2011 Tournament of Books: Handing Out Awards to the Judges

So the The 2011 Tournament of Books ended almost a month ago, crowning Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad winner in a 9-8 decision over Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. Since then, Goon Squad has gone on to win The Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize to go along with its National Book Critics Circle Award. Clearly, Egan's book is the must-read novel of 2010 and deservedly so.


But we're not here to judge the books; we're here to judge the judges. Here are some hits and misses from the omnibus decision:


Bravos

1. The Best Analytical Point Award goes to Anthony Doerr: 

From a certain angle these books feel the same: well-made realistic fiction zeroing in on American bourgeoisie. Sharp detailing. A smattering of jokes. Searing observations about suburbia.

Many of the judges commented on Goon Squad and Freedom having a certain shared ethos, and Doerr nails it here. This observation is not only true of the final pairing, but of the wider tournament field itself. This was a tournament largely about middle and upper middle class white people in contemporary America. The stylistic differences between Franzen and Egan mask a deeper sympathy and might be making difference out of sameness.

2. The Best Metaphor Award goes to Andrew Womack:

For me, this decision comes down to pacing, and Franzen is the Pink Floyd to Egan’s Sex Pistols; by the end of Freedom I couldn’t take another meandering guitar solo, while I was dazzled by how much Goon Squad packed into such a compact space.

While I think Womack is misusing "pacing," which is about cadence and tempo and not length, he's right to mention the reading experience of each work. We're living in a Goon Squad world where shorter, percussive cultural objects about experimentation and recombination seem to be winning the day. Freedom has more in common structurally with Henry James than with anything that exists in our digital age.

3. The Best Perspective Award goes to John Williams:

Egan’s refracted structure seems only half-necessary, and I’m not sure that in 2011 it’s as innovative as it’s gotten credit for.

Williams is bang-on here: the "innovative" appellation is overblown. Goon Squad isn't even the most technically experimental work in the field (Nox and Super Sad True Love Story would rank above it). And though most reviewers, myself included, haven't paid enough attention to the why of Egan's structure, I do think there is a relationship between the structure and her central concerns that is stronger than "half-necessary."  

4. The Seeing the Forest for the Trees Award goes to C. Max McGee:

Where Freedom is a novel of oversharing, telling many episodes from several angles, Goon Squad, often to its benefit, floats us among characters and across decades.

McGee does us the service of noting the difference between scope and length. For all its heft, Freedom is a more focused, exploratory work, concerned with detail, ambiguity, disagreement and indecision. This kind of narrative noodling takes a great deal of time. Goon Squad is like Rufus from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, dropping in and out of history for the most interesting bits. If we prefer Goon Squad to Freedom these days, it might well be that we prefer sampling and observation to sustained investigation.

5.  The Best Invocation of Subjectivity Award goes to Elif Batuman:

Freedom, however, sucked me in from page one. Its central issues—the good versus the cool; how to reconcile sex with normal life; how to live—are particularly close to my heart these days.

 Batumann manages to speak from her own taste in a way that tells us something about the texts at hand without resorting to judgment. I think she identifies the source of the messiness that Freedom is sometimes charged with: how do you write a book about these knotty issues in a way that doesn't end up confused and compromised? Any such effort would likely be dismissed as unrealistic and naive (e.g., the ending of Lionel Shriver's So Much for That). Goon Squad's central themes (time, detachment, and distance) lend themselves more readily to cleaner, more burnished stories. I do wonder if there are two types of reading personalities: one group prefers literature that makes order out of chaos and the other group wants literature to revel in the messiness.

Boooooooooooooos

1. The Beating a Dead Horse Award goes to Jennifer Weiner

 It’s like Sophie’s Choice, if Sophie hated both her kids.Worse, neither book was any fun. Freedom’s characters range from loathsome to despicable, with the author’s contempt dripping from every sentence. Egan’s book seemed more like an exercise in Let Me Show You How Clever I Am than anything as lowbrow as entertainment. But Egan gets my vote, because if Franzen takes the prize, then the terrorists win.

Weiner had a chance to add substance to her on-going displeasure about the separation of "serious literature" from "chick lit." Instead, she chose unfunny sarcasm, a reference to the holocaust, and the always creative Let Me Capitalize Things To Show Ironic Distance From a Category strategy of satire. (Also, how is not being any fun "worse" than having to choose which of your children to kill?). If Weiner ever again wonders why people might not take her seriously as she might like, she'll have the comfort of returning to this brief paragraph to assuage her anxiety.

2. The Everyone Who Plays Gets A Ribbon Award goes to Matthew Baldwin

In the first round I decided against Super Sad True Love Story in its second paragraph, so you’ll be pleased to hear that I made it all the way to page 11 of Freedom—in which Jonathan Franzen describes a child as “like an imaginary friend who happened to be visible”—before declaring it the winner. I think I’ve really grown as a critic.

I guess if you are aware of and self-satisfied about your lame effort, then it's all OK.

3. The "Mixed" Metaphor Award goes to Matt Dellinger

These books were like cocktail cousins made with the same liquor: a Manhattan and an Old Fashioned. A Visit from the Goon Squad is the more concocted, more garnished drink (e.g., the PowerPoint chapter). It’s wonderfully balanced and beautifully made. Freedom is the high-octane classic, not as easy to drink (e.g., 562 pages), but its seriousness delivers more wallop in the end. Goon Squad delighted me; Freedom clobbered me. The martini beats the Tom Collins. 

 Maybe I need to be Don Draper to understand the alcohol metaphor here, but by this logic would straight grain alcohol be the best possible drink? And isn't a good martini harder to make than a good Tom Collins? And a Manhattan and Martini are not the same, right? To crib from this boozy allegory: the first step is admitting you have a problem.

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That about does it for the coverage of the 2011 Tournament of Books. Thanks for reading, and we'll be back next year. The Ape's the early prediction for the 2012 final pair is *DRUMROLLLLLLLLL* Tea Obreht's THE TIGER'S WIFE against Colson Whitehead's ZONE ONE. You heard it here first. Unless I'm way off, in which case you heard it from a guy at the laundromat.

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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2011 Tournament of Books: The Odds

I've finished reading the complete shortlist just under the wire. I laughed. I cried. I made statistical determinations of greatness. Here's my attempt at book-making for the first half of The Tournament of Books. I'll be posting the rest of the odds Monday morning, just in time for the starting bell on Tuesday. This is also a good time to remind you of the bracket contest happening over at Hungry Like the Woolf. If you're interested in the obsessive thinking I've done already, check out my mutterings on the longlist, the shortlist, and the brackets. Ok, enough of that. Let's do this.

In alphabetical order by title:

Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky
Chances of winning first round match: 25%
Chances of winning The Rooster: .5%

Excellent first round pairing by The Morning News: Bad Marie is a bizarro Room. Where Room has a mother and child who cannot escape their location or each other, Bad Marie has a nanny and kid who bounce around with little connection to anyone. 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. Should Bad Marie emerge from this match-up, it will be because of its seductive, elliptical main character, but this won't be enough to see it through to the end, where bigger, badder sharks  
                                                  swim.

Bloodroot by Amy Greene 
Chances of winning first round: 50%
Chances of winning The Rooster: 1%

Bloodroot has several elements that would seem, at first blush, to turn me off: child protagonists, sections labeled by speaker, agrarian mysticism, violence against women as the inciting incident, and an obvious, banal horticultural metaphor. Still, I found myself strangely compelled. For one, Greene is fantastic with setting and her rendering of life in the foothills of the Appalachians is reason enough to read Bloodroot. I think perhaps a less complicated narrative and an easing-off of the allegorical pedal would serve Greene well; she writes well enough to do without so much, well, art. Bloodroot is not quite as polished as The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, but it has a range and richness that The Particular Sadness does not. A sentence-fetishist will pick Bender; a story-seeker will go with Greene. 

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobsen
Chance of winning first round: 66%
Chance of winning The Rooster: 5%

Man Booker-winning The Finkler Question is a biting and relentless parody/think-piece on the recalcitrance of contemporary anti-Semitism, which is both sublimated and periodically virulent. The main character, the nebulously goyish Julian Treslove, becomes a stage on which Jacobsen dramatizes the banal prejudice against Jews that seems destined to be with us always. It is a sobering and difficult subject that really is only made bearable by Jacobsen's caustic wit. As the title suggests, this novel doesn't have a plot so much as a thought: Jacobsen's meandering dialogue and set-pieces are an exploration of a question that doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Chances of winning first round: 95%
Chances of winning The Rooster: 33%

Messy, hyped, ambitious, and controversial, Freedom reflects contemporary America just about as well as any novel could. It is not shapely, refined, or transcendent, but frustrating, rich, and fascinating. Freedom is more mimetic than poetic, so it should be no surprise that reactions from the literary community have been schizophrenic. While Freedom was not my favorite novel of 2010, I do think it was the most interesting, and the judges' rulings will say as much about the judges as the work itself. 

Kapitoil by Teddy Wayne
Chances of winning first round: 5%
Chances of winning The Rooster: 0.5%

Another shrewd first-round paring, Kapitoil tells a relatively straight-forward story in a playful and experimental style and is revealing matched here against Franzen's conventional prose and knotty ideas. Even the hyper-logical protagonist of Kapitoil, Karim, seems to serve as a foil for the mushy liberalism of Freedom's Walter Berglund. Kapitoil, in the end, does seem to be a little much art and too little substance; Wayne's relatively benign satire cannot match Freedom's copious vision.  

Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon
Chances of winning first round: 51%
Chances of winning The Rooster: 5%

This book about low-stakes, long-odds horse-racing is no stranger to being a long-shot; after pulling a surprise National Book Award win, Lord of Misrule has kept the momentum to find its way onto several other prestigious short-lists. Lord of Misrule will not be to the common taste; it's a peculiar work about an arcane world. The characters and action are stylized to the point of caricature and the language abstruse to the point of befuddlement. But like an acquired taste, say annis or French Canada, there is charm and pleasure to be found here--for the right reader.

Model Home by Eric Puchner
Chances of winning first round: 20%
Chances of winning The Rooster: .5%

Cross Freedom with the television series Weeds, and I think you'll have a sense of Model Home. It's both funnier than Freedom and weightier than Weeds, but this combination doesn't make the book complex so much as tepid. It's not a mediocre book; it's just that I feel like I've already been to the places it wants to go. 

Next by James Hynes
Chances of winning first round: 50%
Chances of winning The Rooster: 1%

Like Model Home, Next treads some well-travelled ground: the mid-life anxiety of a male American WASP. Next, though, escapes familiarity with a shocking turn that comes well-into the novel. The less said about this the better for would-be readers, but this modern Walter Mitty is forced out of his own head in a serious way. (Side note: this is one of those books that is ill-served by a digital sample, since it plays a long-game before the final payoff. Had I not been determined to make it through all of the shortlist, I probably would have deleted my Kindle sample. I would have continued, however, if I had sunk money into a print edition. This by-product of digital distribution had not occurred to me before). 




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That's it for part one: come back Monday morning for the rest of the list.


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2011 Tournament of Books: The Brackets

In the pursuit of my eager and vaguely pitiful quest to become the Joe Lunardi of The Tournament of Books, here are some observations on the final brackets for 2011. (Indeed, I am spending so much time thinking about The Rooster that I am sure to be awarded an honorary degree in ornithology).

I still have a handful of the finalists to finish before my full handicapping sheet is ready, but let's have a look at the notable matchups and judge-placements. In no particular order:


1. Most Intriguing First Round Match-Up: A Visit From the Goon Squad v. Skippy Dies

Terrible luck I think for Skippy Dies. (and yes, I am referring to these books as if they were sentient beings. Reason? Skippy Dies has sat on my lap. Paul Murray has not. QED). I thought Skippy Dies had a chance to advance a couple of rounds, but Goon Squad is a terrible match-up, since it is both more formally innovative and just as beloved by readers. I thought it was better than The Finkler Question, but it was seeded as a 3 to Finkler's 1. Note: the winner of this match-up should make it to the semifinals, since I don't think Savages or The Finkler Question will put up much resistance.

2. Award Winners Get the 1 Seeds

There are a lot of tough first round matches for my favorites, mostly because the major award winners were placed in the protected positions; this pushed some books that had considerably more critical and commercial success into the middle of the bracket to duke it out amongst themselves. The upside is that if you are So Much for That and can get out of your first round, then the second round against a one seed is not as tough as it might be. 

3. Best Potential Quarterfinal Match-Up: Freedom v. Room

Veeeeeeeeeeery interesting. Reader darling up against the dauphin of American literature. With the right judge, Room could win this, but Matt Dellinger is a journalist/non-fiction guy and I suspect that Franzen's social commentary will appeal to him more than Donogue's page-turning plot. Plus, there's the gender thing (watch for that as you fill out your brackets. When in doubt, pick the author with the same gender as the judge).

4. Whither Weiner?

Part of me really thought they were going to put Weiner in a position to judge Franzen. I both wanted this and feared it. For good or for ill, though, Weiner gets the Room v. Bad Marie first-rounder, which I expect to go to Room, though Bad Marie presents an interesting opponent. More interesting than the winner here will be Weiner's explanation. 

5. Most Favorable Seed: So Much for That

The right side of the bracket seems much lighter than the left. Super Sad True Love Story seems poised to get to the final, but So Much for That, as a three seed, only has to get through a book about horses, one about a white dude in a mid-life crisis, and a poetry collection to make the semis. 

6. Head-Scratching Judge Placement

There is an excellent chance that the lead-singer of a largely unknown alternative rock band will be the one deciding between Freedom and A Visit From the Goon Squad. This would be like James Salter deciding between The Black Eyed-Peas and Taylor Swift for the Grammy for Best Album. I like having a couple of judging wild cards but not this late in the game. 

7. Applause-Inducing Judge Placement

I really like Audience Judge Catherine George's match. I don't think either of these books is going to do much in the tournament, but these two books are screaming for a struggling MFA to judge them. My sense is that someone who has a draft of something trying to be The Great Canadian Novel in the drawer will be more sympathetic to Bloodroot than The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, but the restraint and polish of Lemon Cake has its appeal. I am disconcertingly fascinated by this. 

8. Zombie Round Chaos

My uneducated guess is that A Visit from the Goon Squad and Room will be the Zombie books. I didn't think about the ramifications of the Zombie round in my earlier observations on the short-list, but the prospect of Goon Squad getting a 1-Up late in the game makes it, to my mind, the sharp's bet to take home the poultry. 

Alright, that's it for now. Back to getting through the whole list before March 6. Let me know if anything else about the brackets caught your eye.
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The 2011 Tournament of Books Longlist: Handicapping the Field

There are many reasons I love following The Morning News’ Tournament of Books every year. 

For one, it is the most inclusive competitive award (meaning not top 10 list or the like), with writers coming from multiple countries. Second, it releases an extensive long list then a longer than average short list: this gives interested spectators a chance to do some pre-game reading and follow along. Third, the round-by-round judging is completely transparent; the judges explain their reasons for choosing the winner in each match. This offers a rare window into how informed, passionate people make decisions about why they like one book better than another. The results are sometimes frustrating, sometimes inspiring, but always revealing. 

There’s another reason I like the ToB: I’m pretty good at picking it. Since I began following it in 2006, I have picked the winner three times, though admittedly at the short list stage: The Road, A Mercy, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Now, if you’ve been paying attention to contemporary literature you’ll realize that these prognostications were not the work of Nostradamus: these winners were all widely read and lauded going into the tournament. 

So, if you’re interested in trying to predict the winner, that’s hint number one: you’ve already heard of the winner, and, if you are a reasonably serious reader of new fiction, there’s a good chance you’ve already read it. 

Here are a few other thoughts on this year’s long-list:

1.       The Favorites

So, if the winner is most-likely a big, established book, then who are the candidates? Well, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen has to be the dauphin at this point. Even though there was some relatively significant backlash, Freedom is appearing on virtually every end-of-year list and is the choice of many for book of the year (though some are admitting this somewhat sheepishly).

If Freedom is the number one overall seed, then Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad is a close number two. The darling of independent booksellers and short-story writers everywhere (even though it is called a novel of linked stories), Goon Squad has a more contemporary and experimental feel than Franzen and thus probably the best contender to knock off the Dickens of 21^st Century America

2.      Comic Novels: Always a Bridesmaid

Sam Lipsyte’s Homeland and Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan made it to the championship rounds in their respective years, so a comic novel is a good bet to go far, but not to win. Brief Wondrous Life had the most humor of any of the winners, but I don’t think you could reasonably call it a comedy. Wolf Hall, Cloud Atlas, A Mercy, The Road and The Accidental are all as dour as a meeting of the G8.

3.       Don’t Be Afraid of Picking a Doorstop

Two previous winners, Wolf Hall and Cloud Atlas, are not the quickest reads in the world.  This is good news for the thick, from the longish The Surrendered to the hefty Skippy Dies to the never-ending The Instructions.

4.      Debut Authors Need Not Apply

Every winner had at least one previous book-length publication. Diaz was probably the least established author in terms of backlist, but his short story collection Drown was a major critical success. Bad news here for folk like Adam Levin and Amy Greene, but a flicker of hope for Charles Yu and Julie Orringer, who both followed up terrific short story debuts with fantastic novels. Probably the prime contender who is knocked out by this trend is Karl Marlantes, whose Matterhorn was my favorite book of 2010.

5.     English is the National Language.

No translated works have won. Even Bolano’s 2666 got knocked out in first round. I don’t want to talk about it.

So, Ape, what’s the pick at this point?

Well, I’m going to reserve my official selection for the short-list, but at this point, I’m going with A Visit from the Goon Squad. I think there’s enough reservation about Freedom to keep it from being a runaway train like The Road or Brief Wondrous Life, and Goon Squad’s combination of creativity and sensitivity make it really versatile: both technique-fetishists and emotional readers will find reasons to love it.

That’s something else to remember: the winner has to get through four judges, so it can’t be too specific a flavor *sniff* 2666 *sniff.* This would be a reason to bet against blogger-fav Room; there have been enough people who hate the book to suggest it has a certain something that could turn a judge off. 

There’s my pick, anybody else want to stick their neck out with me?

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A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

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 what ails us.