Plan B.

OK, so here's what I originally had planned for today: since the novel I'm reading (Richard Powers' first, Prisoner's Dilemma) isn't exactly knocking my socks off (it's not bad or anything--just that the tale of a studiedly eccentric Salinger-Glass-Royal-Tenebaums-type family led by an ever-sickening patriarch, who obsessively chronicles an alternate-history version of WWII wherein Walt Disney liberates 10,000 interned Japanese-Americans to create a soaring homefront propaganda film that will save the world [whew] isn't up to the intricacies and jaw-dropping juxtapositions of his later work: The Gold-Bug Variations or The Echo Maker)

Let's start a new sentence, shall we? That one rather got away from me. (Sometimes I'm envious of gendered/cased languages--one can keep so many dependent clauses straight without resorting to punctuation.) Anyhoo: I thought instead of chatting about book content, I'd write about bookshelf content--with pictures! Except somehow my camera cord has gone missing. Totally bizarre, since my apartment--while ample-space livable, with multiple rooms and everything!--is not NYC-sitcom-huge, and there are only so many places it could be. Stymied!

This is what I took pictures of, though:

• The to-read stack--down to 6, which is crazy. I'll have to go the library or something.
• On my desk, my teensy reference-book (dictionary, thesaurus, two copies of The Elements of Style, one a first edition, one with the Maira Kalman illustrations--everyone in my immediate family got one for Christmas the year it came out) and NYC-guide section.
• On top of my dresser, flanked a bit precariously by my jewelry box and a magazine file containing the first 34 issues of the Buffy Season 8 comic books, kids' books, ranging from picture books (including my signed Bats at the Ballgame!) to my childhood favorites (including my signed A Wrinkle in Time, inscribed, just like Miranda's in When You Reach Me, "Tesser well"), then graphic novels and various miscellaneous tall books.
• My main--and only proper, if you're looking for a Christmas gift idea--bookcase, mostly alphabetized fiction and then non-fiction, but also...
• Idiosyncratic sub-sections. There's some Japanese lit in translation, some Catholic books (works by Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of Siena, of course), poetry (with copies of all the journals my work's ever appeared in, which makes it sounds like there's a lot, right? But no, maybe a half-dozen), and finally my Great War books: poetry, prose, memoir, analysis, even a collection of soldiers' letters in French.

So how do you organize your books? Rhyme? Reason? Color?

Kata sumbebekos.

A happy accident, that the roll of the die (down to 8 sides now!) should have me end up reading Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs directly after my visit to Montaigne-land, because the gentlemen have so much in common: curiosity, quotability, rambling prose style, obsession with the details of everyday, "low" culture. I can't tell you how many times I laughed aloud or blurted out "Exactly!" to the page. A worthy successor indeed!

At one point, Klosterman defines (in a footnote) the oft-tossed-about term "postmodern" as "Any art that is conscious of the fact that it is, in fact, art." I love the unfussy clarity of this definition, though it's unfortunate (and not Klosterman's doing in the least) that the semantic chunks of the word itself place it somewhere in time--I have no idea when. When was "modern"? The 1930s?--because that misleads one to think of art of this kind only being produced within a certain chronological era, when certainly one can find works that embody Klosterman's definition throughout history: say, Tristram Shandy, one of the most postmodern novels I've ever read, despite its being written shortly after the novel was invented (1759-1769). Thinking about the postmodern also got me thinking about what I'll refer to as post-postmodern (although I know that has a critical definition that doesn't jibe with how I'm using it). Art that knows it's art is taken for granted these days. The "new" prevailing mode of art (and I'm using "art" in a less restrictive sense, to mean not objects sequestered in galleries, but cultural expressions of all kinds), I think, is the remix or the mash-up; the unprecedented access to the history of human information and creation collapses the centuries, making it natural and obvious to combine and reshuffle songs or words or images from everywhere--essentially, making Montaigne-ism the dominant artistic manner. It's a great time to be alive.

Connie, at last.

The world where Blackout and All Clear take place was first created in 1982's novella Fire Watch (thank Zeus it's hanging out online, as my copy of the eponymous collection is languishing somewhere at my folks')--the protagonist of which makes a fleeting cameo in All Clear. In between were Doomsday Book (1992--heartbreaking, and singlehandedly responsible for my thenceforth interest in the Black Death) and To Say Nothing of the Dog (1997--one of the funniest novels ever written, and the source of my family's youngest cat's name, Princess Arjumand, Juju for short). It's set it (what is now much nearer than originally) near-future Oxford, wherein the avuncular Mr. Dunworthy presides over the time-travelling history department. A lovely conceit--that this technology would end up being used primarily for historical research! There is, of course, an element of holodeckiness to it, in that we only ever experience the drops that somehow go wrong. This time, Willis returns to the Blitz, where it started for her 28 years ago: three students are sent back to observe various parts of the British WWII experience--Merope (as Eileen O'Reilly) with evacuee children in the country, Michael (as the incongruously American Mike Davis) at the evacuation of the British Army from Dunkirk, and Polly (whose name conveniently works for centuries) as a shopgirl during the opening months of the Blitz. When they individually discover they can't get home, they end up banding together in 1940 London, trying to figure out why they're stranded, whether they can affect events that should have already happened, and whether time travel--and hence the future--is doomed after all.

There's my blurb. Here's why I love her: the effortlessness. The (as I once wrote) "best comic incidental characters this side of Jane Austen." The incredible intricacy of her plots--this one in particular weaves several individual narratives and points of view into not even a knot but a braid, if you follow--and parcels out information over 1100 pages total yet manages to surprise even on the last few pages. She makes me laugh out loud, and she makes me cry. She has as fierce and wide-ranging an imagination as China Mieville, but more, if you'll forgive a phrase frowned upon in contemporary criticism, heart--while my friend Noah actually dislikes her because, as he says, "when you find out what's really happening, it's always optimistic*," I feel like this is a point of view sorely lacking in modern fiction of any type. And it's not like she doesn't earn her happy endings: there is suffering and despair and sacrifice. Or, to put it in terms of the 2010 novels, before V-E Day, there are six years of rationing, air raids, and loss. Darkness before dawn.

And the weirdest thing is? Most literary-readin' folks I talk to haven't even heard of her. Go forth and remedy!!

*with the extremely notable exception of Doomsday Book. Boy howdy.

Skipping ahead.

OK, folks, I'm having a rough day, and I want to postpone writing about Blackout and All Clear till I can do them justice and actually impart some information to interested readers, rather than just flailing about going OMG SO AMAZING (though they certainly are that--definitely in my top 10 for the year. Is it cheating that they take up two spots?). And I'll be on a day trip to Easthampton, MA this Saturday to geek the flip out at Webcomics Weekend, so that entry will have to wait till Sunday morning. Didn't want to fall behind on the sched, though, so I'm skipping ahead to an easy reprint entry, in honor of my current read, Sarah Bakewell's charming and appropriately digressive Montaigne bio, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. Montaigne's the only 400-years-dead dude I count among my best friends, and to put it in a cringingly zeitgeist-y way, the first blogger--or at least the straight-up inventor of the personal essay (in its original meaning, from the French essai--"try" or "attempt.). Back in winter '01 I took a great eight-week preceptorial on his essays, probably something that should be required for all people everywhere, ever. Anyway, here's the final essay I wrote for the class; it's much longer than my usual entries, so join me after the jump, won't you?

"Royal Tenebaums meets Watchmen."

OK, I'm not done with All Clear yet, though I just checked and I'm only 100 pages from the end--OH NOEZ!! THEN IT WILL BE OVER!! It's an absolute masterpiece of plot construction, juggling points of view, piecing out information slyly, until you see things you should have seen all along--like the Agatha Christie mysteries one of the characters reads for research (Ms. Christie also makes a tiny, not-annoying cameo).

But I did finish a book this week, on three 15-minute breaks at work, actually: Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá's lovely comic The Umbrella Academy, Vol. 1: Apocalypse Suite. I don't have anything better to say about it than already said in this post's title, a quote from a fellow Goodreads denizen: a perfect encapsulation of what makes it great (except I liked it way better than Watchmen, but I'm of a distinctly minority opinion about said comic). It's about a septet of super-powered orphans adopted by a monocled, mysterious inventor--in the first issue, they save Paris from a marauding Eiffel Tower driven by a zombie robot Gustave Eiffel himself. Naturally! Then it jumps forward twenty years to the regathering of the children after their "father"'s death, filling in bits of the ensuing embitterment along the way.

There's a second trade, called Dallas, which I'm hoping turns up at the Strand soon so I can peruse it over a few more breaks. Lord knows I can't afford to actually buy it.

Elevator operators.

(OK, The Intuitionist is actually about elevator inspectors, but who can resist the classic example of dactylic hexameter [the Homeric cadence]. Certainly not me!!)

So yeah, elevator inspectors, with the upward movement of elevators as a metaphor for African-American racial uplift, told through the downfall and increasing disillusionment of an unnamed-but-obviously-New-York-but-not-real-New-York-the-New-York-of-noir-city's first black female inspector, Lila Mae Watson. This just-slightly-off-kilter world is hilariously obsessed with elevators--vast amounts of political power are wielded by rival corporations and diametrically opposed factions with the Department itself, Empiricism and Intuitionism. There is, as I said, a noirishness to the story, with a stubborn, principled, but ultimately naive protagonist peeling back layers of corruption and cold-heartedness. And there's a humor running throughout, a kind of knowing "yeah, this is totally a novel about elevators" shrug that provided a much-needed counterpoint to Lila Mae's rather dour character. And yes, Whitehead's beautiful prose imbues the taken-for-granted elevator with a wonder and mysticism that would be impossible for a lesser writer to pull off--yesterday I saw an elevator inspection van on the street, and my heart leapt.

But I don't think he quite pulls off an even trickier feat: deploying a huge central metaphor/allegory without it sometimes becoming too pat, too obvious. OK, elevators go up, like African-American social mobility through the mechanism of the civil rights movement; OK, Empiricism is based on surface details (like segregating people based on appearance) and Intuitionism a holistic, internal approach (we're all brothers and sisters under the skin!). When this shoe drops fairly explicitly, quite late in the novel, I was a bit embarrassed for the book, because I feel like it's suddenly selling itself short. So many marvelous, intricate details (the collegial haircut sported by the male elevator inspectors, for instance; Lila Mae's only ally and his dogged determination to raise the profile of escalators) are unnecessary to the ultimately simple Empiricist=White=Bad, Intuitionist=Black=Good that if you decide it's all a racial allegory you lose a lot of the delight of the book--the speculative-fiction aspects of Whitehead having thought long and hard (and brought his ferocious talent to bear) on the idea of an elevator-mad universe. I feel like, in a way, viewing it as a Race Relations Novel is a way of side-stepping the world-building here, a way for critics to ensconce themselves squarely in the Literature purview without having to worry about having accidentally read something closer to sci-fi. I only blame Whitehead himself a little for this, really, because it's his flair for language and specifics that make it a great novel; but his critic-aided attempts to define the underlying abstractions keep it from being Great.

An Internet pinky-swear.

I make a contract with you, my ten-and-possibly-more readers: for as long as my days off are Tuesdays and Saturdays, I’ll meet you here, to talk about books, as I read them and immediately after, before I forget all I wanted to say about them, and have to reel off another apologetic, amateurish, “in brief” post like, uh, this one. I know I can do it: just look back at the sometimes 1000-word+ reviews I wrote for Watermark’s weekly newsletter. Of course, for those I had free sandwiches as incentive. SAAAANDWICHES.

The Scar, China Mieville: the second novel set in the Bas-Lag world of Perdido Street Station; this one's set in a floating outlaw city called Armada. If you don't count Moby-Dick, which of course you should, it's the best sea-quest novel I've ever read...once I get a hold of Iron Council, I promise you a lengthy essay about Mieville's evolving use of the city--with every novel I've read fictional metropolises (Perdido's New Crobuzon, Scar's Armada, The City & the City's Beszel/Ul Quoma) close in on "real' ones, with the shadow-London of Un Lun Dun a crucial link to Kraken's setting in a richly reimagined London proper. (Although I hear Iron Council's a Western, so it may throw a wrench in the works--if so, like all good critics, I shall simply ignore it.)

Zofloya, or The Moor, Charlotte Dacre: I'm fascinated by old-timey popular literature, especially the high-strung gothic novel, but this one was just OK. Not sure how it would have come off had Oxford World Classics not made the stupendous blunder of giving away the huge twist on the second-to-last page on the back of the book. SERIOUSLY.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller & Jamestown, Matthew Sharpe: Dystopia ahoy! I might owe myself an essay on why I find these so fascinating, but I think it's just that I love thought-experiments in general and have a generally fatalistic view of the world. Of these two, Canticle was much, much better, using the throughline of the Catholic Church (speaking of generally fatalistic) to link three novellas through a millennium, **SPOILER ALERT FOR A 50-YEAR-BOOK** (mouseover for details, since if you're like me you can never successfully skip text without reading it). Jamestown, a near-future retelling of the founding of the titular settlement, was less successful (to me at least)--I can't quite put my finger on why, but I think it has to do with the too-similar idiolect of the many different POVs (the narrative switches with each chapter). Usually I can deal with stylistic repetition (especially if I like said style, and I liked Sharpe's quite a lot), and I rarely care about "believability" in terms of characters' thoughts and words, and in a book that's all about communication and its breakdowns, it actually makes sense for what should be wildly disparate to converge. So I've really no excuse but "I just did, OK" for coming away less than impressed. Please don't revoke my intellectual credentials.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman: Loved it--loved the premise (all the various multicultural lares and penates brought over by centuries of immigrants to the U.S., squaring up for a war with the new deities of Internet and Media), loved the execution. Once you've read it, head over to this great wiki of all the gods mentioned!

I also recently read Colson Whitehead's first novel, The Intuitionist, which deals with racism and elevator inspection--no, really. Stepped it up out of the random-roll sched because it was this month's pick on The A.V. Club's book club (Wrapped Up in Books). Coming up in Tuesday's post: I actually read the A.V. Clubbers' essays, and try to make sense of the book myself!

(BTW: currently re-reading Connie Willis' Blackout, which ended cliffhangingly, since All Clear FINALLY came out this week!!! Will talk about both together, as they're really one v. long book, but it'll take me a while to get through. And then I'll be sad they're over.)