Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

“Pym” by Mat Johnson

Sunday, March 6th, 2011

.

.

The first thing you’ll probably want to know is whether you should read Poe’s “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” before picking up Mat Johnson’s “Pym.” The answer is, that’s not really necessary. Johnson helpfully devotes 15 pages in the second chapter of “Pym” recapping the plot of Poe’s solitary novel and discussing its still-debated meaning. This background is all you need to appreciate this new, inspired-by-Poe, piece of imaginative fiction.

The novel’s narrator, Chris Jaynes, is a recently dismissed professor of African-American literature. He believes Poe’s enigmatic novel, maddeningly obsessed with motifs of black and white, is the talisman that can open up our understanding of race in America, especially the nature of “Whiteness, as a pathology and a mindset.” He seeks to discover, through literary detective work, “the primal American subconscious, the foundation on which all our visible systems and structures were built.” Sleuthing leads to grand adventure. Jaynes assembles an all black crew of six for a voyage to Antarctica to find “the great undiscovered African Diasporan homeland.” This quest is set within a satirical framework that allows Johnson to launch sallies against a slew of social and political targets.

A caution: You’re probably better off not reading reviews of “Pym” found in the mainstream press and magazines — or avoiding, at least, the type of review that spends paragraph after paragraph exposing too much of the plot, revealing too many of the critic’s favorite scenes, highlighting too many jokes and puns (for example, this one). I mean, please. “Pym” is a novel whose twists and turns and revelations you yourself deserve to encounter (and judge) afresh, without prior interference. Set aside those reviews for reading once you’ve finished.

One reason I enjoyed “Pym” is a nostalgic one, frankly. If you’re a reader of a certain age you remember living through what now appears, in hindsight, to have been a golden era of the American satirical novel. There once was a tribe of writers who yanked our chains, social and political. I’m thinking of the years that saw the publication of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” and “Our Gang,” and the works of Terry Southern, John Barth, Gore Vidal, Robert Coover and others. First among them was Kurt Vonnegut, who sustained a long career of telling common truth to ignoble power. Who is extending that satiric tradition into the current day?

Based on the antic fun and strength of “Pym,” Mat Johnson may come to join that assembly of noble writers. The intelligence behind his satire is combined with a hearty sanity that reminds me of Vonnegut, especially.

– – – – –

A version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.

Some amazing photos of the real Antarctica can be found here.

.

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Authors, Book Reviews | 1 Comment »

“Open City” by Teju Cole

Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

.

.

There is no reason to believe Teju Cole intended his debut novel to present a challenge to reviewers, but that is what “Open City” does. The only way a critic can genuinely convey the force of this book — its full weight and effect — is to break a covenant with the potential reader by entering the forbidden territory of the spoiler, by revealing the specific shock that hits you like a block of concrete when you reach the novel’s final pages. No responsible critic will do that (nor will I).

Instead, you are apt to come across a positive reviewer of “Open City” saying the novel is, in some non-specific way, a “tour de force.” Another will cagily suggest something’s amiss by labeling the story’s narrator, Julius, a 32-year-old Nigerian-American who is completing a psychiatry fellowship in New York City, “an unreliable narrator.” I will put it this way: what this enormously talented writer has succeeded in doing is crafting a multi-layered reading experience that, at the book’s close, will redouble your receipt of its literary rewards. “Open City” is a novel you will be dying to talk about with other readers.

Since Cole is a newcomer, reviewers are falling over themselves trying to position him next to some veteran. Which writer will Cole remind the reader of? Candidates are piling up. One is Joseph O’Neill, who, like Cole, is a writer of mixed parentage, multicultural perspective, and author of a novel, “Netherland,” which, like “Open City,” explores themes of displacement and anxiety in post-9/11 New York City. Another is Zadie Smith, who, like Cole, unabashedly tackles matters of race, class, the immigrant experience, and suppressed history that must not remain hidden.

W.G. Sebald has been mentioned as well, presumably for his erudition and a shared style of writing that is slow and meditative, seemingly without much of a plot, and dependent on the cumulative accretion of observations. Cole, however, is not a formal innovator like Sebald, and the reader may be relieved to learn Cole is a conventional technician, using standard-length sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. Albert Camus’ “The Stranger” also has been cited as a model. At first blush this makes some sense (Meursault and Julius, twin protagonists of anomie) but my view is if Cole is following Camus, a stronger influence is “The Fall,” with its restless, talkative confessor.

An author I’d place on the list of comparables is Elizabeth Hardwick. Cole shares Hardwick’s keen turn of mind, her love of music, and her unerring command of language. Cole today, as Hardwick two generations ago, understands the seductive attraction of the walkable streets of Manhattan. Their ears are tuned to the innumerable personal stories waiting to be heard. (Cole has said wanted “Open City” to show how New York City is “a space full of ghosts and unfinished psychological business.”) Finally, like Cole, Hardwick showed no fear in letting autobiography undergird her fiction, notably in “Sleepless Nights.”

And, to add one more plate to the table: I see resemblances to the methods of Roberto Bolano’s “By Night in Chile.” Although Bolano’s short novel uncovers different sins and belongs to an earlier time of stress in a foreign nation, it shares with “Open City” a narrator prone to non-stop outpouring of stories, of exquisitely observed morsels of experience. Both narrators, it could be said, are engaged in a sort of “talking cure,” on a path to revealed truth. In both novels readers may find the meandering style frustrating. A stream of consciousness leaves some cold. Yet in each story it all adds up, at last, to a devastating contemporary psychological portrait.

But enough. Let Teju Cole and “Open City” be what they want to be: each reader’s own discovery.

—–

Notes:

(1) A version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.

(2) Cole has created on Tumblr a page “for and about the the novel Open City” here. For readers of the book it is a worthwhile resource, it takes the place of informative footnotes that a book as dense with allusions as Open City cries out for. But at this point the Tumblr page is only a beginning toward a collection of helpful annotations (I hope Cole, or perhaps others, continue to add material).

(3) A short but revealing interview with Cole is found on the Goodreads site, here.

(4) Audio of a BBC interview of Cole is available here (scroll down the page to find the list of “Chapters” (Cole is interviewed in Chapter 3 which starts at 26:30). The author’s spoken eloquence matches his written eloquence:

“I have not written a book about 9/11. I have written a book about how New York has habitually been a place that very quickly tries to get past the past and move on into the future. And so for characters such as Julius who are highly sensitive to it, it becomes an extremely heavy space. It becomes a space that is full of ghosts and unfinished psychological business.”

“I just think the work of mourning is very important, and if you don’t mourn properly your progress afterwards is sort of artificial, because there are things you haven’t dealt with.”

“It’s about finding your part in the human chain. And saying you’re not the first and won’t be the last.”

(5) Let me mention a few things that bothered me about “Open City.” One is the episode in which Julius takes a four-week vacation to go to Brussels in search of his maternal grandmother (his “oma”), with who he has lost contact. Yet Julius makes no effort to locate her, but instead continues his wandering habits (apparently it never occurs to him to simply hire a local detective). Although it is his essential psychological state, Julius demontrates a woeful passivity that began to grate on me somewhat. He is little more than an “eye and ear,” buffeted by events and strangers’ importuning, emasculated, a milquetoast set upon by bullies and opportunists. There is a wonderful moment during the BBC interview (linked to in Note 4) at 37:45 to 38:30. A fellow interviewee on the program, the passionately engaged sociologist Amitai Etzioni, shows frustration when Cole calmly mentions the Native Americans who once flourished in NYC but now are gone. Etzioni confronts Cole: “You’re so neutral, you’re so cool.” Cole is gracious in response, conceding the point, and assuring Etzioni that when it comes to the depredations of the past, “Believe me, I can get very strident.” “Please do,” recommends Etzioni.

(6) I cannot help but like an author who chooses to be photographed, in the year 2011, in front of what has always been, for me, a comforting reminder of man’s durable commitment to preserving hard-earned knowledge. I’m speaking of something you can still come across in great old libraries: a massive, oak-drawered card-catalog.

.

.

UPDATE (05-12-2012): Just found a YouTube video of a recent interview with the author, here (video published May 8, 2012 by WNYC Radio).  Responding to a question on the influence his photography has on his writing, Cole’s answer segues smoothly into a statement of purpose:

“One very particular influence is that photography inspires me to play with points of view, with actual physicals points, vantage points — to imagine a scene from above or from below. And so Open City is full of bird flights, people in skyscrapers looking down, people in planes, subways, wells. Because when you move up or you move down you actually change what you’re seeing — to defamiliarize the everyday.

“In photography and in writing, I want to give people the same sort of feeling, which is that there is someone else out there who’s noticing the small things of life, the things that are viewed obliquely, the things that deserve our attention but often elude our attention.”

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Authors, Book Reviews, Photos | 1 Comment »

“The Last Brother” by Nathacha Appanah

Friday, February 4th, 2011

.

.

“The Last Brother” is a coming-of-age story, a survivor’s narrative, and a belated history lesson. A seemingly small-scaled tale told in 200 pages, it bursts open to reveal an emotional largeness that will earn the tears of many readers.

Set on the island of Mauritius in the years 1944-45, “The Last Brother” portrays harrowing events in the life of Raj, a nine-year-old middle son of an illiterate and impoverished Indian family. The book is narrated by the now elderly Raj, who, even sixty years later, is driven by an intense search for understanding. His central memory is of a childhood friendship, brief but golden, with an eight-year-old orphan named David, one of 1500 Jewish refugees interned at the island’s Beau-Bassin prison during War War II. The novel traces Raj’s path through loss, guilt, grief and pain, toward a final, remarkable forgiveness.

Nathacha Appanah’s prose is simple and clear. The translation from the French (by Geoffrey Strachan) is beautiful. I was mightily impressed with Appanah’s unflashy but sure command of story-telling. As the story unfolds she adopts a captivating pace and rhythm. The book never flags. Appanah has an intuitive sense of when the reader needs a respite from its dark material (deaths, squalor, cruel abuse from an alcoholic father). And so she pulls us away, from time to time, to land in the present day, where the ever-seeking Raj, by now a retired teacher, quietly reflects on the lessons of six decades ago.

If there are any critical disagreements over this book, one strand will be a debate over whether Appanah has achieved the right balance between the adult Raj’s reflective and retrospective presentation on the one hand, and the immediacy of the youthful Raj’s initial encounters with pain and loss, hope and love. I,for one, think the author has managed the integration masterfully.

Each reader will find treasures in “The Last Brother.” One element that charmed me was how the unshakable love of Raj’s mother is linked to her religious instincts, which are grounded in Hindu animism. The power and magic that suffuses the natural world is a recurring motif throughout the novel. It inspires Appanah to offer striking descriptions of the flora and fauna of Mauritius. This includes the appearance of an enchanted red parakeet, a significant symbol that, you may notice, has found its way onto the book’s cover illustration. As well, the author taps into Christian iconography, starting with the fated aura of the golden-haired David.

Raj is his mother’s son, and he too seeks patterns and purpose in an all too unforgiving world. It is to Appanah’s credit that she quietly convinces the reader that this nine-year-old boy has a view of the world — and most importantly of love and duty — that is worthy of our attention and understanding.

There are insights into the psychology of family relationships, and these also serve the purpose of furthering the thematic arc of the novel. In the first chapter, the 70-year-old Raj speculates why his grown son (a successful information technology entrepreneur) has become so attentive: “But for the past few years now he seems to have all the time in the world for me. It is because I am old, the only family he has left, and he is afraid.” Of course, this fear of being orphaned, of being left behind as loved ones disappear, was Raj’s own greatest fear. Yet the most hopeful element of the book relates not to a familial continuity, but to Raj’s breaking the curse of child abuse. The final chapters being us forward to observe the adult Raj, married with son, lifted up from primitivism, achieving a modern normalcy, as represented by a scene in which Raj takes his little boy to town to pick up a newspaper. I was almost struck dumb by the powerful relief this brings. I was also stuck by an even more up to date scene between Raj and his mother who’s happy ensconced in a fine retirement home by the sea, chatting away with her new friends (the shock is that the mother has her own intelligent voice, which has been suppressed in Raj’s recounting of his early years).

It occurs to me that “The Last Brother” would make a fine addition to a reading list for high school English classes. It is an eminently “teachable” novel. Consider, as a starting point, the numerous insights of Dalia Sofer, here.

– – – – –

(A version of this review is posted on Amazon, here. An interview in which Appanah explains her attraction to the historical backdrop of the novel is available here.)

Tags:, ,
Posted in Authors, Book Reviews | No Comments »

What’s the Matter with Book Critics Today?

Saturday, January 8th, 2011

.

Over a decade ago the distinguished critic Jonathan Yardley, whose book reviews appear in the Washington Post, observed, “There is no such thing as a powerful book critic.”

That remains true today.

Though there is reason to lament this state of affairs, it is not the diminished cultural impact of book reviewers that worries me. Rather, what concerns me is an overall decline in the quality of book criticism appearing in mainstream media publications. There is still a sizable number of people who read book reviews, and we deserve better.

I’ve been monitoring newspaper and magazine critics’ reactions to “Bird Cloud,” Annie Proulx’s non-fiction book released earlier this week. I’m finding that a diseased strain of “reviewing” — a strain that first came to my attention last year around the time of the publication of Jonathan Franzen’s novel, “Freedom” — appears to be spreading.

I’m speaking of a mode of critical attack that exposes not so much the flaws of the book under review as the deficiencies of the book reviewer who indulges in its practice. This baleful approach is characterized by ad hominem attacks delivered in a voice that blends self-absorbed gusto with made-up grievance.

If this virus has a ground zero it might be an execrable “Freedom” review/profile from the pen of Jennie Yabroff, an article that Newsweek editors unwisely chose to publish last August as another marker in the decline and fall of that once vital periodical.

A month later the self-absorbed component of the style was placed center-stage in a review of Philip Roth’s latest novel, “Nemesis,” in The New York Times. In the piece, Leah Hager Cohen spends the first five paragraphs, a sizable chunk of the entire piece, talking about herself, her history, her touch points with Roth’s oeuvre, her moods, her equivocations, her journey. Yes, it’s all about me-me-me, before I go head-to-head with the author. This diversion into the self is “relevant,” she says. To her credit, she then goes on to say intelligent things about the book, judging it fairly on its merits.

Most of us who’ve reached middle age can sense when someone else has pre-judged a matter. I am especially concerned about reviews that signal the presence of prejudice.

One such stink bomb, a book review that adds to the mix an aggrieved whine and some tired preppy insults, landed in December. In an online review posted by The New Republic, Andrew Butterfield does a hatchet job on Steve (“lazy”) Martin’s novel, “An Object of Beauty.” Typical of Mr. Butterfield’s approach is the bloodless delivery of this calumny: “All [Martin] makes you feel is that your ignorance should arouse your envy—that you, poor thing, are less fortunate than he and the fancy people in his book.”

Now, personal rants of this sort, especially those that rise to histrionic pitch, are usually full of howlers, and Butterfield does not disappoint. For example, his command of the book is so slipshod that he is unable ever to get the book title correct, not even once. Three times he refers to it as “The Object of Beauty.” (But wait, you say — is it possible a gremlin slipped Butterfield a rogue, evil version of the good book I had the pleasure to read?) His paragraph assuring us there has never been an art collector who ever wore an Armani suit is a real hoot.

The decline continues to manifest itself in 2011.

Early in his review of “Bird Cloud” published in the New York Times this week, Dwight Garner lays down a marker, dubbing the book “shelter porn.” It can be viewed, he says, as a product of “a wealthy and imperious writer who . . . believes people will sympathize with her about the bummers involved in getting her Japanese soaking tub, tatami-mat exercise area, Mexican talavera sink and Brazilian floor tiles installed just so.” In truth, the tub installation problem that needed correcting (described on page 118) involved a clogged outflow drain which caused water to leak to the downstairs library, threatening Proulx’s research files and vital book collection. I wonder how Garner would react if his auto mechanic were to chide him for selfishly wanting his oil-leaking car engine tweaked “just so.” Oh, never mind.

Then there are the words “tatami mats.” These four syllables have an exotic sound that attracts easy mockery, but does Garner really want to throw his lot in with the class warriors who made hay of Obama’s expression of arugula-love, back in 2008? And what’s with Garner’s prissy “just so” fillip, anyhow? I defy any reader to come away from “Bird Cloud” with the impression of Annie Proulx as a prissy lady (although I have to admit that taunt — Prissy Annie Proulx! Prissy Annie Proulx! — feels kinda good tripping off the tongue). I also defy anyone to come away from “Bird Cloud” with the feeling that Proulx wants us to “sympathize with her” for any of her travails, large or small.

While others (in Slate and in The New Yorker, before which I normally bow down in awe) are saying sweet things about how clever Garner’s review of “Bird Cloud” is (I agree Garner can be witty, and he delivers verdicts with a good comic’s sense of timing), I have a sneaking suspicion neither of the encomium-givers (Timothy Noah and Ian Crouch) has read “Bird Cloud” in full.

One thing I know for sure: no one’s interested in my reviewing their reviews of a review of a book. To get caught up in the vagaries of a posse of literary critics — a dysfunctional family if ever there was one — is not conducive to anyone’s mental or moral health. So, returning to the merits of Proulx’s “Bird Cloud,” I simply will say as a reader I disagree with Garner. With him you get a twofer: a misunderstanding of the book and a misreading of the author.

There has always been a moral component to the best literary criticism. That tradition, when examining “Bird Cloud,” would call on the critic to examine the environmental ethic so important to Proulx’s experience on her 640 acres of raw Wyoming rangeland. Keep in mind this is land the author decided to purchase by trading in her fair-gotten gains from her writings. The seller was The Nature Conservancy, and it is under the constraints of rigorous covenants that Proulx enjoys the property.

Few if any reviewers appear interested in this aspect of the book. Instead, critics stir up (or, in my opinion, make up) grievances. Garner, for example, finds it “deplorable” that Proulx writes so freely about “the perks of [her] success.” Joining Garner in his descent into status resentment is Michael Upchurch, who, in his review of the book in the Seattle Times, gives Proulx the raspberry for overreaching. He sums up his disdain for the 75-year-old author with this barb: “You wonder if Proulx has a single ounce of common sense.”

A notable element in these complaints is the loopy premise that the status of America’s economic health at the moment of a book’s publication could justify placing cautions, if not actual fetters, on free expression. Can that really be what these scolds advocate? Consider how Upchurch upbraids Proulx: “Her decision to publish this account of her extravagance when so many Americans are losing their homes seems in dubious taste.”

All too often nowadays the cultural impotence of book critics’ messages is matched by the imbecility of their content.

I wonder if it’s time to spin a variation on the Catskills resort joke (the food is terrible . . . and such small portions!).

How about this:  What book critics write is terrible . . . and it has no impact!

.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Authors, Book Reviews, Culture, Media | 1 Comment »

“Bird Cloud: A Memoir” by Annie Proulx

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

.

.

It is common for a reader proceeding through an Annie Proulx novel or short story to find that it is growing on you page by page, layer by layer, as her sure carpentry builds a fine and strong effect. That was my experience while reading the non-fiction “Bird Cloud.” If in her best fiction Proulx carpenters untold stories into life, this new work finds Proulx retelling old stories, resurfacing tales of history, geology, geography, climate, biology. Her evident pleasure in doing so means that many readers will be pleased with the telling.

Take note of the book’s cover: a photograph, well-selected, mostly likely a Proulx choice. It is a harbinger of what the 234 pages inside are really about. It is not by mistake that you cannot see the author’s new home whose three-year construction (2004-2006) some publicity material and reviews mistakenly suggest is the main subject of the book. You are right to sense that the vast sky and rangeland extending to the horizon hold multitudes. “Bird Cloud” is not a Wyoming version of “House,” Tracy Kidder’s meticulous recounting of the planning, design and construction of a New England custom home. Proulx offers us no schematics, no blueprints, no floor plans, no budget details. While she does parcel out a handful of practical homebuilding “how-to’s” and a selection of anecdotes (dominated by snafus and disappointments), the house-related material in fact occupies less than half of the book’s content.

The building is not where Proulx fixes her emotional energy. Her heart lies elsewhere: in side-tales of her family’s genealogy; in stories of the “rapacity and venal grasping” of all too many of Wyoming’s founders; in the terrible legacy of insults to the land, its game animals, its Indian inhabitants; in a child-like delight she takes in the “archeological possibilities” of her 640 acres; and in her experience of the raw power of nature at 7000 feet above sea level, where hurricane-force winds and isolation-inducing snowdrifts are routine. The book’s emotional apogee is the final, and longest, chapter — a narrative that tracks through the 12 months of 2007 as Proulx watches the lives of the site’s abundant bird life unfold. In these pages Proulx, amateur as a birder but first-rate as a raconteur, unleashes a warm observational humor.

The book is vulnerable to two criticisms. One is that “Bird Cloud” lacks an overarching theme. It hosts lots of little stories but does not have a big story, and readers who demand an entirely consistent narrative experience may be disappointed. Another criticism is that the book’s subtitle — “a Memoir” — is misleading. This is not a memoir as that label is understood in our era of no-holds-barred confessional outpourings. Anyone expecting this author, now in her eighth decade, to lay bare the intimacies of her personal diary, to expose her emotional core, or to explain, for example, how her three divorces have shaped the woman she is today, will come away empty-handed. Proulx is one author unlikely to appear on Oprah’s couch.

If you see yourself as a potential reader of “Bird Cloud,” consider first reading a rare and revealing interview conducted at her Bird Cloud Ranch, published in the Spring 2009 issue of Paris Review. Another useful prelude to immersion in the book is the free audio excerpt of its second chapter. Entitled “A Yard of Cloth,” it is a stand-alone story of how an eerie intervention of fate saved Proulx and her sister from a fatal accident. The audio clip is available at the website of the publisher, Simon & Shuster. Finally, readers who complete the meandering but engrossing experience of this book and who may, at that point, wonder about the current status of the site, will find the answer in the new property listing, here. Yes, Proulx has placed Bird Cloud Ranch up for sale for $3.7 million.

– – – – –

Tags:, , , , , , , ,
Posted in Authors, Book Reviews | 3 Comments »

Odds and Ends – No. 3

Saturday, January 1st, 2011

.

American (Ah-MAIR-eh-ken) Dialects

In what can best be described as a labor of love, Rick Aschmann has been building a website documenting “North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns.” It’s available here. Reading Aschmann’s exhaustive, discerning, explanatory texts, one theme emerges: most of us are blissfully unaware of the confusing peculiarities of our own dialects, and somehow we manage to understand each other.

On Planes and Trains, Scanning the Books of Others

I’m not alone in being curious about what others are reading, and I freely indulge my curiosity when walking down the aisle of a train or plane, standing on the subway, or sitting with strangers in a waiting room. Yet I wonder, is it rude to look over someone’s shoulder at what they’re reading? Is it wrong to exceed the limit of a quick glance, to surreptitiously read someone else’s book for as many seconds as your position allows? I have a feeling this is wrong — maybe because the action parallels the offense of cheating on a schoolroom test, looking at your neighbor’s paper. Still, it is at worst a quick and victimless theft.

What’s of interest to me is that during the swipe, the thief’s eye and mind is sometimes able to capture enough information to render a judgment on the quality (high or low) of the spied-upon book. Case in point: on a plane last year, as I sat in an aisle seat, I had the opportunity, lasting several seconds, to read half a page of a paperback novel held open by a passenger sitting across the aisle, one row forward. I never learned the title of the book or the name of its author, yet I still remember these phrases gracing the page: “I said stiffly,” “It rang a faint bell,” “The bodies festered,” and, “It was all but intolerable.”

Disrespecting our Flowing Waters

Why does Google Maps not routinely tell us the names of rivers and streams in the areas we are researching?  When you zoom in on the location you’re interest in, using the map or hybrid map/satellite option, and you notice a nearby river or stream or creek, there is no indication of its name. Also, plugging into the search box the names of river and streams usually provides disappointing (or no) results. Suppose you wanted to quickly locate where the North Platte River meets its sister, the South Platte River. Good luck. Am I alone, or part of too small an audience, wanting, and finding value in, that information?

The Value of Elementary School Teachers

I’m one of those people who, half a century later, can rattle off the names of their Kindergarten and elementary school teachers: seven women who are responsible in no small measure for the person I am today. Over the last five decades, ball players’ salaries have risen to a level hundreds of times the average salary of other skilled workers and craftsman. Salaries of CEOs have lofted to ever higher multiples of their company’s typical employee’s salary. Public school teachers’ salaries? Shamefully, teachers have not shared in the economic rewards they deserve.

What do teachers deserve? According to emerging empirical evidence, the answer is a hell of a lot more than their current compensation.  See, for example, the working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, entitled, “The Economic Value of Higher Teacher Quality”.  Adam Ozimek’s thoughts on where this leads, are here. Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist who is also investigating this subject, estimates that an excellent kindergarten teacher is worth a salary of $320,000 a year.

An article in the NY Times explained it this way: “Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more. All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too. The economists don’t pretend to know the exact causes. But it’s not hard to come up with plausible guesses. Good early education can impart skills that last a lifetime — patience, discipline, manners, perseverance.”

A Convergence of Look

The faces of Senator Susan Collins of Maine and John Lennon made frequent appearances in the news in recent weeks — hers, because of  her key role in passing legislation during the Senate’s lame duck session; and his, accompanying stories on the 30th anniversary of his death. See if you agree that something in the photographs suggests a blood relationship:

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.


Tags:, , , , , , ,
Posted in Authors, Culture, Politics | No Comments »

“An Object of Beauty” by Steve Martin

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

.

.

Many readers are going to enjoy this rich, wise and entertaining novel, especially those of you who happen to be:

Part of the art world. “An Object of Beauty” is a closely-observed story that traces the rise and fall of a young business woman in New York City, from 1993 to 2009. It is set in a corner of the commercial arena that traffics in works of fine art. If you work or play in the world of artists, art dealers, gallery owners, auction houses and their supporting enterprises; or if you are simply a curious outsider interested in what Martin calls “this insular collective” — then “An Object of Beauty” is sure to please. During the course of a well-constructed tale, Martin holds a mirror up to the art community’s denizens and their transgressions. If this is unfamiliar territory, you’ll want to be in “learning mode” as Martin (himself an experienced buyer, seller, and lover of art) pauses the narrative from time to time to deliver a mini art history lesson next to an illustration of a painting or sculpture (there are 22 in all) important to the developing plot. On a practical note, he also offers tips on how to negotiate your way through this strange jungle. Martin names names and reveals prices (throughout the novel there is a Balzac-like focus on the prices of everything).

Collectors. Although the reader’s attention is on the wily plots of the young careerist Lacey Yeager, and secondarily on the fate of her friend Daniel (an art critic and the story’s narrator), the author also populates the book with a parade of minor characters who suffer from the collecting disease. They occupy a spectrum from the savvy and methodical to the passionate, obsessive, and borderline insane. Martin displays a psychologist’s skill in exposing the emotional sources of their never-ending longing. If you are, or if you know, a capital-“c” Collector (of coins, dolls, baseball cards, whatever), you will likely find these sketches funny and right on the money.

Fans of Mr. Martin. We know Steve Martin can be a consummate happy clown, and part of the marketing campaign for this novel will (misleadingly) associate the book with his antic, feel-good, sweetness-and-light side. But Martin is more than that, as true fans and readers of his two novellas (Shopgirl and The Pleasure of My Company) know. And we value and trust his serious interests. Yes, there is wit in the new novel, and Martin’s trademark wordplay and love of paradox (“it was easier to sell a painting that was not for sale”), but he wisely suppresses his protean comedic chops in furtherance of the story. Fans of the author will appreciate that “An Object of Beauty” is a serious novel.

In telling a tale of misplaced values and money run amuck, in a world where relationships are polluted by greed and dishonesty, what comes through is Martin’s essential modesty. He avoids making definitive statements. While he may wax philosophical, especially on matters of aesthetics (his own seduction by the power of great art is evident), he makes no grand pronouncements. Instead, there is simply a keen-eyed view of human failings and, sadder still, a sober acceptance of the rarity of love. Martin is a quiet moralist.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Art, Authors, Book Reviews, Humor | No Comments »

Why are women turning away?

Sunday, October 24th, 2010

What accounts for this trend? A slew of recently-released books written by and about women feature on their covers images of women turning aside and away from us. Four examples:

.

___________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________

.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Art, Authors, Photos | 2 Comments »

“Nemesis” by Philip Roth

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

.

.

“Nemesis” is an old-fashioned novel.  The book has the glow of a twilit, though painful, reminiscence.  It is set in the Jewish Weequahic section of Newark during the war year of 1944.  Roth imagines the community suffering through a devastating polio epidemic that cruelly maims and kills its youngest members.  The protagonist is Bucky Cantor, a young man, a stalwart common man, whose decision to abandon his post as summer playground director will have fateful consequences.

Advice from an Elder

Very early in his career Roth sent to Saul Bellow a draft of a short story he was trying to get published, asking the elder writer for comments and advice. One of the remarks in Bellow’s 1957 letter responding to Roth (included in “Saul Bellow: Letters”, slated for release on November 4) stands out: “My reaction to your story was on the positive side of the scale, strongly. But mixed, too. I liked the straightness of it, the plainness.” A half century later, Roth’s new novel respects Bellow’s preference. Direct, straight and plain, “Nemesis” unfolds in a manner you may not immediately associate with Roth. It is as if, having chosen to set his tale in the mid-twentieth century, Roth decided to set aside the signature style and quirks he’s perfected in the last few decades, and, instead, hark back to the American literature of that earlier period, embracing its feel and direction. For me, that embrace is one of the pleasures of this short novel.

The straightforward narrative of “Nemesis,” which follows the traditional path of exposition, rising action, conflict, and aftermath, eschews the inventive and experimental course Roth took in some ambitious novels of the 1980’s and 1990’s, notably “The Counterlife” and “Operation Shylock.” The surprisingly plain voice of the new novel, narrated not by some maniacally garrulous Nathan Zuckerman type but by an even-tempered, practical-minded witness (who later reveals himself to have been one of the Newark child polio survivors), imparts a classic balance to the proceedings. Also un-Roth-like is the absence of ethnic satire (the Jewish community is lovingly portrayed). Readers expecting to encounter Roth’s comical eye for the worst in people, a celebration of rebellion, a sexual adventurousness, will be disappointed. Also, though fulminating anger abounds (Bucky repeatedly shakes his fist at a God “who spends too much time killing children”), that energy may not be sufficient for some readers who may very well find the book lackluster and timid.

A throwback to the last century

In its style (earnest and unfussy) and in its themes, “Nemesis” reminds me of the classic mid-20th century American fiction that has long been a staple of high school English classes — especially the books, stories and plays featuring common men, ordinary Joes who meet tragic ends. “Nemesis” shares with Steinbeck’s “The Pearl,” Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” and Thornton Wilder’s “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” the theme of the vicissitudes of fate and the contingency of our existence. Roth shares with those authors and their social realist contemporaries — the writers who commanded the stage when he was young — an interest in the way the world at large shapes our private lives and how accidental forces shape individual destiny. If you still have a fondness for those books — maybe because they were the vehicles through which you first learned to read and interpret critically — then you are bound to like “Nemesis.”

“Nemesis” is unafraid to tackle the moral dimension of our actions and lives. We are witness to the corrosive effects of resentment, self-pity, suspicion and rage. By book’s end we have come to realize all of us are carriers of disease — “bringers of crippling and death” — if not in a literal sense then in the guise of anger, hate, spite and selfishness. Roth raises anew the old questions: What is our responsibility to our fellows? Are we all to blame? One is reminded of Arthur Miller, especially the stark examination of these issues in his play “Incident at Vichy,” set in World War II. Are we left with the impossible choice between either resigning ourselves to the suffering of others, or taking on a responsibility whose dimensions doom us to failure?

The draft short story Roth had shared with Bellow back in 1957 reminded the elder writer, in one respect, of “The Plague” by Albert Camus, a book Bellow disliked. He warned Roth against writing stories too beholden to a controlling idea: “I have a thing about Ideas in stories. Camus’ The Plague was an IDEA. Good or bad? Not so hot, in my opinion.” I’m not certain exactly what Bellow meant by this; my guess is that he was warning against turning the text into a (mere) parable. And yet there is no mistaking the correspondences between the fictional devastation visited upon the inhabitants of Camus’ Oran and Roth’s Newark, and contemporary or near-contemporary events in Europe. As the writer Abraham Verghese observed in his recent review of Sigrid Nunez’s “Salvation City” (a novel set in a near-future America consumed by a flu epidemic): “An epidemic makes such a great backdrop for a novel.” In reaction to a disease that with shocking speed maims, paralyzes, and kills a community’s “beautiful children,” Roth depicts society’s descent into fear, apprehension and suspicion of outsiders, a course that ends, appropriately, in a search for meaning. 

Coda

One final note: the pages of “Nemesis” close with the narrator’s achingly beautiful memory of an afternoon near the end of June, 1944, before the epidemic seriously took hold of the city, when the Chancellor Avenue playground boys gathered to watch Bucky Cantor demonstrate the throw of a javelin. He writes: “None of us had ever before seen an athletic act so beautifully executed right in front of our eyes. Through him we boys had left the little story of the neighborhood and entered the historical saga of our ancient gender.”

Time will tell, but “Nemesis” could emerge as the one classic Roth novel all of us should read.

– – – – –

(A shorter version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.)

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Authors, Book Reviews | 1 Comment »

“By Nightfall” by Michael Cunningham

Monday, September 27th, 2010

.

.

The play of emotions and themes with which Michael Cunningham is most adroit — love, loss, desire, despair, mortality — are again engaged in his new novel set in present day Manhattan. But take note: To launch the reader into the world of “By Nightfall” Cunningham has chosen for the book’s epigraph a line from Rilke’s Duino Elegies: “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.” In full text, Rilke’s message is even more chilling: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.”  This, Cunningham signals, will be his novel’s all-encompassing theme: the pursuit, use, and misuse of beauty.

Now, this is not the stuff to entice a broad readership.  Many previously attracted by the cross-over appeal of Cunningham’s break-through novel, “The Hours,” will be disappointed to discover that “By Nightfall” is not a comparably rewarding experience. This is, to be frank, a novel for a few.  But still it is a very good novel that I hope will find its audience.

The principal characters in “By Nightfall” are Peter Harris, a 44-year-old contemporary art dealer, and his wife Rebecca, an editor of an arts and culture magazine. The plot, modestly scaled, is set in motion by the appearance of Rebecca’s much younger brother Ethan (age 23), a beautiful, flawed and directionless young man interested in doing “Something in the Arts.” Ethan’s short stay in the couple’s spacious SoHo loft will upend all three lives.

A Slave to Beauty

Here is how Peter remembers his first immersion in beauty, an epiphany he experienced as a teenager at a summer lake as he watched the swim-suited girlfriend of his older brother enter the water:

“It’s not lust, not precisely lust, though it has lust in it. It’s a pure, thrilling, and slightly terrifying apprehension of what he will later call beauty, though the word is insufficient. It’s a tingling sense of divine presence, of the unspeakable perfection of everything that exists now and will exist in the future.”

As a art gallery owner, Peter’s occupation is that of a “servant of beauty.” His role is to judge who among artists is worthy of exceptional recognition and to enable those persons to flourish.  In this endeavor he is suffering a crisis of confidence, seeing himself as a mere “winner of various second prizes,” a person unlikely to rise to the level of taste-maker enjoyed by owners of “first rank” galleries.  He exhibits a post-9/11 existential dread: “[a] conviction, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that some terrible, blinding beauty is about to descend and, like the wrath of God, suck [the world] all away, orphan us, deliver us, leave us wondering how exactly we’re going to start it all over again.”

The Book’s Weaknesses

“By Nightfall” is written in a combination of “voices”: at times there is a third person omniscient narrator, sometimes a second person interlocutor, but principally we are caught within Peter’s own ruminations. The lasting effect is a story told through Peter’s eyes.  While this brings a unity to the novel, it also can be a handicap.  When events, ideas and emotions come to us filtered through Peter’s fears and exquisite sensibilities, the narrative sometimes falls into a rut, trapped by the insular sound of Peter conducting a hothouse conversation with himself.  The reader yearns for more self-sufficiency on the part of other characters — persons we are meant to, and want to, care about.  Happily, Cunningham is terrific with dialog, and the frequent conversational segments — animated, stylish, and verbally agile (these are New Yorkers, after all) — oxygenate the narrative.

One of the reasons “By Nightfall” suffers in a direct comparison with “The Hours” is that the earlier novel gained strength by its focus on the lives of three women (although their lives, too, were mostly “interior” lives).  In following one flawed male exclusively, the new novel is hampered with what I think is weaker stuff.  Consider the following sentiment from the mind of Peter, a view, I suspect, shared by the author:

“We — we men — are the frightened ones, the blundering and nervous ones; if we act the skeptic or the bully sometimes it’s because we suspect we’re wrong in some deep incalculable way that women are not. Our impersonations are failing us and our vices and habits are ludicrous and when we present ourselves at the gates of heaven the enormous black woman who guards them will laugh at us not only because we aren’t innocent but because we have no idea about anything that actually matters.”

Notwithstanding the insight and humor of the author (as evident in the above quotation), the fact is that by situating his exploration of the mysteries of beauty and desire in a precious, privileged environment, Cunningham risks the ire of those same readers now loudly railing against the educated, liberal, upper-middle-class insularity of Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” (another study of an unstable love triangle set in the present day). They scream: “Who cares about characters who are not like me?”

The Book’s Strengths

And yet to dismiss the book’s atmosphere as claustrophobic or its world view as irrelevant is, I think, a fraudulent stance.  Yes, the setting and tone is a highly literary one.  That’s what you expect from Michael Cunningham. He writes principally for other voracious, educated readers. Yes, it helps to recognize Cunningham’s allusions to a high culture sources — Joyce’s “Ulysses” and his short story, “The Dead”; Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”; Mann’s “Death in Venice”; and the real-life doomed affair of Rimbaud and Verlaine.  But what is also remarkable is the broad range of topics Cunningham manages to cover in what is one of his shortest novels.

Among those elements is an insider’s look at the cutthroat and compromised world of contemporary art. And let’s give thanks, that, unlike so many other authors who populate their novels with fictional novelists, Cunningham is willing to explore the paths of creativity through non-writer characters.  Aside from references to actual artists (Brueghel, Rodin, Damien Hirst), Cunningham convincingly creates a bevy of working artists, devising for each an interesting aesthetic and conjuring up a room full of their works for exhibition. Also of interest is the well described minutiae and daily grind of office life in what is, essentially, just another small business operation.  Cunningham has fun with the fact that an art gallery must engage in the soul-sapping compromise of stocking what will sell.

As in previous novels, Cunningham is quite skillful at getting us to feel the connections within families that endure even long after childhood (Peter and Rebecca’s family histories are examined in flaskbacks). He is best with younger characters, especially sibling relationships that take on a love/hate dynamic, and he well captures the pangs of growth beyond adolescence. Fears of growing old and dying are also featured prominently in the new novel and are sensitively evoked.

Of course no one can gainsay the beauty of Cunningham’s writing (filled with perfect details), his intelligence, his empathy.  Other reviewers will doubtless cite their own favorite passages, but for me one that stands out is a terrific set piece in the middle of “By Nightfall” which tracks the steps of an insomniac Peter who, in the wee hours of the night, leaves his loft for a meandering nocturnal walk through the irregular streets of lower Manhattan — it is an unexpected, charmed sequence.

Rilke, Flaubert, Cunningham

To return, then, to the Rilke epigraph that presages the theme of  “By Nightfall,” how is it, one asks, that “beauty disdains to annihilate us”?  I think the answer is found in Cunningham’s obvious devotion to Flaubert.  He shares with the French author a despairing sense of the ultimate inadequacy of language.  In the final pages of “By Nightfall” Cunningham quotes not once, not twice, but three times from the following lament expressed in “Madame Bovary” (here in Gerald Hopkins’ translation):

“After all, no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, of his thoughts or his sorrows. Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.”

Here is another translation of that passage, more beautiful and less faithful to the original, by Francis Steegmuller:

“For none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

Coming late, but coming, to self-knowledge

Peter’s dilemma is the common fate of men: “What do you do when you’re no longer the hero of your own story?”  In Peter there’s more than a little of T.S. Eliot’s aging Prufrock (“No! I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord . . . glad to be of use, politic, cautious and meticulous, full of high sentence”). Peter expresses his fate as a resignation to “live on as a solid second-stringer, respected but not feared [and settled into] a career of semi-defeat, a champion of the overlooked and the almost-but-not-quite.”

A re-balancing is in order. Peter, who’s life is the world of art — the representation of a thing or emotion or idea — comes to realize the falsity of his pursuit. At the close of the book he understands it is, rather, “flesh, the true and living thing, [that] trumps every effort at representation.” Confessing his mistakes and transgressions to his wife (a confession that will continue beyond the final page of the book), he sees he has “failed in the most base and human of ways” — for he has “not imagined the lives of others.” Cunningham’s prescription, his choice as a bulwark against annihilation, is this:

“To love, to forgive, to abide.”

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

A condensed version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.

.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Art, Authors, Book Reviews, Culture | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »