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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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.

The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques: Paracatenation

Paracatenation:
a sequence of sentence fragments, each describing an item in a list.

Example:
"A flashlight, for power cuts, and a stock of AAs. A novel he should have selected more carefully if he was taking only one. An English-Swahili phrasebook, malaria pills, deet. Prescription cortisone cream for persistent eczema on his ankle, a tube that would soon run out."
from So Much for That by Lionel Shriver.

Discussion:
Paracatenation has several uses, but in this case it seems to bring the third person narration closer to the character's point-of-view. The absence of formal narration also suggests a distance between the list and any thinking about or reflection on the list. Many instances of paracatenation are metonymic for a character's internal stock-taking; the most well-known recent example is probably Tim O'Brien's short-story "The Things They Carried."

Previous Entry:

The Generalized Categorical

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All entries in The Dictionary of Fictional Techniques are original to The Reading Ape, unless otherwise cited. (This means that they aren’t ‘real words,’ so don’t use them in your freshman comp essay)