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August 20
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Justin
gave
 
to:
How Fiction Works (Hardcover)
by James Wood
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my rating:
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read in August, 2008
Justin said:
"In essay collections such as "The Broken Estate" and "The Irresponsible Self" (and in countless other pieces for The New Yorker, The New Republic and other magazines), the esteemed literary critic James Wood has demonstrated an as...more
In essay collections such as "The Broken Estate" and "The Irresponsible Self" (and in countless other pieces for The New Yorker, The New Republic and other magazines), the esteemed literary critic James Wood has demonstrated an astounding command of the canon of Western literature, and a gift for sharing this comprehensive knowledge in ways that are illuminating, surprising, daring and imminently entertaining. This (much, much feebler) book reviewer can't imagine, within the musty halls of literary criticism, a writer as resolutely accessible as Wood, who, by remaining accessible without compromising a shred of his fierce intelligence, makes literature itself seem accessible -- even the hard ones.
"How Fiction Works" finds the affable Wood at his most conversational and relaxed. "I can say that I have used only the books I actually own to produce this little volume," he writes in an introductory note. "I can also add that, except for a paragraph here and there, none of it is previously published." The point seems to be that "How Fiction Works" should not be read as one of Wood's formal (though no less readable) essays, but as a conversation piece, a sitdown with Wood in his study as he pulls his favorite, love-worn, dog-eared tomes off the shelf and tells you what makes them work.
In the same introduction, Wood promises to address questions such as "How do we define a successful metaphor? What is a character?" and the all-consuming concern, "Is realism real?" Indeed, "the real . . . is at the bottom of all my inquiries," he informs us. Later he elaborates on this notion, stating, "I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level."
Whether discussing Chekhov, Tolstoy or David Foster Wallace, Wood expects great writers to create, maintain -- and thusly convince us of -- the parameters of a consistent fictional universe. When such an event transpires, few styles of literary fiction (Wood does not seem to work in any other genre) will fail to prove successful, be it Bellow's blustery cityscaping or Hemingway's bracing minimalism.
Wood traces the modern novel's beginnings to Flaubert, who pioneered a kind of descriptive displacement of time and space Wood calls "free indirect style," then springs forward from there, using a dazzling array of examples to show how fiction changed from that point forward. His arranging of source material to prove his points is as fluid and lovely as any great composer's arrangement of musical notes, and, if nothing else, "How Fiction Works" will inspire you to simply read more, whether you care about the inner workings of what you're reading or not. For his part, Wood seems ultimately concerned for fiction's well-being, ending this lovely, eloquent ode to reading on a plea to writers:
"The true writer, that free servant of life," he writes, "is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional." ...less
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August 13
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Justin
gave
to:
Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life (Hardcover)
by Steve Martin
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in August, 2008
Justin said:
"I devoured this book like semisweet chocolate, only some kind of chocolate that isn't too rich and doesn't leave me sick no matter how much of it I eat. I feel like I could read about Steve Martin's analysis of his own standup comedy for thousands of...more
I devoured this book like semisweet chocolate, only some kind of chocolate that isn't too rich and doesn't leave me sick no matter how much of it I eat. I feel like I could read about Steve Martin's analysis of his own standup comedy for thousands of pages. Instead I'm stuck with about 200, and these I cherished.
Born Standing Up is not an intimate confessional by Martin, and those eager to learn more about the man behind the rather aloof, cold public facade will be disappointed here. The book finds Steve Martin looking back on his own standup career as if it all happened to someone else. He seems completely detached from it 25 years later, and rather mystified himself at the astounding success he achieved. And really, I can't say I blame him. If I'd reached a level of performance in which I was putting my show on in front of 20,000 people, I don't think I'd really believe it either. Martin explains what happened. Explains what he did to get where he got, and explains the development of his comedy from doing magic tricks at Disney Land to the astoundingly bizarre "avante garde" style he adopted as a 30-something. Observing the sheer weirdness of his act in retrospect it's hard to imagine how it got so popular, and I think it has entirely to do with the fact that Martin was so obsessed with comedy he performed literally thousands of shows during his lifetime. He attacked the craft with almost unprecedented zeal and the result was a level of comic timing so advanced he could get away with anything on stage, and make people laugh--including wearing balloon hats, slapping himself in the face, and tuning an imaginary banjo. He honed such a unique style that he is the one comic I can think of who is utterly inimitable. Nobody could ever try to emulate Steve Martin without looking like a total copycat. Somehow, in his absurd randomness, he created something utterly profound and memorable.
Anyway, it's fascinating to read Martin's deconstruction of his own comedy career, especially if you're interested in standup comedy itself as an art form, which I very much am. In Born Standing Up Martin provides the best, most succinct description of his own act I could possibly think of, and because he is my favorite standup comic in history, the quote, to me, really describes an ideal version of comedy in general:
"What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh."
Genius. You have to do something a hell of a lot, for a very long time, to come up with such an acute sense of how you actually do it. It's debatable if Martin was the greatest comic in history, but I'm almost positive he was the most precise, astute, and self-aware....less
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August 10
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Justin
gave
to:
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Hardcover)
by Max Brooks
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in August, 2008
Justin said:
"I didn't think much else could be done with the zombie uprising genre but Mel Brooks' son, Max Brooks, has proven me "dead" wrong. Get it? Dead?
Anyway, Brooks isn't aiming for an original plot here: zombie virus breaks out. Zombies eat ...more
I didn't think much else could be done with the zombie uprising genre but Mel Brooks' son, Max Brooks, has proven me "dead" wrong. Get it? Dead?
Anyway, Brooks isn't aiming for an original plot here: zombie virus breaks out. Zombies eat human flesh, who then in turn become zombies. Zombies rise up and take over the world. And, scene.
What's original about [i]World War Z[/i] is Brooks' incredibly imaginative, awe-inducingly thorough vision of how the ENTIRE world would respond to such a crisis. In fact, the book could work as a primer for how we as foolish, self-destructive humans might cope with ANY kind of world-destroying scenario, be it nuclear war, global drought, or zombies. Moving fluidly between India, the U.S., China, Cuba, Iceland, the North Pole, and tons of other places, he strives to present the oral testimony of every kind of character imaginable who might be involved with such an epidemic. We get stories, naturally, from soldiers who fought the zombies down (one soldier provides a particularly chilling image of a sea of 200 million zombies, visible from space, crossing the Midwest), but also from political figures who dealt with the international-relational strife wrought by the epidemic; deep sea divers who hunted the legions of zombies that sank to the bottom of the ocean and still prowl the earth, indestructible to anything but a shot to the brain; and the great thinkers who envisioned strategic locations for humans to move to and be safe. Just when you think he can't possibly think up another angle on this subject, he throws something in like a story from a man who trained dogs to run out and seek zombies out long-range.
All of Brooks' "testimonies" sound like they are being spoken by the same person, and in many cases the interview subjects are far too willing to provide long, elaborate descriptions of a terrible trauma to a relative stranger--but these points are minor when one considers the ideas present here, which are bountiful, dense and frequently brilliant. Brooks greatest accomplishment is making his version of humanity's response to a worldwide disaster completely plausible. What with all the shit going on in the world today, chaos on an epic scale seems more possible than ever—if it does, god forbid, ever happen, I hope this book survives the carnage as a lesson in rebuilding and hope, whether we are recovering from a massive zombie plague or just the inevitable consequences of our own stupid behavior....less
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July 30
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Justin
gave
to:
The Book Against God: A Novel (Paperback)
by James Wood
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in July, 2008
Justin said:
"James Wood is probably as successful as a "literary critic" gets having become a staff writer for the New Yorker, and released a few well-received books of essays. The Book Against God is the Brit's only novel and it kind of r...more
James Wood is probably as successful as a "literary critic" gets having become a staff writer for the New Yorker, and released a few well-received books of essays. The Book Against God is the Brit's only novel and it kind of reads like it's written by someone who has studied the craft of literature very, very hard. While not quite laborious, Wood's prose is certainly studious, and his story of an intellectual failure struggling to come out from his father's shadow hearkens back to the comedies of manners popular in the Victorian Age. (Admittedly, I'm talking out of my ass here a little bit with these references; in actuality, all I know is that Wood's book feels distinctly "British," and when I think of writings that feel British I think of either Jane Austen or Shakespeare, and since this certainly ain't Shakespeare I'll compare it to Austen and call it a Comedy of Manners. What did Austen write again?)
Wood positions his protagonist, Thomas Bunting, an overeducated slacker who can't seem to finish his PhD, against Bunting's father, an overeducated lovably pompous priest involved in what seems like a perfect marriage. In doing so, he manages to communicate a lot of interesting ideas about faith and atheism without making his characters into talking heads. Thomas, a nonbeliever, simply has to show up at his father's house and argue with all of his friends and close family. Viola: interesting points emerge. Thomas is also a chronic liar, apparently (though Wood tells us this fact repeatedly he never really demonstrates it very clearly with actual action), and this flaw has cost him his beloved wife, Jane. The book doesn't reach for much, plot-wise, but simply depicts him struggling to recover from his separation with Jane, his failure as a true intellectual, and the death of his father. In it's own quiet way it's a very strong piece of writing, and yet also not all that memorable, I think because it's very, VERY quiet with almost zero explosions throughout. I'm getting bored right now as I write about it, and yet I liked it. Though I'm not sure I'd recommend it....less
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July 21
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Justin
gave
to:
How to Be Good (Paperback)
by Nick Hornby
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in July, 2008
Justin said:
"I enjoyed Hornby's High Fidelity when I was 21. It felt funny and smart in a way I hadn't encountered in popular literature, especially in how it addressed the difficulties of romantic relationships. How to Be Good is the first book I'v...more
I enjoyed Hornby's High Fidelity when I was 21. It felt funny and smart in a way I hadn't encountered in popular literature, especially in how it addressed the difficulties of romantic relationships. How to Be Good is the first book I've read by him since then (my roommate found it in a free bin and brought it home) and I found it mostly unpleasant, bitter, mean-spirited and unfunny. I don't know what Hornby's marriage is like, or if he's married at all, but I have to believe that something has made him incredibly cynical, whether it's a current situation or something from his past. Good is from the POV of a woman, Katie Carr, who basically seems to despise both her husband and her kids. The book begins with her asking him for a divorce, then quickly pushes that conversation under the rug—a narrative move that actually felt realistic since people with major relationship problems often do ignore the bigger painful truths staring them in the face. But then Hornby gets into this whole convoluted "plot" wherein the husband, David, tries to turn himself into a better person. He starts giving huge amounts of money to street kids and takes in this drifter alternative healer new-age guy who calls himself DJ Goodnews. I mean, he actually lets Goodnews move into their house and live in the same house as his wife and kids. And then the couple, Katie and David, let the dude babysit their kids. Goodnews is a terrible cliche of a smug, sanctimonious hippie and though Katie offers plenty of cheeky British wit regarding the whole situation, her general complacency makes her character both weak and unlikeable, like a really passive aggressive coworker who complains about everything you do without ever directly confronting you about it. Hornby is relentless in his depiction of her general dissatisfaction and by the end of the book, after she's struggled and struggled and finally decided to stick it out with her annoying family, you kind of feel bad for both sides and wish she would just move out. The thing is, I think Hornby wanted to portray a senseless marriage with no chance at happiness. The book's final image, in which Katie looks at the night sky behind her husband and sees nothing but darkness, kind of seals the deal: Hornby was in a bad place when he wrote this thing and the reason it's the one book of his to be completely ignored by the film option bigwigs, is because it's entirely miserable from start to finish....less
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July 08
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Justin
gave
to:
Northline (Paperback)
by Willy Vlautin
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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Justin said:
"I just finished Vlautin's The Motel Life and was so impressed I went out the next day and bought this one, his follow-up. Vlautin has an uncanny knack for creating characters you believe in and root for. Like his main character, Frank Flannaga...more
I just finished Vlautin's The Motel Life and was so impressed I went out the next day and bought this one, his follow-up. Vlautin has an uncanny knack for creating characters you believe in and root for. Like his main character, Frank Flannagan, in Motel Life<i/>, <i>Northline's Allison Johnson is too emotionally crippled to prevent terrible things from happening to her. And yet, she does possess self-awareness and does do just enough to improve her conditions that we never lose hope in her. In his spare, unaffected prose, Vlautin gives us two steps forward (new job, new city away from her abusive boyfriend) for Allison for every one step back (a biligerent drunken escapade with two disgusting barflies, various attempts to kill herself. He is masterful at depicting realistic recovery, never allowing his characters to escape their demons easily, or even completely. Northline lacks some of the great turns of phrase and hilarious dialog found in The Motel Life, but it's no less riveting, and Allison Johnson is another memorable protagonist from one of Portland, Oregon's best novelists.
I could actually see Allison and Frank Flannagan meeting at some point, in another narrative life, and maybe having an adventure or two of their own (they both live in Reno after all). I wonder if Vlautin ever thinks about doing a sort of Cormack McCarthy Cities on the Plain kind of thing and bringing two cool characters from past novels into one book starring both of them......less
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July 03
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Justin
gave
to:
The Motel Life: A Novel (P.S.)
by Willy Vlautin
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in July, 2008, has a copy to sell/swap
Justin said:
"I've been a sort-of fan of Willy Vlautin's band, Richmond Fontaine, since moving to Portland, though I've never really paid attention to the lyrics in his alt-countryish narrative ...more
I've been a sort-of fan of Willy Vlautin's band, Richmond Fontaine, since moving to Portland, though I've never really paid attention to the lyrics in his alt-countryish narrative tunes. Part of the problem is Vlautin's singing voice, which is raspy and weary in that whiskey-soaked kind of way that usually appeals to me, but is also oddly bland, with little differentiation in range or tone from track to track. His music just kind of washes over me. It's pleasant enough to listen to but hardly memorable, and I can't focus on it long enough to absorb lyrical content.
Which is probably why I resisted reading Vlautin's novel, The Motel Life for years following its release. Based on his music, I just didn't think the guy had it in him to sustain my interest for a book's worth of pages. Recently, though, I've been trying to write fiction myself, and so my interest in local writers has been reinvigorated. I picked up Motel Life at Powell's, started reading it, and within minutes was utterly hooked.
Vlautin's prose is deceptively simple, unfettered by big words, but only because its from the point of view of a character, Frank Flannagan, who doesn't use big words. The book's been compared to Bukowski (and Vlautin himself is an enormous fan), but Vlautin's writing is far more interesting than Bukowski's because his characters actually have depth and he tells a story that goes somewhere and has twists and turns that surprise without beating you over the head with their cleverness. I love that the book's main catalyst is a complete accident, as Frank's brother, Jerry Lee, hits a kid on his bike with his car. Neither Jerry Lee nor Frank are bad guys (in fact their inherent sweetness and their love and affection for each other is perhaps the book's strongest element), but they're not the brightest bulbs on the tree either, and their first impulse upon learning of the kid's death is to run.
A lesser writer I feel would have Jerry Lee kill someone with his own hands on accident, like in a fight, and then have the two brothers flee across the country, cops in pursuit. Instead Jerry Lee and Frank return to Reno, where Motel Life takes place, and try to keep on living their decrepit lives. Frank gets a dog. They drink a lot. Jerry Lee gets more and more depressed and shoots himself in the leg because he's too chicken-shit to kill himself. Vlautin mixes stories from the brothers' past into the slow-burning narrative with admirable skill. You begin to know them and care about them so much you become interested in seeing them walk to the liquor store, or get drunk on a back porch. Great writing is like life: Reading it, you don't even realize you've grown to love its characters until something befalls them and you feel their pain. Vlautin's writing snuck up on me, and it wasn't until the final pages, when Jerry Lee says, "I want to fall in love and have someone fall in love with me... Do you think that's so wrong to want? I mean, after what's happened?" that I realized how deeply he was getting to me.
Then only thing that keeps me from giving this thing five stars is Vlautin's device of Frank telling Jerry Lee stories to cheer him up. Frank's stories-within-the-story are long and convoluted and intentionally random and ridiculous. They're sort of funny I suppose, but paled in comparison to the intense, beautiful power of the book's main narrative, and I found myself getting impatient with them and wanting things to get back to what mattered. The dynamic of Frank telling Jerry Lee stories is important and touching, but Vlautin didn't need to spend pages and pages on each one; it's cruel of him to take us away from the main action for that long. This element and the book's ending, which wrapped up way, way too quickly, keep the book from receiving a perfect score from me. What remains is immensely good though> ...less
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June 29
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Justin
is currently reading:
Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (Hardcover)
by Mark Doty
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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June 19
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Justin
gave
to:
True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor (Paperback)
by David Mamet
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in January, 2007
Justin said:
"I love this book. I think it's one of the great books on theater technique ever written. If you want to know why, read my review of Mamet's other popular "technique" book, On Directing Film....more
I love this book. I think it's one of the great books on theater technique ever written. If you want to know why, read my review of Mamet's other popular "technique" book, On Directing Film....less
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June 13
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Justin
gave
to:
Heaven's Coast: Memoir, A (Paperback)
by Mark Doty
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in June, 2008, has a copy to sell/swap
Justin said:
"I just bought Mark Doty's latest collection of poems today, Fire to Fire. So far it's pretty great, most notably for its shimmering de...more
I just bought Mark Doty's latest collection of poems today, Fire to Fire. So far it's pretty great, most notably for its shimmering depictions of natural phenomena ranging from a bat flying in rural Britain to the ocean shores of Provincetown. Doty's gift for lyrical description is so impressive he'll actually startle me with his language, stringing words together to create beautiful, naturalistic illusions, like some kind of linguistic magician. This talent is also found in his prose works, as evidenced by this passage from his memoir Heaven's Coast:
"...On one of the little ponds, this morning, I saw wind riffling the first of the waterlily leaves. They haven't all emerged yet, but new circles tattoo the water, here and there, a coppery red. When the wind lifted their edges, each would reveal a little shadowy spot, a dot of black which seemed to flash on the water, and so across the whole surface of the pond there was what could only be described as the inverse of sparkling; a scintillant blackness. Shining blackly, black but rippling, lyrical: the sheen and radiance of death-in-life."
That's some great imagery right there, and yet Doty's memoirs (which also include Dog Years and Firebird), unlike his poetry, consistently fail to back up such lyrical flights with anything really substantial. The result is that, in his prose works, Doty's descriptive gems often feel flowery—pretty and nice and colorful, but not much else. It doesn't help that Doty's style is far from concise. He chooses to write about himself by moving haltingly through his own consciousness, figuring things out as he goes along, and inviting the reader to go on the journey with him. He doesn't trim the fat, but leaves in all the self-doubting, the internal questioning, the dead ends and the trying again a different way. He seems to be trying to write about his life as he is living it, and like life there is no real end in sight, no answers found; the point of Doty's memoirs seems to be the process, and not the end product.
This style didn't bother me much in Doty's other memoirs because their subjects were relatively innocuous: Doty's dogs and Doty's dysfunctional upbringing in the dirty south and his early explorations of sexual identity and awareness. I did kind of wonder who this guy was and why I should I care enough about him to read two completely self-centered books about his life, but hey, I thought, he IS a damn good writer and that on its own is usually enough to pull me through something, no matter how masturbatory.
But Heaven's Coast is a slightly different story. Here, Doty revisits his late lover Wally's death from AIDS. Here, he write blatantly about his partner's slow, ugly demise at the hands of a vicious, terrifyingly mysterious virus, and then publishes it for profit. And it's okay to do that, but if you're going to hurl the darkest, sickest moments of the alleged love of your life onto a page for all to read and purchase, you better do your damndest to tell their story too, so we can at least TRY to know them like you did (of course we never can, but we want to try, I promise, we do!) I kept expecting there to be a moment in Heaven's Coast where Doty broke poor ol' Wally down, really telling us about him, about who he was, where he came from, and who he might have been. But this never happens. We get wonderfully rich verbal portraits of the peripheral characters in Mark and Wally's life: their late friend Lynda who died in a car accident; Wally's eccentric new-agey brother Jim; another man, Bob, who met a similar fate at the hands of AIDS. These characters pop off the page. Wally, however, does not. We get that he was handsome, that he designed display windows for retailers, that he loved animals. Somehow, though, Doty manages to avoid providing us with any sort of truly telling details about who this man was and why he loved him. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt and think maybe Wally's death was so difficult to take, he just had trouble digging too deeply into his lover's life... but the cynical part of me wonders if Doty just got too wrapped up in writing about himself and how Wally's demise and the whole AIDS epidemic in general has affected him. On and on he goes, wandering the beaches of his hometown, walking his dogs, going to the chiropractor, and ruminating what feels like endlessly on all the aforementioned subjects. There are riveting passages in Heaven's Coast (most of them involving stories about other people; very few of them involving Doty's internalizations), but Doty constantly undermines them with tedious, overlong reflections on the meaning of life and worse, many, many rhetorical questions that come across as just plain sappy. After the very passage I just quoted, for example, Doty follows up the wonderful prose with this:
"Is that my work, to point to the world and say, See how darkly it sparkles?"
Ugh. And, huh? The book is peppered with such tenderly empty questions, some of them piled one on top of another, unceasing. I suspect Doty is aiming for a conversational vibe, but obviously we can't answer him, and the process begins to become an exercise in futility, as he poses question after question without answers, and no attempts to provide answers.
I wouldn't be going on as long as I have been if the subject matter of Heaven's Coast weren't so touchy to me. The book should have been both a lyrical document of living with AIDS in a time when AIDS was new and at its worst, and an elegy to a beloved man in the author's life. In bombarding us with his fears and insecurities (and yes, lovely sadnesses) Doty does paint a powerful and memorable picture of AIDS in the '90s, but in failing to fully tell his lover's life story (or even really trying to), he both sells the person of Wally short and sells his readers short by failing to pin his (Doty's) own emotional struggles on a figure we get to know and thus relate to. In Doty's words Wally is just a cloud of vaguely drawn personality traits and gross sickness (Doty writes with particularly, almost darkly gleeful vividness about the poor man's relentless, uncontrollable diarrhea), not a man for whom we at least get an inkling of understanding of Doty's love for. The result is that Heaven's Coast, for all its 300+ pages of lovely, show-offy linguistic meandering, feels shallow, insubstantial, and sadly, kind of selfish.
What Doty has done (I'm sure unintentionally but nonetheless) is aggrandized his own grief and subsequent recovery, then profited off it. I can't help but wonder if Doty, as writers tend to do, saw this book in his head from the moment Wally was diagnosed. If he did, he's sure not telling, and that too (his avoidance of addressing his own decision to write about and subsequently publish this tragedy) is somehow discomforting to me.
Naturally, the nature of memoir writing is to be self-centered, but this book is one memoir that should have been the exception that proves the rule. Doty should have written about Wally first, himself second. In showing the effects of AIDS on one, fully realized character, he would have somehow made the story as a whole universal, maybe because we feel like we truly know someone and their plight when we can see something of ourselves in them. We can see ourselves in Doty and understand why he would grieve, but we can't see what has compelled him to share that grief with us....less
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