Accismus

Oscar Cabral is a doughy, sci-fi loving virgin. His sister, Lola, is a tough, pragmatic survivor of her own rebellious youth, and his mother, Beli, is an even tougher survivor of her own romantic past and of the brutal and repressive Trujillo regime. The women are as resilient and capable as Oscar isn’t. Lola reinvents herself as the traditional American success story; Beli survives brutal violence and comes back kicking; but Oscar can’t even manage to kill himself effectively. The Carbral family has its origins in the restive Dominican Republic, and has since resettled in New Jersey, bringing with them plenty of baggage and a possible curse from their ancestral land. The Cabrals love hard, lastingly and disastrously, and the unlikely Oscar exemplifies this family trait most of all.

Narrated primarily by Yunior, Lola’s well-meaning but hopeless playboy suitor, the novel’s energetic and entertaining voice is perhaps its strongest element. Diaz writes with enthusiasm, sweeping the reader along through multiple generations, from the DR to Brooklyn to Jersey and back, with quick jumps down to footnotes which ground the reader in the Dominican history of which the narrator candidly assumes our ignorance. Junot Diaz is a solid writer, whose future work I won’t hesitate to pick up, but I wouldn’t number his book among my favorites, and I doubt it will stay with me long. Diaz has original voice down and handles his material with skill and authority…but I’m not sure the material he’s handling is anything much, and his characters are cartoonish types (particularly the women). The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a fun read, but for me, it doesn’t get at anything that resonates, and I’m unconvinced it has much real depth despite the accolades it has received.

Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands is a novel about a girl and her asshole. No, really – exhaustively and all the way through, this novel centers on 18-year-old Helen Memel’s butchered asshole. Having nicked something major during her regular and highly involved shaving routine, Helen is lying in a hospital bed “with my skirt hiked up and my underpants pulled down, ass toward the door.” But she’s not embarrassed about that, or anything else. While she lies there in recovery, Helen ruminates obsessively on her favorite themes – her body, its byproducts and the fun she can have with them. All of this is shockingly explicit, but if you ask yourself why it’s shocking, being (as it is) so utterly everyday and banal a subject (essentially, a long version of ‘everybody poops’), you get closer to Roche’s ultimate purpose.

Wetlands is essentially a protest novel. Helen is merely particularly interested in her body; Roche, on the other hand, is furious that Helen’s interests and comfort with herself could be as rare and shocking as they (to many) are. True, all bodily functions are hidden, but some are more hidden than others – specifically, women’s. Roche’s target here is the sanitized woman: society’s obsession with hair removal, its primitive taboos about menstruation and vaginal cleanliness, its commercial tendency to tiptoe around women’s genitalia with cutesy, pink crap, as though vaginas themselves are an inside joke.

Undoubtedly, bodily secretions are nothing to be ashamed of; whether or not they are interesting is another question altogether. As Helen prods, picks at and wipes herself continuously, the book becomes tedious. Other people’s fluids, like their dreams and their college photo albums, are ultimately of no interest to anyone but themselves. Helen also has family drama and a new love interest, and she is scared and alone and putting on a brave face, but these plot points were clearly thought up after Roche settled on her theme. They feel tacked on, and the ending takes a leap into the surreal that is entirely unjustified by the chapters leading up to it.

Which isn’t to say Wetlands doesn’t have something to offer. Helen is an endearing and original character. And as a feminist howl, the book succeeds – Roche’s point is certainly a valid one that needs to be made more often. Still, she probably could have made it just as well in a ten-page short story.

Rivka Galchen’s surreal tale of psychiatrist Leo Liebenstein’s search for his missing wife, Rema, is an absolute joy to read. In fact, it’s probably one of my favorite books I’ve read this year.

One day, Rema comes home with a puppy, and Leo immediately realizes that his wife has been replaced by a nearly identical simulacrum. But where did she go, and why, and who is this new person bent on impersonating her? Leo’s determination to recover his true love and crack the mystery of his disappearance takes him to Argentina, to the home of Rema’s estranged mother, Magda, and then to remote Patagonia, with the Doppelganger dogging his every step. Behind all of these strange happenings lurks Tzvi Gal-Chen, the mysterious research meteorologist of the Royal Academy of Meteorology, who has possibly hired Leo to battle the evil 49 Quantum Fathers.

The novel charts one man’s struggle to retain his grip on reality, but really, it is about love — its subjectiveness, its inexplicableness, the ways in which we make it up and find it and lose it and manufacture it again. Galchen’s novel brings to mind Borges and Kafka, but it also reminded me of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Atmospheric Disturbances is hilarious and involving with not a single boring passage, and I highly recommend it.

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(By the way, Galchen is one of those entirely hateable people – she’s an M.D. with an MFA from Columbia, and she looks stunning [and about 25] in her book jacket photo.  Fuck her, am I right?)

Shortly after 9/11, Hans van den Broek’s wife leaves him alone in New York City – in the Chelsea Hotel, no less – and returns to England with their young son. For the next two years, Hans commutes to London every other weekend, and spends the rest of his time aimlessly distracting himself in post-disaster New York. He becomes involved with a cricket league composed of various immigrants and enjoys thinking back to his youthful days of playing cricket in The Hague, where he was born. One player is Chuck Ramkissoon, a charismatic and eccentric Trinidadian mover-and-shaker, who has his fingers in all sorts of pies. Hans finds himself more and more involved with Chuck, drawn into his mysterious world.

Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland is largely about cricket, which is something I can’t get a mental picture of at all. Hans himself admits that:

The uninitiated onlooker at a cricket game is . . . puzzled by the alternation of two batsmen and two bowlers and two sets of stumps. . . . It can take a while before the puzzle is sufficiently solved, particularly for the American viewer. I can’t count the number of times I, in New York, fruitlessly tried to explain to a baffled passerby the basics of the game taking place in front of him, a failure of explanation and comprehension that soon irritated me and led me to give up.

As elusive as the cricket descriptions, however, the various illustrations of New York City neighborhoods, landmarks and institutions are lovely, from the Herald’s Square DMV to the Greenwood Cemetery. O’Neill has a knack for setting, and his brief descriptions cut right to the essence of a place. And in Netherland, O’Neill is expansive on the subject of New York. Critics have compared this book to Gatsby, and indeed the mapping is unavoidable: Chuck Ramkissoon is found floating in the Gowanus Canal at the beginning of the novel, and the comparisons only start there. The book spends time on the American dream, the idea that any hard-working dreamer can go rags-to-riches, and Chuck is the ultimate schemer. When Rachel asks Hans about Chuck’s politics, Hans realizes he has no idea:

The decisive item, if I’m going to be honest about this, was that Chuck was making a go of things. The sushi, the mistress, the marriage, the real estate dealings, and, almost inconceivably, Bald Eagle Field: it was all happening in front of my eyes. While the country floundered in Iraq, Chuck was running. That was political enough for me, a man having trouble putting one foot in front of the other.

And yet, for all its Gatsbyish notes, Netherland is not really about America, precisely because it is such a love song to New York City, and any American who spends upwards of a minute in NYC knows that it’s not remotely representative of the 50 states proper (not that any one location really is). But then, in another sense, the quintessential American dream is realistically centered in NYC, because so many immigrants arrive here, join communities of immigrants from their own countries, and live and work here for generations. I’ve met people who’ve lived here for years and have never been anywhere else in the country. This city is more of an international crossroads than a fixed location; it is the most international place I have ever been, which is one big reason why I love it.* In this respect (the gathering of the teeming masses), New York is the ultimate representation of an American ideal – albeit America as it never really was, and most emphatically is not now. But somewhere back there, in between the Puritans and the ’50s, there was a time when New York was thought to be representative of the country itself. Later, after relocating to London, Hans observes:

Although it’s not a secret that I lived for some time in [New York], I’m not accorded any unusual atuhority. This isn’t because I’ve been back for awhile but, rather, because I’m precluded by nationality from commenting on any place other than Holland – one of those parochialisms, I am pissed off to rediscover, that remind me that as a foreign person I’m essentially of some mildly buffoonish interest to the English and deprived, certainly, of the nativity New York encourages even its most fleeting visitor to imagine for himself. And it’s true: my secret, almost shameful feeling is that I am out of New York – that New York interposed itself, once nad for all, between me and all other places of origin.

But commenting on the American dream is not the main thrust of Netherland – this is primarily a book about Hans, and Hans is intrigued by Chuck, but in a removed, and not overly involved way. Whereas Carraway’s raison d’etre as narrator was to observe and describe Gatsby, Hans’s relationship with Chuck is a take-it-or-leave-it sort of friendship, as is everything in Hans’s life at that time. In fact, the motivations of all of the characters in Netherland are fuzzy at best. We don’t really know why Rachel leaves Hans – mostly because Hans, a rather unreliable narrator, will not admit to having any idea himself. We don’t really know why Hans stays obediently behind in New York for as long as he does (again, he doesn’t spend much mental time on it himself), or why everyone in the novel seems to suffer from a confusing and painful ennui (“I wasn’t especially troubled by the hours spent flat on my face,” says Hans, of his habit of lying for hours with his head under the armchair in his hotel room). Perhaps it has something to do with 9/11 itself, which, while mercifully not focused on in much outrageous detail, bookends the story of these people, looms slightly behind them without their ever looking straight at it, just as the actual event framed New York itself and everything that happened here for some time. Hans: “We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington, and, for that matter, Moscow.” But Hans’s mourning has far less to do with 9/11, and more with the fracturing of his family, and his lack of ability to shake off his own inertia:

The difficulty was not merely that I couldn’t think of an alternative to the program of traveling to London once or twice a month. No, my difficulty was that I could not disarrange the boundless, freezing dismay that undermined every personal motion I attempted. It was as if, in my inability to produce a movement in my life, I had fallen victim to the paralysis that confounds actors in dreams as they vainly try to run or talk or make love.

Perhaps Netherland is more about the time it takes to shake off a tragedy – something unreasonable and inexplicable happens, and people totter away from its epicenter, where, stunned and confused, they distractedly go on with their lives.

At any rate, I didn’t care. Nobody could call this a bad book – it won the PEN/Faulkner, after all – and I paged through it readily enough, but it left no deep impression on me, and I wouldn’t ever urge it on someone.

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*Oh, yes, by the by – I love NY now, for those of you I haven’t spoken to in awhile.  I had my reservations for the first couple years, but now I’m like a googly-eyed newlywed, and am currently entirely convinced this is the only place to be (in the US, anyway).

Burt Hecker thinks he was born in the wrong century. He believes that true progress stopped in the Middle Ages, and devotes himself fully to that era, wearing medieval robes, drinking home-brewed mead, and doing nothing OOP – out of period. He is the founder of the Confraternity of Times Lost Regained (think Renn Fair circuit, pre-Renn), which meets at his wife Kitty’s Mansion Inn. Tod Wodicka’s novel opens in Germany, where Burt has journeyed with a chant group that celebrates the life of Hildegard von Bingen, a medieval anchoress and mystic. Ordered by the Court to join the chant group as an anger management alternative (after being arrested for DWI), Burt at the novel’s opening is widowed, estranged from both of his grown children, depressed, and has secretly purchased a one-way ticket to Germany. He has sold his wife’s Inn, and does not plan on returning to the US; rather, he hopes to search for his long missing son, Tristan, who is living in Prague.

As the novel unfolds, Burt’s past is slowly unraveled through flashbacks, while in the present day, he travels to Prague in search of his son. We learn how he met his wife, the crucial role his mother-in-law played in their relationship, of his wife’s excruciating death from cancer, and the circumstances that led to both Burt’s children disowning him entirely. Or, well, we sort of learn that. Burt is the very definition of an unreliable narrator, and seems unable to admit to himself in the retelling what it was about him and his lifestyle that caused his children to find him detestable, rather than merely eccentric and pitiable. Wodicka has stuffed this novel with fantastic, original characters – too many to recount here, in fact; each character, no matter how minor, is well drawn and compelling. But these characters spend the majority of the novel expressing their intense anger and frustration at a high volume, but with no conviction – I could never quite determine why everybody was so very pissed.

ASBW is original, interesting and entertaining, but ultimately, I found it tedious. It’s as if Wodicka came up with a fantastic hero, and then couldn’t quite figure out what to do with him – Burt keeps leading up to an insight he is ultimately unable or unwilling to express.

These short stories by William Trevor are mostly sad, still and contemplative in tone, reminiscent even when the action is unfolding in the present. They involve a cast of characters mostly pressing anxiously into their golden years, seemingly hoping for nothing more than the healing hand of time to make all their past pains and sorrows remote and irrelevant. In “Cheating at Canasta”, a man visits an old Venetian haunt of his and his recently deceased wife, and hears newlyweds arguing about trivialities at the next table; in “At Olivehill”, grown siblings try to convince their aging mother to turn the family forest into a golf course; in “Old Flame”, an elderly woman surreptitiously reads a letter from her husband’s former mistress that the mistress’s companion of many years has died. Other stories concern crimes, many of which are concealed or ambiguous, and whether or not actual guilt matters when you know in your heart you are guilty. In “The Dressmaker’s Child”, a man runs over the child of a social outcast late at night; in “Men of Ireland”, a man visits his boyhood priest and successfully blackmails him by accusing him of molestation that never occurred; in “Bravado”, a young girl watches her boyfriend beat up and kill another boy, and seizes on a thinly offered possible explanation that makes the act seem somewhat less heinous.

If the characters in Cheating at Canasta are praying for time to pass in order to heal their wounds, it is possibly because those wounds fester far longer than they should. Trevor seems particularly interested in how long it takes varying people to get over pain, and the duty of other people to honor their loved ones’ mourning periods, to respect the time it takes. In “The Children”, a couple breaks their engagement when the man’s daughter feels her deceased mother is being forgotten; in “Folie a Deux”, a man runs into a childhood friend who had never recovered his equilibrium after the two carelessly drowned the family dog.

But the characters of Trevor’s stories also know that every wound, however deep and festering, can eventually result in greater strength and knowledge. As the protagonist of “Cheating at Canasta” thinks to himself: “Shame isn’t bad . . . Nor the humility that is its gift.”

Shit, I had some vague idea I might write this book one day, but it seems Jincy Willett has beaten me to the punch (and undoubtedly done a better job of it than I would have).

Winner of the National Book Award concerns twin sisters, Dorcas and Abigail Mather. Dorcas is all brain, and Abigail is all appetite: while Dorcas grows up, tart and intelligent, a librarian who loves bird watching and heavy drinking, and is always armed with a witty comeback, Abigail feeds constantly on attention, sex and food, growing plump and slick, and popular with husbands all across their small Rhode Island town. As Dorcas describes them in their girlhood:

‘When I was twelve, and An American Tragedy was my favorite summer book, my sister thrilled to Forever Amber, especially the scene where Amber, trying to rekindle the passion of Bruce Carleton, her first rapist, appears at the King’s Ball in a beaded gown that makes her breasts stand out “like full pointed globes.” I had to call Abigail “Amber” all that summer. She had been “Scarlett” the previous spring. Already Abigail was coming down in the world.’

The novel opens with Dorcas holed up in her library as a hurricane bears down on Rhode Island. With no way to avoid it, she sits down to read her sister’s recently published autobiographical memoir, about how she killed her husband. Abigail is currently in a women’s penitentiary, awaiting her trial.

The novel proceeds within this frame – Dorcas reminisces back through the sisters’ shared history as she disgustedly reads her sister’s memoir. The memoir is co-written by Hilda DeVilbiss, who Abigail met on her postal route years ago. Hilda is married to Guy, a whiny, infantile, self-aggrandizing intellectual, the satisfaction of whose various needs is Hilda’s mission in life. When Guy demands he meet Abigail, the sisters become unenthusiastic friends of the couple, who soon introduce them to Conrad Lowe, Guy’s college roommate. Conrad is a type-perfect misogynist, sadistic and manipulative – in the same way that Dorcas is all intellect and Abigail is all appetite, Conrad is also more type than individual. He seizes on Dorcas as a contradiction in terms, the world’s only “honorable woman,” and marries Abigail in order to better fuck with the sisters. Dorcas tries to stay close to her sister and shield her somewhat from Conrad’s abuse, without becoming involved with him on any level. This proves an impossibility, of course, and the three are drawn into endless warfare that ends in Abigail’s imprisonment.

Through exaggerating and focusing on each of her character’s primary motivations, Willett perfectly elucidates the conflict between men and women, and women and women. The Mather sisters seem to me to be two aspects of the same person – I don’t think I’m reading too much into the novel to say that they represent the liberated woman’s struggle to satisfy her romantic and sexual needs without compromising her dignity and autonomy. As Dorcas explains to Conrad:

“Abigail and I divided up the world. Sacred and profane. Spiritual and physical. Mind and body.”

Abigail is pure id: immediately upon entering puberty, she revels in being gang raped. When she meets Conrad, she is nearly 200 pounds, an enthusiastic eater who has never dieted. She is naked, unexamined need, unembarrassed, never shy. While Abigail has slept with nearly every man in town, she has never been in love with any of them personally; of course, she falls hard for Conrad, and, to Dorcas’s horror, becomes meek and compliant in the face of his abuse. The scene in which Abigail pines for Conrad, who meanwhile calls Dorcas up for a date, seems to me to be symbolic of a woman wrestling with her own irrational desire: Abigail keens on the sofa like a dog in heat, while Dorcas panics at her sister’s brute, out of control need. She slaps Abigail across the face and douses her with a giant pot of cold water. At Abigail’s begging insistence, Dorcas agrees to have dinner with the hateful Conrad. At dinner, she tells him he’s a bad person, and is to stay away from them, but when she wakes in the morning, he is in Abigail’s bed.

Conrad seizes on Abigail’s weight as her Achilles’ heel, and Abigail develops anorexia and dwindles down to nothing. Meanwhile, Conrad works on Dorcas by manipulating her into frequent bouts of heavy drinking with him, flattering her intelligence and uniqueness. Dorcas is unwillingly susceptible to suggestions that she is mythically superior; this is her weak spot.

Perhaps I am reading too much in, however, when I say they also seem to personify the two factions of feminism currently holding each other in uneasy alliance. Dorcas and Abigail love, but do not really like one another. Dorcas says of her sister:

I know Abigail better than anyone else in the world, and if I were asked to explain this or that particular thing, I could probably give a fairly accurate account of her motivations. I can report that duty has never played an even minor part in her decisions; that she is moved solely by the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain; that she derives pleasure from an astonishing variety of sources, and pain from astonishingly few; and so on. I can even predict her behavior, with a respectable success rate.

But I don’t understand her at all. To understand you have to do more than predict and explain. You must feel some degree of empathy. I have a greater understanding of cats and internal combustion engines and Iranians than I do of my twin sister, Abigail.

Both sisters are powerful, but Abigail’s power stems from fully embracing her sexual role, and Dorcas’s from rejecting it outright. While Dorcas is disgusted by Abigail’s appetites (Dorcas: “My sister has great power, but no dignity.”), she respects her sister’s ferocity and is shocked when Abigail becomes a doormat at Conrad’s hand. The indignity of sex having always been insupportable to Dorcas, she is now witnessing the greater humiliation of love, which is entirely beyond her. Dorcas cannot bear to be treated like a thing, as if she would be of some practical use to another person. When Conrad Lowe admires her legs, she says of the experience:

To be judged desirable, to have any part of my body found desirable, was insupportable to me. Somehow he had known immediately what course of action would be the most vicious. . . . I saw myself for the first time as a thing, a thing in someone else’s mind. Of course I had always acknowledged my body, the fact of my visibility, but I had not been a thing really, because I had been of no use. . . . “

Abigail, on the other hand, prefers at all times to be treated as a thing, to be seen as a practical means to an end, but she takes deep offense at being treated like an idea, romanticized or mythologized, turned into something theoretical that she is not. Dorcas tries to help Abigail figure out why Hilda’s initial introduction of her to Guy had offended her so:

Dorcas: “Because…you were being treated like a thing.”

“I like being treated like a thing.”

“Nothing degrades you, does it?”

“Yes! She degraded me . . . She treated me like an idea! That’s it. She treated me like an idea. Can you imagine the nerve?”

Guy serves as foil to Conrad Lowe; Guy’s demonstrative feminism is a thin cover for his inability to look directly at any woman. Whereas Conrad sees women primarily as disgusting and inferior bodies (a former gynecologist, he says of his former career: “Women fall apart like they’re made in Taiwan. The whole female works is a model for planned obsolescence. They get lumps, rashes, discharges, gross smells. They bleed. Or they don’t bleed. Whichever, they worry about it. Their insides fall out, like the udder on a cow.”), Guy (an artist, who mostly sculpts his wife’s vagina in endless series) sees only his own imaginings:

I had never known Guy to remark on any woman’s physical aspect. With Guy there was always the pretense that we were pure spirit, pure intellect and “sexuality,” and our bodies were incidental, negligible, beside the point.

Conrad uses this gap in his friend’s understanding to humiliate him in company:

They would talk about women, about oneself, as though women were nothing but ambulatory body parts, the container of the thing contained, the part for the whole. They would tell repugnant jokes with horrid imagery, comparing us to carnivorous plants, dead carp, snails. At such times Conrad Lowe would eventually extract from Guy some explicit hateful remark, some punchline of his own, and then he would abandon Guy, slip out form under him like a retracted gangplank. Lowe’s face would transmogrify, the contagiously filthy-minded young man would disappear, and in its place would be this bemused adult with an ironic face, staring at his old chum in mild wonder. And there would be poor Guy, the focus of shocked attention, and the echo of his own obscenity ringing in everyone’s ears like cookware spilling from a closet.

Conrad Lowe is pure hate, a patriarchal symbol referred to repeatedly as “the dominant male.” He is determined to drive a wedge between the sisters, to destroy them both and bend them to his will. Dorcas describes him on first meeting him:

The man was obviously a sadist, a manipulator. I despised him instantly. He inspired in me an absurd crusading zeal.

It was the oddest, most unhinging thing. I hated him, gladly. It was as though I had waited all my life to do battle with this terrible man, and the unhinging aspect of my emotion was the gratitude, the bridal joy.

At first, it seems clear that Abigail is the more vulnerable of the two, but in the end, Dorcas proves no less susceptible to Conrad’s hatred. Perhaps more nefarious (and realistic) than his overt abusiveness is Conrad’s ability to thoroughly occupy nearly all of both sisters’ time and attention over years. Dorcas speaks of her peace of mind and serenity whenever she is briefly apart from Abigail and Conrad; toward the novel’s end, the couple manages to pressure her into actually moving into their house, and while Dorcas tries repeatedly to distance herself and reclaim her own life, she is inevitably drawn back in. She can’t even take a day trip to a park without them inviting themselves along, and when she tries to hike of by herself for a minute, and they follow her, she screams:

‘”What are you people? Twelve? Five? Stupid? . . . Leave me alone! For pity’s sake!”‘

Oh, lest I forget to mention: Winner of the National Book Award is really funny. Hilarious, in fact, and much more broad and subtle than my chosen excerpts make it seem (the few reviews of the book I’ve been able to find do not even mention the themes I’ve focused on here). It’s also an ugly book, really, but it’s an ugliness nobody ever nails with total accuracy. There are two possibilities here: either I am reading way too much into this novel, and it is simply a very clever and entertaining satire, or I am correct in suspecting that Willett has done something brilliant and subversive here. Either way, I’m quite sure Willett at least knows exactly what she is doing.

Ah, the many intricacies of the quirky rich. Bruce Wagner’s I’ll Let You Go is sprawling, detailed and difficult to summarize, but the story mainly concerns – as do so many stories, I’m realizing (only recently, I have read a number of novels based on this same plot – The Last Samurai, Petropolis, His Illegal Self) – a boy’s search for his vanished father. At the beginning of the novel, Toulouse Trotter is informed by his cousin Lucy that his father is not, as he’d been led to believe up to his current age of 12, dead, but rather has simply disappeared. Further inquiries reveal that Toulouse’s father, Marcus, vanished the night of his son’s conception, the night of his wedding to Katrina Trotter – vanished from the bridal bed, which was located high atop an architectural wonder, a perfect recreation of France’s ruined tower, La Colonne Detruite, which Katrina’s father, Louis, had secretly commissioned for the happy couple as a wedding gift. This revelation launches Toulouse and his cousins on a search for their missing relative, and what they uncover will have profound implications for the entire, extended Trotter clan.

There’s no point in here summarizing the many quirks of the Trotters, and the intricacies of their familial relations, which include, among other things, Alzheimer’s, drug addiction, compulsive real estate purchasing, rare genetic orphan disease, puppy-incest, misdirected philanthropy, schizophrenia, devoted servants, celebrity best friends and an immortal Great Dane. Wagner’s Trotters would feel at home with the Royal Tennenbaums or the George Bluths. Unlike the latter family, however, the Trotters, as well as their friends and acquaintances, are continually trying to do good by others, but their motives are rarely pure and their efforts are always fruitless. Toulouse’s Aunt Joyce gives proper burials to dead babies found in dumpsters, to assuage her guilt over her own son, Edward, who suffers from a disfiguring and debilitating rare congenital disorder, and who she was unable to bring herself to visit in hospital for the first months of his life. Her husband, Dodd, conceives a grand rebuilding of his old grade school, but his plans are impractical and despite his placement on the Forbes list, he is humiliated to discover none of his former classmates have any recollection of him. Lani, a minor though important character, has become an advocate for children in the foster care system because she feels a proud obligation to help the less fortunate, but secretly, she is too terrified of the bad parts of town to meet with any of her clients. The parallel storyline in the novel follows the travails of the unfortunate Amaryllis Kornfeld, an abused and neglected orphan, as she is shunted through the hopeless purgatory that is the LA foster system. Amaryllis is a wide-eyed, sweet, resilient wraith straight out of Dickens, and the loathsome foster parents and wrecked children Amaryllis encounters in the system are likewise Dickensian villains – rotten, selfish and cruel.

Reflecting back a few weeks after having read it, I find that my overall impression of the novel is of the aptly named Trotters (not a one of which can stand to sit still) flitting all over and around numerous solid, massive, grand and immobile architectural structures. Much is made of these structures, as backdrop to the Trotter family life, and the structures have their own function in the story. Most obvious is La Colonne, the ruined tower of the Trotter’s ill-fated honeymoon, still stands and functions as a sort of shrine. It’s repeatedly implied that the tower itself – a replica of the Parisian landmark Katrina and Marcus visited shortly before one of Marcus’s breakdowns – is responsible for the fracturing of his psyche (and their family). As Marcus writes to Katrina, “The Tower had become a conspirator – against us, and our happiness. The Tower had to be placated. It was such a beauteous thing; we are often trapped within wondrous designs, without explanation . . . .” Other structures include the European-style village Dodd Trotter specially erected for his wheelchair-(or actually, small efficient buggy-)bound son to easily navigate, complete with movie theater, book store and inn; the topiary mazes that Katrina designs for a living, including one designed for the Alzheimer’s patients at the home where her mother is eventually installed; the gigantic, elaborate insane school complex planned by Dodd Trotter; Louis Trotter’s sacred Withdrawing Room filled with dozens of scale models of grave site memorials commissioned of famous architects by Louis, to adorn his own cemetery plot. All of these edifices are artificial, and all erected at great time and expense to compensate for the lack of something in the particular lives of the wealthy Trotters.

Unique buildings are the fixed points in the Trotters’ lives, but the Trotters themselves are constantly mobile. Early in the novel, Toulouse complains of his mother’s continual jet setting. Marcus’s breakdowns often manifest in his walking insane distances in a fugue state. Edward and Lucy first roll into focus on Edward’s special golf cart, which he is rarely not pottering around in. He also has a 747 simulator, which Lucy and Toulouse use for their trysts. Speaking of jets, there is a short digression in the middle of the book that follows the Trotter children on a round-the-world summer school trip, in which they visit multiple countries in three weeks. I’m not entirely certain how this episode is meant to function within the larger novel, but it was entertaining, not least because Diane Keaton and her daughter were randomly along for half of the journey, for seemingly no narrative purpose at all.

Primarily, I’ll Let You Go is about estrangement and reunion. The novel begins with some Trotters closely bound and others geographically and emotionally distant. As Marcus moves back into the family, the bonds shift, drawing some family members closer and pushing others away. But it is not distance or death alone that separates us from our closest contacts – people change, they develop, they regress, they turn out to be not at all who you thought they were. And yet physically, they remain. Perhaps even more painful than losing loved ones to death or abandonment is losing them to complete personality overhauls.

Wagner’s novel is difficult to categorize. It’s sophisticated and intelligent social satire, it’s a good yarn based around an archetypal plot, it’s a romantic flight of fancy. It contains enough symbols, parallels, themes and irony to recommend it to high school lit teachers seeking material for infinite five-point essays. And yet at the end, for everything it does – and does well – it left me slightly cold. I’m not sure entirely why. I enjoyed the book and would recommend it, but for all it had in style and slickness, it lacked . . . profundity, perhaps?

“But I feel very drawn to other men,” I said. Although something defiant in me forced these words out, I felt myself becoming a freak the moment I spoke. My hair went bleach-blond, my wrist went limp, my rep tie became a lace jabot: I was the simpering queen at the grand piano playing concert versions of last year’s pop tunes for his mother and her bridge club. There was no way to defend what I was. All I could fight for was my right to choose my exile, my destruction.

So speaks Edmund White’s teenage protagonist in A Boy’s Own Story, echoing the concerns of many a burgeoning American homosexual: how to be openly gay without being received as a cartoon, a lisping, prancing stereotype. While White’s Boy speaks from 1950s New England, this particular concern is unfortunately still relevant today. This story – the first in a trilogy of autobiographical novels – charts the unnamed protagonist’s various young affairs and attempts to override his homosexuality (psychotherapy, religion, dating, relationships with everyone from Bohemian adults to popular peers). As each attempt ends in futile frustration, the Boy gradually approaches an acceptance of and candor about his true, unavoidable self, which is the arc of any coming-of-age tale.

White is a fantastic writer, describing the shades of emotion of his teenage protagonist with economical precision and subtle humor. White’s Boy is quiet and introspective, a keen and insightful observer of the society around him, but at the same time, like any adolescent, he finds the motives and opinions of others inscrutable. As he attempts to suss out his place in the social structure and the extent to which his sexual desires and social longing are normal and realizable, he weathers the sort of awkward fumblings, misunderstandings, humiliations and hurt feelings that all young people must plow through. While it was certainly no picnic being gay in the ’50s, it’s really never much fun being a teenager of any persuasion, anytime, anywhere.

Most writers were heavy readers first; most heavy readers eventually try their hand at writing. Some successful writers pick up their trade through osmosis, but most need to carefully study their predecessors, to parse their work and identify precisely how they pulled it off. Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer explains (largely by example) how to be a close reader, mostly with the aim of instructing would-be writers in how to model their own prose. She begins, appropriately, with words, moves onto sentences and then paragraphs; after examining the basic components of text itself, she discusses the larger elements of fiction writing. She also includes an entire chapter raving about Chekhov, simply because she’s totally nuts for him. Nothing wrong with that.

Prose loves reading, and this book makes you want to read, even if her devotion to meticulous close reading makes the entire endeavor seem as exhausting as it is exhaustive. Personally, I am not a close reader. I am a frantic reader. While I appreciate Prose’s call to read less and better, I can’t get over feeling like I’m racing the clock. There are only so many books you can get through in a lifetime, and there are an infinite number of books I really want to read. Since graduating from college, I have never once reread a book, which is, of course, a shame. If anyone should feel at leisure to read closely and carefully, it would be me, as I currently have nothing but free time, but still, I read quickly, in gulps. Which, incidentally, is the best way to read non-fiction (or at least, to read non-fiction for informational purposes).

But fiction is about the read itself. Prose says, of reading Chekhov on a long daily bus commute during a particularly dismal period of her life:

Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as well as the answer to those who say that books will disappear. For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on the bus.

This slim book, edited by Toni Morrison, has eleven short essays originally delivered by various PEN writers on the issue of “censorship and the power of the written word.” There’s an interesting divide here between the authors whose subjects have not generally been political (John Updike, Francine Prose, Russell Banks) and those writers who live and work in turbulent or repressive areas (whether they grew up in these areas, or have traveled widely in them) (Morrison, Pico Iyer, Orhan Pamuk, Nadine Gorimer). The first group tends to talk about the literary crappiness of novels written specifically to draw attention to some cause, or to protest an outrage. They emphasize the importance of literature as an observant and non-judgmental work of art.

Banks:

A true novelist. . . has no thought of his or her audience. . . . Not when submitting oneself to the discipline and rigor and tradition of the history of the form, which require that one be at all times wholly honest and nonjudgmental and as intelligent as possible – that one be, as Henry James prescribed, a person ‘on whom nothing is lost.’

Prose:

The polemicist, or the theorist, or the strategist would have trouble with the stance that Chekhov identified as basic for the artist. That is, the notion that writers must admit they understand nothing of life, that nothing in this world makes sense, so all a writer can do is to try and describe it.

The second group, while often agreeing with the first, tends to focus more on the revolutionary potential of the written word, and on the absolute indignity and intolerability of censorship. Both groups essentially agree with each other: the job of writers is to mirror what is true, and nothing – no cause or party or regime or nation or event – that impedes this truth-telling can be tolerated. So that when Orhan Pamuk (whose essay was, in my opinion, one of the most interesting) writes about Turkey, he is writing what he sees in the society where he lives. Whether or not he intends to make an overtly political statement (and if his book is to be of any interest, hopefully, making a political statement would not be his purpose in writing it), his work might still be censored by those who don’t agree with or like the reality it reflects.

Pamuk:

Whatever the country, freedom of thought and expression are universal human rights. These freedoms, which modern people long for as much as bread and water, should never be limited by using nationalist sentiment, moral sensitivities, or – worst of all – business or military interests. If many nations outside the West suffer poverty in shame, it is not because they have freedom of expression but because they don’t. . . . Yes, we must be alert to those who denigrate immigrants and minorities for their religion, their ethnic roots, or the oppression that the governments of the countries they’ve left behind have visited on their own people.

But to respect the humanity and religious beliefs of minorities is not to suggest hat we should limit freedom of thought on their behalf. Respect for the rights of religious or ethnic minorities should never be an excuse to violate freedom of speech.

The only form of activism appropriate for writers (when they are acting in the capacity of “writer” rather than, say, that of “citizen”) is witnessing, and it’s pretty much impossible to write anything of merit without witnessing. On that, it seems all these contributors agree.

Gordimer:

The extremity of human experience does not make a writer.

Updike:

To be sure, as a citizen, one votes, attends meetings, subscribes to liberal pieties, pays or withholds taxes, and contributes to charities . . . But as a writer, for me to attempt to expand my artistic scope into all the areas of my human concern, to substitute nobility of purpose for accuracy of execution, would certainly be to forfeit whatever social usefulness I do have.

I can’t decide if I like Dave Eggers, or not. I love McSweeney’s Internet Tendency (well, sometimes), and I mostly love The Believer, but I do not generally like the stories published in the McSweeney’s Quarterly, nor am I interested in the books printed under the McSweeney’s imprint. At the same time, I appreciate the whole McSweeney’s publishing philosophy, and the ground they have broken for small presses and internet publishing. As to Eggers’ work itself, I have not read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but have heard enough about it to have a predisposition to dislike it. I feel most people whose tastes I share and whose opinions I admire do not care for Eggers’ books.

As to Vindela Vida, I read Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, and I both liked it and didn’t. I thought it was original and well-written, and I loved the frigid, remote Lapland setting – both because it was descriptive of an area I’d never read anything about, and because it worked perfectly for the book’s subject matter. On the other hand, I disliked the protagonist. I couldn’t at all get a sense of who she was, and I felt she wasn’t honest or open. It’s weird to read a book written in the first person, wherein the protagonist’s attitude is ‘Sigh, I really don’t want to talk about this, but since you ask.’ Particularly, because I usually don’t feel this is an authorial choice; rather, it’s a persona a lot of cool young people my age have adopted, which I find extremely alienating in person, and which is now reflected in many of the characters dreamt up by the same people who currently freeze you if you try to talk to them at Brooklyn parties. I find people intimidating enough; I don’t need to be snubbed by my books. I started reading in the first place because I found characters far more relatable than people, but with the McSweeney’s crew, I often feel the books themselves are judging me.

Which brings me to Away We Go (directed by Sam Mendes, and co-written by Eggers and Vida). Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) are pregnant. Currently, they live in a shack of a house in Colorado, where they moved to be close to Burt’s parents. When they announce their pregnancy, however, Burt’s parents reveal that they are moving to Belgium. Thus, Burt and Verona are confronted with the whitest problem ever made into a two-hour movie: where in America would be best for two young people whose jobs are of a nature to enable them to make a living pretty much anywhere, and who have no limiting ties or hindrances, to settle down and raise a family? And so, the young couple hits the road, to visit old friends and audition cities.

The acting is far and away the best part of this movie. Rudolph and Krasinski are adorable, and every last supporting character does a fantastic job of portraying characters that are cartoonish but recognizable (particularly Allison Janney, as a braying, heavy drinking, inappropriate Mom, and Maggie Gyllenhaal as a drippingly condescending, New Age Earth mother). Everybody is a real sport about committing to dialogue that is frequently clunky or cliched. And – glory, glory, fabulousness! – the women all get to play interesting and hilarious character roles (albeit, as part of a never-ending parade of despicable or pathetically failed mothers).

The writing, on the other hand, ranges from ignorable to grating. There are twee details a-plenty (Verona and her sister climb into a model bathtub in a furniture showroom to cuddle each other and cry about their dead mom) and tortuously written monologues that go on and on, sounding like nothing anyone would ever say (an absolutely astoundingly stupid lecture involving pancake-syrup-as-metaphor-for-ties-that-bind, and Verona’s story of her family’s fruit tree, which made me feel like I was back in a ‘How to score that callback!’ monologue workshop).

But the biggest problem in Away We Go is that it has no problem at all…and doesn’t realize it. The movie would have been fine as a straight up smart comedy, but Eggers and Vida have twisted what is essentially a nothing dilemma (which city do we pick to have our baby in?) into an agonizing journey. But where’s the agony? Particularly because, in the end (SPOILER ALERT), the couple realizes they can simply live in Verona’s (deceased) parents’ gorgeous old mansion on lakefront property, which they already own!

We should all have such problems.

Full disclosure: I have never read John Updike before, but I have always been pretty much bound and determined to dislike him. Having long heard all about how little he thinks of women, and how misogynist his writings usually are, I was predisposed to hate him. But since he’s John-freaking-Updike, he’s always been on my to-read list. So, I recently finally read Of the Farm. I figured it was good to start with, because it’s very short, and because DFW mentioned (in an essay about how awful and misogynist Updike is) that it’s one of the better of Updike’s works.

And what did I think of it? Frankly, I don’t know! I’ve simply always been so prejudiced against Updike that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to read him objectively. If Ian McEwan wrote this book, I might have liked it. I simply don’t know.

Of the Farm is about Joey Robinson visiting his aging mother on the family’s TK-acre farm in Olinger, PA. Joey brings his new wife, Peggy, who he divorced his previous wife, Joan, in order to marry, and her 11-year-old son, Richard. Naturally, Joey has a contentious relationship with his mother – particularly, she dislikes his wives. Now that he is divorced from Joan, his mother is all happy nostalgia for her and the two children of the previous marriage, which makes an already awkward visit even moreso. She (his mother) is quite sick, and has asked Joey to come and do the mowing on the farm she is no longer able to do. This farm is her baby; her husband, Joey’s father, never wanted the farm and he was not suited to work it. There’s a lot of accusation that Joey’s mother’s insistence on farm life killed the long-suffering family patriarch.

The family alternates between dancing stiffly around each other, and full out brawling, which frankly, I can’t relate to. I know that some families go at it in earnest, but it’s not the way I was raised. Forgive the absolute WASPishness of my saying I don’t understand people who can’t even keep their rage bottled up for a four-day visit – particularly when there’s no major catalyst to force things to a head. And after the four hundredth time somebody predicted death and dismemberment if the kid was permitted to drive the tractor. . . well, forgive me, but I expected to see the freaking kid drive the tractor at some point! Chekov’s gun, Updike. Chekov’s gun.

Also, I might be too much a product of the literary phase during which I was raised to appreciate Updike. His prose seems absolutely florid to me; his total seriousness embarrassing. I enjoyed the dialogue, but man, some of the descriptive passages:

. . . butterflies loped and bobbed above the flattened grass as the hands of a mute concubine might examine, flutteringly, the corpse of her giant lover.

Seriously?

Tama Janowitz, if you haven’t heard of her, is a novelist who, as far as I can surmise, accidentally achieved it-girl status for awhile back in the 80s, because she happened to make friends with Andy Warhol and the two of them, plus another woman, had weekly ‘blind date’ dinners where each of them had to bring a likely date for the others (none of these dates ever worked out). After Warhol’s death, Janowitz faded from view, and it seems that whenever she opens her mouth nowadays, she pisses everyone off. She’s kind of Sarah Silverman-ish with the un-P.C. comments, although I don’t think Janowitz does it to provoke; it just doesn’t occur to her that anyone would bother to be offended.

I recently read a fat book of short, humorous essays by Janowitz, Area Code 212. The essays focus mainly on life in New York as a semi-famous but not particularly fashionable person, tiny dogs, ferrets, Janowitz’s adopted Chinese daughter, Prospect Park, Andy Warhol, unmanageable hair, and food. I thought most of them were great fun, although I think the entire book could be condensed into five long developed essays – a lot of these are repetitious and many of them blurbs that don’t seem to be at all thought out.  I’m pretty sure Janowitz would be a lot of fun to hang out with – though she was in the in-crowd at a hot time in NYC history, she mainly just exclaims about all the free fancy food she got to eat.

Area Code 212 is aptly named; Janowitz seems to be one of those people who came straight to NYC as soon as possible, and then never left it. The above list of topics could also serve as her bio. Still, if you have to narrow your entire scope to a single topic, New York – sprawling, ever-evolving – is a good one. New York is also one of those places that was always way more fun right before you got there. I am forever jealous of the many phases of its past, and wishing I had arrived in any earlier decade. Although, no matter when I came to NYC, I’d likely shy as far away from the scene as I do now, so it would probably make no difference.

I was leafing through my roommate’s Glamour whilst sitting on the pot the other day, and came across an article, in which some loser purchases a Ukrainian bride and doesn’t beat her. ‘I didn’t want a submissive woman,’ the dude defensively claims multiple times — just one 23 years his junior, vastly more attractive than him, and entirely economically dependent. This is presented as a great love story by the bought bride in question (who wrote the article), although Glamour does include a sidebar in which it admits that the vast majority of boughten brides are thoroughly beaten, raped, exploited and usually trafficked, rather than simply having to sleep with an ugly, old, socially inept dude once or twice a month in exchange for citizenship and keep. You might think that a women’s magazine would focus on the main problem of trafficked women, rather than highlight the rare happy exception, but perhaps that’s expecting too much from a fashion magazine.

Anyway, Petropolis by Anya Ulinich is about Sasha, a young woman who comes of age in the impoverished Asbestos 2 district of Russia. Her father booked it to America long ago, and her mother, stubbornly clinging to her status as a member of the intelligentsia even as post-Soviet Russia disintegrates around her, is determined Sasha become a successful artist. Art is the one area in which Sasha shows much interest and some small capability, but unfortunately, before she can do much with it, she gets pregnant at age 15. Her mother insists the newborn baby remain with her in Asbestos 2 while Sasha attends art school in Moscow, but Sasha is devastated by the separation from her daughter.

Impulsively, Sasha enrolls in a mail-order bride service and immediately decamps to Arizona with the vague idea of sending for her daughter. When her new husband turns out to be less financially capable than she’d hoped, she runs away, and begins an odyssey across America in search of her father that leads her much farther astray than she expected.

Petropolis is a charming book with a unique, believable and sympathetic heroine. Chubby, Jewish, biracial and Russian, Sasha fits in exactly nowhere, but then, no one she meets seems much more comfortable in their own skin than she is. From a young age, Sasha is forced to know herself and her priorities very well, so that, no matter how wild and unplanned her journey, she proceeds with sturdy fortitude and level head. An impoverished mail-order bride from a blighted town in middle-of-nowhere Russia, Sasha is the very definition of needy. But while she spends the entire book looking for aid, in the end, she doesn’t really end up finding (or needing) it. Ironically, it is Sasha herself who proves best able to help those she applies to, proving that impoverishment comes in all stripes and everyone everywhere – from Asbestos 2 to Brooklyn – gets a share.

I was unable to make it past the first thirty-some pages of this ridiculous little book. Eric G. Wilson seems to confuse people’s behavior in public and in company with their innermost thoughts and private lives. Because people overwhelmingly try to be cheerful, impersonal good sports who make small talk around the water cooler at work, Wilson has written a book about how Americans have doped, numbed and otherwise blinded themselves to all the horrors of life, as well as the benefits of good old contemplative down time. Apparently, when someone says, “I’m fine,” Wilson takes them at their word, and assumes that’s all there is to them, and Against Happiness is written at about that level of understanding. I do think that American culture is overly averse to and avoidant of pain, so I was expecting to be the choir for this book, but the author’s observations of human behavior are entirely surface-level and generalized, and his arguments are condescending and shallow. Wilson writes as if he were a 14-year-old Goth. He also seems to have no sense of humor or self-awareness. To wit:

Look at what sort of people this culture is creating. I have seen them. You have too. They haunt the gaudy and garish spaces of the world and ignore the dark margins. They tilt their heads to the side, feign bemusement, and nod knowingly. They clinch their eyes in looks of concern. They blink a lot, bewildered.

In my experience, this is how people look when they’re hoping you’ll go away and leave them alone, so it doesn’t much surprise me that Wilson observes it in everyone.

Wilson cites a statistic saying that 85% of Americans say they are generally happy, which he takes as a further condemnation of our doped, forced cheeriness – particularly amusing to me, as usually you hear social criticism about how Americans are so entitled and dissatisfied that they are never happy with their lives, that no matter how much they get what they want, they are always wanting more.

“Aren’t some of us so smitten with the American dream that we have become brainwashed into believing that our sole purpose on this earth is to be happy?” asks Wilson in his introduction.

Well, no. Not really. I mean, I might say that we overvalue personal happiness. I would certainly say that we demand too much to make us happy (although, that 85% statistic makes me think twice). But I don’t think even my shallowest acquaintances would go so far as to say the purpose of life is to be happy. And anyway, what is meant by “happy” in that context? People say they just want to die happy, but I think they mean by that to die with a sense that they’ve lived fully, loved well, had some good times, and did the best work they could. Or whatever – they could mean anything, but Wilson doesn’t care what people mean, apparently. He’s constructed quite the chipper straw man for himself to lecture. Later, he himself describes truly experiencing sorrow as in itself “something akin to joy,” but apparently, he doesn’t credit other people who say they are “happy” with meaning anything beyond vapid, superficial cheer.  What Wilson fails to acknowledge is that being content and happy with your life does not mean you don’t experience pain, suffering, heartbreak or existential struggle – those things are all a part of a good life, though it’s unlikely you’d bring them up much at a cocktail party.

He also contradicts himself constantly (at times within a single paragraph!), and often employs the royal ‘we.’ Frankly, I’m amazed I made it as far as I did.

Also, a request: could some psychiatrist please take aside all the thinkers and writers, pundits and journalists in America and explain to them that depression (even mild depression) is not the same as sadness, and that SSRIs are not uppers? It’s true we are an over-medicated country, which is undoubtedly harmful to our health (and certainly our pocketbooks), but antidepressants are not happy pills. They don’t make people high, or give them a boost, or make it to where they don’t feel pain or sorrow. The only thing more widespread than the prescribing of SSRIs is apparently a complete and total misunderstanding among the public of what they actually do, what they’re for and how they work. In fact, Wilson is careful to differentiate between (a) depression as an interchangeable term for melancholia and (b) clinical depression in his introduction, but he goes on to assume that the vast majority of those medicated for depression are simply blue. Well, possibly, but that’s a giant, sweeping assumption, and Wilson should provide some basis for it. Rather, he assumes everyone agrees that this is true and proceeds to mention ‘happy pills’ about five times a page. But antidepressants are not painkillers any more than they are uppers – they don’t work that way. You could argue that we drink too much, smoke too much weed, but Wilson doesn’t mention this (at least not in the first 40 pages). He specifically says that it’s not his intent to romanticize clinical depression, but then he rues the possible loss of “half-cracked geniuses.”

Now, look, obviously a lot of great artists, writers and the like have suffered (and usually, eventually died) from terrible psychological conditions, and it’s no new thing to muse over whether, had so-and-so been medicated, we would have been deprived of such-and-such great work of art or literature. But if it were a choice between a medicated Virginia Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway, the decision would be Virginia Woolf’s, not ours. She might have made a valid choice either way, but simply because she was capable of great writing does not mean that she owed it to us at the expense of her life. If she’d had the option to staunch her depression at the risk of blocking her creativity, that would be her choice and we couldn’t make it for her. And Wilson would be a real asshole to criticize Woolf if she chose her own health (and yes, happiness) over her productivity…unless he were similarly possessed of crippling depression and fervid genius and so knew whereof he spoke, but judging by this book, I doubt it’s a choice he’ll ever face.

Attention, male writers: unless you particularly plan to alienate your readership, try not to cram a bunch of pointless derogatory comments about women into the first ten pages of your book, unless that’s really what you’re all about. I’ve noticed this with a number of books lately – I’ll get all alienated in the first chapter, and decide not to read the rest, and then keep going only to find the entire rest of the book totally devoid of casual misogyny. It’s so weird! I noticed this in Lost Cosmonaut, and now here in David Rakoff’s book of humorous essays, Don’t Get Too Comfortable. In the first essay, “Love It or Leave It,” about applying for citizenship during the latter Bush administration, on page 2, we have:

After twenty-two years, it seemed a little bit coy to still be playing the Canadian card. I felt like the butt of the joke about the proper lady who, when asked if she would have sex with a strange man for a million dollars, allows that yes she would do it. But when asked if she would do the same thing for a can of Schlitz and a plastic sleeve of beer nuts, reels back with an affronted, ‘What do you think I am?’ to which the response is, ‘Madam, we have already established what you are. Now we’re just quibbling about the price.’

On page 7, Barbara Bush the Younger is described (to absolutely no point whatsoever) as “W’s liquor-swilling, Girl Gone Wild, human ashtray of a daughter.” Particularly gratuitous, as Rakoff’s real beef is with Barbara, Sr. (page 8: “Stupid fucking cow.”).

Admittedly, on page 8, we do have a derogatory physical description of a man: “The hairy-knuckled, pinkie-ringed lawyer for a Vietnamese fellow behind me….” No mention of the man’s genitals, of course, or sexual appeal or lack thereof, but still, not exactly a flattering comment. But then on page 9, we’re back to women, describing a “Russian woman in her early forties” who has the misfortune to be standing on line nearby:

She wears painted-on acid-wash jeans, white stilettos, and a tight blouse of sheer leopard-print fabric. The sleeves are designed as a series of irregular tatters clinging to her arms, as if she’s just come from tearing the hide off the back of an actual leopard. A really slutty leopard.

It’s safe to assume that leopard was also female.

But here on page 9, we also have our first woman appear without being described physically, or with any tossed-off, irrelevant sexual slurs attached to her person. This is Agent Morales, who interviews Rakoff for citizenship. Then, by page 11, we’re on to Rakoff’s friend, Sarah (who, based on her introduction as “a self-described civics nerd,” I’m assuming is Sarah Vowell), and nobody describes their friends as pointless and/or distasteful vaginas, so we’re in the clear.

And that’s it, for the rest of the book’s 222 pages: no more offensive comments about women, at least not that reached out of the pages and slapped me, like these first ones. In fact, I really enjoyed the book after page 10. The essays were tart, well-written, observant and entertaining. Why the packed in slurs up front?

So, the moral here is: writers and editors (whether male, female, gay, straight or other): when you have your manuscript all ready for publishing, go through at least the first twenty pages or so, with an eye to how you describe or comment on any women mentioned, as contrasted with how you describe or comment on any men. If you note that every, single woman you bring up is described as a slut, a bitch, a stupid bimbo, a nag, or has been physically detailed for no specific reason (ugly, fat, wart-faced, saggy-boobed, clothes too tight, past her prime, sex on legs, etc.), and that every man is described in terms of his personality traits and actions, then think about whether or not you genuinely want half the population to toss you and your book right out at that point. Because not all readers are as patient as I am. A lot of women won’t make it to page 11. And I’d like to think some men wouldn’t either.

I really don’t direct the above rant particularly at David Rakoff. His is only the most recent book I’ve read to follow this off-putting pattern. But really, Don’t Get Too Comfortable is great otherwise. Rakoff is a sharp and articulate social satirist, and his targets aren’t the easy ones. If there is a unifying theme to these essays, I would say it is what we desire and what we buy, and why, and what we tell ourselves about it, with occasional diversions into the weird and often unpleasant things people like to do for fun. He has drawn a bead on class hypocrisy, and conspicuous consumption. He covers foodies, high fashion, fasting, plastic surgery, cryogenics and Puppetry of the Penis. He goes along on a Playboy shoot, attends a midnight scavenger hunt in Manhattan, forages for edible plants in Prospect Park and works as a pool boy at an upscale resort. He waits outside the Today Show, visits Martha Stewart’s crafts department, and shadows the director of the mystifying Log Cabin Republicans.

Fun stuff, all. With the above-mentioned caveat, I’d recommend it.

The essays in Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist are all very well written, and interesting, more or less. But yet, something about them bothered me, and I think I put my finger on it right around the time Lethem mentioned that when he was a kid in Brooklyn, he used to ride the subway every day to his performing arts school, with his friend and classmate, Lynn Nottage. Many of the essays in this book concern New York City, and life in New York City. The rest are meditations on books and movies.

Lethem was raised by a well-known painter. His mother died when he was 13. He lived in a commune for part of his upbringing. He spent his childhood surrounded by his parents’ Bohemian friends, and went to an arts high school in New York with a bunch of other students who have gone on to be known names. They were raised in an interesting place by interesting people, and taught from a young age that they were bound to be interesting themselves. In the same way as some people are raised in wealth, others are raised in art, and all these writers, playwrights, actors, etc. were to the manor born. There’s nothing wrong with Lethem’s writing or what he’s writing about, and it’s not like he’s never left New York – why, he went to Bennington, then lived in California! – but yet, I was bored by his well-written meditations on the various movies, writers and filmmakers that shaped him, as well as his experiences in a Brooklyn not sufficiently long gone to be so nostalgic about (Lethem was only about 40 when this essay collection was published).

You do not have to live an interesting life in order to be an interesting writer. Perhaps you have to live an interesting life to be an interesting personal essayist, however, or, barring that, at least be really funny. Certainly, you can write great fiction no matter how narrow and dull your circle, and Lethem has mostly been feted for his novels, none of which I’ve read, although I plan to at some point. Reading these essays, however, made me feel like I was sitting in a grad school MFA workshop listening to everyone read essays about being graduate MFA students, and reminiscing fondly about those long-ago days when they were but callow undergrads.

John Leonard in the New York Review of Books:

I’m glad to learn from The Disappointment Artist that Lethem’s father is more interesting than Dylan’s was; that his mother, unlike Dylan’s, didn’t abandon her boy out of narcissism; that Jonathan, unlike Dylan, has siblings. And I am sorry that none of us can fly, besides which we’re opaque. But it is time this gifted writer closed his comic books for good. Superpowers are not what magic realism was about in Bulgakov, Kobo Abe, Salman Rushdie, or the Latin American flying carpets. That Michael Chabon and Paul Auster have gone graphic, that one Jonathan, Lethem, writes on and on about John Ford, while another Jonathan, Franzen, writes on and on about “Peanuts,” even as Rick Moody confides to the Times Book Review that “comics are currently better at the sociology of the intimate gesture than literary fiction is,” may just mean that the slick magazines with the scratch and sniff ads for vodka and opium are willing to pay a bundle for bombast about ephemera.

But all of it makes me itch. Welcome to New Dork! We have been airpopped and multimediated unto inanity and pastiche.

Troy Timmens is a hard-luck soul. His ex-wife was a hard-core drug addict, and ran off, leaving him with their son, Loomis, a steady, serious, well-behaved little boy. Troy supplements his income working as a bartender with a modest amount of drug selling. When he’s busted one night, his son is given to his mother-in-law, Judy, and he’s placed under house arrest for a year. Judy despises Troy and will not allow him any contact with his son. Troy fears he will not be able to regain custody.

Jonah Dolye is a much harder-luck soul. As a small boy being raised by his ancient grandfather and mentally ill mother, Nora Doyle, Jonah is severely mauled by the family’s Doberman. Years later, after his mother’s suicide, Jonah moves to Chicago with few job skills and fewer social skills, to earn a degree and try to make some social connections. When he fails on both counts, he hires an agency to locate his half-brother, given up for adoption by his mother in the ’60s, in hopes that the biological link will somehow provide him with family.

Dan Chaon’s You Remind Me of Me is about connections, both forged and forced, and about the difficulty of jolting our lives out of a track. It is a very good book, particularly in the carefully drawn characters, but after finishing it, I was struck with how little humor there is in it. At all. Not that that’s a bad thing, necessarily, but it’s just surprising to me – you rarely see a book that so steadily refrains from even a single moment of wryness or sarcasm. Both Jonah and Troy get one hard knock after another, but neither of them ever displays a tint of self-aware levity about it all. Chaon’s book questions whether nature or circumstances contributes more to our fate, but perhaps the biggest shared characteristic of Troy and Jonah is their utter inability to step outside themselves for a minute.

Finding herself divorced for the second time, Catherine Hubbard quits her job as a schoolteacher in San Francisco, and returns to her grandmother Georgia’s long-abandoned Vermont house to lick her wounds. Cath, whose mother killed herself, grew up at her grandparents’, and she has fond memories of their idyllic marriage and peaceful, uncomplicated lives. Holed up in the old house, Cath reads through Georgia’s old diaries and discovers that the roots of her grandparents’ relationship were not as innocent and simple as she had assumed. Georgia had a secret that so defined her and her options in her own time, that it is positively infuriating and heartbreaking to read in our time, and the perceived simplicity of her life was a result of the smothering narrowness of her options. As Georgia’s story unfolds, Cath learns that peace and placidity are only achieved through stern determination.

If you wonder how Cath feels or what she thinks about any of this, she will tell you: in great detail and in great length until there is not a single shade of thought or emotion left for you to intuit. This narrator explains, explains, explains. In The World Below, Sue Miller leaves no chance for even the most obtuse reader to miss a single aspect of her point, and as a result, the book exhausted me. I felt like I had been forced to listen to a very loquacious person tell me a five-minute story over several hours. While Georgia’s story is interesting, the majority of the novel is Cath nattering on and on about herself, until you begin to wonder why you ever made friends with this woman and when you’ll ever be able to get off the phone. The novel is rich, with an impressive structure, artful parallels and careful details; unfortunately, Miller’s narrator won’t shut up long enough for the reader to appreciate them.