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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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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The 100 Great American Novels, 1891-1991

Update: this post has moved: The Great American Novels, 1891-1991

The Best Novels of 2010....so far...

Like a keg at a frat party, it seems like we just tapped 2010, but now it is already half-finished.  Lest we find ourselves face down in the yard, wondering what the heck happened last year, The Ape offers the three best novels from the first six months. (Note: these are books published in 2010)

In ascending order:

3. The Ask by Sam Lipsyte

Comic novels rarely enjoy much award-love (Take a look at the past winners of the major book awards; you’ll find more laughs at a burn unit), but Lipsyte’s inventive, caustic, and down-right funny The Ask should be on your radar. Milo Burke, Lipsyte’s protagonist, is the worst kind of mediocrity—the kind that not-so-secretly believes they are destined for some ill-defined greatness. Struggling along at this job as a fund-raiser for a pretentious, mid-level university in New York City (this is starting to hit a wee close to home), Burke has disdain for the wealthy donors he must woo, contempt for comfortable liberalism of his friends, and a one-liner for everything. One to scratch your misanthropy itch, by way of your funny bone.

2. The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

From our review:

Like many Holocaust stories, this one is harrowing, but the time Orringer spent establishing these characters and these stories in the first half of the book deepens our investment; the dreadful cost is brought home all the more powerfully because The Invisible Bridge shows us a time before the fall. Orringer's great achievement here is to give us the Holocaust anew, to remind us of the scale of what was lost and to cherish what survived.

The Invisible Bridge is a two-fer: the first half about a young man going to school in Paris, getting into trouble, and falling in love. (It’s the “We’ll always have Paris” backstory from Casablanca, if Bogie were Hungarian and Bergman older and had killed a cop.) The second half leverages our emotional investment from this deep grounding, as the Nazis, and their allies, round-up and exterminate Eastern Europe’s Jews. This is an engrossing read that has lingered in our minds, even as our raging bibliophilia has marched on.

1.  Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

We’re not alone in our admiration for Marlantes’ steady, enveloping novel of the Vietnam War, and it is sure to be in the mix for all of the major American literary awards. From our review:

Marlantes [is] unrelenting in his account of the Vietnam War's operational and political confusion; he doesn't spare us the arcana of a Marine officer's life, knowing full well, as one of the characters says, that the truth is not found, but assembled:

"Intelligence, Lieutenant," Simpson went on, "is built up by the fastidious collection of minutiae. You understand that, don't you? It isn't the result of spectacular finds. It's the result of hard work, constant attention to detail--to minutiae. Mi-nu-tiae."

And though Marlantes tries to guide us through the minutiae with a chart of the chain of command, a detailed map of the operation, and a lengthy glossary of military terminology, the deluge of call signs, equipment, procedures, ranks, titles, and tactics is beyond comprehension. And once Mellas [the novel’s protagonist] realizes (the reader alongside) that these particulars are not in themselves meaningful, but the minutiae out of which meaning is made, he comes to be himself at last.

Like The Invisible Bridge, Matterhorn re-visits familiar territory, but, and this is the sign of great writing, forces to reconsider what we thought we knew.

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So, there you go—the leaders in the clubhouse for 2010. Several marquee releases await (seriously, just release the new Franzen already), but someone's going to have to bring some serious heat to top Matterhorn.
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