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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Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

We're finding it difficult to process Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, so consider the below not so much a review as post-view, an attempt to get some sort of handle on an unruly text.

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Though Lenny Abramov, the protagonist of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, reads War and Peace lovingly and obsessively, he does not read it well (more on this later). Shteyngart, however, clearly has, and the presence of Tolstoy’s masterwork in the novel is no accident (nor is the brief mention of 1984).

Like War and Peace, 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. State-sponsored capitalism is clearly the boogeyman here, particularly Abramov’s employer Staatling-Wapachung, a Sino-European corporate griffin poised to profit from a financial coup de grace in toppling the good ol’ U.S. of A.

Against this backdrop, Super Sad True Love Story follows Lenny as he tries to get the girl---a beautiful, vapid second generation Korean immigrant who is attracted to Lenny initially only for his salary (more than “239,000 yuan-pegged dollars a year”).

A late 30s schlub working for a “life extension” company, Lenny reads Tolstoy obsessively and furtively, for in this New New York, printed books are embarrassing relics, read only by the tragically uncool.  If going “viral” is our metaphor for digital popularity, social networking here has gone positively bubonic. People are continuously and addictively tuned into their “apparat”, smartphone-like devices that track the information of those immediately around them. Its killer-app (and model name) is RateMe: a steroidal Facebook/Twitter amalgam that gives users access to each other’s age, weight, personal and financial history, and a constantly update desirability index, rating a “personality” and “fuckability” on an 800-point scale. (It is an information orgy that spills over into consumer products: women’s clothing comes from two primary companies: AssLuxury and TotalSurrender.)

The Lenny-Eunice union is draped over a digital divide: his old world romanticism strains against her immersion in the electron-crazed zeitgeist—a tension exhibited in the structure of the novel itself, which shifts between his handwritten diary entries and transcripts of her email and online chats.

Readers might be tempted, being readers, to side with the bookish and old-fashioned Lenny, though I think his War and Peace fetish is a signal from Shteyngart to be wary. Lenny’s belief in his own agency (he stresses on the first page that his mission is to be immortal) becomes comic as the larger forces of culture and history crash on the rocks around him; no amount of Enlightenment thinking is going to provide him a harbor in this storm. For as much as digital narcissisim and global capitalism are the overt targets of Shteyngart’s satire, it is the paradox of information that I find the most fascinating.

The more information Lenny, Eunice, and the rest of the characters accumulate, the more their helplessness and limitation are laid bare. Does it do Lenny any good to know that he is generally regarded as one of the least attractive man in the room? Or does Eunice profit from watching her fuckability score oscillate depending on the cut of her clothes? Of course not. All this self-voyeurism only distracts from the ineluctable forces, both private and public, that shape their lives. For all of her beauty and youth, Eunice cannot escape the shadow of her father’s abuse. For all of Lenny’s self-inspection and optimism, he, like everyone else, is flawed and mortal. Their desire to enumerate their being is a desire for control: of their image, of their fortunes, and of their lives.

As it so happens, Tolstoy’s second epilogue to War and Peace might be thought of as a primer for understanding the worldview of Super Sad True Love Story, all of its own distractions and inventions notwithstanding:

[I]t now seems as if we have only to admit the law of inevitability, to destroy the conception of the soul, of good and evil, and all the institutions of state and church that have been built up on those conceptions…it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.

Somewhat dizzingly, what is articulated here is a call to be-aware of our self-deception, to transcend solipsism not by asserting our ego, but by acknowledging our limitation and fallenness.

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. They might both be right, but I suspect they would both be wrong. The object of terror here is neither the medium nor the message; it is the clear-eyed awareness of what we cannot do.