2011 Tournament of Books: Breaking Down the Quarterfinals

We're now down to four left in the 2011 Tournament of Books. Let's see how we got down from eight...
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Quarterfinal 1 Winner

Quarterfinal 1: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen versus Room by Emma Donogue, judged by Matt Dellinger


Dellinger on Freedom: 
But on the whole, [Freedom's] writing is deep and rich and steady. The themes are familiar yet surprisingly well-woven. The characters and their interactions are finely observed, high-resolution, and intricately textured. By the time I was two-thirds of the way through, references to moments and people from earlier in the book brought back what felt like actual memories. Freedom is a very, very long page-turner, written by a grownup.


While I agree with Dellinger's end assessment, "written by a grownup" is a devastating indictment of Room. The charitable reading of this is that Dellinger is referring to the voice of the narrator of Room and not to the writer herself, but that's not what the sentence suggests. The question it raises, though, is an interesting one: is a first-person book about a five-year old written, in essence, by that five-year old? What depth and complexity can an author layer on top of such a limitation? I do think that Donogue's choice of perspective absolves her of the responsibility to add complexity, but is that to the good of the work? Some might argue that writing a compelling narrative through the eyes of a five-year old adds difficulty, but it seems to me that it actually lowers the overall degree of difficulty, since nettlesome, adult concerns and ideas are foreclosed. Hence, Room is a tighter narrative, but it's just so infuriatingly narrow. Donogue doesn't give us the most interesting part of the story---the interior world of a woman who has been raped every day for years and raised a son in a ten-by-ten shed. I think this point goes for almost all stories written from a child's point-of-view; they must be penalized in the final judgment for not dealing with the full force of adult consciousness. 

Quarterfinal 2 Winner

Quarterfinal 2: The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobsen versus A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, judged by Elif Batuman


Batumann on A Visit from the Goon Squad:
"...as for A Visit From the Goon Squad—interconnected, chronologically-scrambled short stories with recurring characters—I’d heard it described as “a display of Ms. Egan’s extreme virtuosity.” The word “virtuosity,” in book reviews, is a real red flag for me. Perhaps relatedly, I’m suspicious of interconnected stories, which often remind me of the arbitrary, contrived tendency of literature, the tendency that poses a particular threat to the short story, a form where characters all too easily become interchangeable, and each plot seems like it might as well be a sequel or prequel to the one before.

I wish Batumann would have explained "the word 'virtuosity,' in book reviews, is a real red flag for me." My guess is that she sees 'virtuosity' as a privileging of form over content. I find myself increasingly sympathetic to this reading. Goon Squad is remarkably well-executed, with formal dexterity that serves the work's rich intellectual and emotional concerns. I've noticed a rise of late of what I've begun to think of as "balloon-animal fiction"--fiction that pairs undeniable writerly gifts with otherwise unremarkable substance. 

It is a neat trick to make a balloon that looks like a dog--but the likeness of the dog is still fairly crude. If the goal is to make a likeness of a dog, then even the most adroit balloon-savant will lose to the average practitioner of most standard media. In art, sometimes we over-value balloon-twisting ability, to the detriment of our understanding of dogs.

 (I am thinking here of Swamplandia!, The Education of Bruno Littlemore, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Room, and to a lesser extent The Fates Will Find Their Way).  I think there's more to be said about this, but that's as far as I've wandered to this point. 

Quarterfinal 3 Winner

Quarterfinal 3: Nox by Anne Carson versus Next by James Hynes, judged by John Williams

Williams on Nox:
O’Rourke [reviewer for The New York Times -RA] strains to give voice where [Nox] is silent, an effort I found almost impossible to mount myself. Carson’s loss must have been profound, and Nox’s profundity is meant to arise from the gap between her almost illusory relationship with her brother and her real suffering. The fact that she has a far more intimate knowledge of Herodotus and Catullus than she does of her brother might strike some as interesting, even moving. I just found it distant and cold.

I think Williams is right on here, though I would have come to a different judgment, as I am one of those who, as Williams posits, found Carson's "far more intimate knowledge of Herodotus and Catullus" than her knowledge of her brother "moving." I see Carson' grief as a scholar or writer's lament--her immersion into a literary/artistic/historical worlds supersedes her participation in the imminent world. This is compounded by the fact that her only recourse for this division is more literature, more history, more art. Nox is a bandage on an open-wound. Hynes must deploy considerable artifice, as Williams notes, to generate what pathos there is to be found in Next; I'll take inscrutability and distance over construction and spectacle. 

Quarterfinal 4 Winner

Quarterfinal 4: Model Home by Eric Puchner versus The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender, judged by Kate Ortega


Ortega on The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake:
The book carried me back to my embarrassing teenage days, while also raising the stakes. Rose knows she is different and yearns to fit in, just like I did and just like all teenagers do. But she is different for reasons that put to shame the normal teenage feelings of being an outsider. She would have rejoiced if her only “difference” had been a naggy brother. In the end, her story brings with it a reminder that the individual things that make every family special go far beyond bed sheets.


Bender's book does indeed replicate and intensify the central solipsism of teenager-hood: "Rose knows she is different and yearns to fit in, just like I did and just like all teenagers do." But replication and intensification are not of and in themselves avenues toward understanding. Ortega's favorable judgment of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake seems to hinge on the novel's ability to "carry [her] back to [her] embarrassing teenage days," but she does not explain why such a transportation is valuable and/or entertaining. Instead, she says that the "story brings with it a reminder that the individual things that make every family special go far beyond the bed sheets." I don't know what this means. Does she think that recognizing familial individuation might make us think of our own families differently? Or that the deep structure of family systems varies somehow and we should acknowledge that? That is it is a "reminder" suggests that we have forgotten something, though I have a hard time imagining a reasonable person believing all families are pretty much the same (though this even this logic is contradicted by the statement that all teenagers are the same.) 
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On that cranky note, we sail into the semi-finals. Now is time for the favorites to collide and for zombies to rise. The two favorites have steam-rolled into an epic showdown, and while Skippy might be dead, my guess is that Murray's book is laying in the tall grass. 
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Until April 15th, all referral fees generated by The Reading Ape will go to support Rock City Books & Coffee. Read more about the effort here. Just click through any of the below to do your shopping, and you'll be helping. Many thanks.

       

   

Shop at Amazon, help an Independent Bookstore. Wait, what?

Lacy Simons, manager of Rock City Books & Coffee in Rockport, Maine, is trying to buy the store from her retiring employer but finds herself a little short. She has an idea, though.  A really smart idea---ask people who care about independent bookstores to help get her started.

Rock City Books & Coffee

In short, she is seeking pledges from the book-loving web. Like PBS, there are token thank-you gift choices and the promise to donate your pledge amount to charity when things are up and running, but the core of the matter is supporting booksellers and local bookstores. And I'd like to help her out.

This is what I have in mind: I'm going to pledge all of the referral fees that The Reading Ape earns between now and April 15th to Lacy's crusade to buy her bookstore. 

So if you have online shopping to do in the next few weeks, do it through The Reading Ape and you'll be supporting an independent bookstore--just enter Amazon, Powell's or Indiebound through any of the related links and 4-6% of whatever you buy (anything from books to 1500 live ladybugs) will get thrown in with the 15-20 bucks I normally make off these programs in a given month. (Note: since I don't earn referral fees from my own purchases, if anyone else wants to pledge their referral fees, let me know and I'll do my online shopping through you).

Inside Rock City Books & Coffee

Pretty simple. You buy the stuff you were going to buy anyway. Who knows, maybe we can shoot a coupla hundred bucks Lacy's way. I'll be posting regular updates about what is bought and how much we've raised. After it's all over, we'll also have to decide what charity we want Lacy to donate to when she is in the black in a couple of years. But that's for later.

For now, take a look at her proposal, look at the store's website, and see what's what. I think you'll be persuaded to chip in. (You could also help if you blog, tweet, facebook, or whatever this as well.)

Thanks in advance for your participation.

Cheers,
The Reading Ape

(For the record, I only know Lacy through Twitter and have no association with the bookstore. I did go to Maine once. It was pretty. Good accents on the folk up there).

Here are the links:

Today in Paperback: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

I wrote about Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad last summer, and now that it's out in paperback, I thought I would re-run it as further impetus for you to read it (also this blog was only a couple of months old, so this is probably new to most of you). Seriously--if you read this blog, you should read this book.

Here was my review....
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While short stories are one of the oldest fictional genres (if not the oldest), "linked" short stories are among the newest. And it's a bit of a strange genre at that--it possesses neither the depth and development of the novel nor the staccato burst of the short story.

It depends instead, somewhat paradoxically, on omission and inclusion. Characters re-appear at different stages in their lives and in different roles, but the spaces between these appearances are left blank. Often it's difficult to find the strain that connects linked short stories beyond similar people or locations. One might argue that linked short stories best represent our lives as we live them; our lives tend not to have the grand narrative arcs of novels or the disparate, concentrated moments of meaning and action of short stories. It is a genre that balances connection and ambiguity.

As such, it is a genre that can be both beguiling and frustrating by turn. The relationships between the linked stories are often as overt as they are elusive. What does it mean exactly if the main character in one story appears as a bystander in a later story? How are we to connect the threads we see, even as the author creates spaces and questions between them?

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad embodies much that is interesting and confounding about linked short stories. Like many such collections, the central figures of A Visit from the Goon Squad are not people, but ideas--in this case time, memory, maturation, music and technology.

Egan shows us the effect of these forces on a handful of recurring characters, even as she keeps them at arm's length. For example, the collection starts with a blind date between Sasha and Alex, a young couple living in New York City in what appears to be the present day. Sasha, an assistant to record-executive Bennie Salazar, is a kleptomaniac who is probably the most fully formed character in the work; we see her as an adolescent, as a lost woman-child in Europe, and finally as a reasonably well-adjusted mother of two in a not-too-distant future America. And yet, we don't get to know her. We watch her and follow her, track her and recognize her, but Egan keeps her at a distance. The effect is rather more cinematic than fictional; like a movie character, Sasha's interiority is largely inaccessible, even as we have her square in our sights.

This is one consequence of linked stories; we are not given much insight into cause and effect. Sasha is a kleptomanic at the start and appears not be in the end. What was the source of her compulsion? How did it resolve itself? These questions are left open, even as we know somewhere there are answers.
These narrative particularities aside, A Visit from the Good Squad does contain two especially striking stories, both of which could stand on their own in a more traditional story collection. The most formally innovative "story" in the collection is actually a PowerPoint presentation called "Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake." The presentation is a notebook-cum-diary of a young girl in PowerPoint form. The graphs, flowcharts, tables, and bullet-lists represent Alison's attempt to figure her family out, from her Dad's startling disquient to her probably-autistic brother's obsession with pauses in rock music.

Alison'r project, and that of her brother, share some of the larger questions of the collection: How do you understand people who don't understand themselves? How do you deal with incomplete or ambiguous information? How do you construct the story of your life out of the thing strands of your experience?
Egan's final story, "Pure Language," takes these same questions and turns them upside down. In it, 30-something husband and father Alex (who appears on the blind date in the first story) participates in an elaborate technology-driven promotion for an outdoor concert in lower Manhattan. Essentially, the sceme is viral-promotion masquerading as "authentic" word of mouth: using social networking, well-placed text messages to influential friends, and subliminal messages, Alex and the rest of the concert promoters "manufacture" desire among parents and children to go see a show by a fading rock musician. Or rather, they manufacture the perception that the concert will fill a latent desire for connection, collectivity, and transcendence in this particular population.

These twin stories suggest that Egan sees a choice before us. Either we learn to deal with the incompleteness and ambiguity of our lives or we we look for some kind of resolution, even if that means looking to artificial, packaged solutions to fix what ails us.
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Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

2011 Tournament of Books: Breaking Down Week Two

After my stellar week one performance, my match predictions for week two went directly into the proverbial tank. That's bad for my bracket, but great for the post-match commentary....commentary. Here's what stuck out to me from Matches 5-8.... (and here's last week's round-up for Matches 1-4)

Match 5 Winner: Nox

Match 5: Nox by Anne Carson versus Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon, judged by Andrew Womack.


Womack on Nox:


"Still, I was wondering, does it qualify as a contender here? I’m still not completely sure. If there were a nonfiction version of the Tournament of Books, I decided, this work wouldn’t fit so neatly in there, either. It’s part-this and part-that, and no one except the author, and probably not even her, can know which are which."


The tacit understanding behind the Tournament of Books is that it really is a Tournament of Novels (almost exclusively in English). Could the net be cast wider? Probably, but the judging would have more of these types of reactions. Judging (and reading judging) is really only satisfying if the contestants exist on the same plane because what we like about judging is the close assessment of the virtues of objects within a category, not the virtues of the category itself. If I ask "what do you like better: a banana or The Godfather Part II," chances are you won't be comparing De Niro's acting to potassium levels; you'll be debating the qualities of food versus the quality of film. 

Match 6 Winner: Next

Match 6: Next by James Hynes versus So Much for That by Lionel Shriver, judged by Jessica Francis Kane

Kane on So Much for That:

"Every character can and does at some point deliver a diatribe on one issue or another with fluid sentences and the right vocabulary, making them really qualified to testify before Congress, but a little less compelling as fictional creations."


Social issue novels, like comedic novels, don't age particularly well; so much of what they do depends on the concerns of the day that once the calendar flips, the impact of the novel fades. The few that do manage to last tend to have characters that transcend their particular "issue." As Kane notes, the characters in So Much for That are so aware that they are living lives embroiled in "social issues" that it prevents them from having much independent identity. Now, I think So Much for That could have made the characters' awareness of social issues itself a "social issue': it seems interesting that we do have a surplus of canned cultural criticism at the ready. In So Much for That, this is not at all helpful in solving real problems; the only thing that solves problems is decisive action (let's ignore for a minute that this decision action requires nearly a million dollars in cash and a new life in a third world country where the money will last a lifetime to work). 

Match 7 Winner: Model Home

Match 7: Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart versus Model Home by Eric Puchner, judged by Matthew Baldwin

Baldwin on Super Sad True Love Story:

I got exactly as far as “UnitedContinentalDelamerican” before giving up on Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, which is to say about halfway through page one. If my 40 years on this big blue marble have taught me one thing, it’s that hyperbolic corporate portmanteaus are the hallmark of wacky five-minutes-in-the-future dystopias. And that, unfortunately, is a class of literature of which I have had my fill.

Baldwin on Model Home:

Set in 1985, Eric Puchner’s debut novel documents a nuclear family on the cusp of detonation.


Somehow in Baldwin's reading experience, novels about the problems of the nuclear family rarer than comic dystopian novels. (I would imagine that anyone who reads literary fiction with some consistency would find this...striking). This is a secondary problem of judging categories rather than subjects--biases for or against a class become the vectors of analysis, rather than the particular qualities of each. To continue the above example of categorical judging: That Baldwin eats a lot of bananas biases him against finding a particular banana desirable, and that he hasn't seen many mafia movies predisposes him to be delighted by The Godfather II. 

Match 8 Winner

Match 8: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender versus Bloodroot by Amy Greene, judged by Catherine George

George's verdict:

So. Bloodroot, a story that might’ve caught me if it hadn’t been so obscured by its own words, versus Particular Sadness, a fine example of craft that just didn’t move me. Who wins? In the end, Particular Sadness chalked up a bunch of extra points for technical merit, and today, that’s all it needed to move forward.


This was perhaps my favorite moment from the first round judging. Why? Well, George's description of the strengths and weaknesses of the novels lines up with my own, yet she comes to a different verdict. Her preference for craft leads her to prefer (slightly) The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. My preference for interesting messes over bloodless craft leads me to prefer (slightly) Bloodroot. This then is not a disagreement, but an exposure of different value systems. This moment reminds me of the subjectivity of my own taste and gives me access to someone else's subjectivity---to my mind this can only enrich the reading experience. 
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I'll be doing a similar work-up after this week's round two judging, already underway, when it's wrapped up.
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10 Observations on Male Sexual Violence in the Contemporary Novel

I'm not sure if I've never noticed it or if my recent reading is somehow skewed, but I am struck by the number of rapes and/or kidnappings of women by men in contemporary fiction. Of the last twenty contemporary novels I've read, ten have some such incident. This strikes me as a remarkable number.

I'm just beginning to consider why this might be and what it might mean, but here are a few preliminary observations about how sexual assault seems to be represented in mainstream literary fiction:

1. Kidnapping (recently encountered in Bloodroot, Room, Savages and The Fates Will Find Their Way) has clear narrative uses. Savages is a ransom situation, but the rest are sexually motivated (at least presumptively so in The Fates Will Find Their Way).

2. Sexual kidnappers get almost no description, motivation, or detail. They are white, middle-aged, and drive automobiles of no recent vintage. They prefer white, teenage girls.

3. There also seems to be a rise in rape as back-story--that is, female characters who have been raped, but that experience is outside the main time of the novel. Patty Berglund's high-school sexual assault is presented this way, even though one might reasonably argue that it was the crucial incident of the novel.

4. There is also, perhaps understandably, an aversion to narrating the actual sexual assault. Much like the identity of most of the rapists, the rape act is usually left undescribed. Except in Imperial Bedrooms (which could go for all of these actually.)

5. The excruciating emotional work of recovering from an assault happens outside the scope of the text, if it happens at all.

6. According to novels, rapes result in pregnancy exponentially more often than does consensual sex.

7. Likewise, 0% of women who have children by their rapists feel any ambivalence at all about the child.

8. Even in novels without a sexual assault, there often is a specter of male sexual violence, depicted either in untoward advances, menacing stares, dangerous situations, or second-hand stories.

9. Men are almost never the object of sexual violence. And never adult men.

10. Teenage boys are either sexually inhibited or future sex offenders.
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I'm going to be thinking about how male sexual violence is portrayed in contemporary fiction, so if you have other examples or additional thoughts on the subject, I'm eager to hear them

Link Piece: March 7-March 14, 2011

Literary links from the week that was....

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"After all, what good does this access do if we can only find our way back to ourselves, the same selves, the same interests, the same beliefs over and over? Is what we really want to be solidified, or changed? If solidified, then the Internet is well-designed for that need. But, if we wish to be changed, to be challenged and undone, then we need a means of placing ourselves in the path of an accident"

In The New Republic, Nicole Krauss makes a case for bookstores as place to encounter difference. 

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"86. Novels do not take orders well, if at all. They are not soldiers, usually, or waiters. They do badly at housework and will not clean silver.

87. Novels do not wait. They are poor chaffeurs."

Alexander Chee lists 100 things about a novel.   

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"I know that it is now considered gauche for artists and progressive types to talk about money, despite the fact that concern over the exploitation of labor used to be the driving force of leftist thought, but I am not talking about people getting rich. I am talking about a very practical question of how one’s time can be spent." 

Lionel Michel is worried about what the race to bottom in e-book pricing means for writers.  

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"Kirkus will continue to expand and add more of the best book blogs over the next few months. Stick around. The conversation is just getting started." 

Review giant Kirkus is letting the barbarians into the citadel.  

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"Somewhat like a link-infested blog post, Montaigne’s writing is dripping with quotations, and can sometimes read almost as an anthology. His “links” are mainly classical, most often to Plato, Cicero and Seneca."

Anthony Gottlieb on Montaigne, self-reflection, humility, and blogging. 

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Happy Ides, all....

2011 Tournament of Books: Breaking Down Week One

The first week of the 2011 Tournament of Books has come and gone. While there were no real shockers, that doesn't mean there weren't items of interest.

Here are few match-by-match highlights:

Match 1 Winner

Match 1: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen versus Kapitoil by Teddy Wayne, judged by Sarah Mancuso

Mancuso on Freedom:

"...Freedom focuses on two fully human adults who, despite their history of betrayals, return to each other. When Patty and Walter drive away from the lake house, they complete the book’s convincing depiction of a mature marriage—one that survives serious conflicts and requires serious mercies. It isn’t nostalgia for Walter’s affair that broke my heart; it’s Patty’s forgiveness, and Walter’s forgiveness of her own betrayal, and the reminder that such forgiveness is possible..."

Mancuso reads Freedom's end with considerably more hope than I do. In her assessment of these novels, Mancuso provides compelling textual evidence, but here at the end she abandons direct quotation of the text. To my mind, one paragraph describes the nature of Walter and Patty's reconnection, and it is the reader's interpretation of that paragraph that will determine how positive their reconciliation is. I'll quote at length:

"Her eyes weren't blinking. There was still something almost dead in them, something very far away. She seemed to be seeing all the way through to the back of him and beyond, out into the cold empty space of the future in which they would both soon be dead, out into the nothingness that Lalitha and his mother and his father had already passed into, and yet she was looking straight into his eyes, and he could feel her getting warmer by the minute. And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside of him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still in touch with the void in which the sum of everything they'd ever said or done, every pain they'd inflicted, every joy they'd shared, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind" (p. 559).

I find it difficult to call this moment forgiveness. Forgiveness implies a kind of ethical transaction in which wrongs against a moral system are pardoned. Here, the moral system is completely obliterated by "the void." This absence of ethics makes any transgression meaningless, any emotional benevolence null. Their relationship here is cast as a strategic alliance against nothingness--not a turn to each other as subjects of meaning and value.

But that’s me.

Match 2 Winner

Match 2: Room by Emma Donogue versus Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky, judged by Jennifer Weiner 

Weiner on Bad Marie:

"It’s a world where grownups are savages, and children, even worse. (“Caitlin grinned. Caitlin was happy when she got her way. She seemed to get her way most of the time.”). The men are duplicitous and weak, other women are competition, the sex has more to do with power than affection, and everyone behaves badly."

Weiner on Room:

“Still, the book is, to resort to a cliché, unputdown-able, and it raises fascinating questions: What is a mother’s obligation to her child? How much of her independence must a mother sacrifice for a son, or a daughter’s, well-being? How do you survive hardship? How do you survive joy?”

First, I'm going to preen a little and say I called this in my odds-making for the first round:

“Room is essentially a conservative book, reifying conventional beliefs about motherhood, child-reading, and how freaky men can be. Bad Marie is libertarian: the main character acts on impulse only, and we get very little sense of what she wants at all. I suspect Jennifer Weiner, the judge for this round who writes books with relatively familiar values, will go for Room.”

Second, does Room really raise "fascinating questions" about maternal obligation and freedom? Hardly--those questions require the ability to make choices that the mother in Room doesn't have.

Third, a kid getting what they want most of the time makes them "worse" than savage?

These points show the easy morality of Room, hidden in plain view by the narrative conceit and first-person narration. That’s not to say Bad Marie should move on necessarily; it relies heavily on awe-inducing coincidence. But considerations of form offer can more interesting discussion here.

Match 3 Winner

Match 3: Savages by Don Winslow versus The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobsen, judged by Rosencrans Baldwin

Baldwin on The Finkler Question:

"I read novels for plot, but I don’t need it—but in its place I do need life. Perhaps Finkler’s point is that Julian is not the center of the book. Maybe the point of Finkler isn’t to dramatize events or entertain its readers, but to flay, to scrutinize, to attack."

Baldwin makes an interesting point here about the problems of writing compelling satirical novels: they must, perhaps counter-intuitively, have an excess of plot to pull the reader along. Think of the great literary satires: Don Quixote, Candide, Gulliver's Travels---they overflow with narrative. Two reasons for this come to mind. First, story might provide a bulwark against ponderousness and self-importance. Second, the pleasure of compelling narrative might make the reader more receptive to the ideological content of satirical critique.  The Finkler Question's only real defense against preachiness and readerly fatigue is style; as Baldwin mentions, Jacobsen writes some extraordinarily fine sentences. Craft, however, doesn't seem to be enough sugar to help the medicine go down.

Match 4 Winner

Match 4: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan versus Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, judged by Anthony Doerr

Doerr on A Visit from the Goon Squad:

"One of the things I enjoy most about being a fiction writer is the unpredictability of what each individual reader brings to the work. If I write a story about a character with a stutter, say, a reader with a speech impediment will probably react to the story differently than a reader without one. If Jennifer Egan writes a book about time overwhelming characters and turning them into parents, a reader like me, who feels himself being overwhelmed by time and being turned into a parent, will plug into it in a certain way."

Doerr's judgment was my favorite of the first four matches, and this meditation on affection and timing was particularly insightful. One of the great pleasures of the Tournament of Books is that critical subjectivity provides as much of the fun as the winning and losing. This then allows us to revel in what we already know: that there is no high ground of evaluation, no semi-divine objective consciousness that can "properly" assign value. Like many truths, this is both liberating and frustrating. And devilish fun.
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Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon: Brief Review and Giveaway

I probably never would have picked up Jaimy Gordon's Lord of Misrule had it not won the National Book Award, but, thankfully, it did. My brief review is below, but more to the point, I'm pleased to have a copy to give to an interested reader. If you'd like to be entered in the drawing, please send an email with the subject line LORD OF MISRULE to readingape AT gmail DOT com. Entries will accepted until Friday March 11th at 11:59 pm EST. 

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There's something about the coexistence of sadness and romance in horse-racing that's hard to pin down; while its halcyon days are long past, horse-racing retains some of the pageantry and mystery that once made it the sport of kings (now the sport of conglomerates and sheiks). 

The recognition and maintenance of this duality is to my mind the central achievement of Jaimy Gordon's Lord of Misrule. Her characters are down and desperate, but not despairing. Hope is kindled by the prospect of a big win, but the hope is on the level of a trailer home to call your own. Few of the characters seem to have any designs on leaving the track and even fewer of the horses possess anything like quality. Even the plot of the novel seems aimless and beside the point; scene and sentiment are as important as success. 

Ultimately it is Gordon's linguistic verdancy that imbues the near-squalor of low-stakes horse-racing with something like nobility. Her casual, unremarked on deployment of a by-gone lexicon resuscitates, however briefly, the possibility of the perfect horse and the transcendent race.

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Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

2011 Tournament of Books: The Odds, Part II

And we're back with the odds for the second half of the field in the 2011 Tournament of Books (if you missed  the first installment, then you can brush up here). The good folks at The Morning News have done a little pregaming of their own, so be sure to check that out as well.

So here are the rest of the odds, including The Ape's pick to win...
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Nox by Anne Carson
Chances of winning first round: 49%
Chances of winning The Rooster: 5%

This is the most difficult entry to handicap. Nox isn't a book so much as an excavation in paper: photographs, journal entries, dictionary definitions, scraps of correspondence, and fragments from antiquity are all bound in 192 accordion-form book-as-object fetishism. It is beautiful, moving, mysterious, and an anachronism in its own time. Before spending some time with Nox, I thought it had little to no chance of making much noise in this tournament, now I wonder. In the first round, we have Nox's singular form against Lord of Misrule's idiosyncratic style. If I were the judge here, I would be tempted to go with Nox's haunting obsession, but the two works don't even really exist on the same plane. This will be true for any future match-up, and I can't decide if this is a strength or a weakness. My sense is that its difference will be a hindrance in any individual match-up, but somehow this separation from this rest of the pack seems like an overall strength. I will be shocked if multiple judges choose Nox, but I also will be delighted.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
Chances of winning first round: 50%
Chances of winning The Rooster: 1%

The conceit here is pretty clever, and when I’ve told people about it, the universal response has been “That sounds kinda cool.” So here it is. On her ninth birthday, Rose Edelstein discovers, while eating a birthday cake made for her by her mother, that she can taste the feelings of others.  Not bad, right? (Have you noticed that nine out of ten cooks interviewed on the Food Network say that “love” makes their food special? How can “love” make it special if everyone says that? I want someone to say “Actually, it’s a gripping fear of death that makes my hamburgers so moist.”)

Rose goes to school. She tries, unsuccessfully, to make friends. She avoids eating food made by people she knows, and when possible eats mass-produced food as it has the bare minimum of human emotion in it. She gets interested in cooking. And that’s pretty much it. About one hundred pages in, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is like many other earnest, well-meaning coming-of-age novels. No worse, but not a whole lot better.

Room by Emma Donoghue
Chances of winning first round: 75%
Chances of winning The Rooster: 2%

Ah, yes. The book blogger darling, page-turning, soul-disturbing Room, the The Da Vinci Code of domestic horror stories. It can't be said that this book isn't gripping, assuming for the moment that you survive the first 20 pages of getting acclimated to the bracing 5-year old narration. After it's all over, though, I think you'll realize that Room has done to you something like what's been done to the main characters: you've been trapped and manipulated by the narrative and narration. And, as they say, the only way out is through.

Savages by Don Winslow
Chances of winning first round: 33%
Chances of winning The Rooster: .5%

Savages has the advantage of having a strikingly different tone than the rest of the field: its tale of drugs, kidnapping, revenge, and three-ways seems more cinematic than literary. It also, however, has the disadvantage of being mediocre. Flat characters, credulity-straining dialogue, and a glib indifference to horrific events and outcomes plague the book. Winslow's narrator has a tongue-in-cheek and streetwise attitude that is more interesting than really anything in the book. I give it a puncher's chance, though, against The Finkler Question just because it parries Jacobsen's narrative inertia with a forceful (and forced) plot.

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
Chances of winning first round: 25%
Chances of winning The Rooster: 5%

This was the great surprise of my reading year. The easiest synopsis might be that Skippy Dies is Dead Poets Society if Dead Poets Society were funnier, more complicated, and believable. Murray excels at dialogue and setting, two skills that can enliven even the now familiar frustrations of adolescence. In fact, it might be that Skippy Dies is so damn readable not because Murray does something all that new, but that he does something we know and makes it surprising and fun again. Too bad it's not going to make it out of the first round.

So Much for That by Lionel Shriver
Chances of winning first round: 50%
Chances of winning The Rooster: 1%

So Much for That is a necessary, painful story about the La Brea Tarpit that is America's health care system. In it, an upper class family of no particularly special quality finds themselves in the chokehold of insurance, doctors, employers, and the swirling emotions of terminal disease. It is quite a difficult book to get through, and it seems Shriver recognizes this, for after several hundred pages of Chekovian domestic misery, she throws us a few dozen pages of welcome, if flinching, relief. As this genre name suggest, bureaucratic realism instructs even as it enrages.

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
Chances of winning first round: 80%
Chances of winning The Rooster: 5%

Super Sad Love Story takes place during the waning of an Empire in a dystopian near-future New York City where characters scramble to make sense of what is happening and find a place for themselves in the new world order. Here the Napoleonic Wars are replaced with the skirmishes of international capitalism; America’s economic weakness is being exploited by international conglomerates disguised as nations.

Those whose interests align with a resistance to technology (ie most writers and reviewers) will probably praise Shteyngart’s critique of the digital age. Those who see themselves at the vanguard of contemporary culture will probably accuse him of literary grumpsterism. Super Sad has the chops to go far here, but it has proven to be polarizing. In a single-elimination tourney, this isn't the most beneficial quality.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Chances of winning first round: 75%
Chances of winning The Rooster: 34%

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad embodies much that is interesting and confounding about linked short stories. Like many such collections, the central figures of A Visit from the Goon Squad are not people, but ideas--in this case time, memory, maturation, music and technology.

A Visit from the Good Squad does contain two especially striking stories, both of which could stand on their own in a more traditional story collection. The most formally innovative "story" in the collection is actually a PowerPoint presentation called "Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake." The presentation is a notebook-cum-diary of a young girl in PowerPoint form. The graphs, flowcharts, tables, and bullet-lists represent Alison's attempt to figure her family out, from her Dad's startling disquiet to her probably-autistic brother's obsession with pauses in rock music.

Egan's final story, "Pure Language," takes these same questions and turns them upside down. In it, 30-something husband and father Alex (who appears on the blind date in the first story) participates in an elaborate technology-driven promotion for an outdoor concert in lower Manhattan. Essentially, the scheme is viral-promotion masquerading as "authentic" word of mouth: using social networking, well-placed text messages to influential friends, and subliminal messages.

These two stories capture the larger questions of the collection: How do you understand people who don't understand themselves? How do you deal with incomplete or ambiguous information? How do you construct the story of your life out of the thin strands of your experience?

A Visit from the Goon Squad was the most innovative and well-executed work of fiction from 2010. Here's hoping Jennifer Egan has room in her yard for a chicken coop.
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