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 Glass Room by Simon Mawer: The Limits of Metaphor

Metaphor is the salt of literature; in the right amount, it can heighten and enrich. In excess, it becomes flat and bitter, overwhelming  the core experience of the writing. Simon Mawer's 2009 The Glass Room tests this balance with decidedly mixed results.

The "glass room" is not a room, but a house designed in 1929 for Viktor and Liesel Landauer, wealthy newlyweds in a fictional city in Czechoslovakia. Sleek, stark, and willfully experimental, the house represents the possibilities of modernity: "it embodies the pure rationality of a Greek classical temple, the austere beauty of a perfect composition[...]There are no disturbing curves to upset the rectilinear austerity of the space. There is nothing convolute, involute, awkward or complex. Here everything can be understood as a matter of proportion and dimension."

The strangeness of the house's symbolism is that it is not only clearly a metaphor for the narrative, but also for the characters within the narrative. Viktor thinks about the house much as the novel seems to: "The whole essence of the Glass Room is reason. That is what Viktor thinks, anyway." And in the first section of The Glass Room, this synchronicity is provocative. The desire for rationality and control that motivates the Landauers seems to echo Mawer's careful construction of the house as metaphor. 

The difficulty, though, is that extended metaphors are better suited to poetry and do not, in general, make for compelling stories. So as The Glass Room progresses, with the Landauers, and Europe itself, enveloped in World War II, the metaphor does not hold up; it is quite difficult to be interested in the properties of light in the living room when main characters are being whisked away to Auschwitz. 

The subsequent lives of the Glass House, as a Nazi biometric research facility and a clinic for children with polio, explore the colder, more clinical visages of reason. Mawer's complication of rationality, though, seems underdeveloped, as these quasi-vignettes cannot stand up to the history of that Landauer family. It's possible that the conceit might have been more evocative as a series of short stories revolving around the house, but as it is, the discontinuity between the pre- and post-war lives of the house dissipates the novel's force. 

And I would be quite ready to call The Glass Room an interesting failure if not for a nagging suspicion that the unsustainability of Mawer's metaphor might itself be a metaphor for the limits of literature and of art. After all, what building, poem, opera, or poem can fortify us against the inexorable materiality of horror? The disullusionment and exile of the Landauers mark the edges of what metaphor can do, leaving open the possibility that Mawer is using metaphor against itself. 

My first reaction was to be frustrated by the subjugation of story to structure, but the more I think about it, a remark by Willa Cather prevents me from dismissing The Glass Room entirely. Commenting on her novel The Professor's House (another novel using a habitation as a central symbol), Cather wrote: "the design is the story." I suppose that any work that forces us to be mindful of design, to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of plot, must be considered an achievement. At the very least, it requires that we reconsider our own demands and expand the boundaries of our vision.    
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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.