Category: Books

Winter Break Reading

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

One of my favorite things about winter breaks is the opportunity it gives me to try and reduce the number of titles in my Book of Books™.

Big Novels

One of the greatest pleasures of the break was re-reading Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. This is one of the books that I feel like I’ve had a long relationship with, from a sanitized Children’s Classics edition to a revelatory unabridged modern translation. For the past couple of months, the book has been my go-to time filler in a Kindle edition on my phone. One of the great pleasures of the book is its labyrinthine structure and cast of characters. It’s like if every time Dumas introduced a new set of characters or subplot tangential to the main storyline, his editor asked him to cut it and he responded by adding another 150 pages of material. There’s every type of story, and I had completely forgotten the humor of the book that goes along with it’s Byronic heaviness. One chapter, “How To Rid A Gardener of His Dormice” reads like a farcical short story.

Another behemoth of a novel that I powered through, albeit in an audio version, was the latest from David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. Mitchell’s previous book, Cloud Atlas, literally rocked my shit, and I’ve been devouring his writing since I discovered him. Some of the things that I fell in love with in his work is the way that he’s able to connect big, heavy things with emotionally specific characters in artfully plotted stories, as well as his careful use of different modes of writing that often play on genre tropes, giving him a chameleon-like style. I didn’t see as much of that side of his writing in this book; it’s a piece of historical fiction that can be pretty easily categorized, much like his earlier (excellent) bildungsroman Black Swan Green. Which is no reason to dismiss the book. Mitchell chose an interesting location and time, the island trading post of Dejima in the Nagasaki bay at the turn of the 19th century. Like Dumas, Mitchell adorns his story–riveting in itself–with digressions that serve to immerse us in the setting and make us connect with even characters that affect only minor developments in the main plot. And some Mitchell trademarks remain: multiple narrators and stories-within-stories, his subtle shades of magic realism, and even a cameo from a secondary character in Cloud Atlas. The only thing that hampered my enjoyment of the novel was my anticipation of the wonderful “Mitchell effect:” those wonderful moments in his work (particularly in Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten) where you suddenly realize the way that the story you are reading connects with larger themes established subtly throughout the larger work. There are certainly big themes in this book–particularly themes of individual autonomy, state sovereignty, and globalization–but no individual moment to match those in the other books. Still, it’s a spellbinding, wonderfully crafted, and deeply entertaining book.

Science Fictions

A book that made it on my list, on a recommendation from a source I can’t remember, was Alastair Reynold’s House of Suns. This kind of book is pure pleasure for me. It hits so many of my sci-fi buttons at once: epic world building, diverse multi-focused civilizations, political intrigue, morality tales, deep time. This is a book that it’s impossible for me to critique honestly. The quality of the writing doesn’t particularly distinguish itself, and the plot could maybe have used some punching up, but I really didn’t care. I got everything I came for, and I left satisfied.

A little more problematic was John Varley’s Rolling Thunder. I picked up this book on a whim, as one of Varley’s other novels, The Golden Globe, is one of my all time favorites. There were some superficial similarities–Varley’s love for the mixture of futuristic tropes with 1950’s and 60’s American pop culture, light social satire–but I thought the execution was just not on the same level. More bothersome for me after reading another of Varley’s books was the recognition of certain troubling elements of his writing that appear to be habits, particularly his writing of (and about) women. His female protagonist, Podkayne, is certainly endearing, but some of the things said in her voice sound like a rehash of “women are from mars”/When Harry Met Sally-esque nonsense that comes off as very unconvincing from that character.

Odds & Ends

Will Grayson, Will Grayson is a perfectly adequate YA novel with gay male content. I’ve been trying to get a handle on what to say about this book, and I really don’t have anything. The writing’s fine, not great, as is the story and the characters (with the exception of Tiny Cooper “the worlds largest gay person or the worlds gayest large person,” an unforgettable flamboyant gay teen equal parts sage mentor and hysterical drama queen). A couple of interesting thoughts about the book: The structure of this novel is alternating chapters narrated by each of the two Will Graysons, emphasized by different type/capitalization (Note to publisher: all small caps are annoying to read, e.e. cummings be damned!) and presumably written by the two authors. I’ve seen this format used a lot in the past few years, almost enough to create its own genre, like epistolary novels. It makes me wonder what (imagined) collaborations between big names might be like; certainly Levithan is a well known name in both general (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist) and gay (Boy Meets Boy) YA circles. The other realization that I had after finishing this book was the realization of what the familiar, stream-of-consciousness tone mixed with lame observational humor that pervades first-person YA literature reminds me of: bad stand up comedy. I certainly remember being entertained  by the same kind of asides that annoy me now when I was a member of the target audience of these books, so it’s hard for me to come down too hard on it. Still, even if young teens do go for that kind of voice, surely they get tired of reading it ALL THE TIME?

I need to take a moment to point out how ridiculously well my sister knows me, and how great she is at picking presents for me. This Christmas, she got me Dave Mazzucchelli’s wonderful graphic novel Asterios Polyp. Graphic novel? Hell yeah. Drawing style that melds cariacture with concepts from another field–architecture and geometry–to tell a story? Even better. Supremely talented but imperceptive jerk that gives Dr. Gregory House and Jeff Daniels in The Squid and the Whale a run for their money? You’re killing me, this is the perfect book. Except when it isn’t; scenes in the “present” of the novel are incredibly uninteresting and bland compared to the magic of the flashbacks to Asterios Polyp’s marriage, and a structural device where he imagines and speaks to his miscarried twin brother left me rolling my eyes. Still, it’s an interesting, surprisingly touching book that I’d strongly recommend.

Levitt and Dubner’s SuperFreakonomics had about the same effect on me as their first book, Freakonomics (props to them for extending the pun, although I may eat my words if they keep cranking out more of these things), which is to say, little. It’s compellingly written, and full of interesting, seemingly contrarian opinions. The slickness of the writing makes me trust it a little less, but the subjects of each chapter are a little more focused than those included in the first book, which often read more like an exercise in data manipulation than a good-faith attempt to describe real-world phenomena.

David Mitchell – Black Swan Green

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

  • Mitchell, David. Black Swan Green, Random House, April 2006, 304p.
  • One sentence summary: Jason Taylor is 13.
  • This is for: People who love really getting to know a character intimately
  • This is not for: People who prioritize the destination over the journey.

Black Swan Green is an amazing piece of writing. 13 is an age where you have enough of a kernel of maturity to try and figure out the world around you, yet there is still so much that you don’t know. Much of the plot of BSG is driven by this conflict, as Jason Taylor makes false assumptions about the people around him, or is too afraid of ridicule to ask another person what he should do. This makes it an incredibly delicate piece of writing too. Everything takes place from Jason’s perspective, and Mitchell does nothing to wink at his adult readers. Jason’s world is almost a magical world, full of unpredictable adults, new emotions, savage bullies, and distracted parents. He is a wonderful character.

I first read Cloud Atlas after reading about it, and Mitchell, in the New York Times Magazine. I was a little underwhelmed by Ghostwritten, but that was mostly because it covers thematic ground that is very close to Cloud Atlas. BSG is very different from those two, and is perhaps my favorite of his works to date.

Lev Grossman – The Magicians

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

  • Lev Grossman, The Magicians, Viking, August 2009. 416p.
  • A high school senior finds himself pulled into a new world as he goes to a magic prep school in upstate New York. And there’s another plot about an alternate-universe Narnia.
  • This is for: Those who thought that what the Harry Potter Books were missing was sex. Also, anybody who never thought that they would come to appreciate J.K. Rowling’s glacially placed plots.
  • This is not for: Those who don’t already have a deep love for books with magic in them. Probably Christian fundamentalists (this has occult magic AND premarital sex!)

Magic has always been my favorite conceit from fantasy literature. I’ve never been much interested in medievalesque court dramas, or warrior knights or anything like that. When I was younger, I would pore through the meager fantasy shelves in our small-town library looking for something that hit my sweet spot. I still have that tendency, so I thought that even if it wasn’t particularly well written or plotted, I would have a good time reading Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. I guess that the book passed that absurdly low bar; I certainly didn’t not enjoy reading it, but most of the time I was frustrated because I could see glimpses of a much better book poking through the prose. Here are four of my big complaints:

1. When it isn’t clear whether you’re parodying a genre or working within it, self-reference comes across as insecurity.

The Magicians references the Harry Potter books explicitly several times throughout the book. At one point our hero, Quentin Coldwater (right?) wishes that he had access to a spell like one in the HP series, and another time refers to himself and his two friends as being like Harry, Ron, and Hermione. This is consistent with the world that Grossman has built: Quentin lives in our present-day world, and Rowling’s books have been so influential that it’s impossible to imagine a book set in a magic boarding school that doesn’t confront them one way or another. It becomes a problem, however, when these references don’t add anything to the story, and come across as defensive.

Many of the self-referential aspects in The Magicians read as parody or a subtle critique of the conventions of magic school novels and the HP series in particular. At several points Quentin rolls his eyes at the Anglophilia contained in the grounds and program of Brakebills, the upstate NY Hogwarts analogue, as well as the school’s curfew and year divisions. Yet Grossman tries to play it straight as well. Like Harry at Hogwarts, Quentin loves Brakebills so much that he hates going home and feels bored and apathetic when he is not there. The references then come across as defensive–like Grossman acknowledging that he’s working with well-established tropes, and asking you to not hold it against his novel.

2. School-centric books live and die by the relationships contained in them.

Perhaps another reason that Grossman explicitly references Harry Potter is to shut down comparisons between the books. This would be a smart reason, because The Magicians does not come off favorably in that comparison.

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the Harry Potter books are far from perfect, however one of the things that JK Rowling got absolutely right was the pacing and scope of the plots that she could execute in one book. The HP books generally cover a school year, and the somewhat leisurely pace that the books move at allow us to get a real picture of a year in shorthand: the progress that Harry makes in his classes, the changing relationship that he has with his classmates in different books, his strengths and weaknesses as a student. These classroom scenes introduce a lot of mythology as well, but it rarely feels like exposition.

The Magicians has such an absurdly large scale that there is simply no room for this kind of detail. Quentin is supposed to have attended Brakebills for a full five years of his life, yet with the exception of a very well done sequence that covers half of his fourth year at the school, we never get a real sense of how Brakebills operates as a school. This is another example of the trouble with hewing so close to cliched magic-school tropes. We’re given cliched settings and situations then asked to take our protagonist seriously. It doesn’t work. The climax of the book hinges on the fact that you give a shit about the supporting characters (or, hell, the protagonist). I didn’t.

3. This book’s time-line is absurd.

One of the most consistently frustrating features of The Magicians is not so much that it’s a bad book, but that you can see how there could have been about three really good books in its place. This is because: a) it has an awkwardly large timeline, and b) this book is two books mashed together.

The book opens during Quentin’s senior year in high school. In the following 400-odd pages: admission to a magic school, four academic years of same, three summers, a semester abroad, a few months of post-graduate lounging, preparation for a trip to an alternate world, and a couple months in a thinly-disguised Narnia. If this sounds like a lot of ground to cover in not very much space, you still have no idea. Full years are explained away with a sentence or deus ex machina. There’s simply no room for true character moments, only exposition. And considering that Brakebills and the book’s mythology are already caricatures, there’s really not a whole lot of room for interesting writing.

4. Any emotional climaxes or mature ideas are completely unearned.

Grossman certainly tries to have emotional arcs and journeys. A few characters die. Quentin cheats on his (flatly written) perfect girlfriend with his slutty friend. Quentin’s perfect girlfriend harbors secret pains. At no point did I care about any of these people, therefore I was bored silly by these subplots.

The single most frustrating passages come at the end with two complex events: Quentin and his friends take on the monster that has been killing off Narnia, and Quentin decides to give up magic. There are great ideas here, and the writing is devastatingly effective. It almost, but not quite, hits the mark. The problem is that the foundations upon which those passages rest are not sound. Narnia (Fillory) is something we only consider through Quentin’s eyes–we’re never given a reason why we should care. And in the second case, I didn’t feel like Quentin’s love and need for magic was ever expressed in his character, only in the exposition.

In short, it’s annoying to have these good ideas–ideas that you could build while books from by themselves–placed among a book that doesn’t take itself seriously. Brakebills is supposed to be the equivalent of magic college, and yet there are curfews, year segregated dorms, and prep-school style uniforms. It’s nakedly apparent that this is a way to include “edgy” scenes of alcohol, drugs, and sex while keeping the boarding-school aesthetic and British preppiness from the books Grossman is cribbing from (not to mention placating school library purchasers). And the real-world literary references are defensive and plastic. Quentin and his friends use “Magic Missiles” for Gods sake (just because the text acknowledges the D&D reference doesn’t make it any less lame)!

I would not recommend this book. It’s not awful, and the only reason I’m being hard on it is because it was so well reviewed. If you’ve been looking for a mature, more realistic Harry Potter, this isn’t it.

Christos Tsiolkas – The Slap

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

  • Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap, Penguin Books, April 2010, 482p.
  • Brief Summary: A novel told from multiple perspectives, The Slap examines in intimate detail the aftermath and fracture of a social circle after a man slaps a child that is not his own at a family gathering.
  • This is for: Fans of domestic novels. Those interested in themes of societal change, inter-generational conflict, and immigrant experiences.
  • This is not for: ideologues. Those who need big plot points: there are revelations and events that happen throughout the novel, but they take a backseat to the experience and voice of the featured character.

I was intrigued, as perhaps you are now, by the tagline on the front cover of Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap: “At a suburban barbeque, a man slaps a child that is not his own…” Those words immediately suggest conflict; we can imagine how that scenario might play out among people that we know. Friendships broken, inter-familial feuds, overstepped boundaries and violations of trust. All these things can be found in The Slap, however the novel contains much more.

The novel is structured like eight independent novellas, focusing on different characters involved or present at the titular incident. Each has their own perspective on the incident, but also their own secrets, their own experiences, their own relationships. Because all of these characters are fully realized and have their own degree of engagement with the conflict–in fact, in at least two of the sections, the slap plays a very minor role in their story–the slap acts as a common focal point showing the differences in the lenses that the characters use to look at the world. They range in age and perspective from  a 15-year old trying to navigate the rough waters of cruel schoolmates and his own gayness to a 70 year old Greek immigrant coming to terms with his own age and the fact that the world has changed very much since the time he was raising children.

Tsiolkas gives the reader the opportunity to really get in the character’s heads, without judging them or editorializing. It’s a great read.

Two YA Picks

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

I have a soft spot for gay-centric YA literature. This is partly because these books were not available to me (mostly because I come from a small town, but also it seems to me that the category has expanded greatly in the decade since I aged out of the target audience.). YA books play an important part in the lives of the people that read them, and I find that role models from books are often held closer to the heart than their real-world counterparts. Now that I’m located in Portland, the Multnomah County Library has an extensive selection of these books that I missed out on.

Sprout, by Dale Peck, is one of the books that I might have gravitated towards when I was younger. It’s narrated in the voice of Sprout (named for his bright green hair), a gay teenager living in rural Kansas. He is a precocious writer, which provides many opportunities for pithy, breaking-the-fourth-wall addresses to the audience. I found these passages distracting, and cheap. Peck creates many unique characters, and his description of the dusty world that Sprout occupies is so complete that I could picture it in my mind, however the book is, in my opinion, overly brief. I would probably recommend it (after all, it is short), but as the corpus of gay teen lit grows, I cannot imagine that it would remain as an essential work.

The Geography Club, by Bret Hartinger, is much better. This book follows a gay teen that starts a secret club (named the Geography Club to discourage other students from joining) with the other gay students in his high school. Again, the book is slim, however the plot takes place over a few weeks, and there is enough substance that it feels like a light lunch, not an appetizer.