Five Reasons I Did Not Make It Past Page 35 (Melissa Bank – The Wonder Spot)

Page 1: “She turned to Jack now and said, ‘Is your jacket small?’
If it was, I didn’t see it, but my mother had already worked herself into what she called a tizzy. ‘How is it possible for a person to outgrow a suit in a matter of weeks?’ she wondered aloud, as though we had an unsolvable mystery or a miracle before us, instead of the result of Jack lifting weights and running all summer. He’d lost his blubber and added muscles where once there had been none; about once a day I’d put my hand around his bicep, and he’d flex it for me.”

Page 2: “When my mother tried to coax the dog out of the car, Robert said, ‘He wants to come with us.’
‘The dog will be more comfortable here,’ she said.
I thought, We’d all be more comfortable here.
Robert said, ‘Please don’t call Albert “the dog.”‘
My father said, ‘Never mind, Joyce,’ and my mother said, ‘Fine,’ in the tone of, I give up.”

Page 8: “Maybe she’d learned how to pronounce the Hebrew words, but you could tell she had no idea what they meant. She read with zero expression, as though reciting the Hebrew translation of a phone book or soup label, the only semblance of an intonation a pause at the end of a listing or ingredient.
In contrast, my mother, who was no more fluent in Hebrew than I, appeared utterly enthralled; she even nodded occasionally as though finding this or that passage especially insightful and moving.”

Page 12: “The bandleader was singing, ‘Put your right foot in, and shake it all about,’ and the three of them did it along with everyong else, without thinking, as I did, Why? Why would you put your right foot in and shake it all about?“

Page 31: “When he answered, his voice was so quiet I didn’t think he wanted me to hear him: ‘I wasn’t going to get to play.’
‘Why not?’
He raised his voice to normal volume, but it sounded louder because of how quiet it had been. ‘ “Why?” ‘ he said. ‘Because I’m not good enough.’
I was about to say, That’s not true, but I realized that it was true; he wouldn’t have said it otherwise. I waited a minute, and then I said, ‘That sucks.’”

Not Stale Yet (Paul Auster – City of Glass)

Experimental novels fail more often as novels than as experiments. When one succeeds, then, it’s worthwhile to look deeper than the trick. City of Glass, the first novel of Paul Auster’s New York trilogy, deserves its popularity and acclaim, and not just because there’s a character named Paul Auster.

The cover of my copy of the trilogy has an Escheresque cover: a hand holding a pen, and three books, one of which has a cover picturing the hand holding the pen. That’s about how the narration works in City of Glass: it’s a detective novel about a detective novelist, and without giving too much away, let’s just say that there’s Quinn and Paul Auster and “I” and we’re definitely meant to puzzle over exactly how they relate to each other. I was shocked, though, to feel that technique engaging me and drawing me into the narrative. Pointing to meta is rarely anything other than a stale joke; it doesn’t thrill us to see sitcom characters watching a sitcom any more than it shocks us to see the word damn. Escher’s been dead, after all, for 35 years.

City of Glass isn’t just well-storyboarded. It’s cool, and full of sharp prose and curious characters. Auster plays with the detective-novel form–you’ll just have to trust me, because I don’t feel comfortable giving any spoiler more detailed than what’s implicitly between these dashes­­‑-but retains the vigor. The obsessive protagonist, the creepy villain, and the extreme situations they find themselves in are all well-executed and fun to read. In an early scene Quinn intends to discover his man and stumbles on two in the same building who fit the description perfectly. It’s a meaningful counterpoint to the aforementioned narrative jumble, and it’s also expert characterization set in an accurate, vibrant New York City.

If you want an intricate, robust plot and want to see it resolved, City of Glass will disappoint you. But intrigue, good dialogue, surprise, and consequence are all here, as Auster brings to life not just characters but an aging form.

Uncommon Grace (The Great Fire – Shirley Hazzard)

I devour love stories and have no particular interest in the literature of war; therefore my standards for both are high. Only a breathless recommendation from a demanding critic induced me to purchase Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire, which I read joyfully. Somewhere there must be an attic full of Hazzard’s drafts; there is no other explanation for the shine of each of the 326 pages of this novel set in the aftermath of World War Two.

A couple is in love but circumstances prevent their relationship’s realization. Around them, a world dies: a beloved brother is gravely ill; a good man dispenses advice and then passes away; and old age fells another generation. The plot is not intricate, but not so simple that the reader feels shortchanged. The well-chosen details happen in dense paragraphs or are subtly revealed in meditations, dialogue, or physical description.

It is in these modes where Hazzard shows her expertise in character and setting; her lush scenes would seem quaint if not for a complete lack of cheap sentimentality. When a sister and brother are united in spirit as she recites classical history to him, we feel enriched and charmed, as nowhere is Hazzard cheaply dropping names or pushing buttons. Elsewhere the cliche is drained from cliches and only beauty is left, as in an early passage describing Peter Exley’s close friendship with Aldred Leith:

[Peter's father] had given up expecting sense from this only son, whose bookishness led nowhere and who frittered the last of his youth scrambling round crammed little countries and learning dead inimical languages like Italian and Japanese.

Peter’s unaffected impressions were meanwhile sent to Leith, whose letters at this time comforted him, supplying a companionable measure of intelligence, and testifying, within Exley’s isolation, to a previous sharing. He saw how Leith, more reticent than he, nevertheless responded to new circumstances as to fresh existence, experiencing antipathy or charm as the essential matter of finite days; accessible, even so, to dreams engendered. Out of their mutual reprieve, Leith had salvaged immediacy; had kept the fugitive vow of every man in battle: If I get through this, the hours will be made to count.

Note that Hazzard takes some liberties with grammar and sentence structure; this combines with the aforementioned plot tendencies to create a book that demands vigilance not only with content but mechanics. The attention is easily given to a book of this caliber, however, and is repaid many times over. From Japan to China to Britain, from acres of ruin to the small internal revolutions of distant lovers, Hazzard is pitch-perfect, and the result is a masterpiece.

Gone Too Soon (Michael Donaghy — Dances Learned Last Night)

It is a great blessing and a mild curse that there is far more worth reading than any of us will ever get a chance to read. Kurt Vonnegut’s passing has brought to mind the spring day last year when I learned, well after the fact, of Michael Donaghy’s sudden death. I had nobody to share the news with; nobody around had heard of Michael Donaghy.

Donaghy was one of the best contemporary British poets, though he remained obscure in America. I’ve never seen a book of his for sale, except at his reading I attended. Usually I’d just shrug my shoulders and note that the American mainstream has a maximum of total interest; not every competent poet, or history of salt, can hit the radar.

The sort of merit exhibited in Dances Learned Last Night, however, makes it uniquely unfortunate that we’re missing out. Donaghy is not a Stevens-level visionary — Harold Bloom would likely say that he has talent but not genius — but few can match his tack-sharp diction or modulation of tone. His poems are usually short but achieve a communicative fullness: to read one is to be expertly navigated through some human tempest. “Machines” is a typical sure-footed delight, and begins:

Dearest, note how these two are alike:
This harpsichord pavane by Purcell
And the racer’s twelve-speed bike.

The machinery of grace is always simple.
This chrome trapezoid, one wheel connected
To another of concentric gears,
Which Ptolemy dreamt of and Schwinn perfected,
Is gone. The cyclist, not the cycle, steers.
And in the playing, Purcell’s chords are played away.

Dances Learned Last Night is a pleasant compilation: the selections are faithful to the scope of Donaghy’s output yet form a coherent volume. Some of the shortest poems lack the substance of his best work, and in some of his more prosaic efforts we find a poet less at ease in the form, but there is much here to enjoy. Nobody hits my nerves quite the way Donaghy does; my library would be, as the world is, distinctly poorer without him.

Meditations and Brief Thrills (Alice Walker – Now Is The Time To Open Your Heart)

It’s exciting to see the giants updating their output. Salman Rushdie has a new terrorism-centric novel; John Updike’s protagonists are aging into the twenty-first century, if to mixed reviews; and Alice Walker has given us Now Is The Time To Open Your Heart, where we can see her sensibilities applied to the modern world.

Now Is The Time’s cultural criticism is unsurprising in its wisdom and boldness; the American government is persistently decried, as are aspects of contemporary entertainment, with a despair that is more constructive and refined than is commonplace in the counterculture. Her characters, too, show flashes of the descriptive brilliance that keeps The Color Purple so close to our hearts. Unfortunately, these individually successful aspects of the novel are rarely combined.

The book often reads as a journal: dialogue seems a stage for aphorism, and the nature descriptions and episodes are more often connected on a metaphorical level than for the sake of a plot. When the characters interacting for their own sakes, the results are splendid — the protagonist, Kate, and her lover Yolo share some of the best scenes when they’re negotiating and growing in their relationship. I would have loved to read more such scenes, and meet more characters developed more than for the sake of a single incident or moral.

The longing is greatest when I read about Saartjie, who is imprisoned and frequently raped, and who commits a defensive murder. The fragments of her backstory are gripping, and in her dialogue with Kate a lovable and engaging character briefly emerges. Ultimately, though, we are left with a few symbols introduced through her and some commentary on Jet magazine. The result is excellent for what it is, but readers of novels want more.

I’m grateful to have read Now Is The Time; moving through its two hundred generously spaced pages is like handling a smooth jewel. But when I reread Walker, I won’t think twice before reaching instead for The Color Purple, where the ambition is higher, characters more robust, and effect greater.

The Book Itself (Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace)

If David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest endures as it deserves to, future literary historians should find both humor and frustration in the fact that so much contemporary discussion of the book is in fact meta-discussion, with discourse on the text either absent or limited to whether or not the author believes the novel is in fact cohesive and/or gimmicky and/or masturbatory.

We’re doing ourselves a disservice. We should talk about Wallace’s innovation, and not just the footnoted endnotes. It is said that James Joyce characterized by using an omniscient narrator yet using the sorts of descriptions that the character himself would think of; Wallace expands on this technique in a way I’ve never seen before. There is a full spectrum of narrative position, from first-person through a third-person semiobjective narrator closely tied to one or another’s “brain voice” (as Wallace has described it) to more objective narrators in many gradations of distance from those brain voices. Therefore Wallace could choose, in each of Infinite Jest’s 1079 pages, not only among his dozens of engaging characters but among many more points of view than one is accustomed to experiencing in a single book. The effect is that of a top-shelf, high-budget adventure movie.

Also lost in the furor over whether Wallace is a social critic or postmodern flagbearer or just a verbal trickster is just how accurate his social insights are. Infinite Jest captures post-9/11 America uniquely well, and it was written before 9/11; Wallace is that attuned to the characteristic desires and emptinesses and needs and motives that 9/11 foregrounded.

When I read Infinite Jest I puzzled over the footnotes and squinted at the playful neologisms, but I also read stunning stories of loss and redemption and vivid descriptions of everything from woods to sports arenas. The emotional punches varied, and all were potent, but constant was Wallace’s peerless sense of detail: for example, some freak political occurrences lead to the election as President of a hypochondriac lounge singer who is “the first American President to use boss as an adjective.” It is reasonable for some to be turned off by Wallace’s style, but not for us to let his skills go uncelebrated.

Reading About Everything

They don’t write Books About Everything like they used to. I came of age puzzling through Godel, Escher, Bach’s broad, labrynthine exploration of the varied nature of selfhood. We don’t have a more recent match for GEB. A New Kind Of Science claimed to offer a complete picture of the world through the analysis of networks, but the few who finished it tend not to agree with Wolfram that the book is revolutionary. More readable books aim at breadth but simply abuse the process of metaphor, as James McManus does in his poker chronicle Positively Fifth Street, which is commendable but heavily salted with grand interdisciplinary generalizations.

All along, though, there has been Philosophical Explanations, a 1981 opus from Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. The book draws its title from the fact that Nozick prefers to conduct philosophy as an explanatory, not combative, endeavor. Therefore the tone is grandfatherly, that of a dazzling intellect leading us through subjects from “Understanding and Explaining Free Choices” to “Pluralism and Creativity” to “Ethical Explanation and Self-Subsumption.”

Explanations is everywhere readable and nowhere condescending. He draws from Nietzche and Kant, but also from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The freshness of the discourse is remarkable, in its vivifying examples and its head-spinning thought experiments (don’t miss the one about placebos).

Nozick is so readable that he is less a layman’s philosopher as more a man who finds meaning and interest in every corner of lay existence. He rightly blurs the line between philosophy and non-philosophy. Those looking for a Book About Everything could hardly do better.

Getting To The Point (Best Music Writing 2006)

Writing about music is often molded by that central tension in art criticism: what matters about music is so often exactly what is incommunicable in writing. There are a few standard compensations. Research obsessively until the writing is armored in factual density; focus on cultural context to avoid je ne sais quoi-type issues; punt objectivity and get impressionistic.

Da Capo Press’s Best Music Writing 2006 uses all these techniques effectively. Robert Christgau, whom I like to imagine buying index cards by the thousands, contributes an essay on Billie Holliday; Greil Marcus fascinates with a study of the cultural legacy of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War;” and Miss Amp takes us for a fun, personal ride of an interview with Kevin Blechdom.

These are sharp analyses of the music world, but the collection is deficient in analysis of the music itself. A happy exception comes from Mike McGuirk, who has ten single-paragraph reviews peppered throughout the volume; elsewhere, the best writing correlates uncomfortably with the writing most peripheral to the music. (Two of the best selections are a discussion of domestic abuse in the hip-hop world and a Christian rock festival trip report/personal essay.)

Best Music Writing 2006 is worth reading, or at least picking through. The scope is admirably broad — opera to hip-hop; Beatles to Bloc Party; blog to, well, Robert Christgau — and every so often a writer cracks the shell and gives a clear view of the music (David Marchese’s excellent High On Fire essay has moments of this). Serious music fans, however, might be unsatisfied, or at least left itching to stop reading and get back to listening. For its myriad insights, the compilation is too much canvas and not enough paint.

Looking Back (Joan Didion – Play It As It Lays)

If Joan Didion’s nonfiction overshadows her 1970 novel Play It As It Lays, a nation interested on the gambling world and the mistreatment of women will be depriving itself of a gem. In two hundred short pages, Didion depicts Maria, an actress, fighting the toxic effects of her environments, Hollywood and Las Vegas, and of the men in her life, and she does so with power.

Maria’s life and psychology motivate every line of the economical Play It As It Lays. The primary use of the limited third-person perspective often limits our understanding of the few other characters to their relations with Maria; the settings, while historically faithful, are macroscopic projections of her; and the surgical prose usually keeps the reader’s mind on Maria instead of flashy linguistic devices.

It is a joy to read an author with both control and power, and despite the current popularity of prose full of short sentences and back-and-forth-dialogue, there are not many who can employ the style as effectively as Didion. Despite the occasional distraction in a withheld fact or hyperdriven piece of dialogue, the writing succeeds both macroscopically and as a set of paragraphs so clean that it is no wonder Didion sends writing instructors to their Xerox machines so often. Further good choices permeate the book: the novel’s brevity and limited cast of characters allow a focus that is unrelenting without being tiresome.

Play It As It Lays shines in comparison to the current flood of third-rate Vegas journalism and senseless pop psychology, and it retains its meaning and freshness after almost four decades. It’s nice to be reminded that literary ambition can produce not only vast, heavy books but beautiful short works which will not only delight you as you read but will endure far longer.

Hope for an Era (David Foster Wallace – Brief Interviews with Hideous Men)

When a deathbed transcript is punctuated with startling point-of-view devices, and when a third of the word count of a short story about depression is accounted for by footnotes, yet nothing seems out of place, a skilled author is at work. David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a set of short stories that will remind you that the terrors and insights and stresses from which postmodern literature was born can, in the right hands, make us sit still and leave us breathless.

Wallace is notorious for his multi-page sentences and nested footnotes, but nowhere is he juggling a dozen oranges just to prove he can. Rarely, in fact, have I felt more attended to by an author. Salman Rushdie, another allusive worldmaker, can leave me wishing for paragraphs to end, but Brief Interviews never lost its pace. Wallace’s megalocutions are no more superfluous or distracting than Emily Dickinson’s electric brevity.

Further testifying to Wallace’s precision is the degree to which the stories not only excel individually but cohere as a forceful volume. The four identically-titled “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” pieces are a joy; their semi-interrogative form showcases Wallace’s uncommon power of characterization, and their recurrence and arrangement exemplify the book’s inter-story development of themes, motifs, and even individual words.

The literary world is fragmented, and it’s gauche to give anyone must-read status any more, but here are beautiful, readable stories written with careful attention to the contemporary world. Whether your idea of greatness is psychological insight, linguistic mastery, or pure fun, read David Foster Wallace.