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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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 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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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.

Is This What Gender Bias in Reading Looks Like?

Our last post about the Weiner/Picoult/New York Times fracas got us thinking about our own reading choices, as we are the breed of primate to read the kinds of books reviewed in The New York Times. If it's possible that the Grey Lady expresses some selection bias in its reviews, might it be possible that your humble, opposable-thumb sporting Ape has some bias in his reading selections?

Unfortunately, the short answer seems to be yes.

After we finish reading Jonathan Franzen's Freedom sometime this weekend, The Ape will have read forty-five novels/short story collections this year, most of them new titles. Of these, only eight are by women. Even more startlingly, none of the women writers were of color.

We are not happy about this. It seems that if we reading according only to our taste, we overwhelming choose writers like us: white, male, and American (though we go out of our way to cover contemporary American writing, so that last one is not a surprise).

Some gravitation towards sameness is neither shocking nor undesirable, but the imbalance here is dismaying and is cause for some self-reflection. How did this happen and what is to be done about it?

Some of this is contingent: burning through all three of Stieg Larsson's books and and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy perhaps skewed the numbers. Still even last year, of the sixty-one novels/story collections we read, only fifteen were by women, somewhat better than this year, but still not a ratio we're comfortable with.

Perhaps as Picoult and Weiner charge, there is a bias in mainstream book-reviewing and that bias, paired with whatever our own biases are, materially affects the authors we read. Perhaps we've overlooked some serious, talented women for reasons that are not fully realized.

Perhaps the genre itself is skewed; perhaps it is dominated, for reasons either related or not to our own biases, by white men. Here are the female writers of American literary fiction with new books (either paperback or hardback) we've read this year: Julie Orringer, Lorrie Moore, Hilary Thayer Hamann, Amy Greene, Jennifer Egan, Aimee Bender, and Michelle Hoover. Who have we missed? Jane Smiley has a new book, but we've always been lukewarm on her. Is that the smoking gun, our relative lack of excitement for Jane Smiley?

For comparison's sake, here's a gender breakdown of The Millions' most anticipated books of 2010: forty-two total, eight by women--a ratio that seems oddly familiar. And yet not at all comforting.

We're going to thinking about this further, but are also interested to hear what others make of this. We're particularly interested in titles we might pick up to fill in whatever gaps we've missed from women writers over the past year.

Weiner Picoult v. The World

After a late summer vacation and the beginning of fall classes, the Ape gets back into the blogging-swing. Coming up at The Reading Ape: reviews of Franzen’s Freedom, Moody’s The Four Fingers of Death, a reading disease self-diagnosis, and further considerations of reading and the gender gap.

But up first, we pause a moment to reflect on the Weiner-Picoult v. The New York Times whirlwind that kicked up over the last couple of weeks.  Jason Pinter’s interview with the duo for The Huffington Post provides an abundance of mill-grist, so let’s take a look (Ape note: we have never read a work by either Picoult or Weiner.).

1. I am shocked, SHOCKED, to discover there is gambling in this establishment!

Jennifer Weiner: I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention.

Takeaway:  Unfortunately, Weiner’s basic point is correct: female writers have not received the same sort of attention that male writers have. So it’s not the sentiment that is particularly interesting here, but the timing (after all, Woolf covered this all 80 years ago in A Room of One’s Own). There seems to be something specifically galling about the Franzen hoopla for Weiner (let’s put a pin in the phrase “serious critic’s attention” for future use).

2. Sometimes the Answer is in the Question

Picoult: …When in today's market you only have a limited review space for books, I wonder what the rationale is for the New York Times to review the same book twice, sometimes in the same week.

Takeaway: The people who write about books for The Times want to write about books they think are important, not giving the widest possible coverage. The narrowing of the focus necessarily increases the wattage given to certain books, and multiple reviews of high profile books tempers the clout of any individual review with multiple perspectives. 

3. The Medium is the Message

Picoult:… I read a lot of commercial fiction and a lot of the same themes and wisdoms I find in commercial fiction are the same themes and wisdoms as what i see lauded in literary fiction.

Takeaway: One thing that the both Picoult and Weiner seem to overlook is the primacy of form in “serious criticism.” Perhaps Picoult is right that the themes and wisdoms are similar, but presumably the style and shape of those themes and wisdoms are not. The mass market appeal of a Picoult novel (or for that matter a Larsson or Grisham) due to “readability” suggests an artlessness that doesn’t appeal to people who spend their lives thinking about literature. 

4. Careful, your Ad Hominem is Showing

Weiner: First of all, I think it's hilarious that a guy who went to Sidwell Friends, Yale and Johns Hopkins, favors "made-to-measure Lord Willys shirts," snacks on charcuterie, sips Calvados and throws book parties at "the velvet-cloaked Russian Samovar" is presuming to lecture anyone on what constitutes true populism. Let the word go forth: my populism is real...and it's spectacular. 

Takeaway: This is not a takeaway so much as it is context: both Weinder and Picoult went to Princeton. 

5. The Flattening of Culture

Weiner: How can anyone claim the paper plays fair when genre fiction that men read gets reviewed but genre fiction that women read doesn't exist on the paper's review pages? It would be as if the paper's film critics only reviewed tiny independent fare and refused to see so much as a single frame of a romantic comedy, or if the music critics listened to Grizzly Bear and refused to acknowledge the existence of Katy Perry or Lady Gaga. How seriously would a reader take a critic like that?

Takeaway: Weiner suggests that a literary critic should have the same breadth as a critic of music or film, but as any serious reader knows, literature, as a genre, resists that sort of coverage. A film reviewer could reasonably see all the new releases in any given week; this is simply impossible for even the most active book reviewer. Couple that with the relative depth of serious book reviews and you start to see why the reviews in The Times can seem more arbitrary than its film or music reviews. 

6. Yea, But See, They Don’t Care About That.

Weiner: I think if the NYT cares about its darlings finding a wider audience, the smartest thing it can do is be a little more respectful toward the books readers are actually reading.

Takeaway: It’s not at all clear that this is the mission of the NY Times. In fact, we sincerely hope it isn’t. If the goal of The Times was to give attention to the books people were actually reading, we’d have mostly Twilight, Clive Cussler, and Sophie Kinsella reviews. And the food writing would be about Doritos. 

Criticism is the last line of a winnowing process that starts with agents, moves to publishers, then to booksellers and critics. Whatever cache the Times Review still has is because there is a level of discernment implied in what it reviews. Take away that discernment and the prestige evaporates. We’re not suggesting that the Times doesn’t require self-reflection (what doesn’t after all?), but that asking them to map popularity is counter-productive. 

7. I Still Don’t Get It

Weiner: I think a most respectful and informed attitude toward a wider range of books would help everyone - commercial writers, literary writers, men, women, and, most importantly, readers.

Takeaway: Weiner and Picoult, by their own admission, make a jillion dollars from their books and their readers adore them. What “help” do they need exactly? We wish they would just pull a full Fredo and say it: “I want respect and I was passed over!” We can understand this feeling and do indeed sympathize with it.

There is a case to be made, we think, that most readers feel estranged from literary writing; it is difficult, provocative, and sometimes experimental. It is, in a very real way, artistically elitist. And it’s these types of books that The Times highlights. Weiner and Picoult might be spot on when they say their books are similar enough to Hornby or Tropper to warrant inclusion: we are not familiar enough to say. 

If the Ape is honest with his primate-self, though, our attitude about the discernment of “serious critics” echoes the sentiment of Colonel Nathan Jessop in Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men: I want them on that wall. I need them on that wall.

          But perhaps those of us who care about such things need to do a better job watching the watchers.