Quote for the Ages

...novels should not be honest. They are a pack of lies that are also a set of metaphors; because the lies and metaphors are chosen and offered shape and structure, they may indeed represent the self, or the play between the unconscious mind and the conscious will, but they are not forms of self-expression, or true confession.

--Colm Toibin, New York Times Book Review

Weekend Lit Crit

Better than a thousand words--and ditto for zombies, werewolves & other undead:


see more Funny Graphs

Pity the Poor Book Reviewer

Ed Champion (aka Bat Segundo) channels my experience as a book reviewer in a video that had me laughing out loud: The Occupational Hazards of Book Critics.

I'm still groaning about the 900-page piece o' crap I reviewed for People in 2001. The book's bestselling author was so incensed at my unflattering assessment that she exhorted her legions of fans to bombard the People books editor with nasty emails. Then she got a multi-million-dollar, multi-book deal--further proof (as if any was needed) that my opinion didn't matter a damn.

This should be screened at next month's NBCC members meeting--or better yet, at the book awards ceremony.

Here We Go Again...

Today’s NYT has an “Ideas & Trends” piece by Charles McGrath: Great Literature? Depends Whodunit. The pull quote recycles an ancient myth beloved by the literati:

Today's novelists feel as if they have to choose either pedestal or plot.

"Oh please!" I groaned, to the complete uninterest of two women deep in conversation in an unknown (to me) language at a Las Vegas Starbucks this morning.

In the 4th graf, McGrath states:

Jane Austen wrote chick lit. A whiff of shamefulness probably began attaching itself to certain kinds of fiction — and to mysteries and thrillers especially — at the end of the 19th century, with the rise of the “penny dreadful,” or cheaply printed serial.

Not exactly. Novels and their mostly female readers were decried as "frivolous" long before penny serials made their appearance--in the 1850s, according to Wikipedia. Austen's NORTHANGER ABBEY, written in the late 1790s and published posthumously in 1818, lampoons sensational Gothic fiction as exemplified by Ann Radcliffe's 1794 THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO. In NORTHANGER ABBEY, teen protagonist Catherine and her new best friend Isabella rapturize over Udolpho et al. the same way I and my friends did over our favorite books--first Nancy Drew mysteries, then as we grew older, works by Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt. The clothing and hairstyles may be different, but girls are still the same. That's what makes Austen timeless.

McGrath discusses how genre writers, such as Chandler and Hammett, are "promoted" into the mainstream.

The puzzling thing is that such promotions don’t happen more often. Both Ian Rankin, the British mystery writer, and Stephen King, the horror-meister, have complained about a double standard — a conspiracy, in effect — among critics and reviewers that tends to ghettoize genre writing and prevent its practitioners from being taken seriously....

To transcend its genre, a book has to more nearly resemble a mainstream novel — it has to be less generic, in a word. A good example is the mysteries of P. D. James, justly praised for a characterization so rich and detailed that for long stretches you can forget you’re reading a crime story in the first place.

But is that always what we want — to forget why we’re reading what we’re reading?

Why not? To me, a hallmark of a good book, no matter what genre, is that it makes me forget why I'm reading it, even if it's been assigned to me for review, or for a class. In fact, a really good book makes me forget myself entirely: I'm totally immersed in the world the author has created, to the exclusion of everything else. I don't care about what John Updike, per McGrath, describes as the novelist's "implicit contract with the reader, which is to deliver on the promise that a particular genre entails."

The promise of any novel should be to hold the reader in thrall from beginning to end. I couldn't put down A VERSION OF THE TRUTH by Jennifer Kaufman & Karen Mack (and not because they took my publicity workshop for their first novel, LITERACY & LONGING IN L.A.). Whereas that's just what I did when THE WINTER ROSE by Jennifer Donnelly brought my suspended disbelief crashing to the ground. I was all the more disappointed because I loved A NORTHERN LIGHT, her (very grown-up) YA take on the case that inspired Dreiser's An American Tragedy.

McGrath ends with Henry James, who wrote a story about an author who wants to write potboilers, but can't manage "to turn a silk purse into a sow's ear."

...for most writers there is no such thing as slumming. You write, by his lights, what you have a gift for writing; anything else will be revealed as fakery.

Exactly. Which is why I have given up on writing The Great American Novel. Now I have my sights set on writing The Great American Potboiler--and not feeling guilty or ashamed about it.

Harry and Me

Nine years ago, I was a regular reviewer of young adult fiction for Publishers Weekly. In spring, I received a galley of a YA novel fresh from the U.K. The book had me completely enthralled; I couldn't put it down. I vividly remember sitting in the brown wool club chair in my office, thinking, This is the best thing I've read since Mary Poppins.

The book was Harry Potter & the Sorceror's Stone. My starred review ran in July 1998, the first in the U.S. It began:

Readers are in for a delightful romp with this award-winning debut from England that dances in the footsteps of P.L. Travers and Roald Dahl.

I was thrilled when the second half of the sentence made it as a pull-quote. (I just Googled it: 387 hits!)

That summer, I drove from VA with the Boy Wonder (then 9) and dog Jenny to northeastern PA, land of BW's birth. We stayed with my friend Mary, whose children were 4, 6, 9 and 12. I brought along the galley of Harry Potter, and on the last day told the kids that I had a magical new book. Who wanted to hear it? They all assembled around me--except for the 12-year-old, who declared that he was "too old" to listen to stories.

As I read, the children crept closer and closer. By the end of the first chapter, they were huddled right by me--even the 12-year-old--their eyes wide, their mouths little O's of astonishment. I read until my voice gave out; the kids howled with disappointment when I stopped. I had to promise to send the galley to Mary once BW had finished it.

Next day in the car, BW, who was on fire to find out what would happen to Harry Potter, volunteered to read the rest of the book aloud (he didn't inherit my motion sickness). So for 9 hours that's just what he did--though after awhile we agreed that he should give up on giving Hagrid the same accent that I did (I'm good at Britspeak). I think he finished reading just before we pulled into our driveway. It was the best road trip ever.

Once home, BW looked up Harry Potter on Amazon and posted his enthusiastic review, in the course of which he found out that the sequel was already out in England. Mary's mother, who lives in London, was going to be staying with her soon. So I pleaded with Mary to ask her mother to bring over the second book and then mail it to me. Deal!

A few weeks later, we received a copy of the UK edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which I duly read to BW. (It has the most adorable endpapers: copies of letters to JK Rowling from schoolchildren praising the first book.) The following spring I was assigned by PW to review the book, so I read it again. My review, again starred and the first in the U.S., ran in June 1999. Here are the first and last sentences:

Fans who have been anxiously awaiting the return of young British wizard Harry Potter (and whose clamor caused the Stateside publication date to be moved up three months) will be amazed afresh, and new readers will likely join Harry's delighted legion of followers, for this tale is even more inventive and exciting than its predecessor, Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone....Rowling might be a Hogwarts graduate herself, for her ability to create such an engaging, imaginative, funny and, above all, heart-poundingly suspenseful yarn is nothing short of magical.

I wasn't assigned to review Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but with BW's pleas ringing in my ears, I got PW to send me an extra galley. We brought it with us on vacation to Chincoteague, and every spare moment we were inside (there were many; it was a rainy week), BW shoved it at me with the command, "READ!" So I did. I think I read the entire book aloud in just three days; that was the most TV-free beach vacation ever.

By the time the fourth HP book came out, I was no longer writing for PW, and so couldn't snag an extra galley. Though BW did suggest--several times--that I could perhaps just, you know, ask. I couldn't and didn't, so we joined the screaming mob for the Harry Potter midnight party at the Charlottesville Barnes & Noble. What a scene! Kids were literally jumping up and down in excitement, some of them while perched atop their fathers' shoulders. No way BW had the patience for me to read the book to him; he was going to gobble it up all by himself. Fine by me; I didn't relish reading any more doorstops aloud. (I have great empathy for Jim Dale and Stephen Fry.) But being the Mean Mom, I forbade BW from staying up all night to finish the book, so he spent all of Saturday reading it in bed. (I have a picture somewhere of him in his jammies, HP in front of his face propped up on the comforter.)

Book Five came out when we were at the beach. I'd called ahead to reserve a copy at the one little bookstore in Chincoteague. The guy who took the call seemed bemused that anyone would want to do that for a kids' book. We showed up to buy it as the store opened Saturday morning. Two people had been there already, but there was no one behind us. Again, the guy was scratching his head over all the fuss. (More proof--as if any was needed--that Chincoteague is The Resort That Time Forgot.)

For Book Six, I didn't even bother to think about attempting to get into the Charlottesville B&N party. BW got dropped off there and was #200-odd in line. Sometime after midnight, I hung around outside, viewing the insane crush inside and thinking NFW would I want to be in there. BW stayed up reading till some ungodly hour, then finished the book by 9pm Saturday.

And now for Book Seven.

I feel that I should mark the close of the Harry Potter Era in some way. It's not only the end of the series, but also the end of BW's boyhood, as he turned 18 in May. I live just a few doors down from the Tattered Cover, which is putting on a big bash, so I suppose I'll go over when BW does. Of course he preordered a copy, and I'm sure will stay up most of the night to read it (maybe Sunday night too), which means I'll get a crack at it by Monday. No problem; I can wait to say goodbye.

A Face for Lit Crit

Alex Kuczynski, the multi-surgically enhanced author of Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery, wrote about A Model Summer, the debut novel by model Paulina Porizkova in yesterday's NYTBR.

Ms K comes out with claws blazing:

...Porizkova makes her own contribution to a literary sub-sub-genre, books by supermodels. Most of these get bad reviews, either because they’re truly awful, like Naomi Campbell’s “Swan,” which won Seventeen magazine’s Super-Cheesy Award, or — call me a conspiracy theorist — because jealous book critics aren’t tall and gorgeous, so they try to wield their puny amount of power to establish some sort of moral order.

GalleyCat rightly calls her out and adds a challenge:

Setting aside how this wounds me personally, I have to take that (much like Gawker did) as a challenge to the book reviewing community, many of whom are quite fabulous (although I have no idea how tall anybody is, really)... Who else do you know, especially outside New York City, that puts the lie to Kuczynski's jocularly cruel generalization?

I wouldn't characterize Ms K's generalization as "jocularly cruel." I would call it self-revelatory. Maybe she tries to establish some sort of order with her writing--notice I don't call it a "review" (more about that later)--but I would call it a pecking order, not a moral one. She comes off as the jealous one, proof that all life is high school.

I would never call myself gorgeous, though I still look OK if the lights aren't too bright. However, I am tall (6 feet in flats). I'm always the tallest woman at the National Book Critics Circle meetings. In fact, I'm often the tallest woman everywhere I go. (I stay away from sporting events, so I'm never around any female basketball players.) I'll bet I'm taller than Alex Kuczynski.

But guess what? An author's looks and height don't matter when I'm reading a book for review. Before I write, I don't look at the press kit and author headshot, if there even is one (not usual with galleys). And how can you tell height from a headshot anyway?

Beyond all this, what really struck me about Kuczynski's piece is that it's a book report (and a catty one at that), not a book review. After 850 words, most of them spent on plot recitation, I had no idea of whether Porizkova's book was well written or worth reading. A poor model indeed.

Proust v. Stander

Marcel wins by a knockout. In fact, several of them. I tried, I really really tried. But day or night, SWANN'S WAY put me to sleep. Its torrential verbiage wore me out and left me hungry--not for a tea-soaked madeleine, but for the lean clarity of THE GREAT GATSBY or the finely wrought sensuality of Colette. The ultimate sign of my defeat is that I moved the two copies of the book (I thought I'd do better with the new translation after the Dover edition proved unreadable) from my bedside pile to an upper shelf in the living room. Onward and upward...literally.

Coming Soon: More Drunkelogues (ZZZZ...)

Seems there's now a 13th Step. After hitting bottom, you hit the keyboard--if you're a white boy with glitterati cred, that is.

According to Choire Sicha in the NY Observer, this fall there are no less than four (count 'em: 4!) rehab memoirs hitting the bookshelves, all from youngish men with somewhat famous last names and/or connections. All that and the film of RUNNING WITH SCISSORS too.

I can hardly wait...NOT!

Tolstoy famously noted, "All happy families are alike." Here's what I discovered: So are all recovery stories. I came of age--and beyond--surrounded by drunks and drug addicts. Even married one, once upon a time. So I've been to countless Al-Anon meetings and a few AA meetings as well. And every wretched tale I've heard or read goes like this:

1. Drunk falls into downward spiral of alcoholic excess, often losing home/job/friends/love of significant other(s).
   
2. Drunk bottoms out, sometimes in a spectacular fashion, almost always in a sordid one.
3. Drunk goes through painful drying-out process.
4. Drunk rejoins society a new and better, if rather shaky, person.
   
5. End of story, except for those poor souls who lather, rinse & repeat; sometimes more than once.

I wonder what these new authors bring to the table that we haven't seen before. Not much, I expect. None of them seems to have done anything particularly remarkable other than become sober--a grueling feat, but certainly not an unusual one. None of them has lived long enough to look back on their recovery through the perspective of aged wisdom; or even humility, as Sicha adroitly points out. These guys are only in their thirties. One of them says that he wrote his book because he has twins to put through college. Maybe he's off the sauce now, but he must be smoking something to think that he'll earn enough from this one book to pay for two kids' higher education (and you know he's thinking Ivy League, not Moo U), especially with three more like it coming out this season.

And another thing: Why are these recovery books all by men?

Way back when AA started, it was thought that women couldn't be alcoholics. We know better now. Are women on the crash-and-burn party circuit not writing tales of speedy redemption? I would hope they'd have the sense not to, but I suspect that for some reason (sexism?), more likely their stories are just not getting picked up for publication. Not that there's anything wrong with that: what goes on in those rooms should stay in those rooms, if only because it's so nauseatingly repetitious. I wish the boys felt the same way, or at least would wait till they had a complete 4th act--or even a 5th or 6th--to share with the world.

Being an Intellectual is Hard!

Marcel Proust would so get blasted on Miss Snark's Crapometer. She gave writers hell for opening their novels with back story and having nothing exciting happen in the first 500 words. I'm 60 pages into SWANN'S WAY, nothing has happened other than dinnertime conversation and the nameless narrator is still whingeing about getting a proper bedtime kiss from his overly beloved maman. I hope to dog there's going to be a plot soon, but I'm not holding my breath. There's something very meta-PoMo about my lying in bed every night, reading about some mamma's boy lying in bed every night.

My special challenges are to:

1. manage to read over and around Max, who takes my picking up a book as a signal to park his 13-pound self on my chest;
2. wade through Proust's endless, semi-colon and dash bespattered sentences without immediately falling asleep;
3. stay so interested in the book that I won't forsake it for others.

And guess what? I've failed miserably at #2 and #3. In fact, so miserably that I was easily sidetracked by two newcomers that were given me, respectively, by their agent and publicist: RUMBLE ON THE BAYOU by Jana DeLeon, a (gasp!) mass market original; and THE RETURN OF THE PLAYER by Michael Tolkin.

Guess what else? I gobbled up RUMBLE in a day and a half and am now roaring through RETURN. Neither one has put me to sleep, even with Max's soporific purring on my chest. In fact, each has kept me awake--most happily, I might add.

So, to those who prefer to savor every soggy morsel of their tea-soaked madeleines, I wish you bonne chance. For now, I'm sticking to Cheez Doodles and California rolls.

P.S. Watched "Match Point" the other night, which I loved, but was struck by how similar it is to "The Player" (the movie anyway; I haven't read the book). So similar, in fact, that I guessed what the ending would be. I hate when that happens--and it didn't with RUMBLE ON THE BAYOU.