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Book Rate: July 4, 2006
A
digested book "review": cheap shots, glib commentary,
shameless advocacy of insidious ideology of social and economic
justice and idiosyncratic and totally arbitrary choices of books
that come our way via our gallant and steadfast UPS drivers and
other routes...
Maybe.
Posted: July 4, 2006
Note: The following entries come from Robert
Birnbaum and Matt
Borondy
Books covered this week include:
Everyman by Philip Roth
A Strange Commonplace
by Gilbert Sorrentino
The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip
by George Saunders, illustrated by Lane Smith
Simon Bolivar: A Life
by John Lynch
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
by Alison Bechdel
You Can't Get Much Closer Than This
by A. Z. Adkins Jr. and Andrew Z. Adkins III
To Cherish The Life of the World,
the selected letters of Margaret Mead
Tomorrow They Will Kiss
by Eduardo Santiago
Song for My Fathers: A New Orleans
Story in Black and White by Tom Sancton
A Wanderer in the Perfect City:
Selected Passion Pieces by Lawrence Weschler
Everyman
by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin, 192 pages)
This may be held to be a silly idea by some of the poetasters who
pollute public conversation with their disingenuous blather about
this or that book, but I am perfectly happy to give some writers
automatic entry to my "To Be Read" piles (some even receive veteran's
preference). Admittedly, it would be silliness to say that such
a list would be the same for everyone. Mine includes Elmore Leonard,
Amy Bloom, Charles
McCarry, Alan Furst, Jim
Harrison, Andrea
Barrett, and yes, Phillip Roth. One thing I have noted about
Roth's critical reception is that he seems to be plagued by reviewers
out to prove that they: 1) are as smart as him; and 2) can write
as well. Feh! Without any qualification I am willing to wager that
in every one of Roth's novels there is a gem—such as this
one from American Pastoral:
"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as
to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without
an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you
can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a
foot thick: you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes
instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take
them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to
say and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well
have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them:
you get them wrong while you're with them and then you get home
to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong
again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole
thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an
astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do
about this terribly significant business of other people, which
gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on a significance
that is ludicrous, so ill equipped are we all to envision one
another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to
go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers
do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then
proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing
than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day?
The fact remains that getting people right is not what living
is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting
them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration,
getting them wrong again. That's how we know we are alive: we're
wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or
wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you
can do that—well, lucky you."
In Everyman, which you should be forewarned is as dark
as a book can get having DEATH as its main character, Roth's nameless
protagonist observes:
"Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life,
and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious
folderol meaningless, childish, couldn't stand the complete unadultness—the
baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers.
No hocus pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven
for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms
decided by the bodies that lived and died before us. If he could
to be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself,
that was it—he'd come upon it early and intuitively and
however elemental, that was the whole of it. If he should every
write an autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male
Body…"
-Robert Birnbaum
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A
Strange Commonplace
by Gilbert Sorrentino (Coffee House Press, 160 pages)
Gilbert Sorrentino was born in Brooklyn in 1929 and died on May
18, 2006. Over the course of his life he wrote more than 30 books,
including Mulligan Stew and Aberration of Starlight.
He taught creative writing at Stanford University for many years,
and received, among many other awards and honors, two Guggenheim
Fellowships, a Lannan Literary Award, and the 2005 Lannan Lifetime
Achievement Award. Sorrentino's passing occasioned some bittersweet
conversation about his legacy.
In any case, it seems that the masterful Sorrentino joined the
ranks of underappreciated artists, though the Center for the Book
web site proclaims "he was a tireless re-inventor of literature,
and a champion of all the pleasures—and even pitfalls—that
are unique to fiction. The loss of his voice is staggering and irreparable."
His latest novel takes its title from a William Carlos William poem
and it ranges over mean city streets of the ‘50s to the "culturally
vacuous " present presented with Sorrentino's signature ribald humor.
R.I.P.
-Robert Birnbaum
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The
Very Persistent Gappers of Frip
by George
Saunders and illustrated by Lane Smith (McSweeney's, 84 pages)
Here's the McSweeney's synopsis of their republication (originally
published in 2000) of Gappers of Frip:
"Three families live in the seaside village of Frip—the
Romos, the Ronsens, and a little girl named Capable and her widowed
father. The townspeople of Frip make their living raising goats,
but they must fight off a daily invasion of gappers, bright orange,
many-eyed creatures that cover goats and stop them from giving
milk. When the gappers target Capable's goats, the Romos and the
Ronsens turn their backs on the gapper-ridden Capable. What will
Capable do about her gapper plague? An imaginative tale accented
with haunting illustrations, an adult story for children, a children's
story for adults, an ocean side fable for the irremediably landlocked,
a fish story for loaves, and a fable about the true meaning of
community."
-Robert Birnbaum
____________
Simon
Bolivar: A Life
by John Lynch (Yale University Press, 352 pages)
Simon Bolivar, The Great Liberator, a.k.a. "The George Washington
of Latin America," is a big deal in Latin America. He was an intellectual,
a revolutionary and a warrior who is credited with the liberation
of six countries. This is the first major English-language biography
of Bolivar in half a century. John Lynch concludes the key to his
greatness lies in his supreme willpower and a charisma that inspired
people to follow him. Here Bolivar declaims in 1819:
"We are not Europeans; we are not Indians; we are but a mixed
species of aborigines and Spaniards. Americans by birth and Europeans
by law, we find ourselves engaged in a dual conflict: we are disputing
with the natives for titles of ownership, and at the same time
we are struggling to maintain ourselves in the country that gave
us birth against the opposition of the invaders. Thus our position
is most extraordinary and complicated. But there is more. As our
role has always been strictly passive and political existence
nil, we find that our quest for liberty is now even more difficult
of accomplishment; for we, having been placed in a state lower
than slavery, had been robbed not only of our freedom but also
of the right to exercise an active domestic tyranny…We have
been ruled more by deceit than by force, and we have been degraded
more by vice than by superstition. Slavery is the daughter of
darkness: an ignorant people is a blind instrument of its own
destruction. Ambition and intrigue abuses the credulity and experience
of men lacking all political, economic, and civic knowledge; they
adopt pure illusion as reality; they take license for liberty,
treachery for patriotism, and vengeance for justice. If a people,
perverted by their training, succeed in achieving their liberty,
they will soon lose it, for it would be of no avail to endeavor
to explain to them that happiness consists in the practice of
virtue; that the rule of law is more powerful than the rule of
tyrants, because, as the laws are more inflexible, every one should
submit to their beneficent austerity; that proper morals, and
not force, are the bases of law; and that to practice justice
is to practice liberty."
Pretty powerful, yes?
-Robert Birnbaum
____________
Fun
Home: A Family Tragicomic
by Alison Bechdel (Houghton Mifflin, 232 pages)
Alison Bechdel, creator and perpetuator of long-running comic strip
Dykes to Watch Out For, has rendered her own life in this
so-called graphic novel and as one review asserts (hopefully this
won't scare you off), "As much as she isn't sure of what she's seeing,
Bechdel's great care in documenting the female coming-of-age experience
is radical, even groundbreaking." Comic strip devotee and editor
Chip
Kidd enthuses, "…Alison Bechdel's mesmerizing feat of
familial resurrection is a rare, prime example of why graphic novels
have taken over the conversation about American literature. The
details—visual and verbal, emotional and elusive—are
devastatingly captured by an artist in total control of her craft."
Or as Amy Bloom attests, "If David Sedaris could draw, and if Bleak
House had been a little funnier, you'd have Alison Bechdel's
Fun Home."
-Robert Birnbaum
____________
You
Can't Get Much Closer Than This
by A.Z. Adkins Jr. and Andrew Z. Adkins III (Casemate,
256 pages)
A.Z. Adkins, Jr., fought in the European Theater of World War II
in 1944-45 after graduating from The Citadel. In You Can't Get
Much Closer Than This: Combat With Company H, 317th Infantry Regiment,
80th Division, Adkins puts his war stories to paper in great
detail, with the help of his son Andrew Z. Adkins III (who, it should
be noted in the spirit of full disclosure, is my boss and is super
cool). This collection of writing was a main selection of the Military
Book Club and has done a great service to those who fought in the
war and their descendants--and, of course, we are all in a way their
descendants.
A taste:
"On the outskirts of town was a little hill. Bill
Butz and I went with Major Williams to the top of the hill for
a look-see. We had been there only a little while when we saw
six men, formed as skirmishers, coming toward us with their rifles
at their hips. Naturally we spread out and took cover. This would
have been a hell of a time for the Krauts to attack us as all
of our men were just moving into town. We looked through our glasses.
The men heading toward us were not wearing helmets. When they
came closer we saw their striped pants and shirts and knew they
were escapees from the concentration camp. When they got to us
we found out they were Russians. They told us what had happened."
More clips and photos from the 80th infantry division can be found
at 80thdivision.com.
-Matt Borondy
____________
To
Cherish the Life of the World: Selected Letters of Margaret Mead
edited by Margaret Caffrey and Patricia Francis (Basic
Books, 448 pages)
The website of the Institute
for Intercultural Studies, an ethnographic organization founded
by Margaret Mead in 1944, puts it like this: "When Margaret
Mead died in 1978, she was the most famous anthropologist in the
world. Indeed, it was through her work that many people learned
about anthropology and its holistic vision of the human species."
Margaret Mead's personal and professional letters have been collected
for the first time in To Cherish the Life of the World,
a brand-new (released yesterday) book edited by Margaret Caffrey
and Patricia Francis that includes a foreword by Mead's daughter,
Mary Catherine Bateson.
Reading about Margaret Mead's famous book Coming of Age in
Samoa on Wikipedia,
you can learn such facts as:
"Mead herself described the goal of her research: 'I have
tried to answer the question which sent me to Samoa: Are the disturbances
which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself
or to the civilization? Under different conditions does adolescence
present a different picture?' She found that it did. (See pp.
6-7, American Museum of Natural History edition of 1973.)
"Mead conducted her study among a small group of Samoans
— a village of 600 people on the island of Ta‘u —
in which she got to know, lived with, observed, and interviewed
(through an interpreter) sixty-eight young women between the ages
of 9 and 20.
"She concluded that the passage from childhood to adulthood
(adolescence) in Samoa was a smooth transition and not marked
by the emotional or psychological distress, anxiety, or confusion
seen in the United States."
Just in case you were wondering.
-Matt Borondy
____________
Tomorrow
They Will Kiss
by Eduardo Santiago (Back Bay Books, 283 pages)
By now readers who have regularly put up with me know that 1) I
am an avid expatriated Chicagoan, 2) a Jew, and 3) a lover of numerous
things Cuban. Thus it's no surprise that Cuban-born (though raised
in the cultural hot spots of Miami and L.A.) Santiago's debut novel
makes its way onto my literary radar screen. The most excellent
Ann
Louise Bardach opines that it is, "A feast of splendidly drawn
characters-of anxious dreamers, lost souls, and gritty survivors-…
a work of gentle loveliness, sometimes searing and often hilarious."
The story goes like this: Cubana Graciela Altamira toils in a New
Jersey doll factory and is a regular lightning rod for various kinds
of trouble. Though far from her homeland, Graciela longs for the
same happy ending(s) that seems always to come in her beloved soap
operas. She lives with Caridad and Imperio—two women she has
known since girlhood—who are by her side in the factory. And
it seems Graciela will never be free of her past, or achieve the
love she finds quite unexpectedly in the frigid, anti-tropic New
Jersey winter. Here's an
excerpt:
Telenovelas can be cruel with that first kiss. I sat in
front of my television set and waited for the protagonists to
finally find true love, the way farmers waited for the first rains
of spring.
"Don't worry, Graciela. Tomorrow they will kiss," I sighed
to myself with complete certainty as the night's episode ended.
I always watched as the names of the actors rolled across the
screen while the romantic theme song played. This was my time.
This was when, inspired by the music and the drama I had just
watched, I allowed my mind and my heart to merge, just for a blissful
moment, just until a screeching commercial message shook me out
of my daydream. Used Cars! Used Appliances! Easy Credit! It was
1966 and everything offered to Latinos on the Spanish- language
channel was just as used.
I turned off the set and went into the bedroom to check on
my two boys. Ernestico, who was nine years old, slept curled up
in a ball, his long legs tucked under like a cricket. Manolito,
one year younger, slept on his back, his chubby self open to the
ceiling, fearless.
I returned to the living room, unfolded the sofa into the
uncomfortable bed it became every night, and lay down.
Alone, as usual.
But as always, with a little prayer to every saint and virgin
I had ever heard about. Even the ones I didn't believe in.
"Send me the right man," I prayed, "or take away my desire
to find true love."
-Robert Birnbaum
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Song
for My Fathers: A New Orleans Story in Black and White
by Tom Sancton (Other Press, 320 pages)
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Even before the catastrophic events of last year I was drawn to
New Orleans, for some of the same reasons I find Cuba and its culture
and history alluring—the music, the food stuffs, the inclusive
mongrelization (synthesis) of its cultural matrix, etc., etc. Thus
I was quite riled up at the idiotic (and quite preposterous) suggestion,
post-Katrina, that the city not be rebuilt. Tom
Piazza quickly came out with sweet book and brief, Why New
Orleans Matters, and then there is veteran journalist Tom Sancton's
Song for my Fathers, which Other
Press features as "the story of a young white boy driven by
a consuming passion to learn the music and ways of a group of aging
black jazzmen in the twilight years of the segregation era. Contemporaries
of Louis Armstrong, most of them had played in local obscurity until
Preservation Hall launched a nationwide revival of interest in traditional
jazz. They called themselves 'the mens.' And they welcomed the young
apprentice into their ranks. The narrative unfolds against the vivid
backdrop of New Orleans in the 1950s and ‘60s. But that magical
town is more than decor; it is perhaps the central player, for this
story could not have taken place in any other city in the world.
Written several years before Katrina crashed into New Orleans and
changed its face forever, Song for My Fathers seems all
the more moving in the wake of that cataclysm."
Wynton Marsalis wistfully opines: "Even before Hurricane Katrina
struck, something unrecoverable was being lost in New Orleans--the
world of the legendary original jazzmen of Preservation Hall."
-Robert Birnbaum
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A
Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces
by Lawrence Weschler (University of Chicago Press, 304
pages)
The University Of Chicago Press is to be commended for keeping
a number of Lawrence Weschler's titles in print. Lawrence Weschler
(whom Pico Iyer, in the book's forward extols, "Weschler seems so
hungry for life that the rest of us become hungry for him . . .
a magician, a performer, and a scholar. All in one.") is among other
things the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities
at New York University. He has authored twelve books, including
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, Vermeer in Bosnia,
and, most recently, Everything
That Rises: A Book of Convergences.
Portland, Oregon's excellent weekly The Stranger observes
on this collection, "The stories in this collection are evidence,
primarily, of the existence and survival of true individuals in
a world often seen as increasingly homogenous."
And Weschler further elaborates, "There is something both marvelous
and hilarious in watching the humdrum suddenly take flight. This
is, in part, a collection of such launchings."
The eight essays include profiles of people who "were just moseying
down the street one day, minding their own business, when suddenly
and almost spontaneously, they caught fire, they became obsessed,
they became intensely focused and intensely alive." Or about a teacher of
rudimentary English from India who decides that his destiny is to
promote the paintings of an obscure American abstract expressionist;
and a gifted poker player who invents a more exciting version of
chess; an avant-garde Russian émigré conductor speaks
Latin, exclusively, to his infant daughter; and Art Spiegelman as
he creates his epic opus, Maus.
-Robert Birnbaum
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Want more? See last week's reviews.
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