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My Toddler, The Copyeditor

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:52:42 EST

I recently received the copyedited manuscript of my second novel, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. A manuscript wearily proceeds to the copyeditor only after it has valiantly survived numerous rounds of edits and revisions at the hands of the editor; the editor and writer strike this metaphor, eliminate that repeated verb, compress this chapter or that paragraph, remove this unnecessary character, clarify that plot point, etc. By the time the writer has finished an umpteenth draft and the editor signs off on the manuscript, the writer is convinced the book is as perfect as it can be, that nothing more can possibly be done. But no. Then the even-yet-more-anal copyeditors come in, questioning every comma, every dash, every split infinitive or somewhat unusual verb construction or nonstandard usage of the English language. The author has a few options here -- he can accept the copyeditor's edits, figuring that this person is probably so well steeped in grammatical rules that she must be right; he can override all her edits, taking out his frustration at all those middle school English teachers he didn't like, insisting that he is the artist here, thank you very much, and that if he wants to bend some grammatical rules, then that's well within his rights; or he can obsess about each and every edit, questioning why he originally wrote it that way and wondering if it really is in fact better, or if that tiny violation is in fact ruining the book, and he should change it again.

Which brings me to my son, who turns three this summer. He is deeply, deeply into the Why? phase. He questions everything -- why this, why that. I had never imagined it possible to question so many things. Why is this truck blue? Why is this wheel round? Why this truck has four wheels and this truck has six wheels? Why this excavator has tracks and no wheels? Why this front-end loader has wheels and no tracks? I'm an intellectually curious person, but a toddler blows an artist away when it comes to an almost metaphysical sense of curiosity.

"Why this water cold?"
"Well, buddy, it's really hot out, so people like to drink cold water when it's hot out."
"Why people like cold water when it's hot out?"
"Because it cools them off."
"Why it cools them off?"
At which point, you can begin a complicated discussion of physics and biology, or you can make up a goofy answer, or you can try to distract him with an entirely new line of thought, such as, "Hey, buddy, wasn't that fire truck neat?" But this runs the risk of being countered with, "Why that fire truck neat?" Or why was it red, or why did have a light, or why did it go Wee-a-wee-a-wee-a instead of woo-woo-woo, etc.

Interestingly, this curiosity is directed not only at the outside world but also -- like any navel-gazing novelist -- at himself as well. Such as:
"Daddy, I just drew on the wall. Why I draw on the wall?"
"Um, I don't know, buddy. Why did you draw on the wall?"
"Huh."

Or:
"Daddy, why I like trucks?"
"Because trucks are awesome."
"Why I like fire trucks and excavators more than telephone line repair trucks?"
"I don't know, why do you like fire trucks and excavators more than telephone line repair trucks?"
"Because I'm a silly goose."

As I spent a week or so staring at and debating the various marks on my copyedited manuscript, I questioned the logic (or lack thereof) behind every literary decision I had made in the roughly two years of writing and revising the darn thing. Okay, the copyeditor wants me to insert a comma into this sentence, and this one, and this one. I guess I didn't like commas that much while writing this book. Why? Should I allow her to insert the commas? Or was I right to leave them out -- did their absence, despite going contrary to accepted grammatical etiquette, add something indefinable to the sentence, and therefore the book itself, or was it just a weird mannerism of mine that I should correct? Why did I do that? Was I subconsciously mimicking some other writer? In which case, is that bad? Or do I simply want a new, freer world unencumbered by so many commas? But will that bother readers? Why?

I could hear my son's high-pitched, ridiculously cute, Platonically inquisitive voice in my head: Why Daddy use a dash here instead of a semicolon? Why Daddy not use comma in this sentence? Didn't Daddy use semicolon in similarly constructed sentence on page 137? Daddy wants to be consistent here, doesn't he?

Which led to even more agonizing conversations:
"Why Daddy not use a comma in this sentence?"
"Well, I thought the sentence would kind of move better, would flow with the action or the revelation of the scene a bit more naturally without the comma in the middle there."
"Why Daddy not think action flows as well with commas?"
"Well, that's a good question actually. Huh. Why don't I?"
"Because Daddy's a silly goose."

Or:
"Why Daddy insist on keeping that long phrase in the middle of sentence here?"
"Well, I understand why the copyeditor wanted me to strike it, but see -- it's in the middle of a paragraph, and all the other sentences are these short, declarative sentences. If I strike that phrase, then I'll have a paragraph consisting of too many consecutive declarative sentences."
"Why Daddy not like too many consecutive declarative sentences?"
"Well, son, have I ever told you about a man named Raymond Carver?"

Etc, etc, for roughly 400 pages. Well, I did indeed complete my round of the copyedits, and I sent the manuscript back to my publisher, and the book even has a release date now (mark your calendars! January 26). I will of course continue to question myself when I read the galleys in a few weeks or months, and the advance copies after that. My son, by then age three, will no doubt still be questioning everything as well, and I'll continue making up answers and hoping they're right, or close enough.

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My Swine Flu Dilemma, or Why You Shouldn't Write A Novel About An Epidemic

Tue, 12 May 2009 20:16:38 EST

I tell myself that I'm not really a hypochondriac.

Still, because my first novel dealt with a fictional town that tries to quarantine itself from the 1918 influenza epidemic, I've developed a bit of fatalism about the flu. Surely my book has tempted the gods, and the next flu pandemic (which most health experts agree is inevitable) will come looking for me in particular. I can already visualize the obituary headline: Writer of Flu Novel Dies from Flu in Ironic Tragedy.

A couple of weeks ago, with stories about swine flu being updated every hour, I had a dilemma. I was scheduled to fly from Atlanta to Los Angeles, along with wife, son, and two generations of my in-laws, for a family reunion. At the time, Southern California was one of the few parts of America in which swine flu had made an appearance. I felt relatively safe here in Georgia, but LA seemed somewhat borderline. And airports -- particularly major, international hubs like Hartsfield-Jackson and LAX -- are hardly the safest places to be when nasty viruses are looking for new hosts.

Only hours before our flight was scheduled to depart, Vice President Joe Biden went on TV and made his now infamous comment about how no family members of his would be getting on an airplane anytime soon. This did not ease my psyche. I still wasn't quite sure what my family and I should do, as it remained unclear whether the swine flu was about to take the next step toward outright pandemic. Indeed, our decision was particularly puzzling because the flu seemed to be in this odd in-between stage. It didn't seem to be The Big One yet, but it did seem to have the potential. If it did turn out to be The Big One -- with hundreds of critically ill people in a number of cities overwhelming our physicians, hospitals, and then morgues -- at least we'd have known what to do: stay home, slowly go through our supplies of canned goods, watch CNN and hope for better news soon. We weren't at that point, thank goodness. The death toll in Mexico was scary, yes, but the infection rate here in the States was hardly severe enough to make us all shut-ins. Right?

Part of the problem -- which hasn't changed since 1918 -- is that a typical flu can incubate inside its hosts for a few hours or days, allowing us to infect others unknowingly. By the time you realize it's The Big One, you've probably already caught it from a subway ride (or cross-country flight) on which no one was even coughing yet.

As a self-employed writer, it would be relatively easy for me to become a shut-in without anyone noticing, if not for that pesky family reunion. But most people have to balance concerns for their health with fears of being fired for skipping work, or the need to show up at the office so they can afford to pay the mortgage on the house they might rather be hiding in.

In the fall of 1918, the pandemic was exacerbated by the fact that the U.S. government, distracted by the Great War and wanting to maintain a confident home front, refused to acknowledge the flu's severity until it was too late. In Philadelphia, just as the virus was beginning to attack the city, thousands of people attended a pro-war parade, cheering and sneezing on each other. Surely our government wouldn't make similar mistakes today. But here in 2009, it was disturbing to see international health experts bickering according to their national interests: first European politicians advised their citizens not to travel to America, then the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention objected and said visitors have nothing to fear.

(Meanwhile, Russia and China, unhindered by messy things like Bills of Rights, a critical press, and due process, were already said to be considering quarantining foreign travelers.)

So what should I have done? Fly to LA and chance it, or postpone the trip and be safe?

No one wants to look like Chicken Little. Telling your friends you can't make it to the multiplex because you'd rather stay home and wait for the swine flu to vanish will cause your friends to think that you're just avoiding them, or that you're crazy. And blowing off a family reunion will lose major points with the in-laws.

During the period immediately after September 11, many of us were afraid to fly, but there was a certain patriotic machismo associated with heading back to the airport. Canceling our flights to Florida and avoiding public places would have been "letting the terrorists win." But that logic doesn't quite work when the villain is a virus. Avoiding LAX or a crowded theater when a dangerous illness lurks is hardly "letting the flu win."

And so as Wolf Blitzer went on and on about the swine flu, most of us continued with our social and professional lives. We simply hoped that our local grocery store clerk or the pizza delivery guy or our administrative assistant was not unknowingly harboring the virus. What else could we do? Government advice to wash our hands frequently was little more than anyone's mother would have recommended -- and it was frighteningly similar to the advice handed down by our much less scientifically equipped experts in 1918.

The sad truth is that, despite a near-century of medical advancement, our attempts to conquer influenza remain somewhat blunted by the fact that it mutates so quickly; once virologists isolate the swine flu strain, they'll need to create and then distribute a vaccine for it before the flu mutates once again.

The other sad truth is that, despite the myriad sociological lessons we can learn from the 1918 pandemic -- about the need for strong and honest government leadership as well as individual civic responsibility -- human nature hasn't mutated much since then. Our interconnectedness, our belief in a free society in which citizens can come and go as they choose, our social instinct to appear blithe and unfazed rather than panicked and silly -- these things continue to conspire against us.

Well, my family and I did fly to LA. Despite having to deal with a somewhat cranky, jetlagged toddler who woke up at 4 AM every morning, all was well. Much ado about nothing, I suppose, and two weeks later the swine flu stories have all but vanished from the press. Maybe I was silly to worry, and am even sillier to admit it with this post. It was hardly the same kind of dilemma as, say, standing guard with a rifle in front of a quarantined town and having to decide what to do about the possibly ill stranger walking toward you, but still, it felt weird. And because bad influenzas that appear in the late spring have been known to lie dormant for a few months before returning with a vengeance in the fall (as happened in 1918), we all may find ourselves with similar dilemmas soon.

Not that I'm a hypochondriac or anything.

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Don't Judge an Author By His Author Flap

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:12:54 EST

Last week my wife and I traveled a few blocks to see Junot Diaz, author of the Pulitizer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, give a reading as part of Agnes Scott College's annual Writers Festival. I was curious to see how Mr. Diaz would be in person, not only because I loved his book (yes, it deserves the hype) but also because of the rather, um, extraordinary author bio on the hardcover flap of Oscar Wao. Author bios are tricky things. They are often written by the author himself, sometimes by his editor or publicist. When you craft your own bio, you have to ask yourself, how much information do I need to share, how much should I praise myself, and how many accomplishments should I mention in order to make myself stand out from the pack and grab the fleeting attention of book browsers and bookstore owners? And how do I do this while not sounding like an arrogant and big-headed jerk whose pompousness scares readers away? Diaz' bio caught my eye when I bought his book in hardcover a couple years back -- I'd read a few of his stories in The New Yorker and liked them, and was anxious to read his long-awaited, years-in-the-making novel -- but I didn't know much about him. Here's how the bio on Oscar Wao reads:

"Junot Diaz' fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His debut book, Drown, was met with unprecedented acclaim; it became a national bestseller, earned him a PEN/Malamud Award, and has since grown into a landmark of contemporary literature. Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, Diaz lives in New Jersey and is a professor of writing at MIT."

Wow! Drown received "unprecedented" acclaim? Really? Winning the PEN/Malamud and being a bestseller is pretty awesome for any debut collection, absolutely, but is that combination truly "unprecedented"? What exactly would constitute "unprecedented" acclaim? Winning the PEN/Malamud and the Cy Young Award would be unprecedented. Winning the Nobel Prize and an MTV Video Music Award would be unprecedented (and Bono doubtless is trying). But what about the acclaim Drown received was unprecedented? And "landmark" of contemporary literature? For a book that, seriously, I often tried to buy over the years but could never find in a bookstore? I don't think I've ever seen the word "landmark" used in an author bio , not even when describing, say, The Grapes of Wrath or Invisible Man. I figured that Mr. Diaz must be a rather conceited chap, or very self-conscious and paranoid and therefore he felt compelled to over-compensate by tooting his own horn with unprecedented volume, or, hopefully, the bio had been written by some over-caffeinated publicist and had slipped past Mr. Diaz unnoticed until publication time. I had to hope that last explanation was the true one. So when I heard that Diaz would be giving a reading in my newly adopted town down here in Georgia, I had to check him out and see for myself.

I'm very happy to report that Diaz seems neither conceited nor paranoid. He was a gracious speaker, went out of his way to praise the college for having him, complimented our little town and thanked us profusely for making time to hear literature rather than watching game shows at home, joked with the students, etc. And he was goddamned hilarious. He read excerpts from a story called The Sun, The Moon, The Stars, published back in 1998 by The New Yorker, and I was pretty much laughing constantly. I absolutely love his ability to write narrators who are both intelligent and profane, who feel honest but also seem to cheat the reader of certain information, which is a lot harder than it sounds. But his reading style was particularly entertaining, making even lines that might have snuck past the reader with little fanfare seem laugh-out-loud funny in person. (Every young writer should hear this guy give a reading.) Basically, I loved him, and the whole crowd ate him up. I report this with more than a little relief, because I hate it when a writer or musician I admire turns out to be a jerk. I will henceforth blame some mysterious publicist at Knopf for writing that insanely inflating author bio, and will assume that Diaz was up to his ears grading papers that semester and didn't get a chance to veto the bio until it was too late and the book jackets were already printing. The lesson, therefore, which I should have known as a writer myself, is that we shouldn't judge a writer by his author bio. Even if it's the most over-the-top author bio you've ever read.

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The Savage Detectives and the Hopefully Greatly Exaggerated Death of Literature

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:44:21 EST

A few months ago, while still living in DC, I was wandering through the city and I noticed quite the crowd squeezing into the doors of my local independent bookstore, Olssons. Wow, I thought, is there some big-name author giving a reading and signing? Or perhaps some cool band is playing an impromptu, afternoon set? But no -- I got closer and realized that the crowd was due to the fact that Olssons, a small local chain, was closing this particular location, and selling off its stock at a big discount. What a sad scene, to see that this is what it took to get a bunch of people into a bookstore: the death of the store itself.

Then just last week I learned that, back in September, right after I left town, Olssons filed for bankruptcy, shuttering its remaining locations.

And then the latest bad news for book lovers, particularly book lovers in our nation's capital: the Washington Post has announced that it will soon discontinue its Sunday Book World section. The powers that be claim that they will still run lots of book reviews on Sundays, but will move those articles into other sections. (Which is kind of like the coach taking the aging outfielder out of the starting lineup but insisting that it isn't a demotion and that the ol' slugger will still get plenty of exciting pinch-hitting opportunities in some random 7th innings.)

With various employers in various industries announcing tens of thousands of layoffs last week alone, perhaps the loss of a few book reviews and the closing of a few bookstores don't constitute the end of the world. Still, this is getting depressing. With everyone talking about the Death of Print, and newspapers losing all their ad revenue to Craig's List, the latest news isn't exactly surprising. But it's still pretty alarming when one of the country's last book sections vanishes. How many professional book reviewers are left out there? I have nothing against my books being reviewed on blogs, and I'm happy to read reviews of other books on blogs, but I still feel something is missing when major cities' newspapers no longer devote any resources to covering books. I was very, very fortunate when my first book came out in that it was reviewed by most major U.S. papers. But ten or even three years from now, how many papers will be reviewing books? It seems there will be one or two book reviewers for maybe the New York Times or San Francisco Chronicle, and every other paper in the country will occasionally borrow those two reviewers' copy. But what happens when the opinions of only two people make or break a book? (And don't even get me started on the book "section" of the local paper here in my new home of Atlanta.)

The blogosphere to the rescue, you say. And maybe that's what will happen, with sites like Bookslut.com becoming the new Post Book World. Maybe I'm just a traditionalist scared of change, maybe this won't seem like a big deal in a few years, maybe everything will work out just fine.

Or maybe no one will be reading books anymore?

Considering all this doom-and-gloom about literature's place in the contemporary world, this probably isn't the best time for me to be reading Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives. Anybody who's anybody in letters seems to be praising the late Mr. Bolano, whose work has only recently been translated into English. The Savage Detectives, a long book that made Bolano's reputation internationally, is a series of vignettes about a group of young writers in 1970s Mexico City (and, later in the book, all over the world). They fall in love, they have sex, they get in trouble, but mostly they write and talk about writing. They try to make it as writers. They wait tables, they publish short-lived literary journals, they bum around Europe, they pick grapes in France. They fight over favorite writers, they attack each others' reputation. The book is supposedly autobiographical (although there's a new controversy about that), but while reading it, I found myself thinking the same thing I'd thought when reading On The Road or Tropic of Cancer: "Gosh, this would have been fun to live through, but it's awfully dull to read about." Bolano is a great writer, and there are some wonderful passages here, but I found myself getting tired of this gaggle by the time I was less than halfway through this 649-page opus.

In general I've been wary of Books About Writers, wary about stepping into that hall of mirrors. That way lies solipsism, narcissism, self-importance. Bolano's book seems to be poking fun at self-important, narcissistic writers, or at least having fun with them, so he gets points for that, but still, one longs for a plot, for a reason to invest so much time in these often-petty characters. The book has been praised (hugely praised) by critics and other writers -- i.e., people whose opinions I respect a great deal (and usually agree with), but people who are predisposed to liking a book about writers, a book that itself puts literature and the struggles to create it on such a high plane. Unfortunately, the book's near-complete lack of plot means that it will pretty much only be read by such people -- it's sort of the anti-crossover book. More than narcisissm and solipsism, I think I feel wary of Books About Writers because of the inherent intellectual snobbery there. I don't want to write books just for other writers and for book critics -- I want them to read my work and love it, of course, but I don't want to aim exclusively at them. I don't want to write books about professors and MFA students. I don't want to close my fictional universe off that way -- I want to open it, I want to reach other people, I want to expand readership. Hey, I loved college, but I fear the growing academization of literature, the MFA industry churning out writers who teach other aspiring writers who will themselves teach other writers, etc etc, creating a legion of writers defined by the academic world.

But since I've been reading The Savage Detectives at a time when book critics are being fired and bookstores are closing, I can't help but wonder if I've been wrong all along, if I've missed the zeitgeist on this entirely. It seems we're reaching a point where the only people who are reading are the professors and the book critics and the MFA students. Maybe writing about writers, writing books about books, is the only way to get by these days. Maybe there's no way to cross over, maybe there is no other side. Maybe I've been wrong to fight this. Hell, maybe my third novel should be about a depressed thirty-something college professor who has an affair with his beautiful twentysomething MFA student and talks to her about Rilke and Rimbaud while they lie in bed together.

The characters in The Savage Detectives want to give their lives to literature (or at least, they want to give their youths to it), but Bolano seems to be asking what the characters are getting back. If he were alive today, and if he were revising his own book, I wonder if he would have made it even darker.

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The Inauguration: I Was There, Once

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:46:00 EST

Out of a sense either of literary nonpartisanship or perhaps cowardice, I've been reluctant to drop any hints about my political inclinations. Having written a novel that deals with messy issues like individual rights versus collective needs, and morality during times of crisis -- a novel that tries to put forth very opposing viewpoints in equally sympathetic light -- I've thought it better not to comment on loaded contemporary issues so that whatever I say about Iraq or Bush or Obama or taxes wouldn't somehow overpower what I'd written. I want my fiction to be read and enjoyed by Democrats and Republicans alike, as well as Whigs and Tories, Freemasons and Cool Mooses. I've had old-fashioned hippies and Army Colonels tell me they liked my book, and I love that, and don't want to do anything to change it.

But I can't resist writing about this historic day and revealing myself as one of the many who proudly voted for Obama. I watched the Inauguration this morning with my two-year-old son, who was understandably more interested in playing with his trucks and coloring with his markers but who will one day be reminded that he too saw history in the making. Among all the other emotions dancing in my heart was nostalgia for the six years my family and I lived in the District of Columbia, a mere 15 blocks from where President Obama took the oath of office. We left the area and relocated here to Atlanta just four months ago, a good decision for my family but one that yields a bittersweet feeling during a time like this. I wish I could have been there, in that crowd, in the cold, cheering and just looking into peoples' eyes. Bad timing on my part. As someone who has moved around a lot in the last ten years, I'm somewhat used to this feeling -- I watched my beloved Patriots win their first Super Bowl from an apartment in Chapel Hill, NC, wishing I could be at my former apartment in Boston's South End, running through the icy streets, screaming; I watched my equally beloved Red Sox break their curse from a bar in Capitol Hill, D.C., wishing I could have been with my brother Dan, who at the time was at a bar across the street from Fenway Park with several hundred fans who couldn't pronounce the letter R if they tried. I'm glad I've been fortunate enough to live in many places and fall in love with different cities, but such geographic philandering means that it's easy to be in the wrong place during these seminal moments.

Today, wondering what it must have been like to be in D.C., I can console myself with the fact that I was fortunate enough to attend an Inauguration earlier in my life. In 1993, during my freshman year of college, I volunteered for Bill Clinton's first Inaugural, living in suburban Virginia for a month at the home of my girlfriend's sister. I volunteered for the Inaugural Committee's "Bells for Hope" event, a goofy exercise in which we spent most of January calling churches and towns and asking them to ring their bells at the precise moment when then-Pres-elect Clinton would ring a replica of the Liberty Bell, just outside Arlington National Cemetary, the night before his swearing-in. This act apparently would symbolize national unity and hope, or something. We volunteers worked at the D.C. Navy Yard in a cramped office within a sprawling, moldy, labyrithine structure that was slated for destruction the following spring (and is now the site of one of Washington Nationals Park's many parking lots). We called mayor's offices and spoke to pastors, and every time one of them said they'd ring their bell, we found their town on the large map hanging on the office wall and duly stuck in a thumb tack. By the end of three weeks, we had placed tacks all across our great land. As a reward for this hard labor, we were granted tickets to attend the swearing in.

Obviously, Clinton's first Inaugural lacked the historic power of today's moment, but it was still a big deal. I was 18 and had been raised by Rhode Island Catholic Democrats. Presidential politics were, like rooting for the Sox and Pats, exercises in crushed faith and despair. (How much has changed, in politics and sports.) I had no real memory of a Democratic President -- Carter had been defeated when I was in kindergarten -- so to see a Democrat take his place in the White House was fairly mind-blowing.

I remember getting on the Metro that morning at the Pentagon station in Virginia, remember the packed train cars. My girlfriend's sister was named Hilary, and whenever we lost sight of her in the crowd and called her politically loaded name, dozens of heads would turn. I remember the cold -- we were told that night that Clinton's was the coldest Inaugural on record. We took our place on the lawn just south of the Capitol's west steps at sunrise, clutching a bag of bagels, all of which would be rock-hard seven hours later when the pomp and circumstance had concluded. I remember hearing Maya Angelou's poem (it was so cool to me, the young English major, that Clinton had followed in JFK's steps by requesting a poem). I remember taking a few photos in which you can sort of kind of almost see Bill's head through the maze of scaffolding that we had to look through to see the stage. I remember the cold. I remember, after it was over, the sheer massiveness of the crowd. We were a sea of people, and as we made our way from the Mall, you couldn't tell if you were walking on grass or concrete, street or sidewalk. You couldn't see your feet. You just moved your legs. I remember suddenly hearing an official voice proclaim "Clear the way!" and we stopped, and space opened up before us, and there was a phalanx of Air Force officers in their sky-blue uniforms, and between them walked Nelson Mandela and James Earl Jones. Mandela and Darth Vader, passing no more than ten feet from me! I remember how happy everyone was, and how cold.

Three days later I came down with mono, was sick for three weeks, and lost twenty pounds. Still, it was awesome.

For obvious reasons, today is a bigger deal, and I thought about making the trip up and staying with friends, but ultimately decided against it. Instead, my son and I began our day in literary style, going to a bookstore to finally buy Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father. Then, back to our new home, in the city of Martin Luther King Jr., and to the TV. It was very odd to see my former city looking the way it did, overrun with vibrancy and passion and hope. All those streets I'd walked and biked along, places I'd been with my wife and son, and there they were, transformed. I used to ride my bike down Pennsylvania Ave and past the Capitol, loop along the Mall, and would turn around back to the Capitol and up that surprisingly steep hill, weaving between some of the security bollards along the Capitol sidewalk, always slightly fearful some armed guard might not like the way I looked or might be suspicious about my backpack and tell me to stop, killing my momentum (never happened, fortunately). Living in D.C. during the Bush years, the post-9/11 years, was rife with those mixed emotions: awe at the grandeur of where we were but also inconvenience and downright fear that we were a great big target. Still, it was home for me. This morning when my son looked at the Washington Monument and National Mall on the screen, I told him that was where we used to go to see "the museum that had the elephant and the hippopotamus," wondering if he remembered how I took him there once a week. Wondering how long he'll remember.

My son's favorite part of the Inaugural, by far, was the helicopter that took President Bush away. He loved it (in a nonpartisan way, of course). It no doubt reminded him of the many helicopters that flew low over our D.C. rowhouse daily, or hourly, or minutely. (The loud and vibrating presence of helicopters is one of the many annoyances that D.C. residents just have to deal with, though after the birth of my son I learned that they had a definite benefit in kid-entertainment-value.)

I thought, looking at that crowd, about how awful the Mall will look tomorrow. (D.C. residents also learn that the Park Service spends about 4/5 of the year blocking access to and repairing the lawn that gets totally destroyed during the 1/5 of the year in which it is actually used.)

I noticed, during the signing of the nomination papers, that Obama is a lefty, and pointed that out my son, who was at the time gripping a blue magic marker with his left hand and drawing what I believe was a dump truck.

I thought, listening to the Inaugural Address, that this is an amazing time. It was an amazing city, forever part of my past. Here's hoping the future is even better, for all of us.

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Favorite Books of 2008

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:27:48 EST

'Tis the season for Best Of lists, so here's mine. If you're reading this, you're probably just trying to fritter away the last moments before your Christmas vacation begins, so I'm happy to oblige. All of these books would make fine presents, of course. Please think of the beleaguered publishing industry when buying your gifts! Books make great presents! (Okay, no more industry shilling.)

Unlike most lists, these aren't necessarily books that were published in 2008, they're just my favorite of the books I happened to read this year -- most were published one to three years ago.

My faves:

Lush Life by Richard Price. A true American masterpiece disguised as a police procedural. In the gentrifying Lower East Side of a few years back, three drunk white hipsters are mugged, and one of them is killed. The investigation is Price's means of plumbing the depths of his disparate characters: burned-out cops, disillusioned artists, young New Yorkers full of dreams, street kids trying to get by. As sound an examination of its time and place as any straight-up literary work of the last few years; it reminded me of The Corrections but with more drive (and I loved The Corrections). The best dialogue I've read in... well, I can't remember reading better dialogue.

Citizen Vince by Jess Walter. I hyped this in my summer reading post, so I'll be brief: this book and Walter's newer one, The Zero, constitute as good a 1-2 punch as any author has delivered in recent years. A sheer pleasure from start to finish. I myself have given this book as a gift a number of times in the last ten months and no one has been disappointed.

Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris. I devoted an entire post earlier this year to Ferris' fine first novel, so I won't repeat myself here. But I loved the book, and its theme of corporate layoffs has only become more timely.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche. Telling you that this is a novel about a civil war in Africa is probably the best way of scaring you away from it. But don't be scared. For the first 100 pages it calmly details the mild tensions of a relatively priveleged household -- a professor, his rich girlfriend, and his young servant -- just like any other modern, priveleged "literary novel." But the book gradually and then suddenly shows the ways the characters are torn apart by the Biafran War in Nigeria. Adiche shows that you don't need caffeinated, overwrought descriptions when your subject matter is this powerful: just stick with simple sentences and perfect clarity and your prose will pack a whallop.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Speaking of caffeinated prose. But here it works. This book has been hyped enough elsewhere, so I won't add to the chorus other than to say: Man, I really liked it too.

And in the nonfiction category:
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner. Brilliant and fascinating, this is a secret history of America since World War II. Weiner's thesis, backed up in historical moment after historical moment, is that the men who run the Central Intelligence Agency (mostly, paranoids and alcoholics) have been uninterested in the difficult task of gathering intelligence (the agency's core mission) and would much rather overthrow foreign leaders and start insurrections. As a result, our intelligence gurus failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, failed to predict China's entry into the Korean War, failed to predict 9/11, failed to predict pretty much every major foreign event that's impacted our nation, because they were too busy starting coups and assassinating people (and drinking). Picture the guys in Mad Men, but with a license to kill. Terrifying stuff.

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright. Should be required reading, for many reasons.

Hmm, I didn't mean to end the year on such a down note, with books on the CIA and Al-Qaeda. But I'm sure I'm not alone in that I've wanted to do a lot more reading on such matters recently, to try and better understand the complicated world we find ourselves in today.

I know the hard times are making most of us feel like the Cratchett family at the moment, scrimping and worrying, and wondering what the viciously spinning wheel of time has in store for us next. If we ever needed a holiday, we need it now. I like to read so much not as a way of hiding from the world, but grappling with it, trying to figure it out. Writing and reading can be an escape, yes, but more than that: an escape without escaping. Tackling the world's issues from a new angle. Looking at a vexing problem through someone else's eyes. Asking questions that you know you won't get answers to, but want to ask all the same, just to hear how they sound in different voices. Like most people, I plan on spending a lot of time with family this month, eating and drinking and laughing and trying not to worry. But I'll always find a moment to sneak off with a book, and escape, and wonder, and enjoy.

Happy holidays, everyone.

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Hard Times

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:56:09 EST

OK, this is swiftly becoming the Dead Writers blog, owing mainly to my slow pace. So far this autumn I've posted new bits at roughly the same rate as major American authors have passed away. But I feel compelled to write a little about Studs Terkel, who died earlier this month. He's credited with inventing, or at least popularizing, the genre of oral history with his books like Working, The Good War, and Hard Times. I would be dishonest to go on and on praising him like long-time admirer since I've only read one of his books, but the one book of his that I have read has been sticking with me for a variety of reasons.

About a year and a half ago I read Hard Times, his oral history of the Great Depression, as research for my second novel (which is like 99.99999% finished, I swear). My novel is set during the Depression, and I'd read some histories of the Depression itself as well as some more specific works focusing on particular issues or figures of that time. But Hard Times opened up that world for me in a way nothing else had. Terkel rarely writes with his own voice and instead lets his many interview subjects speak for themselves. Not only do you benefit from the fact that he gets so many completely different people to chime in (stockbrokers who lost everything, CEOs who emerged unscathed and never understood what all the fuss was about, union workers who fought with cops, cops who had to help evict people from their homes, career criminals, priests, social workers, society wives, Pullman porters, Latino fruit pickers, etc), you get to hear it in their own words. As a fiction writer, that is priceless -- to hear the pacing and rhythm of their sentences, the slang they used or didn't used, the things they talked about and the things they talked around... you just can't get that from reading straight history, or old novels, or old newspapers, or even from watching old films. You need to hear the way people really spoke, and Terkel's book is like a giant microphone hanging over the heads of legions of people who lived through that time.

The other benefit of reading oral history is that it reminds you that, no matter the era or place, viewpoints are as varied as people themselves. When you think historically, it's tempting to put certain time periods into one box or another, to categorize them. So in the Twenties, everyone was drunk and prosperous; in the Thirties, everyone was hardscrabble and threadbare; in the Forties, it was all about fighting the war with dignity and courage. Partly this is how we're taught in high school, partly it's the result of the shortcuts and sifting that any historian not writing a 1,000-page book has to make. But when you read Hard Times you see just how fractured and complicated and messy every time period is. There are people in the book who tell Terkel that one of the oddly nice things about the Depression was how it brought people together, how the fact that everyone was poor meant that people were more willing to pitch in and help out, to get through this together. But then there are people who tell him the opposite, that folks in the Thirties were under such pressure that they fought each other for every scrap, that they were too afraid to help the less fortunate because more poor saps would ask for their help, that during the Depression they saw the depths of human meanness. There are people who tell him that FDR saved the nation, and some who say that he destroyed it. Some blame the banks, some blame the government. (Sound familiar??) Some say that survivors of the Depression lived on to become extremely thrifty for the rest of their lives, so terrified that everything could be taken away again that they let nothing go to waste. Some say that the survivors could only expunge their awful memories by living exorbitantly for the rest of their lives, working to acquire all the luxuries they'd been deprived of during those awful years.

This is what I love about reading histories, and why I've wound up writing two historical novels even though it's not a genre I feel wedded to. Looking closely at a past time allows us to see through the easy categorizations and labels, to see all the layers and contradictions and madness in the human heart. We live with this day by day, yet sometimes we assume that "times were simpler back then." They weren't. We have always been this complicated, this divisive, this confused.

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Infinite Sadness

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:31:49 EST

(First, apologies for the lack of posts all summer. My family and I have just relocated from Washington, DC, to Atlanta, and my life has been consumed by realtors and title attorneys, box cutters and bubble wrap. What little time for writing I've been able to squirrel away has been devoted to editing my forthcoming second novel, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. I promise to be a better blogger this autumn. And to drink less coffee, and to think purer thoughts, and to call my mother more often...)

When I opened the New York Times Web page the other day on my pirated and very slow wireless signal (still setting up the new Mullen office), I saw the photo of that familiar bandana-ed head above the headline "The Magic of David Foster Wallace." I thought, oh joy, a new DFW book is coming out! I had no idea! So I clicked on the headline and was stunned to learn that Mr. Wallace, 46, took his own life last weekend.

DFW is the Sonic Youth of contemporary American fiction. Just as the unusual and challenging but brilliant sounds crafted by Thurston Moore & Co. inspired a litany of "alternative" bands who achieved more crossover success than they themselves ever did, DFW's dense and unusual but horizon-expanding books probably kept away a good deal of casual readers even as they laid the groundwork upon which many of today's most heralded writers stand. His influence on the last decade-plus of fiction cannot be overlooked; it is hard to imagine the novels of Dave Eggers or Jonathan Safran Foer, to name only two, existing in their current forms without Wallace showing up to show us how many different forms great fiction can take.

I read Infinite Jest during my first year out of college. I was living in Boston and I clearly remember lugging that enormously heavy tome with me on the Boston buses, to the orange line at Sullivan Square, through the bowels of the T, to my horrible first job, and over to the Common on my lunch breaks. I somehow managed to read the 1,000+ page monster in only one month, a surprisingly short period mainly because I made a point of taking it with me wherever I went that April (I still remember the month!) and cramming one or two pages of reading into every elevator ride, on-hold call, and burrito-microwaving I could. I loved it. Loved it so much that not only did I march out to buy his other books, but I flipped to the back jacket and made a point of buying the works of the writers who had blurbed it, most of whom I'd never heard of in 1997 but have since taken their rightful places as Literary Bigshots (nice to meet you, Mr. Franzen and Mr. Eugenides).

Infinite Jest had a huge influence on me, and it affected my writing in, I admit, ways that were not entirely good for me or my early readers. I was one of the nameless thousands who wrote terrible imitation Wallace for at least a few years: run-on sentences that were equal part erudite academic jargon and hipster slang, intentionally difficult sequences of narrative disconnection, three adverbs when two or even one would have sufficed, occasional uses of acronyms and strange terms without explaining what they meant until like the thirtieth page, the use of the word "like," etc. etc. (This influence probably is not at all apparent in my first novel, but it sure is there in my earlier, failed, unpublished first novels.) So many of us have imitated him, and none of us could get it right. None of us had his energy -- that's what caught you and made you want to keep going, until, almost without realizing it, you were as addicted to his prose style and pace and skewed viewpoints as his characters were addicted to drugs and sports and money and sex. I've been thinking a lot lately about Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys, a very different novel, but along with Jest it was a hugely inspiring book for me during that scary first year after graduation. In Wonder Boys, protagonist Gray Tripp is a drug-addicted novelist who has written a 2,000+ page book that is nowhere near finished; when asked why it's so long, he says "I couldn't stop." In a similar but far less scatological way, that sums up the experience of reading Wallace -- you read him and read him because you couldn't stop.

It's weird too that my first-ever blog post last spring was about writers who died young and/or suffered from mental illness. I did not realize we would be adding another exalted name to those unfortunate ranks, certainly not one I was such a big fan of. I didn't see this one coming. But at the same time, sadness and depression were always a big part of his art (one of his best stories was called "The Depressed Person"), so it isn't surprising to find that they were part of his life as well.

Someone once said (Tolstoy, probably) that when a writer is tackling the ending of a book, he or she should aim for "unpredictable inevitability." The reader should be surprised by the ending, but at the same time, on reflection, it should feel inevitable, that it never could have happened any other way. I wish this had happened any other way. I wish that the man who wrote such inspiring fiction was still doing so and, more importantly, was as happy as I was when reading his work.

Just last week, before hearing the news, I had been talking with a writer friend who mentioned that he enjoyed reading Haruki Murakami much more in college than he does now, and I mentioned that I'm the same way with Don Delillo. We talked about how there are some writers who seem to appeal more to the intellectual side of our brain and less to the emotional, and how these writers resonate a bit more with the college and academic crowd but ring less true as we grow older or leave that cloistered world. Which isn't a negative judgment or a positive one, and maybe isn't fair or right, but hey, the fact is, I so loved Infinite Jest when I was 22 that I reread most of its 1,000+ pages, but as I read Wallace's other fiction (his first novel and his short stories) over the next decade, they didn't quite grab me as much, and a few years ago I mentally assigned him to that College Cultist section of my bookshelf. I bought Oblivion, his final book of short stories, a while ago but still haven't cracked it open. (His essays and journalism, however, are another matter -- absolutely goddamn worship-inducing fantastic.) I'm rethinking this appraisal of Wallace now, and remembering the ways he let his tiny moral and emotional streak poke out of all that postmodern haze every now and then. Sometimes we make people laugh or we show off our intelligence because we're insecure, and then we suddenly open up, and we hope people didn't miss that key moment.

Wallace did write a Big Important essay in which he called on young writers to stop with the solipsistic/narcissistic gimmickry and instead to dare their fiction to tackle the Big Important Moral Issues of the age the way 19th Century novelists did, but he's been criticized for failing to do this with his more recent fiction, a criticism I agreed with. But I certainly plan to pull those giant books (in more ways than one) off my bookshelf again and take another visit to DFW's odd and troubling and brilliant and inspiring universe. There was always a lot of sadness in there, and reading him will never be the same, just as listening to Nevermind was never the same after Kurt pulled the trigger. The sadness will feel stronger. But all the sad and difficult stuff, as any writer of postmodern inclinations will agree, only makes the sudden, surprising moments of sweetness and light that much sweeter.

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Indiana Jones and the Lowered Expectations of Aging Storytellers

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:12:23 EST

I was born in 1974, which means that the summer Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom hit the screens, I was 10, the perfect age to appreciate -- indeed, adore -- that film. I saw it in the theaters six times. I wanted to be Indiana Jones -- I even received, for my birthday that summer, an official Indiana Jones fedora, which I wore pretty much constantly until I tragically lost it at the end of the summer (evidence is mixed as to where/when I lost it, but one theory is that I left it at the theater at viewing #6). I would have loved a bullwhip as well, but my parents wisely drew the line at weaponry, though I was able to find some rope in the garage that I could coil up through my belt loop.

People in my generation -- Generation X, as it has so condescendingly been labeled -- have been put in an odd position the last few years by Hollywood and its marketing, money-craving genius. First a few years ago, with the dreadful new Star Wars trilogy, and now this summer, with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, we are being granted the unusual opportunity to relive (or at least revisit) the experience of seeing the films that we so adored as children (or at least newer sequels/prequels to such films). This has proven to be rather "illuminating," to borrow the line from the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade -- an experience both fun and depressing. Kind of like growing up.

It is hard to overestimate the impact that Star Wars and Indiana Jones had on the collective childhood of Generation X. I do not think I was unusual in that I owned nearly all the Star Wars toys and spent countless hours with them, imagining new stories and adventures for Luke and Han, silently (or loudly) creating my own sequels in the backyards and family rooms of my family and friends. Indy didn't have the same relentless toy marketing as Star Wars, but damn those films were awesome -- I am somewhat unusual in my generation in that I liked the Indy movies even more than Star Wars. In addition to my fedora and makeshift bullwhip, I collected the Topps trading cards for Temple of Doom, I memorized all the film's lines, I owned the John Williams score on cassette and listened to it so much that even today I can hum you the entire film. Indy and Star Wars were the stories my generation was raised on, the atheistic religion we were baptised into, the background against which all other stories would be judged -- and our own stories would be created. When I was encouraged to enter a creative writing contest in the sixth grade, I wrote an Indiana Jones adventure. I lost the contest. But I probably had more fun than the winner did.

Of course, such naked adulation only sets you up for disappointment. Five years later, when Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade hit the theaters, I saw it on opening day (an early matinee, just after getting out of my last day of ninth grade, a terrible year for growing up). I thought the movie was lousy. It lacked the cool darkness of Temple of Doom, which had so appealed to my preadolescent mind; worse, it had replaced young Short Round, the sidekick with whom I had so identified, with Sean Connery's doddering old Henry Jones. And I was flabbergasted at the dogfight sequence in which Indy guns down two German planes -- hadn't we been told, in Temple of Doom, that Indy didn't know how to fly? Such narrative inconsistency stunned me. Only when I saw Last Crusade for a second time (a few days later) did I change my mind and realize, hey, that's a pretty good flick. The action sequences were as well orchestrated as the first two films', the lines were great, Indy kicked butt, and I wound up seeing Last Crusade at least two more times on the screen. I didn't run around with a fedora and fake whip anymore (hey, I was 15 now; even if I'd still wanted to wear the fedora -- which I probably did -- I knew I would have gotten my ass kicked). But at least I felt that Spielberg hadn't let me down.

And so, 24 years after Temple of Doom (and 19 years after the most recent Indy adventure), Spielberg & Lucas & Ford have graced us with installment four. I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last week, and I was underwhelmed. My wife liked it, but -- and she might disagree with me on this -- she never loved Temple of Doom the way I did. Maybe I was only repeating the experience of seeing The Last Crusade in '89, setting myself up for disappointment. Maybe I just wasn't in the proper mindset. But the dialogue seemed leaden, Ford seemed bored (which is even worse than seeming old), the CGI special effects were downright goofy (did we really need anthropomorphic ground hogs, or magic monkeys, or an amada of killer ants?), and too many sets looked like the half-hearted Hollywood stage sets that they surely were. It felt like the masterminds of the first three films were going through the motions, eager to cash their million-dollar checks. But maybe not. Maybe the fault was mine: for being older, for not being 10 anymore, however much Hollywood would like me to remain a bright-eyed ten-year-old forever.

The fact is, it is impossible for me, now, to love a movie as much as the ten-year-old me loved Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Even some of the critics who have given lukewarm or negative reviews to the new film still say that at least it was better than Temple of Doom. Indeed, many critics and fans claim that Temple of Doom was the worst of the Indy films, but the fact remains that I was 10 when I first saw it and I will never be 10 again, therefore no sequel can possibly do it justice. When I watch Temple of Doom these days (which I do at least every few years), I do see that the plot is as threadbare and ridiculous as Crystal Skull's, that the action sequences are full of events that defy the laws of physics (leaping out of a plummeting airplane and landing on an inflatable raft? not to mention the entire mining car chase scene), that the heroine is a sexist stereotype and that, yes, wow, there are some pretty icky racial stereotypes throughout the film. But the 10 year-old me was deliriously, gloriously blind to such flaws.

So even while I make note of all Temple of Doom's flaws, it is impossible for me to view it with fully adult eyes -- I know the darn thing so well and equate it so strongly with that period of my childhood that I can't give it a sober assesment. It's like being asked how pretty you think your mother is compared to other women her age. Um, how can I judge that, and how is my judgment fair? The re-creation of the Indy and Star Wars films puts us Gen Xers in an unusual position -- even if the new movies are indeed as good as or even better than some of the earlier ones, they can never seem that way to us, because they're still kid films, and we're not kids anymore. Just as I can't watch Temple of Doom with fully adult eyes, I couldn't watch Crystal Skull with kid eyes either. Sitting through the new movie is less like watching a new film and more like watching an old home video of the 10-year-old me: it's awkward and embarrassing, and I cringe now and then, thinking, "Wow, did I really look like that? Think like that? Dream like that?"

A friend of mine says summer action blockbusters like Crystal Skull are great so long as you "check your mind at the door" and have fun with it, but I've never known how to do this. My brain is kind of attached to the rest of me, to my capacity for wonder and excitement and thrills. I tell stories for a living, so I like to think I have a pretty healthy and vibrant inner child, but that still isn't enough to inoculate me against the kinds of gaping plot holes and clunky dialogue that might have washed over my younger self.

Just as a slightly older generation of writers like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem drew its childhood inspiration from Spiderman and Hulk comics, Indy was huge in my formative storytelling brain. I can't help wondering how different a writer I might be if I hadn't been raised on the Indy films, and whether that's a good or bad thing. Even today, I'm typing this sentence beneath the watchful gaze of my framed Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom poster, which has been at my side throughout the writing of my first two novels (the second one coming soon to a bookstore near you, as the previews say). In it, Indy's holding a machete and standing in a temple entrance, looking not so much tough or angry as ready. Ready for whatever obstacles might come his way: stampeding Thugees, Chinese mafia, sophomore year of high school, first dates, college. He might not be the same guy after he's been confronted by and somehow survived these various cliffhangers, and his past might not make as much sense in a more adult future, but I'm still glad he let me tag along as his sidekick.

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My Summer Reading Picks

Thu, 29 May 2008 08:51:57 EST

Someone recently asked me if I had any "summer reading" picks, which got me to thinking of the whole concept of a Summer Read, or a Beach Read. People tend to think of trips to the beach (or any other vacation) as the time to pick up something trashy, or fun, or simple, or lesser than what one might ordinarily read. Which goes a long way toward explaining the kinds of books you'll usually find at airport kiosks. But I'm the guy who was once teased for taking The Brothers Karamazov to the beach, so I'm not your typical beach reader. I just enjoy reading novels too much -- and feel too aware of all the great books out there that I haven't gotten to yet -- to want to waste my time with O is For Overdone or something like that.

(And hey, I do have my guilty reading pleasures -- anyone who's as big a sports fan as I am spends way, way too much time reading about sports online. So don't think I'm trying to act all superior here. I too enjoy reading good junk, just not when it comes to novels.)

So, with those disclaimers dispensed with, if someone nonetheless asked me for some Summer Reading picks, here's what I'd recommend. I've broken them into two groups: Books That Are Sort of Like Thrillers, Only Way Better, and Books That Are Really Short:

Books That Are Sort of Like Thrillers, Only Way Better
There seems to be a growing subgenre out there of literary authors taking the basic ideas of hardboiled detective fiction and doing something crazy with it. Here are a few of my favorite examples:

Citizen Vince, or The Zero, by Jess Walter. My new favorite writer. Citizen Vince is about a smalltime New York hood who's been relocated to Spokane, WA, as part of the Witness Protection Program. In the days leading up to the 1980 Carter/Reagan elections, he is given his first-ever voter ID card as part of his new identity; meanwhile, he begins to fear that the mob has tracked him down. He becomes obsessed with both national politics and his own survival in a funny, entertaining story that would be particularly good to read in this election-year summer. Walter is a writer who deserves a lot more attention -- extremely readable yet brilliant, with characters you want to hang out with all day, at the beach or wherever. And if you like Citizen Vince and/or want something a tad more challenging and thought-provoking, I highly recommend The Zero, Walter's latest, which was nominated for the National Book Award. Sort of a cross between the film Memento and 9/11, it follows a police detective with serious memory problems who finds himself entangled with a shadowy government antiterror agency just after 9/11 -- he has gaps in his memory, so he keeps "appearing" in scenes but can't remember what he's supposed to do in them. Funny, smart, awesome.

Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem. A man with Tourette's Syndrome tries to investigate the murder of his friend and mentor, who was a smalltime Brooklyn gangster. As you can imagine, it is difficult to stealthily dig for clues when your condition requires you to shout "Eat me, Bailey!" every now and then. I, like many people, first "discovered" Lethem with this book, and I'm so glad I did.

The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead. In a somewhat alternate reality, elevator inspectors are as important as cops. When an elevator crashes on the shift of the world's first black female elevator inspector, she needs to investigate who is framing her and why. A clever racial allegory and a darn good yarn.

The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by Michael Chabon. Not much to say about this mega-best-seller that hasn't already been said. It's a 1940s style noir detective story set in a hypothetical present that imagines what would have happened if Alaska, rather than Israel, had become the post-WWII homeland for the Jews. The Coen Brothers are already slated to direct it, according to various Internet sites whose reliability I can't in any way vouch for.

In The Shadow of the Law, by Kermit Roosevelt. If you liked the movie Michael Clayton, you'll love this. It doesn't fit into the pseudo-hardboiled genre like the above books, but I wanted to give it a shout-out anyway. This first novel follows a number of lawyers, novice and veteran, ethical and shady, in a bigtime D.C. law firm as they get involved in two major cases. That sounds like a standard thriller, but what puts this far outside of Grisham or Turow territory is the attention paid to the different characters and their dilemmas, as well as Roosevelt's keen eye for exposing the sad ironies and moral tragedies inherent in the modern practice of law.

Books That Are Really Short
There is something to be said for being able to write a powerful, intelligent, artistic work in only 200 pages or so. I haven't come anywhere close myself. Also, there is something to be said for having a (physically) lightweight book in your beach bag or hiking sack or carry-on. Here are some that get it done with minimal blathering:

Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney. With so much '80s nostalgia in the air, it's a wonder this one isn't back on the bestseller lists. This is a seminal first novel about a young man losing his bearings in NYC, before novels about young men losing their bearings in NYC became standard requirements for writers who have MFAs and live in Brooklyn. And it's one of the only books I've read in a single plane flight.

The Passion, or Sexing The Cherry, by Jeannette Winterson. I haven't read her in years, but Winterson's first two novels are gorgeous stories that meld fairy tales with examinations of love and gender and history. I'm willing to bet Jonathan Safran Foer is a huge fan (and that is in no way a shot against Mr. Foer).

Anything Written By George Saunders. I can't even begin to describe how cool his short stories are, so I won't try.

The Committments, by Roddy Doyle. The best novel about music ever written. It's about a group of teens who form a soul covers band in 1980s Dublin. Hilarious, raunchy, and so, so smart about music and what it means to people. And you can read it in about the time it would take you to listen to Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club four times.

The Stranger, by Albert Camus. Guaranteed to win you as many weird looks at the beach as The Brothers Karamazov, but at only 1/10th the weight! Plus, it has a murder on the beach! If you want to mix existentialism with your mai-tai, this is it.

Happy Summer, everyone!

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Me on TV

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 11:06:58 EST

OK, as promised, here's a link to my first-ever TV interview. The fine news anchors of WIVB, Buffalo's CBS affiliate, chose my book as their April choice for their monthly book club.

I happened to be in Upstate New York to take part in the "Tale for Three Counties" community reads project, so I met anchors Lisa Scott and Victoria Hong at a coffeeshop and chatted about the book. A surreal experience indeed. People trying to enjoy their cappucinos kept looking over at us with expressions like, "Who's that guy who thinks he's so important?" I felt kind of bad about that, as it felt very much like the coffeeshop I frequent here in DC, and I'm sure I would have given the same looks if someone had shown up with a video camera and microphones. They do serve up a damn fine cappuccino at Cafe Aroma, so if you're ever in Buffalo and need to kill some time and get a nice buzz going, that's your place.

Whenever I see incredibly friendly and energetic morning anchors on TV, I assume that they can't possibly be that energetic and friendly in real life, off camera, and that it's all an act. Well, I'm happy to report that they really are that energetic and friendly, or at least Lisa and Victoria were. And, in a relatively rare event with book/media things, they'd even read the book! And liked it! (Authors quickly get used to doing interviews with radio or magazine folks who clearly haven't read it and are only working off notes based on the book blurbs; that's just the way it usually works, so it was refreshing and flattering to be interviewed by people who'd actually read the thing.)

I haven't watched the interview myself yet, as it seems kind of narcissistic, but I suppose I will eventually. Hopefully I didn't look at the camera, or play with my hair too much.

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Operation Warrior Library

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 09:43:43 EST

What do soldiers read? Pretty much anything they can get their hands on, I've been told, as they don't have many options. Usually that means magazines, as English-language books in Iraq and Afghanistan are fairly scarce.

But a few writers and publishers are doing their part to increase the supply of good reading material among our troops abroad. It all started with a certain Col. George Reynolds, an avid reader who was one of the first people to send an email via my Web site (which you too can do by clicking here). Col. Reynolds also sent an email to a buddy of mine, Paul Malmont, whose action-packed first novel, The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, tells the tale of 1930s pulp fiction writers who get caught in a wild pulp tale of their own (it's a Book About Writers for people who don't read Books About Writers). After corresponding with the Colonel, Paul had a great idea: Why not send a box of his novels to troops in Iraq? And why not talk other writers into doing the same thing? By coordinating with the good Colonel, this is what happened. As a result, a dozen or so writers (at my last counting, but I could be way off) have sent off boxes of their books, and a number of publishers have ante-ed up as well.

So, if you're a writer, consider contributing by sending an email to Paul -- he's the contact for this awesome endeavor, which the Army anointed with the official and totally cool name of Operation Warrior Library. And if you're a reader, email a writer you like and ask him or her to contribute. (Other contributors include such personal favorites of mine as Glen David Gold and Alice Sebold.) It's a great, nonpolitical way to support our men and women who are out there risking their lives. Whether you're an Obamamaniac who wants the troops brought home today or a McCainiac who wants to leave them there another 100 years, sending them some quality reading material will, hopefully, provide them with some amount of respite from their challenging days and nights.

And you might even get a cool thank you gift: After receiving a couple boxes of my novel, Col. Reynolds sent me a crisp Iraqi dinar, complete with smiling image of Saddam Hussein.

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How Much Complexity Can You Handle?

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 09:28:45 EST

Interrelated Thoughts on Sacred Games, The Wire, and Everything Bad Is Good For You

(OK, I've been slacking on the blog. I have an excuse, which will interest those of you wondering about my new book: I've been busy putting some finishing touches on the manuscript, which my agent has now read and green-lighted. So after a few more edits I'll be sending it off to my editor, and then, presumably, I'll have more time to exercise my right as a 21st Century Human by blogging. So, here goes...)

I recently read Vikram Chandra's 900-page Indian cop-gangster epic Sacred Games. Good stuff. But let me note again that it was 900 pages, meaning that it finishes second only to Infinite Jest as Longest Novel By A Non-Dead Guy I've Ever Read. And honestly, if it had a different font size and a more standard use of paragraph breaks, it probably would have been 1,100 pages. (The first sign of trouble, after noticing how impressively heavy the thing is to carry around (in hardcover!), was the fact that it didn't have page headers listing the author or title, as the book designer wisely dispensed with them to buy Chandra a few extra lines per page, which probably saved them 50 pages or so.)

I really dug this book. Taking place in present-day Bombay/Mumbai, it alternately follows a humble, hardened Sikh cop (Sartaj Singh) and Bombay's number one gangsta, Ganesh Gaitonde. Most critics spent much ink noting the crazy multinational empire that Gaitonde builds, with harems in Thailand and movies in Bollywood and money laundering in the Middle East and assassination plots in London, etc, and all the attendant statements about globalization and interconnectedness. But my favorite parts of the book were the Singh (cop) chapters. Cop stories are so easy to get wrong, as there are so many cliches waiting for the ambitious writer to trip over, and I can think of few cop novels that I've really, really liked. Chandra, though, does a perfect job of following the genre conventions just enough to keep the story going while also subverting them in interesting ways. Through Singh's investigations, we get to learn about the tensions between different castes and immigrants and religions in Bombay (tensions which resonate in any country), the complicated modern relations between men and women (there's a great blackmail plot involving an affair), and the constant presence of corruption and graft (Singh is portrayed as a Good Cop partly because he only takes some bribes, which tells you something about the state of policing in India).

I might even call Sacred Games a Great Book, but a 900-page Great Book, like a great marriage, is going to have its rough patches. I eventually became bored with the Gaitonde chapters; maybe this makes me out of touch with my fellow Americans, but mobster characters (Goodfellas, The Sopranos, etc) don't quite do it for me. Also, the Singh chapters were told in spare but pitch-perfect third-person narration, combining an eye for detail with a heartbreaking weariness of what Singh sees around him, whereas the gangster chapters were a cockier first-person, narrated by a total egotist who I eventually got tired of. Egotists can be either superb narrators (see Nabokov) or really annoying ones, and Gaitonde seemed more the latter to me.

But the part of the book that I vacillated between admiring and disliking, and the theme of today's post, was the many many tangents and sidebars and extraneous stories. Tangents, of course, are what can make fiction so interesting and fun, but too many of them can muddle a book. And a reader's tolerance for tangents tends to decrease on page 650 or so, when we start wanting the storyteller to get on with it already. Writers constantly face choices, choices about what to put in and what to leave out. I myself struggle with this all the time. The Last Town on Earth has chapters or long sections written from at least six major characters' perspectives, so there was a lot of balancing to do, lots of balls to keep in the air at once. But readers can only handle so much before confusion or impatience set in. As a writer, I tend to gravitate toward multicharacter, multiperspective stories (my new one has at least five characters' perspectives, as of the current draft), so I can totally relate to the desire to put more in, to add something from the daughter's perspective and something from the second-cousin's perspective and hey maybe a chapter about the immigrant waiter at the restaurant down the street and something about that panhandler guy, etc. Aiming for that epic scope, trying to tell The Complete Story, to get it all down, to encompass this great big sprawling story we call Life. But as a reader, that sometimes doesn't work, and we want the writer to use his artistic judgment to choose only the characters and stories that best tell his tale. So: why this disconnect?

Because I'm behind the times TV-wise, I've only recently started watching Series 1 of The Wire, which has been hailed by critics as the best show in the history of television. And I can't disagree: I absolutely love it. If I didn't have a toddler and if my wife and I weren't always so tired by dinnertime, we'd try to watch a season a week. What makes the show so great? The dialogue and the realism, yeah, but mainly the characters and the complexity and the many interwoven subplots. There are at least a dozen "major" characters thus far, cops and drug dealers and cop's spouses and DA's and drug dealers' girlfriends and judges and other cops and other dealers, and I'm only on the eighth episode. The show has been called "a television novel" because of its novelistic scope, encompassing so many characters and daring to go on tangents (for example, by taking time in a random episode to show ten or fifteen minutes in the life of one of the characters we hadn't seen much of before, just to flesh him or her out, to add depth, to reveal something new). It's awesome, and addictive: I want to know more about everyone. Yay, complexity! Yay, tangents! Give us more!

In Steven Johnson's provocative Everything Bad Is Good For You, he argues that societal whipping posts like TV and video games are actually making us smarter, not dumber, because they are so much more complex than they used to be. Instead of Pacman running around on a simple screen, Myst or Doom contain hundreds of secrets that need to be explored, challenging our cognitive processes. And instead of the linear storytelling and small casts of CHIPS or Starsky and Hutch, more recent TV sensations like Lost or 24 have countless subplots and dozens of characters and aren't afraid to confuse us or leave us hanging or throw out information that it might take us a whole week of water-cooler gossiping to figure out. Johnson argues that people who blindly bemoan TV and praise literature haven't noticed how far TV has come, and he makes a lot of points that intrigue and frighten me as a novelist.

Because here's the thing: Some of the aspects of The Wire that I most love are extremely difficult to pull off in fiction. Even though The Wire has been called "a TV novel," the fact is, few novels have as many characters and perspectives as The Wire has. It out-novels the novel. And it makes me wonder (or fear) whether this is a sign that TV could be (shudder) a more effective medium for complex storytelling than fiction is. Why? First of all, the visuals help: as anyone at a cocktail party or at a new job knows, we remember faces a lot better than names. So when a random, previously unimportant character wanders on screen in episode 5 and suddenly does something really important, we might not remember his name, but we do remember that he's the guy that threatened McNulty a few weeks ago. Whereas, with fiction, for example Sacred Games, when Chandra suddenly hits us on page 500-something with a 40-page chapter that's a flashback to an episode early in the life of a character whose name I don't at all recognize, because he hasn't been mentioned in hundreds of pages, I'm kind of lost, and maybe even annoyed. Second, TV and film are more social than reading; even if we don't remember who that somewhat familiar face on the TV is, we can hit pause and ask our friends, whereas reading is solitary.

(I should note that some of The Wire's extraordinary writers, like Richard Price and George Pelecanos, are also great novelists. And that, although critics and writers love The Wire, its viewership was relatively low compared to, say, Everybody Loves Raymond, so maybe viewers don't want complexity after all. Or maybe only certain kinds of viewers.)

So what does this all mean? I have no idea. I only know that, as a writer, I want to tell complex, complicated stories, and I want to go on tangents, to find a way to squeeze in this perspective and that story and this anecdote and that overlooked character. I want to get it all, even if this challenges the reader -- and maybe, if it challenges him, that very challenge will become addictive, and make the reading experience so much richer and more rewarding than a straight first-person linear tale would have been. But I have the constant fear that if I do make it too complex, if I ask too much of the reader, if I annoy him too much, he'll throw up his hands, put the book down... and just turn on his TV.

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Then We Came To The Envy

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:48:49 EST

I recently read Joshua Ferris' much-hyped, National-Book-Award-nominated debut novel, Then We Came To The End. As a fellow first-novelist, it would be so easy for me to say it was overhyped, that he didn't deserve the cover of the New York Times Book Review, that he's yet another young Brooklynite writer, that blah blah blah. I even put off reading it for a while (bought it in hardcover months ago -- it's now out in paperback) just because I didn't want to face such feelings, or be filled with envy if the book did turn out to be That Good. Well, it is That Good.

In fact, I can happily report that Ferris' book is so good that I wasn't even envious, didn't feel bitter, didn't feel snarky -- just felt the Warm Fuzzy of literary joy to be reading something so funny, so entertaining, so emotionally right. I tip my cap to the man. I wish upon him even more praise, and even more sales.

For those of you who missed the hype, Then We Came To The End can be summarized (thinly, but not inaccurately) as the literary-novel equivalent of TV's The Office, but without that show's uncomfortable sense of sadomasochist voyeurism. It's set in a Chicago ad agency and takes place during the dot-com crash, dramatizing an impending series of layoffs, office affairs, cubicle shenanigans, and the other happenings that somehow keep us going from Monday through Friday. I laughed out loud, in public, several times while reading it; during an unexpectedly tense sequence late in the novel, I did that "cover-the-bottom-half-of-the-page-with-your-hand" thing so I wouldn't accidentally read the dramatic end of a chapter before I was supposed to.

And as a writer who did not go the MFA route, who has not been in the academic system for his writing apprenticeship, and who (I admit) has something of a chip on his shoulder about this, I was so pleased to read a book that dared to address Work. Work as setting, yes, but work as existential issue, work as identity, work both as unavoidable impediment to and intrinsic part of our happiness. So many writers (especially writers in my generation) don't seem to have much 9-to-5 experience, having shuttled from college to grad school to teaching appointments, and it was so refreshing to see someone write about a subject that, in my opinion, has been entirely overlooked in the canon, especially of late. Writers -- either because they're in school as students and then as teachers, or because they've been successful enough to write full-time or take piecemeal work as journalists -- are less likely than Normal Folks to have normal jobs, which explains the gap in the canon. I'm not saying teaching isn't a real job -- I am the son and brother of teachers -- I'm just saying, come on, there is no shortage of novels about professors, or journalists, or grad students. We need more books exploring the myriad enraging, perplexing, infatuating, annoying aspects of that thing that happens to us in our offices. The feeling of being trapped there, of yearning for more, of hoping that the Job can provide the very escape we so desperately seek, of wondering what happens when that escape hasn't come, whether it's the fault of the Job or (no!) some fault of our own. (And hopefully people will actually want to read such books, though sometimes I think publishers assume they won't, unless the characters' jobs are in publishing.) Thus ends my quasi-Marxist anti-academia plug/rant.

Seriously: Buy the book on your next coffee break, and start reading it on the one after that, and you'll thank me.

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Off to Western New York for "A Tale for Three Counties"

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:04:30 EST

Well, the good people of New York are losing their unfaithful Governor today, but they get me in return! I'm off to Upstate New York to participate in a Community Reads project. The organizers of "A Tale for Three Counties" chose my book as their 2008 Community Reads; I'll be giving talks and signings at four locations spread across three counties in Western New York, between Buffalo and Rochester.

Spearheaded by libraries, universities, and city halls, Community Reads have been taking off over the last few years. At a time when Americans are reading fewer books, and are particularly less likely to read fiction, these projects are a much-needed way to inspire renewed interest in the pleasures of literature. Writers don't often get a chance to interact with readers, so this is an unusual opportunity for me to get feedback and see the many ways in which readers have interpreted the words I put on the page.

Luckily The Last Town on Earth seems to be generating a lot of interest from universities (for All-Freshman Reads) and other communities over the past few months; this is the first in a handful of similar projects I'll be doing this year.

Librarians, university profs and administrators who organize Community Reads might want to take a look at the Web site created by "A Tale For Three Counties". They've done a great job taking the book in different directions, with a college art exhibit on "plague art," a library presentation of items belonging to a WWI soldier, a "review contest" for readers, and articles by the local paper discussing what would happen to their communities should a new epidemic break out. Good stuff, and it's great that people have found so much to delve into.

The local paper, the Batavia Daily News, recently posted an interview with yours truly: here's the
link.

While in Buffalo I'll be doing my first TV interview! If I can figure out how, I'll post a link to the video when I get back...

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Are writers crazy?

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:16:10 EST

Are writers crazy? Maybe not, but that sentence struck me as a particularly apt way to begin my first blog posting. I was thinking about this because I was catching up on some New Yorker reading recently, and it turns out that two issues in the past few months ran articles about famous writers who suffered from severe depression and alcoholism. The first story, about William Styron, was an excerpt of his daughter's recently published memoir; the second detailed the mysterious death of Malcolm Lowry, author of the postmodern classic (or is that a contradiction?) Under the Volcano.

The Styron article notes that, while the Sophie's Choice author could be quite the entertainer when hosting cocktail parties dotted with intellectuals and filmmakers, his heavy drinking didn't exactly make him the most pleasant father to have around the house, particularly when his writing wasn't going well. According to Syron's daugher, his depression was not necessarily a result of the wounds one normally equates with troubled writers (bad sales, cruel reviews, no money, dismal job teaching remedial writing to a community college in East Nowhere, etc). He received plenty of acclaim and what seems like more than respectable financial success for a novelist. As will happen when you're on top, he did receive his share of ire as well; The Confessions of Nat Turner, which won the 1967 Pulitizer Prize, was strongly criticized by black intellectuals who disapproved of the white author's take on Turner. Still, the New Yorker article lays the blame for Styron's troubles on subtler demons that sprang from his mother's death when he was thirteen.

The Lowry article, meanwhile, details that author's tempestuous marriage. His wife served as his editor, but also as his nurse and all-around lifesaver -- he was so addled by various mental problems that she tied his shoes for him, and his alcoholic spells were so bad he occasionally begged on street corners for spare change to buy more booze. Lowry's death was ruled accidental at the time, an overdose on various medications and alcohol. But some scholars are arguing, the story notes, that Lowry's wife, driven to exhaustion and despair by his manic extremes, may have deliberately fed him too many meds that night.

So the same magazine ran two stories, in less than three months, about depressed, alcoholic novelists. The Crazy Writer is almost a stereotype, except there's too much evidence to consider it a mere stereotype. Looking back, there indeed have been many maniacs, depressives, suicides, and other legions of the unwell in our ranks. And they're the writers who get the most attention, because they're so much more interesting -- interesting and repulsive and horrifying and sympathetic and sad and tragic -- than the more typical writer, who tends to be a quiet sort who spends far too much time alone in his or her office. We can't all be Hemingway, shooting rhinos and scaling mountains, or F. Scott, boozing with Manhattan's and Hollywood's glitziest, though journalists of course would prefer it if we could. The Crazy Writers, finally spared their torments in the placid afterlife of the canon, look down on us mortal writers from their pedestals. They are benighted saints of passionate madness, and it is as though we living authors should kneel before their books and vow to sacrifice our own mental health in the pursuit of similar artistic riches.

I read the two Crazy Writer stories with a mix of fascination and terror, thinking, could this happen to me? Could the sting of bad press, or, the opposite, the dizzying impossibility of high expectations, ground me down to such a lowly place? Fortunately, I don't think so. I had a healthy upbringing, and I have a supportive family -- this seems to disqualify me from about 90 percent of literary breakdowns. I don't agree with the theory that writers or artists are all a bit crazy, and that this craziness is what drives us to create, and that the crazier we are, the better our art. Thank God for the example set by folks like Michael Chabon and Jeffrey Eugenides, hugely talented and successful writers who also, as far as I know, seem to lead sane and healthy lives.

Soon after I got my first book deal, I saw Bret Easton Ellis give a reading at Olssons Books here in D.C. At the time I'd only read his first novel, Less Than Zero. That book helped Ellis achieve widespread fame and literary success at an insanely young age, something that he has admitted was both a blessing and a curse. Ellis was on tour that night to promote his new book, Lunar Park, which I later read and enjoyed very much. The main character of Lunar Park is an approaching-middle-age writer named Bret Easton Ellis who is haunted by a man who looks just like he did back when he wrote Less Than Zero. He is also being stalked by a man who looks just like the terrifying protagonist of his ultraviolent later novel, American Psycho. So, although I wasn't yet an expert on the cult of Ellis, it seemed irresistibly symbolic for me, the newly minted writer, to attend the reading of a novel about a writer who goes crazy, written by a writer who himself may or may not have gone crazy.

Ellis has a deadpan sense of humor and put on a fun show. But during the Q&A, it was one of the unfunny things he said that has stuck with me. He was asked about his writing routine, how he does it, how long, what time, etc, and one of the points he made was that, in order to write well, you "have to be healthy." I had never thought of that before. Maybe it's because I myself, despite having written a novel about an epidemic, have been blessed with a largely healthy life. But I think it's a great point Ellis made, and I get it more now than I did back in that September of 2005, as I myself not only have gone through the full publishing cycle but also have had my first child and have dealt with the attendant sleep-deprivation, family illnesses, emotional stresses, etc. You have to be healthy. Writing when you haven't had any sleep and are subsisting on espresso in the daytime and bourbon at night might sound romantic, and might fit perfectly with all those Crazy Writer stereotypes, but it won't result in great art, and you'll likely go crazy. Writing on Quaaludes and speed sounds edgy and wild but will leave you with some awfully long, incomprehensible sentences that, odds are, will not be studied in the kinds of Postmodern Fiction courses that first got you really into Pynchon and Beckett. Writing when you're emotionally and psychologically unwell and unsafe might sound therapeutic, but it also might be the wrong way to deal with some important issues you need to deal with.

(And yes, I know, a few Great Works have been created this way, sure, and yes, you could argue that artists occasionally need to experience life at the extremes in order to get new perspectives, to find bizarre and original sources of inspiration, etc, okay, but even then I would argue that they need to recalibrate themselves before sitting in front of that word processor. And yes, I also have admitted when asked that one of the reasons I write is because it "keeps me sane," and there is a lot of truth in the notion that a writer, if deprived of his artistic outlet, might go a little looney, and yes, I see this, definitely, but here again there is a fine line.)

So I want to share Mr. Ellis' sage advice to any aspiring writers out there. I try to remember it on days when I'm too foggy from a long night up with a sick toddler, or when I myself am losing a fight with the flu or am otherwise overstressed or freaked out or unwell. I want to write, I want to create, I want to push envelopes and cross lines and tear down old buildings, but first I have to be healthy. I want to push and push and push, but in my art, and not in my life. I want inspiration and creativity and new ways of seeing, but I don't want to inspire my daughter to write a memoir about my many foibles, or inspire my wife to kill me. The New Yorker will have to find another crazy novelist to write about -- and no doubt they'll find one.

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