Was, White Teeth, A Heartbreaking Work ...
Another couple books here, usual drill.
Was (Geoff Ryman): I heard about this book a while back* and the only thing I knew about it was that it was about the Wizard of Oz. That was also the only thing I knew about Wicked, so I promptly assumed they were the same book. Eventually I read Wicked and found out they were actually different books but it wasn't until now that I knew what the actual difference is. Unsurprisingly the books turn out have as much in common as O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Olympos. Wicked is basically a straight fantasy with political overtones set in Oz; Was is a mostly real-world story about the real** Dorothy Gale, about Judy Garland, and about a modern-day actor interested in them both. This is one of those books where everything sucks for everyone at all times, though, so the actor is dying of AIDS and Dorothy is abused and Judy Garland has a famously fucked-up child-actor kind of life.
I've seen a couple writers talking about how writing classes are full of stories about people dying of cancer. The idea, I gather, is that when someone is dying every act they make, even the most trivial, is suddenly fraught with significance. They're not just talking with their brother, they're Talking With Their Brother With Cancer. They're not just washing the dishes, they're Washing The Dishes With Cancer (you would think soap would be more effective). While this isn't an impossible-to-use trope, I think it's easy to rely so heavily on it that it starts to feel like the only defining attribute of the character.
Since I bring this up of course that is kind of how I felt about Was. Pain and suffering aren't the only defining traits of the characters here but they do take up a lot of pages, and often felt to me like they're an excuse to not have to give the characters meaningful relationships. I think I'd feel less like that if there were any working relationships*** given screen time in the book: the only one that exists appears in two brief glimpses and nothing more.
On the other hand, I like historical novels and this had a lot of good bits, mostly about farming life in the late 19th century and about movie actors in the 1930s. Dorothy was interesting as a character even with the crappy life arranged for her, and the latter parts of the novel picked up and started to get past total suckiness for everyone. So yeah, kind of mixed feelings.
*Since it's one of Adam's favorite books.
**"Real" for purposes of this book, not in real real life.
***Thinking here about the one between the psychologist and his wife. You could claim that the one between Baum and Dorothy is one, but if so you would be mistaking momentary kinship and understanding for an actual relationship. (And to write a fictionalized version of an abused child's life where she has a happy and loving relationship with her abuser is incredibly sick.)
White Teeth (Zadie Smith): I guess the deal here is this never won me over, but despite that there were a bunch of individual pieces I liked. It's one of those big and sprawling novels mostly about the immigrant experience in London -- 400-odd pages, three extended families, fifty years. Things don't even come together at the ending -- they just veer together briefly, and Smith shouts "ok, ending!" before they swerve away again. She also feels no compunction about dropping a character midway through and bringing them back two hundred pages later, and this just adds to the disjoint feeling. It also (I think) contributes to the variance in depth among the characters; some of them are really nuanced and interesting and this just makes it more jarring when they're interacting with characters who are unbelievable cut-outs.
Uh. Possibly another way to explain how I feel about this book is that most of the jokes didn't work for me -- they were more clever than funny or too convoluted or just lame. But there were plenty of places where I legitimately laughed and in a sense that's even harder, to get a laugh from a semi-hostile audience. I would guess that people more in tune with the subject matter would like it more, as would people more ok with big messy novels.
P.S. I saw that the book has a big smoochy blurb on the back from Salman Rushdie, and then it turns out the book also has a big smoochy scene about Salman Rushdie (albeit not by name) (also, not literally smoochy). This seems a little .. tacky, but it gave me an idea: Douglas Coupland should totally put a big smoochy blurb by himself on the back of his own next book.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Dave Eggers):
Ok, so everyone knows that Eggers is the McSweeney's guy. If that doesn't mean anything to you, just assume he is both the subject and author of every Onion article about hipsters. This specific book is a lightly-fictionalized autobiography about the period in his twenties when, immediately after the sudden death of both his parents from unrelated cancer, he ended up in San Francisco raising his eight-year-old kid brother.
Anyway, so the deal is basically Eggers is an extremely acute observer -- not of other people or situations or his relationships to other people -- but of his own thoughts and feelings. The further deal is that he's totally mired in post-post-post-(keep adding until you're bored)-irony, and this makes all his statements require a sort of haruspicy to interpret properly. Like, a recurring motif in the book is where he talks about how he and his brother play frisbee and they are godlike at it and people stop in awe to watch. From this, I am pretty sure we are supposed to understand 1) he is not actually Apollonian in his frisbee hurling 2) but he does think he's good 3) but when he's playing he's actually thinking to himself "I'm brilliant! I'm the best player that ever lived!" 4) but while thinking that he also realizes that it is untrue and is making fun of himself 5) and furthermore he realizes that we will go through all these steps and laugh at the bit where he is writing this 6) and ideally we will come away thinking that he is in fact pretty good at frisbee but is at the same time a self-effacing kind of dude 7) except that we know he is thinking all this which kind of undermines the self-effacing when he's doing it on purpose 8) and he realizes we know this and so ... You get the idea. Or maybe you don't -- at some point in the peeling-away-the-layers process I had to take it on faith that I wasn't totally destroying the thread by digging into it.
It might sound like it, but this ultra-meta/self-indulgent style wasn't actually the main issue with the book. No, the main issue with the book is that a large chunk of the book is about Eggers' tenure at Might magazine (a sort of scrappy proto-Wired or Suck.com) and he thinks that what they did at Might was dumb and a waste of time. At least, that's what I think he thinks -- as you can gather from above, it's hard to decide what he thinks about anything because he can't come out and say any of it without, like a decorator crab, covering his carapace with sponges and sea anemones to disguise his true appearance. Or something.
So what we get in the chapters on Might are lots of stories, where I think the intent is we ratchet them down just like we ratchet down his genius frisbee-playing and end up with the desired outcome of disliking the him of those stories. Except I think it's great that Eggers and the other magazine folks were idealistic and trying to do something big. I don't think it's obvious that they really succeeded in wholesale deconstruction of any aspect of modern society, but not succeeding 100% isn't the same as failing, despite what football coaches and sales gurus will tell you. You can have an effect on single people if you don't immediately change the course of society as a whole, and that is still totally worthy doing, and I wish he could feel that way.
Really, I wouldn't interpret him as being so down on himself about this if it weren't for the contrast. See, the reason why Eggers seems down on himself in these sections is because there are sections where real love and enthusiasm shines through -- the parts with his brother. The stories about cooking with his brother, going to parent-teacher conferences for his brother, and just hanging out with his brother are all great. This despite the fact that his parenting is objectively terrible. Eggers seems to have three techniques which he applies repeatedly: 1) doing things at the last minute (or later, and grovelling to get them accepted anyway) 2) getting the women in his life to clean up his apartment and 3) giving his brother noogies.
I guess this is enough information to decide whether you'd like the book or not. Not so much based on the detail I've related, but if your eyes glazed over at the rambling side-notes in this review, man, would you dislike this book.
Up next: as you no doubt know, October is the Annual IF Competition, the happiest time of year, so I am a bit preoccupied with playing and reviewing games for that. I expect more books will turn up at some point, though.
Was (Geoff Ryman): I heard about this book a while back* and the only thing I knew about it was that it was about the Wizard of Oz. That was also the only thing I knew about Wicked, so I promptly assumed they were the same book. Eventually I read Wicked and found out they were actually different books but it wasn't until now that I knew what the actual difference is. Unsurprisingly the books turn out have as much in common as O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Olympos. Wicked is basically a straight fantasy with political overtones set in Oz; Was is a mostly real-world story about the real** Dorothy Gale, about Judy Garland, and about a modern-day actor interested in them both. This is one of those books where everything sucks for everyone at all times, though, so the actor is dying of AIDS and Dorothy is abused and Judy Garland has a famously fucked-up child-actor kind of life.
I've seen a couple writers talking about how writing classes are full of stories about people dying of cancer. The idea, I gather, is that when someone is dying every act they make, even the most trivial, is suddenly fraught with significance. They're not just talking with their brother, they're Talking With Their Brother With Cancer. They're not just washing the dishes, they're Washing The Dishes With Cancer (you would think soap would be more effective). While this isn't an impossible-to-use trope, I think it's easy to rely so heavily on it that it starts to feel like the only defining attribute of the character.
Since I bring this up of course that is kind of how I felt about Was. Pain and suffering aren't the only defining traits of the characters here but they do take up a lot of pages, and often felt to me like they're an excuse to not have to give the characters meaningful relationships. I think I'd feel less like that if there were any working relationships*** given screen time in the book: the only one that exists appears in two brief glimpses and nothing more.
On the other hand, I like historical novels and this had a lot of good bits, mostly about farming life in the late 19th century and about movie actors in the 1930s. Dorothy was interesting as a character even with the crappy life arranged for her, and the latter parts of the novel picked up and started to get past total suckiness for everyone. So yeah, kind of mixed feelings.
*Since it's one of Adam's favorite books.
**"Real" for purposes of this book, not in real real life.
***Thinking here about the one between the psychologist and his wife. You could claim that the one between Baum and Dorothy is one, but if so you would be mistaking momentary kinship and understanding for an actual relationship. (And to write a fictionalized version of an abused child's life where she has a happy and loving relationship with her abuser is incredibly sick.)
White Teeth (Zadie Smith): I guess the deal here is this never won me over, but despite that there were a bunch of individual pieces I liked. It's one of those big and sprawling novels mostly about the immigrant experience in London -- 400-odd pages, three extended families, fifty years. Things don't even come together at the ending -- they just veer together briefly, and Smith shouts "ok, ending!" before they swerve away again. She also feels no compunction about dropping a character midway through and bringing them back two hundred pages later, and this just adds to the disjoint feeling. It also (I think) contributes to the variance in depth among the characters; some of them are really nuanced and interesting and this just makes it more jarring when they're interacting with characters who are unbelievable cut-outs.
Uh. Possibly another way to explain how I feel about this book is that most of the jokes didn't work for me -- they were more clever than funny or too convoluted or just lame. But there were plenty of places where I legitimately laughed and in a sense that's even harder, to get a laugh from a semi-hostile audience. I would guess that people more in tune with the subject matter would like it more, as would people more ok with big messy novels.
P.S. I saw that the book has a big smoochy blurb on the back from Salman Rushdie, and then it turns out the book also has a big smoochy scene about Salman Rushdie (albeit not by name) (also, not literally smoochy). This seems a little .. tacky, but it gave me an idea: Douglas Coupland should totally put a big smoochy blurb by himself on the back of his own next book.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Dave Eggers):
Ok, so everyone knows that Eggers is the McSweeney's guy. If that doesn't mean anything to you, just assume he is both the subject and author of every Onion article about hipsters. This specific book is a lightly-fictionalized autobiography about the period in his twenties when, immediately after the sudden death of both his parents from unrelated cancer, he ended up in San Francisco raising his eight-year-old kid brother.
Anyway, so the deal is basically Eggers is an extremely acute observer -- not of other people or situations or his relationships to other people -- but of his own thoughts and feelings. The further deal is that he's totally mired in post-post-post-(keep adding until you're bored)-irony, and this makes all his statements require a sort of haruspicy to interpret properly. Like, a recurring motif in the book is where he talks about how he and his brother play frisbee and they are godlike at it and people stop in awe to watch. From this, I am pretty sure we are supposed to understand 1) he is not actually Apollonian in his frisbee hurling 2) but he does think he's good 3) but when he's playing he's actually thinking to himself "I'm brilliant! I'm the best player that ever lived!" 4) but while thinking that he also realizes that it is untrue and is making fun of himself 5) and furthermore he realizes that we will go through all these steps and laugh at the bit where he is writing this 6) and ideally we will come away thinking that he is in fact pretty good at frisbee but is at the same time a self-effacing kind of dude 7) except that we know he is thinking all this which kind of undermines the self-effacing when he's doing it on purpose 8) and he realizes we know this and so ... You get the idea. Or maybe you don't -- at some point in the peeling-away-the-layers process I had to take it on faith that I wasn't totally destroying the thread by digging into it.
It might sound like it, but this ultra-meta/self-indulgent style wasn't actually the main issue with the book. No, the main issue with the book is that a large chunk of the book is about Eggers' tenure at Might magazine (a sort of scrappy proto-Wired or Suck.com) and he thinks that what they did at Might was dumb and a waste of time. At least, that's what I think he thinks -- as you can gather from above, it's hard to decide what he thinks about anything because he can't come out and say any of it without, like a decorator crab, covering his carapace with sponges and sea anemones to disguise his true appearance. Or something.
So what we get in the chapters on Might are lots of stories, where I think the intent is we ratchet them down just like we ratchet down his genius frisbee-playing and end up with the desired outcome of disliking the him of those stories. Except I think it's great that Eggers and the other magazine folks were idealistic and trying to do something big. I don't think it's obvious that they really succeeded in wholesale deconstruction of any aspect of modern society, but not succeeding 100% isn't the same as failing, despite what football coaches and sales gurus will tell you. You can have an effect on single people if you don't immediately change the course of society as a whole, and that is still totally worthy doing, and I wish he could feel that way.
Really, I wouldn't interpret him as being so down on himself about this if it weren't for the contrast. See, the reason why Eggers seems down on himself in these sections is because there are sections where real love and enthusiasm shines through -- the parts with his brother. The stories about cooking with his brother, going to parent-teacher conferences for his brother, and just hanging out with his brother are all great. This despite the fact that his parenting is objectively terrible. Eggers seems to have three techniques which he applies repeatedly: 1) doing things at the last minute (or later, and grovelling to get them accepted anyway) 2) getting the women in his life to clean up his apartment and 3) giving his brother noogies.
I guess this is enough information to decide whether you'd like the book or not. Not so much based on the detail I've related, but if your eyes glazed over at the rambling side-notes in this review, man, would you dislike this book.
Up next: as you no doubt know, October is the Annual IF Competition, the happiest time of year, so I am a bit preoccupied with playing and reviewing games for that. I expect more books will turn up at some point, though.