Category: Reading and Books

Title: Matrimony

Author: Joshua Henkin

Origins: Josh Henkin emailed me through our mutual friend MJ Rose last year to let me know he was coming to San Francisco for an event at the Booksmith, my neighborhood bookstore. Josh is also the brother of UC Berkeley professor David Henkin whom I’m friendly with through my synagogue.

Synopsis: Twenty years in the span of a marriage beginning when Julian and Mia meet in college in the 1980s. Has chapters taking place in both Ann Arbor and San Francisco which means its subtitle should read "written especially with Kevin Smokler in mind."

Verdict: This is my favorite book of this year. It’s not complicated, stylish, thick or hip and I don’t care. A great story, about good, flawed people, told so effortlessly that think you must know them, or know someone  knows them or didn’t you spot one of them at a show last night or in line at the post office? It goes down like hot chocolate but feels like an energy drink. You want you sprint to your desk immediately and write your own grand version of your own grand relationship, if only you could as well as Josh Henkin does with these people who don’t exist.

Henkin reminds me of early Jennifer Egan (who blurbed Matrimony) or a Thisbe Nissen, both writers who focus on relationships and families and get unfairly pegged as lacking ambition because their characters are usually white, well-educated literates. I don’t hold that against these writers, even though they often address my demographic and I’m embarrassed of it sometimes. Empirically, it takes tremendous skill to write fiction that’s the equivalent of a great pop song: clear narrative, robust storytelling, pleasant on the throat but doesn’t feel like having chewing gum for dinner. It’s taking something that looks simple and executing about four times better than the criterion set by the genre. And it’s the kind of book I love to recommend because, for most, it not only does not disappoint but surprises.

So I recommend Matrimony like I would recommend a sunset. It’s not going to blow you away with originality. But it’s there, elegant, quiet and beautiful, like the end of the day. It never boasts nor fails to live up to itself and it waits, with dignity, for others to find it and for you to return.

New York Magazine (Sept. 14, 2008)

Summary (theirs):

The book business as we know it will not be living
happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name
authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new
boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the
corporate world.

Thoughts (mine):

A strong summary of the mess that is book publishing right now. The further I get from when my own book was published, the harder this stuff is to swallow. I’m probably angry and hurt, yes, but also sad that an industry where I had once seen my future will probably now only be a small part of it. It’s not that I think there’s no room for me. I just wonder if there is any real future at all.

Here’s where I’d love to say "Oh well," and skip higgildy piggildy on my way. On some days I can and return to my latest book project, an idea that I’ve been chasing for a few weeks now and hope to make real.

As I sit in the Mechanics Library, trying to imagine myself, again, on the shelves in a building like this, I’m writing out on the little table in front of me…

"I hope this is one of those days."

Today is the anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Kerouac originally wrote the thing over 20 days, no punctuation or paragraph breaks, on a giant continuous scroll of paper. Didn’t sleep much and listened to a lot of jazz while typing. Less romantic was the two handfuls of rejections the scroll received from publishers. Kerouac spent the next few years revising, adding commas and line breaks before being published on this day in 1957. It still sells about 100,000 copies a year, mostly to self-righteous teenagers, as I was.

I had my requisite 14 month love-affair with Kerouac and his traveling companion Neal Cassady. I too at the time thought the solution to restlessness of self and distrust of one’s country was to hit the road and live fully over every inch of its hide–mottled, flat, amber waved and coursing with rivers of blood. I’ve grown up since but still have a dream of driving across country, perhaps not to understand myself but where I am from, to feel not special but grateful for this country for making me who I am and humble amongst its hills for the inherent challenge that presents.

And before that maybe I need another read of On the Road, to remember how "hitting the road" and finding America became a possibility at all.

(via The Writers Almanac)

• Book Forum recently had a great piece about the the 50th anniversary of On The Road.
• When in San Francisco, a visit to City Lights Bookstore and to the Beat Museum 1 block away are a must. Both are in the North Beach part of town, where Kerouac and company used to hang out.

I’ve said before that I’m very tired of my bibliophilic brethren discussing books as if the physicality of reading is a non-issue. My friend and colleague Mark Sarvas and I differ on this one. He doesn’t care if a reviewer/journalist/pundit reads a book in the bathtub or while skydiving. He cares about what they have to say about what’s inside. A fair opinion.

I, on the other hand,  think we only benefit from treating reading as a real world (and that means physical, sensual and yes sexual) activity rather than solely a cerebral one. Those in the business of books and those of us who love them do more than enough to take books seriously and it is not helping matters. Let us now be willing to make reading as delicious and as artistic as fine chocolate.

Now the last place I expected to find a like-minded friend in this argument was in the pages of the reliably stodgy London Review of Books. That was, until I read John Lancaster’s magnificent essay about The Library of America earlier this summer. In it, Lanchester does what many great essays do: Take something we know beneath the water line of our consciousness and bring it above.

The choicest bits…

I am an abject fan of the Library. I own..They are about the
nicest books I have. American books are in general printed to much
higher standards than British books. The Library takes that
tendency about as far as it will go: it’s hard not to take the volumes
down from the shelves and stroke them, like a Bond villain fondling a
cat.

What is really hard, though, is to read them. The books are
so gorgeous, so marmoreal, that I find them unreadable. Not unreadable
in the Pierre Bourdieu/Edward Bulwer-Lytton sense, and not unreadable
in theory – I want to read them, I really do. It’s just that in
practice, I don’t… As for the Pléiade, my record of ownership is fairly
strong, but equally unblemished by actual reading. I have six volumes:
three of Proust, two of Simenon, and one of Taoist philosophy (don’t
ask). If pressed, I would say that the Pléiade volumes are
theoretically more readable, or less not-readable, than the Library of
America; something to do with the sexily diminutive format. This is
pure theory, however. In practice they are both equally easy to
not-read.

And then…

That makes 16 volumes of beautifully produced and entirely unread great
writing. What is it about these amazingly gorgeous books that makes one
not want to read them? Perhaps it’s to do with having a palate
corrupted by paperbacks. I buy more hardbacks now that they’re cheaper
– sales figures suggest lots of us do – but in my head I still think
that the paperback is somehow the real form of a book. It has a
cheapness and democratic availability, and it doesn’t matter if you
drop it in the bath or lose it or discover that it’s been ‘borrowed’. I can’t shake off the sense that a hardback is a slightly over-posh relative of a real book.

Bringing it home…

There’s a risk that memorialising writers, consigning them to Culture, is a way of ignoring them.

Genius. I didn’t know who John Lanchester was until I read this piece. Now he’s made himself a fan here in America.

Title: Woman Hollering Creek

Author: Sandra Cisneros

Origins: WHC was one of those you couldn’t avoid if you were in college in the early 1990s, a totemic example of a kind of American literature establishment English departments overlooked: about women, about Mexican-Americans about cities like San Antonio, Texas. That it became a rallying cry for the Political Correctness movements of the time has done it and its legacy a disservice. Its much more than repeating a community’s story back to it. Which I discovered when I took this book on my recent trip up north to Healdsburg with my girlfriend. 

Synopsis: A collection of short stories largely focused on towns, communities and heads of households along the Mexican-American border.

Verdict: Sandra Cisneros uses the words the way a great ballerina or athlete uses their body, which a grace that seems effortless but masks the craft and skill of a great professional. The title story is a feminist classic, deservedly so, but deserves a place alongside Vonnegut’s "The Long Road to Forever" as an example of perfect narrative architecture barely holding in a swelling heart about to burst. I also liked  "Little Miracles, Kept Promises", a story told entirely through letter to the Virgin De Guadalupe, which races past its gimmick well before you you can label it a gimmick. The last story (which I quoted in an earlier post) reads like a section of a Texas-fried Tales of the City, which coming from this San Francisco convert, is high compliment.

I very much enjoyed Cisneros’s first collection The House on Mango Street (WHC is her second) but felt, there as here, she needs a bit more patience with some of her stories. There’s maybe five too many one-and-two pagers that read as ideas for larger pieces that never materialized instead of the pieces themselves. But thankfully, those pass quietly and leave us with the larger, meatier work, which is wonderful.   

Title: Box Office Poison

Author: Alex Robinson

Origins: I hadn’t heard of Robinson until I spent the day in Ann Arbor with my friend Carla Borsoi. In late afternoon, we visited the Vault of Midnight comic book store where Ms. Borsoi thrust this graphic novel into my hands and said "You must read this." I’ve heeded her advice.

Synopsis: A small group of friends deal with dead-end jobs, crappy apartments, and indecipherable relationships make a go of it in mid 90s New York City.

Verdict: If the characters on Friends were actually people you wanted to hang out with, you’d have BOP. Ed, Sherman and crew are likeable, flawed and real. Their problems everyday instead of melodramatic. The subplot involving an exploited artist from the golden age of comics rides hard on the break of geekery but avoids falling over because Mr. Robinson has a soul as well as reverence for the form.

The plot doesn’t exactly break new ground and if you weren’t tumbling into adulthood at that time, the period details might not resonate. But if you’ve ever been young, lost  and confused, Alex Robinson is your new best friend. I don’t care if this book of his has been done before. He does it with more heart and style than his antecedents. And I want to read him doing it again.

Title: CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella

Author: Geroge Saunders

Synopsis: Saunder’s 1997 debut short story collection, (he’s published five books since) containing 6 tales and a novella. All are terrifying, absurd and hilarious. Imagine George Orwell and Terry Pratchett’s grinning love child.

Assessment: I’m not going to say George Saunders is for everyone. if you like your short stories grounded in realism, the problems of everyday people or the love affair grandmother had at the summer cottage all those years ago, move along, nothing to see here. But if you enjoy an author throwing one handful of  foolishness at you after another (Jerry went to work. His boss was a fish. Jerry ate him. Then went home to his wife who had become a hyrax that afternoon) while never cracking a wink then grab this book immediately. It’s twisted, weird, scary but never at your expense. The spirit of these stories is magnanimous, even when they layer on cruelty like an overfrosted cake.

And Saunders refuses to let up. He  doesn’t wave off the bruised dystopias he creates because there’s ironic brownie points to be gained by doing so. No he’s as committed to his fantastical worlds as Roald Dahl. Ask yourself then, if you picked up Roald Dahl blended with Blade Runner, would you be into that sort of thing?

Verdict: I was. Six of seven of these stories I’m calling modern classics. And given that this was the man’s first book, I’m working the other two of his I own into regular rotation. By the time he hits his stride he’ll be too brilliant for this earth.

Source(s): I read his children’s book The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil some time ago, loved it, and bought this one soon after. Mr. Saunders’ editor at Riverhead is a friend who also has me on an early warning list.

Please tell me why we should care (unless we are Mark David Chapman) which section of Brooklyn famous writers live in? Because New York Magazine would like us to believe this is very very important to know.

Without understanding why, I follow their example. At the moment, I am deeply immersed in crafting a similar piece, complete with map, on where the pulsating heart of literary San Francisco takes its dry cleaning. So for all you stalkers out there eager to pawn a lint ball of mine on eBay, please begin snooping at Son Loy Laundry, right here.

I’m usually there in the late morning, surrounded by large Syrian men in track suits whom I call Chaz and Skip. If one is cutting me a line of cocaine on the pants pressing iron, that means go away (via Felicia Sullivan).

Title: The Shape of Things of Come: Prophecy and the American Voice

Author: Greil Marcus

Synopsis: Cultural critic Greil Marcus weaves together John Winthrop, Bill Pullman, 24 and Pere Ubu to discuss this particular point in our cultural history.

Assessment: One reads Greil Marcus to watch Greil Marcus think. His themes are often buried beneath linguistic flourishes and his connections, when looked at straight on, seem like utter nonsense. But the journey is the point here, not the arrival because the arrival is imaginary.  Or put another way, do you really want to interrogate the value of why Bill Pullman’s face is a visual stand-in for the violence at the core of the American soul or are you just glad Marcus raised the question at all?

Verdict: Very artfully constructed but with little take-away. All whipped cream and no sundae. But its damn fine whipped cream (first heard about on KQED Forum).