christmas would be nice.

Anyway, since halfway point summaries (or retrospectives, or recaps) seem to work so well for sports seasons (e.g. the All-Star break report cards that always have baseball journalists salivating), I suppose it's worth a try on a book blog, too. So without further ado, here are my thoughts on the first half of book-worming, 2010-style.

But first, some stats (in keeping with my love of baseball, of course). Leading off, my gender ratio was a bit lopsided: nineteen books written by men, and only six by women. The writers' nationalities tell a similar story: eighteen Americans and seven of everyone else (only one nation, Great Britain, had multiple authors, with two). Fifteen books fell into the non-fiction category, with ten in fiction. All but four books were published in 2007 or later. Three books were under 200 pages, fifteen were between 200 and 300, five were between 300 and 400, and two were over 400 pages. In summary, the average book was a non-fiction work spanning 274 pages, published in 2008, and authored by an American male. (My girlfriend has ever so gently reminded me to include more women and authors of color in the second half; luckily for me, her English literature degree is, contrary to her lamentations, quite relevant when it comes time for book recommendations.)

And now, onto the 50BF2010 awards:

Best Non-Fiction Book: The Big Short, by Michael Lewis

When I reviewed The Big Short on April 18, I described it as a "very, very entertaining book." Relative to the seven books I've read since then, this has only become even truer. This is not due to any shortcomings of those books as much as it is a further ringing endorsement of The Big Short. Michael Lewis takes an incredibly complex and arcane set of circumstances and transforms it into a suspenseful narrative with an uncomfortably ambiguous approach to morality. (Were his characters the good guys, or villains? I think it's a bit of both.) His insider story of the outsiders who prophesied the coming Great Recession is almost beyond belief; but then, never more so than the financial collapse itself, which Lewis captures vividly with intimate portraits of the people who, after watching in shock as it unfolded, proceeded to cash in on the subsequent implosion. Most of the time I feel ambivalent about the term "must-read;" but if ever the expression had an appropriate usage, The Big Short undoubtedly qualifies.

Honorable mention: SuperFreakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner; and Freefall, by Joseph Stiglitz


Best Fiction Book: The Dream Life of Sukhanov, by Olga Grushin

This story, of a Soviet art critic whose fragile political stature is threatened by the dawn of glasnost, is a delicately woven tale of the zeitgeist of the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s, and a brilliant depiction of one man's struggle with self-identity in the face of previously unimaginable national transformation. Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov's sojourns through his past and present gradually coalesce into one time-blurred journey, with surrealism as both its guide and genre, realism as its omnipresent companion, and metamorphosis as the destination. That Olga Grushin managed to pen this novel in a non-native tongue is a testament to the boundless nature of her literary imagination, and an apt metaphor for Sukhanov's own disorientation in a world not his own.

Honorable mention: The Disappeared, by Kim Echlin; and The Informers, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez


Worst Non-Fiction Book: Reality Hunger, by David Shields

It's officially filed under "Literary Criticism," according to its ISBN categorization. But I remain unconvinced that Reality Hunger is actually anything of the sort, and even less so that it amounts to much more than self-aggrandizement. David Shields opens his book with epigraphs by Picasso, Walter Benjamin, and Graham Greene, and then proceeds, for the next 205 pages, to steal and plunder from authors, thinkers, and entertainers both near and far, past and present. The intention, he implies, is to revolutionize the commonly held platitudes that have defined and separated the worlds of fiction and non-fiction and, in the meantime, to decimate international standards of intellectual property rights. Why this is so urgent is never made entirely clear. To be fair, it is difficult to concoct a cogent argument out of 618 literary scraps from authors who, strangely enough, write their own material. But this is no deterrent to the inexorable Shields, whose campaign to throw open the doors to appropriation of others' creativity fails to appreciate the very real line between ideas and their expression. His literary remix, unsurprisingly, dissolves into cognitive dissonance.

Dishonorable mention: The Flight of the Intellectuals, by Paul Berman; and The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean


Worst Fiction Book: The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte

Q: What do you get when you start with a disenchanted development officer, add in a newly rediscovered friendship with an old college buddy, and, for good measure, throw in a subplot involving his wife's potential infidelity?

A: A terrible novel. One online reviewer noted, with a beautiful sense of irony, a bit of dialogue late in the book in which Milo, the book's utterly forgettable antihero, asks a colleague, "...If I were the protagonist of a book or a movie, it would be hard to like me, to identify with me, right?" Her reply: "I would never read a book like that, Milo. I can't think of anyone who would." Well said. It seemed as if author Sam Lipsyte neglected to decide whether he was writing comedy or tragedy until, at the end, he eventually gave up and decided, rather arbitrarily, to stop writing. Fortunately, it was as good a point as any to stop reading.

Dishonorable mention: Family Album, by Penelope Lively


Onward march to the next twenty-five!

#25: Reality Hunger

I really need to stop reading manifestos. First it was The Communist Manifesto. Then, earlier this year, it was You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by Jaron Lanier. "Workers of the world, unite!" yielded to much ado about the "hive mind." Like any manifesto, both were distinctly aware of their characterization as such; hence, the grandiose language and sweeping world vision. (I suppose Karl Marx's received a bit more attention than Jaron Lanier's, however.)

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, by virtue of its self-descriptive subtitle, belongs to this same (decreasingly exclusive) club. However, David Shields, whose other books have titles like The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, hardly looks like a kindred spirit of the communist revolutionary or the cautious Internet pioneer (based on his photograph on the book's back flap, at least). The bald and bespectacled author appears better suited for a dignified study of poetry, or perhaps as a caption writer for a nature-themed daily calendar.

Neither of these subjects is what Shields is interested in writing about, however. In what the author describes as "twenty-six chapters; 618 mini-sections," a case is made for an emerging writing form. "An artistic movement, albeit an organic and as-yet-unstated one, is forming," Shields writes. "What are its key components? A deliberate unartiness: 'raw' material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional."

Or did Shields actually write this? Aha, he would reply, but that's just the point: who cares? Each of these hundreds of fragmentary "mini-sections" operates as a unique thought, yet also as an integral part of the whole. What if section three were written by David Shields? Or what if it were David Mamet, or David Carr, or David Markson (all of whom are also quoted in Reality Hunger)? Does knowing the identity of the author -- or, for that matter, evaluating the authenticity of the text itself -- alter the experience of reading the work? And if so, is this for the better or the worse? In short, why the big fuss over intellectual property?

Well, for one, most writers struggle to scrape together the requisite means to make a living out of their dreams. When someone else comes along and irreverently plucks a quote here and a passage there wholesale, a drop in royalties is the result. This would appear to be an understandable reason for approximately 618 authors, speakers, and public figures to be very angry with David Shields. Thanks to the lawyers at Random House, however, the author was generously spared this fate. Lamenting the loss of a "freedom that writers from Montaigne to Burroughs took for granted," Shields explains, in a brief note following the main text, that his publisher's dutiful attorneys "determined that it was necessary for me to provide a complete list of citations," but that readers may easily "restore this book to the form in which I intended it to be read" by cutting out these very citations with a pair of scissors.

"Reality cannot be copyrighted," Shields declares. He is right, it cannot; but its various expressions can, and do, warrant legal protection. The author, in an online defense of his book, claims that "numerous bloggers appear to think I'm the anti-Christ because I don't genuflect at the twin altars of the novel and intellectual property." But I suspect theirs is merely a case of disenchantment, not stupefaction. The starving masses may be hungering for reality, but it is doubtful that a hardcover compendium of reprocessed ideas will provide the necessary protein. The last sentence of Reality Hunger reads, "Stop; don't read any farther." I'm assuming it was David Shields who wrote this line; regardless of the author, this advice would have been far more useful in the book's earlier pages. Even reality hunger disappears when confronted with enough junk food.