2014 - Match-Up Decisions

[Juniper]

today's match-up:


The People in the Trees

vs.

The Goldfinch

http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/201...

judge: Roxane Gay is the author of two forthcoming books: An Untamed State and Bad Feminist: Essays. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I profiled Philipp Meyer for The Aesthete and reviewed Long Division for the Nation.”

Roxane Gay: Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees are unexpectedly similar. Both novels are sweeping in scope, covering decades of intrigue and tumult. In both novels, men are seeking something elusive, something that will, ultimately, lead to their downfall. In both books, the narrators are not terribly reliable, with each man seeing the world in ways that suit his purposes and each man giving over to some kind of vice. Despite these similarities, one of these novels succeeds grandly, while the other fails—though to be fair, it fails grandly.

Donna Tartt is, undoubtedly, a brilliant writer. She is coolly in command of her craft. As I read The Goldfinch I found myself admiring her talent as much as I loathed the experience of reading this novel. I couldn’t help but think of the judge who recently sentenced a woman to reading Malcolm Gladwell. I, too, had been sentenced.

The Goldfinch is one of those books where the writer is so passionately absorbed in her words she forgets about the reader. Tartt’s prose offers up exacting details of how Theo Decker sees the world as a child, as a teenager, and as a young man haunted by the trauma of his past. Throughout, the description is baroquely ornate. Even rain is rendered excessively, as “raindrops dancing and prickling on the sidewalks, a smashing rain that seemed to amplify all the noise on the streets.”

Tartt offers details, more details, and more details yet while completely ignoring things like explaining the museum bombing that is a catalyst for most of the novel’s intrigue. When she describes Mrs. Barbour, the matriarch of the family who takes Theo in for a time after his mother dies, Tartt writes:

Mrs. Barbour was from a society family with an old Dutch name, so cool and blonde and monotone that sometimes she seemed partially drained of blood. She was a masterpiece of composure; nothing ever ruffled her or made her upset, and though she was not beautiful her calmness had the magnetic pull of beauty—a stillness so powerful that the molecules realigned themselves around her when she came into a room.

The acrobatic arrogance of this writing is nearly commendable. Here we have high definition prose—exquisitely clear, but showing us, perhaps, more than we need or want to see.

Tartt also gives over to excess when detailing Theo’s anxieties, which, particularly as he gets older, seem wildly disproportionate. It’s as if she knows that Theo’s worry over the painting he took, as a mere boy, from the museum when it was bombed is sort of strange, given the context in which it happened, so she tries to make us forget that strangeness by relentlessly amplifying Theo’s anxiety until we forget what originally caused it. And then there is the odd preoccupation with iPods, as if she is saying, “Here, I am acknowledging the modern world.” There are 17 references to the device, most of them jarring in their specificity. (I counted.)

Still, I kept reading. I wanted to see what would happen to Theo. He goes with his father from New York to the economically ravaged outskirts of Vegas, then his father dies and Theo is back in New York with Hobie, the furniture restorer and kindly man who takes him in. It becomes rather striking that there’s a way middle class white men suffer, and the way everyone else suffers. There is unrequited love and international intrigue and oh-so-much lamentation. The cast of characters is quirky and richly drawn. The plot becomes increasingly preposterous as it unfolds, but Tartt is so composed and confident you simply go along. She knows what she’s doing and she doesn’t give a damn what you think about that.

As the novel ends and we realize Theo has spent most of his life protecting something that was not in his possession, Tartt offers a line so exquisite, it manages to stand out from the overbearing prose around it: “And it was awful to learn, by having it so suddenly vanish from under me, that all my adult life I’d been privately sustained by that great, hidden, savage joy: the conviction that my whole life was balanced atop a secret that might at any moment blow it apart.” To find this elegant prose amidst so much unnecessary prose is what made The Goldfinch infuriating. We are constantly reminded of how good this book could have been.

Where this novel ultimately fails is in the ending. After nearly every plot thread has been neatly resolved (or nearly so), Tartt offers up a tidy and overwrought philosophy that forces the reader from the confines of her baroque prose into a cold and lonely place. Whatever brilliance Tartt created, she very nearly destroys it with her unwillingness to simply end the novel. She writes, “And that’s what all the very greatest masters do. Rembrandt. Velázquez. Late Titian. They make jokes. They amuse themselves. They build up the illusion, the trick—but, step closer? It falls apart into brushstrokes. Abstract, unearthly. A different and much deeper sort of beauty altogether.” In these few lines, Tartt manages to encapsulate what she has done with The Goldfinch: There is illusion and there are tricks and the writer has amused herself, but eventually, albeit grandly, it falls apart.

The People in the Trees is not a novel that reveals its brilliance easily. This is Yanagihara’s debut novel and there is an intriguing rawness to her novel’s composition. The premise is so convincing, so immersive, that Yanagihara wills you to love what she has done. Norton Perina’s fictional memoirs are written so adeptly that you come to believe he is a real person who has lived in the world. The novel begins with an AP article about Perina facing charges of sexual abuse, so we know something will go terribly wrong, but the wrongness is revealed subtly. Even though we know how Perina’s story will end from the beginning, we nearly forget because Yanagihara so thoroughly pulls us into his mind and his adventures and his misdeeds.

The prose is sly when we see how Perina is a man who is far too charitable in how he understands himself and how he moves through the world. He is deeply unlikable but compelling; his utter lack of self-awareness is hypnotic. In his memoirs, for example, Perina criticizes Esme Duff, a colleague he resents, for omitting details of the a’ina’ina ceremony on the island of Ivu’ivu, where young boys are sodomized by village elders. “However, I considered her omission the worst sort of intellectual hypocrisy: when documenting a culture, one cannot simply leave out details that one finds distasteful or shocking or that do not fit into the tidy narrative one has constructed.” He cannot acknowledge his own intellectual hypocrisy but is more than willing to identify that hypocrisy in others.

Observing the same village, Perina writes:

I found myself admiring the village, even its simplicity. Yes, it was a crude sort of life, but there was a cozy sense of bounty here, of everything having its place, of every need of life—food, shelter, weaponry—being well considered and provided for, of life stripped to its essence and yet comfortably fulfilled. How many societies can say this, that they have recognized all they need and have made provisions for it all?

Perina is very comfortable in his condescension, and that comfort only increases as he gets closer and closer to his great discovery. That condescension and the callous decisions he makes in pursuit of “science” ultimately lead to the downfall of the people of Ivu’ivu as well as his own downfall. What comes to pass is devastating, though he is the one who pays the smallest price.

Like Tartt, Yanagihara is baroque in her descriptions. A slab of meat is described as “a large swaying apron of red meat, extravagantly quilted with white threads of fat.” Toward the end of the novel, Perina describes an infection plaguing his recently adopted son Victor as “furrows of hot, bubbling welts, each capped with a snowy peak of pus, how they had moved across the whites of his eyes, leaving them as yellow as fat and secreting a mysterious slime that was as thick as wax.” The details are so visceral, so cinematic, that they often made my skin crawl. I wanted more, always more from this book.

What really elevates The People in the Trees is its audacity. Yanagihara exemplifies what a writer can do with imagination. She creates an entire people and establishes their customs with unwavering confidence. The geography she maps of Ivu’ivu, with the oppressive heat and wet air, the exotic fruit and unknown terrains, is utterly convincing. As Perina’s fame grows and he wins the Nobel, we can see the consequences of his success even if he cannot. There is even foreshadowing when Perina notes, “I liked to watch the children most. They were smaller than the children I had seen in America and, unexpectedly, more handsome: the features that looked odd on their parents…were charming on them, and they wore their nakedness well.” Though we don’t know quite how telling this observation is, it is easily recalled when we realize the extent of Perina’s depravity.

Perina develops a compulsion of sorts, adopting more than 40 children from Ivu’ivu. He brings them into his home even though he seems to be more enamored with the idea of fatherhood than the reality of it. The children are accessories, petty nuisances, and, we eventually learn, something much darker—something, like the island from which he took them, to be plundered for his personal satisfaction. Yanagihara brings this novel to a somewhat shocking close but she does so with tenderness. She makes it possible for me to pity Perina as much as I loathe him. That is a grand thing in a novel, allowing the reader to hold such complex feelings about something that is, at its core, quite simple and easy to condemn.

The winner of this round is, without a doubt, The People in the Trees.

TODAY’S WINNER: The People in the Trees

http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/201...

[jess]

I'm feeling wracked with anxiety about the Lizzie Skurnick round. I can't decide what she'll do! Anyone have any guesses? Did anyone fill out brackets?

[Melissa Rochelle]

jess wrote: "I'm feeling wracked with anxiety about the Lizzie Skurnick round. I can't decide what she'll do! Anyone have any guesses? Did anyone fill out brackets?"

I filled out brackets and they're halfway close to being good...kind of. John Green really messed me up with his TPitT pick and also with E&P not being a zombie. BUT if Lizze Skurnick picks The Son and Life After Life remains a zombie pick, then I have some hope. :-)

I have NO idea what Lizzie Skurnick will do with these two books and we have to wait until MONDAY for the next round of judgments to begin. I need them now!

[Katie]

Life after Life and Luminaries screwed up my bracket but I wait anxiously on next week. The Son was my favorite book of the year so I'm way too invested in it winning!

[jess]

I have read this paragraph TOO MANY TIMES this week.

Lizzie Skurnick talks about books for All Things Considered, The New Republic, Bookforum, and many other places. She is the author of Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, and the editor-in-chief of Lizzie Skurnick Books, an imprint reissuing YA classics. A collection based on her “That Should Be a Word” column for the New York Times Magazine is forthcoming in 2014.

[Juniper]

jess wrote: "I'm feeling wracked with anxiety about the Lizzie Skurnick round. I can't decide what she'll do! Anyone have any guesses? Did anyone fill out brackets?"

i have no idea!! and my brackets are a disaster. haha!! :)

[[deleted user]]

jess wrote: "I'm feeling wracked with anxiety about the Lizzie Skurnick round. I can't decide what she'll do! Anyone have any guesses? Did anyone fill out brackets?"

That round is KILLING me, too! I filled out(ish) a bracket, but I couldn't even bring my self to fill in that part of the tournament because I love those books so much. I am pretty proud that up until this point (for what I've filled in), the only decision I've missed was John Green's!

[Jan]

All right, you guys inspired me to procrastinate on a looming, wakes-me-up-at-4am-worrying deadline by googling some of Lizzie's reviews. Based on 10 minutes skimming reviews at her blog, theoldhag.com, I predict her review will be witty and thoughtful, and she'll go for The Son. But what do I know?!?! :-) FWIW, I loved both books and will be happy/torn whatever she decides, but I will be deeply disappointed if this year's Pulitzer goes to any book other than The Son or The Good Lord Bird.

[Barbara]

I'm just thrilled that my two favorites are still in the race. When I saw the original brackets I thought that there was no way that my favorite -A Tale for the Time Being and my second favorite -The People in the Trees could survive.

I've been following the TOB for six years and last year was the first time my two favorites made it to the finals and they both were Zombie winners. This years I have to hope for the opposite for them to go all the way and defeat the Zombies. It is so much more fun when you have a dog in the race!

[Jan]

Barbara wrote: "I'm just thrilled that my two favorites are still in the race. When I saw the original brackets I thought that there was no way that my favorite -A Tale for the Time Being and my second favorite -..."

March madness! :-)

[Anne]

Barbara said: A Tale for the Time Being and my second favorite -The People in the Trees

I think these are my two favorites also. It is very rare for me to have read (m)any of the books in the tournament but this year is an exception and I liked several of them enough to pull for them and be ok with them advancing.

[Juniper]

today, it's the first round of the semi-finals. the match-up is:


A Tale for the Time Being

vs.

The Good Lord Bird

judge: John Darnielle is the lead singer of the Mountain Goats. His first book, Black Sabbath: Master of Reality, was published in April 2008, and he is currently working on a novel for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “Fiona Maazel listed my song “Woke Up New” in a playlist she made for Largehearted Boy, and Rainbow Rowell has said complimentary things about my music. I’m friends on Facebook with Giancarlo DiTrapano of NY Tyrant, the house that published Hill William.”

http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/201...

John Darnielle: I should say before I say much else that I don’t read a lot of books that come right out and tell me their stories. I like Blake Butler; I like William Gass; I like Mercè Rodoreda’s Death in Spring and Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli. I tend to seek out books that don’t just ask me to work for it: They won’t give me a damned thing unless I do.

But I got caught up in A Tale for the Time Being pretty quickly. Its several narrators felt like real human beings with real depths; that shifting-alliances feeling one gets from trading off between speakers produces its own comfortable rhythm over the space of several hundred pages. One story would hang from a cliff while the next picked up just at the point where things had looked utterly hopeless. I was immersed. Several scenes made me cry or nearly cry; I liked Nao, the teenage narrator in Tokyo, and believed in Ruth, the grown-up in Vancouver who’s reading Nao’s diary. I felt for Nao’s family. They were struggling. I wanted to see them succeed.

At the same time, the braiding effect between the two central plotlines and their smaller subplots was kind of Dickensian, which cuts two ways. If you don’t have some love for Dickens, I don’t get you: Storytelling is a high calling, and Ruth Ozeki, like Dickens, is called. But everybody who’s spent some time with Dickens gets familiar with that lurking suspicion, almost always rewarded, that no matter how high the tension gets, the hero’s going to emerge largely unscathed. Some ingenious solution will be arrived at to spare us, and all good people concerned will be spared from what seem, in the telling, like the inevitable consequences of the plot.

And so several points in A Tale for the Time Being put me in that really uncomfortable position of wanting harsher consequences for people whom I’d come to love, people to whom I wished well. Nao’s father’s failed suicide attempts, for example: He’s a diligent, thorough man in most spheres of his life. When he sets his mind to a task, he makes something of it, even if it’s only turning his once-beloved philosophical texts into origami. But his first two suicide attempts are blocked, and his third is blocked by magic reaching backwards through time. I was relieved that he’d been spared! Because I liked him. But he lost some of his humanity in the process, and I missed it, even though its full presence would have meant real horror.

In many ways this tension is what A Tale for the Time Being ends up being explicitly about: the shared knowledge, between author and reader, that there are a number of ways the telling of a life might go, and that many of them aren’t very nice. Ozeki loves her characters, it seems clear. She doesn’t want them to come to harm if she can help it, and of course she can help it: They are always rescued from disaster in some way. Even when Nao’s inescapable ending is confronted—i.e., she must have died in the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011—we’re presented with some quantum-mechanics workthroughs that ease the blow. To me that felt like wanting to have your cake and eat it, too. If you’re going to kill one of your characters, you have to live with the loss, and let the reader fully suffer it.

Still, I loved the people in this book, a lot. I wanted them all to live to see another day, always. Pretty clever of a book to point out to you that magic’s necessary if you, as a reader, are going to get what you want. The less turbulent of the two central plotlines—the story of Ruth, the writer in Canada who finds Nao’s diary and translates it, scrambling to learn Nao’s fate (the other story, naturally, is the diary itself)—boasted such deft characterization that I found myself drawn deeper into it even as its twin, Nao’s story, went through more dramatic passages and told the harder story. Finally—and this was a big plus for me—there’s so much information in this book about things I knew next to nothing about. Primary texts of Zen Buddhism. Japanese history and geography. Recent developments in Japanese culture. Mythology, legend. I like when a story is teaching me things without letting me know what’s going on. Which brings me to James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird.

The framing device—a found manuscript from an unverifiable source, presented to speak almost entirely for itself—is right up my alley. The story that follows is exciting, then funny, then shocking, then profound. It’s hard to say much about a book that speaks so clearly for itself. The prose lilts; it’s packed end to end with tall-tale phrasing (“Doyle, barefoot, quaked like a knock-kneed chicken and begun moaning like a baby” is the one I found just now opening the book at random and scanning down the first page I looked at) and a lot of really unlikely from-the-jaws-of-death rescues, many of which are rooted in historical fact. It’s the story of John Brown and his movements over the years leading up to the raid on Harper’s Ferry, about which I knew only the barest details before reading The Good Lord Bird.

Telling a comic story whose context is slavery while not minimizing its horrors is a really neat trick. Shifting the tone just enough at exactly the right moments, reminding the reader of the weight of the struggle and the monstrousness of its target, threading the comic and the unimaginably tragic together without letting the seams show—yanking the rug out from under you, I guess I mean, when it’s time to show you the floor—that’s something bigger.

Here, the narrator, Henry Shackleford, a kid, is an invented character surrounded by historical personages: John Brown, his family, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass. John Brown frees Henry by kidnapping him, mistaking him for a girl in the process; Henry declines to correct him or his men about this, and lives as a girl for the rest of the book. That Henry is more narrative device than character gets a little too clear during his years working in a brothel (he manages to fool everybody, and works in the saloon rather than in the beds upstairs) but McBride uses Henry to bring deeply moving stories of struggle and survival—slaves teaching one another to read in secret, the movements of the underground railroad—to light. Henry’s insight into the problem of would-be white liberators who don’t listen to the people they ostensibly want to help is delivered with such wit that you want to hand the book to your friends. Here, read this: It says something really clearly right under your nose.

I’m giving The Good Lord Bird the nod between these two because of how effortlessly it glides between its comic clothing and its sober, resonant heart. It almost never shows its hand; it lets the story do the work. I loved A Tale for the Time Being, and I have to say that Ozeki’s narrators seem more substantial to me than Henry Shackleford does—Henry, as I say, is there to tell you about what he saw. He gets out of a lot of scrapes that are unbelievable, but others don’t. Henry’s a way to get a look at the bigger canvas. But the stories he tells you! The people you meet!

TODAY’S WINNER: The Good Lord Bird

http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/201...

[Anne]

This decision breaks my heart. I loved A Tale for the Time Being and couldn't even finish The Good Lord Bird. I did love the judge's comments about both books so his decision makes sense to me and I can tell he loved ATftTB also. Color me a little bit sad today.

[Barbara]

So sad to see A Tale for a Time Being go.

While I don't agree with the final decision, I absolutely agree with Darnielle's analysis. I loved the characters in both books; the information I learned from both; the comic relief of Good Lord Bird and the complexity of the dual plot lines in Tale. However, when I weighed the merits, the scale was heavier for the Time Being.

At least my favorite lost to a book I respected.

[Juniper]

aww. sorry, anne!! i have not yet read 'a tale for the time being', and it's the one i am most disappointed about not getting to before the tournament. i loved (so much) 'good lord bird', so i am pleased it won today's match. but, i feel like i would still be happy had the decision gone the other way.

[Anne]

I don't read comedy well (so it's my own shortcoming) and while some call The Good Lord Bird a comedy and some don't, it just didn't resonate with me. It is about such serious issues that I find it really hard to read about them when delivered in this tone. I'd really love to hear from any of the readers who might be in the Harper's Ferry area. If you are out there, what did you think?

[Susan]

I enjoyed A Tale for the Time Being but couldn't get past Part 1 of The Good Lord Bird. I didn't like the writing style and felt too uncomfortable reading a comic novel about slavery. Unlike some of the other books I didn't get around to, the judgments on GLB haven't made me want to go back to it either (but maybe that's because I actually did read some of it).

I am sad to see A Tale for the Time Being go, but I was nervous it would replace Life After Life (my fave in the ToB and my fave novel of 2013) as a zombie. Only one more day to see if LaL can carry through. I don't have much hope that The Goldfinch will go away, though I would love it to.

[Juniper]

humour is a very tricky thing in literature, and it doesn't always translate well to readers!! but i wouldn't say it's a shortcoming, anne.

some people listened to GLB on audio - i wonder if that made the humour better?

in 'the good lord bird', i didn't find the comic moments took away from or diminished the seriousness of the broader subject matter. i never once felt that mcbride was making light of anything. i appreciated the moments of levity and i suppose they did help highlight absurdity too. it was a tricky thing mcbride took on, in choosing to write the story the way he did. for me, the book totally worked. but i can see how it won't for many readers.

[Anne]

Great points, Jennifer. I did listen to about half of GLB. I didn't love the reader so that added to my issues with it.

I didn't actually feel McBride was trying to make light, it was just difficult for me to read about such serious issues in that context. Sorry, it's really hard to express what for me was sort of a visceral reaction.

[Ellen]

I didn't have much of a dog in this race -- I liked A Tale for the Time Being better, but had some reservations about it, particularly some of the false notes in Nao's voice -- there was a coy cutesiness to it that rang very faux to me. I found Good Lord Bird hard to follow, hard to like, didn't see the humor in it, and was totally befuddled by the whole conceit of Onion dressing in women's clothing. I still don't get it.

But this is the first chance I've had to comment on The Goldfinch vs. People in the Trees. These were my two favorite books of the group, with People in the Trees my clear number one. I just thought it was TOO out of the box, and TOO disturbing, and would never make it past the first round -- so for it to have vanquished not one but TWO of the biggest hard-hitters in the ToB makes me ... well, proud, like as if it was my own child (I SAID I was way too invested in this).
I really liked the Goldfinch -- but it was definitely flawed, and a little overblown, and the Russian mob stuff was simply tiresome and hackneyed. But I liked it way better than The Son so now I have some hopes that People in the Trees ... might? just? edge out The Son, but if not, The Goldfinch -- or even Life After Life, which was probably my third favorite, or tied with How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asian -- might win over The Good Lord Bird. I'll be sitting on the edge of my seat until tomorrow. Vive The People in the Trees!
P.S. Anyone going to the Rooster party tonight? I thought about it -- but I just can't. Too tired; too much going on.

[Ed]

Adding to the chorus of those sad to see 'Tale for the Time Being' go: my favorite book of last year (regardless of ToB) and my zombie pick (thought it had a chance). But quite happy to see that so many others (incl ToB judges) had the same affection for this book.

But 'Good Lord Bird' was my surprise "like" of the tourney, so not too terribly heartbroken ... ToB has taught me over the years to not get too too too invested in the outcome (ha!).

That said, at this point my dream finale would be 'Life After Life' vs. 'Good Lord Bird' ('People in the Trees' is the only current alive book I did not get to).

[Ellen]

Oh, Ed -- read The People in the Trees. You may love it or you may hate it (and you may have to power through the 100-pp mark, which sadly it looks like John Warner never managed to do), but you'll never forget it.

[Ed]

HI Ellen! I may still get back to it! 'Trees' was definitely my push/pull, yes/no, read it/don't read it book of the tournament. At the moment, experiencing my usual ToB fatigue (seem to hit the wall at 10-13 ToB books), so going to knock out some other books -- but it is still nagging at me! :-)

[Jan]

Jennifer wrote: "humour is a very tricky thing in literature, and it doesn't always translate well to readers!! but i wouldn't say it's a shortcoming, anne.

some people listened to GLB on audio - i wonder if that ..."

The humor comes through loud and clear on the audio, which deepens the tragic/horrible aspects when you get to them. Any book that's written in the vernacular or uses the conventions of oral tradition can be greatly enhanced by an effective narrator. Michael Boatman, who reads GLB, is one of the best. I highly recommend the audio version.

[Jan]

Ed wrote: "HI Ellen! I may still get back to it! 'Trees' was definitely my push/pull, yes/no, read it/don't read it book of the tournament. At the moment, experiencing my usual ToB fatigue (seem to hit the w..."

I second Ellen's response. Take a break for now, but People is well worth the read when you're ready for it. (And TOB fatigue: yes! This is the first year I read all the books before the tournament started, and I was *craving* a good mystery when I finished.

[Ellen]

Heh. I finished The Goldfinch in the very nick of time -- Thursday night the 13th (my first year, too, Jan, of reading all the ones I intended to read in time) -- and immediately sat down the next day with a Simon Serailler mystery by Susan Hill, and followed it with another. Now I'm reading Lynn Shepherd's second literary Victorian mystery, A Fatal Likeness...

Ed, make sure to let Jan and me know if you do read it.

[Katie]

Must be in the water I jumped in to Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie series when I was tourny'd out. I hadn't ever read it and it came up in some Life After Life comments and my library e-loans had them all on hand so voila a nice break after so much mind bending in different literary directions :)

[Anna]

Ha! I went for the "mystery" genre as well after finishing ToBX reading. Except I went back (way back) to Sherlock. Nice easy reading with a little intrigue.

[Juniper]

today's match-up:


* The Son

vs.

* The People in the Trees

judge: Lizzie Skurnick talks about books for All Things Considered, The New Republic, Bookforum, and many other places. She is the author of Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, and the editor-in-chief of Lizzie Skurnick Books, an imprint reissuing YA classics. A collection based on her “That Should Be a Word” column for the New York Times Magazine is forthcoming in 2014. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I reviewed Elizabeth Gilbert’s book.”

http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/201...

Lizzie Skurnick: If the test of a book’s worth is how many other books it makes you order, then The Son wins this round, hands down. Before I had even finished Meyer’s epic, I had two-day’d The Captured: A True Story of Abduction by Indians on the Texas Frontier, Captured by the Indians: 15 Firsthand Accounts, 1750-1870, and the YA level Indian Captive by Lois Lenski, which I read alongside The Son for good measure.

The white captive who becomes part of the Indian tribe is so gloriously loaded a cliché it’s almost exhilarating to watch an author take it on. Once a Comanche tells our narrator his shooting is for dogshit, however, I felt myself in capable hands.

Eli McCullough, born in 1849, son of a Scotsman and Castilian, is taken prisoner by a Comanche band along with his brother, whom they shortly slaughter. (They have already raped, killed, and dismembered his mother and sister back at the house.) The book then becomes a family saga, in which Eli’s son, granddaughter, and what I can only refer to as the three stages of Eli—pre-, during, and post-captivity—tell the story of Texas and their hand in its creation. (Or destruction, depending on who’s telling.)

This skeletal description seems to suggest so many awful things this book could be that I hasten to assure you it is none. Meyer is equally adept at rendering a girl’s first period and a man walking through the house of the neighbors he’s helped massacre. (The sole survivor of which he will later impregnate, but who’s counting.) In fact, the book is so superb, it seems to render such considerations beside the point—I felt embarrassed to be looking for Tontos in a book whose characters are so fully-fleshed, so already a general inquiry into the topic of, for lack of a better term, “otherness.”

True, when Eli’s granddaughter Jeanne Anne, herself elderly and dying, thinks, “The Visigoths had destroyed the Romans, and had themselves been destroyed by the Muslims. Who were destroyed by the Spanish and the Portuguese. You did not need Hitler to see that it was not a pleasant story. And yet here she was. Breathing…” it might occur to you that the numerous people throughout the narrative who are not breathing because they were raped, scalped, hacked to death, shot, drowned, and/or disappeared might be less even-keeled.

But Meyer’s characters lead the book in a different direction entirely—not how you should think about victor and victim, but of the wholesale attenuation of our laggard humankind. Regarding her own glassy-eyed, seated grandkids, the last of the McCullough line, Jeanne despairs. “In Australia, frozen into rock, there were the footprints of three people crossing a mudflat. At twenty-seven miles per hour—all three moving as fast as the fastest man on earth today. They were speeding up when the tracks ended.” I wept at this, possibly. The human race is literal—and we’re losing it.

Improbably, Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees shares a great deal with The Son: tribes being overrun by Westerners bearing trinkets; proper names bisected by apostrophes and strikethroughs; spears; nudity; rituals; wild hogs; children transplanted from native populations; dirt; huts; money. (It ends with Micronesia and Spam.) We are stuck with the slightly unpleasant company of mediocre med student Abraham Norton Perina, known as Norton, shunted off to accompany a sociologist to a remote jungle to find out if a tribe of people actually eat a turtle whose flesh grants eternal life.

The book begins with a newspaper clipping of Norton’s arrest and conviction for sexual assault of many of the children that he, post-Nobel, adopted from the island; the story itself is a letter to his former research assistant from jail. (The assistant adds lengthy footnotes to the narrative, referring to other studies on Norton’s work and clarifying information, which is helpful. If we had only him to hear from, we would think the island was made up only of tiny monkeys, a fruit pulsing with worms, and one devastating ritual I will not go into here.)

Yanagihara does not overload us with science; it is Norton’s observation of his own emotions that is on display. “It is amazing,” he says of the man he desires, “how sloppy and invasive nonscientists are in a lab; to them, the entire space is like a boutique, and our instruments are mere stuff to be handled and fondled and played with like gadgetry.” You can luxuriate in pretty much any Yanigahara sentence—where Meyer’s prose is lean and lyric, hers is overstuffed like a jungle itself, wild with rare creatures and splashes of color. At times, it’s almost prurient: in a pages-long section on a lab filled with such descriptions, a mouse’s spleen “a tiny, savory-looking thing, meatily brown and the size of a slender watermelon seed.”

But the lack of any of the study’s specifics, which Norton cops to, can be annoying for, say, an Asimov fan, who likes to see a Neanderthal go back in time with a teacher who describes his progress step by step. Norton is not only—crashingly, we learn—unreliable, but a narrator often bored with his surroundings, reporting his meeting with a Micronesian king is “banal.”

I would have loved for Yanagihara to not only have the fictional editor note more illuminating and rigorous books, but give us entire sections of them as relief from Norton’s suffocating company, an act of which, in the meta-textual world of the book, she is clearly capable.

If may be odd to criticize a work by way of saying you’d like 90 pages more, but that is my criticism of The Son. For all that I envy it and will reread it immediately—I practically already have—we don’t quite get to see how the adolescent, hickish Eli, who timorously scalps his first kill with the Comanches, becomes the tyrannical Colonel, a despot who haunts his entire family, a far shorter span than Meyer covers flawlessly down generations of McCulloughs.

Yanagihara, on the other hand, has done exactly the opposite: taken 368 pages to explain one brief, terrible moment, with touching bits of awful every hundred pages. (My favorite: that teeny monkey given a moment’s description that I am devastated to learn is food a few lines down.) But revolving a book around one moment is the work of mysteries, not literary fiction—you like it to click into place and, Dickens-like, reveal the machine of the entire plot. Here, we are left charting how awful, exactly, a person can be. Boom, here it is. Pretty awful.

On the other hand, I had no idea I could ever get through a narrative with as many rapes and scalping as The Son; I didn’t know there could be one with this many in which it was not gratuitous. It’s impressive how Meyer makes the inhumane human, to say nothing of lyric, and funny, and illuminating. But I might be more impressed with how Yanagihara, in one sentence, has creeped me out for weeks. It was a singularly unpleasant experience, but it was weird, new, and powerful. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything like it, and I’m not sure if I ever want to see anything like it again.

TODAY’S WINNER: The People in the Trees

http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/201...

[Anne]

Well, this is a bit of a surprise. I almost feel like I have to duck when I say I liked The People in the Trees. It is a hard book to read and felt really long in the middle but it did leave a lasting impression. I concur with the judge's wrap-up: "It was a singularly unpleasant experience, but it was weird, new and powerful."

[Juniper]

i just started reading TPitT last night...it's okay for me so far...but i am not as engaged or sucked in as i have been with other books.

the last line of the decision: "...and I’m not sure if I ever want to see anything like it again." cracked me up - skurnick may not want to see anything like it again...so let's pass it down the line for the next judge! :)

[Sherri]

Am I the only one who read Lizzie's commentary and thought for sure she was about to choose The Son?

My to-read list got longer while I read The Son too. I added "Giant" by Edna Ferber. This is the book Jeannie talks about being interviewed for. I'm also going to read Meyer's "American Rust".

[Juniper]

yeah -- i thought she was going that way too, sherri!

[jess]

I also added Giant by Edna Ferber. I was positive Lizzie was going to choose The Son, based both on my previous Lizzie research and the first 90% of her judgement. Sigh.

[Ellen]

She totally, totally psyched me out; I was ruefully certain throughout her analysis that The Son was her pick. So, once again, I let out a gasp and tears came to my eyes when I read the decision. I can't believe that this book, which blew me away but which I can't imagine recommending to anyone, and which I thought would never even make it out of the starting gate, given its subject matter, has now taken out THREE of the heaviest heavy hitters. I can't believe it. And now it has to go back against Life After Life -- and I can't possibly predict what's going to happen.

Have I told anyone lately how much I love the Tournament of Books?????

Jennifer -- I can't suggest how to read The People in the Trees. I don't think I fell into obsession with it until the last 50-100 pp. I understand why John Warner keeps giving up; it probably could have used some editing in the middle, but I also think it might need every page of its set-up.

I just can't believe it's made it this far. I'm verklempt.

[Juniper]

today's match-up:


The Goldfinch

vs.

The Good Lord Bird

judge: Jane Hu is a writer, grad student, and Canadian. She has published at The Awl, Slate, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New Republic. Currently, she lives in Montreal. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “None.”

http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/201...

Jane Hu: Disclosure: It’s my opinion that there is no way to hold a non-subjective book competition. This is why literary awards are fraught with political questions of taste, race, class, and gender. Spoiler alert. And so I love how the Tournament of Books introduces a different judge for each book pairing as this seemingly both mitigates and exacerbates the personal vagaries of each individual reader. Having a range of judges gives an appearance of fairness, but it is also a giant FU to the very idea that these competitions could be anything but. If none of this really means anything, however, why not just pack up our books now and go home, where we can read in private and arrive at our own conclusions in our own time?

Hahaha, I’m joking, welcome to the Zombie Round!!!!

Ever since I started following the ToB, I’ve loved the Zombie Round—it goes against everything I’ve just said. A Zombie Round invites the fantasy that the judges’ decisions here do matter, that it is possible to have misjudged a book. The Zombie introduces doubt among the living, and allows us not only to revisit, but to potentially even change, the past. The Zombie Round is hope, which is why I, irrespective of my opening paragraph, take it seriously.

(How does one kill a zombie? Shoot it in its head, not its heart.)

For this match, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch has returned from the dead. I know, I know. The hugely anticipated, once-in-a-decade, galley-brag-ful Goldfinch is the underdog here. Tartt’s novel lost to Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees last week, but it’s baaaaack. Appropriately so too, for Tartt’s novel takes the possibility of resurrection and restoration as its theme. The novel is meta as all get-out, and its meta-ness layers itself around the idea of returning, again and again, to that crucial moment where things might have happened differently. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Theodore Decker, protagonist and narrator of The Goldfinch, loses his beloved mother in the first chapter. A bomb goes off just when they are separated in different rooms of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Boom—the space of cultural preservation is suddenly littered with messy death. When Theo emerges from the wreckage, he leaves the museum not with his mother, but with a 17th-century eponymous painting by Carel Fabritius that becomes metonymic not just of the loss of his mother, but also of all her imaged futures. That is, the painting becomes a huge motherfucking deal to Theo.

As Tartt’s novel goes on to follow the next decade and so of Theo’s turbulent life—shuffled from caretaker to caretaker—Fabritius’s painting becomes the one consistent object of what is a rather unpredictable world. (It also functions as a centerpiece for Tartt’s rather unpredictable narrative.) Theo carries the painting with him throughout his travels, clinging to it almost desperately, as though it were a talisman or perhaps a portkey back to when his mother (who loved the painting) still lived. Even as it dawns on Theo that he has in fact committed an egregious act of art theft, what can he do but to continue to keep it close? The novel doesn’t criminalize Theo’s decision to keep The Goldfinch either. Even as Theo’s illegitimate possession of the painting comes to threaten his very life, we must also remember that the painting has, for so long, sustained Theo’s (rather tenuous) will to live.

Theo’s modes of survival don’t always make sense, and part of the pleasure of reading The Goldfinch might be our vicarious experience of what amounts to a lot of violent self-destructive behavior counterbalanced with moments of reparative tenderness and deep musings. Theo is another one of Tartt’s notorious masculine protagonists, and he contains multitudes. A specimen of profoundly reticent and repressed male sorrow, Theo’s coping methods are by no means original: sex, booze, and an array of hard drugs. Meanwhile, Tartt’s female characters leave less to be desired. Theo’s two main love interests, Pippa and Kitsy, never really emerge as more than projections or idealizations. While this is partly the point (further evidence of Theo’s self-absorption), even Kitsy’s acknowledged performance of flightiness comes pretty close to caricature. Inversely, Theo’s exploration of his own interiority, while not entirely not un-self-aware, gets recuperated as the complex core of the novel.

The Goldfinch has been compared to other bulky orphan narratives—Charles Dickens’s and Harry Potter—but one important distinguishing point about The Goldfinch is that it isn’t one of present narration or even, I’d argue, forward propulsion. In between the pages of what is an incredibly jaunty page-turner is a novel that is fundamentally conservative in structure and subject matter. Theo never gets far from the cliques of New York art dealers and tastemakers, which is partly overdetermined from the start: Theo’s mother, who used to be an art student, had really good taste. Upon her death, Theo embarks on a journey that is ultimately an attempt to get close to everything she loved. It is Are You My Mother? for grown-ups.

Insofar as The Goldfinch is Dickensian (and for what it’s worth, I don’t really think it is all that much), it might lie in Tartt’s unabashed faith in melodrama. I love that The Goldfinch does not flinch from sentimentality; nor does it seem to suggest that the label is, in 2013, even necessarily bad. Respect. Tartt’s gendering of melodrama and pathos, however, is where the resemblances start to come apart. Some of Dickens’s most moving characters weren’t naughty boys, but orphaned girls.

James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird is as irreverent as Tartt is sincere. I’m not sure what the two books would do if they met on the street, but reading them alongside one another, it became quickly clear that they weren’t really speaking the same language. In a way, this makes it both easy and difficult to judge them. Aside from both referencing a bird in their title, both being orphan narratives, and both being retrospective narrations, there remain few congruences.

The Good Lord Bird is a historical novel that retells abolitionist John Brown’s attempt to raid Harper’s Ferry in 1859. (No spoilers here: The raid was a failure, people died, Brown was imprisoned, tried, and then hanged. But what came shortly afterward was the Civil War!) John Brown might be the ostensible protagonist of The Good Lord Bird, but we encounter him through Henry Shackleford, a mixed-raced boy who Brown “rescues” after accidentally killing his father in a bar raid. As with historical novels, what often counts more than plot is character, and McBride has generated one of the most delightful narrative voices I’ve yet to encounter in young Henry. Brown quickly renames him “Little Onion” after Henry, in a moment of panic and confusion, eats what turns out to be Brown’s good-luck charm: a rotten onion. Emphatic that Onion is now his new good-luck charm, Brown insists on bringing him—that is, her, for Brown also mistakes Henry’s gender—along for the ride. Consequently, Henry Shackleford is in drag for most of The Good Lord Bird. Like much of McBride’s novel, this scene of misidentification and borderline appropriation (John Brown literally makes a young black boy his lucky charm??) is told with great humor and levity, but the underlying tragedy of the situation never feels far from all the effervescent surface of McBride’s playful language. Whereas Tartt lays out pathos in unshrinking generosity, the more melancholy moments of McBride’s novel appear between what is largely a rollicking picaresque. The Good Lord Bird is shot through with moments of startling clarity from Onion that are all the more devastating due to his quiet acceptance of the absurd world as such:

Some things in this world just ain’t meant to be, not in the times we want ‘em to, and the heart has to hold it in this world as a remembrance, a promise for the world that’s to come. There’s a prize at the end of all of it, but still, that’s a heavy load to bear.

In a way, McBride rejects grandiose language as a way to downplay rhetoric itself. And while the novel does not come down firmly on one side, there is a sense that its repudiation of rhetoric is a way of acknowledging John Brown, whose integrity lies in the ability to say something and then actually act upon it. In The Good Lord Bird, our words matter. As Brown tells Onion in a moment that winks back at W.E.B. Du Bois: “Talk, talk, talk. That’s all they do. The Negro has heard talk for two hundred years.” When we meet Frederick Douglass, McBride takes pains to ridicule the “speeching parlor man.” In one particularly sacrilegious scene, we see a boozed-up Douglass turn from putting the moves on Onion to talk talk talk:

The more stupefied he got, the more he forgot about the hanky-panky he had in mind and instead germinated on what he knowed—orating. First he orated on the plight of the Negro. He just about wore the Negro out. When he was done orating on them, he orated about the fowl, the fishes, the poultry, the white man, the red man, the aunties, uncles, cousins, the second cousins, his cousin Clementine, the bees, the flies, and by the time he worked down to the ants, the butterflies, and the crickets, he was stone-cold, sloppy, clouded-up, sweet-blind drunk, whereas yours truly was simply buzzing.

Indeed, The Good Lord Bird might be the first and last time we see Douglass represented primarily as a lecherous pedophile who gets black-out drunk.

Despite such sacrilegious treatment of its historical characters, The Good Lord Bird is nonetheless fervently indebted to what we might think of its literary past. McBride’s acknowledgment of the narratives underpinning his contemporary (and novelistic!) retelling of John Brown’s legacy is manifested more often through form rather than plot. Even as McBride pokes fun at Douglass’s speeches, many of Onion’s thoughts nod to an oratory, list-like rhetoric. Irving Washington’s and Herman Melville’s “found document” introductions reappear in the preface of The Good Lord Bird. And even as the novel maintains a generally light and satirical register, McBride’s chapter endings are almost always framed as moments of retrospective observation: “The Old Man never saw him again” or “You get stretched out wrong to ruination, and that would cost me down the road.” (Huck Finn’s closing “I can’t stand it. I been there before,” anyone?) Above all, McBride’s style mashes the high with the low, the comedic with the sentimental. Comedy in The Good Lord Bird often emerges from failed communication, but we know well by now that this is often the same cause of regrettable tragedy. At one point, Onion goes to visit the lower-ranked slaves outside in the “slave pen.” One of them approaches him and says, “Every nigger got the same job. Their job is to tell a story the white man likes. What’s your story?” To which Onion responds, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Of course, McBride’s novel is Onion’s story. I think you’ll like it.

I’m shooting the Zombie in the head. I went for the heart first, but I just couldn’t find it.

TODAY’S WINNER: The Good Lord Bird

http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/201...

[Deborah]

Given that the TOBX finals are staring us in the face, I was wondering what to do until next year, when I saw this comment posted after today's decision:

Also, the time of all good things must come to an end, sob, and next week is cold turkey week for too many of us. If anyone needs a little literary methadone in his or her life, then try this ToB-inspired discussion over at the Three Percent website: the 17 book long list of the Best Translated Fiction Award has been announced, and every day a new short essay appears on the site by a different commentator, saying why a particular book should win the award.

Anybody interested in setting up a Goodreads group to follow this award?

[Juniper]

today's match-up:


Life After Life

vs.

The People in the Trees

judge: Jeff Martin’s books include The Customer Is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles and The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books. He has written for GOOD, The Millions, Salon, Poets & Writers, and Publishers Weekly. Jeff is the founder and executive director of the literary organization Booksmart Tulsa in his hometown of Tulsa, Okla. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I’ve done a couple of events with Elizabeth Gilbert over the years.”

http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/201...

Jeff Martin: I’m sure you’re dying to know. What’s the best part about being a judge in an enterprise such as the ToB? The element of surprise. No contest. It’s hard to stay as eclectic as one wants or perhaps intends to be. I strive for diversity of all kinds on my real and virtual bookshelves, but it’s all too easy to follow the narrow paths of interest laid out by previous favorites and authors of comfort. Not to mention those pesky “You might also like this” algorithms. All of this is to say that Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life completely blindsided me. Of course I knew of Atkinson’s work, but until I cracked the spine on this ambitious tome, I hadn’t read her. In the wake of a truly significant work of art, and Life After Life certainly qualifies as such, my mind becomes obsessed, for lack of a better word, with figuring out why I personally found said work so impactful.

Being the youngest of three boys, there’s something to be said for birth-order theories. There’s also something interesting about the order in which we read. For no obvious reason, I read Kate Atkinson’s book before picking up Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees. I’m not sure why. They arrived together. I had both sitting on my nightstand. Either way, the power and shock to the system that Life After Life provided left a lingering impact that threatened to overshadow The People in the Trees. Unfair or not, it’s the truth. Order matters.

Based on a real-life story of a Nobel Prize-winning doctor’s dual role as helper of humanity and predator of the weakest among us, it’s got all of the pieces that should add up to an “important” work of fiction. Yanagihara’s boldness of style (footnotes and literary devices abound) reminded me of Dave Eggers’s more recent novels. There’s no doubt that we’re dealing with an immensely talented writer and serious themes of global importance. Did I mention that this is her debut novel? The level of confidence here is off the charts. If David Foster Wallace and Barbara Kingsolver had produced a child with equal literary ambition, Yanagihara might bear some resemblance. But I struggled at times getting past the shiny exterior—I feel this way about Wes Anderson’s films from time to time. And the first-person, unreliable narrator thing going on here leaves me more disinterested than intrigued: “…despite my obvious interest in this narrative, this is not my story. For one, I am a quiet man. For another, I am not interested in telling my story anyway—after all, there are altogether too many stories nowadays.” Yanagihara has the goods. No doubt about it. And I will look for future work based on the high points here.

I’ll be candid. When I opened the package that contained Life After Life, I was hoping for something else—anything, really. But my skepticism faded quickly with the introduction of Ursula Todd. She is born. She dies. Rinse and repeat. And repeat. And repeat. This novel, crafted with a watchmaker’s precision, could have become the literary Groundhog Day. Then again, I felt from the first two pages that we might be entering some sort of noir/femme fatale territory:

“A fug of tobacco smoke and damp clammy air hit her as she entered the cafe.”

“The blonde lit a cigarette, making a phallic performance out of it.”

“Around the table guns were jerked from holsters and pointed at her. One breath. One shot.”

These words wouldn’t feel out of place in a work by Chandler, Cain, or Hammett. And given Atkinson’s history with mystery, I assumed the narrative would stay in this territory. It doesn’t.

There are many lines and passages repeated to great effect. Several times within the 500-plus pages, I had that eerie sense of déjà vu. Such a unique sensation. Had I already read this? Why does this seem so familiar? And with that use of language and attention to detail, Atkinson gives us, the readers, that greatest of gifts: we feel what Ursula feels. Only in tiny flickers, but the recognition of feeling blurs the line between reading it and living it. The book is so full of surprises, I was immediately searching for friends and family to discuss it with. It’s a hard book to explain, and more to the point, why would you want to? But “trust me” and “see for yourself” aren’t always the most convincing arguments for diving in. Maybe Hunter S. Thompson said it best: “Buy the ticket. Take the ride.”

It’s been reported that The People in the Trees was a decade in the making, so it may be a while before I have a chance to see what’s next from Yanagihara and reassess. I do know for certain, though, that 10 years from now, I will have revisited Life After Life numerous times: sometimes on the page, but more often than that, in my head.

TODAY’S WINNER: Life After Life

http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/201...

[Juniper]

THE FINAL!!!


Life After Life

vs.

The Good Lord Bird

All Judges.

Héctor Tobar: So it’s down to two, unorthodox historical novels. Watching the same character die repeatedly in Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life offered many pleasures. But after seeing “darkness fall” over Ursula repeatedly, and her subsequent resurrections, it felt like a book about the power of the writer as much as anything else. James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird took many satirical liberties and besmirched the name of Frederick Douglass, but the story of a slave boy in drag joining John Brown’s abolitionist army was more energetic, pointed, and rooted in historical truths, in this writer’s opinion.

The Good Lord Bird - Life After Life
1 - 0

Greg Walklin: Upon advancing The Good Lord Bird, I hoped that it would be read and judged again and again. I am surprised (pleasantly) to get my wish. Fortunately—for my sanity—this decision required none of my quarterfinals agony. Built on a brilliant idea, Life After Life’s structure is supremely inventive, and flashes are exquisite. But it’s threadbare. Its characters feel like plot devices, and the story’s intentional repetitions just end up demonstrating a much too arbitrary plot: It gave me déjà vu, in other words, for all the wrong reasons. It can’t pluck a feather from The Good Lord Bird.

The Good Lord Bird - Life After Life
2 - 0

Jane Hu: There is a kind of voracious reading that happens between the ages of seven and 17 that I thought was reserved only for, well, children. Sometimes I wonder if all my reading since has been a secret attempt to get close to that experience of sustained absorption. To have a book become your entire world so effortlessly is a precious ability that rarely occurs during the exhaustion and distraction of adulthood. SOB. I was the last judge to carry The Good Lord Bird to this championship round, and I stand by my assertion that it is a tremendous novel, but Life After Life is my “Single Ladies.” It’s one of the best self-obsessively formal novels of all time. How did Atkinson manage to craft a story so simultaneously cognitive and visceral (there’s a parenthetical that made me burst into tears)? Atkinson overrides any jaded, ironic, post-post-whatever take on the world: Just when you think, “Been there, done that,” Life After Life surprises you with the possibility (nay, hope!) that, just maybe, you haven’t.

The Good Lord Bird - Life After Life
2 - 1

Geraldine Brooks: I had my say on Atkinson in the playoff round, so I will merely summarize here: I liked the middle bit.

John Brown, the great dark Rorschach blot of the American conscience, seemed an unlikely, maybe even un-PC vehicle for humor. But McBride pulls it off. His effervescent young narrator is pitch-perfect and wholly original. There are pitfalls to McBride’s irreverent approach—he’s sacrificed much of the tension of Brown’s drama, as potently deployed by Russell Banks in Cloudsplitter and (ahem) Tony Horwitz in Midnight Rising. Even with that caveat, my choice: the voice. Bird gets Rooster.

The Good Lord Bird - Life After Life
3 - 1

John Freeman: For years we have waited for a response to William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. So long, in fact, that we forgot we were waiting. The Good Lord Bird sings like a bird set free, with a voice that ought to join Huck Finn, the narrators of Toni Morrison’s Jazz, and Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao as a voice which is here to tell us who we are in music so lovely we almost forget it was born in terrible pain. It’s an alarmingly beautiful book.

The Good Lord Bird - Life After Life
4 - 1

Rachel Fershleiser: The Good Lord Bird is a hell of an achievement—a witty, rollicking American adventure about our despicable, dead-serious history. But in Life After Life, I got my book about female inner worlds. These characters face rape, abortion, abusive marriages, motherhood—all the inescapable strictures of a woman’s existence even as she has a freedom beyond imagining. Amid the extraordinary premise, it’s the fundamentally ordinary that is so beautiful: love for a brother, sharing secrets with a friend, seizing or shirking opportunities. Ultimately the book is a serenity prayer—a hymn to what we cannot change, what we can, and how we learn the difference.

The Good Lord Bird - Life After Life
4 - 2

John Darnielle: I didn’t finish Life After Life. I didn’t finish it because I did not like it at all. I came to dread picking it up. I feel bad about this: You can tell from the blurbs on the jacket alone that this is a book that has enriched people’s lives. They love it. I didn’t.

When I don’t dig something, I try to refrain from blaming the object of my scrutiny. I just assume we have different interests. I don’t think of my taste as some yardstick of excellence more reliable than anybody else’s, or consider it exemplary. I can see how a person might really enjoy the recurring-and-building structure of Life After Life; I can imagine someone growing more and more invested in Ursula, whose first death occurs right after her birth and whose final death will involve an attempt on Hitler’s life. I can see how a person might regard ongoing variations on the phrase “darkness fell” in the recurring death scenes as close-up magic: deft, masterful shifts of authorial focus. I’m not that person.

The Good Lord Bird I’ve already talked about: I found it wholly engaging from beginning to end. It gets the nod from me because it was the one I liked.

The Good Lord Bird - Life After Life
5 - 2

John McElwee: What a rich, thrilling, frustrating book The Good Lord Bird is, bursting with hokum and history and terror. It made me realize my middle-school education might have been uncomfortably war-of-northern-aggression-slanted. But there are blind spots: This story about a boy in a dress hardly touches gender. It’s safe in the brilliant glare of its voice. Life After Life is oversweet and mannered, but it’s sure far-reaching—a work of multiplicity, potentiality. Think Woolf’s Orlando, or “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody).” I hate to blame a book for being narrow on one of humanity’s most egregious failings, but I’m going with excess over dearth.

The Good Lord Bird - Life After Life
5 - 3

John Green: It pains me to pick against the excellent Life After Life again, but I feel I must. It may be that as an American I am biased toward American stories, but The Good Lord Bird is just so brilliant. It had everything I want in a novel and left me feeling both transported and transformed—the last book I remember loving so thoroughly was The Orphan Master’s Son, winner of the 2013 Rooster.

The Good Lord Bird - Life After Life
6 - 3

Lydia Kiesling: Anything that hints at a Mitford lineage is catnip to me, and I raced through Life After Life with great enthusiasm. But while I spent my quarterfinal judgment dithering about whether it is OK to favor a book just because it is more in keeping with one’s taste, I am compelled here not to pick the book that I liked more. The earth didn’t move when I read The Good Lord Bird, but its execution is masterly and airtight, to the extent that Atkinson’s novel seems a bit…baggy by comparison. I hereby exercise my judgely right to move the goalposts.

The Good Lord Bird - Life After Life
7 - 3

Mat Johnson: I don’t like books that make you restart the narrative repeatedly; fuck a prologue. Life After Life had me restarting the entire world throughout its many pages, but I loved it for that because it made me care about the characters, the world, and the many pathways along which all lives can meander. The Good Lord Bird knows exactly who its readers are, and gives them exactly what they want. It has some truly funny scenes, as well. But between the two, Life After Life was the one I hated to put down and kept finding myself picking up.

The Good Lord Bird - Life After Life
7 - 4

Roxane Gay: I admired the ambition of both Life After Life and The Good Lord Bird. In Life After Life, I loved the delicacy and precision of language and the overall idea but at times, the story flagged and I wanted something more satisfying from the novel than I received. Of The Good Lord Bird, I initially thought, “Oh man, another slavery book.” I was also perturbed by how too often, McBride seemed terribly amused with his own humor to the detriment of the story he was telling. That said, The Good Lord Bird is so imaginative and passionate. The prose is vivid and full of energy. I loved Henry’s story and his wit and ferocious capacity for survival, and that made it easy for this book to win the 2014 Rooster.

The Good Lord Bird - Life After Life
8 - 4

Jami Attenberg: The heart is only capable of so much love. You’d think it would be full of endless admiration, but the world is much smaller than we realize, and our hearts act accordingly. Thus, I liked, but did not love, both of these books. Life After Life was formally inventive, witty, and believable, but ultimately felt overly long and repetitive. The Good Lord Bird entertained me and moved quickly, but its noisiness and razzle dazzle blocked my connection to its emotional stakes. I enjoyed Life After Life more—the puzzle of it, and the evolution of Ursula—and that is my pick.

The Good Lord Bird - Life After Life
8 - 5

Roger D. Hodge: Life After Life is elegant and clever, but my vote goes to The Good Lord Bird, which presents us with the central drama of American history, enacted in the tragicomedy of Captain John Brown, the Don Quixote of abolitionism. In 1859, Henry David Thoreau foresaw a day when Americans would finally be at liberty to weep over John Brown’s body, when we would be equal to his flawed example and able to take our revenge for the crimes of slavery. James McBride has written a brilliant answer to that challenge.

The Good Lord Bird - Life After Life
9- 5

Sarah Schulman: Applying death to the living and life to the dead is a common preoccupation. The narcissists are outraged at the thought of never having been born. The religious make do with fate. That Atkinson approaches this formally is intriguing. And yet, I never had the revelation that a structural experiment aims to provoke. Perhaps it was the overly familiar British middle-class crisis: abortion, anti-Semitism, singlehood, and even worse…marriage. While she finds some searing emotional moments that McBride lacks, ultimately I preferred his bumpy ride through unfamiliar terrain, which while shallow in places, was never neat.

The Good Lord Bird - Life After Life
10 - 5

[Juniper]

Lizzie Skurnick: Though I’m pretty sure this did not actually happen, if you told Kate Atkinson and James McBride, “Write a historical novel about a race-obsessed political figure who plunges his nation into a bloody war that will inexorably change their time and, indeed, ours, through the eyes of a girl, sort of, with guns” you might get Life After Life and The Good Lord Bird. The former, a relief of a historical novel, adores and eviscerates John Brown in equal measure on his bumbling, pivotal trek to Harper’s Ferry. (AND AHEM ATTENTION FLAP-COPY WRITER JOHN BROWN IS NOT ONE OF THE “MOST FORGOTTEN CHARACTERS IN AMERICAN HISTORY.”) Its chronicler, young, cross-dressed Onion is, improbably, one of the more illuminating narrators on slavery and abolition. (It does not hurt that he is unintentionally piss-yourself funny.) But Atkinson’s Ursula Todd is also titanic: She is psychic, dies repeatedly, and both lives and dies during the Blitz (SA-WOON) in Atkinson’s sneaky add-a-version text. (And yes, watching, as a recent first-time mother, a child die over and over in new horrible ways was a beautifully multifaceted kind of torture.) I loved both these books, their moods and mastery, and made no progress deciding between them as a critic. So I became my true self: a book-pusher. I would (and have) pressed the entirety of Atkinson on somebody, but The Good Lord Bird is the one I would press alone, saying “This. Read this one.”

The Good Lord Bird - Life After Life
11- 5

Jeff Martin: Honestly, I had this thing all but decided in my mind. I knew that no book could or would dislodge the hold that Life After Life had on me. When James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird showed up in the mail with its chest puffed out and a shiny National Book Award sticker almost yelling at me from the upper left corner of the cover, I was dubious. Man, was I wrong. The Good Lord Bird is better than I ever expected, and more powerful due to my low expectations. Beyond that, it’s the rare social statement novel that’s both “important” and endlessly entertaining.

That said, in the days after reading it, I didn’t feel the desire to read it again. In fact, all I wanted to do was start Life After Life again. And again. And again.

The Good Lord Bird - Life After Life
11 - 6



The winner of TOBX: THE GOOD LORD BIRD

[Anne]

Well the ToB is finished for another year. While I didn't care for The Good Lord Bird, as always I loved the judging and the commentary. Thanks for setting up this discussion thread. It is so much less intimidating than the ToB discussion.

[Katie]

Agree it wasn't my pick but I am surprisingly not disappointed. The judgements on the whole were great (I'm still a little bitter about Luminaries I was sad it lost and that was the one judgement that just fell totally flat for me, the judge and I just shared nothing in common it seems). I'm sad to see it end, on to trying to read the right 2014 books...and wondering if GLB might take the Pulitzer....

[Drew]

Ditto, Anne. I found TGLB soporific. It sounds like it would have been better as an audiobook. Because I've been swamped both at home and work, I've only been following the discussion here - I haven't even read most of the judgments! - but when I finish The People in the Trees and At Night We Walk in Circles, I'm going to go back and relive TOBX. I'm about 100 pages from the end of TPitT and I'm barely able to tear myself away from it. That Norton is a real piece of work!

[Juniper]

aw...i really loved 'the good lord bird'. it was my pick to win it all, so i am quite thrilled.

i am glad you find this space more comfortable, anne. i feel a bit intimidated by the comment space over on the website too. they all know each other so well, i sometimes feel like i am interrupting.

[Mina]

Thank You all for such great discussion and insight for the tournament this year. I completely enjoy all the commentary in this group. I only got through six of the books this year which is better than last year and the year before. TGLB is going on Spring Break with me.

[Jan]

Just want to add my thanks for the list of books (with links, no less!) and also for the comfortable commenting space here. People on the public TOB comment section also seem very friendly, but I'm impressed by how many seem to be professionals of some sort, whether writers, professors/teachers, reviewers, or agency people. This is my fourth or fifth TOB, and it really has gotten to be more fun and more all-consuming each year. And I read ALL the books this year before the tournament started. I think I want that on my gravestone! OK, moseying over to the 2015 Contenders group...see y'all there!