Year-end Round-up

I've been neglecting things here for quite a while. Here's the stuff I've been reading since the last time I mentioned the stuff I've been reading:

Lush Life by Richard Price--I think Price is the current master of crime fiction in the U.S. Lush Life touches on all facets of life on the Lower East Side with the best dialogue being written today.

Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music by Greg Kot--Great explanation of the current state of the music business and how we got here. It's mostly stuff you already knew about if you follow the scene closely, but Kot puts it all together and adds some good inside info.

Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball--An epistolary novel that follows a man's descent into depression and suicide by recounting letters he writes to everyone he's ever known in his last days. Some are very effective, ranging between humor and pathos, while some fall flat and feel a bit too forced. One of those books that I thought I would like more than I did.

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby--I generally like Hornby's books, but this one felt like he should have gone right to the screenplay and skipped the novel altogether. And it's a movie I don't think I'd pay to see.

Invisible by Paul Auster--I liked Auster's early novels, then I grew tired of his lazy style. I read somewhere that Invisible was a return to form. It wasn't.

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker--Probably my favorite novel that I've read this year. Baker's story of a poet trying to write the introduction to a volume of rhyming poetry and relating a history of poetry in the process. It's got all the writing you love if you love Nicholson Baker and if you don't, you should.

Jernigan by David Gates--The relentless downward spiral of an alcoholic widower trying to raise his teenage son and failing miserably at everything. Funny, bitter, brutal and not a word out of place. I'm now a David Gates fan.

Black Dogs by Ian McEwan--The narrator recounts the story of his in-laws marriage against the backdrop of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The well-crafted writing we expect from McEwan with the big payoff at the end. The only problem for me was knowing the payoff was going to be there and feeling like the rest of the novel was like wading through the shallows to get to the big waves.

Grumble on the Rumpus

Rumpus.net accepted my write up on Carpenter's Gothic for their "Last Book You Loved" series. Check it out here.

Our Noise

Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, the Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed Small is a must for indie rock fans. Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance started Merge Records back in the late eighties to release 7" singles of their band, Superchunk, and other bands from the Chapel Hill scene. The label grew with the popularity of bands like Spoon, Arcade Fire, Neutral Milk Hotel and The Magnetic Fields. John Cook conducted interviews with McCaughan and Ballance and numerous musicians and locals from the Chapel Hill scene to put together this interesting peek into the world of indie music. Great photos and stories throughout--especially if you were a Superchunk fan back in the day. No Pocky for Kitty was a staple in six-disc cd changer and I had a crush on Laura Ballance, just like every other indie rock fanboy. For a long time, though, I thought she was the one singing in that thin, raspy voice buried in the mix.

Carpenter's Gothic

William Gaddis is one of those writers I've been hearing about for years, a writer's writer of difficult but rewarding fiction, a post-modern master. The Recognitions is considered his masterpiece, but it's a huge, intimidating book, so I picked up Carpenter's Gothic not long ago with no idea what to expect.

The story involves a married couple, Paul and Elizabeth, renting a house (the Carpenter's Gothic of the title) from a mysterious divorced geologist. Paul, who once ran some shady business dealings for Elizabeth's late father, is trying to get started as the media consultant for a southern evangelist while Elizabeth wanders and frets around the house. The action never leaves the house and mainly follows Elizabeth as other characters come and go. Gaddis' genius (for me) is in the dialogue. Ninety percent of the writing is dialogue--the fragmented, digressive speech of a hyperkinetic group of characters. Characters ramble on for paragraphs, changing direction in mid-sentence, jumping to phone conversations without warning and occasionally Gaddis will even insert a stage direction without separation into the midst of a chunk of dialogue.

And it all works brilliantly. Gaddis has captured the feverish way people talk to each other, especially those closest to us who don't ever seem to require context. He also manages to touch on subjects like Christianity, colonialism (and the relationship between the two), sexuality, politics--all without ever leaving the confines of the carpenter gothic house in suburban New York.

Icelander/Last Night in Montreal

I'd come across a reference to Last Night in Montreal somewhere online and when the name came up again later, I decided to check it out. The story revolves around Lilia, who has spent her life as a child abductee on the run with her father until she ventures out on her own as a young adult. She still has trouble settling in one place for too long, and when the novel opens, she has just disappeared from her boyfriend's apartment.

Emily St. John Mandel writes in a comfortably lyrical style, handily conjuring the American Southwest or a noirish frozen Montreal, where the boyfriend has gone to search for Lilia. He's led to Montreal by the daughter of the private detective who has spent much of his professional career tracking Lilia. The daughter, Michaela, has watched her parents' marriage crumble as her father spends weeks and months on the road and she eventually develops her own obsession with Lilia. This is where the novel ran into trouble--the private detective and his daughter never felt like they had much depth. Their back stories felt contrived and their dialogue never rang true. I never believed that the man would abandon his own daughter to continue his search.

St. John Mandel's flashback scenes between Lilia and her father, however, do an excellent job of evoking a growing relationship between a young girl and a father she doesn't know (he abducts her from his estranged wife's home). St. John Mandel also deftly handles the secret behind Lilia's abduction to keep me reading even though the frustration of the private detective scenes nearly drove me to bail out on the book.


Icelander is billed as an Agatha Christie mystery novel as written by Nabokov. A better comparison, I thought, was to John Barth. Dustin Long uses some of the same metafictional trickery to adorn a conventional plot line. I always felt that Barth's strength was his ability to play games with the reader and the narrative structure, yet put it within a plot dynamic enough to be a page turner. Long's approach involves a nameless heroine pulled into solving a murder mystery she has no interest in, a secret kingdom beneath the surface of Iceland (as well as its incestuous royal family), masters of disguise, anagrammatic names, doppelgangers, and even a character named Connie Lingus. Long is very good at creating a whole fabricated world of culture, complete with footnotes and asides. At times, the jokey names and winkwinknudge tricks grew tiresome, but some of the characters were intriguing enough (e.g. the dimwitted actor recounting his visit to the secret kingdom of Vinlandia) to keep the plot interesting. Long handles a variety of styles with a skilled touch--I look forward to reading something else from him.

Strength of Materials!

Finished The Dog of the South this morning and now I'm scheming to get hold of everything Charles Portis has published. What a twisted genius. I can't wait.

Dr. Reo Symes

From Dr. Reo Symes in Charles Portis' The Dog of the South:

The kind of people I know now don't have barbecues, Mama. They stand up alone at nights in small rooms and eat cold weenies. My so-called friends are bums. Many of them are nothing but rats. They spread T.B. and use dirty language. Some of them can even move their ears. They're wife-beaters and window peepers and night crawlers and dope fiends. They have running sores on the backs of their hands that never heal. They peer up from cracks in the floor with their small red eyes and watch for chances.

I had heard that Portis' novels were very funny, but when I started The Dog of the South, I expected something like the madcap, almost slapstick, sensibility of The Confederacy of Dunces. It's very different from that, with a more demented and subversive kind of humor. Portis has a sharp writing style that is perfectly attuned to the narrator, Ray Midge, and his random, weightless existence on the trail of his wife and her ex-husband, Guy Dupree, in the British Honduras.