Not Entirely Asleep: One Big Complaint, 3 Microreviews

I promise things will pick back up shortly here–October's been travel-filled and otherwise engaging. Here: here's some elsewhere for the moment:

An interview with good old yrs truly at the Kenyon Review, and here you can read the two poems I've got in the latest issue

My review of The Marriage Plot over at the Star Tribune. Please know that I was 1/10th as hard on the book as I'd be in conversation–because, obviously, I was writing for a newspaper, and one cannot just be a wild-eyed maniac in a newspaper. Regardless: it was scary to see the book get starred reviews in Kirkus and PW, but it's been nice since to see it get lots more cautious, critical reviews since.

I don't want to get too much into this, but the Eugenides book seems, to me, part of a pretty shitty batch of anticipated fall fiction. First, this guy needs his f-ing head checked, and B+N reviews should now never be trusted (also: could there be a more say nothing review than this?), and I want someone to honestly tell me that Whitehead's Zone One is even remotely worth reading. I forced myself to read the thing and feel used and betrayed because of it. Whitehead's a phenomenal writer—any single paragraph in Zone One is interesting and full of vim and vigor and pep—but paragraph after paragraph with multiple sentences given over to cleveristic fireworkery about hallways and cool cultural asides…come the fuck on. Also: time does not work in this novel. The first 80 pages take place in a single afternoon–there's flashback, but it's shit. Time doesn't work, and the paragraphs are festooned with so many larded, overly clever/cool shit that a reader—this reader—has to just walk away. It's a terrible, terrible book.

As is, for the record, Drew Magary's The Postmortal. I love Magary, and have jumped up and down about how great he is before, and I actually hope he'll answer the interview questions I sent him through his publicist and, in doing so, maybe help me understand why I'm wrong about his novel, but lord almighty is The Postmortal a falling apart shitfest. Here's the thing: it's a dystopian book about what happens when aging is cured. Fine. The book's presented in brief snippets—Magary's a blogger, after all—and features characters who make stick figures seem fully developed and fleshed out, and the book ends up feeling like the cheapest, easiest possible book Magary could've written—a failure at character level, a failure at idea level, all of it (and how in the fuck it got a B+ is just beyond me—I'm guessing it says more about the fact that Magary's got active, online fans than it says about the book). Look, I don't love dumping on books, but this fall's been a batch of shit, and it's been miserably frustrating to feel just nut-kicked by (count em) THREE books.

Now that this has become a review, let me point out three books that are good—not amazing, not knock you sideways, but very very good.

1. Karaoke Culture by Dubravka Ugresic. No, I don't know how to pronounce the name either, and no, I'm not necessarily crazy about this book just because of the essay on the minibar that's been floating around for quite awhile, but this book of essays by Ugresic's just vinegar and caustic enough to be fun without feeling cutting. She writes, basically, on pop culture, and the former Yugoslavia, and she's entertaining and weird, if sometimes a little predictable (it seems a pretty facile thing for a smartish book person to think about Big Brother, for instance: no matter how much shitty television tells us about ourselves, we don't need every smart person to note the same things shitty television tells us about ourselves). Still: mostly fun.

2. Cerulean Blues by Katie Fallon. This is, full disclosure, by a friend, and it's I believe the debut book from Ruka Press in DC, and I personally love this book—I'm massively interested in Cerulean Warblers, how their habitat's being destroyed (both in WVirginia and Central America), why anyone should bother saving a bird smaller than the palm of a 12 year old. It is, however, a book which mimics the form (and therefore causes some of the same frustrations) of food writing that I got bent out of shape about here at KR. Regardless: it's a good book, and once you read it you can be the dick at the party who tells folks when they talk about Freedom that there's actually a book about Cerulean Warblers far better than the one Franzen wrote.

3. Groove Interrupted by Keith Spera. The book's subtitle's Loss, Renewal, and the Music of New Orleans, and if you care about American music you're gonna want to read this. Good companion book: It Came from Memphis. This book's worth reading exclusively for chapter on Alex Chilton, but then there's one on Toussaint and Anselmo and Davenport and all this other great stuff and you're deep in, the night half over and you with all this great noise in your head.

Apologies for the nasty frustration—it's been a hard fall for reading. Maybe I should be blaming Harbach's Art of Fielding for being so satisfying, so early on, and therefore leaving everything else seeming damn paltry. Anyway: more in a bit, back to regularly scheduled programming.

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