More from the Goon Squad

Returning to Egan.... I listened to Slate's discussion and had a couple takeaways.

First of all, I really need to join a book club. I wanted to be able to chime in on that discussion several times.

Second, I learned from them that the PP chapter got a lot of buzz (both good and bad) and I was gratified to hear that it worked for them as well. They also discussed the ways in which we see characters at various points in their lives (and filtered through different perspectives). Where I didn't talk about this before was with respect to the "flash forward." We don't just know what happens to characters by meeting or hearing about them again (or before), even within a story we are suddenly taken years into the future and told what becomes of a person. For example, we get Sasha's story when she's around 30 and again in college, but then we see her at 19 where we find out where she is in her 40s. (This is good, b/c it gives us a foundation to understand the next chapter, written in her daughter's voice.) But the flash forward doesn't always necessarily serve that kind of narrative purpose (the book club's example was finding out what happened to the grandson of an African tribal dancer, who appears as a very minor character much later, which I hadn't noticed) and I found it intensely comforting somehow. More so, I think, than they did.

And finally, not related to the podcast, I couldn't get over the fact that Alex and Sasha are both diminutives of the same Alexand(e)r(a), which made their date seem strangely awkward. (Probably just because I've used both as nicknames.)

Story + story + story = novel?

A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010)


This book won a bunch of awards. (Or a least the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer.) And I had been sitting on a Slate Audio Book Club podcast since last August. And fiiiiinally I got around to getting a copy.

Here's where it turns out that I had already read a bunch of the book. Probably a third or so. Damn New Yorker. About three stories in, I found myself really frustrated. None of this was really new. Sigh, grr, etc. But then, this is where the structure of the book kicked in and argued its case. For it's not just a collection of short stories. It's a collection of stories that tie together and interconnect. A character in one story reappears in another. And while it seems like the threads that connect them are weak and few in number, they build upon one another, and you realize that you're getting the rich backstory to a throwaway line from 150 pages earlier.

We start in what is roughly the present, then dive back, then way back, then hang out somewhere between the 70s and now for awhile, and eventually finish in the future. Each story uses its own devices - third person, first person, at least one tale told in the second-person you. Another is an article (of the DFW persuasion) detailing a celebrity interview we already know (from however many stories previous) ends badly. But then there's chapter 12, "Great Rock and Roll Pauses," written by an adolescent daughter of characters we knew before. It's essentially a PowerPoint presentation, and it's tremendously effective for all that it's gimmicky. I waxed poetic about this to my boyfriend, venturing out into a reverie on why all the white space is so meaningful in a story about pauses and what is left unsaid. And so he's taken the fall for you, who only have to know that I had lots to say - of varying coherence - on the topic.

And I love the idea that in the not-so-distant future, this is how I children will tell stories. That in its own way, the PowerPoint can be a surprisingly eloquent medium. And then I lost it in the final story, which takes place roughly in that same period(ish). It's a mildly dystopic future NYC that looks quite a bit like Shteyngart's, in which handheld devices have kinda taken over (with a bit of Brooklyn hipster resistance thrown in too). For whatever reason, this felt overdone. Or at the very least out of place with the rest of the book. Ends get tied together, sure. But I didn't need this final story to feel the heft and power of the whole.

(next post coming after I actually listen to the audio book club podcast, scheduled for tonight's drive home...)

Sense and Sensibility, updated

The Three Weissmanns of Westport - Cathleen Schine (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

I decided to read this modern retelling of S&S after hearing about it here and there, and then having it pop up on Slate's Double-X Book Club. I held off on listening to the podcast for 4 months until I could read the book, and finally it's all come to pass.

I found myself underwhelmed both by the book and the discussion (more on the latter later). It's clever, and I loved identifying the characters who pop up and remembering their Austenian counterparts. Marianne and Elinor as 5o y.o. women is an interesting twist, and Betty Weissmann is a far more fun Mrs. Dashwood. But then things get all wonky in the second half - and I can't even discuss it here without engaging in major spoilers.

And this is what I wanted to hear about on the book club podcast. How much can you change the template of Austen's original? Does it matter if the original seems utterly implausible in today's world? Or is Schine arguing that there might have been a better way to plot Austen all along? I don't know, and the Double-X ladies skirted around this, when for me it was the central point. Oh well. Also, they referred to the novel as chick-lit - or rather "hen lit" (clever) - which jagged me off on a tangent about genre fiction and the very specific potential definitions for women's genre fiction. For me, this is definitely a woman's novel, but it's not chick lit, which has very specific conventions about the female protagonists as well as the plot.

Oh well. The novel was still a fun read, even if occasionally infuriating, and it was often funny. A couple memorable moments:
Miranda the literary memoir agent has a client who writes about her (fake) childhood in Rhodesia. This was entirely too close to Alexandra Fuller for me and I was confused as to what Schine might have been trying to say (the Slate ladies noticed this too).

Annie the librarian through her sister's eyes: "Miranda sometimes thought of Annie as a kind of desiccated opium addict, stretched out in a smoky, sweet-smelling den with her fictional strangers, cut off from the noisy circus of life, uncaring, inaccessible, eyes closed in someone else's dream." Harsh.

There are young twins named Juliet and Ophelia. NO. No matter how pretentious you are, you do not name both of your girls after Shakespearean heroines that go a little (or a lot) crazy and off themselves.

But mainly I was caught up with trying to work out how I felt about the plot.

Serendipity, finally

Not quite ready for the real post, but I've been excited about mentioning this for two weeks now...

A few years ago, I was walking around West LA listening to the NYT Book Review podcast where one of the reviewers mentioned a book that she just absolutely fell in love with. I forget the context, but whatever she said made me want to read it. So when I got home, I wrote the following in my "books to read" list: "An Uncommon Kindness - Muriel T..." But when I went to find this book at the library, it didn't seem to exist. I'd try again now and then when I noticed it, but really, I kinda figured it was a lost cause. Why, oh why, did I not actually listen to the podcast again right when I got home so I'd get the author right?

But then, a couple weeks ago, I was at the library, list in hand, looking to see what was in stock. (Not much.) I went to find The Flying Troutmans, even though from what I could remember hearing about it, I wasn't sure it was the book I wanted to read right then. But it wasn't on the shelf anyway. But sitting right where said book was supposed to be: A Complicated Kindness, by Miriam Toews. Erin to self: Wait a second.... [jaw dropping]

So there it was. Uncommon and Complicated: got that wrong. Muriel & Miriam: really? Toews though? That's clearly forgivable. (Why I know and like the name Toews right now, btw. Chicago's my ideal hope for the Stanley Cup this year, and I like their players w/o knowing really anything about them except that they are mostly young and all signed to looooooooong contracts.)

Anyway, so I found the book. By accident. Yays.

Sunday reads - with lots of links

Every Sunday, the newspaper takes up much of my day. I have to sort it, and then read through it, spending more time with certain sections than others. For some reason, I save the Opinion/Book Review until the end. This doesn't really make sense, b/c by then I am tired of reading the paper, but yet I haven't seen fit to change my ways.

So today, I took that section out for coffee and discovered a few happy coincidences:

Professor Gordon Wood thinks about history. I don't usually have regrets about leaving academia, but articles on the state of academic history always leave me with a little longing. Reviewer and historian Douglas Brinkley (best known to me for his appearance in Spike Lee's masterful "When the Levees Broke") briefly explains the predominance of social history in the academy, and apparently neither Wood nor Brinkley like it too much, b/c it gets rid of the storytelling aspect of history and turns off the masses. (I don't really understand this sentiment - b/c can't it be both more interested in race, gender, and class and tell a good story????) Anyway, there is a nice little summation of Wood making perhaps a similar argument:

the incendiary warfare between the popularizers and academics must stop. Whether it's a bestselling Albert Einstein biography published by Simon & Schuster or an esoteric university press case study on the Watts riots using deconstructionist Jacques Derrida and structuralist Michel Foucault as gurus, the historian's mission should be the same: to communicate the past to everyday people. To Wood, an audience is essential if historians are going to influence the consciousness of our times. "We Americans have such a thin and meager sense of history that we cannot get too much of it," he writes. "What we need more than anything is a deeper and fuller sense of the historical process, a sense of where we have come from and how we have become what we are."

Well, amen, I guess.
Ben Ehrenreich talks about more books about the Odyssey. He's a good one to write this review, b/c he wrote this really wacky book loosely based on the Odyssey as well. This is a good reminder that maybe I should read the original one of these days (like apparently we should have in 10th grade).

A guy my parents knew when I was little is in the Opinion section. I love brushes with fame. And editorials in the paper are among my favorite kinds. Okay, so this guy Jess Winfield was one of the founders of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, an oddly important part of my youth. (Their Hamlet - hey Mom, did Jess play Hamlet? Or no, he was Ophelia, right? - is almost key to an understanding of who I have grown up to be. Here's a video of it - but it's really not the same as seeing it outdoors sitting on hay bales with the original cast.) But I digress, b/c this article is about how Shakespeare would view the presidential candidates, and in what ways they do or do not resemble characters from the Bard's histories and tragedies. Really good stuff.

Tessa Hadley is interviewed on the NYTimes Book Review podcast. Um, technically this has nothing to do with reading the paper, but I was listening on the way home from the coffeeshop and grocery store, so am lumping it in. She is awesome. I like her bunches.