A Literary Life

Dress Your Family in Corderoy and Denim (David Sedaris)

Witty gay man tells stories: A great cocktail party or a great book by David Sedaris, whose talent is for taking the ordinary or the embarassing and turning the tables, painting over the black white and gray with a rainbow of colors. Though he hates the rainbow flag being associated with “alternate lifestyles” (read: alternate sexualities) and swears he wasn’t asked to vote on that one.

I didn’t enjoy this book quite as much as Me Talk Pretty One Day (read that review here). The stories in this book were more “a day in the life” tales, whereas the other colelction (his first, I believe) were more the stories he had been accumulating over a lifetime, refining and analyzing to comic perfection. The cast of characters, which includes Sedaris’ unique family and his long-time boyfriend, is still both funny and human, light and yet often moving.

Case in point. One story regards his visit to his sister’s, where she vents the family-wide annoyance with Sedaris’ work and how it puts them on display for the world to see–at their most vulnerable, naked to their core personalities.

“We stopped for gas on the way home and were parking in front of her house when she turned to relate what I’ve come to think of as the quintessential Lisa story. ‘One time,’ she said, ‘one time I was out driving?’ The incident began with a quick trip to the grocery store and ended, unexpectantly, with a wounded animal stuffed into a pillowcase and held to the tailpipe of her car. Like most of my sister’s stories, it provoked a startling mental picture, capturing a moment in time when one’s actions seem both unimaginably cruel and completely natural. Details were carefully chosen and the pace built gradually, punctuated by a series of well-timed pauses. ‘And then… and then…’ She reached the inevitable conclusion and just as I started to laugh, she put her head against the steering wheel and fell apart. It wasn’t the gentle flow of tears you might release when recalling an isolated action or event, but the violent explosion that comes when you realize that all such events are connected, forming an endless chain of guilt and suffering.

I instinctively reached for the notebook I keep in my pocket and she grabbed my hand to stop me. ‘If you ever,’ she said, “ever repeat that story, I will never talk to you again.’

In the movie version of our lives, I would have turned to offer her comfort, reminding her, convincing her that the action she’d described had been kind and just. Because it was. She’s incapable of acting otherwise.

In the real version of out lives, my immediate goal was to simply to change her mind. ‘Oh, come on,’ I said. ‘The story’s really funny, and, I mean, it’s not like you’re going to do anything with it.’

Your life, your privacy, your occasional sorow — it’s not like you’re going to do anything with it. Is this the brother I always was, or the brother I have become?”

Telling a story–telling a true story–can be a powerful thing, which is naturally why we love them so much, especially when someone like Sedaris is the story-teller. Those tales are real, real people, real circumstances… of someone who is not us, who we don’t feel bad about laughing at. In Sedaris’ case, though, he often makes sure we are laughing with him, with his family and friends. We laugh because we see ourselves there. And that is no mean feat.

Read this book. Read this book if, especially if, you don’t usually read books. It may just give you the bug.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection

On Beauty (Zadie Smith)

This is my second Zadie Smith book, the first being The Autograph Man, an interesting but ultimately unsatisfying story about opposites. In much the same way, On Beauty is an interesting but ultimately unsatisfying story about physical and mental attraction and worth. Yet again, there is the multi-ethnic smoothie that Smith loves to project upon every corner of the world–a white professor married to a black non-academic with three kids, one religious, one academic and one a horrifying and annoying parody of a rich black kid imitating glorified street culture. (Man that kid bothered me!) Just to add some more drama to the mix, let’s throw conservatism against liberalism and art history against deconstructionism. Just for fun, you know, to see what fireworks happen.

Like a kid in a science lab, Smith seems to be dreaming up experiments and throwing them together to see the results, which she is naturally (and obviously in some areas) making up as she goes along. The result for me was that plot points seemed incredibly artificial and staged–sure, the protagonist’s main enemy moves across the ocean to take a position at that specific university. Yep, really likely. Or the mid-life crisis with the balding man lusting after some hot, young student–couldn’t she have taken a slightly unique tack on that one? Or the very talented yet poor boy who is buoyed up and ultimately crushed by the system of the insecure rich and over-educated. Nope, I never heard that one before, right?

Zadie Smith is not a bad writer. Quite the opposite. She strings together words into necklaces worthy of princesses in ball gowns and her characters can be strikingly memorable at points. But this book seems like a rushed and mismatched melting pot of ideas, a half-baked plan presented as a main course. And what did I learn about beauty? Not much. However, I did discover yet one more place that it is not. I guess that is something.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars = mediocre 

The Autograph Man (Zadie Smith)

tandem
Function: adjective
1 : consisting of things or having parts arranged one behind the other
2 : working or occurring in conjunction with each other

It is an old (and bad), academic joke that there are three types of people in this world: those who can do math and those who can’t. I was always in the invisible third category, the type who gets it wrong not because they are unable to do math but because they can’t muster up enough interest to care. But it is no matter. We all know that there are two types of people in the world–those who like/do/have something and those who do not. Pick a topic, any topic, no matter how inconsequential and the formula will hold true. (Those who eat cocoa puffs and those who don’t, those who are Scorpios, those who have hot tubs, those who are Russian…)

The fact that the main character in The Autograph Man is named Alex-li Tandem is significant when approached in this light. After all, Alex is an expert of categories. For starters, he is writing the quintessential book on jewish versus goyish tendancies and is an amalgamation of a Chinese father and a Jewish mother. He is an unknown failure who makes a living on the signatures of the famous. His girlfriend is black to his white, his two friends are a rabbi and a Kabbala devotee. At other various points there are cats and dogs, youth and age, fame and anonymity, etc and etc. And Tandem is our eyes upon this world of co-existing opposites that (of course) are only labels in the end which obscure our basic humanity.

Okay, so it’s a good concept, a good gimmick if you will. Yin and Yang duality and the ethinic and religious smoothie (now with non-fat yogurt!) that is the modern world. Though this book was interesting and I don’t regret reading it, that was all this theme was when the pages shuffled to the end and the cover shut–a gimmick. Cute and inspired in a blog post or SNL skit sort of way, but hardly the stuff of insightful literary fiction. Let me give you an example: the International Gesture. This is a phrase Smith uses in the book to describe characters’ movements, as in “he made the International Gesture for the Jewish shrug” or “a lewd International Gesture” or “the International Gesture for lunacy (temple, tapping finger).” It was cute and funny the first time she used it. It got old and clumsy as it continued to be repeated, exposed for the hollow device it was.

Alex himself is also unfulfilling as a character. He is shallow, short-sighted, constantly drunk and immature. He has his redeeming qualities but most of them are his friends, who seemed much more genuine and “of this earth” tangible than Alex. In the end, I began to wonder why this assorted supporting cast continued to support and associate with Alex. They suffer his mistakes, clean up his vomit, forgive him his lies and say they love him. I kept saying, why? And where on earth does all of this schmuck’s money come from, money for a trip from London to America, for a fancy hotel, for the empty hotel mini-bar? So much just falls from the sky unexplained in order to fill in the gaps in plot and characterization.

Zadie Smith is a very talented writer and her first novel–White Teeth–was all the rage when it was released. A hard act to follow. This sophmore effort turned out to be sophomoric as a result. Not bad, not unreadable but clumsy and with delusions of grandeur, cobbled together with bubble gum and celebrity. In the end, as in all things, there will be those that like Smith’s The Autograph Man and those who won’t. Or maybe there will be a large group of those that, like me, are capable of appreciating it but can’t muster up enough interest to really care either way. Smith tried to lecture me about 1 divided by 2 equals 1/2 and 1/2 plus 1/2 equals the world. I doodled in my notebook and combatted drowsiness. Math is not my thing.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars = Mediocre

Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)

Let me start by saying that I loved this book. Let me end by saying I don’t know if I fully understand this book. Now that I have sandwiched both ends of my thoughts about Cloud Atlas, I suppose I need to add the peanut butter and jelly.

Similar to my PB&J filling, David Mitchell crafts a story that is both rich and substantial as well as light but sticky. It is the second book I have read of late (the other being Specimen Days) that has experimented with segmenting a story over the lives of several unrelated people in distant time periods. We begin in the journal of an estate agent in 1850 traveling through the South Pacific back to his gold-rushing home of San Francisco. Then, jump to the letters of an open-minded (read: bisexual) young composer in the 1930s–> a cub reporter in the 1970s who stumbles upon a nuclear power conspiracy that endangers her life–> a mediocre, modern English publisher imprisoned in with age–> an interview with a human simulant from the Korea of the future–> and then finally travels to a primitive Hawaiian culture that struggles to retain civilization after “the fall.” Each story jolts into one another, sometimes even in mid-page, often in the exact moment where you decide as a reader that you like this character more than the last.

Now here comes the great part. After the Hawaiian adventure, we travel the same road in reverse. Back through time to our American agent on a sea voyage. There! See? There! There is the exact moment where it is no longer possible to put down this unique and convoluted (yet becoming more and more unified) book. Clear the calendar and cancel all appointments. You are in for the long haul.

There’s the peanut butter, Ladies and Gentlemen. And here’s the jelly, aye, here’s the rub. Again, I loved it. Mitchell paints every character with humanity and depth. He interweaves the tales without being heavy-handed, leaving bread crumbs and hints in tiny details. (Except the comet–you’ll see–which was a bit too obvious) At the end, I could see Mitchell’s message about human nature: the stronger preying on weaker, our hunger for power building and then tearing down our families/cultures/environment, about other sorts of hunger–for goods, wealth, fame, love, freedom–and slavery, both forced and voluntary.

In short, it made me think. A lot of thoughts. A lot of thoughts I can’t quite synthesize as yet but can’t get rid of, like a child’s sticky fingers after lunch. I see that the book is a sort of Hegel-ian model of dialectic history–forgive me, I was a History major as well as English. Hegel thought that each idea/movement/governmental system/thesis brought into existence its opposite or antithesis. These combined will disappear. Like a + and a -, they become a 0, negate each other, mean nothing, annihilate both. Therefore, they will come into conflict and something else–a fusion of sorts, not necessarily an even one–will emerge.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of my sticky fingers, sticky thoughts. Excellent thoughts as well. An excellent novel is one that will stick to your ribs (okay, okay, no more food analogies). Though I highly recommend this book, I will also recommend that you read it with a friend or in a book club. From my own experience, you will want someone to speak to about this. I feel I have a lot of ideas I need to test on another reader’s ears or that I may have missed some important piece they picked up.

Here we go. Here’s a solution—> Read it. Love it. Write me. Help me.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars = Buy the Hardcover

Specimen Days (Michael Cunningham)

Michael Cunningham is an odd duck. I don’t mean that in a bad way. In fact, I quite admire his work. Like every other literate person on earth, I adored The Hours. A Home at the End of the World, well, no so much (see here). I say odd then because it has been more than two weeks since I finished the book as I sit to write the review and I still don’t know quite what to think of it.

Did I like it? Yes. Post-modern stylings with timeless style. That’s Cunningham. Much like in The Hours, he interweaves time and space. And literary characters. In the former, it was Virginia Woolf. In this work, it is Walt Whitman. The book is divided into three parts, all taking place in New York City.

1. 19th Century during the Industrial Revolution, Whitman’s own age
2. Close to the present day, post-911 and alert for terror
3. The future, when androids are possible and the world is going to hell in a handbasket (Well, faster than it is now)

In each tale there are three characters: a man, a woman and Walt Whitman. They change roles and experience vastly different plotlines, all centered upon the lust for life and disdain for the mechanization of man in Whitman’s work. Oh, and the freeing nature of death. Very interesting. Very different. Very successful? Maybe not.

I absolutely loved the first tale, narrated by a young boy with limited mental faculties who must begin work in a typical (dangerous) foundry. It was mystic, melancholy and foggy. The characters touched me and the events surprised me. I was thinking, “This is The Hours all the way.”

Then, the second book hit with a thud for me. This one had a female narrator who was a sort of terrorist negotiator. There were parts that were excellent, including a revelation regarding the boy at the end. Yet it felt too aciton-adventure-like. Like, if it were a movie, Angelia Jolie would play the lead and Haley Joel Osment the little boy. Canned, you know? Like he didn’t quite pull it off. The third book was also interesting, narrated from an androids perspective. But again, this one felt as if a Pulitzer Prize winning author was trying his hand at Sci-Fi.

I have nothing against genre fiction. Honestly. I just don’t know if this book elevated itself to the realm of literary fiction. Sometime I think yes because scenes and themes from the book have been returning to my thoughts, a sure sign of a book that touched me. Yet, I also was looking forward to starting my next book before this one was done, a sure sign that something is amiss.

I don’t know about this one. He took a risk and I applaud that. The literary world is a better, richer place because he took that risk. I just don’t know if Evil Knevil actually cleared all of those barrels or if he missed and is seriously injured. It is as if I am a member of the crowd, waiting for the smoke to clear to see if he is still standing.

Will Specimen Days stand the test of time? I think I will have to wait for the smoke to clear.

Rating: 3.5 out 5 stars = A book club selection for vacation reading

An Invisible Sign of Her Own (Aimee Bender)