Vampires, Nazis, Bill Faulkner, and Mister Steve Martin

One thing about being an avid reader is that other avid readers are always trying to push their favorite books to the top of my reading queue. In most cases I don’t mind, because I know plenty of people whose taste in literature I respect and trust. In other cases, however, I find myself having to read a four hundred page fantasy/horror novel about undead Nazis.

What happened was this: a former student dropped by my office and, in the course of our conversation, mentioned a book he was reading, The Keep, by F. Paul Wilson. He told me a little about it, I politely responded by saying it sounded interesting, and then a week later he brought me the book and said he’d come back in a week or two to see how I liked it. Somehow, I ended up with a reading assignment.

To be fair, the book wasn’t bad. The book begins with the plight of a crippled Jewish-Polish intellectual and his hot-but-chaste gypsy daughter who are in danger of being killed by Nazis during the build up to WWII. Then we get a German military officer who hates the new Nazi regime, especially the cowardly officer who abandoned him in battle years ago but is now finding success in the ranks of the Third Reich because he likes to kill helpless people. These two guys are competing for the command for an old abandoned castle in the mountains of Eastern Europe, but things get a little hairy when they accidentaly awaken the vampire who had been imprisoned in the cellar hundreds of years ago. Of course, when the vampire stirs, a gallant warrior with a mystical sword starts a journey from halfway across the world because his spidey sense starts tingling. All of this comes to a head in an apocalyptical battle between the forces of good and evil for control of the world. And, oh yeah, the Highlander guy falls in love with the gypsy girl which brings up all kinds of problems, like should mortals date immortals, or should they stick to their own kind like God intended. Confusing, right?

Yeah, it’s a dumb book, but here’s where I have to admit that this book would have BLOWN MY MIND in junior high. As a kid, I experimented with Dungeons and Dragons and my reading mostly consisted of Stephen King novels and the Dragonlance series. Throw in the allure of evil men with swastikas and jack boots, and what you end up with might be the craziest fantasy/horror novel of all time. Or at least the craziest fantasy/horror novel to make the New York Times Bestsellers List.

After indulging in four hundred pages of guilty pleasure, I decided to redeem myself by finally reading Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. I’ve been thinking about teaching this book in an American Lit class, despite not really wanting to read it, and then when it showed up on Oprah’s list, I figured I had no choice but to slog through it. Thus, another reading assignment.

Instead of beating around the bush, I’m just going to come out and say it: Faulkner bores me. Over the years, as I’ve read different books, I thought maybe that I didn’t get it, or maybe I wasn’t reading the right stuff, so I always tried to reserve judgment, or at least be open minded, but today I’ll take my stand. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t hate Faulkner, and I’m pretty sure I understand why it’s “important” and “good” from a literary standpoint, but I just think it’s boring. Sure, the structure is interesting: instead of a single narrative voice, the story is told in short sections—some a few pages, some a few words—from the perspective of a dozen or so different characters. It’s an idea that is quintessentially Modern, understanding an event by piecing together the fragments that make up the event, recognizing that life is too complex to be articulated in a tidy linear and chronological narrative. I get that. But the thing is, while the structure is interesting, the plot of the novel is ­booorrrring!

Basically it’s about the Bundren family hauling their dead mother’s body to a cemetery in another town. The journey would normally take a couple of days, but because of various obstacles (mostly rain and stupidity) the family spends eight days traveling through rural Mississippi with a corpse in the back of a mule-drawn wagon. While the trip has a few moments of excitement, mostly nothing happens. Or maybe, more accurately, too much happens. The book is full of minor subplots as each character deals with the passing of the Bundren matriarch, as well as with their own individual issues (unwanted pregnancy, festering insanity, toothlessness, etc.). For me, however, the style of the novel undermines most of the concern I have for the characters. There are a few exceptions—the widower Anse Bundren is an hilarious display of spectacular laziness, and young Vardman’s notion that his “mother is a fish” makes for some interesting stream of consciousness—but mostly the characters seem underdeveloped and uninteresting. Faulkner once said that most novelists are failed poets, which makes sense, because I think his Modernist style better suits writers like Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, or Wallace Stevens. And while his portrayal of the South is interesting, everybody knows you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a Southern Writer, and I can think of a few that portray the people and places just as well.

The most satisfying book I read last month, a happy medium between best-selling undead Nazis and prize-winning rednecks, was Steve Martin’s Shopgirl. It’s a book I’ve been meaning to read for years, and now that they’ve released the movie, I decided to pick up a copy before the experience of reading it was tainted by seeing too many trailers for the film.

Shopgirl isn’t a literary masterpiece, but it’s a nice read, short, and full of lovely sentences. The plot is barely there, mostly covering a vague and awkward courtship between Mirabelle, a young girl who works the glove counter in an L.A. department store, and Ray Porter, a rich old man who likes the way Mirabelle looks. What I like most about this book is the tone. There’s not a lot of dialogue in the book, and the few conversations between characters are usually nervous and uncomfortable. Instead, what we get is a third person account of loneliness. The characters in this book spend a lot of time alone, and even when they’re together, the narration seems detached and self-conscious as Mirabelle and Ray struggle to transition from solitude to society. If the book were longer (it’s only about 100 pages) then the feeling of the book might not be enough to carry the story, but as it is, Martin does a good job of creating an atmosphere for these characters to float around in.

I’m looking forward to the Shopgirl movie, even though it was a little annoying to read the book imaging Claire Danes and Steve Martin in the main roles. I’m curious to see how Martin makes a screenplay from a book with so little dialogue, but I’m also expecting it to be understated and a little melancholy, another good movie for autumn. Instead of other books, Shopgirl mostly reminded me of the kinds of movies I love to watch late at night when the weather turns cold, like Lost in Translation, Beautiful Girls, and Garden State, movies about loneliness and introspection that seem to fit the way I feel in October and November. More than anything else, Shopgirl was comforting, and some days comfort seems a lot more important than any Nobel Prize.

Reading Round Up!

The last few weeks I’ve been on a roll, thanks mostly to the rare convergence of a string of good books and the time to read them. This post will cover a whopping FOUR books, so let’s just get to it.

1. Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem. I don’t read much crime fiction, but I’m guessing Motherless Brooklyn sticks pretty close to the requisites of the genre: there’s a dead guy, a hierarchy of criminals, a broad range of suspects, and a first-person narrator determined to unravel the truth. So this book seems to be a fairly straightforward detective novel, except THE MAIN CHARACTER HAS TOURETTE’S. How crazy is that? I don’t really know anything about Tourette’s, but Lethem seems to do a good job describing the effects of the syndrome. He puts readers inside the head of Lionel Essrog to show the difficulties of working one’s way up the ladder of small-time crime while constantly being confused and distracted by a jumble of involuntary word games, a sort of verbal and aural OCD. Essrog adds a human element to this otherwise stereotypical genre, and it’s his combination of vulnerability and resilience that provides the book’s most poignant and clever moments.

2. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. This book is really thick. I figured it would take weeks to read, and I figured it might be boring, but I was wrong on both accounts. The Corrections is about the Lambert family, three adult siblings and their parents. The premise of the novel is that Enid wants her children to come home for one last Christmas together, but the real story revolves around the reasons her children are less than thrilled by the idea. Big chunks of the book focus on each of the five characters, their personal stories as well as their conflicts and confidences with other family members. What makes the book so readable is that every character is important. By spending so much time understanding each character’s point of view, readers get a lot of personal perspective, so when the characters get together, the result is really multi-dimensional; encounters are driven by implication and back story as much as by conversation, so readers see subtle struggles that don’t require much narration on the author’s part because the intricacies of each character have already been introduced. In addition to good writing and great characters, it’s a neat literary trick.

3. Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer by Warren St. John. The title of this book comes from the last two lines of an Alabama football cheer: “Rammer jammer yellow hammer / Give ‘em hell Alabama.” Like that cheer, this book is funny and kind of weird. Rammer Jammer is a memoir of the ’99 Alabama football season, told mostly from the RV lot outside the stadiums. More than football, it’s a book about fandom. St. John buys a beat-up old camper and hangs around days-long tailgate parties trying to understand why so many people (including himself) invest so much time and money, so many hopes and dreams, into a game. It would be easy for the author, a reporter for the New York Times, to turn snarky and condescending in the face of working class football fans in Alabama, but St. John reveals his biases upfront, using the book’s introduction to establish himself as a native Alabamian and life-long fan of the Crimson Tide. This pedigree isn’t always enough to bridge the gap between author and subject, however, and some of the book’s great moments come when St. John struggles to be accepted into the group of fans. Beneath the fanecdotes (I just made that word up, feel free to use it), the author tackles interesting, if not always life-altering, questions of individuality and group identity.

4. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy’s new novel, set in modern-day Texas, involves guns, drugs, money, and lots and lots of bloodshed. Example: a guy named Chigurh goes around killing people with a sort of pneumatic battering ram normally used for braining cows in a slaughterhouse. What else do you need to know? I’m not sure this book adds much credibility to the idea that McCarthy is the great writer of this generation, the only legitimate heir to writers like Faulkner and Hemingway, but it’s a good read, fast-paced and violent, and full of characters that remind me of Garth Brooks and Robert Duvall in SNL’s “Who’s More Grizzled” sketch.

So that’s it for now. I’m getting pretty bored with writing about all these books, but I’m still trying to keep it up until the end of the year. I’m currently in the middle of a novel that features both vampires and Nazis, so the next post is bound to get more exciting.

Summer Reads (Make Me Feel Fine)

This post was supposed to be about Sarah Vowell. Before I even started reading Assassination Vacation, I planned out the opening of this post. I was going to cull blurbs from my LiveJournal, where I’ve been writing dumb, gushy things about Sarah Vowell for several years. Here’s a gem from January 2003:

“i hope you were able to tear yourself away from the sanford&son marathon long enough to catch the sarah vowell re-run on cspan last night. you big dummy.”

See? It’s funny, right? Well, the bad news is that I haven’t finished reading Assassination Vacation. I really liked the Lincoln part, and the stuff about Charles Guiteau was pretty good, but I eventually lost interest and stopped reading after about a hundred and fifty pages.

Sarah, I’m sorry. Please don’t take this as a reflection of the book, but let it reflect instead an undeserving reader. I’ll get back to it, I promise.

In the mean time: Hurrah for summer! I started a bunch of other books that I haven’t (and probably won’t) finish—the most notable was Edward Conlon’s Blue Blood, a true-life account of being an NYC cop—but the first real literary achievement of my summer was finally reading Horn Island Dream by Wes Dannreuther. I picked up this book in February after hearing the author read, and I’ve been looking forward to reading it since then. The book is set in Pascagoula and is tagged as “a Gulf Coast novel.” The main character is a high school kid discovering the paintings and writings of Walter Anderson, a WPA-era artist whose vision of the Mississippi Gulf Coast has really come to life over the last fifty or more years. I’m a fan of Walter Anderson, and I enjoyed chatting with Dannreuther back in February (Mississippians of similar ages form a pretty broad social network, so it didn’t take long to discover a few common acquaintances), so from the beginning this book took on a very personal tone.

The biggest strength of Horn Island Dream is the setting. The book’s plot mostly serves as a vehicle for Dannreuther’s deft portrayal of life on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Jimmy, the book’s main character, is a kid with two options: the romantic call of the ocean (which his mother forbids him to heed) or a dead-end job at the shipyard (which his step dad has already lined up). Readers familiar with the Gulf Coast will recognize this contradiction of a seaport blessed with natural beauty and the promise of endless opportunity, and the prevailing small town attitudes that often make such a place seem inescapable. I’m hesitant to call this book “good beach reading” for fear of slight, but I read it almost entirely while on the beach, over the course of a week or so, and it was comforting to read about Jimmy struggling to make sense of that Gulf Coast town while I struggle to make sense of this one.

I’m trying to think of a segue involving beach towns and hurricanes, because after reading Horn Island Dream, I didn’t finish another book until Hurricane Dennis left Julie and me housebound for most of last weekend. We lost power for a few hours, which meant no TV, so I picked up Doubt: A Parable by John Patrick Shanley, which recently won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was a quick read, and afterwards I felt inspired to finally read Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, which won the Pulitzer in ’93. I don’t read plays very often, and I forget how much I enjoy them. Because they rely almost solely on the words of the characters, plays are like books boiled down to the most essential elements, and plots, settings, and actions are mostly left implied; the result is a sort of emotional concentrate, and the effects of the work are more immediate than, say, a five hundred page novel.

Doubt is a great example of what I love about plays. It’s concise, and most of the dialogue comes from tense conversations between three main characters. The plot involves a priest suspected of sexual misconduct, but Shanley seems to be less concerned with the priest’s actual innocence or guilt, and more concerned with the doubts that surround his accusation. Shanley believes doubt can be a good thing, and that recognizing uncertainty can lead people to make positive changes; whereas denying doubt can result in delusions and veiled truths. We know from the title that the play is meant to be a parable, though it isn’t clear what the parable actually refers to. I realize my reading is colored by my own political bias, but I can’t help thinking of how the current White House administration refuses to acknowledge uncertainty, and often demands a particular kind of either/or thinking that minimizes the chance for doubt. Maybe Shanley is using this story to comment on not just the idea of doubt or the scandals that have plagued the church during recent years, but also to make a statement about the current political and cultural climate of the country.

Angels in America­­, on the other hand, which deals with homosexuality, AIDS, McCarthyism, and the Reagan era, is less subtle in its political and social indictments. Compared to Doubt, Angels in America has more characters, more themes, more subplots, and more pages. Because it’s more complex, Angels in America seems to lack the centralized power of a tighter play. The characters are strong (particularly Roy Cohn, a key figure in the McCarthy hearings and a member of Reagan’s administration, whose homosexuality was considered an “open secret” throughout his career, until he died of AIDS in the mid-eighties), and the conflicts also involve doubt, uncertainty, and the difficulties inherent in doing the right thing, but at times the play seems to overreach its grasp. Maybe in production some of the drama is restored (particularly in scenes involving visits from angels), but reading the play was sometimes chaotic and confusing. I’d certainly recommend reading it, but I still think Doubt was the better of the two.

So that’s the extent of my summer reading so far. I’ve got a few more weeks of vacay, and I hope to get more reading done before school starts back next month. All in all, I’ve read fewer books than I would have expected by this point in the year, but I guess that doesn’t count all the books I started but never finished. I’ll try to do better.

Hairball and Charlie

I.

Maybe it has something to do with the modern world and the paralyzing effects of infinite possibility, but I’m often relieved to have other people make decisions for me. Last month, for example, I was floundering. I bought all those books but just couldn’t get motivated to read any of them. It’s not that any of the books were particularly bad; the issue, I think, was one of commitment. I would start a book, get twenty or thirty pages into it, and then, before I could really commit, I’d start another book just to make sure there wasn’t something better languishing on the shelf. I was getting frustrated, so I was glad to get an email from my friend Katy asking for my address so that she could send me a book.

In her email, Katy made a point of saying “I won’t tell you anything about it, but I think you’ll like it.” This was just what I needed. If I didn’t know anything about the book, I would have to actually read it before forming an opinion. This is something I rarely do. Usually, when I start a book, I’ve already decided whether or not I’ll like it, so the actual reading process is mostly a way to confirm what I already suspect. Perhaps this explains why I couldn’t get excited about reading any of those books I bought last month. They were books I’d carefully studied before buying, or books I had been meaning to pick up for a while, or books I became interested in only after hearing excerpts read by the authors. I already knew that those books would be at least slightly interesting, so to actually read them seemed a little beside the point.

When I got the book from Katy, it was one I’d never heard of: The Frog King by Adam Davies. My initial instinct was to read reviews online and find out just what I was getting into. It was an instinct that took a fair amount of self-control to curb, but ultimately I threw caution out the window and just started the book cold. Oh, the possibilities!

A few things were made evident on the first page: it’s set in New York; it’s a first-person narrative written with a detached sort of irony; and the narrator is a young, disheveled malcontent who works in publishing. I was immediately reminded of Bright Lights, Big City and a dozen other books like it. This book is derivative and unoriginal, I thought, and then I quickly scolded myself.

In the book, Harry “Hairball” Driscoll stumbles through the Lower East Side perpetually worried; he avoids work, gets drunk, and screws around on the woman he loves. He desperately wants to write the great American novel, but he can’t find anything worth writing about. He finds himself confined by mundane connections to a world he wants no part of, so he searches for transcendence in the lowest of places: filthy apartments, seedy bars, and homeless hangouts.

The story may sound fairly typical, but I came to realize that there’s a fine line between easy rip-offs and new additions to old genres. Prufrock seems a likely archetype for Hairball, but the tradition of the self-conscious misplaced young man in American literature extends at least as far back as Whitman and Emerson. Like those guys, Harry desires more than anything else to rid himself of the trappings of polite society.

In this literary tradition, the emphasis shouldn’t just be on the character telling the story, but also on the time and place in America during which the story takes place. So maybe the real strength of Davies’ book lies not in what he says or how he says it, but in when he says it. Through Harry Driscoll, The Frog King reflects a disposable culture in which individuals find little to care about. Everybody is out for themselves, and that includes Harry. He plans to get it together eventually, but for a character like Harry, that’s not easy; the distractions of his daily life don’t leave much time to figure anything out, and the result is a sort of paralysis, often mistaken by others as apathy or indifference. It’s this conflict between action and indifference that drives the story. In the end, Harry realizes that beneath it all some things are worth living for, though the book’s conclusion is not particularly optimistic.

Thinking about Hairball got me thinking about similar characters: Stingo, from Sophie's Choice; Will Barrett, from Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman; and every character in every Raymond Carver story. Maybe it was the title, but mostly Hairball made me think of Henderson, from Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King. So, on a trip to visit Julie’s folks in Birmingham for Easter weekend, I stopped at Books-A-Million and picked up Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, which I had never heard of until I saw it on the shelf. Reading the back cover, I was surprised to learn (and a little ashamed for not knowing) that Bellow won a Nobel Prize, which was awarded the year he published Humboldt’s Gift. So, judging the book by its cover alone, I knew it would probably be good, and I realized there was a chance it might even be great.


II.

I wrote that first part two weeks ago. Since then, I’ve been trying to figure out what to write about Humboldt’s Gift. Shortly after I started reading the novel, Bellow died, and the temptation to eulogize is strong. After Bellow’s death, there was a brief flood of press celebrating his accomplishments, and I feel the urge to do the same here, but, truth be told, I’m not sure I really get Humboldt's Gift. The book was a chore to read; it’s been a chore to think about; and—right this minute—it’s a chore to write about.

The complexity of the book, I think, outweighs my ability to write about books, so in lieu of an enlightened analysis here goes a list of the book’s themes: there’s individuals vs. society; art vs. commerce; love vs. sex; men vs. women; lower middle class vs. upper middle class; rural life vs. city life; and, like The Frog King, action vs. indifference. These are just a few.

The only thing tying these themes together is a washed-up writer named Charlie Citrine, the book’s protagonist. Charlie’s day-to-day life is a series of minor catastrophes, all of which stem from one or another of these themes. Charlie spends his days torn between his low-life accomplices and his bourgeois acquaintances. He argues with his rational wife (divorce pending), and he argues with his sensual mistress. He struggles to make something meaningful, and he struggles to make money. Before one conflict is resolved another pops up, and much of the book’s joy comes from Charlie’s determined effort to remain (mostly) optimistic in the face of ever-impending doom. Ultimately, though, it’s this every-which-waywardness that makes Charlie a more complicated version of Hairball and serves as the vehicle for the book’s main ideas.

Charlie is a thinker, and he views his own life in the context of both classical and popular philosophies on literature and life. Specifically, Charlie’s latest interests revolve around sleep, boredom, and something called anthroposophy, which I don’t really understand, except that it relates to some kind of spiritual enlightenment. Bellow introduces more names and theories than I can keep up with, and sometimes the book gets dense and hard to slog through. At one point in the narrative Charlie’s girlfriend, reading some of his pages, tells him, “When you get to the story, let me know. I’m not big on philosophy.” This quotation pretty much sums up my attitude toward the book. The story is good, but often the ideas are over my head, though I imagine it’s the heft of these ideas that makes the book worthy of a Nobel Prize.

Currently I’m reading When She Was Good by Philip Roth. I checked it out from the library after reading that Roth was a student of Bellow’s. It’s good, but I’m not going to write about it; I think this post probably exhausts the topic of old sad bastard lit, at least for now. Besides, summer break starts next week, and I just got Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation from Amazon, so I’m anticipating an upswing in the mood of my reading materials.

Good Country People

The last post was long and boring, and writing it felt a lot like work. Therefore, I’m determined to keep this one a little shorter and a lot less dense. I figure that will be pretty easy to do, mostly because I haven’t actually finished a book since finishing Sophie’s Choice. And while it’s true that I haven’t been reading lots of books lately, it’s worth noting (to my credit, I like to think) that I’ve been buying lots of books lately. During February I was able to visit Square Books in Oxford and Lemuria in Jackson, two of my favorite bookstores in Mississippi. Coincidentally, I ended up unusually broke at the end of the shortest month of the year.

I was in Oxford because we were on our way to Memphis to see Wilco, and maybe that explains why I came home with a bunch of books about country music. Among other things, I picked up cheap copies of Bill Malone’s Country Music, U.S.A. (the definitive history of early country music, which I’ll probably never read), and Are You Ready for the Country: Elvis, Dylan, Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock by Peter Doggett (the definitive history of modern country music, which I’ll also probably never read). The book that excited me most, though, was a book I’d never heard of, an ethnomusicological (it’s a real word, I swear) study called Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture by Aaron A. Fox.

Fox teaches ethnomusicology (see, I told you so) at Columbia, and this book recounts his experiences hanging out in Texas beer joints playing, listening to, and talking about country music. The book’s premise involves ideas about how language in working class cultures influences the music of those cultures, and how the music then, in turn, influences the language. He tries to explain the difference between “real” country and “pop” country by claiming “real” country springs from working-class culture, whereas “pop” country is an attempt to sell the language and ideas of working-class culture back to working-class people. But I only read about thirty pages, so I may have it all mixed up. I lost interest in this one because I got too bogged down in the academics. In the preface, Fox says he wants the book to be accessible to readers who don’t possess a prior knowledge of ethnomusicology, so maybe it gets better, but ultimately I was too distracted by the footnotes and cross references to really enjoy reading about his ideas and experiences regarding music and culture.

Two weeks after the trip to Oxford, I went to a conference in Jackson, an annual meeting of community college English teachers from the Southeast, and there was a room on the penthouse floor of the Hilton where a girl from Lemuria was selling books. For the most part, the books being sold had something to do with the conference. There was a reading by Mississippi authors one night, and afterwards I bought several books, a few of which I started reading, and all of which I hope to finish before the end of the year, so maybe I’ll write about those later. But the real sleeper of the bunch was a collection of poems by Beth Ann Fennelly entitled Tender Hooks. For me, poetry is a lot like photography: everybody does it, and almost all of it sucks, but every now and then I run across something that just blows me away.

I was stunned by the truth and beauty of Fennelly’s poems. Mostly, the poems are about motherhood. Not a romanticized, sentimental view of motherhood, but a harsher, more realistic side that doesn’t get much press. She writes about giving birth (“my asshole turned inside-out like a rosebud”), about biological changes (“and I cry milk to hear my baby—any baby—cry”), and about changes in her lifestyle (“From the kitchen, fixing her bottle, I hear it: / two milk teeth against my beer can.”). In her attitudes regarding her body and her body’s reaction to pregnancy and motherhood, I’m reminded of Walt Whitman, and can’t help but think of his claim, “The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer.” Indeed, there’s something spiritual about how firmly these poems are rooted in the natural world.

Fennelly addresses another literary theme that hasn’t gotten much attention since Jonathan Swift: eating babies. In one poem, Fennelly writes, “By your age, calves are slaughtered, / because, milk-fed, they have the best flavor.” In another poem, she admits, “I like to take her whole foot into my mouth.”

By tackling these themes with little reluctance and even less delicacy, Fennelly gets to the primitive truths of human emotion and behavior. Motherhood becomes an act of nature, something Darwinian, which is a welcome relief from all those who speak of the miracle of childbirth. For Fennelly, there’s nothing miraculous about it. It’s hard work, it’s gross, and it evokes emotions that are less human and more animalistic. In fact, I don’t like these poems because they deal with parents and children; I like them in spite of it. Although her subject is new parenthood, her perspective reveals truths about our bodies and our selves that apply to any reader.

And, to come full circle, my opinion of Fennelly’s work is supported by one of my favorite voices in modern country music. On the back of Tender Hooks, there’s a blurb by Lucinda Williams, who says, “Her poems are brave and beautiful.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

My New Favorite Book

I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of weeks now, and I’ve finally decided that Sophie’s Choice is my new favorite book of all time. It’s been a while since I’ve had a favorite book of all time, and writing those words makes me suddenly realize how much crap I’ve been reading lately. I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary stuff, not necessarily bad stuff (in fact, I like most of it), but stuff that sometimes seems a little breezy and often lacks the sheer density of words and ideas that one associates with serious literature.

Sophie’s Choice, however, is a serious book. In his use of time and place, Styron’s style is probably comparable to Faulkner, and it’s a comparison worth getting out of the way early. The relationships between the characters are intricately woven, and their stories are hopelessly intertwined. Adding to the complexity, Styron tells the story through a number of voices. The narrator is Stingo, but sometimes large chunks of the story are told in Sophie’s voice, and we also get letters from Stingo’s father and excerpts from Stingo’s journal. Because memory is an important theme in Sophie’s Choice, the stories told by all of these voices take place over the course of many years, and the settings of these stories include Brooklyn, Virginia, and Poland. Maybe it sounds trite, but Styron does a good job of making each character important; because each character has his or her own story, and, because those stories necessarily affect their relationships with each other, when the three main characters converge, the dynamic of their interaction is sweet and loving, explosive and violent, and everything in between.

Like any good Modern Southern novel, much of the story also involves issues of race. Stingo wrestles with the guilt of his slave-owning ancestors; Sophie wrestles with the guilt of surviving Auschwitz; and Nathan, Sophie’s violent and erratic lover, likes to press the buttons that make both of them squirm. I may not have it exactly right, but I think Styron wants to make the point that those of us who inherit evil shouldn’t be held responsible for the sins of our forefathers, regardless of how closely we might be related.

It’s difficult to write much more without spoiling the story, but it will suffice to say that as secrets are revealed throughout the book, they seem less like plot points in a novel and more like turning points in the lives of the characters. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me this should be the exact goal of good fiction.

* * *

As for the movie, let me say first that I generally dislike any movie that is set in any time other than the one in which it is made, with the exceptions of Dazed and Confused, Animal House, and futuristic sci-fi movies like Escape from New York and Judge Dredd. For the most part, these kinds of movies seem a little too cartoony, and I get too distracted by romanticized costumes and settings to pay attention to plot and characters. So, since Sophie’s Choice was made in the 80’s, but set in the 40’s and 50’s, I was prepared for the worst.

That being said, Sophie’s Choice is a pretty good movie. Because the book is complex, and because so much of the book’s power comes from meticulously developed characters, it’s understandably necessary for the movie to stick to the plot points. The book is long, over five hundred pages, and it would be impossible to capture every nuance without making the film overly long, a film that already clocks in at around two and a half hours. So it’s not that I didn’t like movie, but I enjoyed the book an awful lot; I was hoping for a different perspective from the movie, but mostly it’s just a condensed version of the same story, sort of a Sophie Lite.

What makes the movie worth watching is the acting. The three actors (Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Peter MacNichol) engage in some pretty tense scenes, and one bad performance could easily undermine the other two, but this is never the case. Even the accents are good: Streep’s stumbling English, encumbered by her thick Eastern European accent; and MacNichol’s aristocratic Southern accent, sounding a lot like Memphis. Is MacNichol really Southern? I have no idea, but I’m convinced he must be. Kline is no Brando or Paul Newman, but he’s still top notch, and something about his performance reminds me of a Tennessee Williams movie. My friend Ben said this movie marked Kline’s transition from stage to screen, and I think it shows in the theatrical quality of the film.

So, yeah. My new favorite book. And in loving this book, I’m reminded of one of the reasons I love books in general, and that’s because they’re fun to talk about. At the Mardi Gras parades this weekend in New Orleans, I was walking to the Quarter with Ben and Robbi, and we were getting drunk, catching cheap plastic beads, digging the high school brass bands, and talking about American literature. Not just Styron, but Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, and other stuff. And it was fun. This is why I want to read more this year: to practice what I preach to my students; to remind myself that books don’t just belong in the classroom, but that they are essential—as essential as Mardi Gras in New Orleans—to living the good life.

Know When to Fold 'Em

I was an English major at the University of Southern Mississippi when Rick and Steve Barthelme were indicted for conspiring to cheat one of the casinos down on the coast. At the time, details were sketchy. I remember that the charges involved something about trading hand signals with a blackjack dealer, and I remember that the story broke in New York. I also remember being impressed that these two professors of creative writing, these two Mississippi authors, were involved in such a first-rate literary scandal, a scandal involving riverboat gambling, no less.

For a while it was unclear whether the brothers would keep their jobs, assuming, of course, that they didn’t get hauled off to jail. I found it hard to believe that firing them would be in the university’s best interest, not only because of their name (which had become an important one in modern American literature, thanks to their older brother Donald), but also because Rick’s latest book, Bob the Gambler, had recently received a good deal of critical acclaim.

Some time passed, and nothing much happened. Rick and Steve managed to keep their jobs and avoid serving any time in jail, but I was never really sure why. After a while, the story just died down quietly. At some point, though I don’t remember exactly when, I recall seeing Double Down on a bookstore shelf, the brothers' non-fiction account of the entire ordeal, and I figured I should read these two books to get the whole story.

That was years ago. I finally picked up copies of these books while I was home for Christmas, and I read them over the holiday break. In fact, Bob the Gambler was the last book I finished in 2004, and Double Down was the first book I finished in 2005, and I hope that isn’t, like, symbolic, because Bob the Gambler was interesting and pretty fun, but Double Down was boring and redundant.

Bob the Gambler is a quick read. The prose is sparse and almost mundane, like Raymond Carver or Donald Barthelme, and the plot barely exists beneath the slice-of-life details of the narrative. This alone might make the book easy to dismiss as too derivative, too heavily influenced by family ties, but the characters are strong and the writing is rock solid. Barthelme writes with an emotional detachment that serves the story well; after all, he’s writing about a guy who feels alienated from his family, an alienation that only increases when he takes up gambling. Barthelme’s detached style is highlighted by moments of real clarity, like when the title character (whose name is actually Raymond, not Bob) stumbles out of the casino, again and again, and has to deal with his losses. Here’s Raymond in the parking garage, contemplating a recent streak of bad luck:

"I remember being crushed by unexpected defeats—good cards beaten by better cards. Hands by the book and with the book going out the window. None of it accumulated in my head. It went through, each hand a snapshot, isolated. I knew how much I’d lost, but it was too ridiculous, too far-fetched to take seriously. People like me didn’t lose thirty-five thousand dollars overnight . . . What would Jewel say? What could she? I laughed when I thought of hiding it from her."

Maybe the premise of the book—middle-aged family man falls into the throes of gambling addiction—seems a little trite, but Barthelme does a good job of making the reader care about the guy; it’s kind of a sentimental book, but not overly so.

After finishing Bob the Gambler, I was really fired up to read Double Down. Bob the Gambler seemed like the first part of the story, the part that ends with losing everything, the part that precedes the dangerous plan to win it all back. Double Down, I reckoned, would be the juicy stuff. I wanted dark alleys, seedy motel rooms, and wild schemes. I wanted conspiracy. At one point, the brothers write, “Couple the word ‘win’ with the word ‘money’ and you have a recipe for genuine thrills,” and I could only imagine the thrills that this book might have in store.

Unfortunately, these guys rarely “win” any “money.”

Most of Double Down covers the same ground as Bob the Gambler. Whole sentences, even paragraphs, often seemed very familiar. And the criminal charges don’t get mentioned until almost two-thirds of the way through the book. Even then, there’s not much to say: the brothers claim it was all a mistake, a big misunderstanding, and the D.A. drops the charges. Simple as that. The rest of the book seems a little padded, with a good deal of family history that doesn’t much seem related to the gambling, except for the occasional implication that the brothers’ addiction is the fault of their parents. And the same stuff about “loss” and “hope” that evoked sympathy in Bob the Gambler seems heavy-handed here, but maybe if I’d read them in reverse order the opposite would be true. I don’t think so, though. It’s easy to forgive a fictional character for losing all that money, especially a down-and-out guy like Raymond, but the brothers themselves fail to evoke much sympathy, particularly when they dump hundreds of thousands of dollars into slot machines.

All in all, I’m glad to know more about the story, and Bob the Gambler was a good read, but reading Double Down immediately afterward was a bit superfluous. For what it’s worth, I’ve only read two other books about gambling: Positively Fifth Street by James McManus (which is great; it’s McManus’s dramatic real-life account of getting to the final table at the World Series of Poker) and How to Play Poker Like the Pros by Phil Hellmuth, which I need to dig up and dust off, since the card room at the dog track has reopened for the season. That, combined with school starting back up a few weeks ago, might severely limit my resolution to read more, but I’m still hoping for the best.