CORE DUMP Y2K10: The imaginary pullquote from an unwritten review of Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy, a book I failed to get around to talking about as much as I wanted to, but which I remain convinced is an excellent and frightening novel that I think everybody with a stake in the whole “being a part of human society” thing ought to take the time to read

Posted by Darby on Friday, December 31st, 2010 at 1:55 pm.

If I were to write a full review of Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy, this would probably be the pull quote:

What lingers, months after reading it, when the specific details have faded from memory, is a sense of lingering strangeness, an extension of the borders of the story past the point at which the premise ought to have split at the seams. Perhaps it was a trick, but it was a well-executed one, in that case, if it was, one that entertained and terrified at once with a depiction of lostness within stifling claustrophobia. Metropole is both a grand Kafkaesque metaphor for the alienating qualities of modern society and an effectively affective story of a waking nightmare.

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CORE DUMP Y2K10: 5937 words worth of unfinished blog posts, presented alphabetically, and coated with self-forgiveness

Posted by Darby on Friday, December 31st, 2010 at 1:47 pm.

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New Review at The Quarterly Conversation: Stephen Dixon, What Is All This?

Posted by Darby on Tuesday, December 7th, 2010 at 1:08 am.

The Winter 2011 (2011?) Quarterly Conversation is live. It includes my review of What Is All This?, the new Stephen Dixon short story collection. The review begins sort of like this, though you’ll have to go over there to see the footnotes (footnotes?):

What Is All This? is a potent, refreshing collection of previously uncollected short stories by Stephen Dixon. Though the music world might label this an “odds-and-sods” collection, this volume cannot be dismissed so lightly. This? is a book that reminds us fans why we enjoy Dixon’s writing and gives inquiring neophytes an excellent opportunity to sample the kinds of things he has gotten up to over the last five decades.

Any attempt to sum up Dixon as a writer would be a fool’s quest. So, allow me: he uses male narrators and a lot of dialogue and limited description and down-to-earth language, except when he doesn’t. His language can be transparent, translucent, opaque. His sentences can last for pages; three words alone can knock you out of your chair. He avoids grand statements and shuns the workshopped sheen of the parabolic arc, preferring instead straight lines or scribbles, action that bleeds off the edges or compresses all into boxes of black ink. Sometimes he shatters frames and builds new things from the slivers. Sometimes, his stories are simply stories. To put his work in context, the back flap author bio has it that Dixon grew up reading Joyce, Hemingway, and Kafka. Fair enough: his work reads like each filtered through the rest.

Also, timing is everything, I suppose? The December 2010 issue of Bookslut includes a lengthy, excellent interview with Stephen Dixon (not by me). The money quote comes down at the bottom and gives me the chills:

You have been working on a novel, His Wife Leaves Him, for the last four to five years. How would you best describe the scope and scale of this epic length work-in-progress?

I’m not quite sure. It’s definitely my most emotional work as well as, perhaps, being my funniest. It might also be my most adventurous structurally, and also the cleanest and clearest writing I’ve ever done. It’s also my most elegiac. I’ve never been so satisfied with a work, which is why it’s so difficult to complete. I don’t want to let it go, but it’s told me recently I have to — that I’ve come to the perfect finish — and anything beyond what I’ve planned as the ending will hurt the book.

Today’s November 15. I’d say that by December 1, the novel will be done. It won’t reach 900 pages, but it’ll be close.

Uhm. Yes. Please.

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Aw heck

Posted by Darby on Sunday, November 14th, 2010 at 2:27 pm.

And for my next trick, I’ll be teaching a master class in how not to blog.

Anyway, I’m avoiding another project right now, long enough to say that I read all those books I said I was going to read, and I haven’t said much of anything because if you don’t have anything nice to say, avoid blogging about it for two months? Well, not that I have nothing nice to say, more like, I have nice things to say, but I mostly have not nice things to say, and I didn’t really think anyone would mind if I opted not to rant off like a total jerkface for a while. Because do you really need a long post by some guy with a blog talking about how he’s sort of not that crazy about Freedom by Jonathan Franzen and about how he pretty much completely disliked Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas, a book that may have single handedly killed all joy our humble narrator may have once taken in self-indulgent meta-fiction? Both of which are true things I could say about my recent reading experiences? Yeah, things got a little dark and despair-ridden there, so, you know, best to duck and cover until the nuclear wave of ugh passed by. Or something. How does this work again?

I do still have some good books I want to talk about before the year is up, like Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy, which, do us both a favor and just read it and help me avoid the embarrassment of not having told you to read it sooner, yes? And other books from this year. And stuff.

And, uh, yeah. I’ve also got a review coming out sometime soon. That’s for a book I liked. Get excited.

Plus, you know. Dostoevsky.

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Immortality; or, 2006 is my Independence Day

Posted by Darby on Thursday, September 16th, 2010 at 8:11 pm.

Editor’s note: the following post is kind of jumping the gun, a bit, but it’s also kind of becoming quickly out of date, as well; it’s a little paradoxical. There’s more books from earlier this year yet to be discussed and a book from right now that is in the process of being discussed but since time marches on (time is no man’s Elizabeth!) this post is going out now, whatever warts may remain upon its fair skin. This post will also require a sort of explanatory follow-up post, which will follow in either timely or untimely fashion. Or not at all. Professionalism.

–

There are a lot of books out there. Think about it too much, you’ll drive yourself bananas. Limited resources and all. One pair of eyes. The preciousness of each spare moment. Having a lifespan.

Me, I try not to think about it too much.

By which I mean I think about it constantly.

It’s sick.

This is one reason I resist setting myself up with reading lists. Strict lists fill time and have ends and remind me of my own mortality.

I do not enjoy contemplating the immediacy of my mortality.

So, instead, immortal, I bounce. I pick up whatever looks good, next. Sometimes I know a book or two out what’s coming next. Sometimes not. I have ideas, I have moods, I have goals. I have huge piles of books to read, but they’re more quantum mechanical than classical, less propositional logic, more chaos theory.

This usually serves me well. The good books coalesce and I get dizzy because everything is awesome. Other times, the system crashes. Everything sucks. I quit reading. I wash dishes. I update my iPod. I contemplate my career. As scary as that can get (maybe tonight I will update my resume? that sounds like fun?) I always bounce back and my brain fizzes and the plates pile back up in the sink, where they belong.

The iPod still gets updated. But that’s another story.

I think I mentioned in an earlier post that I could see a path filling the rest of this year, constructing itself out of the books that I need to read like whoa. This would typically bother me the way hitting the seventh hour of a nine hour road trip bothers me. When the odometer becomes more interesting than the sights. Checkboxes, checked.

The problem is, right now? This Summer of Dostoevsky ’06 project isn’t going to finish itself.

Since I started this project, a couple weeks ago, I have had one goal: to read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s five big novels, beginning with rereads of Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, before moving on to reading Demons and The Adolescent each for the first time, after which I would finish with a reread of The Brothers Karamazov.

Karamazov is a book I was assigned at the end of high school. I read most of it, those final weeks of youth. I loved it. Reading it probably helped get me on the path to being wherever I am today. Thanks for nothing, Dostoevsky!

Honestly though, sincerely: I’m terrified of it. Rereading it. What if it sucks? What if my tastes changed? Maybe the new translation blows. I might wind up questioning every decision I’ve ever made. I might have to quit.

I might have to become an economic theorist.

And yet, though this book could be the frozen donkey wheel at the bottom of the unexplainable pit that spews golden light out from underneath my life, the turning of which will send me spiraling through space and time on paths that could literally break my brain, I know, in my gut, as a true hero must, that we have to go back.

Well: I do. You keep doing your own thing. Unless you want to go back with me. That’s cool, too.

I’ve put going back off for a good long while now. (Sort of like growing up.) For the last fifty or sixty or two hundred books or so (ask my girlfriend how many times I’ve brought it up by now) (actually, don’t) Karamazov has been the book I have been just about to get to one or two more books from now. Each book or two had a habit of turning into another book or two, though. It’s been the perpetual priority number one at the top of the metaphorical office white board alongside all the other priority number ones of the moment. The hour. The month. The month after that.

The Kindle did not exist, when I began this project.

Now, today, here, with the coffee table stack sitting at the same height for months now, books filling gaps faster than the stack can shrink, a never-ending list of old fat books I need to read next wrapping around the apartment like a noose, books by authors who I will buy in hardcover coming out left and right, books by authors I would not buy in hardcover that I got interested in when they were first out in hardcover finally starting to come out in paperback, the weight of unavoidable mortality becoming itself more unavoidable each passing day, and Dostoevsky, all the while, sitting, patiently, waiting his turn, something has to give.

Business time demands it be gotten down to.

So: a set list.

The gates are now closed, for a while, and 2006 and 2010 are mashing like ham and eggs in an antimatter omelette, and things are going to run something like this: a seven book rock-block of gotta-dos, curious-enough-to-dos, have-meant-to-dos, and why-not-dos, in no particular order.

  • Two books by Hans Keilson: The Death of the Adversary and Comedy in a Minor Key. See, this is the problem: I don’t read as much as I once might have and I don’t read that fast and now I’m trying to do reviews a little more often so when I look at the book shelves and I see all the books I should be reading and might read and could read next that’s really where my focus should remain, with these decisions I’ve already decided I’ve made. But then Francine Prose comes along, whose novels I have been meh on but whose criticism I enjoy, and she praises something, and the next think I know, I own it. I’m pretty sure I ordered these two books in a fugue state of consumerist-driven suggestion. To be fair, Prose could have praised dirt and blood and I would have woken up with a bunch of it on my hands. At least they are slim numbers, this time out. And they do sound good.
  • Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen. There’s the hype. There’s the hoopla. There’s the complaining and there’s the gushing. And yet, there remains pure cause and effect: still, the simple fact that Franzen wrote a novel I have not read and another novel that I liked and another novel that I liked a lot, really liked a lot, and then he spent a long time writing his next novel, and now it is out, and I want to read it. And I’m going to read it. And I’m not going to feel bad about it. Even if it makes me a misogynist. Keyword Franzenfreude!
  • Our Tragic Universe, by Scarlett Thomas. I drove to the bookstore the day Freedom came out to buy a copy because I believe sometimes some things should happen when physical bodies manipulate physical objects with actual plastic debit cards. Perhaps someday I will end my resistance and I will stop fighting the future and have an e-reader surgically implanted into my metacortex and replace release day symbolism with drooling data downloadism and that will be fine because by then I intend to be dead of old age. Until then, I have my car and highway and bookstores and the deluded thrill of feeling like things matter for no other reason than because they might, like a book’s publication can match the opening day histrionics of movies made of explosions and fart jokes. When I picked up Freedom, the new Scarlett Thomas book was near it. I could not miss its garishly shiny cover, the design of which seems more appropriate to a young adult fantasy novel than whatever it is Thomas does, smartypants hipster lit or whatever. I don’t mind shiny, I guess, though, because despite having believed I’d have to wait for this one in paperback, I bought it on the spot.
  • The Dalkey Archive, by Flann O’Brien. I like Flann O’Brien. The Third Policeman freaked me out a little and At Swim-Two-Birds, well, I need to reread that one someday. But not this day, because The Dalkey Archive is up, largely because I really liked Omega Minor, by Paul Verhaegen, which was published by Dalkey Archive, and I’ve felt I’ve owed it to them ever since to read the book from which they took their name. This is what passes for logic in my world.
  • The Taker and Other Stories by Rubem Fonseca, translated by Clifford E. Landers. I don’t know a thing about this book other than it’s a quite thin short story collection and it’s endorsed by Thomas Pynchon. I’m sold, you know? Plus it was actually chucked up by an online recommendation engine, which, for once, actually suggested something I knew nothing about, something other than Jane Austen and Philip Roth, so I figured it’s worth a whirl. Plus, cool cover colors.
  • And then, The Brothers Karamazov. At last. At long, long last.

So, if you are a stalker who likes to play along at home (the bushes outside the apartment building), here’s a chance for you to grab a title or two from my stack—I mean that metaphorically, get your own copies, taking mine would defeat the purpose—so you can share your comments with me and I can share my comments with you and through such means as are available to us the dialogue will occur and the world will be a better place, my fellow immortal.

Also note that this means…well, I’ll tell you later, what to note that this means. (It’s mostly about 2011, which might as well just not even bother showing up to work, because it is fired though it has already quit? Question mark? Something.)

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New review at The Collagist: The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich

Posted by Darby on Wednesday, September 15th, 2010 at 7:06 pm.

The September 2010 issue of The Collagist is live. This one includes my review of The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich. The review begins like this:

This is less a final review and more the beginning of a reading of The Orange Eats Creeps, the strange, excellent debut novel by Grace Krilanovich. This is not intended to seem like a cop-out, but rather the only rational approach to discussing this unique work. The wealth of material at hand invites frantic acts of interpretation, making the reader an active collaborator in creating the story, even as it resists giving in to easy—or hard-won—conclusions. It is a slippery novel. It will never lay still and compromising in your hands, but the harder you hold on to it, the harder it is to hold. In confounding, it rewards: to borrow a line from the book, “It’s only a problem if you make it one.”

Strange and excellent are the right words, I think, but also, I think I worry I haven’t quite yet done this book justice. So I’ll probably say more about it. But not yet! Meaning you have time to decide whether this might be a book you would like, and then to go get yourself a copy, and read it, and then share your thoughts about it via your thought-sharing means of choice! Yes?

(Also, incidentally, I’ve decided one of the really fun things about writing these reviews for real publications (which reviews are, to be fair, intrinsically “fun” to write less in the sense of “wow eating this ice cream for dinner sure is fun” and more in the sense of “wow this is an awful lot of work and my head hurts where I tore all the hair out and maybe I’ll go out for ice cream when I’m done but in the mean time, screw it, let’s go clean the bathtub”) is that you get to put all this effort into writing the damn thing, and then it’s done, and it kind of just goes away for a while, and you forget about it, until one day you show up and hey, there it is, like a magical gift you left in the corner long ago for yourself to find much later, and it’s like, hey, sweet: free content you can share with your friends and family to give your life that sheen of seeming like one that something is being done with. It’s a nice feeling. It’s entirely secondary to having the chance to tell a bunch of people whether or not they should read a book, though, of course.)

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Apologies, and a weird picture of a girl with a gun to her head

Posted by Darby on Tuesday, September 14th, 2010 at 11:20 pm.

No, the apologies are not for dissing Nobody Move, but for any recent issues you may have experienced reaching this blog. Something’s been failing, though it’s unclear what. Let me know via your favorite form of Internet magic if your quality of life is affected by these spotty outages.

Also, I apologize to anybody who has come to this blog recently, and failed to find a convenient archive of past posts. Creating an actual design for this place has been on the agenda since Day One. I am not good with agendas. In the meantime, at least the archive is up in the sidebar now, pinned to the loose drywall, covered in dust. You will find the first 5.25 years worth of posts over here; someday this, too, will be included in the sidebar. (Professionalism.)

Also, apropos of nothing, Haruki Murakami fans may want to look at this. Don’t expect to understand it. But, you knew that already.

In other news, there is more to come. (That I can say that with a straight face is not what is to come, though it is, itself, news.)

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Unkind thoughts about Nobody Move by Denis Johnson

Posted by Darby on Monday, September 13th, 2010 at 8:48 pm.

I dislike dismissing a toss-off B-side of a novel by a highly respected author, particularly an author with whom I have some excellent prior experience, but: come on, guys, this book blew. At least, it did, for me, when I read it as part of my post-Drowning Tucson pop-ish-lit rock block earlier this year. I suggest the context in which I read the book may have colored my attitude toward it, as this is the Johnson book that was originally written and serialized in Playboy part by part over the course of four months. Maybe it was more impressive, at the time, partaking in the feat of it, feeling a bit like you were part of something. But as a stand-alone book divorced from that context? Yikes. I understand it’s not air-quotes literary work, but as a book that failed to excite or entertain, as a book that was not much fun, it wound up being, for me, not much of anything. What really kills me looking back on it now is that I see a parallel between my situation, reading it at a time when I desperately needed something exciting and pleasurable to pick me back up, and Johnson’s situation, writing it when he was coming fresh off Tree of Smoke, his lauded Vietnam novel, which, though I have not read it, I suspect must been an intense and draining chore to write, a book I imagine an author would want to shake off a bit before moving on to the next serious project. That sort of parallel makes me think this should have been a match made in heaven, one book written with one reader in mind. No dice. Perhaps it was a release to write it but with such a highly unmemorable end product I can’t help but feel cheated out of my ten bucks. I loved Jesus’ Son and will read more of his work in the future, but for now, I wouldn’t mind reclaiming the hours I lost to this disposable, slight book.

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There is a book that hurt me and I had to get away from myself for a while

Posted by Darby on Sunday, September 12th, 2010 at 10:31 pm.

I. In which, dragons

Dragons.

II. In which, gradeschool

I did not get into fantasy when I was a kid. For my sensitive, developing tastes, fantasy was for nerds nerdier than me. Specifically, the kind that had friends who shared their interests and who were enough unaware of their own impossibly high levels of awkwardness that they were able to safely congregate and discuss their shared passion for rolling dice and casting freeze. Dorks.

I’ve watched some Party Down lately (pour one out) and it is fair to say that the Little Tiny Baby Darby who struggles to this day to remain alive and vocal inside my heart and mind and soul saw a handsome, grown-up version of himself in Roman, the insular, desperate, sad writer of hard science fiction. For me, as for Roman, fantasy never felt serious, as a kid cutting my teeth on Arthur C. Clarke and David Brin and Larry Niven. Ignore the fact that I liked epic books featuring hyper-intelligent talking dolphins; the hypothetical science behind them trumped orcs any day.

My experience with fantasy remained limited for a long time. I read, airquotes, The Hobbit for a high school assignment, my Freshman year. I don’t remember it well. I didn’t know that books could matter in a way that they had up to that point not yet mattered. Plus it felt dull and singsongy and bleah, little tiny people looking for treasure. I didn’t even read The Lord of the Rings until after I saw all the movies, four years ago.

Fact is, I was probably enough of a social and emotional wreck growing up (why yes, I say out loud again in my head, to the popular blonde girl sitting in front of me in eighth grade religion class the one time I can recall her ever saying a word to me, that I am indeed using my free time to read a 700 page novel about a black hole falling into the earth’s core, and yes, in fact, I say to you again from the distance of decades, I will feel a horrifyingly squirmy, painful feeling in my gut 20 years later when, as a fully grown adult, this memory rushes back to the surface, unbidden and covered in razor blades, in the course of drafting a largely futile blog post about how books can hurt as much as memories do) that I suspect that if I’d started reading fantasy novels in grade school, high school, whatever, I’d probably still be trying to figure out what’s so good about penises and vaginas. I intend no offense to fantasy nerds. I believe it took me long enough as is to figure these things out. And how they related to alternate universe theories. It’s just, I mean, I know what kind of kid I was, and however cool we all are with basically whatever in our adulthood when we have all set aside our childish ways and can speak rationally to each other about most any topic under the sun (hint: we are basically not all cool at all with anything in our adulthood, and will cut your face if you think otherwise) I know that it’s probably by the grace of a few ellipses in my reading lists that I got past high school and into a semi-functional adulthood, one that does not involve Magic: The Gathering cards and being in jail.

But now I am an adult and I pay the rent and I spend a lot of time at a day job doing day job things and I am not in fact ruling the world and making the popular kids work for me the way everybody said would happen by now (the nerds, in fact, have not grown to inherit the earth, whatever the marketing literature might suggest) and now I know with a heightened sense of precision how literature can do more than entertain and enlighten–it can take us the hell out of here. And not just off this planet with cardboard-cutout friends on ships constructed from hard scientific theory, but out of this time completely, to fantastical places, in pain is noble and elf chicks are hot and dragons are cool, in a totally healthy, socially acceptable sort of way, so long as you pretty much keep that business to yourself when you’re in the wrong company, which is about a thousand percent of the rest of the people on this planet. With purposelessness, comes great purpose.

In short, me and fantasy, we’re chill, these days.

Chill enough, at least.

Depending on who’s asking.

III. In which, hurts

As I’ve mentioned a couple times now, I read and reviewed this book, Drowning Tucson, by Aaron Michael Morales. I said in my review that the book hurt, and that it’s a sort of personal hurt; I compared the book to a number of books, but I think it is, still to this day a little bit to my own surprise, The Chocolate War, a wicked young adult novel by Robert Cormier, that might be the one that ultimately most well defined this type of hurt for me. And so early in life. I talk a bit about rigged, unfair systems in my review of Drowning Tucson, the notion that there are things that must be wrong for the world to work the way it does. Which is nice and all, a nice enough depiction of the source of the pain these kinds of books wreck me with, but I’m not sure I adequately communicated the intensity of the pain that comes to me from reading these kinds of books, the feeling of wanting to throw a beautiful, brilliant book across the room and cry and scream at it like a psychopath after turning the last page, like an unwilling accomplice, the anguished feeling of being dissolved into something that can’t be true, it can’t, but maybe it is, maybe, and screw you, author, you asshole, for having the skills needed to drag me through it in such a magnificent manner, for being able to make me need to turn pages even as I hate the thought of knowing what comes next. It’s the sick feeling of having lived dangerously without ever leaving a chair, the terrifying feeling of waking up in the middle of the night and knowing the monsters are real, the gut-sucking depth of lightlessness made real, the horror of being human and knowing no way out but the worst way out there is. It is unfair. It is unfair. It is unfair.

It is unfair.

IV. In which, pop

After finishing the Morales book, and having to spend some more time with it, in order to draft that review of it—which was a hard review to write, probably the hardest review I’ve done yet, in so far as it required deeper analysis of a thing I was both a fan of and largely mortified by—there came a point shortly after when I knew I was done. The weighty stuff and me, we needed to cool off, get away from each other for a bit, attend to our separate affairs. I needed to have some fun. Or at least to find some pages of stories with which I could soak up the sweat that clung to the brow of my brain. Quick reads, long reads, whatever. Just don’t make me feel anything but pretty much okay.

So I went on a pop-lit-ish bender in the middle of this year. The problem with reading pop-ish-lit for me these days is that it seems like I’ve passed some kind of point which makes it harder and harder for me to enjoy disposable books. Like, my snappy fun books need to massage the literary-addicted portion of my brain at least a little bit. Or maybe it’s just a general reading malaise that leads me to get really bored and antsy and annoyed far too fast with any book that isn’t cooking for me past page 50; I’ve quit more books (literary or otherwise) in the last two years than I did in the previous thirty. When the going isn’t going and I stop wanting to read and I start wanting to not read, it’s all bad, all around. So it’s hard to want to read something that’s just enjoyable but not, like, in a really brain-working way; I need at least the right amount of verbal window dressing on my story to make me want to stick with it. It’s probably the sort of thing that leads fancy restaurants to do fancy versions of diner grub, like some kind of olive branch held out to ideologically simpler times or ways of life, even though we all know we can all see past the French words to the fact that you’re a still a have even as you’re eating a burger and fries.

To put it simply, it is with the greatest trepidation anymore that I attempt to give myself permission to have pure fun when I read. I felt my experiment with it this year was met with mixed results. In the end, the job got done, and it got done pretty much well enough, though I suspect in more of a remission-of-symptoms way than a cure-to-the-cause way.

There’s a couple other books involved here that I might go into in another post, but I wanted to take some time in this post to discuss my strange, growing, and largely confusing interest in dragons.

V. In which, discussed

I really do not understand my strange, growing, and largely confusing interest in dragons.

VI. In which, books

I read two dragon books this year. I liked them both, well enough, and would suggest they both contributed well to a rejuvenation of the part of my brain that wants to read good books that might wind up hurting me emotionally; it is probably terribly belittling of me to suggest these books acted as a mental vacation for me, which isn’t really what I’m trying to say, even as I’m pretty much flat out saying it? Whatever, there’s Jane Austen, and then there’s Jane Austen fan fiction, and if pointing that fact out makes me sound like a snooty jerk, then at least let me buy you a burger and a beer before you tell me so to my face.

From another perspective, both of the dragon books I read this year are the first books in their respective series—because it is intrinsic to the genre of dragon literature that dragon books exist in series form, because who wants to read just one book about a dragon when you can read multiple books about a dragon?—and both respective series are series I might continue to purchase books from with the money I earn as an adult, books which I might read in the time I spend pretending I am not an adult. Though, to be fair, it will probably not be any time soon that I return to these fantasy worlds, because if one of the books I have lined up to read between now and the end of the year completely screws me up, then I’m going to quit reading forever, because I can not handle two books like that in a single year.

The first dragon book I read this year was A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin which I am certain is bringing quite a smile to the faces of all of the dragon-book fans in this blog’s audience because HA HA HA SPOILER ALERT THERE ARE NO DRAGONS IN THIS BOOK. Well, I mean, and again, spoiler alert, there is dragon birth on the closing page, which, okay, fine, maybe the rest of the books in this series (which is not complete and according to all the Internet rumors I have read will not be complete until Cleveland gets a championship sports team around the day after never) feature dragons on every single page doing totally sweet dragon things like eating people and posing for prog-rock album covers (I really do not understand my strange, growing, and largely confusing interest in dragons) but you may continue to color me doubtful until proven otherwise.

To be fair, and to touch on two points at once, while I have just acted like a total spoiler alert jerk, which is the kind of jerk I usually do my darned best to not be, preferring instead to be the kind of jerk who splits infinitives, I think it is only fair to allow those curious readers who might use my blog to gauge whether or not a book I have read is one they might want to read a quick glimpse of the sort of thing that they would be getting themselves into with this book, as, if you are like me, and you walk into it expecting mind-numbing, pleasure-center-tickling, hardcore dragon action, you are going to need to get past your (my) (highly irrational) (and largely confusing) desire to read about flying lizards that shoot fire out of their noses, because the actual book that I actually did read was, actually, sort of a little hey-not-so-bad to bordering-on-being-kind-of-bad-ass? I mean, for a politically charged fantasy novel in which there’s pretty much little to zero sparkle magic, it engaged me, once I came back to the book after I quit it, because I did actually start reading it earlier in the year only to give up after about 200 pages, when I realized it was not in fact delivering the dragon-fueled dragon-orgy for which I felt such a (desperate and alarming) desire. But then the Morales book happened and suddenly Thrones had this shiny halo of awesome glowing around it and, well, it happened, and I mostly liked it, even if I got annoyed by it, when it made me feel things, like when that one thing happened that I’m totally not going to spoil for you but which let’s just say whoa.

The other dragon book I read, His Majesty’s Dragon, by Naomi Novik, had dragons in it doing cool dragon things. Pure win.

It’s a book I got interested in a while ago (incidentally, it seems like every time I look up the reference for a historical-in-my-life note on the blog, it comes up 2006; what’s up with that?) and have sort of kind of somewhat meant to get around to for a while now, and then the Morales thing happened, and I was at the book store within 12 hours buying genre books because I needed them more than a whiskey-and-heroin cocktail because life is hard.

His Majesty’s Dragon (which is kind enough to state its dragonocity right there in the title) sets a dragon story in the specific historical context of the Napoleonic Wars and it did a pretty good job of being what I wanted it to be, even if Novik has an unfortunate tendency to use the word “very” a lot, which is a terrible word to use more than once in your life, ever, historical setting or not. Also, to be fair, I could deal with moderately less chatty dragons, as everybody (nearly nobody) knows dragons are far more interesting when they are tearing people in half with their fifty-foot-long claws while standing on mountains with their wings spread wide and explosions and hot naked elf girls, but I suspect that’s the sort of thing that’s more interesting in theory than practice or maybe I’m just programmed wrong.

VII. In which, monsters

Still: the monsters are real.

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Belated thoughts on A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan; also, an awkward slap at a possibly awkward bit of kerning

Posted by Darby on Thursday, September 9th, 2010 at 8:06 pm.

I’m looking at the small stack of books I’ve read this year, and I’m realizing, I’ve really done a piss poor job of it, this year, of talking about these things–and I apologize for that; not sure where the time went, not sure what I’ve been doing with it. Well, okay, work and school and life, yes, all that, and, a general antipathy toward writing? Something. Not an antipathy. A sense of distraction, a mood of displacement. I’m shaking myself out of it. A little bit here, a little bit there. (What’s it like, to simply like a thing, and then do it a lot?)

What bugs me most is that even as I spend a significant amount of time working with a few specific books (such as Drowning Tucson, just to toss an example out there), other books, like A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, really get the short shrift. Here’s an author I really like who has written a book that I really like and by the time I get around to talking about it, what’s there for me to remember to say? I don’t know. I don’t remember. Articulating the source of my enjoyment now is sort of a challenge. I remember as much that I liked this book a good deal, more than I liked The Keep, which I liked, less than I liked Look at Me, which, of course, I enjoyed whole-heartedly, though, what? My girlfriend finally read Look at Me this year; she liked it but was not clear on why I loved it. I really must add that book to the stack of books I need to re-read sooner rather than later, so I can better say today why I liked it yesterday, or however many years ago yesterday was. Which is of course what I said when I read The Keep, so…fuck.

What I can say is that I feel like this is sort of Egan’s freak-out novel, a novel that really isn’t a novel, a formal exploration that itches at the constraints of what it is to be a novel today. It’s the frames of The Keep, cracked over the knee, and scattered at the feet. It’s a book that questions the point where novels and stories intersect, without looking to make any bold claims, or really even any claims at all. It just is what it is and it doesn’t look to excuse itself. My ARC, I don’t see it classifying itself anywhere in print as either a novel or as a story collection which is about as it should be, this unclassifiedness–though, to be fair, I’d call it more of a novel than Drowning Tucson, which, well, really simply was not a novel at all. But this book, Goon Squad, isn’t a novel, either, per se, itself. It’s something else. It’s a bit ragged, cast on fine strands that think of themselves as ropes. It’s really more fun for it.

Kerning. Serious Business.

Kerning. Serious Business.

(Also, speaking of the differences between ARCs and official copies–this whole getting-books-before-they-are-books thing being still kind of new and fascinating to me and being something that really doesn’t even happen that much, not a billionth as much as it happens for others, I mean–I’d like to ask if maybe someone with an official copy of Goon Squad and an eye for kerning can tell me if the word “From” on the cover is, uhm, doing it wrong? Anyone? I mean, I know I haven’t been put through quite enough design bootcamp yet to get to be a real dillhole about it, or maybe it’s just some inherent latter-day humility or something, the feeling like I’ve crumbed up enough of the stuff I’m supposed to be good at that to speak with any sense of emphasis about things I’m not supposed to be good at would be really like begging for a slap to the face, but, whatever, either way, yow; where’s that O going? Up, up, and oway, you big fat black hole I can’t help but stare at now, now that I’ve noticed how awkwardly you want not to join the party, R over there making out with F, M pretty much trying to go as far from you as it can. Ahem. Or maybe I’m way wrong. Anyway.)

PowerPoint. Serious Business.

PowerPoint. Serious Business.

Anyway. The reactions I’ve tracked on the book have been mixed, from all out “boo” to “ehhh” to “cautious yeh,” which I pretty much understand. If I rave about the book and talk about it being the novel in which Egan sort of freaks out for a while, and if you hear that yes there is in fact an entire chapter set as a PowerPoint presentation (which really is pretty well done and sort of awesome in its way), I can totally understand if you expect the book to be absolutely transformative, a work of art for all eras. Expectations boosted, and all. And truth is it’s not that good. I can get that someone might find it fluffy, disposable–there’s portions I recall dragging for me a bit, here and there, though not enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth, not enough for me to say I less than really liked the book. Again, of course, if this was a couple months ago, I might be able to offer a better defense or deconstruction of my defense, but I’ll leave it for now as, yeah, not for everybody.

That said, what I’ll say is this: I think Egan’s got a White Noise in her, or go ahead and pick a big novel of your choice that isn’t actually big. Maybe Goon Squad is actually it, and I’m just secretly hoping it isn’t so I can still have yet the best to wait for. Maybe not. Either way, I’m having fun coming along for the ride and I’m looking forward to seeing where she goes next.

But, in the meantime, if you’ve read Goon Squad, and you think I’m a jerk for liking it, let me know in the comments. If enough people call me a jerk, I’ll have to do something about something else I’m going to talk about in a bit (or in more than a bit) so I can get myself on firmer ground from which to call you jerks right back. Or you could tell me I’m right for liking it. I’m not going to judge.

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