A Memory Palace

Great House - Nicole Krauss (W.W. Norton & Co., 2010)

Nicole Krauss blows my mind. (I have mentioned this before.) A few years back, I gushed about The History of Love, and her latest novel employs a similar plot devise, being a sort of biography of a thing. In this case it's a desk, this monstrosity of a desk that is confiscated during Nazi occupation, and touches the lives of a surprising number of people. Strangely, I kept seeing the desk as almost like an organ - all the different drawers like pipes and .... I don't know.

Her stories are lyrical and haunting, and it's no surprise that many of the narrators are either authors or loved ones of writers. They speak in a high-flown language that doesn't really bear any relationship to how most of us talk, but carries the weight of intense sadness, loneliness, emptiness, and a struggle to know those we love.

I noted less than I would have liked, and this makes me sad. I'd probably direct you to the entire (long) chapter "Lies Told by Children." The first narrator, the author who owned the desk most recently, comments on how the things she loves she is reluctant to share with others, unlike those who want to share the music and literature that makes them who they are. She also has a lovely line about her youth: "I had been young and full, bursting with feeling, overflowing with desire; I lived closer to the surface of myself."

This is, perhaps, a book better meant to be reflected upon in conversation - or silence - than in a blog. It consists of interwoven parts, and leads to interwoven thoughts. I want to talk about it, and digress, and bring up other points, and wander down tangents. (That last might have been redundant.) So go read, and then come talk to me about it, okay?

Literary debates

Michael Silverblatt generally makes me giggle. Because I'm like that. But I found his discussion with professor and author Marjorie Garber fascinating.

Have a listen:

Vacation Reading

There's Cake in My Future - Kim Gruenenfelder (St. Martin's Griffin, 2010)

For my vacation, I brought a bunch of unread New Yorkers (of which I read one, on the plane ride home) and a serious novel (post to come), which I worked on at airport gates and on the plane. But for the meat of the trip, the hotel reading, I wanted light and fun. For that, I went with the Gruenenfelder.

The premise is cute. Three friends. One tries to direct the future through this cake pull charm thing. Except it gets messed up and fate has its own plans for the ladies. I like these "friends" books, b/c you get different stories. One woman tries to adjust to married life, one negotiates the problem of being best friends with the guy you love, and the third rebounds - or attempts to - after a breakup. All light, all fun, all funny. Also, set in Los Angeles. Hurrah!

One thing that got a lot of attention from me was the mention of the crushworthiness of John Krasinski; the other was this line, from the fiancé: "I love that you think that anything I do could be fraught with subtext. I'm a guy: we are rarely, if ever, fraught with subtext." I still don't really believe this is true, regardless of what guys tell me, but I thought it was adorable all the same.

Going back to find Gruenenfelder's first two novels. But first I really need to make a dent in that pile of magazines. My nightstand thinks it's still January, folks. :(

She's back!

Dead Reckoning - Charlaine Harris (Ace Books, 2011)

I've sorta missed my girl Sookie. This series has long since been completely out there. I mean, there's suspension of disbelief, and then there's what Sookie's Louisiana requires. But, after 9 months or whatever, I realize I've missed it. It was oddly comforting to return to vampires and werecreatures and fairies and witches and demons ... and now elves? Well, elf.

Too much going on. And everyone is out to kill Sookie or someone she loves. Or is creating plots that impact Sookie or someone she loves. Also, everyone still wants to have sex with her. It's exhausting, but it's fun.

But this installment was also sad. I'm not sure what comes next for Ms. Stackhouse. Each book has a melancholy ending, but this one hit harder for me. I guess I have to wait until next spring to find out what's next.

Or, How I Found Love Thanks to a Bluebird

Goodnight Tweetheart - Teresa Medeiros (Gallery Books, 2011)

It is getting to be the case that I can't read a serious book without having its lighthearted companion on the nightstand with it. And this was on an endcap at the library. I'm sure David Foster Wallace would appreciate the fact that while I was reading a novel that is in so many ways a meditation on presence and paying attention, I was also starting a short romance about Twitter, which is essentially a paean to short attention spans.

Abby is a writer who had an amazing breakout novel, and who is suffering less from sophomore slump and more from a crippling case of writer's block. Her agent puts her on Twitter so she can connect with fans and keep her name out there. And she immediately meets a guy, a literature professor. And most of the novel is the DM (direct message) banter between them. Lots of pop culture references, lots of flirtation, lots of ... well, mainly just flirtatious pop culture references.

There is a deeper undercurrent, of family and love and loss and connections and how they are difficult and frustrating and all that. And of course escapism, which is one of Twitter's strong suits. How does Twitter enable us to get away from who and where we are? And can that be a good thing? How strong of a connection can you really form with someone who you met in spurts of 140 characters? I spend a lot - a lot - of time on Twitter, so these are questions I've spent some time pondering. Answers? I might still need to get back to you on that.

Mindfulness

The Pale King - David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown and Company, 2011)

Talking about DFW is something I do quite a bit, but that I find intensely difficult. (And I'm far from the end of the bell curve of his most devoted fans.) So I'm gonna skip all a whole bunch and go straight to an attempt to make some sort of sense for myself of this unfinished work.

I found myself wondering how long this novel would have been if finished. There's so much... it stands up well as it is, but then I think about Infinite Jest, and I start to think that maybe these 538 are really only about half. And that's.... well, it is. We can leave it there.

What DFW had in mind only really became clear at the end, in the notes, where I was like: ohhhhhh, so that's why everyone was so ... what's the word? They were all gifted. But these quirks all seemed to make sense in middle of the mind-numbing bureaucracy of an IRS building in the middle of a Midwestern field in the middle of the 1980s. It's as much about being present, and paying attention, and breaking through that wall. Thus.... a big long list.

• "It was true: The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not." (Esp, in the case of the character thinking this, when you are inundated with extraneous information.)
• This unbelievable passage, too long to quote in full here, about the power of interrupting a conversation and asking "what's wrong?" which will shock the other person into wondering how you know. "He doesn't realize something's always wrong, with everybody. ... He doesn't know everybody's always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they're exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing's ever wrong, from seeing it."
• §13 is a really quality depiction of the thought process in panic attacks, and the way anxiety about having anxiety becomes the central source of the anxiety.
• This is (naturally) a footnote: "There are secrets within secrets, though--always."
• The 100-page mega-chapter has several thought-provoking moments, although it becomes funny when you realize later one what its function is.
• A callback here to that first quote I mention: "It had something to do with paying attention and the ability to choose what I paid attention to, and to be aware of that choice, the fact that it's a choice." Different speaker, same idea.
• Oh, and that guy's mom becomes a lesbian in the mid1970s and opens a feminist bookstore called Speculum Books. I loved this.
• Advice often merely points out "the wide gap between the comparative simplicity of the advice and the totally muddled complication of [the advisee's] own situation and path."
• Wallace, as a character: "What renders a truth meaningful, worthwhile, & c. is its relevance, which in turn requires extraordinary discernment and sensitivity to context, questions of value, and overall point - otherwise we might as well just be computers downloading raw data to one another."
• Back on the point of paying attention, there's another lovely long passage (by the DFW character) about concentration and studying and how most paying attention is done in "jagged little fits and starts" and is mostly all the things we do to distract ourselves.
• Oh, and then we get to the uncomfortably true observations about the banality of certain immaturities... that no one truly understands and loves you for who you are and "you're also aware that your loneliness is stupid and banal even while you're feeling it, the loneliness, so you don't even have any sympathy for yourself."

And this doesn't even get at how interested and funny and annoying and actually quite tragic most of the characters are. At how fascinating and extraordinarily rich and DFWian. This book is a treasure, partially formed. And that, unfortunately, has to be enough.

It's a choice, mindfulness. It's a choice what we pay attention to. And everything about David Foster Wallace makes me want to remember that. And to make choices that I find satisfying. It's so difficult; it's unbelievably and maddeningly difficult. But still worth the trying.

Festival of Books + DFW

Before I tackle The Pale King in full, I thought I would start with a quick and dirty overview of the panel I attended yesterday. Times book critic David Ulin moderated a panel with Wallace's biographer D.T. Max, agent Bonnie Nadell, and editor Michael Pietsch.

The discussion began with Nadell's and Pietsch's experience in the weeks and months following Wallace's death, compiling the thousands of pages of work and going through it to see how much of a book was there. It moved on to an exploration of some of the ideas he explores in the work and, for lack of space to consider it more fully, why the work remained unfinished.

Of our threesome, we had just finished the novel, were halfway through, and were about to start. But the discussion I think worked for all of us, although we were distracted by what appeared to be some tension between Nadell & Pietsch, who knew DFW much longer and more intimately, and Max.

A couple interesting lines I picked up from each:

Max mentioned the struggle of "pushing away extraneous noise and thoughts." Nadell noted that Wallace found non-fiction easier and more fun, and "he didn't trust how much fun it was." Pietsch formulated maybe my favorite question: "Is the plot what's happening while you think you're looking for the plot?"

Festival of Books - Trojan Edition

It's that time of year again where I brave the ridiculous sun and crowds to celebrate books with tens of thousands of other people. This year, the LA Times Festival of Books moved to the University of Southern California, which totally worked for me, although I really missed my excuse to get Diddy Riese. On the other hand, this year there was free Ben & Jerry's! (Yay volunteerism!)

My friend, her bro, & I wandered around, checking out booths, ducking into shady spots, and filling out the group crossword puzzles. We also added our reads to the giant "What are you reading?" wall. There is nothing quite so awesome as putting both The Pale King and Goodnight Tweetheart. (Do I contradict myself? ....) I was totally gratified to see several references to Beverly Cleary on there. Hurrah.

We also went to the DFW panel on The Pale King, but that's for another post...

LOL Online Dating

Love @ First Site - Jane Moore (Broadway Books, 2005)

This is an advance ready copy, just fyi. I assume it's close enough to the final product.

So, I really needed me some British chick lit. I miss Bridget Jones. This seemed promising. It's got the right ingredients: 30something, goofy gay male friends and sassy female friends, hilariously awful work environment, frustrating dating set up, etc. But I spent a lot of the book thinking that it was fine, but.... It was missing something. And the love story depends on a lot of scenes that are not only not in the novel, but don't seem to have time to be in the novel. When would they have happened? Hmm?

But then I got to the final few pages, and it got seriously adorable. Problems galore, but awwww. So. Cute. Anything more I say gives it all away. And I mean, you'll know what's going to happen, obviously. But still. Awww.

So it didn't really fill my chick lit need. But it was okay. Next up?

This is water.

I have started DFW's The Pale King. As a result, he is much in my mind lately. (He is also much on the Twitter. Everywhere. Goodness.)

So I am listening to the Kenyon commencement speech from 2005. So powerful. Watch.

Part 2

National Library Week

I enjoyed the heck out of this NPR blog post about how awesome libraries are. It's a lot about how it's free, but there was also this:

In particular, I found that all those cheap romance paperbacks were beaten, mangled, shaken and stirred. Not so that you couldn't read them, but just so you knew they'd been read a lot. Oddly, I found this ... comforting. I picked up some of those horribly abused books and felt like I was putting my hands on tangible populism. Those books are there because they're read, and it actually made kind of a good reminder that the library was trying to help, that the idea was to serve readers.

And anyone who manages to check out DFW's Infinite Jest and three Nora Roberts novels on a single visit deserves applause for sheer awesomeness. (Also for being quite a bit like me, although I needed my own IJ copy, and have different guilty pleasure authors.)

A likely match

Sex, Lies, and Online Dating - Rachel Gibson (Avon Books, 2006)

Lenny and Eunice were really bringing me down. This totally beautiful and heartfelt story, no matter how satirically presented, was a little more than I could handle. Especially because it was, as promised, "super sad."

So I needed another love story to read in tandem. Enter Rachel Gibson. She writes contemporary romance novels, and first caught my eye (in a Booklist capsule review maybe?) because at least a few of her titles center around the fictitious NHL Seattle Chinooks. Yay hockey players! This one does not, but our protagonist is a fan of the minor-league team in Boise.

In addition to liking hockey, Lucy is a mystery writer who has decided to tackle the subject of a serial killer who meets men on dating sites and then sends them to their death via erotic asphyxiation. So she has to date some for research. The trouble is that someone in the city is acting out her book, even while it's still being written. Which leads her to Quinn, a cop who is dating around in hopes of drawing out the killer, who is, obviously, Lucy. Right? Blah blah immediate physical connection, growing emotional attachment, annoyance at lies and concerns about how the other one feels, etc. In short, the perfect antidote to Lenny and Eunice. So just what I needed.

What can love do?

Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart (Random House, 2010)

Once upon a time, I really enjoyed The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Gary Shteyngart in general. But you know how you get lazy about following the stuff you like?

So over the summer I read excerpts from SSTLS in the New Yorker. And that's how it ended up on my book list. Although it then took, what? 6 months to actually get my hands on it. But here it is.

In short: dystopian future. Shteyngart as always does a great job of creating a world that is recognizable and yet totally different. The US is collapsing, and is pure consumerism and cell phones and rankings and .... man, I hate doing these overviews in any sort of way that makes sense. So screw it. Let me skip to the interesting parts.

Lenny's diaries are interspersed with the e-mails and chat transcripts (although they have different names) of Eunice, the girl he falls madly in love with and who, for her own reasons, finds her way to him. What makes them so fascinating and heart-breaking is how much they cannot communicate at all, how little we can actually express to the people we love, the ones we want to understand us most. And how little sense life makes, even at the best of times, and certainly not in a country falling apart.

Some moments:

• "keep a diary, to remember who we were, because every moment our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities ..."
• a passage I cannot find about Lenny's attempt to spend an entire week without books .... this in a world where no one reads, and no one has read for decades. And yet, despite this, the Naughty Librarian look continues to be desirable.
• "the clarity of being alive during conclusive times, the joy of being historically important by association." [I remember feeling this - although far more dread - on 9/11, the wish that I could have lived when history wasn't happening.]
• on bipartisanship's dangers: "When we lost touch with how much we really hate each other, we also lost the responsibility for our common future."
• "I felt the weakness of these books, their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world." And I felt so much weight on much shoulders when I read that. And then, this lovely lovely line:
• "The fading light is us, and we are , for a moment so brief it can't even register on our äppärät screens, beautiful."

Lenny and Eunice. They're each terribly flawed, but their flaws make them truly real and human. It's especially noticeable in Eunice, who starts out such a cipher, such a creature of this brave, unhappy new world. Lenny sees depths in her, and we don't. Turns out he was right, just not in the way he expected.

Starting Over

The Season of Second Chances - Diane Meier (Henry Holt & Co., 2010)

(advance reader's edition)

Something I always seem to forget when I am sick or depressed is that I find narrative healing. So while I was spending a week fevered and coughing, I couldn't manage to read any of my New Yorkers. Why didn't I try a novel at the very start?

Finally I picked up Meier's, a reader's edition that I came into possession of somewhere along the line. It's about a middle-aged woman who leaves her teaching job in NYC when she is recruited for a new project at Amherst. She seems to have no spontaneity, no rich inner life, and yet there is already a promise of it, when she begins by buying this ramshackle Victorian house near campus. She gets drawn into a world of color and possibility, dragged slowly by her handyman - if such a term really gets at his talent for not only fixing a house, but unearthing its true potential - and her officemate. And a supporting cast of characters. Joy is, what? I think 48, when the novel opens, but she blossoms almost like a teenager, finding that there is strength in vulnerability, and freedom in tying yourself to a community.

Joy grows into herself in ways both expected and not, and loose ends maybe don't knot as nicely as one might like. But this book was a lovely break from my life, and even from the West Coast. And it made for a good reminder that life doesn't necessarily work on a schedule, and that maybe I don't need to worry so much about missing my chances or running out of time. We grow when we are ready to grow.

Awww

The Cinderella Deal - Jennifer Crusie (Bantam Books, 2010/1996)

Remember how a couple months ago I was like "omg, Jennifer Crusie is like the most adorable thing ever"? I picked up another of her titles recently - this one a reissue of one of her earliest works - and I maintain that her work is just purely adorable. How can you hate on romance novels when they are this sweet?

That said. Will someone please explain to me why people in books and movies are always getting themselves into fake engagements or fake marriages? Does this ever actually happen in real life? (Psst Corey Perry, if you need a fiancée, call me. I won't ask too many questions.) This time, stuffy yet hot professor guy needs a family life in order to nail down his dream job (oh, and by the way, he is writing this crazy feminist book, just so you know) in some little town in... Ohio?... so he ropes in his aggravating kooky artistic neighbor. Who loves strays. And the rest is essentially what you'd expect, all done with a really light hand.

I am recovering (I hope!) from an awful flu, so I keep thinking back to the scene where the whole "family" gets some terrible bug and is laid up for ages. If they made it through, so will I, right?