People say summer is for reading, which I don't get. It's freaking hot out. And being that I'm a quintessential WASP, my reading experience is enhanced by the lilting breezes of a 75-degree day. Which means I don't read much in the summer. Which means the following reviews detail books read in a 2-3 week blitz here in the more lovely and more temperate fall - or whatever it is we Missourians are experiencing currently. So grab a shawl and enjoy.
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
Here's what happens when you get a $660,000 advance as a debut author: People read your book en masse because they've heard of it. Jon Franzen blurbs an inert one-liner replete with the ever-fashionable elipses on your cover. Because it was marketed well. Because the publisher needed it to be marketed well. Because you got a $660,000 advance. Consider me one of these people. Cause see, from my personal reading experience, I've found that very few authors can talk sports. Maybe it's because the utter saturation of daily sports-related material is so ingrained into my psyche that to watch the literary scion give it a go is, well, fingernails on things that make awful sounds. Or maybe it's because I played both baseball and basketball pretty competitively, and even the highest-paid Harbach's usually fail on an Updikean Rabbit-ish scale. (Unless of course you're David Foster Wallace, and you reinvent sports journalism with a Roger Federer piece just after you publish maybe the greatest sports novel not considered a sports novel of all time.) But I'm one of the people that fell to the throngs of reviews and ringing endorsements and decided to read a literary novel about baseball, despite obvious hesitations.
Well, let's just say that everyone was right.
Harbach's prose is effortless, much in the way this sentence and that initial clause was effortless, being that it might be the most common, purposely vague praise of book critics. I say this because his prose is effortless, effortless in a way that didn't change the game, that will never feature the word 'avant', that doesn't befriend the wandering hipster brow, but rather, one that draws no attention to itself and, in a surprising turn to the traditional, steps into the shadows and lets the story have its turn in the spotlight. So I won't focus on his writing, which is both brave and endearing in this most cynical of times. I'll focus on the story, blessedly.
Henry Skrimshander, Guert Affenlight, Chef Spirodocus, Affenlight's daughter, Pella: these are some of the Pynchonian characters inhabiting Westish College, a mid-Wisconsin liberal arts school that evokes the most romantic, searingly sober aspects of adolescence for each one of us. There's the green grass of a ball diamond in the morning, the dreaming hoi polloi sprawled out across a mid-afternoon quad, the gritty integrity of cafeteria cooks, the aristocratic invisibility of school presidents, the homey grunge of dorm rooms, and the Infinite Jest-ian duel with routine and the crushingly ordinary. Oh, and there's a gay love affair, a preternaturally gifted shortstop with an inexplicable case of the yips, a five-star chef that slaves away in a university setting serving helpings of life lessons and hash with each spoonful, and a Division III title race that's as compelling and spare as anything I've read in fiction in a long time.
Harbach's book has evoked names such as DFW and Franzen when searching for comparisons, and both fit the bill for specific reasons. Franzen's style is throwback, and famously so, landing him on the front cover of Time because, well, he's a white male, and he writes in a way most people are used to reading. (There are other reasons, like, he's a phenomenal storyteller, his characters are the most realized of any author working today, etc. But you get the idea.) Harbach's style is similar. His characters are full. His story is filling. And he evokes DFW because of his Hal Incandenza-like character, Henry, who basically mirrors Hal's downfall.
Hal begins to suck at tennis because he can't smoke pot anymore. The spiral is irreversible and even goes as far as rendering him completely incomprehensible and outwardly incontinent, a complete 180 from his formerly erudite, OED-memorized self. Henry, without giving too much away, basically forgets how to throw the ball to first, a la Chuck Knoblach, and transforms from a surefire first-round MLB draft pick to a lowly, journeyman ballplayer. In fact, there's a line in A of F that, had I had the time to comb the tomb that is IJ, is eerily similar to one penned by DFW, one that describes Henry's realization that, for the first time in his life, he's happy when practice is cancelled, just as Hal, for the first time in his life, is happy when tennis is cancelled due to snow.
Bottom line is, you could do worse than get almost 3/4 of a million dollars before selling a single copy of your first book, then get universally praised and compared to who many consider the two greatest writers of the last 20 years. And I'm not here to take anything away from that. I loved every second of the book. Harbach's ability to describe baseball is fluid, but doesn't do any bar-raising of its own, which might be a win in this case. His story is, quite simply, engrossing and fun. With The Art of Fielding, we all win.
3.95 Beaver Pelt Hats
Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead
It's probably no secret to those of you who read this blog, which would be you fellow members of the GBCOA, that CW is my favorite living writer. And it's really not even close. His penchant to change it up every time he comes out with a new book, whether it be a racial allegory about dueling elevator inspectors, a modern-day folk tale/journalism diatribe about/not about John Henry, a love letter to a city that everyone loves to write love letters to, or a paradox of language and nomenclature held together by the renaming of a town, speaks volumes of his gifts and imagination as a writer. And yet, his sentences are gorgeous. There is no writer working today who chooses words more carefully, has a wider array of words to choose from, and constructs sentences with such variance and wit.
This is all to say that I was hesitant to read his latest offering, Sag Harbor, as I'd heard it was basically an autobiography, and man do I hate autobiographies. My obvious admiration for CW and subsequent trepidation about SH should illustrate just how colored my hatred of books-about-me-told-by-me really is. And yet. I was wrong, of course.
What a hilarious, loquacious, subversive read. If you follow CW on Twitter, then you'll know exactly what this book is like. It's deprecating in the best way, brutally honest and yet hopeful for no evidential reason. Basically, CW was the son to a doctor and a lawyer, grew up in midtown Manhattan, and summered in Sag Harbor, the part of the Hamptons where the African-American population settled some decades back. In other words, he was rich, and he was the real-life version of Theo Huxtable. The book chronicles one summer in Sag Harbor as he vacillates between epiphany and depression, finally ending up where we all end up eventually: in our own heads, wondering if anything's ever really changed.
Rather than coming-of-age, this bildungsroman manages to wobble and prod his way halfway across the tightrope of teenage angst without really making it across. We leave our young Colson, ahem, Benji, up in the air, in a figurative no-man's-land circa mid-1980's aristocrat New York, left to fend for himself in a world without too many real obstacles other than the ones created in that OT-punching dome of his. It's brilliant. It's exactly what life is without making too much up for selling-a-book's sake. Oh, and be on the lookout for the section about New Coke. One of the best passages in any book of the past year or two.
So here's to the Rum Raisin Imbeciles, and those that fight the good fight to ward them off and do something a little more substantive with our lives. We're with you, Colson. And from now on, I will be, too. I apologize for doubting.
3 Beaver Pelt Hats (based solely on Colson Whitehead scale, where JH Days is a 5, Intuitionist a 4)
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
In this spare, despairing account of a family in post-Apartheid South Africa, Coetzee managers to tell a story that needs to be told without putting a single thing into the story that doesn't need to be there. The result is sheer and biting. And at times, even a bit cynical. It also won the Booker Prize in 1999. So, some people agree with me.
Professor David Laurie, our sad sack of a protagonist, has an affair with one of his students and is driven out of his university and into the arms of his estranged lesbian daughter, Lucy, who just happens to live on a farm in rural South Africa adjacent a black farmer in the midst of buying up all the land in the area. Frosty relationships ensue, are borne out, and crumble around one very pivotal and scathing scene I won't ruin, and eventually one academic disgrace is curtained by two very private, very personal disgraces that taint the lifeline of the rest of the story. Safe to say this book is pretty much a downer. From beginning to end. But where new beginnings were signaled to a country post a revolution, it becomes quite clear that, in a strong and vindictive way, nothing has changed at all.
Maybe it's one person's disgrace, maybe it's a community's, maybe it's a country's. Or maybe it's just the way things are, and it's part of an evolution of ideas and pluralities that coexist to ram certain civilities down our throats while ignoring others entirely. Either way, it's Coetzee at his most political and emotional, in a moving and haunting story of a country where politics and emotion have supposedly changed everything - without, of course, changing the very way we live with each other each day.
2 Beaver Pelt Hats
Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders
This was a re-read for me, maybe my third time through, but figured I'd post about it in the spirit of full disclosure. Saunders is the man, a very strange and sordid man whose stories shake you out of the ordinary. If you're an aspiring writer and you find yourself falling into conventional storytelling cliche and trope, read these stories. Or anything by him, really. It's always refreshing and invigorating.
3 Beaver Pelt Hats
A Gate At the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
What can you say about Lorrie Moore? Her sentences are sublime, her word choice impecable. But her post-9/11 novel misses the mark in almost every other way. It tries to be sentimental, but ends up in nebulous territories that simmer in between uncomfortable and weird. And trust me, I'm cool with weird. Just ask Saunders. But there's just something about this tale of racial tension (not really hardly any racial tension here, just set against a 9/11 backdrop to kind of catapult it into some sort of racial thing) that leaves me feeling, well, fine about the world.
Really the only offensive thing that happens here is the main character is cursed at as she babysits a child of a different race one day and a car drives by hurling racial epithets her way. Oh no! What world is this?! Omar Little better take cover in this world Moore has audaciously created, #sarcasmfont.
There's no coming of age, there's no revelations at the end, although both are sought after and attempted to exhaustion. This just isn't an interesting or redeeming read. There aren't many post-9/11 novels out there that are any good, but this isn't even one of those that can be considered passable. It's vanilla. And Lorrie Moore is so much better than vanilla.
3 Clubbed Baby Seals
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