The Sense of an Ending, as mentioned by kevinfromcanada and hungrylikethewoolf, is a book about memory and contemplation.  It is a slim book, less than 200 pages, but it packs a lot of meaning in its small frame.  It won the Man Booker Prize, so I guess that means it is properly literary and British all at once. The writing is technically excellent. What do I mean by that?  I mean Barnes is obviously a master of language and narrative.  The prose is precision crafted.  It has to be to fit that much weight in a novella. All of that being said, I still felt that the book isn’t complete.  It seems like a really well-written character study on the idea of the unreliable narrator, but I turned the last page and said, “Seriously?  That’s it?”  I enjoyed the book.  I’m glad I read it.  I just don’t think it lives up to the hype. I’m certainly in the minority.

If The Sense of an Ending is properly literary and British, The Devil All the Time is properly hard-boiled and hellish.  I don’t know if that comparison works, but it’s the best I can do.  I’ve described The Devil All the Time to friends in the following two ways:

1. It’s brutal.
2. It’s David Lynch meets Rob Zombie in West Virginia.

Pollock’s book takes the Southern Gothic to new and bizarre lows.  The book is soaked through with violence and suffering.  The characters are essentially a testament to the depravity of humankind- a man broken by war and loss, a serial killer, a statutory rapist preacher, a corrupt small town cop, and several lonely women who just go along with it all.  I want to call the characters absurdly tragic, but as I was reading the book the national news reported that a man hit his two sons with a hatchet and set their trailer on fire killing them all in a murder-suicide.  That would fit in this book.  Pollock offers the reader a little twisted humor here and there.  He has a superb sense of timing and lets the reader come up for air right before it all gets to be too much, but he has no mercy for his characters.  What’s disconcerting is that the book is engrossing.  You want to know what happens to these people, although you don’t care if it’s something terrible.  In some cases you may want something terrible to happen to them.  On top of all of that, Pollock’s prose captures each disturbing scene perfectly.  There’s a sinewy beauty to it.

How do you judge those two books against one another in the Tournament of Books?  Emma Straub is the judge.  She has a Tumblr full of nice, cuddly things.   I’m guessing The Devil All the Time doesn’t have a chance. The Sense of an Ending is certainly the more literary book, but The Devil All the Time is the more creative and daring.  The Sense of an Ending is heavy with the idea of how we remember our lives and how we come to terms with how we behaved.  It is more concise and personal.  The Devil All the Time is heavy with the idea of how humankind desperately wants and needs redemption from our unyielding depravity.  It is bigger, messy, and abstract. The Sense of an Ending is a book award type of book.  The Devil All the Time isn’t, but I think I will remember it longer.

Anyone who believes that you can make art from language is part of a small, nearly-vanishing community, and we should all form a wedge and march on the enemy. Do we need different uniforms in this struggle, different stripes on our arms so that it’s clear who the realists are? Maybe, but I care less and less. I find myself fascinated by various techniques of fiction writing, and ever since early college I have tried to read all across the divides, before I even know there were divides. I love what William Trevor can do with a short story, and at the same time David Markson is staggeringly brilliant to me: the simplest language, yet utterly original on the page. We are in a time when narrative tradition is getting honed and exquisitely refined by the novelists who are considered major: very subtle improvements on an established method. But the premise of art is that writers will seek new methods to reach people with language. This isn’t experimental at all: it’s traditional. It’s a tradition for artists to push forward and try to do new things. Such a project has defined the making of art from the very beginning. There’s nothing more traditional than that.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

I started with State of Wonder mainly because the hype around the book suggests that it has a good chance to go far in the tournament.  It is a modern Heart of Darkness-style journey into the jungle by a middle aged pharmacologist to find an elusive doctor working on a wonder drug for her pharmaceutical company.  The pharmaceutical company wants to know when they will see a return on investment. Though the concept borrows from Conrad, the details and Patchett’s prose are original enough to make the journey-into-the-dark-in-order-to-find-one’s-self  all new and interesting.  The setting and atmosphere are engrossing.  There were a few too many deus ex machina, but that is typical in adventure stories.  Overall, I enjoyed the book.

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

I never imagined reading a literary book about baseball, campus life, and literature.  Of course, The Art of Fielding isn’t really about baseball, campus life, and literature. It just uses those things as metaphors for life… or something.  There were parts of this book that I enjoyed, but overall it just felt overly contrived and way… too… long.  As a former high school coach, I can say I have never met a baseball player who would be accepting of a openly gay teammate who reads books in the dugout with a booklight on his cap.  It just wouldn’t happen.  The book seems to move between wanting to be a satire and a serious drama.  Overall, I thought it was likeable but uneven.    It’s paired against Open City  in the first round, and then it will likely face The Marriage Plot.  I haven’t read Green Girl  or The Marriage Plot, so I’m making that assumption based solely on Eugenides’ reputation. As always, much depends on the TOB judges.

The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht

Of the three contenders I have read so far, I like The Tiger’s Wife the best. As the protagonist, Natalia, searches for meaning in the circumstances of her grandfather’s death and his love of tigers, she finds a mix of stories within stories, folktales, Balkan history, and a cast of intriguing characters.  It becomes difficult to tell what really happened and what has been imagined through time and lore.  I think it is a beautiful book. I’m afraid its downfall in the tournament may be a judge who doesn’t like the fable and allegorical qualities of the book and would rather choose something grounded in realistic circumstances.  The Tiger’s Wife faces The Stranger’s Child in the first round.

I’m working on The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes now.

The overriding theme is the need to make things right with the past, but the harder RASL tries the higher the cost to himself.  There is some Native American imagery regarding life being a maze, and the time jumping lends to the theme.  There is the recurring image of a pebble being dropped in water and the resultant ripples.  It reads like a blend of Raymond Chandler, Hunter S. Thompson, and LOST. Good, dark  fun all around.

The series is steeped in mystery, and Smith is a master of cliffhangers.  I don’t want to give away much of the plot because the mystery of it all is what drives the series.   Rumors are circulating on the interwebs that the series will come to an explosive conclusion in 2012 or 2013.  Issues 1-11 have been collected in three volumes.

I thought the biography was fairly extensive (roughly 400 pages) and paced well.  Vonnegut was shaped by a series of complicated events and Shields does a good job documenting those critical events: his childhood marked by his family’s fall from fortune during the Great Depression and as a result his mother’s suicide; the struggle between his brother’s excellence at science and his desire to write; his experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden, which most people know later became the critical impetus for his most beloved novel, Slaughter-House Five; excelling as a PR man for General Electric; and his sister and brother-in-law’s tragic deaths that led Vonnegut to adopt their three children, which placed six children total under his wife at the time, Jane, and his care.

Shields does an especially good job capturing Vonnegut’s struggles as a new writer with a family of six children.  Vonnegut was diligent in his writing regime, waking every morning and hunching over his typewriter for hours.  It was the era of magazines, and Vonnegut paid his dues selling stories.  Vonnegut’s novels didn’t come easily, but he followed his morning writing ritual for much of his life.  Shields gives critical analyses of Vonnegut’s early novels, but his later novels don’t receive as much attention.  Vonnegut was troubled by critics for much of his career, but especially with his later work.

I also found Vonnegut’s experiences at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop especially interesting.  It was that experience that ultimately gave him the inspiration and motivation to complete Slaughterhouse-Five.  I was also unaware that Vonnegut taught and befriended many great writers, like John Irving and one of my favorites, Andre Dubus.  It was the first time that he felt like part of the literary community.  His time at the workshop also led to an extra-marital affair that sped the end of his already stressed first marriage.

Writer Naeem Murr once told me, when he was the writer-in-residence at my my college, he didn’t think it was a good idea for artists to have children, because the art often takes everything the artist has.  If you look at the lives of famous writers, you’ll find that this is often true.  Vonnegut was no exception.  Though he had enduring relationships with his wives and children, those relationships were often strained due to his work and his life-long battle with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

Shields begins the book with an appropriate quote from Vonnegut’s Wampeters, Foma & Granfallons (1974), “I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction.  And I myself am a work of fiction.”  That quote sums up what I found most revealing about the biography.  Much of Vonnegut’s image among his loyal readers, myself included, is part of the fiction.  Vonnegut was on the cutting of edge of the new metafiction technique in literature, and he became popular during the 1960s.  Shields writes about the film adaptation of Mother Night:

…in the film, Vonnegut is not there to intervene the way he could in metafiction—there is no safe, ironic distance in the storytelling—so that the film Mother Night unfolds pretty much as straight drama.  The problem, Vonnegut later came to realize, was that filmed versions of his novels are one character short: himself.

Placing a fictional character of himself in his books is what makes them great, but the demand for that fictional character on speaking tours, as a creative writing teacher, and during interviews was something Vonnegut often wrestled with throughout life.  Shields touches on that struggle throughout the biography:

His readers assumed the voice they trusted in the novels was rooted in a combination of wisdom and sophistication, but the truth was different.  Vonnegut was more like his readers than they could have guessed.  His themes of community and extended family for persons who are naïve or lonely had much to do with how he saw himself, and he idealized some of his boyhood.  His summers at Lake Maxinkuckee had been his communal paradise lost…

I didn’t find the fact that Vonnegut was sometimes sad, cruel, or distant surprising.  He’s human.  If you’ve ever read his nonfiction essays, you will see all of those things, as well as humor, love, and kindness.  What I found most surprising were the seeming contradictions between how his readers viewed him and his conservative nature.  For example, Vonnegut was a shrewd investor in companies like Dow Chemical and Texas International Drilling Funds.  Shields explains that Vonnegut didn’t object to capitalism, but the use of capitalism to “justify the power of the rich over the poor.”  Vonnegut’s views of sexuality and society were also relatively conservative.  Shields writes:

Unfortunately, many of his younger readers and fans misjudged him…Sometimes their wrong impression created awkward, man-behind-the-curtain moments when at last they saw him in person.  In the spring of 1972, for instance, he spent one morning at West Point visiting classes and in the afternoon delivered a lecture.  At the end of the lecture, a cadet who had been looking forward to the event approached him. “And he said, ‘I can’t imagine you wrote those books,’ and I had, I swear to God I had, but I was not the man he thought should have written those books.”

Vonnegut was a brilliant PR man.  He created his own image, much like Mark Twain, which is discussed in the book as well.  Whether that image conflicts with him in reality doesn’t matter.  His work stands on its own.  In fact, that image is part of the artistry.  I believe much of the controversy over this biography is unwarranted.  Krementz and Mark Vonnegut may use the premise that they are defending Kurt’s image, but the truth is they are likely more worried about how they are portrayed.  Shields’ work is heavily annotated and documented.  Anyone who is a fan of Vonnegut should read this biography.

If you like Blade Runner, you really owe it to yourself to read the book or comic.  Both the film and novel are excellent, but they are really two different animals (pun intended).  The film is very character driven and its thematic focus is very narrow. It’s good, but it’s narrow. The novel is idea driven and is much more complex than the film.  Philip K. Dick was as much philosopher as storyteller.  There are some crucial scenes and ideas in the novel that make it superior to the film, because they add so much more depth and meaning to the story.

For example, one crucial element in the novel is Mercerism, a religion that uses technology to give people a sense of connectedness.  People can plug in and feel connected physically and spiritually to Mercer (and all humanity as a result) as he eternally struggles up his hill, like Sisyphus.  As his invisible persecutors throw rocks at him, everyone connected feels the pain.  They actually bruise and bleed.  This is a human need that androids do not understand.  The film doesn’t have enough time to develop this idea, and it is too far removed from Dekker’s primary mission.

The Mercer idea also leads to Buster Friendly, a media personality constantly broadcasting on TV and radio.  Everyone loves him.  Everyone watches.  He has a cast of silly characters that join him similar to variety show and late night TV.  The idea of Mercerism and Buster Friendly are just two examples of Philip K. Dick’s prescience.  They also contribute to the development of Deckard’s character and the difference between humans and androids.

I’m not sure if the comic adaptation now constitutes a third animal in addition to the film and traditional novel.  It includes everything in the novel, and readers who know the film will recognize elements of it in the comic as well.  Tony Parker’s illustrations are brilliant and flow seamlessly with the text.  I had to keep reminding myself that I was actually reading a novel that was written in 1968.  Everything fits and looks perfect in this adaptation.

Parker’s illustrations also illuminate Dick’s underlining themes and the bigger questions at play.  What does it mean to be human?  If the androids are more than human, what does that mean?  What is empathy and why do we have it? Deckard feels like he is increasingly becoming dehumanized by the hunt for the escaped androids.  During Deckard’s internal monologue, Parker often illustrates him imagining that he is killing the androids.   By the time that moment comes in reality, Deckard has already done it in his mind repeatedly.   There is a sense of anti-climax.  It doesn’t mean that much anymore. He has lost some of that empathy.

In addition to the great adaptation, the comics also include an essay at the back of each issue by the likes of Warren Ellis, Jonathan Letham, James Blaylock, TimPowers, etc. The essays are very different from one another.  Some discuss the book and film from an academic perspective.  Some discuss Philip K. Dick in general.  Some are like memoirs. I found all of them illuminating after reading the respective issue.

In short, the comic adaptation is fantastic.  I loved every second of it.  I managed to use the internet machines to track down all 24 issues of it, but BOOM! has issued 6 volumes that collect the whole series.  I will close with a quote from Gabriel McKee’s essay at the end of issue 21:

Dick’s universes have shaky walls and insubstantial foundations.  But throughout it all—and this is where I think many of Dick’s academic admirers get him wrong—he never abandons hope that an authentic ultimate reality exists.  At the core of all of that anxiety… there is a faith that something real is hidden beneath the veil, and that it can and will break through that veil to help us.  And it is that hope, more that the surface anxiety, that gives his stories such power.

Wherever You Go

Yona Stern travels to Israel to seek forgiveness from her sister for a past sin.  The book opens with Yona’s arrival at the airport, and the novel in many ways is about why Jewish Americans travel to Israel.  “The metallic clanging.  The loudspeakers blaring in five languages. The luggage carousel coughed up its half-digested suitcases.”  Leegant is masterful with descriptions throughout the novel, and this opening scene will undoubtedly be familiar to many readers who have made the journey.

This is not Yona’s first trip to Israel.  In fact, her grievous sin against her sister was committed on a past trip.  The reader learns from the customs agent that the name Yona means dove in Hebrew.  Her sister’s name, Dena, means judgment.  Dena, a mother of five and pregnant again, is part of the settlement movement, which is viewed as radical by some.  She is stoic and unrelenting.  The symbolism in the novel is clear.

The second character the novel follows is Mark Greenglass, an ex-drug dealer turned talented Talmud teacher.  While the novel opens with Yona arriving in Israel, the first time the reader meets Mark he is stepping off a train in New York having come from Israel to deliver a series of lectures.  Leegant writes:

He was a fake. An imposter. It was all falling apart and he couldn’t stop it. He ought to pull off the yarmulke, the tzitzit fringes, throw them into the trash.  Everything was unraveling and he didn’t know why, only that it was slipping away from him like so much water from his fingertips.  One day it’s the organizing principle of your life, and the next it’s nothing. Gone, evaporated.

Mark is struggling with his faith, but like Yona, the internal struggle is tied to the aching need for atonement.  As he thinks about how he has skipped the morning and afternoon prayers, he muses:

And now he was going to skip them all again.  In the place where the whole business began. New York. Where he’d descended with Regina and climbed back out alone.  The irony was not lost on him.  He was giving it up in the place where all that hot desire for the holy had first taken root.

While in New York, Mark wants to help Regina, his first love.  Religion saved him, but he left her behind.  She is caught in the nightmare of drug addiction, and now he is wavering in the very thing that took him away.

Also like Yona, Mark feels ostracized by his family.  Mark’s father, Lenny, is all business and money.  He has no interest in religion or art or anything remotely emotional.  Yona and Dena are polar opposites, as are Mark and his father.

The third main character in the novel is the one that ultimately brings them all together.  Aaron Blinder is a young college dropout, lost and lonely in the world.  As I said before, the symbolism is clear. Aaron is appropriately named.

He, like Yona and Mark, is a family outcast.  His lack of ambition and series of failures embarrasses his father, a famous Jewish American writer whose books focus on the Holocaust.  Aaron desperately wants to be a part of something important.  He wants to be a success.  He wants his father to look at him with pride.  While living in an extremist commune on the edge of Israeli territory, not fitting in, not respected by the Israelis:

He felt the hand of the almighty Avenger guiding him, touching him on his very shoulder, looking down at him from this cracked ceiling in this miserable outpost on the edge of the scorpion desert where a hundred battles had been fought and where so much blood had soaked into the earth that even the mountains had turned red.

Aaron’s naiveté and desperation blindly leads him to violence, which brings the characters together and becomes the denouement of the novel.

I really enjoyed the novel because there are so many layers of themes, symbols, and character conflicts.  There are the main characters with their personal conflicts and stories- the theme of atonement through sacrifice.  On another level they represent Jewish Americans who feel drawn to Israel for political and religious reasons.  They want to be a part of something bigger and more important than themselves; yet, as a taxi driver tells Yona in the novel:

“Americans will always be new. No matter how long they’re here… They could be here thirty years, even fifty, and they’ll still be new. Except maybe if they shed blood.  Then maybe someone might say they belong.”

At one point Eyal, an Israeli, tells Yona:

“The radical settlers I know, and believe me, I have a few in my family closet, they need black and white.  They don’t like the gray… they like absolutes.  And drama.  They don’t want to be ordinary people thinking about car payments and bank overdraft.  They want a big life.  Historical, theatrical.”

And this ideology drives Aaron to action.  It is the tension between the epic history of the land and everyday life in a democracy.  Leegant captures the nuances and themes in beautiful prose.

Wherever You Go was published in paperback in July 2011 by W.W. Norton.  Leegant won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for the best book of Jewish American fiction for her collection of short stories, An Hour in Paradise.  She lives half the year in New England and half in Israel where she teaches at Bar-Ilan University.  I look forward to reading more of her work.

We wanted more.  We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped out spoons against our empty bowls, we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots… We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.

The story is told by the youngest of these three brothers.  The narrator turns 7 in the fourth chapter of this slim novel.  Age 7 is symbolically the age boys leave their mothers and follow their fathers.  It is ultimately his coming-of-age story, but the majority of the narrative is told in the first person plural.  The three brothers grow up in poverty in a dysfunctional family, and the bond between them gives the story its weight.  Yet, Torres shows us very early during that seventh birthday that our narrator is to be singled out.

Then Ma leaned in and whispered more in my ear, told me more, about why she needed me six.  She whispered it all to me, her need so big, no softness anywhere, only Paps and boys turning into Paps.  It wasn’t just the cooing words, but the damp of her voice, the tinge of pain—it was the warm closeness of her bruises—that sparked me.

Torres masterfully builds the bond between the brothers.  They are outsiders caught in the middle of the turbulent relationship between their mother and father.  They are outsiders in their neighborhood, as poor sons of an interracial marriage.   In one scene, the boys are pretending to be trolls in front of the drugstore.  A pregnant woman stops and speaks to them.  Torres summons Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” in a roundabout way.

“Don’t you all know how to be proper?”
We looked at our sneakers.  Manny swept up the change from the ground and pressed it into her hand.
“Here,” he said, “give this to your baby.  Tell him it’s from us.”
“Us who?”
“Us three.”
“Us brothers.”
“Us Musketeers.”
“Us tricks.”

If you have ever studied “We Real Cool,” you may remember that it doesn’t end well for the “We.”  In fact, they may not have as tight a bond as they think.  It is obvious from the beginning of this novel that the only way the story could work is if the narrator somehow becomes his own person.  Torres drops hints and symbols all along the way.  Yet, Torres’s choices in the key plot and character development are what I find disappointing.

There is a scene that comes out of nowhere three quarters of the way through the book that immediately signals that this is a coming-of-age novel about sexual awakening, and that sexual awakening defines the narrator’s identity and separation from the “Us.” From that point in the novel the “we” slowly dissolves into “I” and “them.”  The narrator states, “They smelled my difference—my sharp, sad, pansy scent.”

The last few chapters of the book don’t seem as carefully written.  The narrator is smarter than his brothers.  They are drunk and violent copies of his father.  He resents them and is embarrassed by them.  The reader is simply told that the mother and father privately speak to him about his potential.  He is college bound.  Inevitably, the narrator is more self-destructive than his brothers.

It is a beautifully written book.  I was just disappointed in the choice of that key plot element, which ruined the last quarter of the book for me. It just seems trite. In a book that spends so much time building this complex relationship between the brothers, mother, and father; I think it’s a cop out to resolve the narrator’s individuality this way.  Perhaps that is my flaw as a reader, and I’m willing to accept that.