Did I really read that book?

Posted on April 14, 2013 by Richard Bowker

A while back I read The Good Soldier. As I did, I kept having the feeling that I had read it already. But this was never more than an occasional niggling at the back of my mind — a scene, a character would seem vaguely familiar, but then for long stretches the feeling would disappear.

Maybe I did read The Good Soldier, and its memory simply disintegrated in my brain over the years. I didn’t like it this time around, and it’s unlikely to have made much of an impression on me in high school or college, when I was vacuuming up novels daily. But it’s also possible that I didn’t in fact read it — that the scenes and characters just reminded me of something else, also now lost. Beats me. Memory, modern science tells us, is fragile and unreliable. We don’t know what we think we know. (This recent Radiolab podcast tells the story of a woman who confidently identifies the man who had brutally raped her, only to find out years later that she had been mistaken.)

All of this is by way of an introduction to the following lovely review of The Distance Beacons from a very perceptive reader named D. Jensen:

What I can’t believe is that no one else has reviewed this book. Perhaps it is because this is the second (and hopefully not the last) that Bowker has offered us.
It has been a long, long time since I read this book, but I do remember it as a better than “a good ‘un”.

Walter Sands, the only P.I. in a post-apocalyptic (no longer United) States is asked to search for a rebel organization that is threatening to assassinate the President when she comes to Boston to campaign in favor of the New England states to rejoin the union.
Along with his friends and roommates, Walter uncovers much more than he or his employer expect.

Another great read from Bowker. I think that I like it that he never really describes the nuclear war that created this future mish-mash country. It was what it was and now the survivors are just trying to rebuild their lives and perhaps a country that may or may not resemble the earlier version. There is no sweeping view of this time; there is just the observations of the people “on the ground” so to speak. Bowker knows how to keep the characters relevant and relate-able and how to build the tension in the story to keep the reader turning pages–or flipping screens.

Worth the time where so many are not.

It’s all so very true! Except for the part where he (she?) says “It’s been a long, long time since I read this book.” As I may have mentioned here, The Distance Beacons was written a while ago (with a different title), but it ended up in a carton in my basement after Bantam declined to print a sequel to Dover Beach. No more than half a dozen people read it back then, and it’s only the e-book revolution that has allowed it to see the light of day now. D. Jensen is having a Good Soldier moment.

Unless, you know, my memory is playing tricks on me.

A few thoughts about “Telegraph Avenue”

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Richard Bowker

Telegraph Avenue is Michael Chabon’s latest novel. I’ve read two others by him: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and the entertaining but less interesting serial novel Gentlemen of the Road. He is an astonishing writer. Quit reading this stupid post and download one of his books.

That said, I didn’t like Telegraph Avenue as much as The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which I thought was utterly brilliant. It’s about black and Jewish folks just getting by in the Oakland of 2004. Two men run a marginally profitable used record store threatened by a superstore that may be built nearby. Their wives are midwives struggling to keep their practice going in the face of opposition from hospitals who don’t want them doing home births. All the characters are wonderfully comic and sympathetic. Their lives are described in rich detail. I don’t know how Chabon does it.

Still, at 465 pages the book feels overstuffed and somewhat exhausting. While I willingly gave myself up to the strange alternate universe of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, I wasn’t especially interested in the extensive, loving descriptions of 70s black music and films that is central to the book. Your mileage may vary.

A couple of other points:

Telegraph Avenue is best read on an ebook reader with a built-in dictionary. If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself looking up a lot of words — Chabon’s range of vocabulary is spectacular. I’m not a foodie, so I don’t feel too bad not knowing lavash and turmeric. But I figure I should have known a lot of his other words — clabber and selvage, for example. I know ’em now.

Finally this was the first book I’ve come across where the author credited the hardware and software used to create it: “This novel was written using Scrivener on Macintosh computers.” Modern times.

In which I review “Why Does the World Exist: An Existential Detective Story” using upgoer5

Posted on January 26, 2013 by Richard Bowker

This is the book I’m talking about. And this explains the words I’m using (and not using). Why am I doing this? Because this is my writing place!

Why is the world here? Why is there something instead of nothing? We’ve talked about this before. In this book, a man goes around talking to men (they are all men) who have thought a lot about this question. They all have different ideas.

Some people believe that God made everything. But then who made God? Where did God come from? Is God just “there”? Where is “there”? And why is God the way He is and not some other way?

Some people think that something just pops out of nothing. But if this is possible, why is it possible? Why is the way things are exactly this way and not some other way?

Some people believe there are many, many worlds — many “everythings” — and each one may have a different way that things are. Maybe everything that could be, is. But why? Why isn’t there just nothing, which is the most simple way for things to be?

Some people think this has something to do with us, and the way we can think. Maybe there is something instead of nothing just so we can be here. Some other people think this idea is really stupid.

The man writes about what these people look like and where they live. He eats with many of them and he talks about what they eat. Most of them know each other; none of them agree with each other.

In the book, he also talks about his dog dying and then his mother dying. This makes him sad and it made me sad, but I’m not sure what this has to do with why there is something instead of nothing.

In the end, I don’t think he knows the answer to this question. And we don’t, either. Probably we will never know. Should that make us sad?

Should authors feel bad when they kill off a character?

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Richard Bowker

Here I talk about the problem that pops up when you kill off a character in a series, only to realize later you’d like to have him around. A more interesting issue is your emotional relationship with characters you create. Should it bother you when you kill them off? I was talking to a reader about Pontiff, where (not much of a spoiler alert) a sympathetic character dies at the climax. She wasn’t especially bothered by this, because it was a bit of a twist on what she was expecting, but it made perfect sense in the context of the plot. Which was the effect I had hoped to achieve.

But I had grown to like that character. I wished her nothing but the best! I was sorry she had to die! This didn’t stop me from killing her, all the same. It wasn’t a question of morality; it was a question of aesthetics. Your readers aren’t going to care about your characters if you don’t care about them yourself. But you’re the boss — not the characters.

This brings me to the case of the angelic character Little Nell in Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop The novel was serialized, as all of his novels were, so readers could follow the decline of the little girl’s health week by week. Wikipedia says:

The hype surrounding the conclusion of the series was unprecedented; Dickens fans were reported to storm the piers of New York City, shouting to arriving sailors (who might have already read the last installment in the United Kingdom), “Is Little Nell alive?” In 2007, many newspapers claimed the excitement at the release of the last volume of The Old Curiosity Shop was the only historical comparison that could be made to the excitement at the release of the last Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Dickens lived life and wrote fiction in a higher key than anyone else. so it’s not surprising that he was as upset by her death as his readers were.

Dickens was traumatized by the death of Little Nell. As he was writing it he felt as though he were experiencing the death of one of his children. It also brought back painful memories of the death of his sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth.

But a novelist has gotta do what a novelist has gottta do.

Here, if you can bear to read it, is Dickens’ description of Little Nell in death:

She was dead. No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon. She seemed a creature fresh from the hand of God, and waiting for the breath of life; not one who had lived and suffered death. Her couch was dressed with here and there some winter berries and green leaves, gathered in a spot she had been used to favor. “When I die, put near me something that has loved the light, and had the sky above it always.” Those were her words.

She was dead. Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell was dead. Her little bird, a poor, slight thing the pressure of a finger would have crushed, was stirring nimbly in its cage, and the strong heart of its child-mistress was mute and motionless forever! Where were the traces of her early cares, her sufferings, and fatigues? All gone. Sorrow was dead, indeed, in her; but peace and perfect happiness were born, imaged in her tranquil beauty and profound repose.

This is great stuff, although you may be inclined to agree with Oscar Wilde: “One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears…of laughter.”

Another bad review for Senator! (Also, reading a book on an iPhone)

Posted on December 2, 2012 by Richard Bowker

At the risk of running counter to the purpose of this stupid blog, which is to persuade people to buy my stupid ebooks, I’d like to highlight a one-star review of Senator that just showed up on Amazon:

Too soon after the elections. Just one more book that proves that politicians are first grade liars, and will do anything to stay in power.

It’s easy to be snarky about a review like this. The obvious remedy for the reader’s problem with the book is to read it when she’s not sick of politics. It’s not the book’s fault that she read it right after the election!

On the other hand, this highlights something important about the fickleness of everyone’s judgments about books (and movies and music…). We encounter them at a specific time and place, and our judgments about them are inevitably colored by those circumstances. Sometimes you’re too young for a book; sometimes you’re too old. The books I enjoyed before I had kids may not be the ones I’d enjoy after I had kids. It’s impossible to be completely objective in your assessments of books, and an author shouldn’t blame a reader for not trying.

Based on a recommendation from one of my very fine readers, I recently read The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, which is number 30 on the list of the greatest English language novels of the twentieth century. (He changed the title of the novel, and also his last name. Read Wikipedia to find out why.) Just for kicks, I read the book in the Kindle app on my new iPhone. And I hated it! But now I’m never likely to be able to fully disentangle my assessment of the novel from the modality by which I encountered it. I thought that reading a book on an iPhone was pretty claustrophobic, with the small screen size giving you such a small view of the text. And guess what — I found The Good Soldier to be claustrophobic as well, with the narrator’s obsessive telling and retelling of his story of the interactions among several decidedly unpleasant people. So, what can I make of the novel? Reading it was at best a two-star experience for me, but maybe reading a leather-bound critical edition of the book would have caused me to give it an extra star or two. Maybe if I hadn’t read parts of it while waiting to get my hair cut, or during half-time of a Patriots game in which the secondary once again wasn’t getting the job done…

That’s why an author should be eternally grateful when he encounters readers who seem to understand and enjoy what he’s trying to do. There are so many ways in which that can fail to happen.

Rule #1: Don’t sleep with your biographer

Posted on November 13, 2012 by Richard Bowker

A correspondent notes that if General Petraeus had read Senator, he wouldn’t be in this mess.

I have now added a “Life is stupider than fiction” category, but I don’t see how anything could top the Petraeus / West Point grad – Ph.D. student – jealous mistress / Tampa socialite – honorary Korean consul with a crazy twin sister and a bogus cancer charity / jealous FBI agent sending shirtless photos of himself / general with enough time on his hands to send thousands of emails story.

I know I wouldn’t be able to top it.

Philip Roth is retiring

Posted on November 10, 2012 by Richard Bowker

At 79, Roth apparently has had enough of writing novels. The Slate writer thinks this may explain his recent attempt to fix his Wikipedia page–it’s time to work on his legacy.

The recent news that he had finally agreed to work closely with a biographer also suggested that perhaps he saw the end of his career approaching. And his recent contretemps with Wikipedia further implied a focus on his legacy.

If this is true, I’m glad his last novel was Nemesis, which was great, rather than the one that preceded it, The Humbling, which was embarrassing. It’s always good when people have the sense to bow out at, or at least near, the top of their game. I’ve always liked John Updike, but I was unable to finish the last couple of novels he wrote; the times seemed to have passed him by. Even Shakespeare seems to have gone on a bit too long; I wouldn’t regret it if Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen had never seen the light of day.

Maybe the best way to leave the stage belongs to Charles Dickens; drop dead with a murder mystery (The Mystery of Edwin Drood) half-finished and the killer unrevealed. Which led to ongoing attempts to finish the novel, including this one:

The third attempt was perhaps the most unusual. In 1873, a young Vermont printer, Thomas James, published a version which he claimed had been literally ‘ghost-written’ by him channelling Dickens’ spirit. A sensation was created, with several critics, including Arthur Conan Doyle, a spiritualist himself, praising this version, calling it similar in style to Dickens’ work and for several decades the ‘James version’ of Edwin Drood was common in America. Other Drood scholars disagree. John C. Walters “dismiss[ed it] with contempt”, stating that the work “is self-condemned by its futility, illiteracy, and hideous American mannerisms; the mystery itself becomes a nightmare, and the solution only deepens the obscurity.”

I don’t think anyone would try to complete an unfinished Philip Roth novel. And I certainly don’t think Roth’s ghost would help him.

Penguin and Random House merge: should we care?

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Instead of a big six in publishing, there will be a big five, as the corporate owners of Penguin and Random House have announced a merger.

The deal, analysts said, would give the new company, to be called Penguin Random House, greater scale to deal with the challenges arising from the growth of electronic books and the power of Internet retailers. Publishers are increasingly worried about the leverage wielded by Internet giants like Google, Apple and, especially, Amazon. These companies have vast resources to invest in new technology, like digital sales platforms, and the size to let them negotiate better terms on prices.

The Times article mentions the usual “synergies” that come from a merger–combine warehouses, for example, and you can decrease per-copy costs of printed books. There’s also something about emerging markets that I suppose makes sense. But the big issue seems to be ebooks and digital media. The Wall Street Journal says:

Mr. Makinson [Penguin CEO] said the merger will allow the companies to invest more heavily in social media and other new technologies. With fewer traditional bookstores around, he said, “it becomes harder and riskier to take a chance on new writers because you can’t be sure of finding an audience.” Social media can help remedy that.

I find this pretty baffling. What kind of investment do you need for Facebook, Twitter, etc.? And big publishers haven’t been taking a chance on new writers for decades now–how is digital media going to make this change?

The Times article also suggests that the new company might develop its own e-reader, which is beyond baffling:

The combined company is expected to invest heavily in e-books and what Mr. Dohle called digital product development. He said that did not necessarily mean it would produce its own e-reader device, as some in the industry expected.

And what does it mean to invest heavily in ebooks? What is there to invest in? Anybody can create and sell an ebook for approximately zero dollars. What does the additional investment get you? (Actually, I’m just talking about fiction here; I can see all kinds of cool things publishers could do with nonfiction ebooks if they got creative. So let’s hope that’s what they mean.)

Anyway, for major authors, this can’t be good news. Even if the new company doesn’t reduce the overall number of imprints, it’s hard to believe they’ll be competing against each other as aggressively as if they were separately owned. For new or minor authors, maybe there’s some benefit, but I can’t quite figure out what that is.

For readers, the news could be bad if somehow the combined Penguin Random House manages to negotiate a better deal with Amazon, forcing Amazon not to discount as much (including their ebooks, once the agency model goes away). But that’s going to be a hard sell if Amazon controls, say, 75% of the market (it currently has about 60%, but that will presumably rise once it can discount again).

Meanwhile, Senator has dropped to #3858 on Amazon. Damn–what did I do wrong?

In which I contemplate my eternal damnation

Posted on October 27, 2012 by Richard Bowker

During my early morning run the other day I was thinking about this post, where I suggested that, according to standard Catholic doctrine, a pretty large percentage of Americans over the past forty years were prime candidates for eternal damnation. And it occurred to me that, according to the standard doctrine I learned growing up, I’m going to hell too, along with a large chunk of the people I know. Not because of anything to do with abortion, but because I was given the gift of faith and rejected it, turning my back on God’s love.

Hell doesn’t come up much nowadays–I’m sure parts of the Church find the fire-and-brimstone stuff embarrassing. This Times article (“Hell Is Getting a Makeover”) points out that the latest Catholic catechism contains only five paragraphs about hell in a 700-page book. And the pain of hell, we now believe, is not physical but mental:

Hell is best understood as the condition of total alienation from all that is good, hopeful and loving in the world. What’s more, this condition is chosen by the damned themselves, the ultimate exercise of free will, not a punishment engineered by God.

Of course, to get to this spot, the theologians have to go the “Jesus’ words shouldn’t be taken literally” route, since Jesus had lots to say about unquenchable fire and the weeping and gnashing of teeth and so on. But that’s theology for you.

In any case, hell is still real, and apparently I’m going there. Maybe I’ll contemplate Pascal’s wager on my deathbed–but I doubt it.

And I can’t help thinking that the sermon in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a far more interesting vision of hell than the etiolated modern view. Here is just a taste.

The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts, whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible, so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns, so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property, that it preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with incredible intensity, it rages for ever.

That should’ve kept those Irish lads on the straight and narrow!

“Maine” and plotting

Posted on October 1, 2012 by Richard Bowker

In my previous post about the novel Maine (by J. Courtney Sullivan) I was complaining about its lack of verisimilitude. I’ve now finished the book, and things got better on that front, although she talks at one point about “Irish Need Not Apply” signs; those signs are much more typically worded “No Irish Need Apply.”

OK, not a big deal.

Sullivan does a pretty good job of recreating the famous Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942, which becomes a central incident in the narrative. (My grandfather was a police captain in Boston back then and was on duty that night; he was worried that my mother and father (not then married) were celebrating at the nightclub, because my father had attended Holy Cross, which upset the heavily favored Boston College football team at Fenway Park that afternoon. The football game also figures in Sullivan’s retelling of the fire.)

On a scale of “threw the book across the room in disgust without finishing it” to “eagerly devoured the book and only wished it could be longer,” I rate Maine “had no problem finishing it, but wished it was 100 pages shorter.” I don’t think the characters or, the plot justify the 500-page length. Here’s the plot:

Three women (daughter, grand-daughter, and daughter-in-law) separately make their way up to Maine to visit the family matriarch at their summer home. They argue about a couple of big issues in their lives. Then they leave.

That’s about it. It’s what I think of as an organic plot–it flows out of the characters rather than being imposed upon them. I’m not complaining about that kind of plot, but I want more resolution than Maine offers. The plot extends backward in the narrative as well as forward, which is also fairly standard. A point-of-view character pours a cup of coffee and thinks about the past. Another point-of-view character checks her email and thinks about the past. Eventually we know a whole lot about these four people, how they think about each other and all the other people in their family, all of which informs the final confrontations.

This is all fine, except the final confrontations just don’t give us the payoff we’re looking for. The problem is that nothing fundamental changes as a result of the confrontations. The ending isn’t sappy, with all the conflicts of a lifetime somehow neatly resolved, but that doesn’t mean the ending is satisfying. Take the Cocoanut Grove incident. This turns out to be the motivating event in the matriarch’s life; everything that happens afterward–her marriage, her drinking, the way she treats her kids–flows from the secret she has held inside her about the fire. She finally tells a priest the secret. And then–nothing. After 450 pages, I was looking for a bit of a payoff. But she doesn’t change; nothing changes.

My guess is that the author fell in love with the outsized multi-generational Irish-American family whose story she was telling, and ultimately she couldn’t impose enough order on that story to make us care as much as she did.

But then, I’m a guy, and this is a book about women. Maybe a couple of strong male characters would have changed my mind, but they pretty much don’t exist in Maine. Sullivan should stretch herself and try a male point-of-view character in her next novel. I’d give it a read!