Richard Dawkins The God Delusion

So Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is #4 on Amazon.com right now and #8 on the New York Times Bestseller list. His shill is simple: Belief in God is irrational and religion has caused irreparable damage to society. Unfortunately, his ideas are a bit too simple. Marilynne Robinson, in an essay in the November issue of Harper’s, thoroughly dismantles the idea that Dawkins possesses even an undergraduate-level grasp of logic. Her review can be found here, and please, please, do your critical reasoning skills a favor and read her critique before you make the mistake of purchasing his book.
Or, here for a similarly scathing review by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books.

Labels: Marilynne Robinson, Richard Dawkins

Mix Tape #4

An irony, of course, was that as soon as he’d surrendered – possibly as soon as he’d confessed to his depression, almost certainly by the time he showed her his hand and she put a proper bandage on it, and absolutely no later than the moment at which, with a locomotive as long and hard and heavy as an O-gauge model railroad engine, he tunneled up into wet and gently corrugated recesses that even after twenty years of traveling through them still felt unexplored (his approach was spoon-style, from behind, so that Caroline could keep her lower back arched outward and he could harmlessly drape his bandaged hand across her flank; the screwing wounded, the two of them were) – he not only no longer felt depressed, he felt euphoric.

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

Inside the back room, the woman has crawled out from underneath the man. Now fuck me like a dog she tells him. She grips a pillow in her fists and he breathes behind her, hot air down her back which is starting to sweat and slip on his stomach. She doesn’t want him to see her face because it is blowing up inside, red and furious, and she’s grimacing at the pale white wall which is cool when she puts her hand on it to help her push back into him, get his dick to fill up her body until there’s nothing left of her inside: just dick.

Aimee Bender, “Quiet Please”, in Girl in the Flammable Skirt

But once I’d gotten him to speak out on the open water, once I’d heard our story in his words, there’d been in me my own desire for this, so that as I lifted my skirts to him, helped him myself with his jeans buttons and gently lifted the suspenders off his shoulders, then felt him inside me for the first time in all that while, there rose in me the low moans, the sounds I’d heard our first night together in a hotel in Hattiesburg. There rose up around us the ghosts of my momma and daddy, the sounds they two made, and I couldn’t help but remember our wedding night, couldn’t help but recall the fear I’d felt, the trembling I’d made at his touch, the two of us finally alone. He’d been seated on the edge of the bed, me standing before him, and he undressed me with careful hands, my dress taking months to find its way free of buttons and clasps, his big hands fumbling, trembling of their own. He was young then, only a boy, me only a girl, our bodies new and unexplained, and when finally my dress fell away from around me, and then my petticoats and slip and underclothes, he’d leaned back, taking me in with his eyes. And then I undressed him, and we started in on the long and beautiful task of learning each other.

Bret Lott, Jewel

Labels: Mix Tape

The Road of Cormac McCarthy

So I just finished McCarthy’s The Road last night. I didn’t mean to finish it last night, I meant to start it, but by midnight I was convinced that it was good enough to lose sleep over. And the rest of the book certainly didn’t disappoint. Here’s a few bullet-pointed thoughts:

• The most common dialogue between the son and father is “okay.” Rather ironic for such a hauntingly dark postapocalyptic tale.
• The book’s obsession with food – missing it, finding it, describing it, eating it – turns every meal into a sacramental act, laden with the symbolism of memory and love.
• What is most intriguing about this novel is not what is included, but what is excluded – McCarthy writes with enviable restraint. In a lesser novelist’s hands, it would have doubled in size to include much more backstory, internals, and explanation of the plague.
• The religious element is pronounced – both anger towards God and the child associating his father with God – but mainly at the beginning and end of the novel. God is slipped in subtly in the middle – as curses referencing Christ or as references to Job: “Curse God and die.”

The story is told in fragments, and here’s an excerpt:

There was a skylight about a third of the way down the roof and he made his way to it in a walking crouch. The cover was gone and the inside of the trailer smelled of wet plywood and that sour smell he’d come to know. He had a magazine in his hip pocket and he took it out and tore some pages from it and wadded them and got out his lighter and lit the papers and dropped them into the darkness. A faint whooshing. He wafted away the smoke and looked down into the trailer. The small fire burning in the floor seemed a long way down. He shielded the glare of it with his hand and when he did he could see almost to the rear of the box. Human bodies. Sprawled in every attitude. Dried and shrunken in their rotten clothes. The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.

Labels: Cormac McCarthy

Twilight of the Superheroes: Deborah Eisenberg

In Deborah Eisenberg’s latest collection of short stories, Twilight of the Superheroes, the reader is always catching up. In more than half of the stories she starts by throwing you in the middle of a scene, sometimes by way of a line of dialogue, and introducing three or more characters in the first sentence or two. For instance, she starts Revenge of the Dinosaurs with five characters:

Hi, Barbara, I said. You’re Barbara?
Eileen, said the nurse who answered the door. Nights.
I’m the granddaughter,” I said.
I figured, Eileen said. Barbara told me you’d be showing up. So where’s that handsome brother of yours?
Bill? I said, I beat Bill? That’s a first.

Or this opening for Like it or Not:

Kate would have a little tour of the coast, Giovanna would have the satisfaction of having provided an excursion for her American houseguest without having to interrupt her own work, and the man whom everyone called Harry would have the pleasure, as Giovanna put it, of Kate’s company: demonstrably a good thing for all concerned.

By the time you’ve unraveled the relational matrix of the original characters, Eisenberg has sped off to fill in back story, to add two or three more names to the many-spoked wheel of relatives and friends, and to ruminate on generational responsibilities (Flaw in the Design) or political repercussions (Twilight of the Superheroes). If you believe, somewhere in the middle, you have finally caught up, there will be a POV shift or flashback to stagger and surprise. If this disorientation of the reader were all she offered, Eisenberg would merely be a difficult writer, not necessarily a talented one. But she ensures that by the end of her stories, you have caught up, which makes the endings resonate.

Although her endings certainly aren’t a neat bowtie. In Window, a woman moves in with a man who has a small child. When the man becomes abusive, she runs away, kidnapping his child, yet the ending forecasts nothing – whether she gets away with it, where she’s going. In Like it or Not, Kate is taken (not entirely willingly) on a sight seeing tour with Harry, but the climax doesn’t even involve her. And it ends on a soft note, which does not wrap up the story as much as it simply portrays the end of an emotionally heightened span of time in her life. With stories this long, you would expect endings to make it towards the pot-of-gold side of the narrative rainbow, to reveal a twist or character turn. But they don’t. These endings don’t cater to plot, they cater to the emotional states of the characters, nipping at a sensitive region of a character’s motivations or state of mind, commenting in an elliptical way on the essence of their internal struggles.

For example, look at the end of The Flaw in the Design, a story about a disgruntled son who blames his father for the corporate greed ruining the earth, told from the perspective of the wife who has an affair. This last paragraph shows the scene just before the first paragraph, on how they came to be having an affair:

We had taken the taxi, had stood at the desk; we had done it – the thought kept tumbling over me like pealing bells as we rose up in the elevator, our hands lightly clasped. And we were solemn, and so happy, or at least I was, as we entered our room, the beautiful room that we might as well have been the first people ever to see – elated as if by some solution, when just minutes before we’d been on the metro platform, clinging fiercely, as if before a decisive separation, the way lovers do in wartime.

Between the beginnings and endings, these six stories are extremely long, although that isn’t a criticism. It’s just that they are longer than what is conventionally expected for short stories, which means they are in the no-mans-land between short stories and novellas. In this space Eisenberg still fleshes out remarkably complete human beings, welts, warts and all. Her characters often belong to the jet-set demographic, trafficking in the exclusive regions of the country, like plush lofts in Manhattan or sight-seeing along unnamed coasts. They often are disenfranchised – from their families, from knowledge of themselves, from hope. Bearing names like Giovanna, Matsumoto, Lucien and Alma, they seem to have their complete histories and futures implied inside a few scenes, a few bits of dialogue. In Some Other, Better Otto, the protagonist Otto is a gay musician and grammar nazi who cares for a sister so brilliant she had an episode and was institutionalized, and interacts with a little girl, Portia, who refuses to talk except to the microphone of her fist. Add in six or seven additional personas with character tags of their own, as well as a thanksgiving dinner, and you have an inter-relational maelstrom of delightful proportions.

It was challenging to wrap my head around these stories. They are difficult, but that is their virtue. These are the type of stories you must read at least twice: once just to get abreast of their accomplishment, the second time to try to unravel. To truly give them justice, they deserve many more readings than that.

Labels: Deborah Eisenberg

Janet Fitch Reading in LA

Despite that Paint it Black is a book with suicide at its center, the talk at the Los Angeles Central Library was refreshingly funny. Rachel Resnick kept it light by cracking jokes and by her repertoire of hyperbolic expressions (laughing face, shocked face, impressed face). Janet Fitch was composed, thoughtful, wearing a black leather skirt with high heels, and her mother and father were there to support her (her mother was listed as “Mother Fitch” on the reservations list). Other than an audience member that demanded to know whether White Oleander was based on Fitch’s relationship with her mother and subsequently inquired about her marital status, the night went smoothly. Here were some of my favorite quotes from Fitch during the evening.

On developing characters:
“I am a very ear-driven writer; I hear a character before I see them.”

On the order of writing:
“Plot comes last. Hearing the character comes first. The ending is also last because the ending is what shapes the meaning.”

On how just-published writers claim not to have unpublished books in the drawer:
[pantomimed a growing nose] “That’s just a crock.”

On her inspiration for depressing tales:
“You don’t get to decide the substance of your creative source. I just seem to have come from a dark place. When I was young, my brother would read me Edgar Allen Poe. So I didn’t sleep from when I was six until I was twelve.”

On making suicide realistic:
“One thing I did was to go to web sites for bereaved people every day or two, to remind myself, this is happening right now and I need to get it right.”

On how she picked a type of suicide for her character Michael:
“I really went through the metaphorical connotations of suicide: someone who takes pills wants to sleep. Someone who hangs themselves is suspended. Someone who drowns wanted to drown themselves. Michael – with profound self-hatred, and because he’s an intellectual – shoots himself in the head.”

On having a moral obligation to her readers:
“How do you reconnect people to the entire range of human possibility? They want to play happy all the time and when they feel something else they feel like they’re doing something wrong. So we need the whole range of human emotion. My moral obligation is to reconnect people with being human.”

Labels: Janet Fitch, Reading

(Not) The Best Christian Short Stories: Bret Lott, Editor

I kind of liked some aspects of Bret Lott’s Jewel (the lyrical voice, the emotional connection to the characters), so when I saw he had edited a collection, I decided to give it a try. The title made me wonder if anyone was creating good literary works that dealt with transcendent themes, but Lott terrible selections responded with a resounding no. What he promises, in the introduction, is literary fiction. What we get is half-craft moralistic fluff. Why is it that so many religious authors resort to the moralistic fable? Why is it that they refuse to make characters actually do something evil? (unless they are roundly punished in the end) What can’t they curse like real human beings? (saying that a character said a word beginning with “D” and ending with “it”, is not, as one of these authors assumes, transgressive) Where are the Flannery O’Connors of today?

In fact, Lott picked such horrible selections (on some of these, the prose sounds like something straight from a young adult series) that it made me wonder whether the publisher wanted only to capture the evangelical market, rather than anyone who is near literate. The answer did lie in the publisher: WestBow is a publisher for “Christian” novels, which means they did want him to select goodie-goodie stories free of any nasty elements that might ruffle conservative feathers. Westbow even sponsored the contest that one of the included stories won, for which they promised a book contract. The question then is why Lott would agree to put his name on a collection like this – perhaps his taste is not quite as good as it seems. In the end, I guess to get a real anthology of Christian stories, you need a secular publisher to publish it.

Labels: Bret Lott

Joyce Carol Oates: Landfill

So Joyce Carol Oates based her fictional story Landfill, published in the October 9th issue of the New Yorker, on the real-life death of a student attending The College of New Jersey (TCNJ). So what? Professors at TCNJ have flamebroiled her with charges that she felt no pain in reawakening the trauma of the family. Regina Kene wrote in an email to Oates: “You so flimsily disguised the true College of New Jersey story upon which your fictionalized account is based, and used your imagination so cruelly, that it can only add to the overwhelming pain the [Fiocco] family has already suffered.” She added in a later interview: “It could not do anything but bring back horrible memories.” So Regina, do you read much fiction? I’m guessing not, because you teach for the department of sociology and anthropology and publish articles with titles like: “The Colored, Eco-Genetic Relationship Map (CEGRM): A Conceptual Approach and Tool for Genetic Counseling Research.” Which leads me to believe you’re sincerely concerned about the condition of this poor family in your community, but perhaps you’ve maybe missed all the recent fiction books about 9/11 (check out six novels about 9/11 here). You’d think books like that could bring “bring back some horrible memories.” But maybe you’d like to condemn all those too.

Of course, JCO doesn’t escape all blame. The problem is not that she used her imagination cruelly, just that she didn’t use it enough. Her defense of herself is likewise pitiful: “Most of my short fiction appears in literary magazines like Virginia Quarterly Review, Yale Review, Conjunctions, etc., which are read by a small and exclusively literary audience,” she said. “If the story had appeared in one of these, it would have passed unnoticed.” Oh, so it’s just if someone finds out and gets angry? Great ethical reasoning; your attempt to preserve public image will surely win you the Nobel. The worst response from JCO came from an email she sent to the Associated Press just after the affair broke, in which she compared the school’s criticism to the Muslim fundamentalists who issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his “The Satanic Verses.” Sorry Oates, but there might be a few small differences here. You hardly have to hide in safehouses for the next decade. You don’t have the federal government demanding an apology to release international tension. You aren’t fearful for your LIFE.

Although, on the whole Oates is right about this. She should be able to take a real-life event and fictionalize it, even if a few people who see the connections get miffed.

Labels: Joyce Carol Oates

Mix Tape #3

On offering to help the blind man, the man who then stole his car, had not, at that precise moment, had any evil intention, quite the contrary, what he did was nothing more than to obey those feelings of generosity and altruism which, as everyone knows, are the two best traits of human nature and to be found in much more hardened criminals than this one, a simple car-thief without any hope of advancing in his profession, exploited by the real owners of this enterprise, for it is they who take advantage of the needs of the poor. When all is said and done, there is not all that much difference between helping a blind man only to rob him afterwards and looking after some tottering and stammering old person with one eye on the inheritance. It was only when he got close to the blind man’s home that the idea came to him quite naturally, precisely, one might say, as if he had decided to buy a lottery ticket on catching sight of a ticket-vendor, he had no hunch, he bought the ticket to see what might come of it, resigned in advance to whatever capricious fortune might bring, something or nothing, others would say that he acted according to a conditioned reflex of his personality.

Jose Saramago, Blindness

The next day Slater did not answer his telephone and I became concerned that he really might have died. Then, on the off-chance, I checked with the desk and discovered he and his luggage had departed the hotel. No message. Just gone. ¶ I immediately felt like someone who has been passionately seduced, fucked, and abandoned. This is not a pleasant feeling at the best of times and all my old animus against Slater came surging back. I was far too angry to read and far too agitated to sleep, and this was how I came to be inspecting the Indian haberdashers on Batu Road.

Peter Carey, My Life as a Fake

The boy’s mouth was set angrily. “I hope you don’t think,” he said in a lofty indignant tone, “that I believe in that crap! I may sell Bibles but I know which end is up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m going!” ¶ “Give me my leg!” she screeched. He jumped up so quickly that she barely saw him sweep the cards and the blue box into the Bible and throw the Bible into the valise. She saw him grab the leg and then she saw it for an instant slanted forlornly across the inside of the suitcase with a Bible at either side of its opposite ends. He slammed the lid shut and snatched up the valise and swung it down the hole and then stepped through himself.

Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People”, A Good Man is Hard to Find

Labels: Mix Tape

Man Booker Prize

Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize for her novel The Inheritance of Loss. She’s 35 – the youngest writer ever to win, but youngish-ness is what you have after eliminating David Mitchell and Peter Carey. The Indian-born writer’s mother, Anita Desai, had been shortlisted three times but failed to win. Now we’ve seen examples of judges privileging certain books because an author’s last shortlisted book failed to receive the prize, but not so often have we seen generational debt repayment – they didn’t give it to her Mom, so she might as well receive it. But perhaps I’m being overly callous – I haven’t even read the book. Ah well. For those of you curious of her style, here’s a short excerpt:

Sai, sitting on the veranda, was reading an article about giant squid in an old National Geographic. Every now and then she looked up at Kanchenjunga, observed its wizard phosphorescence with a shiver. The judge sat at the far corner with his chessboard, playing against himself. Stuffed under his chair where she felt safe was Mutt the dog, snoring gently in her sleep. A single bald lightbulb dangled on a wire above. It was cold, but inside the house, it was still colder, the dark, the freeze, con­tained by stone walls several feet deep.

Labels: Prizes

Brits imitate NY Times

The New York Times poll-cum-popularity-contest that elected Toni Morrison’s Beloved as the winner now has an copycat. The Brits couldn’t resist the allure of staging their own survey, and canvassed famous authors for their “best of” between 1980 and 2005. Here’s the Guardian article. Much as I think the contest misses the mark of nailing down a hierarchy of talent or “goodness”, it still manages to reveal our cultural preferences and valuations, so here:

First place: Disgrace (1999) JM Coetzee

Second place: Money (1984) Martin Amis

Joint third place: Earthly Powers (1980) Anthony Burgess

Atonement (2001) Ian McEwan

The Blue Flower (1995) Penelope Fitzgerald

The Unconsoled (1995) Kazuo Ishiguro

Midnight’s Children (1981) Salman Rushdie

Labels: Prizes

Literary Mix Tape #2

As I watch her now, three hundred and ninety-three pounds and gaining by the day, her frame so vast she has not been able to pull it upright in more than two months or to fit through any doorway without first having to take the door off its hinges, her breath so stormy it makes the dogs bark all the way up and down the street where she now lives with her sister in Los Angeles, and sets the piano in their neighbor’s house playing mad tunes at odd hours of the night, it is impossible to believe that my mother, Roxanna the Angel, was once a young woman with watercolor eyes and translucent skin, that she could stop the world with her laughter and compel men, my father among them, to follow her across an entire city without knowing why they chased her or what they would do if ever she stopped and answered their calls, that she had been so light and delicate, so undisturbed by the rules of gravity and the drudgery of human existence, she had grown wings, one night when the darkness was the color of her dreams, and flow into the star-studded night of Iran that claimed her.

Gina Nahai, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith

To assuage Tereza’s sufferings, he married her (they could finally give up the room, which she had not lived in for quite some time) and gave her a puppy. ¶ It was born to a Saint Bernard owned by a colleague. The sire was a neighbor’s German shepherd. No one wanted the little mongrels, and his colleague was loath to kill them. ¶ Looking over the puppies, Tomas knew that the ones he rejected would have to die. He felt like the president of the republic standing before four prisoners condemned to death and empowered to pardon only one of them. At last he made his choice: a bitch whose body seemed reminiscent of the German shepherd and whose head belonged to its Saint Bernard mother. He took it home to Tereza, who picked it up and pressed it to her breast. The puppy immediately peed on her blouse.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

In art school a decade ago I learned that the best way to memorize a landscape is to close your eyes for several seconds and then blink in reverse. That is, open your eyes just briefly, allowing those images before you to burn themselves onto your retina in an instant rather than with an extended gaze. I mention this because this is essentially the same principle that is in operation when one’s world is illuminated by the nuclear flash. ¶ This flashing image is a recurring motif in both my everyday thoughts and in my dream life. My most recurring flashing image is of me sitting on the top floor of a 1970s cement apartment building along the ocean waterfront of West Vancouver, on the 20th floor, looking out over the ocean. One of the people in the room with me says “Look,” and I look and see that the sun is growing too large too quickly, like a Jiffy pop popcorn foil dome, glowing orange, like an electric stove element. And then I am awake.

Douglas Coupland, Life After God

Labels: Mix Tape

Allen Ginsberg’s Martifice

On November 1st, the 50th anniversary of Howl, De Capo Press is releasing poems and journals from Allen Ginsberg. If nothing else, they’ve chosen a provocative title: The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice. The title came from a notation on one of Ginsberg’s notebooks that combined the words Martyrdom and Artifice into Martifice. The book is rich with comments and analysis of Ginsberg’s friends, literary and otherwise, including this bit about Jack Kerouac that’s intriguing because of his estimation of Kerouac and himself:

“I think Jack is the greatest writer alive in America of our own age – yet Harcourt rejected his first version [of On the Road] as being too personal and subjective – not worked out in objective story – which feeling I went along with. Now this second version seems to them a garble of unrelated free associations. I think I will stick by Jack, though I haven’t seen the pages yet, only snatches in his letters. He understands me – so he must be great.”

Poetry buffs and dilettantes, check it out – there’s 65 poems that haven’t been published elsewhere and the book clocks in at a hefty 515 pages.

Labels: Allen Ginsberg

Literary Squabbles

Salman Rushdie lashed out at John Updike in a recent interview from The Guardian:

“I don’t subscribe to the very predominantly English admiration of Updike. If you take away Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, and some of the short stories, there’s a lot of … slightly … garbage. Think of The Coup! The new one [Terrorist] is beyond awful. He should stay in his parochial neighbourhood and write about wife-swapping, because it’s what he can do.”

To be honest, all the enmity at the top echelons of the literary world becomes quite tiresome. Why do writers always have to denounce other writers, dismissing their skills as illusory and their oeuvre as crap? It’s obviously an ego thing, especially in this case, as Updike had unfavorably reviewed Rushdie’s last book Shalimar the Clown. I mean, it makes for great fun for us on the sidelines, to watch literary greats spar in the ring, but sometimes it feels less like sparring and more like an alley fight with groin shots and sucker punches. Which can also be fun, albeit eventually wearisome.

Of course, Rushdie seems to be a lightening rod for this type of thing. In July it was the Brick Lane fracas with Greer. And V.S. Naipaul virtually denounced any sympathy for Rushdie during the fatwa. I could go on.

Labels: John Updike, Salman Rushdie

Literary Mix Tape #1

This is the first installment of a new feature on BookFox. From time to time I’ll select a chunk of prose from several writers along a particular theme and post it on the site. The goals of this project are the same as the musical mix tape – to introduce my readers to new voices, to revel in the skill of well-known writers, and to play with ironic, complementary, and paradoxical juxtapositions. Read for kicks and giggles, read as exploration.

Literary Mix Tape #1: Bodies

The sticks flashed, the players hurtled past him, grunting and cursing. He stood there in the weather, a physical presence, chilled, his hair wet, yet he wasn’t there at all. He was reliving an episode from the previous year when his son had been the star player on the team, a moment like this one, the field slick, the players’ legs a patchwork of mud, stippled flesh and dark blooming contusions. Chris had the ball. Two defenders converged on him, and Jimmy – the coach, the father – could see it all coming, the collision that would break open the day, bone to bone, the concussion, the shattered femur, injury to the spinal cord, to the brain. The sound of it – the sick wet explosion – froze him so that he couldn’t even go to his son, couldn’t move. But then, a miracle, Chris pushed himself up from the icy turf, stiff as a rake, and began to walk it off.

T.C. Boyle, “When I Woke Up This Morning, Everything I Had Was Gone”, in Tooth and Claw

My father’s right arm ended not in a hand but, at the elbow, in a bony swelling. Think of a pollard tree in silhouette. That was my father’s stump. Its skin was drawn tight across the bone and tucked frowning into the hole left by the missing lower joint. The indented scar was like those made in the ice by boys with stones – a small uneven puncture, wet with brackish pus. The arm was rarely dry or free from pain. As he grew older it would seem (he said) that his wasted and unsummoned semen had found less rewarding outlets from his body than he would have wished. He picked it rolled and spongy from the corners of his eyes after sleep. It gathered on his tongue and stretched into stringy tresses when he laughed or spoke. It formed white blisters on his lips, on his thighs, between his toes. It dried and hardened in his nostrils. And it formed pools of sap in the vents of his severed elbow.

Jim Crace, The Gift of Stones

Months of injecting this stuff have given my body an odd aspect, as with every shot more chalk is deposited along the walls of my veins, much in the manner of earth being piled up to form either an embankment or a cutting around a roadway. Thus the history of my addiction has been mapped out by me, in the same way that the road system of South-East England was originally constructed. ¶ To begin with, conscious of the effect, I methodically worked my way through the veins in my arms and legs, turning them first the tannish colour of drovers’ paths, then the darker brown of cart tracks, until eventually they became macadamised, blackened, by my abuse. Finally I turned my attention to the arteries. Now, when I stand on the broken bathroom scales and contemplate my route-planning image in the full-length mirror, I see a network of calcified conduits radiating from my groin. Some of them are scored into my flesh like underpasses, others are raised up on hardened revetments of flesh: bloody flyovers.

Will Self, “Scale”, in Grey Area

Labels: Mix Tape

Janet Fitch’s Sophomore Effort

Janet Fitch is a very nice woman, although she’s a bit too particular about her tastes in literature (It’s one thing to dislike E.L. Doctorow, it’s another to insist he can’t write a sentence). On the sentence level, however, we find a key distinction between her bestselling White Oleander and her newest book Paint it Black. White Oleander had luxurious prose, sentences to cuddle up with at night. But Paint it Black sports much starker writing, words stripped raw by grief. Although the new voice fits the topic (a suicide and the aftermath), it’s simply not the voice she excels at.
The content of PIB doesn’t feel as strong as WO either. In the first few chapters of PIB, the protagonist vacillates between sorrow and fury so often that the intended effect finally wore off. This vacillation might have been pitch-perfect for what happens in real life, but it just didn’t work on the page.
Oprah probably won’t pick this one up, but that’s okay. Fitch has gotten past the sophomore hump and can start on her next offering. And besides, PIB hit 19 on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list. She could be doing worse.

Update: Fitch just rose to #1 on the L.A. Times bestseller list on 10/8 (from five last week).

Labels: Janet Fitch