A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Daniel Menaker reviews Tim Page’s memoir about growing up with Asperger’s: “The writing here is for the most part clear, conversational, mordantly funny. In fact, you wonder how the author can have such a wide palette of expressiveness, given the nature of his nature.” . . . A smart piece by Andrew Delbanco on two new books about education, and why “despite the manifest ambiguities of the data, Americans persist in believing that our schools have fallen from some golden age of excellence.” . . . Gordon Haber reviews six recent books about God vs. No God. On the longest of them, Robert Wright’s 567-page The Evolution of God: “He consistently provides an unnecessary level of detail, which creates a book that refuses to end. Days after I finally got through it all, I flinched whenever I got a text message, for fear that it was Wright with further elucidation.” . . . In the fifth issue of n+1’s book review, Marco Roth reads Caleb Crain’s self-published book of blog writing: “Crain handles [all topics] with an unflagging open-mindedness and intelligence, as though conducting a course on how to be a responsible polymath.” . . . Henry Hitchings compares the seventh edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature with previous versions. Final verdict: “a scrupulously produced, smartly laid-out, academically serious and at the same time relishably browsable book, replete with valuable information.”
At the moment (I have 7 1/2 before dinner) I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. This struck me on Reading platform, watching Nessa & Quentin kiss, he coming up shyly, yet with some emotion. This I shall remember; & make more of, when separated from all the business of crossing the platform, finding our bus &c. That is why we dwell on the past, I think.
Every Thursday on the blog brings a post about a paperback book.
(This week’s contribution is written by Jessica Ferri)
Marbles is a book of aphorisms by James Guida. An aphorist aims to convey the same perception and truth that any writer does, but in fewer words. Like Twitter, but more profound.
An example from Guida: “Generally, your recent past is discernible on you, in the way that, after hours in a pub, cigarette smoke used to live on for a while in your hair.” This is beautifully written and the analogy of scent makes us aware of our behavior, how obvious it may be to others. Another of my favorites: “How often we lack full honesty of our tastes when introducing them to others. A pox on prefacing!” The anxiety of human interaction is summed up in those mere eighteen words. How often have we failed to do justice to our beliefs when describing them to someone else?
The pleasure of Guida’s aphorisms is the way they illuminate the ridiculous, childlike, or reckless nature of our actions while simultaneously convincing us that we wouldn’t know nearly as much about ourselves and others without our errors. The subsequent knowledge and growth makes all the struggle and embarrassment worth it. In conclusion, as Guida writes, “Basically, the whole affair threatened to make adults of us all.”
I learn from the Book Beast that Dan Aykroyd’s grandfather, Samuel, was “a dentist with a side career as a psychic investigator.” His “research into the paranormal continued with his son [Dan’s father, Peter], who sought to create the first device capable of capturing ghostly voices only to be told by the ghosts themselves that such a contraption was impossible to build.”
“I would like to see more hard physicists come in and start to analyze what’s going on,” the younger Aykroyd said. “Are oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen molecules coalescing to produce these visions in front of people? I’d love it if some research were done on materialization, which is the most exciting part of this, where full-formed limbs come out of a medium’s mouth and even a full-formed body. It would be nice to get some DNA and see if it’s the DNA of the person exuding this mass of ectoplasm or the DNA of another being.”
You know what? I’m sure hard physicists would be more than thrilled to check that DNA. Now if one of them could just be in the room when ectoplasmic limbs are popping out of a medium’s mouth. . . .
Amazon: What is it about a book that says to you (or you hope says to readers) that it’s an NYRB book?
Frank: Frankly, my sense of what an NYRB Classic is keeps changing as new, unexpected books (One Straw Revolution is a perfect example) turn up. Or you could say, that what draws me to a book is its being unexpected. The book should be something that shifts your perception of writing or of the world, that fills in a gap — or possibly opens one. (Maude Hutchins’s Victorine, for example, makes you think very differently about the literature of the 1950s than, say, Revolutionary Road.)
Instead of trying to come up with a joke about an “Extraordinary Canadians” series (and don’t think I couldn’t), I’ll just say that these books do look quite lovely. . . . Gregory Cowles thinks Padgett Powell’s new novel, composed entirely of questions, is an example of “the Ramones effect.” . . . “Why would our [literary] choices be so different from those of our grandparents?” . . . Edan Lepucki considers the anxieties of the author photo, and particularly the stunning(ly goofy) work of Marion Ettlinger. (“Clearly, the writer is trying to appear thoughtful. Most of the time, though, they look like they’re starring in a pain killer ad.”) . . . The evolution of a book cover design, and a one-sentence summary of the designing job: “I just keep slogging away at it until it stops looking cheesy.” . . . I got a funny press release this morning that I thought about sharing. Well, Stephen Elliott got it, too, and he’s posted it for everyone’s pleasure.
Even professed Johnsonians are quite likely never to have read Rasselas, by which omission they are missing a valuable piece of great literature. We know from Boswell’s Life, and from Johnson’s own letters, the circumstances in which Rasselas came to be written. . . . Through studies of Johnson’s relationship with Mrs Thrale, who later wrote his life, we are more aware than we used to be, of the depth of Johnson’s fear of insanity. Like George III he may have been padlocked as a medical treatment for his mental condition. Rasselas was written in a period of intense reaction following the loss of his mother, and it expresses his anxieties. “Disorders of intellect happen much more often than superficial observers will easily believe. Perhaps if we speak with rigorous exactness, no human mind is in its right state.”
With Halloween looming, AbeBooks cleverly puts together a list of 10 ghostwritten titles. It includes Sinclair Lewis writing the memoir of a tennis player.
The most entertaining summary is of Hedy Lamarr’s Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman, ghostwritten by Leo Guild: “[Guild's] artistic liberties caused Lamarr to sue her publisher over inaccuracies in her own autobiography.”
A couple of years ago, Paul Collins wrote a piece marking the 10th anniversary of Guild’s death, in which he called him “quite simply, the greatest hack ever.” He worked for Bob Hope, wrote a book called The Werewolf vs. Vampire Woman, and another called Street of Ho’s:
Set on Times Square’s notorious “Minnesota Strip,” Street of Ho’s reads like . . . well, like Bob Hope’s assistant writing a novel about hookers. Representative sentence: “Sheila made him a ham and cheese sandwich and they made love while he ate.”
Mark Twain once speculated that the God of Genesis was obsessive-compulsive. Do you think God might have some psychological problems?
Probably, yeah. There’s lot of evidence to suggest that he does. Look at something like the story of Noah and the Flood. God creates this rainbow and says it’s a sign to himself that he’ll never again destroy the human race by flooding. When I read that, I thought, “Wow, God is actually crazy.” He has to find a way to remind himself not to kill everybody again. That’s crazy behavior.
The divine creator shouldn’t be saying: “Note to self: Don’t wipe out all of humanity on a whim.”
But then again, if God wants to be irrational, that’s his business. Rationality is a human concept. Consistency and being reasonable, those are all human concepts, and we can’t impose those on the creator. He can be as irrational and inconsistent and whimsical as he damn well pleases. He wants to destroy us in a moment with a snap of his fingers, that’s his business. We can’t say, “God, you shouldn’t do that.” We’ve broken his heart. It’s like having a kid and the kid turns out bad. What are you going to do?
For the first time since the site launched in March, I’ve added a new entry to the Editor’s Note page. There you’ll find an explanation of a revamped Shelf section and a couple of other brief notes. Please head over there for the info…
A continuing series that highlights books recently acquired by publishing houses for future release. Each post features a book we’re looking forward to, and a book we’re . . . not.
The Cherry:
Jon Kukla’s The First American, a revisionist history of the American Revolution recovering its “missing southern half” in the life and legacy of Patrick Henry, based on extensive new research.
The Pit:
Anna J. Evans’s Dead on the Delta, the first in a series set in post-apocalyptic Louisiana which is overrun by poisonous, insect-like fairies with a taste for human flesh and blood, and the field agent who is immune to their venom.
On Monday, in addition to fresh posts in the Circulating and Backlist sections, the site will feature a couple of small changes, which will be discussed in a new installment on the Editor’s Note page. While you hold your breath in anticipation, consider following The Second Pass on Twitter. Also, if you’ve been enjoying the site, please spread the word!
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
The Economist says that readers of Sweet Thunder, Wil Haygood’s new biography of Sugar Ray Robinson, “get two histories: of boxing and of Harlem in its glory days during the first half of the 20th century.” In The Washington Post, Gerald Early says that, though Haygood “seems to run out of gas” near the end of Robinson’s life, his book is still “certainly one of the best biographies of a boxer ever written.” . . . Marco Roth smartly considers the “rise of the neuronovel,” and wonders why, in works by Ian McEwan, Jonathan Lethem, Rivka Galchen and others, “novelists have ceded their ground to science.” . . . Irvine Welsh says that it’s “somewhat erroneous and unquestioningly indulgent – but nonetheless tempting – to think of [John] Irving as literature’s Bruce Springsteen.” Welsh really likes Irvingsteen’s latest. The blurb: “[B]ig-hearted, brilliantly written and superbly realized. [A]bsolutely unmissable.” . . . Alexandra Jacobs reviews Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man, about his yearlong experiment living as an extreme environmentalist — in his Fifth Avenue apartment. (“There’s a certain problem with branding oneself a radical environmentalist superhero and then letting a real old-fashioned book about the experience roll luxuriously off the presses.”) . . . Elizabeth Lowry on “the most informative and entertaining art book you are likely to read this year.”
Every Thursday on the blog brings a post about a paperback book.
Originally published in 1972, Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine is, as Ben Marcus notes in his afterword to an edition published last year by Dalkey Archive Press, “if not science fiction, then really strange fiction.” The story is only 99 pages long, but it’s hard to use a word like novella for a work with such a fully imagined, minutely detailed world.
The narrator is the wife of Unguentine, who begins her dreamlike telling by noting that her husband has recently committed suicide, flinging himself over the side of the boat on which they’ve lived together for “thirty to forty years.” Over those decades, the barge has grown into what Marcus describes as “more landmass than boat.” That floating mass is the star of the show, a stunning creation that a filmmaker like Wes Anderson or Jean-Pierre Jeunet might love to build, but which they couldn’t possibly make more believable than Stanley Crawford makes it on the page. It includes lush gardens, farm animals, 40 trees, “a towering salt-water distillation plant,” and “five hundred sails each the size of a manly handkerchief.” There is also a dome made up of small glass windows, the construction of which is one of the most beautiful passages in the book.
Early in the story, Mrs. Unguentine confesses that her husband is a drinker who beats her, but for the rest of the book he’s portrayed as a hermit who rarely interacts with the only other person in his world. The boat is large enough that the couple “go for days on end without seeing each other.” And even when they do, Unguentine rarely speaks, preferring to write notes.
Because of its deep surreality and the impossible largeness and diversity of the boat, the novel lends itself to allegorical readings about, among other subjects, ecological stewardship and the possibilities (and limitations) of knowing and loving another person. Crawford has said:
My novels all describe “systems” of various degrees of derangement. The plot consists of a description of the system, and the end comes when the description is complete and/or disintegration sets in or takes place.
Combining that thought of Crawford’s with the manic energy, OCD tendencies and prolonged hidings of Unguentine, perhaps thoughts of environmentalism and love would usefully yield to thoughts of personal obsession and the very idea of being in the world. Crawford again:
I would say that the barge is something about “liberation,” but liberation at the cost of too much control and oppression. The best image I might summon up here is the Kavafy poem in which the voyager discovers after long travels that he is still, despite everything, only himself. Another version of a similar theme is [Henry] James’s short story, “The Beast in the Jungle,” in which the terrible fate awaiting the narrator turns out to be the narrator’s fear of living.
The group Publishing Perspectives has started a blog called The Cork-Lined Room, where, starting Monday, they will be leading a discussion of Marcel Proust’s masterwork, Les Plaisirs et les Jours, a collection of his early columns and other journalism.
No, no, it’s In Search of Lost Time.
The group offers 10 reasons why you should use this opportunity to read along. No. 3:
You’ll impress your friends. Consider the following piece of dialogue. Them: “Did you catch last night’s episode of Lost?” You: “No, sorry, I was so enthralled reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time that I couldn’t bring myself to turn on the television.” Game, Set and Match. (Of course, you should say it nicely.)
In his introduction to the wickedly fun Poisoned Pens: Literary Invective from Amis to Zola, editor Gary Dexter gives three reasons why we should pay attention when writers write negatively about their peers:
Firstly, attacks by writers on other writers confirm our reasonable suspicions that some of the canonized masters have occasionally been over-rated by timid critics and snobs. . . .
Secondly, what is negative is, if nothing else, generally sincere. Good reports of fellow writers can easily be flattery or log-rolling: just think of the ways book-reviewers operate. . . .
Thirdly, writers often do their best work when they are attacking other writers.
Arranged chronologically, the book doesn’t waste its time with lightweights, or even middleweights. It begins with Aristophanes dissing Euripides, and near the end we find Samuel Beckett attacking himself. In between, Melville addresses Emerson’s “gaping flaw” in a letter to a friend: “It was, the insinuation, that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions. These men are all cracked right across the brow.”
George Bernard Shaw goes after the biggest game, taking a deep breath and spewing this about Shakespeare:
. . . his unbearable platitudes, his pretentious reduction of the subtlest problems of life to commonplaces against which a Polytechnic debating club would revolt, his incredible unsuggestiveness, his sententious combination of ready reflection with complete intellectual sterility, and his consequent incapacity for getting out of the depth of even the most ignorant audience, except when he solemnly says something so transcendently platitudinous that his more humble-minded hearers cannot bring themselves to believe that so great a man really meant to talk like their grandmothers.
Shaw goes on to say that he’d like to “dig [Shakespeare] up and throw stones at him.” This theme of exhume-and-assault recurs in Mark Twain’s opinion of Jane Austen, which I recently shared. Poisoned Pens also includes Twain’s hilarious criticism of James Fenimore Cooper’s conventions:
Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was his broken twig. . . . Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step on, but that wouldn’t satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can’t do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leather Stocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series.
Later in the book, Faulkner and Orwell get their punches in on Twain. But Faulkner himself isn’t safe. (Clifton Fadiman on Absalom! Absalom!: “Apparently the entire population of Jefferson, Mississippi consists of rhetoricians who would blanch at the sight of a simple declarative sentence.”) And so it goes, the circle of gripe…
Below are excerpts from two recent reviews of a new biography of Ayn Rand, both of which are well worth reading in full. The book is Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller.
Grant Ayn Rand a premise and you’d leave with a lifestyle.
Stated premises, however, rarely get us all the way down to the bottom of a philosophy. Even when we think we’ve reached bedrock, there’s almost always a secret subbasement blasted out somewhere underneath. William James once argued that every philosophic system sets out to conceal, first of all, the philosopher’s own temperament: that pre-rational bundle of preferences that urges him to hop on whatever logic-train seems to be already heading in his general direction. This creates, as James put it, “a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of all our premises is never mentioned . . . What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great universe of God. What it is—and oh so flagrantly!—is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is.”
No one would have been angrier about this claim, and no one confirms its truth more profoundly, than Ayn Rand. Few fellow creatures have had a more intensely odd personal flavor; her temperament could have neutered an ox at 40 paces.
At the Barnes & Noble Review, A.C. Grayling offers more about the biography in question. (His approving blurb: “deeply absorbing . . . uncompromising, lucid, excoriating.”) He also gets in plenty of his own commentary about Rand’s cult of personality:
A biography of Rand therefore has to consist largely in an exposition of her philosophy and an exploration of its effects on her personal life and those around her. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made reports both with unblinking thoroughness. She confirms what one surmises from the novels and essays themselves: that Rand was a brilliant but repulsive person, who inveighed against tyranny but was a tyrant, and who demanded loyalty from the disciples of her philosophy of individualism and independence, oblivious to the stark paradox involved. The members of her inner circle called themselves ‘the Collective’ as a joke; some of them came to realise too late just how ironic the label was, for Rand in effect organised her devotees into a cult from whose teachings any deviation — least of all into the individual independence she vaunted — was regarded as an unforgivable crime.
Grayling also fires off a candidate for Best Four-Word Sentence of the year: “Life is Rand’s refutation.”
It was almost midnight in Virginia, late for the farmlands north of Richmond, when the breathing quickened in the stall, the phone rang in the Gentry home, and two men came out the front door, hastily crossing the lawn to the car.
John Self interviews Simon Crump, author of, among other things, a recent book of fiction about Michael Jackson. (“Neverland is, and always was intended to be, a sympathetic portrayal of a talented, vulnerable boy called Michael who lived in a big house and was slowly losing his marbles.”) . . . The movie (and book) junkies at Pajiba are kicking off their second annual “Cannonball Read.” This time, they’re challenging people to read 52 books in a year and blog about each one. For everyone who completes the task, the site is donating to a charity in memory of one of its readers/contributors. . . . John Ortved, the author of a new, unauthorized history of The Simpsons (Second Pass review to be posted in the next day or two) is interviewed by the New York Times. . . . The joys of reading Updike backward. . . . I have a good friend who has frequently wondered if we’re reaching a point where more people write than read. This piece about “universal authorship” joins him in wondering. . . . In promoting his new book, Jose Saramago has decided to slam the Bible and religious people generally. . . . If you’re in New York City tomorrow night and care at all about book design and have $35 to spare, I imagine this event will be worth your time.
A continuing series that highlights books recently acquired by publishing houses for future release. Each post features a book we’re looking forward to, and a book we’re . . . not.
The Cherry:
Peter Kramer’s [untitled] wide-ranging and provocative take on the history, meaning, and future of psychiatric diagnosis as embodied by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, tied to the release of the fifth edition.
The Pit:
MaryAnn Marshall’s Reunions: How Fate Brought Us the Dogs We Love, a collection of stories about how our meetings with our canine friends are so often fated and the psychic connections extraordinary.
First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.
The BBC is conducting a project of which the Second Pass heartily approves. Prominent authors are recommending “forgotten classics” to be rescued from obscurity. Radio 4 listeners have heard the authors’ cases for their choices, and a vote will determine which book gets new attention by being adapted into a radio serial.
Howard Jacobson recommended The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia by Samuel Johnson. It was Johnson’s only work of prose fiction, “[w]ritten in a week to pay for his mother’s funeral.”
Rasselas is an example of how a novel can fall from favor. It was widely read in the 19th century and is read by characters in Jane Eyre, Middlemarch and Little Women. “It is the seedbed for that tradition of novels of female compassion,” Jacobson added.
I had no idea that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a syndicated comic strip based on the life of Woody Allen. It was created by Stuart Hample, and the best of it is collected in the forthcoming Dread & Superficiality: Woody Allen as Comic Strip. Hample describes the unlikely genesis of the project in an excerpt up at the Guardian. Allen not only agreed to the idea of the strip, but offered to help with the jokes:
[H]is help turned out to be dozens of pages of jokes from his standup years. Some were mere shards, such as “tied me to Jewish star – uncomfortable crucifixion”. Others were even more minimal: “bull fighting”, “astrology” (Woody occasionally translated these hieroglyphs).
But there were longer notations: “Sketch – man breaking up with female ape after his evolution.” And there were little playlets: “Freud could not order blintzes. He was ashamed to say the word. He’d go into an appetizer store and say, ‘Let me have some of those crepes with cheese in the middle.’ And the grocer would say, ‘Do you mean blintzes, Herr Professor?’ And Freud would turn all red and run out through the streets of Vienna, his cape flying. Furious, he founded psychoanalysis and made sure it wouldn’t work.”
He also offered criticism of the strips: “Please don’t make me so masochistic. I’m not in life. Trying and failing is funny. Masochism is not.”
Even if, like me, you weren’t aware of the strip, you probably know Hample’s creation from its brief animated appearance in Annie Hall:
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Two critics on the other side of the Atlantic praise a new biography of Charles Dickens. John Bowen: “At nearly 700 pages, this is a lightweight next to many of its precursors, several of which easily break the thousand-page barrier. But it is a triumph of compression, and immediately takes its place as the most authoritative, fair-minded and navigable of modern biographies.” And Simon Callow: “Cumulatively, it is profoundly moving, chronicling the constant restless interaction between the life and the work.” . . . John Gray reads a big new book about the history of democracy, and praises half of its conclusions. . . . Dwight Garner finds insight in John Keegan’s new history of the American Civil War, but wonders at the detached tone: “Distant and chilly, The American Civil War seems to have been written by a mainframe computer buried deep in a fortified bunker.” . . . John Self finds himself enjoying Sarah Waters’ new novel: “I’d read her last two (also Booker shortlisted) novels, Fingersmith and The Night Watch, and liked them to varying degrees without doing anything mad like declaring myself a fan, or hanging onto them. These tempered expectations meant that her new novel turned out to be a pleasant surprise.” . . . David Thomson writes two reviews of new Hollywood-star bios: A new look at Clint Eastwood that draws heavily on previous sources; and an oral biography of Robert Altman. (”[A] smart, amusing, lively book, full of anecdotes and a generous step toward perceiving the glorious and perverse ways of Altman himself.”) I’ve always found Altman overrated myself, but that’s a discussion for another time.
Five years of my life and the dream that I had of myself, all down the tubes because I couldn’t pull off something other people seemed to pull off with relative ease: a novel. By then I wasn’t even interested in a Great American Novel. I would have been elated with the eminently forgettable NJ novel.
Every Thursday on the blog brings a post about a paperback book.
It seems to me that the word anthology used to have a bit more weight behind it. To anthologize something was to acknowledge it had stood the test of time, or to ensure it would keep standing it. Now, anthologies of new, loosely connected material are published every week, and the annual “Best American” series keeps expanding, threatening to simply publish all of a given year’s American writing under one rubric or other (American Blog Posts About Parking Spaces 2009, etc.)
There is no better recent example of anthologizing done right than Picador’s series of Paris Review interviews, the fourth volume of which is being published this month. The books are beautifully, uniformly designed. They look great together. Even the paper they’re printed on feels terrific.
Oh, and what’s on the page is best of all.
The magazine started its interviews with prominent authors in 1953. The style of these interviews is a dying breed. If it weren’t for the fact that the Paris Review continues the tradition, it would be a dead breed. The conversations are in-depth, often recorded over a considerable amount of time, and they are crafted. In this fourth volume, Hermione Lee interviews Philip Roth. In her introduction to the piece she writes about first speaking to him in the summer of 1983. Then:
The transcripts from this taped conversation were long, absorbing, funny, disorganized, and repetitive. I edited them down to a manageable size and sent my version on to him. . . . Early in 1984, on his next visit to England, we resumed; he revised my version and we talked about the revision until it acquired its final form.
The interviews are prized, in part, for the insights they offer about the writing process. Lee coaxed this from Roth, asking him “How much of a book is in your mind before you start?”:
What matters most isn’t there at all. I don’t mean the solutions to problems, I mean the problems themselves. You’re looking, as you begin, for what’s going to resist you. You’re looking for trouble. Sometimes in the beginning uncertainty arises not because the writing is difficult, but because it isn’t difficult enough. Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening. Fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.
The insights often arrive when a subject discusses the work of other writers, as in this response from William Styron:
Faulkner doesn’t give enough help to the reader. I’m all for the complexity of Faulkner, but not for the confusion. That goes for Joyce, too. All that fabulously beautiful poetry in the last part of Finnegans Wake is pretty much lost to the world simply because not many people are ever going to put up with the chaos that precedes it. As for The Sound and the Fury, I think it succeeds in spite of itself. Faulkner often simply stays too damn intense for too long a time. It ends up being great stuff, somehow, though, and the marvel is how it could be so wonderful being pitched for so long in that one high, prolonged, delirious key.
The fourth volume will certainly appeal to poetry fans, since Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound and John Ashbery are all included. Current writers like Marilynne Robinson, Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami are also here, but it’s the golden oldies who make the series the true gem that it is. Here we get P.G. Wodehouse, E.B. White and a rollicking group interview of Jack Kerouac, which includes this representative bit of stage direction: “[Kerouac plays piano. Drinks are served.]”
For years, the culture’s idea of an interview has been five minutes spent on a couch promoting a movie. In this collection, as in the first three, another form altogether is on display. The writers are frequently witty, erudite and surprising, as when E.B. White was asked about his reading habits:
I was never a voracious reader and, in fact, have done little reading in my life. There are too many things I would rather do than read. . . . I don’t like being indoors and get out every chance I get. In order to read, one must sit down, usually indoors. I am restless and would rather sail a boat than crack a book. I’ve never had a very lively literary curiosity, and it has sometimes seemed to me that I am not really a literary fellow at all. Except that I write for a living.
Now I really have to read Jonathan Lethem’s new novel and find out for myself. I’ve been going back and forth about it. I tend to like Lethem (which went in the “plus” column, obviously). Then I read that the book involved pot-smoking paranoids (a “minus” in my book). But it was also touted as a return to his more fantastical earlier works (a plus for a big fan of Girl in Landscape like myself). Then there seemed to be a critical consensus of sorts that the novel wasn’t up to snuff (a minus). But one of those reviews was a grumpy, not entirely convincing take by Michiko Kakutani (plus). And now I see this description of the book’s protagonist, Perkus Tooth, that Lethem gives in a recent interview:
He’s a volatile, supersensitive, paranoid, prematurely washed-up, shadowy, vain, and impossible person, a kind of twitching nerve insufficiently covered in flesh. I love him, myself.
If you’re in New York, Lethem has planned a creative local tour that will find him (and others) reading the entirety of the book over the course of eight nights at seven different venues.
Granted, the site is in its infancy, but it’s hard to tell what’s happening over at the Huffington Post’s new books page. Editor Amy Hertz ruffled a few feathers in an open letter to publicists, which emphasized that the site is not a “review”: “[T]here’s a reason [review] sections in newspapers are dropping like flies. Book reviews tend to be conversation enders, and when you’re living in the age of engagement, a time when people are looking for conversation starters, that stance gets you nowhere.”
That’s a bit dispiriting, but not the most surprising sentiment these days. Until you remember that the site’s primary partner is the brainy New York Review of Books. The oddity I noticed on my first visit to the HP books page was a series of adjectives at the top of each post. By clicking on one or more of these buttons, readers can vote for what they think of the piece. The options are: Amazing, Inspiring, Funny, Scary, Hot, Crazy, Important, Weird. Basically, all the adjectives that Paris Hilton could name. They keep these buttons up top even on the essays they reprint from the NYRB. (I don’t know about you, but I find Norman Rush’s take on James Ellroy “Inspiring” and “Hot”!)
If the print NYRB is going to keep up with the times, I think the least it should do is provide a page of perforated adjectives in the back of each issue, which readers can choose from, tear out and mail back to the journal. Engagement!
Steven Heller writes an appreciation of the “incredibly ground-breaking” covers for the Time Reading Program of the 1960s. The covers “had a huge influence on trade paperback design. Yet the TRP is all but forgotten today, ironically, even by some who created the covers.” His piece is accompanied by a 39-cover slideshow. (Via Casual Optimist) . . . A collection of previously unpublished Kurt Vonnegut stories is being published later this month. I’ll have a review up sometime in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, I was going to post something from the book on the blog, but Gregory Cowles has beaten me to it, posting the exact same excerpt I had in mind over at Paper Cuts. . . . Berkeley Breathed is interviewed about the first volume collecting his great comic strip: “Bloom County’s oddness reached out to a lot of disturbed minds, in a way that Beetle Bailey probably didn’t.” . . . The great Odd Books looks at a 1939 volume of astrological predictions about Hitler. . . . Nina Sankovitch has been reading (and reviewing) a book a day for one year. Not to be outdone, Jack Pendarvis has started reading a book flap every day.
A while back, I linked to a contest to redesign the cover of Nabokov’s Lolita. We now have a winner. It is not the cover at left. That one is by Suzene Ang of Singapore, and it was chosen as best not by John Bertram, who sponsored the contest, but by John Gall, a brilliant designer and art director at Vintage/Anchor. He said: “It takes a second before you see what is going on. It’s abstract enough to keep it metaphorical, yet literal enough to imply a sense of story. I love the tease of having the type run up the leg. Elegant, with a sense of humor.”
I like his choice more than the grand prize winner, but I can see why it didn’t appeal most to Bertram. One of Bertram’s big complaints about previously published covers was that they focused on Lolita’s sexuality and “serve[d] to re-traumatize the poor girl all over again.” The winner he chose, Lyuba Haleva of Bulgaria, pleased him by focusing on Humbert: “Somehow it all feels right to me and very inspired, and although the typeface is anachronistic and suggests to me a classic European novel, it seems to work.”
Like nearly every other blogger, from time to time I check what people are searching for that leads them to my site. “Great American novels” or “greatest American novels” is generally among the top few search terms.
Here at The Second Pass, by far the most common phrase that has led people here (aside from “second pass”) is “end of the world.” I don’t know what that phrase says about the psychology of Google users — or maybe I do — but the reason it leads them here is Jon Fasman’s excellent assessment of the post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker.
A quiet day here on the blog side of things, because of updates to both sections “above the fold” — an essay about Anthony Burgess’ Earthly Powers in the Backlist section, and a review of William Trevor’s latest in Circulating.
The blog will be more active tomorrow. In the meantime, I recently spoke (via e-mail) with Tim O’Shea, who runs the culture-interviews site Talking With Tim. He asked me about The Second Pass’ design, its successes and missteps, the response to “Fired from the Canon” and upcoming plans. You can read the results here.
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
David Ulin reviews Francine Prose’s new book about Anne Frank’s diary: “There’s no criticism, Prose argues, in calling Frank’s book crafted; if anything, the opposite is true.” . . . A British writer living in France reviews four books about France by British writers. (“[W]hat really makes us obsess over the French is that they evidently do not much care what we think of them.”) . . . Philip Pullman reviews a book that sounds like it might appeal to anyone who feels strongly about books as objets d’art. (“[T]he main thing to say about this book is that it is a stupendously good piece of design. The author and the publisher have taken real, prolonged, and exhaustive pains to make a beautiful book, and succeeded.”) . . . Simon Critchley and Julian Barnes have both written about coming to terms with death. Alexander Provan says they have created a new genre: “End-of-Self Help.” . . . Norman Rush reviews James Ellroy’s Blood’s a Rover, and says that the trilogy it caps off is “a major achievement in high parody.” . . . Jeremy Treglown reviews an “absorbing” new biography of W. Somerset Maugham, “an extraordinary, extravagant, generous and bitter artist.”
Every Thursday on the blog brings a post about a paperback book.
In his introduction to The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature, J. C. Hallman, who edited the collection, writes about “a kind of personal literary analysis, criticism that contemplates rather than argues. . . .” Examples of that brand of analysis are what Hallman has gathered here, and the collection is a treat even if its larger organizing principle might have been better left unstated.
Hallman’s brief intro scratches the surface of a larger, more bitter battle between academic and popular criticism. And unsurprisingly, that battle has been joined online. This comments thread at The Valve manages to be thoughtful and productive for a while before devolving into a more typical, repetitive Internet tussle.
In an essay included here about Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde writes:
. . . where there is no exaggeration there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding. It is only about things that do not interest one, that one can give a really unbiassed opinion; and this is no doubt the reason why an unbiassed opinion is always absolutely valueless.
Many of these pieces reflect that judgment, serving as very personal testaments to the power of certain works. In this vein, Salman Rushdie writes about The Wizard of Oz; Walter Kirn describes trying to meet The Catcher in the Rye “out in the open,” away from what he’s been taught to think about it; and Dagoberto Gilb uses his mother’s relationships as a way of understanding Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, offering smart, aphoristic insights about the characters in those three novels. (“They’re believers in these personal religions that we all really know deep down.”)
It still seems that the collection needn’t be posited against a more academic form of investigation. One can read this book and still believe in the necessity of a slightly different approach — not a theoretical, jargon-larded one, but simply a more consciously instructive one. Randall Jarrell’s “The Humble Animal,” an appreciation of Marianne Moore’s poetry, makes many sweeping (sometimes obscure) pronouncements about the subject but never really gets specific. It passes along an enthusiasm, but it doesn’t teach us anything. Cynthia Ozick’s piece about Truman Capote includes some fantastic descriptions of the author — “like an old caricature of Aeolus, the puff-cheeked little god of wind . . . his tongue on his lip like a soft fly.” But Ozick’s argument about why Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, is a “dead and empty book” seems unnecessarily tortured. Ozick’s voice and natural gifts make up for a lot (I think I’ll always have that “soft fly” in the Capote corner of my mind now), but it’s not an essay I would teach in a criticism class.
But any arguments about the source or role of criticism are beside the point. With the heavyweights included here — Nabokov’s extended analysis of The Metamorphosis by Kafka, Susan Sontag on Dostoevsky, Albert Camus on Herman Melville — The Story About the Story doesn’t have to win any arguments to justify its existence.
Herta Müller, the Romanian-born German novelist and essayist who has written widely about the oppression of dictatorship in her native country and the unmoored life of the political exile, on Thursday won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy described Ms. Müller, “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” . . . Ms. Müller, 56, emigrated to Germany in 1987 after years of persecution and censorship in Romania. She is the first German writer to win the Nobel award since Günter Grass in 1999. Just four of her works have been translated into English from the original German, including the novels The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment.
The man who played the mascot Mr. Met from 1994-1997 is hoping to sell a book about his experiences. In his answer to the question below (from this interview), he starts by showing a sense of humor about (and a knowledge of) the current publishing biz:
Does your book proposal contain shocking revelations like mascot groupies or mascots injecting one another with performance-enhancing drugs?
Mr. Met is actually part-zombie and part-vampire. That’s not true, but I hear that’s the only way to get a book sold these days.
Seriously, part of the reason I wanted to write a book about my time as a professional mascot is that most people have no idea what a mascot actually goes through on a regular basis. In my four years on the job, I was abused by players, reprimanded by umpires, nearly trampled to death by exuberant parade-goers, and even had my life threatened by Secret Service agents. Not to mention that I once a encountered a very gruesome naked celebrity.
I haven’t any right to criticise books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
A continuing series that highlights books recently acquired by publishing houses for future release. Each post features a book we’re looking forward to, and a book we’re . . . not.
The Cherry:
J. North Conway’s The Third Degree: Thomas Byrnes and the Birth of the Modern American Detective, a story of murder, mayhem, and intrigue — the celebrated career of a 19th century New York detective who tackled the city’s most notorious murders and robberies and perfected and popularized “the third degree.”
The Pit:
Michael Sullivan’s Necessary Heartbreak, an inspirational time-travel novel about a single dad who has lost his faith and is struggling to raise his 14-year-old daughter when they discover a portal leading back to first-century Jerusalem during the tumultuous last week of Christ’s life.
For those of you interested in the trade of book reviewing, two links for you today. First, a multi-page report by Laura Hazard Owen about the future of reviewing online. I’m interviewed in the piece, which also includes thoughts from Mark Sarvas, James Mustich, Sarah Weinman and other online writers and editors.
And the new issue of Bookslut features an interview with the Washington Post’s Ron Charles, whose hysterical acceptance speech for an award at the last National Book Critics Circle ceremony brought down the house. Asked about the shrinking opportunities for professional reviewers, he says:
The number of books keeps rising, as far as I can tell. The number of readers is stable or stagnant or even declining. When you look at the amount of space we spend covering television… I’m not criticizing my own paper, I’m criticizing my own industry. Who needs help watching TV? Reviews of television shows, I shake my head; I can figure out if I want to watch The Office or Curb Your Enthusiasm all by myself. But help me find a good novel, in this enormous stack of books at the book store. That’s a real service.
Daniel Menaker reviews Tim Page’s memoir about growing up with Asperger’s: “The writing here is for the most part clear, conversational, mordantly funny. In fact, you wonder how the author can have such a wide palette of expressiveness, given the nature of his nature.” . . . A smart piece by Andrew Delbanco on two new books about education, and why “despite the manifest ambiguities of the data, Americans persist in believing that our schools have fallen from some golden age of excellence.” . . . Gordon Haber reviews six recent books about God vs. No God. On the longest of them, Robert Wright’s 567-page The Evolution of God: “He consistently provides an unnecessary level of detail, which creates a book that refuses to end. Days after I finally got through it all, I flinched whenever I got a text message, for fear that it was Wright with further elucidation.” . . . In the fifth issue of n+1’s book review, Marco Roth reads Caleb Crain’s self-published book of blog writing: “Crain handles [all topics] with an unflagging open-mindedness and intelligence, as though conducting a course on how to be a responsible polymath.” . . . Henry Hitchings compares the seventh edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature with previous versions. Final verdict: “a scrupulously produced, smartly laid-out, academically serious and at the same time relishably browsable book, replete with valuable information.”
:
(This week’s contribution is written by Jessica Ferri)
is a book of aphorisms by James Guida. An aphorist aims to convey the same perception and truth that any writer does, but in fewer words. Like Twitter, but more profound.
I learn 
, for which Dan has contributed a foreword. It turns out that the comedic actor is quite the paranormal believer:
Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog recently sang the praises of the smart and lovely NYRB Classics series, and 
is a perfect example) turn up. Or you could say, that what draws me to a book is its being unexpected. The book should be something that shifts your perception of writing or of the world, that fills in a gap — or possibly opens one. (Maude Hutchins’s 
, for example, makes you think very differently about the literature of the 1950s than, say, 
.)
Instead of trying to come up with a joke about an “Extraordinary Canadians” series (and don’t think I couldn’t), I’ll just say that 
With Halloween looming, AbeBooks cleverly puts together 
At Vanity Fair, R. Crumb 
The Economist says that readers of Sweet Thunder, Wil Haygood’s new biography of Sugar Ray Robinson, “
Originally published in 1972, 
is, as Ben Marcus notes in his afterword to an edition published last year by Dalkey Archive Press, “if not science fiction, then really strange fiction.” The story is only 99 pages long, but it’s hard to use a word like novella for a work with such a fully imagined, minutely detailed world.
In his introduction to the wickedly fun 
, editor Gary Dexter gives three reasons why we should pay attention when writers write negatively about their peers:
Below are excerpts from two recent reviews of a new biography of Ayn Rand, both of which are well worth reading in full. The book is 
by Anne C. Heller.
by William Nack:
John Self 
by Carson McCullers:
The BBC is conducting a project of which the Second Pass heartily approves. Prominent authors are recommending “forgotten classics” to be rescued from obscurity. Radio 4 listeners have heard the authors’ cases for their choices, and a vote will determine which book gets new attention by being 
I had no idea that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a syndicated comic strip based on the life of Woody Allen. It was created by Stuart Hample, and the best of it is collected in the forthcoming 
. Hample describes the unlikely genesis of the project in an excerpt 
Two critics on the other side of the Atlantic praise a new biography of Charles Dickens. 
:
It seems to me that the word anthology used to have a bit more weight behind it. To anthologize something was to acknowledge it had stood the test of time, or to ensure it would keep standing it. Now, anthologies of new, loosely connected material are published every week, and the annual “Best American” series keeps expanding, threatening to simply publish all of a given year’s American writing under one rubric or other (American Blog Posts About Parking Spaces 2009, etc.)
is being published this month. The books are beautifully, uniformly designed. They look great together. Even the paper they’re printed on feels terrific.
Now I really have to read Jonathan Lethem’s new novel and find out for myself. I’ve been going back and forth about it. I tend to like Lethem (which went in the “plus” column, obviously). Then I read that the book involved pot-smoking paranoids (a “minus” in my book). But it was also touted as a return to his more fantastical earlier works (a plus for a big fan of 
like myself). Then there seemed to be a critical consensus of sorts that the novel wasn’t up to snuff (a minus). But one of those reviews was a grumpy, not entirely convincing take 
Steven Heller writes 
David Ulin 
In his introduction to 
, J. C. Hallman, who edited the collection, writes about “a kind of personal literary analysis, criticism that contemplates rather than argues. . . .” Examples of that brand of analysis are what Hallman has gathered here, and the collection is a treat even if its larger organizing principle might have been better left unstated.
, is a “dead and empty book” seems unnecessarily tortured. Ozick’s voice and natural gifts make up for a lot (I think I’ll always have that “soft fly” in the Capote corner of my mind now), but it’s not an essay I would teach in a criticism class.
and 
.
The man who played the mascot Mr. Met from 1994-1997 is hoping to sell a book about his experiences. In his answer to the question below (from 
A new book collects 
. . . . A reader’s 
.