Category: Books

Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2001
Saying that The Corrections is a tale of a nuclear family coming together for one last Christmas–the father is slowly dying of Parkinsons–is like saying Ulysses is a story about two guys wandering around Dublin and only meeting in the evening. Jonathan Franzen’s amazing novel made me laugh many times, not just at his humorous turn of phrase, or his ability to cut to the heart of an absurd situation, but his absolute skill at jumping back and forth in non-linear time in a fresh way, of spinning the reader round until familiar situations and locations are rendered strange and wondrous. It’s a laugh at the deft slight-of-hand that he’s perfected.
The Lamberts were once a traditional Midwestern family, but their three children who have flown the coop, leaving a large, empty house, a mother who obsesses over Christmas and a father who is slowly losing his grip on reality. The eldest child Gary, is a successful businessman/depressed alcoholic with three kids and an awful, manipulative wife (Franzen gets in good digs at the generation of hassle-free parents raising sonofabitch children); middle child Chip is a failed professor and scriptwriter who is gamely hanging on to his youth and who leaves for Lithuania to join the dot-com revolution; finally, youngest daughter Denise is a famous chef whose sexual shenanigans have been a constant disruption in her life.
Each section of the novel is devoted to one of these five characters, but freely jumps about when it needs to. Although comic, it’s also tremendously sad, but not in a maudlin way. Characters have epiphanies, but are usually in no state to change anything. Or they continue on their merry way.
The novel brims with three-dimensional characters to such an extent that I started to dream about situations in the novel as if I was sorting out events of the past day. Even more peculiar, there is a scene in the last part of the book where Gary, staying in his childhood bedroom, has a late-night hallucination that he can’t leave the room because of the horror that waits for him in the hallway. He is forced to pee in a commemorative beer stein. It was only after putting down the book, falling asleep, and eventually rousing myself from a similar troubled non-sleep that I realized that the sequence suggests that Gary has the gene that is causing his father’s dementia (father’s basement, indeed, is full of empty coffee cans full of urine.) But it’s again to Franzen’s credit that he doesn’t signpost this foreshadowing. I mentioned this to my friend (who was the one to recommend the novel) the following day and he hadn’t caught it either. I suppose the novel would hold up to several rereadings, and Franzen seems to be making allusions throughout to the Chronicles of Narnia, among other things. But I can’t remember enough about the books to get it all.
I meant to highlight phrases that I liked, but I got into the book so much I just forgot. I will, however, leave you with the one I Post-It noted: “Soon they were engaged and they chastely rode a night train to McCook, Nebraska, to visit his aged parents. His father kept a slave whom he was married to.”
The novel is full of such turnabout sentences, and as such was a delight to read. Apparently, there’s much consternation over Franzen’s novel-writing style and/or his attitude to his characters. Just read the bloody book like I did.
(Check out this Franzen interview at Salon.com.)

A nice collection of Philip K. Dick Book Covers. Can’t wait for the Linklater film adaptation of Scanner!
By way of The Cartoonist

Picador, 1994
This looked like a promising book on Muzak, lounge music, and everything in between, but I was disappointed in the end by it. Desperately in need of a coherent thesis and a discriminating editor, Joseph Lanza’s book is a bit of history here, some hagiography there, with one or two interviews thrown in because he could.
One main problem is that I don’t believe Lanza likes half of the music he writes about. Sure he probably likes Martin Denny and Les Baxter, but I don’t feel any passion when he’s writing about Mantovani. And it’s like he thought the former would be a great topic for a book, or perhaps Muzak (and aren’t they the same thing? I hear someone rhetorically asking), then set off to write. As deadline loomed Lanza discovers–gasp–he doesn’t really like 90% of this stuff.
Evidence of my theory is that he packs his hagiographies of these artists with ad copy quotes from the backs of albums. Instead of responding to the music honestly, Lanza tells us what some record company stooge in the ’50s told us to feel.
The initial history of Muzak is interesting, as the idea of music as crowd control is examined. But then follows a long section of musician biographies, none of which are particularly enlightening, or made me curious to hunt anybody’s work down in thrift stores. To me there’s worlds of difference between Peter Nero and Antonio Jobim–to Lanza there’s not.
Then the book looks around for things to write about. He spends a chapter on the Mystic Moods and 101 Strings orchestras, trying to make a case for their albums’ sonic playfulness. There’s a chapter on “space music” and Windham Hill that doesn’t tell me too much about the label and its impact (and isn’t that impact over?).
As this book is written in 1994, we get an interview with Angelo Badalamenti on his Twin Peaks music, but it feels out of place here. Lanza tries to make a case for his subject and overreaches:

“Demographics in the future will be defined less and less by sex, age, politics, or even income, and more and more by one’s taste for exotic locales or nostalgic situations absorbed from childhood television exposure–a social direction which gives background music an awe-inspiring role.”

You don’t actually believe that, do you?
Anyway, do we even have Muzak piped in buildings these days? Everywhere I go, they have bloody “lite rock” playing, supposedly soothing me with the screechings of Mariah and Whitney.

McSweeney’s, 2004
Chris Ware, possibly one of the finest comic artists of the last 20 years, takes the editorial reigns for this issue of McSweeney’s, and turns it into a half-quirky, half-conservative survey of the State of the Art. Conservative in that very few of the artists are unfamiliar to me, and any fan of Fantagraphics Books and Last Gasp will know the roster: Robert Crumb, Los Bros Hernandez, Daniel Clowes, Jim Woodring, Seth, Kim Dietch, Julie Doucet, Lynda Barry, and many more usual suspects. Quirky, because we also get essays from John Updike, Ira Glass, and glimpses of errata from Krazy Kat’s George Herriman and Charles Shultz. Those last two are not surprising if you know that Ware is also editing their collections. Most of these separate articles are by Ware as well, and his writing is scholarly and not snarky; if you were expecting the self-deprecation of his Acme Novelty Library text, it ain’t here.
There’s a slight thematic thread running through Ware’s selection, which is set up in an essay on Rodolphe Topffer, the “inventor of comics.” Topffer’s work, which is subsequently appropriated by the Americans (if not outright stolen) is a satire on a romantic, suicidal buffoon. It’s almost if the despair and self-loathing that infects most American comics is there from the beginning, like bad DNA.
Ware leads off with selections from the present and past, ones that play with the iconographic simplicity of earlier strips. Ware’s own work, a short two-pager about a collegiate romance (told from a female POV, a first), is typical of his spare brilliance. How he gets so much emotion out of tiny little ideographs is beyond me. Then follows Ware’s appreciation of artist Philip Guston, who is often called “comic bookish” even by critics who like him. Ware’s here to dispute it (which he does easily). Guston’s work, sampled here with three unnerving paintings, sets the stage for the uneasy middle of the book, with scary work from Mark Beyer, Gary Panter, Charles Burns, Richard Sala, and Art Spiegelman.
There’s a section on comics journalism (Kim Dietch’s Death Row piece, and a section from Joe Sacco’s Sarajevo tales, among others), then the final selection, closest to Ware’s heart, I believe, in which comics are used to bare souls (Joe Matt, Debbie Dreschler, Jeffrey Brown) and expand the medium into the complex levels of literature (no excerpt of the Hernandez Brothers can really do them justice, though). I love Ben Katchor‘s work in this compilation. His “Hotel & Farm” series belongs to a strain of American Surrealism that has brought us Lynch and the Coen Brothers, but has nothing to do with either of them. The stories, based around the city/country conundrum of the title, weave various strange narratives together like a fabulous tall tale. I want more of this. Adrian Tomine‘s work resembles a younger version of Raymond Carver or John O’Hara, of relationships falling apart slowly, inorexably. It’s too bad that many of the submissions to this issue come from already published work, though–it would have been nice to see how each of the artists dealt with a particular assignment. On the other hand, such plans often lead to weak work. Still, this is a large (265 pages) anthology, and Ware is to be commended for this overview.
And did I mention that the dust jacket folds out into a splendid Ware-drawn Sunday comic section doubletruck? It’s a lovely thing all around.

Harvest Books, 2002
A lot of my reading of “Life of Pi” was informed by my previous reading of a compendium of shipwreck and survival-at-sea tales last year (see here for a review). That book scooted into the present day and skipped modern tales of being lost at sea, since, it informed us, modern lifeboats are so much more well stocked.
Indeed so. We get a good look at what’s in a modern lifeboat in Yann Martel’s novel, but that doesn’t stop the supplies running out and the despair and hallucinations from setting in. Much of the novel is set in a lifeboat shared by its title narrator and a fully grown Bengal tiger. Pi is a 16 year-old Indian lad who winds up in this predicament after the cargo ship, which was carrying his family, assorted members of his father’s zoo, and himself to Canada to emigrate, sinks in the Pacific.
Before then we learn Pi is a young lad with a passion for religion (he becomes, much to his teachers’ chagrin, a Christian, an Muslim, and a Hindu simultaneously, because he just loves God) and a knowledge of science (mostly zoology, learning in his surroundings).
I expected a religious fable, and while there are elements of that (much more than I’m interested in), the novel never stops being a boys’-own survival tale, with Pi learning to assert himself as the Alpha male on the tiny boat. Much is to be learned about big-cat behaviour, as well as how to kill and eat various sealife. I had also never heard about ‘solar still‘ devices to turn sea water into fresh, until this book.
Near the end, Pi goes temporarily blind, and the book gets weird (and very readable). He meets another lifeboat survivor, who comes to an unfortunate end. Pi lands on a floating island made entirely of fresh-water-making algae, who sole inhabitants turn out to be meerkats.
And the end, after being rescued, Pi offers the Japanese insurance investigators two versions of the same story, one with the tiger and a much more bloody version with nothing but humans. He asks them which story they liked the better, and is told the more unbelievable one, the one with the animals. “So it is with God,” he says. It’s an attack on dull reason (and bloody realism), but the book is at its best when combining the two. (Martel also offers, by doing so, an 11th hour twist that you can take or leave, the opposite of the narrative tactics of recent Hollywood thrillers (such as “Identity.”))
This book has been inescapable in and outside reading groups. Unlike The DaVinci Code, “Life of Pi” is charming and well-written, Martel is able to go with description, interior and exterior, that other writers would probably never consider (especially in the slow disintegration on the boat. I don’t believe Martel ever had to go through such an ordeal, but you believe his character did.)
Here’s an interview with Martel, if you are interested in a little more background.
The book also made me add Pondicherry to my list of future travel destinations, along with a stay at one of the many hill stations in the country.

Bluejay Books, 1984
The word is out that Michel Gondry’s next film will be an adaptation of Rudy Rucker’s 1984 novel “Master of Space and Time” and that it will star Jack Black. I had never heard of Rucker up to this point, as I don’t really follow sci-fi (trying to read “Ringworld” back when I was 15 put me off the sort of high-technology based sci-fi). Apparently, though, he’s one of the fathers of cyberpunk along with Gibson, and if Gondry likes him, I better check him out.
So I did. By a pure stroke of luck, our local library had only this novel and “The Hacker and the Ants” on their shelves, and the former is now completely out of print. (Jon, who is now interested in reading the book too, found that there’s only two copies in the entire L.A. County library system, and one is reference.)
Well, now, I haven’t read a book so fast. Less than 24-hours later I was returning the book back to the library. One thing I know–it’ll be a hoot of a film. In fact, the first chapter is pure Gondry, in which our hero Joe is briefly sent into a time loop and wind up surrounded by ever decreasing and increasing copies of his body. This is due to his friend and crazy inventor Harry (I assume the Jack Black role) who has come back from the future to tell Joe he’s mastered time and space. How? Joe will tell him tomorrow, he is told. And off we go.
Rucker plays with the paradoxes of time travel and indulges in some parallel reality play, but in essence this is a three-wishes story, with each of the three main characters (the third being Joe’s wife Nancy) getting a chance at changing the world. Gondry has always expressed admiration for the pop physics of “Back to the Future,” and so this will be his take on it, I suppose.
There’s a little bit of dated elements here–the slight homophobia and the caricatured Vietnamese bloke grate a bit–but the story is so fun it doesn’t matter.
If you can find a copy you won’t be disappointed.
There’s aRudy Rucker web site for more info.

There’s a great debate going on over atDesign Observer about the new issue of McSweeney’s, edited and designed by Chris Ware. It certainly looks like a beautiful thing and I can’t wait to get my paws on it.

Writing about books, as I do, I occasionally get free stuff in the mail from authors, and occasionally, I read them. In a recent column, I wrote about Penguin UK’s insipid campaign to make book reading by males “sexy” (ad slogan: “Are You Good Booking?”) and received an email from Jake Needham, a writer of detective novels who can’t get published here, but does a rollicking good business out of Asia. It helps that his novels are set in Thailand, of course, but he’s all-American and writes in English. He’s also been told that he’s “too male,” whatever that means (and James Ellroy isn’t?).
So I just spent a few days reading his debut novel “The Big Mango,” a chewy bit o’ pulp that made its way to the top of my reading list as soon as I opened the envelope. The plot revolves around a huge load of money, hidden after the fall of Saigon, and the two-bit lawyer who is mysteriously called to Thailand to investigate the death of the man who may have known where it is.
It reads fairly autobiographically (not that Mr. Needham is two-bit, or any bit), a middle-aged farang falling in love with an alien world (here being Bangkok) and its hot alien women. There’s a lot of driving around on tuktuks and many descriptions of the unbelievable tropical heat. Lead character Eddie Dare is well drawn enough, but his army buddy/traveling companion Winnebago is along for the ride mostly–he doesn’t seem to have much narrative function apart from comic relief. Ex-pat reporter Bar feels like a flip-side to Eddie, and his life is interesting until the plot necessitates more action. There are no major Thai characters in the book, just farangs and a mysterious Vietnamese woman named Lek, although I guess you could say Thailand is the main character. With Eddie fresh off the boat and the time span of the novel only a few days, there isn’t time for a deeper portrait of Bangkok to emerge. But as Mr. Needham’s written two more set in the country, perhaps he’s had a chance to flesh it out. Still, a quick read, exactly what the book sets out to do.

Here’s a harsh review of John Fowles’ Diaries from the London Review of Books. I had no idea the man was so misanthropic.
In 1996 I picked up a copy of Learning From Las Vegas in paperback. Only now do I discover that the hardback original is much more beautiful. (And it’ll set you back $3,500 or so, used.)

This is from Joseph Lanza’s book on elevator music that I’m currently reading:

Karlheinz Stockhausen later suggested using computer-programmed “sound swallowers” to neutralize every unwanted noise in a public place with its opposite vibration.”

Do you think he meant these?