http://www.goodreads.com/review/list_rss/147289 en-US Thu, 08 May 2008 11:55:58 -0700 60 http://www.goodreads.com/ 200 41 http://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/gr_logo.gif 21867372 Thu, 08 May 2008 11:55:58 -0700
Regular readers know that one of the subjects I'm often talking about here at CCLaP is that of so-called "genre fiction" versus "mainstream literature," and especially of the natural danger of the former; that many genre novels are as popular as they are simply because they deliver that genre's fetishistic details in spades, not necessarily because they're good at the building blocks behind all good literature (or in other words, character and plot and style, the same criteria off which CCLaP's reviews are based). So why bother reading genre pieces when you're not a natural fan of that genre? Well, because every so often, a genre novel will come out that is good at the literary ABCs, that does appeal to audience members besides those who naturally love that genre to begin with, and as a result become much more exciting and worthwhile projects than simple mainstream literature; to cite a good recent example, think of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer-winning The Road, how on the surface it seems like any other post-apocalyptic science-fiction thriller but in reality actually tells a much deeper and more profound message than most other books of that genre.

That's what led me, frankly, to reading 2007's Heart-Shaped Box this week, the surprisingly popular debut novel by Joe Hill; because it's a genre novel itself, to tell you the truth, a genre I don't usually care for that much (horror, to be specific), but one that's been getting a lot of attention in the last year from places other than the horror community, a small-press novel that has nonetheless landed in the top 10 of the New York Times bestseller list and with a big-budget Hollywood adaptation by Neil Jordan coming out later this year. Ah, but then I actually read it, and am now even more confused than I was before; because to be perfectly frank, Heart-Shaped Box is an okay novel but certainly nothing better than most other horror books, or at least from the viewpoint of this non-fan who tends to lump all their storylines together. Because really, if you want to think of genre novels in a standardized, almost scientific way, you can really think of them like this -- that all genre novels basically start with a semi-hacky plotline full of easily-guessed cliches (which is why they're known as genre novels in the first place), and how good or bad that novel turns out to be hinges on where that author goes with that semi-hacky plotline, either upwards into unexpected territory or downwards to wallow in its hacky, cliched mess.

And that's the biggest problem with Heart-Shaped Box; unlike the best genre work out there, the stuff that legitimately breaks through to a general mainstream audience, here Hill chooses to wallow in the most predictable cliches available whenever given the choice, whenever given the chance to otherwise elevate his material into something truly unique. Because I mean, seriously, just how many more horror projects do we need that feature as its main villain a creepy horse-faced old man in an antique black suit and fedora hat who talks with a threatening southern drawl? Or dogs that can somehow preternaturally sense the looming evil around them long before the humans do? Or sassy grandmas who accidentally provide the key to the story's entire resolution, through their folksy sayin's spouted around their homey kitchen during a down moment in the plot? These are all bad cliches of the horror genre, the things that make me as a non-fan flee from most hackneyed books within that genre; the entire reason I picked up Heart-Shaped Box was because I thought it was going to be better than that, given the fanatical grassroots popularity the book has inspired since first coming out.

Unfortunately the book is not that; it's a decent horror story, don't get me wrong, but ultimately nothing better or even different than a typical Stephen King novel circa 1982 or so, all haunted cars and cheesy inner dialogue and badly dated rock lyrics and the whole bit. (And speaking of which, by the way, can I just get this off my chest, please? What self-respecting death-metal veteran would ever possibly consider Counting Crows and Coldplay among his favorite bands? Cheese And Rice, Joe Hill, pick a music style and stick with it already, or don't bother making your main character a grizzled death-metal veteran to begin with.) If you're already a fan of horror novels, by all means go ahead and pick it up if you haven't already; if you're like me, though, and tend to only tackle a handful of such projects per year, Heart-Shaped Box unfortunately should not be one of them.

Out of 10: 6.8, or 7.8 for horror fans ]]>
author: Joe Hill
name: Jason
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 05/08
date added: 05/08/08
shelves:
review:
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Regular readers know that one of the subjects I'm often talking about here at CCLaP is that of so-called "genre fiction" versus "mainstream literature," and especially of the natural danger of the former; that many genre novels are as popular as they are simply because they deliver that genre's fetishistic details in spades, not necessarily because they're good at the building blocks behind all good literature (or in other words, character and plot and style, the same criteria off which CCLaP's reviews are based). So why bother reading genre pieces when you're not a natural fan of that genre? Well, because every so often, a genre novel will come out that is good at the literary ABCs, that does appeal to audience members besides those who naturally love that genre to begin with, and as a result become much more exciting and worthwhile projects than simple mainstream literature; to cite a good recent example, think of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer-winning The Road, how on the surface it seems like any other post-apocalyptic science-fiction thriller but in reality actually tells a much deeper and more profound message than most other books of that genre.

That's what led me, frankly, to reading 2007's Heart-Shaped Box this week, the surprisingly popular debut novel by Joe Hill; because it's a genre novel itself, to tell you the truth, a genre I don't usually care for that much (horror, to be specific), but one that's been getting a lot of attention in the last year from places other than the horror community, a small-press novel that has nonetheless landed in the top 10 of the New York Times bestseller list and with a big-budget Hollywood adaptation by Neil Jordan coming out later this year. Ah, but then I actually read it, and am now even more confused than I was before; because to be perfectly frank, Heart-Shaped Box is an okay novel but certainly nothing better than most other horror books, or at least from the viewpoint of this non-fan who tends to lump all their storylines together. Because really, if you want to think of genre novels in a standardized, almost scientific way, you can really think of them like this -- that all genre novels basically start with a semi-hacky plotline full of easily-guessed cliches (which is why they're known as genre novels in the first place), and how good or bad that novel turns out to be hinges on where that author goes with that semi-hacky plotline, either upwards into unexpected territory or downwards to wallow in its hacky, cliched mess.

And that's the biggest problem with Heart-Shaped Box; unlike the best genre work out there, the stuff that legitimately breaks through to a general mainstream audience, here Hill chooses to wallow in the most predictable cliches available whenever given the choice, whenever given the chance to otherwise elevate his material into something truly unique. Because I mean, seriously, just how many more horror projects do we need that feature as its main villain a creepy horse-faced old man in an antique black suit and fedora hat who talks with a threatening southern drawl? Or dogs that can somehow preternaturally sense the looming evil around them long before the humans do? Or sassy grandmas who accidentally provide the key to the story's entire resolution, through their folksy sayin's spouted around their homey kitchen during a down moment in the plot? These are all bad cliches of the horror genre, the things that make me as a non-fan flee from most hackneyed books within that genre; the entire reason I picked up Heart-Shaped Box was because I thought it was going to be better than that, given the fanatical grassroots popularity the book has inspired since first coming out.

Unfortunately the book is not that; it's a decent horror story, don't get me wrong, but ultimately nothing better or even different than a typical Stephen King novel circa 1982 or so, all haunted cars and cheesy inner dialogue and badly dated rock lyrics and the whole bit. (And speaking of which, by the way, can I just get this off my chest, please? What self-respecting death-metal veteran would ever possibly consider Counting Crows and Coldplay among his favorite bands? Cheese And Rice, Joe Hill, pick a music style and stick with it already, or don't bother making your main character a grizzled death-metal veteran to begin with.) If you're already a fan of horror novels, by all means go ahead and pick it up if you haven't already; if you're like me, though, and tend to only tackle a handful of such projects per year, Heart-Shaped Box unfortunately should not be one of them.

Out of 10: 6.8, or 7.8 for horror fans
]]> 21770894 Wed, 07 May 2008 07:21:15 -0700
Almost everyone agrees by now that the United States currently wields an enormous amount of power and influence over the rest of the world; but does that give us the right to call the US an "empire," at least as how we traditionally define the word? After all, the US isn't trying to actively annex or colonize any foreign lands, has no interest in adding more states to the 50 we already own; we do have a vested interest, however, in seeing American-owned businesses do well in these foreign lands, a commonality among many empires throughout the ages, and we're not afraid to use military force to achieve those aims, yet another commonality. We spread the idea of free-election democracies and free-market capitalism, but then insist that the countries we deal with adopt such measures themselves, or suffer the wrath of an imposed democracy through the barrel of a gun.

Perhaps it's better, then, says bestselling essayist and futurist Amy Chua in her new book Day of Empire, to think of the United States instead as a "hyperpower" -- not necessarily an empire or republic or kingdom dealing with all their warring neighbors, but literally a society that has gained unquestioned dominance over the entire planet at once, or at least whatever part of the planet was known to those people at that point in history. If you define it this way, Chua says, then you can actually see a clear line of hyperpowers stretching back chronologically to Cyrus' Persian Empire of 500 BC, with other such infamous societies as the Roman Empire, Genghis Khan's Mongol Empire, and even the Dutch Republic of the 1600s falling on this line as well; and what's more, you can actually see very obvious similarities between such groups when you align them in this fashion, lessons that can be applied to the US as well at this particular moment in history (the moment we're about to lose our hyperpower status, that is). And indeed, that's something else Chua convincingly does throughout the book as well, is show example after example of powerful empires that never did make it to hyperpower status -- the Ottoman Empires of history, the Spanish Inquisitions, the 20th-century fascist states -- and proves that none of them heeded the lessons about hyperpowers that she points out in this manuscript, thus reinforcing her theories about such societies' rises and falls even more.

So what exactly are the grand secrets about such hyperpowers that Chua discovers? Well, nothing too terribly surprising, if you really stop and think about; basically, that time after time after time, all hyperpowers in history saw their ascendency during a time when they embraced tolerance, when the society itself welcomed different religions and points of view and skill sets and culinary palettes, that the powerful combination of work power and brain power is what vaulted these societies into hyperpower status in the first place. And consequently, in example after example after example, where these hyperpowers started to fall is when they suddenly stopped being tolerant, when success and laziness and a drop in societal education turned the populace into xenophobic, superstitious zealots; time after time, Chua shows how such an attitude has driven away the very people and resources that made that society so powerful, usually right into the arms of another society on the rise that is happy to accept the resources. That's why this line of so-called hyperpowers seems sometimes to be an unbroken stretch from one society to the next for the last 2,500 years; because mainly it's a history of huge groups of people fleeing from one region of the world to the next, all the Jews with their money and scientists with their heretical ideas, and let's not even start with those dirty, dirty bohemians. Every time such groups are forced to flee one hyperpower because of rising intolerance, Chua convincingly argues here, these are always the moments those hyperpowers begin their downfalls; and whatever society ends up embracing these refugees tends to become the next hyperpower in history, which makes a lot of sense when it's explained that way.

And indeed, Chua's book is full of such "ah hah, yes, you're so right" moments, conclusions that make so much logical sense when you read them but that you had never really thought of yourself before this book; this manuscript is very much a reflection of the law professor Chua is during the day, moving very logically from one step to the next to the next. In fact, this might be the most interesting thing of all about Day of Empire, is that Chua does such a great job of pointing out the surprising amount of similarities from one hyperpower to the next; from Greek emperors bowing before Egyptian gods to Queen Victoria declaring herself the Empress of India, Chua creates an unshakable argument through facts and historical records of how important such religious tolerance and surface-level gestures have been to every single hyperpower in existence, no matter how those gestures are actually expressed from one decade to the next. In fact, as painful as it is, Chua also convincingly argues here how close such "evil" societies throughout history came to becoming long-term and secure ones, if they had only embraced such tolerance a little more themselves; to use one chilling example, how the Nazis would've probably gotten World War II called off as a stalemate, and survived well into our times, if they had only been able to embrace Russians, Poles and Czechs as equals and work out some kind of mutually beneficial truce. If not for the Holocaust, if not for their official policy of considering all their neighbors vermin, the Nazis could've very well "won" WWII precisely by not losing it; and this is the case with almost all the not-quite-hyperpowers in history, Chua argues, from the Spanish Empire embracing the Inquisition during the Dark Ages to China's Ming Empire embracing isolationism after the devastation of the Mongol Hoard.

It's an intriguing and thought-provoking book, one that will really have you looking at America's position in the world in a different way, wondering how we too might be able to "softly transition" out of hyperpower status like Great Britain did a century ago (a point in history Chua clearly admires), or if we are doomed to crash and burn like the old hyperpowers who never learned these lessons. Combined with the last section of this manuscript, a look at the rising regions and coming powers of the world (mostly the EU, China and India), it's a great primer as to how powerful societies get things right, where things go wrong, and what we can likely expect in global politics over the next 25 years. Day of Empire is a fast-moving, plainly-written book, one of those great nonfiction accounts geared towards a general populace that I love so much; not only policy wonks but simply those wanting to know a little more on the subject will find the book a real asset, and it gets a big recommendation from me today.

Out of 10: 9.3 ]]>
author: Amy Chua
name: Jason
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 05/08
date added: 05/07/08
shelves:
review:
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Almost everyone agrees by now that the United States currently wields an enormous amount of power and influence over the rest of the world; but does that give us the right to call the US an "empire," at least as how we traditionally define the word? After all, the US isn't trying to actively annex or colonize any foreign lands, has no interest in adding more states to the 50 we already own; we do have a vested interest, however, in seeing American-owned businesses do well in these foreign lands, a commonality among many empires throughout the ages, and we're not afraid to use military force to achieve those aims, yet another commonality. We spread the idea of free-election democracies and free-market capitalism, but then insist that the countries we deal with adopt such measures themselves, or suffer the wrath of an imposed democracy through the barrel of a gun.

Perhaps it's better, then, says bestselling essayist and futurist Amy Chua in her new book Day of Empire, to think of the United States instead as a "hyperpower" -- not necessarily an empire or republic or kingdom dealing with all their warring neighbors, but literally a society that has gained unquestioned dominance over the entire planet at once, or at least whatever part of the planet was known to those people at that point in history. If you define it this way, Chua says, then you can actually see a clear line of hyperpowers stretching back chronologically to Cyrus' Persian Empire of 500 BC, with other such infamous societies as the Roman Empire, Genghis Khan's Mongol Empire, and even the Dutch Republic of the 1600s falling on this line as well; and what's more, you can actually see very obvious similarities between such groups when you align them in this fashion, lessons that can be applied to the US as well at this particular moment in history (the moment we're about to lose our hyperpower status, that is). And indeed, that's something else Chua convincingly does throughout the book as well, is show example after example of powerful empires that never did make it to hyperpower status -- the Ottoman Empires of history, the Spanish Inquisitions, the 20th-century fascist states -- and proves that none of them heeded the lessons about hyperpowers that she points out in this manuscript, thus reinforcing her theories about such societies' rises and falls even more.

So what exactly are the grand secrets about such hyperpowers that Chua discovers? Well, nothing too terribly surprising, if you really stop and think about; basically, that time after time after time, all hyperpowers in history saw their ascendency during a time when they embraced tolerance, when the society itself welcomed different religions and points of view and skill sets and culinary palettes, that the powerful combination of work power and brain power is what vaulted these societies into hyperpower status in the first place. And consequently, in example after example after example, where these hyperpowers started to fall is when they suddenly stopped being tolerant, when success and laziness and a drop in societal education turned the populace into xenophobic, superstitious zealots; time after time, Chua shows how such an attitude has driven away the very people and resources that made that society so powerful, usually right into the arms of another society on the rise that is happy to accept the resources. That's why this line of so-called hyperpowers seems sometimes to be an unbroken stretch from one society to the next for the last 2,500 years; because mainly it's a history of huge groups of people fleeing from one region of the world to the next, all the Jews with their money and scientists with their heretical ideas, and let's not even start with those dirty, dirty bohemians. Every time such groups are forced to flee one hyperpower because of rising intolerance, Chua convincingly argues here, these are always the moments those hyperpowers begin their downfalls; and whatever society ends up embracing these refugees tends to become the next hyperpower in history, which makes a lot of sense when it's explained that way.

And indeed, Chua's book is full of such "ah hah, yes, you're so right" moments, conclusions that make so much logical sense when you read them but that you had never really thought of yourself before this book; this manuscript is very much a reflection of the law professor Chua is during the day, moving very logically from one step to the next to the next. In fact, this might be the most interesting thing of all about Day of Empire, is that Chua does such a great job of pointing out the surprising amount of similarities from one hyperpower to the next; from Greek emperors bowing before Egyptian gods to Queen Victoria declaring herself the Empress of India, Chua creates an unshakable argument through facts and historical records of how important such religious tolerance and surface-level gestures have been to every single hyperpower in existence, no matter how those gestures are actually expressed from one decade to the next. In fact, as painful as it is, Chua also convincingly argues here how close such "evil" societies throughout history came to becoming long-term and secure ones, if they had only embraced such tolerance a little more themselves; to use one chilling example, how the Nazis would've probably gotten World War II called off as a stalemate, and survived well into our times, if they had only been able to embrace Russians, Poles and Czechs as equals and work out some kind of mutually beneficial truce. If not for the Holocaust, if not for their official policy of considering all their neighbors vermin, the Nazis could've very well "won" WWII precisely by not losing it; and this is the case with almost all the not-quite-hyperpowers in history, Chua argues, from the Spanish Empire embracing the Inquisition during the Dark Ages to China's Ming Empire embracing isolationism after the devastation of the Mongol Hoard.

It's an intriguing and thought-provoking book, one that will really have you looking at America's position in the world in a different way, wondering how we too might be able to "softly transition" out of hyperpower status like Great Britain did a century ago (a point in history Chua clearly admires), or if we are doomed to crash and burn like the old hyperpowers who never learned these lessons. Combined with the last section of this manuscript, a look at the rising regions and coming powers of the world (mostly the EU, China and India), it's a great primer as to how powerful societies get things right, where things go wrong, and what we can likely expect in global politics over the next 25 years. Day of Empire is a fast-moving, plainly-written book, one of those great nonfiction accounts geared towards a general populace that I love so much; not only policy wonks but simply those wanting to know a little more on the subject will find the book a real asset, and it gets a big recommendation from me today.

Out of 10: 9.3
]]> 21719144 Tue, 06 May 2008 13:27:13 -0700
Regular readers know that I am a big fan of the unique subgenre known as "steampunk," but might not know what exactly steampunk is; and similarly, regular readers also know that one of the issues often tackled here at CCLaP is the difference between so-called "genre" projects and so-called "mainstream" ones, but might not know what those differences are or why they matter. And since today's book under review brings up these topics yet again, I thought I would use it as an excuse to talk about them in greater detail, along with telling you about the book itself; because the book under question, see, is the inventive steampunk tale The Somnambulist, the high-profile debut novel of Times Literary Supplement critic Jonathan Barnes, a book destined to make you either squeal with Victorian fanboy delight or shudder with non-fan disgust. It's a great example of why genre novels are loved by fans of that genre and hated by everyone else, and why it can sometimes be so difficult as an "objective" critic to review such projects in the first place.

So what exactly is steampunk, to not put too fine a point on it? Well, it was originally an outgrowth of the "cyberpunk" movement in science-fiction in the 1980s, which is how it got its name; novels and stories and comics that were being written by these same cyberpunk authors and dealing with the same complex modern issues, but couched in the visual sumptuousness and rigid morality of the Victorian Age, which for practical purposes you can think of as roughly 1840 to 1900. And indeed, it is not too much of a stretch at all to reimagine current tech and ethical issues through the filter of that era; it was the height of the Industrial Age as well, after all, the era that saw the profession of science first come into its own, a half-century of human history that arguably saw as much rapid technological progress as we're seeing in our own times. In a world where dozens of things formerly thought of as magic were actually getting invented, standardized and ready for retail sales, of course it would make sense to set a semi-fantastical, semi-magical tale within such an environment; now imagine the exquisite detail and luxurious materials that went into such Victorian-Age contraptions, all that brass and wood and ivory and the like, and you can easily see why a contemporary author might want to set a modern-style tale in those years instead of our own.

And in fact Barnes' book teeters right on the edge of fantastical the entire time, a novel which could be argued is actually more magical realism than science-fiction; London at the turn of the 20th century, yes, but a London with secret magical archives in the basement of the British Library, a London with secret police departments guarding millennia-old mysteries from becoming public knowledge. It's within such a place that we meet the book's two main characters: a past-his-prime stage magician named Edward Moon who doubles as a notorious Holmes-style private investigator (in fact, Arthur Conan Doyle exists in The Somnambulist's London too, and is considered an untalented hack by our book's hero); and the eponymous "Somnambulist" in question, a hideous eight-foot-tall mute with no body hair, Moon's on-stage assistant and the focus of his most famous trick, able to be stabbed repeatedly with swords without ever being hurt, who refuses to drink anything else in his life but milk and of that 15 to 20 pints a day.

And of course it's this that gets us into one of the first big differences between genre work and so-called mainstream literature (or movies, or whatever); a genre project is full of whimsical little details that cater to that specific genre only, that will be loved by fans of that genre but despised by most others. Because let's face it, unless you naturally enjoy dainty little complicated half-magical whimsical elements in your adventure fiction, you are bound to go a little crazy trying to read The Somnambulist, and very quickly into the manuscript too; this is a book, after all, that features a whorehouse catering to circus-freak fetishes, a gentlemen's lounge for hideously disfigured war veterans, cadavers brought back to life Frankenstein-style, and a subterranean spy agency hidden in the back of an East End opium den, among lots of other details that have you either laughing or groaning even before you've finished this sentence. All genres have their little details that cater just to those who love the genre, which is why they're called genres in the first place -- crime fans have their brilliant serial killers, western fans have their stoic cowboys, and steampunk fans have their disfigured mad-scientist supervillains in tophats and overcoats. You either accept these details or you don't, which means you simply either accept such books as entertaining or you simply don't; that's a big sign of a project being a mainstream versus genre one, if its enjoyment does or doesn't rest solely on the details of a specific type of literature.

Because that's the other thing about The Somnambulist, that the storyline itself is very much a fast-paced, plot-heavy one, which brings me to about the biggest complaint I have; that many parts of the novel feel like Barnes imagining how the eventual big-budget Hollywood adaptation of that scene will look, instead of the scene directly servicing the storyline itself. And this again is a big difference between so-called genre projects and mainstream ones, that genre projects almost always concentrate more on painting striking mental images in their readers' heads, almost always favor plot more heavily than character since it's the details of a plot that most defines what type of genre it is. Because make no mistake, if you're a fan of steampunk, The Somnambulist is going to give you a boner; it's 350 pages of hansom-cab chases and obscure clues found on ancient gravestones, a giant conspiracy tale that of course features a famous poet from the 1700s, of course features a pagan society leaving little signs of itself all over the city, of course features grandiose evil lairs buried within the labyrinthine tunnels of London's tube system! Whew, oh, excuse me, I think I need to visit the bathroom for a few minutes!

Now, I'm quite aware that the above paragraph has a certain amount of you shaking your heads and rolling your eyes even as we speak, which of course is another sign of something being a genre project; it's the same reaction I have, for example, when someone says to me, "See, he solves crimes, but he's a phobia-obsessed recluse! Hah? Hah? Isn't that interesting?" Well, no, not to me, because I'm not a particularly big fan of crime fiction, just as others don't care for steampunk, romance, historical thrillers, or all those other shelf labels at your favorite corporate superstore. It doesn't mean they're necessarily bad books, which is where the difficulty lies for me as a critic; because how exactly do you describe a book that's great, but only great to that small segment of the population who naturally loves that genre in the first place? It's always the balance I'm trying to strike here, given that CCLaP concentrates on a higher percentage of genre novels than many other lit-oriented publications.

I guess, then, I'll say what I always say about such books; that steampunk fans are sure to love it, others not so much, that it's definitely worth taking a chance on if you're feeling adventurous, but ultimately you're not missing all that much if you're not. That's the ultimate beauty and curse of genre fiction, after all, is that when all is said and done, the projects tend to bleed into each other a lot in our collective memories; it's why genre books receive so much scorn from the general populace and so few awards, despite such books comprising the vast majority of ones published, bought and read in this country. The Somnambulist is very much like that, a book that's definitely enjoyable but that you will likely get mixed up with other steampunk books years later when recalling; that's not necessarily a bad thing, but certainly something you deserve to know before going into it.

Out of 10:
Story: 9.0
Characters: 7.2
Style: 8.4
Overall: 8.0, or 9.0 for steampunk fans ]]>
author: Jonathan Barnes
name: Jason
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 05/08
date added: 05/06/08
shelves:
review:
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Regular readers know that I am a big fan of the unique subgenre known as "steampunk," but might not know what exactly steampunk is; and similarly, regular readers also know that one of the issues often tackled here at CCLaP is the difference between so-called "genre" projects and so-called "mainstream" ones, but might not know what those differences are or why they matter. And since today's book under review brings up these topics yet again, I thought I would use it as an excuse to talk about them in greater detail, along with telling you about the book itself; because the book under question, see, is the inventive steampunk tale The Somnambulist, the high-profile debut novel of Times Literary Supplement critic Jonathan Barnes, a book destined to make you either squeal with Victorian fanboy delight or shudder with non-fan disgust. It's a great example of why genre novels are loved by fans of that genre and hated by everyone else, and why it can sometimes be so difficult as an "objective" critic to review such projects in the first place.

So what exactly is steampunk, to not put too fine a point on it? Well, it was originally an outgrowth of the "cyberpunk" movement in science-fiction in the 1980s, which is how it got its name; novels and stories and comics that were being written by these same cyberpunk authors and dealing with the same complex modern issues, but couched in the visual sumptuousness and rigid morality of the Victorian Age, which for practical purposes you can think of as roughly 1840 to 1900. And indeed, it is not too much of a stretch at all to reimagine current tech and ethical issues through the filter of that era; it was the height of the Industrial Age as well, after all, the era that saw the profession of science first come into its own, a half-century of human history that arguably saw as much rapid technological progress as we're seeing in our own times. In a world where dozens of things formerly thought of as magic were actually getting invented, standardized and ready for retail sales, of course it would make sense to set a semi-fantastical, semi-magical tale within such an environment; now imagine the exquisite detail and luxurious materials that went into such Victorian-Age contraptions, all that brass and wood and ivory and the like, and you can easily see why a contemporary author might want to set a modern-style tale in those years instead of our own.

And in fact Barnes' book teeters right on the edge of fantastical the entire time, a novel which could be argued is actually more magical realism than science-fiction; London at the turn of the 20th century, yes, but a London with secret magical archives in the basement of the British Library, a London with secret police departments guarding millennia-old mysteries from becoming public knowledge. It's within such a place that we meet the book's two main characters: a past-his-prime stage magician named Edward Moon who doubles as a notorious Holmes-style private investigator (in fact, Arthur Conan Doyle exists in The Somnambulist's London too, and is considered an untalented hack by our book's hero); and the eponymous "Somnambulist" in question, a hideous eight-foot-tall mute with no body hair, Moon's on-stage assistant and the focus of his most famous trick, able to be stabbed repeatedly with swords without ever being hurt, who refuses to drink anything else in his life but milk and of that 15 to 20 pints a day.

And of course it's this that gets us into one of the first big differences between genre work and so-called mainstream literature (or movies, or whatever); a genre project is full of whimsical little details that cater to that specific genre only, that will be loved by fans of that genre but despised by most others. Because let's face it, unless you naturally enjoy dainty little complicated half-magical whimsical elements in your adventure fiction, you are bound to go a little crazy trying to read The Somnambulist, and very quickly into the manuscript too; this is a book, after all, that features a whorehouse catering to circus-freak fetishes, a gentlemen's lounge for hideously disfigured war veterans, cadavers brought back to life Frankenstein-style, and a subterranean spy agency hidden in the back of an East End opium den, among lots of other details that have you either laughing or groaning even before you've finished this sentence. All genres have their little details that cater just to those who love the genre, which is why they're called genres in the first place -- crime fans have their brilliant serial killers, western fans have their stoic cowboys, and steampunk fans have their disfigured mad-scientist supervillains in tophats and overcoats. You either accept these details or you don't, which means you simply either accept such books as entertaining or you simply don't; that's a big sign of a project being a mainstream versus genre one, if its enjoyment does or doesn't rest solely on the details of a specific type of literature.

Because that's the other thing about The Somnambulist, that the storyline itself is very much a fast-paced, plot-heavy one, which brings me to about the biggest complaint I have; that many parts of the novel feel like Barnes imagining how the eventual big-budget Hollywood adaptation of that scene will look, instead of the scene directly servicing the storyline itself. And this again is a big difference between so-called genre projects and mainstream ones, that genre projects almost always concentrate more on painting striking mental images in their readers' heads, almost always favor plot more heavily than character since it's the details of a plot that most defines what type of genre it is. Because make no mistake, if you're a fan of steampunk, The Somnambulist is going to give you a boner; it's 350 pages of hansom-cab chases and obscure clues found on ancient gravestones, a giant conspiracy tale that of course features a famous poet from the 1700s, of course features a pagan society leaving little signs of itself all over the city, of course features grandiose evil lairs buried within the labyrinthine tunnels of London's tube system! Whew, oh, excuse me, I think I need to visit the bathroom for a few minutes!

Now, I'm quite aware that the above paragraph has a certain amount of you shaking your heads and rolling your eyes even as we speak, which of course is another sign of something being a genre project; it's the same reaction I have, for example, when someone says to me, "See, he solves crimes, but he's a phobia-obsessed recluse! Hah? Hah? Isn't that interesting?" Well, no, not to me, because I'm not a particularly big fan of crime fiction, just as others don't care for steampunk, romance, historical thrillers, or all those other shelf labels at your favorite corporate superstore. It doesn't mean they're necessarily bad books, which is where the difficulty lies for me as a critic; because how exactly do you describe a book that's great, but only great to that small segment of the population who naturally loves that genre in the first place? It's always the balance I'm trying to strike here, given that CCLaP concentrates on a higher percentage of genre novels than many other lit-oriented publications.

I guess, then, I'll say what I always say about such books; that steampunk fans are sure to love it, others not so much, that it's definitely worth taking a chance on if you're feeling adventurous, but ultimately you're not missing all that much if you're not. That's the ultimate beauty and curse of genre fiction, after all, is that when all is said and done, the projects tend to bleed into each other a lot in our collective memories; it's why genre books receive so much scorn from the general populace and so few awards, despite such books comprising the vast majority of ones published, bought and read in this country. The Somnambulist is very much like that, a book that's definitely enjoyable but that you will likely get mixed up with other steampunk books years later when recalling; that's not necessarily a bad thing, but certainly something you deserve to know before going into it.

Out of 10:
Story: 9.0
Characters: 7.2
Style: 8.4
Overall: 8.0, or 9.0 for steampunk fans
]]> 21646207 Mon, 05 May 2008 12:16:34 -0700
So are you familiar already with what's known as the Birkin bag? It's the product of Hermés, one of those European "designer boutiques" that exists for no other reason than to severely overcharge rich people with self-esteem issues; you know, one of those places that sells hundred-dollar handkerchiefs, $500 t-shirts and the like, eagerly bought up by the wealthy and idle so that they can prove to strangers that they too can afford to waste $500 on a t-shirt. (Yeah, I don't get it either.) But of all the ridiculously overpriced merchandise that Hermés sells, perhaps none is more infamous than their Birkin handbags; named after a famous French singer and habitual Hermés customer, these bags cost a minimum of $10,000 new from the store, and depending on the type can run you upwards of $75,000 or more. And human nature being what it is, of course, it's nearly impossible to get one's hands on an actual Birkin, with there being an infamous two-year waiting list at most stores to even be given the opportunity to blow that kind of money; needless to say, the self-imposed scarcity drives all these upper-class women with self-esteem issues crazy, with some of them willing to go to almost any lengths and pay any price to get ahold of one of them themselves.

And thus enters witty gay entrepreneur and Huffington Post columnist Michael Tonello, whose new memoir Bringing Home the Birkin is a doozy of a book; it's the purportedly true story of how Tonello managed to get his hands on literally hundreds of Birkins himself over just a few years' time, always done legally and with Hermés employees fully aware of his existence, making himself a fortune in the process by reselling them on eBay for insane markups. And I'm telling you, this is exactly what you want a personal memoir to be -- funny, thrilling, chock-full of great cocktail-party stories told with the flair of a natural raconteur, following an overall storyline as tight as any fictional project, one whose ending is not necessarily something you can guess beforehand. It's one of those books I just absolutely love coming across as part of maintaining CCLaP -- one of those books I would never naturally pick up myself, but that turned out to be a real delight, one that makes me happy and glad to be in a position to recommend to others.

So how did Tonello do it? Well, for starters, it helps if you don't buy into the hype of brand-obsession yourself; although a longtime collector of fine clothing (usually in the service of his former day job, providing hair and makeup services to various east-coast media shoots), Tonello admits that he doesn't share the religious devotion to certain designers like his clients do, and finds it emotionally easy to give up ownership of high-ticket items. In fact, that's what brought Birkins to his attention in the first place; after impulsively moving to Barcelona in the early 2000s, then having his prearranged job fall apart once arriving, Tonello found himself selling off big portions of his back wardrobe to the various designer consignment stores around the city, amazed that certain decade-old scarves of his would still be snatched up at nearly the original price by certain crazed collectors. This led him to eBay (of course), where he found that he could actually make a profit off of certain items depending on what they were; this then led to certain customers emailing him with "wish lists," certain old and new boutique items that Tonello would keep a specific eye out for while traipsing across Europe in his travels. And this, of course, is what led him to Birkins for the first time, and for developing the same kind of obsession over their fake scarcity as so many of us do when first hearing about them.

Because that's the smart thing about Tonello, and why he became so good at being a Birkin broker; he realized quite early on that this so-called exclusivity is simply a shell game on the part of Hermés, and that if you could just break their code it shouldn't be hard to buy a Birkin anytime you want, simply by walking into a store and asking for one. This led Tonello to trying out different things at the various Hermés stores he visited across Europe, trial-and-error style until he was able to notice certain things working over and over; and then this realization inspired the expansion of Tonello's globetrotting shopping sprees, to the point of finding himself traveling to places like South America and Russia on a regular basis, just to hit up the stores that rich old white women usually don't make it to. And when all is said and done, really, the winning equation to getting a Birkin turns out to not be that complicated at all...

1) Dress the part -- never walk in a store wearing less than a quarter-million dollars in clothes and jewelry.

2) Identify which of the half-dozen "Hermés employee types" you're dealing with when you walk in, then cater to their weaknesses. (So if it's a "Grandmother" type, act like the pleasant courteous son they never had; if it's an "Incurable Romantic," act like they have a chance of having sex with you later that night.)

3) Blow a thousand dollars first, buying other stupid crap. Or if you're in New York, blow five thousand dollars.

4) When they're ringing you up, off-handedly ask, "Oh, and would you happen to have any Birkins in the back as well?"

5) Ka-ching!

But of course, I'm simplifying the situation for humorous effect; as Donello actually demonstrates here quite well, the real secret to becoming a Birkin regular is more complicated and ephemeral than that, a strange mishmash of sucking up, buying into the hype, and sincere friendships, a legitimate community of high-end haute-couture lovers that you must somehow ingratiate yourself into, if you want any chance of making an actual career out of something like this. And indeed, this is one of the big strengths of Bringing Home the Birkin, and what separates it from the endless similar chick-lit crap that HarperCollins desperately, desperately wants you to think of when thinking of this book (and seriously, HarperCollins marketing department, if you mention Sex in the City one more time in your promotional material I might just vomit all over myself); because Tonello shines a light here through the foggy haze of all that, and shows how the entire haute-couture culture is an endless house of cards that ultimately relies on peer pressure and catering to people's fears in order to work. It makes it a weightier book than the ones it will undoubtedly get compared to by others, a stronger tale that doesn't have to rely so much on you being an obsessive fashion-lover yourself in order to enjoy.

Now, that said, oh man does Tonello tell some great stories on the way to this disillusionment -- of flying into Rio just to visit a Hermés store, of attending star-studded European fashion events, of racking up half a million on a credit card in a single weekend. In fact, that might be the most enjoyable thing of all about Bringing Home the Birkin, is that Tonello is simply a natural storyteller and gifted raconteur; take for example what is easily the best story of the entire book, his uneasy relationship with a skeevy chickenhawk gay hustler he accidentally meets one night, who has various Hermés employees "eating out of the palm of his hand" and so can therefore get his hands on certain items that Tonello can't. Needless to say, things quickly devolve between the two, with Tonello eventually having to hatch a wacky noiresque scheme to steal back a $25,000 Birkin the hustler stole from him in the first place; there's not much funnier of a mental image in this whole manuscript, to tell you the truth, than that of Tonello sneaking around the streets of Paris with a group of headphoned goons in sunglasses, wondering if his hotel room is "safe" and asking himself just what he's gotten himself into, when first thinking it would be fun to sell a bunch of overpriced purses to a group of rich housewives.

This is what I mean by how wonderful this book is; it at once gives us all the great anecdotal stories that come with the highest end of the fashion industry, while still pointing out all the depressing realities that such an industry produces, all the various hangers-on in a community like that who swirl around the small amount of rich, beautiful and famous in the center. That after all has become the biggest problem with America's entertainment industry as well, that there is simply so much money being generated from it in so many different ways that it's become an almost unstoppable monster; it's no longer just about the actors and directors and producers in the middle of it, but all their yoga instructors and dog psychiatrists and personal shoppers, all the gossip columnists and publicists and people who get paid to convince celebrities to use certain products in public. That's what makes Bringing Home the Birkin so fascinating, because ultimately that's what Tonello's story is about as well -- not the fashion designers themselves, but those who game the fashion system in order to skim a profit off its top, the endless retail employees and eBay resellers and party crashers and blog owners and the rest, all of them taking their own little cuts from the massive amounts of money being exchanged in the middle of it all.

It's a fascinating book that tells a fascinating story, not the best-written thing I've read this year but certainly far from the worst, one of those fabled books about fashion that even non-fashion-lovers can enjoy. It gets a big recommendation from me, and I imagine will also be one of the winners of CCLaP's annual "Guilty Pleasure Award."]]>
author: Michael Tonello
name: Jason
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 05/08
date added: 05/05/08
shelves:
review:
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

So are you familiar already with what's known as the Birkin bag? It's the product of Hermés, one of those European "designer boutiques" that exists for no other reason than to severely overcharge rich people with self-esteem issues; you know, one of those places that sells hundred-dollar handkerchiefs, $500 t-shirts and the like, eagerly bought up by the wealthy and idle so that they can prove to strangers that they too can afford to waste $500 on a t-shirt. (Yeah, I don't get it either.) But of all the ridiculously overpriced merchandise that Hermés sells, perhaps none is more infamous than their Birkin handbags; named after a famous French singer and habitual Hermés customer, these bags cost a minimum of $10,000 new from the store, and depending on the type can run you upwards of $75,000 or more. And human nature being what it is, of course, it's nearly impossible to get one's hands on an actual Birkin, with there being an infamous two-year waiting list at most stores to even be given the opportunity to blow that kind of money; needless to say, the self-imposed scarcity drives all these upper-class women with self-esteem issues crazy, with some of them willing to go to almost any lengths and pay any price to get ahold of one of them themselves.

And thus enters witty gay entrepreneur and Huffington Post columnist Michael Tonello, whose new memoir Bringing Home the Birkin is a doozy of a book; it's the purportedly true story of how Tonello managed to get his hands on literally hundreds of Birkins himself over just a few years' time, always done legally and with Hermés employees fully aware of his existence, making himself a fortune in the process by reselling them on eBay for insane markups. And I'm telling you, this is exactly what you want a personal memoir to be -- funny, thrilling, chock-full of great cocktail-party stories told with the flair of a natural raconteur, following an overall storyline as tight as any fictional project, one whose ending is not necessarily something you can guess beforehand. It's one of those books I just absolutely love coming across as part of maintaining CCLaP -- one of those books I would never naturally pick up myself, but that turned out to be a real delight, one that makes me happy and glad to be in a position to recommend to others.

So how did Tonello do it? Well, for starters, it helps if you don't buy into the hype of brand-obsession yourself; although a longtime collector of fine clothing (usually in the service of his former day job, providing hair and makeup services to various east-coast media shoots), Tonello admits that he doesn't share the religious devotion to certain designers like his clients do, and finds it emotionally easy to give up ownership of high-ticket items. In fact, that's what brought Birkins to his attention in the first place; after impulsively moving to Barcelona in the early 2000s, then having his prearranged job fall apart once arriving, Tonello found himself selling off big portions of his back wardrobe to the various designer consignment stores around the city, amazed that certain decade-old scarves of his would still be snatched up at nearly the original price by certain crazed collectors. This led him to eBay (of course), where he found that he could actually make a profit off of certain items depending on what they were; this then led to certain customers emailing him with "wish lists," certain old and new boutique items that Tonello would keep a specific eye out for while traipsing across Europe in his travels. And this, of course, is what led him to Birkins for the first time, and for developing the same kind of obsession over their fake scarcity as so many of us do when first hearing about them.

Because that's the smart thing about Tonello, and why he became so good at being a Birkin broker; he realized quite early on that this so-called exclusivity is simply a shell game on the part of Hermés, and that if you could just break their code it shouldn't be hard to buy a Birkin anytime you want, simply by walking into a store and asking for one. This led Tonello to trying out different things at the various Hermés stores he visited across Europe, trial-and-error style until he was able to notice certain things working over and over; and then this realization inspired the expansion of Tonello's globetrotting shopping sprees, to the point of finding himself traveling to places like South America and Russia on a regular basis, just to hit up the stores that rich old white women usually don't make it to. And when all is said and done, really, the winning equation to getting a Birkin turns out to not be that complicated at all...

1) Dress the part -- never walk in a store wearing less than a quarter-million dollars in clothes and jewelry.

2) Identify which of the half-dozen "Hermés employee types" you're dealing with when you walk in, then cater to their weaknesses. (So if it's a "Grandmother" type, act like the pleasant courteous son they never had; if it's an "Incurable Romantic," act like they have a chance of having sex with you later that night.)

3) Blow a thousand dollars first, buying other stupid crap. Or if you're in New York, blow five thousand dollars.

4) When they're ringing you up, off-handedly ask, "Oh, and would you happen to have any Birkins in the back as well?"

5) Ka-ching!

But of course, I'm simplifying the situation for humorous effect; as Donello actually demonstrates here quite well, the real secret to becoming a Birkin regular is more complicated and ephemeral than that, a strange mishmash of sucking up, buying into the hype, and sincere friendships, a legitimate community of high-end haute-couture lovers that you must somehow ingratiate yourself into, if you want any chance of making an actual career out of something like this. And indeed, this is one of the big strengths of Bringing Home the Birkin, and what separates it from the endless similar chick-lit crap that HarperCollins desperately, desperately wants you to think of when thinking of this book (and seriously, HarperCollins marketing department, if you mention Sex in the City one more time in your promotional material I might just vomit all over myself); because Tonello shines a light here through the foggy haze of all that, and shows how the entire haute-couture culture is an endless house of cards that ultimately relies on peer pressure and catering to people's fears in order to work. It makes it a weightier book than the ones it will undoubtedly get compared to by others, a stronger tale that doesn't have to rely so much on you being an obsessive fashion-lover yourself in order to enjoy.

Now, that said, oh man does Tonello tell some great stories on the way to this disillusionment -- of flying into Rio just to visit a Hermés store, of attending star-studded European fashion events, of racking up half a million on a credit card in a single weekend. In fact, that might be the most enjoyable thing of all about Bringing Home the Birkin, is that Tonello is simply a natural storyteller and gifted raconteur; take for example what is easily the best story of the entire book, his uneasy relationship with a skeevy chickenhawk gay hustler he accidentally meets one night, who has various Hermés employees "eating out of the palm of his hand" and so can therefore get his hands on certain items that Tonello can't. Needless to say, things quickly devolve between the two, with Tonello eventually having to hatch a wacky noiresque scheme to steal back a $25,000 Birkin the hustler stole from him in the first place; there's not much funnier of a mental image in this whole manuscript, to tell you the truth, than that of Tonello sneaking around the streets of Paris with a group of headphoned goons in sunglasses, wondering if his hotel room is "safe" and asking himself just what he's gotten himself into, when first thinking it would be fun to sell a bunch of overpriced purses to a group of rich housewives.

This is what I mean by how wonderful this book is; it at once gives us all the great anecdotal stories that come with the highest end of the fashion industry, while still pointing out all the depressing realities that such an industry produces, all the various hangers-on in a community like that who swirl around the small amount of rich, beautiful and famous in the center. That after all has become the biggest problem with America's entertainment industry as well, that there is simply so much money being generated from it in so many different ways that it's become an almost unstoppable monster; it's no longer just about the actors and directors and producers in the middle of it, but all their yoga instructors and dog psychiatrists and personal shoppers, all the gossip columnists and publicists and people who get paid to convince celebrities to use certain products in public. That's what makes Bringing Home the Birkin so fascinating, because ultimately that's what Tonello's story is about as well -- not the fashion designers themselves, but those who game the fashion system in order to skim a profit off its top, the endless retail employees and eBay resellers and party crashers and blog owners and the rest, all of them taking their own little cuts from the massive amounts of money being exchanged in the middle of it all.

It's a fascinating book that tells a fascinating story, not the best-written thing I've read this year but certainly far from the worst, one of those fabled books about fashion that even non-fashion-lovers can enjoy. It gets a big recommendation from me, and I imagine will also be one of the winners of CCLaP's annual "Guilty Pleasure Award."
]]> 21518883 Sat, 03 May 2008 09:57:30 -0700 The Final Solution by literary wunderkind Michael Chabon, like the others published originally as a magazine story (in The Paris Review; in fact, it won the in-house "Aga Khan Prize" in 2004 for being the best story to appear that year in that publication, according to the editors). This is an entire cottage industry, as a matter of fact, for those who don't know, the writing of new Sherlock Holmes tales now that the copyright on the character has expired; and I'm an obsessive Sherlock Holmes fan, so have now read dozens of these stories by contemporary authors other than Arthur Conan Doyle. And that's why I say that Chabon's take on the subject is bound to disappoint a certain amount of "Baker Street Irregulars" out there; because here Chabon is writing a story more for a general populace, using Holmes in an old-age setting (World War II, when he's supposedly in his nineties and living in the countryside) as an excuse to comment in more general terms on the subjects of dying, aging with dignity, and the onset of dementia. It's an interesting-enough story, I suppose, but ultimately a let-down for me after expecting another exquisitely reimagined Holmesian tale like so many that now exist; and then there's that unfortunate title (the name of the Nazi plan in the 1940s to kill all the Jews before the war ended), which somehow manages to be both offensive and not relevant to Chabon's actual story in any way whatsoever. Again, worth checking out if you don't have to spend any money to do so.

Out of 10: 7.2 ]]>
author: Michael Chabon
name: Jason
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 04/08
date added: 05/03/08
shelves:
review:
This is one of four newish books I recently read mostly so I could finally get them off my queue list, all of which were actually pretty good but are mere wisps of manuscripts, none of them over 150 pages or so in length. This one is the 2004 Sherlock Holmes tale The Final Solution by literary wunderkind Michael Chabon, like the others published originally as a magazine story (in The Paris Review; in fact, it won the in-house "Aga Khan Prize" in 2004 for being the best story to appear that year in that publication, according to the editors). This is an entire cottage industry, as a matter of fact, for those who don't know, the writing of new Sherlock Holmes tales now that the copyright on the character has expired; and I'm an obsessive Sherlock Holmes fan, so have now read dozens of these stories by contemporary authors other than Arthur Conan Doyle. And that's why I say that Chabon's take on the subject is bound to disappoint a certain amount of "Baker Street Irregulars" out there; because here Chabon is writing a story more for a general populace, using Holmes in an old-age setting (World War II, when he's supposedly in his nineties and living in the countryside) as an excuse to comment in more general terms on the subjects of dying, aging with dignity, and the onset of dementia. It's an interesting-enough story, I suppose, but ultimately a let-down for me after expecting another exquisitely reimagined Holmesian tale like so many that now exist; and then there's that unfortunate title (the name of the Nazi plan in the 1940s to kill all the Jews before the war ended), which somehow manages to be both offensive and not relevant to Chabon's actual story in any way whatsoever. Again, worth checking out if you don't have to spend any money to do so.

Out of 10: 7.2
]]> 21518284 Sat, 03 May 2008 09:46:47 -0700 This Year You Write Your Novel by Walter Mosley, an author I don't necessarily like that much personally but certainly respect a whole lot, among other things for being one of the only black authors in history to break through the lily-white publishing barrier of the science-fiction industry. That said, this extremely thin how-to book feels more like a weekend toss-off on Mosley's part than a finished and polished manuscript; a book that purports to show you how to finally get off your ass and in twelve months actually write that novel you've been telling yourself for years that you're going to someday write, but in fact is an odd mishmash of different kinds of literary advice, some more practical and some more craft-oriented, organized a bit sloppily and with not much concrete "real" advice in there at all. It's worth checking out if you get a chance to do so for free, but I'm not sure I'd recommend shelling out $20 to read this not exactly helpful fluff article turned full-length book.

Out of 10: 7.0 ]]>
author: Walter Mosley
name: Jason
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 04/08
date added: 05/03/08
shelves:
review:
This is one of four newish books I recently read mostly so I could finally get them off my queue list, all of which were actually pretty good but are mere wisps of manuscripts, none of them over 150 pages or so in length. This one is the nonfiction This Year You Write Your Novel by Walter Mosley, an author I don't necessarily like that much personally but certainly respect a whole lot, among other things for being one of the only black authors in history to break through the lily-white publishing barrier of the science-fiction industry. That said, this extremely thin how-to book feels more like a weekend toss-off on Mosley's part than a finished and polished manuscript; a book that purports to show you how to finally get off your ass and in twelve months actually write that novel you've been telling yourself for years that you're going to someday write, but in fact is an odd mishmash of different kinds of literary advice, some more practical and some more craft-oriented, organized a bit sloppily and with not much concrete "real" advice in there at all. It's worth checking out if you get a chance to do so for free, but I'm not sure I'd recommend shelling out $20 to read this not exactly helpful fluff article turned full-length book.

Out of 10: 7.0
]]> 21516519 Sat, 03 May 2008 09:18:52 -0700 How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, by a hip French literature professor named Pierre Bayard; because make no mistake, this is not exactly a practical how-to guide to faking your way through cocktail parties, but more a sneaky examination of what it means to "read" a book anyway, if by "read" you mean "understand, relate to, can recall details of, and can discuss with others." After all, if we read a book as a child and then completely forget its story as an adult, do we still get to count that as a "read" book? Bayard gets into all kinds of interesting questions like this, ultimately arguing that the most important thing we can do as readers is understand the entire time period that book is a result of; in the goal of accomplishing that, then, he argues that it's perfectly okay to just read the Cliff Notes of famous huge books you know you're never going to get around to actually reading, perfectly okay to discuss a book at a cocktail party you're familiar with but haven't actually sat down and scanned each and every page. This is how we learn, he argues, how we grow as both humans and patrons of the arts; every Wikipedia entry we read, every conversation we fake our way through, every BBC adaptation we check out, ultimately helps us understand the full-length books we do sit and closely read from the beginning to the end, which is why we shouldn't be ashamed of any of these activities but rather proud of them. Funny, smart, and very French; a very fun afternoon of reading.

Out of 10: 9.2 ]]>
author: Pierre Bayard
name: Jason
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 04/08
date added: 05/03/08
shelves:
review:
This is one of four newish books I recently read mostly so I could finally get them off my queue list, all of which were actually pretty good but are mere wisps of manuscripts, none of them over 150 pages or so in length. This one is the surprisingly thoughtful How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, by a hip French literature professor named Pierre Bayard; because make no mistake, this is not exactly a practical how-to guide to faking your way through cocktail parties, but more a sneaky examination of what it means to "read" a book anyway, if by "read" you mean "understand, relate to, can recall details of, and can discuss with others." After all, if we read a book as a child and then completely forget its story as an adult, do we still get to count that as a "read" book? Bayard gets into all kinds of interesting questions like this, ultimately arguing that the most important thing we can do as readers is understand the entire time period that book is a result of; in the goal of accomplishing that, then, he argues that it's perfectly okay to just read the Cliff Notes of famous huge books you know you're never going to get around to actually reading, perfectly okay to discuss a book at a cocktail party you're familiar with but haven't actually sat down and scanned each and every page. This is how we learn, he argues, how we grow as both humans and patrons of the arts; every Wikipedia entry we read, every conversation we fake our way through, every BBC adaptation we check out, ultimately helps us understand the full-length books we do sit and closely read from the beginning to the end, which is why we shouldn't be ashamed of any of these activities but rather proud of them. Funny, smart, and very French; a very fun afternoon of reading.

Out of 10: 9.2
]]> 21515825 Sat, 03 May 2008 09:10:13 -0700 The Last Opium Den was first published as a simple magazine article in Vanity Fair -- it was the edgy and controversial author's attempt at the turn of the millennium to see if there were any honest-to-God opium dens left on this planet, done up right with the seedy beds and the dressed-up Asian women holding giant long pipes and the whole bit, maybe out in the middle of the jungle in Cambodia or wherever. Of course, this being Tosches, the slim story is actually about a lot more than that as well; it's about the cannibalization of global culture, the proliferation of squeaky-clean Euro/Americans into every corner of the world, and incidentally why heroin was created in the first place, as basically a portable form of self-administered opium that precisely didn't need an entire seedy den full of soiled mattresses and dressed-up Asian girls holding giant long pipes. It's only an hour or two of reading, but it's a dense and enjoyable read, something to borrow from a friend or pick up at the library. ]]>
author: Nick Tosches
name: Jason
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 04/08
date added: 05/03/08
shelves:
review:
This is one of four newish books I recently read mostly so I could finally get them off my queue list, all of which were actually pretty good but are mere wisps of manuscripts, none of them over 150 pages or so in length. And indeed, Nick Tosches' The Last Opium Den was first published as a simple magazine article in Vanity Fair -- it was the edgy and controversial author's attempt at the turn of the millennium to see if there were any honest-to-God opium dens left on this planet, done up right with the seedy beds and the dressed-up Asian women holding giant long pipes and the whole bit, maybe out in the middle of the jungle in Cambodia or wherever. Of course, this being Tosches, the slim story is actually about a lot more than that as well; it's about the cannibalization of global culture, the proliferation of squeaky-clean Euro/Americans into every corner of the world, and incidentally why heroin was created in the first place, as basically a portable form of self-administered opium that precisely didn't need an entire seedy den full of soiled mattresses and dressed-up Asian girls holding giant long pipes. It's only an hour or two of reading, but it's a dense and enjoyable read, something to borrow from a friend or pick up at the library.
]]> 21472375 Fri, 02 May 2008 13:21:09 -0700
The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label

Book #16: The Island of Dr Moreau, by HG Wells (1896)

The story in a nutshell:
Along with French author Jules Verne, the British HG Wells is considered one of the co-founders of the "science-fiction" genre*, in which the latest advances in that field are elegantly enfolded into thrilling or sometimes philosophical fictional narratives. (So in other words, think of him much more as the spiritual godfather of Michael Crichton than Isaac Asimov.) And indeed, his early-career masterpiece The Island of Dr Moreau contains not a single fantastical element at all, but is rather a chilling extrapolation of what was happening at the time in the real world of medicine, starting as these Victorian novels often do with a shipwreck in the middle of an ocean, and of our everyman hero (a gentleman named Prendick) getting picked up by a mysterious ship out in the South Seas somewhere. Taken back to the remote tropical island where his rescuers are heading, he is there introduced to our eponymous doctor, a creepy former London surgeon who was disbarred from his profession for shady ethical practices.

And sure enough, it's no coincidence that Moreau happens to be on this remote island, and is having his nutso alcoholic nihilist assistant run around the various nearby islands and acquire as many exotic animals as possible; turns out that he has continued his formerly banned research here, a truly horrific series of experiments that has him seeing if he can somehow turn an animal into a fully rational human, through an elaborate series of delicate surgeries and psychological conditioning. Needless to say, he hasn't exactly succeeded yet, leaving the three humans on an island full of snarling, retarded man-beasts; to protect themselves, Moreau and the assistant have established among the beasts what they call "The Law," a combination of rational rules and religious dogma that keep the human/animal hybrids just barely civilized and not in a constant state of violent bloodlust. The majority of the book, then, concerns Prendick's time on the island and the ways that this delicate peace of course starts quickly falling apart; I'll leave the actual plotline itself as unspoken as possible, in that this 112-year-old story is actually still thrillingly surprising.

The argument for it being a classic:
Like many of the books reviewed here as part of the CCLaP 100, there is a strong argument for The Island of Dr Moreau being a classic based on its historical, trailblazing aspects; it's one of a handful of books, after all, to singlehandedly kick off the entire genre of science-fiction (now with millions of fans and which generates billions of dollars a year in revenue), not to mention such speculative tech writers as the aforementioned Crichton, Tom Clancey and more. But on top of this, though, this particular book is important too because it's held up so well over the decades, certainly much better than almost all of its Victorian fantastical counterparts; as its many fans will tell you, it still has the power to shock and disturb, and deals with issues like genetic engineering and the ethical role of doctors that are surprisingly relevant to this day. If you're going to pick any of the pseudo-science-babble books of the late 1800s to designate as a must-read, fans say, best to pick a book like this, not only as historically relevant as the others but simply a much more entertaining modern read.

The argument against:
A weak argument today at best; like many other Victorian fantastical tales, I suppose you can argue that Dr Moreau is too flippant and garish a tale, too focused on pleasing a lurid, mainstream crowd. But then that gets us into the whole subject of whether the forefathers of the various modern artistic genres out there even deserve to be recognized as the authors of "classics," people such as Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne and the aforementioned Jules Verne; and I think most intelligent people at this point in history would say that these are indeed authors worthy of "classic" status, making this not really much of an argument at all.

My verdict:
Ah, how nice to again come across a book whose "classic" status seems to not be questioned by very many people at all; it happens so rarely, after all, much more rarely than you would think for a series of book reviews all centered around so-called classics. And indeed, it was a sincere and pleasant surprise to read Dr Moreau for the first time (I haven't even seen any of the movie versions) and discover just how legitimately scary and gross and great it was to modern eyes, after a year now of such badly dated 1800s prose like is found in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (to mention one infamous example). Now that I've sampled both, I can definitively state that Wells was a much better writer than Verne, and that his titles can hold up in a canon list without necessarily the Roger-Marin-style asterisk that so many other Victorian genre authors need. That said, please be aware that this is a surprisingly disgusting book, one that deals with such then-current hot topics as vivisection (or the act of cutting open animals while still alive, in order to figure out how their insides work); but then again, it also gets you thinking about all kinds of interesting ethical questions still relevant to current society, like whether the animalistic part of our brains can ever be truly tamed and controlled (another hot topic among Victorians), and if the torture and slaughter of animals can ever be a morally justifiable action. It not only gets an enthusiastic yes from me today, but I can even declare it better than a lot of the contemporary genre novels I've read in the last year. Highly recommended.

Is it a classic? Oh my, yes

*And by the way, it's no surprise that Wells ended up as one of the founders of science-fiction; he was actually a dual student of biology and sociology at university, who pursued not only creative writing as a lucrative hobby at the same time but also the visual arts as well. In fact, Wells was much, much more well-known when alive as a brilliant political analyst, socialist activist, and a forefather of "futurism:" among other accomplishments, in the 1910s he predicted the outbreak of World War I, in the '20s predicted that the war's destruction would pave the way for the rise of fascism, in the '30s predicted that fascism would culminate in another world war right around 1940, and in the '40s called for the creation of what we now know as Wikipedia (which he called the "World Brain"). Oh yeah, and he was a founding member of both the League of Nations and the United Nations, and incidentally was the inventor of the world's very first miniature war-game ("Little Wars," in 1913). What a surprisingly fascinating guy! ]]>
author: H.G. Wells
name: Jason
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1896
rating: 5
read at: 04/08
date added: 05/02/08
shelves:
review:
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label

Book #16: The Island of Dr Moreau, by HG Wells (1896)

The story in a nutshell:
Along with French author Jules Verne, the British HG Wells is considered one of the co-founders of the "science-fiction" genre*, in which the latest advances in that field are elegantly enfolded into thrilling or sometimes philosophical fictional narratives. (So in other words, think of him much more as the spiritual godfather of Michael Crichton than Isaac Asimov.) And indeed, his early-career masterpiece The Island of Dr Moreau contains not a single fantastical element at all, but is rather a chilling extrapolation of what was happening at the time in the real world of medicine, starting as these Victorian novels often do with a shipwreck in the middle of an ocean, and of our everyman hero (a gentleman named Prendick) getting picked up by a mysterious ship out in the South Seas somewhere. Taken back to the remote tropical island where his rescuers are heading, he is there introduced to our eponymous doctor, a creepy former London surgeon who was disbarred from his profession for shady ethical practices.

And sure enough, it's no coincidence that Moreau happens to be on this remote island, and is having his nutso alcoholic nihilist assistant run around the various nearby islands and acquire as many exotic animals as possible; turns out that he has continued his formerly banned research here, a truly horrific series of experiments that has him seeing if he can somehow turn an animal into a fully rational human, through an elaborate series of delicate surgeries and psychological conditioning. Needless to say, he hasn't exactly succeeded yet, leaving the three humans on an island full of snarling, retarded man-beasts; to protect themselves, Moreau and the assistant have established among the beasts what they call "The Law," a combination of rational rules and religious dogma that keep the human/animal hybrids just barely civilized and not in a constant state of violent bloodlust. The majority of the book, then, concerns Prendick's time on the island and the ways that this delicate peace of course starts quickly falling apart; I'll leave the actual plotline itself as unspoken as possible, in that this 112-year-old story is actually still thrillingly surprising.

The argument for it being a classic:
Like many of the books reviewed here as part of the CCLaP 100, there is a strong argument for The Island of Dr Moreau being a classic based on its historical, trailblazing aspects; it's one of a handful of books, after all, to singlehandedly kick off the entire genre of science-fiction (now with millions of fans and which generates billions of dollars a year in revenue), not to mention such speculative tech writers as the aforementioned Crichton, Tom Clancey and more. But on top of this, though, this particular book is important too because it's held up so well over the decades, certainly much better than almost all of its Victorian fantastical counterparts; as its many fans will tell you, it still has the power to shock and disturb, and deals with issues like genetic engineering and the ethical role of doctors that are surprisingly relevant to this day. If you're going to pick any of the pseudo-science-babble books of the late 1800s to designate as a must-read, fans say, best to pick a book like this, not only as historically relevant as the others but simply a much more entertaining modern read.

The argument against:
A weak argument today at best; like many other Victorian fantastical tales, I suppose you can argue that Dr Moreau is too flippant and garish a tale, too focused on pleasing a lurid, mainstream crowd. But then that gets us into the whole subject of whether the forefathers of the various modern artistic genres out there even deserve to be recognized as the authors of "classics," people such as Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne and the aforementioned Jules Verne; and I think most intelligent people at this point in history would say that these are indeed authors worthy of "classic" status, making this not really much of an argument at all.

My verdict:
Ah, how nice to again come across a book whose "classic" status seems to not be questioned by very many people at all; it happens so rarely, after all, much more rarely than you would think for a series of book reviews all centered around so-called classics. And indeed, it was a sincere and pleasant surprise to read Dr Moreau for the first time (I haven't even seen any of the movie versions) and discover just how legitimately scary and gross and great it was to modern eyes, after a year now of such badly dated 1800s prose like is found in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (to mention one infamous example). Now that I've sampled both, I can definitively state that Wells was a much better writer than Verne, and that his titles can hold up in a canon list without necessarily the Roger-Marin-style asterisk that so many other Victorian genre authors need. That said, please be aware that this is a surprisingly disgusting book, one that deals with such then-current hot topics as vivisection (or the act of cutting open animals while still alive, in order to figure out how their insides work); but then again, it also gets you thinking about all kinds of interesting ethical questions still relevant to current society, like whether the animalistic part of our brains can ever be truly tamed and controlled (another hot topic among Victorians), and if the torture and slaughter of animals can ever be a morally justifiable action. It not only gets an enthusiastic yes from me today, but I can even declare it better than a lot of the contemporary genre novels I've read in the last year. Highly recommended.

Is it a classic? Oh my, yes

*And by the way, it's no surprise that Wells ended up as one of the founders of science-fiction; he was actually a dual student of biology and sociology at university, who pursued not only creative writing as a lucrative hobby at the same time but also the visual arts as well. In fact, Wells was much, much more well-known when alive as a brilliant political analyst, socialist activist, and a forefather of "futurism:" among other accomplishments, in the 1910s he predicted the outbreak of World War I, in the '20s predicted that the war's destruction would pave the way for the rise of fascism, in the '30s predicted that fascism would culminate in another world war right around 1940, and in the '40s called for the creation of what we now know as Wikipedia (which he called the "World Brain"). Oh yeah, and he was a founding member of both the League of Nations and the United Nations, and incidentally was the inventor of the world's very first miniature war-game ("Little Wars," in 1913). What a surprisingly fascinating guy!
]]> 21271062 Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:09:01 -0700
As a book critic, I of course try to steer clear of any information I can about a book I'm about to review, until I'm done with the book myself and have already made up my mind about what I thought; so imagine my surprise, then, when finally checking out what others had to say about today's book in question, Anne Enright's The Gathering, and seeing so many people call it an unrelentingly dour and grim tale. Because I hadn't thought of it that way at all when actually reading it, but rather as witty, lively, and with a precise control over the English language; it wasn't until afterwards that I stopped and realized, as the Guardian UK most famously put it, that the book actually concerns an "alcoholic suicide, blank-eyed paedophile, violent father, vacant mother and irritatingly smug priest, not to mention its scenes of bad sex, self-harm, a funless wake and 5am grief-stricken howling." Oh yeah, that's right, I thought after seeing so many people mention it; and how remarkable that it never even occurred to me at the time, how remarkable that the book should be that good. No wonder it went on to win what many consider the most prestigious literary award on the planet last year. No wonder.

Because yes, ladies and gentlemen, the day is finally here; after nine months of following the contest, of tracking down and reviewing as many of the nominees as I could, the day has finally arrived to review the winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize, given out each year to what a jury of peers believes is the best novel of the last twelve months to be written by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or Ireland. And indeed, Enright is in fact Irish, only the fifth Irish author in the history of the Booker to win the prize; and as you can tell from what's already been mentioned, it doesn't get much more stereotypically Irish on the surface than with The Gathering's plotline, fascinated as it is with drunken funerals, brawling families, weepy suicidal artists, and deceptively sexy pale middle-aged Gaelic women having bizarre Alice-Sebold style breakdowns. Erin go Bragh, motherf-cker!

The story of one of those huge Irish Catholic families (twelve siblings altogether, nine of whom are still alive at the time of our tale), The Gathering narratively centers around 38-year-old Veronica, somewhere in the middle of the sibling chain, a frazzled but not altogether unhappy wife and mother who nonetheless has been recently having some marital problems and drinking more than she's happy with. The reason for the eponymous gathering, then, is the drowning suicide of the black sheep of the family, the manipulative and charming loser Liam, who for years has been living right on the edge of civilized society (and his family's patience) until finally delving underneath for good while spending some time in Brighton (on the southern coast of England, a day trip from Dublin where the rest of the story takes place). Because of various complicated factors, it is Veronica who must travel to Brighton in order to identify and claim Liam's body; the book basically follows her through that journey and on through the funeral itself, peeking in her head and watching her attitudes about all the things going on, watching her fumble through her hazy memories and try to determine if there might be one single childhood event that can somehow explain how Liam eventually came to be.

In fact, I find it a fortuitous coincidence that I just happened to read The Gathering in the same exact week I read Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway for the first time as well; because when all is said and done, both authors are basically attempting the same thing, to let us literally crawl inside their main protagonists' heads and follow along with their thoughts stream-of-consciousness style. In this, then, Enright's book helps clarify a point I wanted to make in my original Dalloway essay, but wasn't sure how to actually verbalize until now; that although Woolf's original 1925 literary experiment should definitely still be admired for what it tries to accomplish, it's also true that we as a global culture have now had 80 years to expand and improve on those early rough Modernist experiments, with results these days that are just so much better than any of those trailblazers could've ever achieved back then. Because really, if you want to describe Enright's personal writing style, and explain a little about why people go so nuts for her work, just think of stream-of-consciousness done exactly and perfectly right -- no cruddy head-scratching abstraction, no pretentious "artsy for artsy's sake" run-on sentences, no even calling undue attention to itself, but rather a confident and solid style that seems to somehow slip right up into our hero's brain without either her or us noticing.

Because that's the thing -- it's a fascinating story, really fascinating, but the way it's told to us is by Veronica simply remembering little bits and pieces of it here and there, by her slowly revealing her opinion and attitudes about certain relatives and events in a piecemeal fashion. The Gathering is a story as we more often hear stories in real life, not as a traditional sit-down A-to-B-to-C uninterrupted tale, but rather as a loose collection of scraps and trails, with the narrator themselves sometimes remembering situations wrongly, sometimes deliberately lying to us. That's what makes the whole childhood aspect of this plot so intriguing, after all, is because Veronica herself admits that her memories of it all are so spotty, that sometimes she thinks she might be filling in the blanks in a certain false way deliberately, because in her heart that's what she really wants the situation to have been. Was Liam sexually abused as a kid? Was she as well, and now has only repressed memories of it all? Or does she want an easy excuse for herself as to why Liam ended up the way he did as an adult, and a lazy justification for her growing coldness to her husband? Was her brother simply a hustler, when all is said and done? Could she and the other siblings have done more, or was he simply doomed to have the kind of romantically tragic life that he did?

Enright takes on all these questions in The Gathering, and a whole lot more; and like I said, by telling the entire story through the filter of this very human, very flawed creature at its center, it makes us as the reader as confused about the objective "truth" as Veronica is herself. And that ultimately is maybe Enright's biggest lesson here -- that no matter what the trauma, no matter what dark things may or may not have occurred in our lives that we may or may not remember, it is how we perceive those things and react to them that is ultimately the only important thing. If Veronica chooses to be a victim, then that's what she's going to be, regardless of whether or not she actually was the victim of something in her past; if she chooses not to be, she suddenly isn't, even if she actually was abused as a kid and by all rights should be a victim. In a way it's actually the opposite of what we think of when we think of traditional Irish stories, because Enright is arguing that all of us are ultimately in charge of our own fates; it's for such reasons, like I said, that I ended up not really thinking of this novel as a typical gloomy Irish story when actually reading it, despite it sharing so many surface-level qualities.

And then of course no discussion of The Gathering is complete without a mention of Enright's mastery over the English language, a detail that both assured its nomination in the first place and that this year guaranteed its win over all those other fey little pointless nominees. I don't like quoting from books in my reviews, in that I feel quotes without context rarely ever convey the full power of why you wanted to quote them in the first place; that said, here is a particularly beautiful passage from the book that struck me quite powerfully, a paragraph that not only nicely explains what is always the most annoying thing about Liam-black-sheep types, but also is indicative of what concerning Enright's writing style I love so much...

"The problem with Liam was never something big. The problem with Liam was always a hundred small things. He had cigarettes but no matches, did I have matches? Yes, but the match breaks, the match doesn't strike, he can't light these cheap Albanian trash matches. Do I have a lighter? F-ck, he has split the matches. Why don't I have a lighter? He goes to find a lighter, rattling all the drawers in the kitchen. He walks out, leaving the back door open. He comes in the front door twenty minutes later with a lighter he found on the street -- lying just outside the house actually -- except that it is wet. He lights the oven from the pilot and lights his cigarette from the oven and burns his hand and after he has put his hand under the tap for a while he fusses in the cupboard for a baking tin and he puts the lighter -- a cheap, plastic lighter -- he actually puts it in the oven, and when I scream at him he shouts right back at me and there is a tussle at the oven door. After which, there is an hour of sulking because I do not trust him to dry a lighter in the oven without burning the house down. And after the sulk comes The Discussion."

Anyone who's...]]>
author: Anne Enright
name: Jason
average rating: 2.83
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 04/08
date added: 04/29/08
shelves:
review:
(My full review of this book is larger than Goodreads' word-count limit. Find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

As a book critic, I of course try to steer clear of any information I can about a book I'm about to review, until I'm done with the book myself and have already made up my mind about what I thought; so imagine my surprise, then, when finally checking out what others had to say about today's book in question, Anne Enright's The Gathering, and seeing so many people call it an unrelentingly dour and grim tale. Because I hadn't thought of it that way at all when actually reading it, but rather as witty, lively, and with a precise control over the English language; it wasn't until afterwards that I stopped and realized, as the Guardian UK most famously put it, that the book actually concerns an "alcoholic suicide, blank-eyed paedophile, violent father, vacant mother and irritatingly smug priest, not to mention its scenes of bad sex, self-harm, a funless wake and 5am grief-stricken howling." Oh yeah, that's right, I thought after seeing so many people mention it; and how remarkable that it never even occurred to me at the time, how remarkable that the book should be that good. No wonder it went on to win what many consider the most prestigious literary award on the planet last year. No wonder.

Because yes, ladies and gentlemen, the day is finally here; after nine months of following the contest, of tracking down and reviewing as many of the nominees as I could, the day has finally arrived to review the winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize, given out each year to what a jury of peers believes is the best novel of the last twelve months to be written by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or Ireland. And indeed, Enright is in fact Irish, only the fifth Irish author in the history of the Booker to win the prize; and as you can tell from what's already been mentioned, it doesn't get much more stereotypically Irish on the surface than with The Gathering's plotline, fascinated as it is with drunken funerals, brawling families, weepy suicidal artists, and deceptively sexy pale middle-aged Gaelic women having bizarre Alice-Sebold style breakdowns. Erin go Bragh, motherf-cker!

The story of one of those huge Irish Catholic families (twelve siblings altogether, nine of whom are still alive at the time of our tale), The Gathering narratively centers around 38-year-old Veronica, somewhere in the middle of the sibling chain, a frazzled but not altogether unhappy wife and mother who nonetheless has been recently having some marital problems and drinking more than she's happy with. The reason for the eponymous gathering, then, is the drowning suicide of the black sheep of the family, the manipulative and charming loser Liam, who for years has been living right on the edge of civilized society (and his family's patience) until finally delving underneath for good while spending some time in Brighton (on the southern coast of England, a day trip from Dublin where the rest of the story takes place). Because of various complicated factors, it is Veronica who must travel to Brighton in order to identify and claim Liam's body; the book basically follows her through that journey and on through the funeral itself, peeking in her head and watching her attitudes about all the things going on, watching her fumble through her hazy memories and try to determine if there might be one single childhood event that can somehow explain how Liam eventually came to be.

In fact, I find it a fortuitous coincidence that I just happened to read The Gathering in the same exact week I read Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway for the first time as well; because when all is said and done, both authors are basically attempting the same thing, to let us literally crawl inside their main protagonists' heads and follow along with their thoughts stream-of-consciousness style. In this, then, Enright's book helps clarify a point I wanted to make in my original Dalloway essay, but wasn't sure how to actually verbalize until now; that although Woolf's original 1925 literary experiment should definitely still be admired for what it tries to accomplish, it's also true that we as a global culture have now had 80 years to expand and improve on those early rough Modernist experiments, with results these days that are just so much better than any of those trailblazers could've ever achieved back then. Because really, if you want to describe Enright's personal writing style, and explain a little about why people go so nuts for her work, just think of stream-of-consciousness done exactly and perfectly right -- no cruddy head-scratching abstraction, no pretentious "artsy for artsy's sake" run-on sentences, no even calling undue attention to itself, but rather a confident and solid style that seems to somehow slip right up into our hero's brain without either her or us noticing.

Because that's the thing -- it's a fascinating story, really fascinating, but the way it's told to us is by Veronica simply remembering little bits and pieces of it here and there, by her slowly revealing her opinion and attitudes about certain relatives and events in a piecemeal fashion. The Gathering is a story as we more often hear stories in real life, not as a traditional sit-down A-to-B-to-C uninterrupted tale, but rather as a loose collection of scraps and trails, with the narrator themselves sometimes remembering situations wrongly, sometimes deliberately lying to us. That's what makes the whole childhood aspect of this plot so intriguing, after all, is because Veronica herself admits that her memories of it all are so spotty, that sometimes she thinks she might be filling in the blanks in a certain false way deliberately, because in her heart that's what she really wants the situation to have been. Was Liam sexually abused as a kid? Was she as well, and now has only repressed memories of it all? Or does she want an easy excuse for herself as to why Liam ended up the way he did as an adult, and a lazy justification for her growing coldness to her husband? Was her brother simply a hustler, when all is said and done? Could she and the other siblings have done more, or was he simply doomed to have the kind of romantically tragic life that he did?

Enright takes on all these questions in The Gathering, and a whole lot more; and like I said, by telling the entire story through the filter of this very human, very flawed creature at its center, it makes us as the reader as confused about the objective "truth" as Veronica is herself. And that ultimately is maybe Enright's biggest lesson here -- that no matter what the trauma, no matter what dark things may or may not have occurred in our lives that we may or may not remember, it is how we perceive those things and react to them that is ultimately the only important thing. If Veronica chooses to be a victim, then that's what she's going to be, regardless of whether or not she actually was the victim of something in her past; if she chooses not to be, she suddenly isn't, even if she actually was abused as a kid and by all rights should be a victim. In a way it's actually the opposite of what we think of when we think of traditional Irish stories, because Enright is arguing that all of us are ultimately in charge of our own fates; it's for such reasons, like I said, that I ended up not really thinking of this novel as a typical gloomy Irish story when actually reading it, despite it sharing so many surface-level qualities.

And then of course no discussion of The Gathering is complete without a mention of Enright's mastery over the English language, a detail that both assured its nomination in the first place and that this year guaranteed its win over all those other fey little pointless nominees. I don't like quoting from books in my reviews, in that I feel quotes without context rarely ever convey the full power of why you wanted to quote them in the first place; that said, here is a particularly beautiful passage from the book that struck me quite powerfully, a paragraph that not only nicely explains what is always the most annoying thing about Liam-black-sheep types, but also is indicative of what concerning Enright's writing style I love so much...

"The problem with Liam was never something big. The problem with Liam was always a hundred small things. He had cigarettes but no matches, did I have matches? Yes, but the match breaks, the match doesn't strike, he can't light these cheap Albanian trash matches. Do I have a lighter? F-ck, he has split the matches. Why don't I have a lighter? He goes to find a lighter, rattling all the drawers in the kitchen. He walks out, leaving the back door open. He comes in the front door twenty minutes later with a lighter he found on the street -- lying just outside the house actually -- except that it is wet. He lights the oven from the pilot and lights his cigarette from the oven and burns his hand and after he has put his hand under the tap for a while he fusses in the cupboard for a baking tin and he puts the lighter -- a cheap, plastic lighter -- he actually puts it in the oven, and when I scream at him he shouts right back at me and there is a tussle at the oven door. After which, there is an hour of sulking because I do not trust him to dry a lighter in the oven without burning the house down. And after the sulk comes The Discussion."

Anyone who's...
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