Sara Gruen - Water For Elephants

It is very rare indeed that I read a book with raised lettering on the cover, but I found myself recently with a copy of Sara Gruen’s novel Water For Elephants, which I found to be a well-paced, well-researched, very enjoyable read.

The story follows Jacob, a young Ivy League student who goes in one chapter from sitting for final exams to shoveling shit on a third-rate train circus in Depression-era America, surrounded by the requisite cast of midget clowns, bearded ladies, toothless lions, drunken roustabouts, overbearing bosses, and an elephant that only understands Polish. Water For Elephants is ultimately a story about all the familiar themes: finding your place in the world, finding love and trust in unexpected places, and discovering that life has a funny way of working out in the end.

That’s all I can really say without ruining the plot, so I save my real accolades for Sara Gruen herself. After years of making a living as a technical writer (hence, perhaps, the sparseness of detail), she decided to retire early and write fiction for a living (NOT an easy thing to do emotionally or financially). She meticulously researched the world of train circuses during the Great Depression and did a fantastic job of weaving in history (or at least potentially-true anecdotes) into a world of pure fiction.

Water For Elephants is not the tome of literary fiction that I would normally enjoy— a book that works on a hundred different levels, which is packed full of precise and minute detail, which rewards readers the second and third and fourth times through. In fact, I am confident I will never be tempted to glance at this book again, but that one reading was very enjoyable. There is not much going on behind the prose, but there is still plenty to satisfy. The setting doesn’t pop as much as one might expect, but the characters are very lively, especially the animals. The climax is well written, the twist is actually surprising, and the framing device not used too obnoxiously.

There could have been more to it, yes, but the fact is: being dissatisfied because you want more is far, far better than being dissatisfied because there is way too much.

Ahem, The Kite Runner, I am looking in your direction.

John Irving - The Hotel New Hampshire

“The first of my father’s illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.”

How tantalizingly great is that line???


I find it hard to review a book that I love—nearly impossible, in fact. What can you say except ‘fuck Farewell To Arms; make this required high school reading’? So maybe I’ll just talk about the author.

More than any other novelist I know (excepting Steinbeck and Faulkner) John Irving exemplifies the maxim of ‘throw what you know’, which is, in no particular order: circuses, bears, rape, motorcycles, Eastern Europe, tragedy, anarchists, weightlifting, love, dwarfism, poetry, adultery, opera, prostitution, incest, and hotels— he writes about them all constantly. The dwarf (Owen Meany) who became the lovable movie character Simon Birch was not the first dwarf to populate Irving’s fictional universe. Nor was the Hotel New Hampshire, namesake of this novel, the first hotel. Earl was not the first (or last) bear, and the 1937 Indian, with which this novel begins, is certainly not the first motorcycle. These things and ideas permeate any Irving novel, resulting in a ridiculous pastiche of familiar themes presented in unbelievable and, ultimately, moving ways, which I think is his biggest strength. Not a single plot from any Irving novel I have ever read (most of them, not all) is remotely believable, yet all of them feel deeply rooted in the real world, and are populated by real people.

I’ve tried three or four times to write a quick synopsis of The Hotel New Hampshire as an example, but it just doesn’t work. Nothing makes sense without copious explanations—not Freud, Chipper Dove, or Iowa Bob; not Fritz and his circus or the toilets at the Stanhope; not Screaming Annie the prostitute, and certainly not Miss Miscarriage, the Gatsby-loving revolutionary. Even the family needs a novel’s worth of explanation: weirdo Frank, half-deaf Egg, little Lily, the relative buoyancy of Sorrow, the tangled relationship between a sister and a brother. Susie, the smartest bear of all, makes less sense than anyone in the book, yet she feels more authentic than every character combined in whatever novel Oprah is pimping this month, guaranteed.

The only criticism I have is that the final chapter—the self-proclaimed ‘epilogue’ (“because there always is one”) goes on for far too long. It gets caught in weird tangents explaining the future happenstances of every character as if it somehow mattered, as if the story on its own was not enough. Take Fred—the late-arrival deaf handyman. He’s not quite Egg, but he’s supposed to resemble Egg, and the comparison is half-assed and entirely unnecessary. Egg already broke your heart; Fred just confuses you for the 10 pages of his existence.

But another way to look at it is this: given that ‘it’s a little long’ is the easiest criticism to make, what is far more impressive is that in 400+ pre-epilogue pages, there aren’t a dozen expendable words. The Hotel New Hampshire is a triumph of making every line count and every description matter, of making every character distinct and every situation work.

Plus, I can’t read this book without crying at least six times. Maybe that’s the only acclamation it needs.

C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity / Joseph Campbell - The Power Of Myth

“I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it.” – C.S. Lewis

“There [in Beirut] you have the three great Western religions— Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and because the three of them have three different names for the same biblical god, they can’t get on together. They are stuck with their metaphor and don’t realize its reference.” – Joseph Campbell

"If you swear that 'there is no truth' and 'who cares', how come you say it like you're right?"-- Conor Oberst

Fact: religion trips me the fuck out. Mostly, honestly, because I find the arguing that goes on between religious groups to be profoundly retarded. Every religion is based on a series of improbable events and fundamentally unprovable shit, and arguing that someone else’s unprovable shit is dumber than your own is kind of like trying to write a convincing op-ed piece about which shade of blue is the ‘coolest’.

However, I do love to read, and I strive to understand other points of view, so after multiple friends recommended C.S. Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity’, I took the task on. For a different take on human belief, I also read Joseph Campbell’s ‘The Power Of Myth’ and, as soon as I did, knew they had to be reviewed together.

First, Lewis:

I know, a fantasy author writing about the ultimate fantastical being is rife for parody on a level with a science fiction author inventing a religion involving space aliens, but Lewis’ endeavor is quite admirable. During the Battle of Britain, when Londoners were cowering in holes while the Luftwaffe carpet bombed their homes and businesses, former-atheist and Narnia-inventor C.S. Lewis presented a series of radio addresses about everyday, human (‘mere’) Christianity. These radio addresses were eventually edited and turned into a book which I read cover to cover, making copious notes throughout, agreeing and disagreeing with points in (roughly) equal measure. And I find myself more enriched for it, at least from the perspective that I understand more about the intellectual rationale behind Christianity.

Lewis does a great job (generally) of setting out a line of logic, and following it, and bringing the reader along, and most of his logic is extremely insightful. The concept of God as being out of time is brilliant, and his general argument for some sort of transcendent power in the universe is very strong. Other arguments, however, are neither strong nor brilliant. Example: Lewis says marriage is the ideal partnership, with the husband as the head of it. I ask, ‘why does it need a head?’ ‘To settle disputes definitively,’ Lewis responds, ‘since there is no third vote.’ I say, ‘fair enough— why can’t the wife be the head?’ ‘Hm,’ Lewis says (and I am not even kidding), ‘because who would you rather have discipline the neighbor’s dog if you caught it crapping in your yard—the husband or wife?’

Not only is this possibly the most retarded explanation for why men should have dominion over their families I have ever heard, he goes even further in his pandering, saying, in effect, ‘and women—you say you want to be in charge, but do you really want that? C’mon!’ General debate rule #37: if this guy could have thought up your argument, it’s probably not a good one.

Another point of contention came when Lewis took the leap from ‘there’s something beyond what we know in life’ to ‘the Fact of God’, partially due to an ever-thinning stream of logic, but mostly because of extremely poor language usage— something Lewis, as a linguist, complains about throughout the text. 'The word Gentleman has lost all meaning.' Sure. 'The word Christian will lose meaning similarly if used to describe any charitable person.' Most likely. 'The Fact of God.' Wait a tick...

Now, ‘Fact’ has many archaic definitions—‘a thing done’, a ‘crime’, a ‘feat’, but for the past few hundred years it’s been used to mean ‘a truth known by actual experience or observation’, ie. something provable, as in ‘it’s a fact that that your dog is dead’. But God, by every rational definition (including Lewis’ own), has no actual, physical existence and cannot be measured or studied or ‘actually experienced or observed’ and therefore it is hardly, argumentatively or linguistically, appropriate to call God a ‘Fact’. Nor it is appropriate to take a force which is completely and utterly beyond human comprehension and insist on calling it ‘He’. Sorry, linguist— God is not a fact, and God is not a dude.

This was partially what made the book less compelling for me—1) often specious logic which I noted and wrote about and, eventually, found some explanations for in ‘The Power Of Myth’, and 2) hypocritical, contradictory calls on a host of issues. Example: Lewis decries, at length, the ego-stoking and intellectual snobbery of many non-Christians (which surely exists), but then envisions Christianity as a secret society of freedom fighters that works incognito trying bring about a grand moral revolution— perhaps the most ego-stoking image that could possibly be assumed by the most powerful religious group in the most powerful nation on Earth.

Perhaps it sounds like I am slamming ‘Mere Christianity’, but to be quite honest, it’s probably the best piece of Christian literature I have ever read; it’s very persuasive in many ways, though-provoking and challenging throughout, and though I disagreed with many of Lewis’ postulates, the book does its job—it gives starting places for thought and reflection. What led me away from the ideas behind ‘Mere Christianity’, ultimately, was something I began questioning early on in the book and didn’t really grasp until I got into ‘The Power Of Myth’. Lewis argues hard for, indeed much of his case hinges upon, the existence of a universal moral law, his prime example being that everyone knows murder is never alright. This is imperative to his argument, and I couldn’t quite believe that this statement was true. I felt like it was true to a point, but only for the people of that faith within that community—outside groups were a different story.

Example: plenty of young American soldiers believe it is alright, or at least not so bad, to gun down Afghan or Iraqi civilians because they may disagree with our policies and actions. Plenty of Muslims are brought up believing wholeheartedly that it’s okay to blow up Americans, or members of opposing sects of Islam, but never a member of their own group. Ethnic/political/religious rivalries like this exist everywhere, and for almost every group, the rules for treating insiders and outsiders is different. Lewis’ assertion was just too clean-cut and convenient for me, too damn easy.

Then I opened Joseph Campbell's ‘The Power Of Myth’ and found this exact same dilemma—that within each individual society only the in-group benefits from supposed ‘morals’, which are hardly absolute. Campbell uses Deuteronomy 10:13-14 as an example, where God commands the Hebrews to invade other cities, slaughter all the males, and take every woman and child as property. Now, for a Hebrew to enslave or murder another Hebrew was unthinkable— a terrible crime— but to go into Canaan and kill everything in it was simply what God desired—the same God, coincidentally, who commanded ‘Thou shalt not kill’.

Lewis brings up a good point here in conjunction with capital punishment—that there were two words for ‘kill’ at the time. One meant generally ‘take the life of’ and one meant ‘murder the innocent’, which was the word used in the commandment. In that context, killing as punishment does not violate God’s law. But how can one possibly rationalize throwing baby boys off of castle walls or running through the old and infirm as anything but murder in cold blood, unless anyone in the out-group cannot be considered innocent, in which case the rules for treating the in and out-groups are expressly different and in a matter of pages Campbell has shot a hole the size of a Volkswagen through Lewis’ theory of universal morality.

Despite how it might seem, ‘The Power Of Myth’ is not the anti-'Mere Christianity'. Campbell takes an entirely different approach to the issue of human faith, not arguing for or against any specific belief system, but instead illuminating the basis for every single one of them—mystery and myth. The idea is that there is some endless force within the universe (much like Lewis’ original postulate) and that the entire story of human faith is the story of man trying to tap into this force. Every religion that has ever existed has concerned itself with that idea, and the particular belief system that each society develops is nothing but a metaphor, a useful way for them to explain the mystery of existence. Myth was/is a means of cluing people into this mystery, as well as disseminating knowledge and social expectations to new generations.

Campbell runs through an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient cultures and myths and belief systems, showing the endless common threads that run throughout all human experience of God. He shows how forest gods the world over take certain characteristics, and desert gods other characteristics, how hunting traditions and planting traditions have very distinct imagery associated with them, and how Yahweh is simply a clever synthesis of both. Campbell clues the reader into the common reference behind every metaphor and it becomes clear: each society has created a god or gods that fit their experience of the world as a way of explaining the unexplainable. In this sense, the Christian God is no more ‘correct’ or ‘true’ than any other god. The Christian God works as a metaphor for many, yet ultimately is but one face of the unknowable on a mask that can be spun around infinitely, and the sum of all those faces is the sum of human experience.

What we have here, between C.S. Lewis and Joseph Campbell, is the battle of the generalist vs. the specialist— Lewis knows more about language and the complicated logical processes behind explaining the Christian God, but he is woefully lacking in many other areas and, indeed, his terse appraisals of ‘Muhammadism’ and Eastern philosophies are almost laughable in their lack of complexity.

Lewis is like the PhD candidate, brilliant in his field, but Campbell is the guy with 17 degrees and a broad understanding of social anthropology, archaeology, human psychology, physiology, sociology, philosophy, history, literature, art, and comparative religions. And then we have his specialty: myth— the fundamental building blocks which create the various paths of proper being within every society. Had they ever debated, I think Lewis would have become quickly aggravated because while Campbell can tread water in Lewis’ ocean, the moment Lewis steps outside of his specialty, he is in way over his head.

The other thing which Campbell does is dispel the idea that the Bible was somehow divinely inspired—the literal word of God— by tracing back every major image, event, and theme in the Bible to myths and traditions thousands of years older than Christianity. The creation story, the Fall, the flood, the Savior dying and resurrecting, the virgin birth, walking on water, sacrificing a son to forgive sins, and so forth from cover to cover of the old and new testaments are echoed in myths from disconnected cultures across the globe, and once the underlying symbolism of all those stories is understood and context is established, it becomes difficult to say with a straight face that Bible stories are any more true in a literal sense than the Sumerian and Egyptian and Indian myths which informed them.

The case for a literal interpretation of the Bible is as weak as the case for a literal interpretation of Aesop’s fables, which isn’t to discredit or discount the function Christianity plays in my culture and many others—the messages behind the words are valid and useful, just as the morals of Aesop are valid and useful despite being explained through trolls and witches and wicked children. What is frustrating is that, until fairly recently in human history, those stories were understood and interpreted in terms of general application to human life, as a kind of culture-specific topographical map. What modernity has done is turn that general map into a GPS system which no three people can agree upon.

Lewis himself infers that the bible is a literal translation of God’s desires, ignoring the linguistic and literary aspects which he, as a specialist, should be well versed in: namely, the concept of poetic language versus prosaic language. Virtually nothing besides history texts (and even those are suspect) written more than a thousand years ago was written in prosaic language. Religious texts especially are full of poetic language and images and abstract ideas and metaphors within metaphors (uh, parables??). They were not written, nor intended to be read, as literal fact, and this is modernity’s big stumbling block: we’re a prosaic culture reading poetic words and using them to precisely order our lives. Poetics are meant to be fluid and we’ve turned them rigid, into a precise religious doctrine, confining their usefulness to one very narrow way of being.

Myth is poetic in nature and, as opposed to a system of ecclesiastical beliefs, isn’t concerned with one particular course of behavior. In fact, prominent myths in most cultures contradict each other— a tacit acceptance that there is not just one path to follow, and that giving several avenues will allow more people to pass. The battle for the individual is to choose a path which allows you to live in accord with society (because it’s useless not to) but not allow society to dictate too much of what you do within it (otherwise your life is already gone). Myth assisted this passage through life, strengthening society on the whole and man individually by giving multiple ways of being and hinting at the underlying wonder and mystery of life, and has been influencing mankind (and thus the world) since hominids first began to imagine and create.

As for the text itself, 'The Power Of Myth', being just a series of conversations, keeps a quick pace. Campbell does have his quirks— he stumbles into grouchy-old-man-land quite often with simplistic and unsupportable views on modern youth, and while I don’t agree with all of his ideas, I think there is much more knowledge and wisdom packed into it than ‘Mere Christianity’. Campbell explained to me in rational and sympathetic terms the human need for meaning and all the forms that it takes and, in fact, has made me even more supportive of Christianity— along with every other faith in equal measure— than the Christian scholar’s text, which is a pretty damn mysterious thing in and of itself.

But the final a-ha! moment came from the least likely of places—Rolling Stone. Several issues ago they had an interview with Win Butler, lead singer of The Arcade Fire, who pretty much summed up my feelings exactly. “There’s a lot of metaphorical language in the Bible,” he said. “There are things about organized religion that I find intriguing, [but] I think that people mistake describing something for understanding it—that happens in religion a lot.”

Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried

For the record, I don't traditionally like the 'war memorial' genre. I also tend to dislike books that others gush over, although that could just be a case of inflated expectations.

However.

Tim O'Brien's memoir about his experience in the Vietnam war begins with an item-by-item list of all of the things that his company carried - literally - during their time in Vietnam. My initial skepticism of such a trite literary conceit was rather spectacularly undeserved, though, a fact that began to dawn on me as O'Brien moved smoothly through physical items into items of memory or experience that these men carried with them. This theme carried through the entirety of the book, though unobtrusively so, gently nudging me every so often to think about how each story would weigh on each character.

Perhaps that was the most intriguing thing about the book, though. O'Brien is an openly unreliable narrator whose self-awareness turns that unreliability into a virtue. In fact, the pugnacious nature of his unreliability seems itself to be a literary device, showing that one of the things he carries is his desire to have experienced all of these things, so that he can legitimately write about them. At the very least, he carries the weight of his obligation to tell the stories that so many of them cannot.

In terms of structure, the vignettes have a dreamlike unreality to them that reflects the surreal quality traditionally applied to the Vietnam era. I can't be sure if this is deliberate, but whether premeditated or not, O'Brien's reflection of the dazed sort of horror that everyone seems to feel about Vietnam is the perfect foil for his uncompromisingly unreliable storytelling. The loose structure of the vignettes seem to be O'Brien's way of showing how his memories of that time are both disjoint and fluid - each story is vividly distinct from others, yet as the book progresses the narrator obfuscates what happened to whom and when, and dead characters pop back to life, then are dead again as he jumps back and forth in time.

Though at times O'Brien's "don't romanticize this, nothing I say here is true" theme can be a bit grating, the book is beautifully constructed and written. O'Brien strikes the difficult balance between impactful emotional content and sappy self-indulgence, and the result is a book well worth reading.

George Orwell- Burmese Days

There is a pattern in Orwell's books: the main character is a pathetic guy, fatally flawed from birth, but basically good (unless it's autobiographical, in which case the main character is awesome); the other characters are criminals at heart, and the one exemplary, saintly character gets dragged through the mud and usually dies at the end (kind of like Jesus). The main character takes a feeble stab at saving himself and "Jesus" but ultimately fails due to circumstances that capitalize on his numerous weaknesses (again, unless it's autobiographical, in which case, the main guy has no weaknesses and solves problems by moving to another country).

Burmese Days is not a huge exception! I read it to get a pseudo-historical perspective on the British occupation of the Irrawaddy delta region, since Orwell was stationed there for a while and the novel would undoubtedly be a loose disguise for his personal observations and opinions. Which it was.

As an early novel, it isn't very good. The plot is silly (most likely intentional) and smacks of allegory. The main guy, Flory, is a lone (and silent) voice of dissent in a sea of imperialistic bigotry. He hates his mediocrity but manages to perpetuate it with every action, except for his friendship with a saintly Indian doctor, the one guy he can talk honestly with. Then a girl shows up, a girl whom he falls in love with and dreams he can share his silent opinions with, but she turns out to be a horrible bitch, a female copy of the other white guys. This is not to deter Flory. Her approval, by either boosting or deflating Flory at critical junctures, determines how well he defends his Indian friend, whose status hinges on his relationship with the white guys, and who has come under attack by a corrupt Burmese magistrate.

Orwell never waxes pedantic, opting instead to sound less like commentary and more like observation (one of his main strengths, and probably a large factor in avoiding the banning of his books). He never says outright, "the only smart character is the corrupt Burman, the only decent character is the gentle Indian doctor, the white guys and Burmese slaves are sniveling, terrified bastards." But...that's exactly what the book tells you. Racism is put into context, the smart guy wins, the gentle guy loses, and all in all, the book ends up being as silly as it is realistic.

Please no snarky comments about Orwell's real name. 'George Orwell' is a way better selection than Eric-name-so-mundane-I-already-forgot.

Mark Twain - The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim's Progress

It’s easy to criticize art for being too long, whether literature, film or music. But there are times when the criticism is apt.

In 1869, Mark Twain convinced a San Francisco newspaper to pay his passage on a voyage from New York to the Middle East in exchange for his account of the journey. Thus, the man had hefty deadlines to meet, and this aspect shows itself irritatingly throughout the entirety of “The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress, Being Some Account of the Steamship Quaker City’s Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land; With Descriptions of Countries, Nations, Incidents and Adventures, as They Appeared to the Author” (even the effin’ title is ridiculous!): egregious padding of passages; tangents on top of tangents; well-known biblical tales retold in detail; irrelevant data and nearly-identical anecdotes repeated throughout 500 unwieldy pages—all of which turn a fun and interesting travel book into an exercise in tedium on par with Joyce’s Ulysses or the collected works of every emo-warrior-poet on MySpace.

When Twain sticks to telling his story, he’s great. As usual, his sardonic wit and singular point of view make many passages delightful to read and he’s at his funniest with his tongue lodged firmly in his cheek. When his party finds the very hole in which Joseph was placed by his brothers, Twain claims that anyone must accept the indisputable nature of the fact since, in 1,800 years, no one has proved it wasn’t that hole. When his party comes across the One True Cross in the Holy Lands, he declares it the best of all the One True Crosses he has seen in cathedrals throughout Europe. But these moments of levity are often in the minority, stranded miles apart between unnecessary recountings of stagecoach rides through the Old West and musings on the depth of Lake Tahoe.

As a journal-keeping exercise in tracking first impressions and mood swings across the rocky emotional landscape of extended travel, this book is great. But as a story designed to captivate and entertain, its failings are obvious. Though I’m glad to have read it, given that I appropriated the title for a blog long ago, I can’t recommend The Innocents Abroad to anyone. When a book can stand to lose 150 pages without altering the story in the slightest, it officially qualifies as too damn long.

Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner

I’m a perennial fan of the underdog, and this colors my perception of popular culture because the opposite is also true-- I eschew anything that makes its way onto multiple 'Best Of...' lists. Few Americans read more than 2 books a year, yet whenever Oprah puts her stamp on a novel, it'll sell a quarter of a million copies faster than Eliot Spitzer's "escort" will get her own reality show (and you know she will).

Not only is this obnoxious, but it tends to homogenize taste and lower the intellectual bar since everyone who reads two books a year can “talk books” because everyone else has read the same two. Not only do they get to feel learn-ed (with two syllables), but a common enemy is found in the person who says "No, I didn't read The DaVinci Code, but I did read the collected essays of Jacques Derrida and Vonnegut's Galapagos.”

Of course, not all best-sellers are bad, as not all buzzworthy bands are terrible, but I generally avoid ‘the next big thing’. However, I do trust my friends, and when one of them would not shut her word hole about Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, I finally caved.

And she's right. It is very good.

Taking place over several decades, The Kite Runner tells the story of protagonist Amir's personal redemption as he struggles in adulthood to reconcile his past and atone for childhood sins. Amir grew up with his friend and servant Hassan, but greedy for his father's affections and ashamed of himself for abandoning Hassan in his moment of need, Amir drove Hassan away. He lives with his guilt until the chance at redemption comes. Amir, now emigrated to America and a successful writer, must return to a war-torn Afghanistan and perform a redeeming act.

The first half of the book is a retelling so powerfully authentic that it reads like a memoir, including an account of Afghani immigrants in the US and a sweeping history of Afghanistan which is almost more interesting than the main plot. But suddenly The Kite Runner turns into an action-packed tale of mystery and intrigue, complete with the great confrontation between good and evil. The evil in the present represents the evil in Amir's past, but Hosseini was not satisfied with that-- it actually IS the evil from the past. I guess symbolic redemption wasn’t obvious enough, so he had to get literal.

I won't give away too much, but when the child of the man you betrayed saves you in the EXACT same way that his father did long ago, it becomes too easy, almost gag-worthy. The very act of the child saving Amir makes the point— the obvious similarity is a ‘Dear Reader, you remember this, right?’ moment of epic proportions, not to mention that forcing a desired web of connections like that often leaves holes in logic that the beauty of the web cannot hide.

But my biggest complaint is a simple one, a rule of thumb for writers—get in late, get out early. Hosseini has a very evocative style, and uses it well to give readers a strong sense of what the characters feel, only to stick around 2 sentences too long and tell us what we just figured out. Amir wants his father to love him; his father gives Hassan attention; Amir cries. Excellent, we get it, no need to follow with "That hurt my feelings. I wanted that attention. All I ever wanted was for Baba to love me the way he loved Hassan." I don't know if that's just Hosseini’s style or concessions to editors/publishers saying "this could be a big thing, but you're going to need to hold the readers' hand a little more." Either way, it detracted significantly.

This appraisal may seem overly critical for a book I claim to enjoy, but despite my complaints, this is one of the best novels I’ve read in a while, and one of the rare times when pop culture and talent actually collide.

But isn't that the problem with buzzworthiness, after all? It creates an expectation for perfection, and any minor blemish stands in contrast as an ugly, jagged scar.

John Kennedy Toole- A Confederacy of Dunces

The most notable thing about this book is that I enjoyed it most when I wasn't reading it. I'd put it down and reflect happily on Toole's base, onanistic, and utterly absurd characters, dreaming of how I could incorporate more of their attributes into my own life in a vague attempt at self-improvement. That was my favorite part. Perhaps part of this is due to the fact that I read the first 200 pages in a darkened room lying in bed next to a very sick and hungover boyfriend. This book is extremely appropriate for such times.

In short, A Confederacy of Dunces is set in New Orleans in the early sixties. It's about the bizarre escapades of a certain questionably sane, morbidly obese, highly educated (Medieval studies major) Ignatius C Reilly, who had peacefully coexisted with his mother until she drunkenly drives into a building and suddenly owes a thousand dollars. They aren't financially well-off, so Ignatius finds himself faced with the challenge of getting a job. Hilarity ensues.

Lurking beneath the hilarity are some very well-drawn characters who embody various issues present in the sixties: the red scare, civil rights, various liberations, etc. Despite the setback of being a Pulitzer-prizewinner, the book doesn't preach, and it doesn't really say anything about the human condition. It was initially rejected by Simon and Schuster for "not being about anything." If you read the forward, you'll get a sense of how autobiographical the story probably was. At the very least, it's like viewing New Orleans forty-five years ago through a window that selectively magnifies absurdity.

Some people have protested the book on the basis that the characters are not likable, but if you ban books containing dislikable characters, you'd lose a lot of good stories. And, in a way, the characters are actually quite likable, once you decide to give them a chance.

A Defense of Fantasy Fiction

There's a time at every social event where a new acquaintance asks me, "So what do you do for fun?" It's not always this exact phrase, but inevitably a question of its ilk shows up in casual conversation. When I choose to respond honestly, I mention that I like to read, and I almost always get the same response: "Really? I hate reading." It's not like this is an unusual feeling - newest reports say that only 46% of Americans have read a book in the last year. Though it doesn't count nonfiction or memoir as having read a book, the point remains that many Americans don't read books. Perhaps they read the newspaper, or biographies, or gossip magazines, but they aren't reading fiction.

This isn't intended to be a defense of reading where I stridently declare that the decline of civilization is caused by the decline in readers and rise of television watchers. Instead, I intend to explain why fantasy fiction in particular is undeserving of the oblique mockery and borderline social suicide status it has somehow obtained. In fact, I hope to show why reading fantasy fiction is beneficial, both to the reader and to the greater press of humanity with which we all interact.

Of course, the most obvious hallmark of fantasy fiction is its eponymous characteristic - that the world and characters are fantasy and do not exist. Setting aside the point that all fiction is fantasy, fantasy fiction employs settings, worlds, plot devices, and events that do not exist in our own world. More importantly, they CANNOT exist in our world. While many fantasy novels are set in worlds that closely resemble the Medieval period in our own history, urban fantasy inserts elements of the unreal into our everyday existence. Whether in castles or high-rises, though, reading about things that don't exist revives our hope that there are wondrous things in the world, and that great acts of heroism are possible. Every day people go to work and watch the news about murders and car crashes, and while these things can happen in fantasy, they're usually caused by the forces of evil. In a world where very little happens to make people laugh and clap their hands in delight, it's a distinct relief to read about it and to believe, just for a little while, that it could be possible for the evil overlord to be overthrown and for the deliriously happy new king and queen live happily ever after - it's all too rare in our own lives.

Take a look around at the female characters in most literary fiction these days, and you'll find the four women from Sex & the City scattered in a myriad of incarnations and splashed around the pages of contemporary fiction like the unimaginative, 2-dimensional characters they are. Leave off Hemingway's refusal to grant agency to his female characters (itself a matter of debate) and look at contemporary authors. Many authors treats their female characters as stereotypes - even the female authors. While fantasy fiction has its share of male-heavy series, my experience has been that the great majority of fantasy writers employ strong, well-imagined and well-characterized female characters. Often, they (and their male counterparts) struggle with the same dilemmas of character and human condition as their more well-respected brethren in the 'literary fiction' world. For example, Lynn Flewelling's series about a girl who is put into a boy's body by dark magic to save her life is not so dissimilar to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex. Though the stories are of course different, the two main characters struggle with their identities and societal expectations in much the same way, and both authors allow the reader to experience how they imagine the character would react to such circumstances. The difference is that with Middlesex I KNOW that I'm suppose to learn something about the human condition, whereas Flewelling prefers to allow her readers to take in that aspect of the story as such, without bludgeoning them to death with the 'significance' of her work.

In that same vein, I have come to regard the authors of fantasy fiction as people who stubbornly cling to the hope that people are, at their most basic, equal-minded and able to judge others based on character rather than gender, race, or sexual orientation. I have a hard time calling to mind any fantasy novel that I have read (and lord, I've read a lot) that did not either have strong homosexual characters (both male and female) or make it clear that in that world, homosexuality was unusual but not looked down upon. Perhaps this acceptance is the most blatant indulgence of unreality by fantasy authors, beyond even the presence of magic - I for one find it easier to believe in dragons, werewolves, vampires and wizards than in a world that doesn't judge people for who they want to sleep with. But that's the point, in my view: literary fiction shows us the world as it is, but fantasy fiction shows us the world as it could be.

Fantasy as a genre is seen as simplistic and more suitable for young adults than serious grown-ups with houses and careers and kids (or at least pets) of their own. That couldn't be further from the truth. Okay, some fantasy fiction is simple in plot or message, but that's ok. A whole lot of contemporary literary fiction is too. Despite the almost universal plot device of 'good vs evil' employed by the genre, it's rarely that simple, in real life or in fantasy fiction. The shades of gray a reader sees on an everyday basis are there in the genre, too, but the difference is that in fantasy fiction, you get to read about the characters unraveling the evil plot and saving the righteous ruler of the realm and suchlike. The issues of modern life are there, but disguised, and maybe a little softened, and the best part is that at the end of the book there's resolution. The one thing that we can't get in real life is the sense that all the little loose ends are tied up neatly and tucked away in satisfying little bundles, and as such, that aspect of fantasy fiction is immensely reassuring to the modern reader. We spend all day struggling through continously evolving problems and dilemmas - why should we have to wade through it in our entertainment, too?

Fantasy fiction for me is intellectual cotton candy - it's light and generally unchallenging and allows me to escape the uncertainty of my everyday life. If I wanted to learn explicitly about the human condition, I'd do it by looking into the nooks and crannies of my own character, or watching the news, or reading a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Instead, I'll learn about it unwittingly, in a satisfyingly innocuous fashion - and I'll get to have unicorns and dragons, too.

Christopher Moore - The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

Despite the mythical lust lizard (which I’m guessing explains why I found this book in a fantasy bookstore), The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove is more of a muddled romantic comedy with suspense elements mixed in for extra confusion than a fantasy novel. Basic premise: a small-town psychiatrist takes all her patients off their anti-depressants and gives them placebos without telling them Simultaneously, an ancient shape-changing prehistoric lizard comes to the town, causing an outbreak of horniness and the complete mental breakdown of an already unstable former B-movie actress. With a pothead constable and meth-lab thrown in.

Christopher Moore writes an entertaining enough novel, but from the cover endorsements I expected to be laughing the way I do at David Sedaris or Tom Robbins. Instead, the plot seemed farcical and forced. Though the dialogue had some spark, the problem with the novel, at its most basic, is that it was a funny idea that was poorly executed. It could have been done better, and it showed.

Michel Houellebecq- The Elementary Particles (UK version: Atomised)

Let me start out by saying that this book is admirably ambitious in its attempt to draft a "tribute to humanity." The reviews on the cover were nothing but raves (of course). It is also unique in that it was written by a French guy--relatively rare for a fairly mainstream novel. Supposedly, it was written for intelligent people.

The story follows the parallel lives of two men who share the same irresponsible, perpetually absent, hippie mother. They grow up ignorant of each other's existence, but meet in adulthood and encounter each other throughout the book. Like two particles in an entangled state, they are both dysfunctional but in opposite ways. One is an obsessive scientist and the other is a compulsive hedonist. Through their experiences and the experiences of the people they affect, we are supposedly given a portrait of troubled humanity, culminating in the conflict of love versus innate selfishness and isolation. That's the tribute.

Unfortunately, the book fails to live up to its ambitions. Either Houellebecq's reality is supremely different from the average American's (mine), or he is careful to select aspects of humanity that are narrow to the point of absurdity. Like many of his ancestral existentialists, his thesis is sensational and unrealistic. His world is one of constant orgies, sadism, emotional isolation, and hippies (only the nymphomaniac hippies though). He sort of attributes these scourges to the rapid breakdown of Judeo-Christian values over the course of the 20th century. Paradoxically, the author appears intelligent: he knows his physics well enough to throw around names, and I completely agree with him that physics and biology need to communicate better. I couldn't find any inaccuracies in the book, just lots of inconsistencies:

1. Houellebecq portrays religion as a champion of morals and integrity. He ignores its support of child molestation, oppression, and warmongering.

2. I was unaware of the orgies that Houellebecq likes to describe. Apparently they are these New Age getaways where people have sex with each other to relieve the stress of their hellish day jobs. He seems to think a majority of people attend these things; however, from my surveys, it would appear that it's more of a clear minority bordering on imaginary. Maybe it's different in France--I didn't check there.

3. Houellebecq hints time and again that only women are capable of love, and that men are horrid go-getters who repeatedly trash the world. I appreciate his efforts to champion the females, but I would appreciate it more if he didn't assume all and only good women are characterized by a soft, servile persona and driving need to love and be loved. The distribution of these traits is scattered across many individuals, not all of whom are good or of a specific gender.

I didn't want to judge a book based on how its opinions clashed with mine, but I just did. Had the book been a smidgen less sensational, and more realistic (since the author is trying to send a message, I expect he would try to be realistic) it could have been carried into my good graces on the smoothness and honesty of the writing. I read 98% of it in one day. It's not a bad read, just don't expect to agree with anything.

The only valid take-home message in the book is that people should be less cruel to each other. Ignore his ideas as to why people are cruel to each other; if you're interested in that sort of thing, read "Obedience to Authority" by Stanley Milgram, or the works of Konrad Lorenz.

Rudolfo Anaya - Bless Me, Ultima

I've been reading a lot of foreign books lately. Rudolfo Anaya's acclaimed book Bless Me, Ultima, culturally replete and unapologetically rambling, reminds me of a long story told by one's grandparent or older relative. You may be interested in the beginning, and even at intervals throughout, but the book, like the stories it recalls, failed to hold my attention.

Bless Me, Ultima is the story of Antonio's loss of innocence over the course of roughly two years - he witnesses murder and the magic of the curandera while trying to determine his path in life: priest or farmer. Ultima, the title character, is an old curandera who helps shape Antonio's life. In keeping with the movement of magical realism, particularly as it has been seen in Latin American literature, Antonio witnesses both the magical power of good and evil, and must choose between them. For all that magical realism sounds exciting, it really involves nothing more titillating than what you'd see if you bothered to re-watch The Crucible.

For all that Anaya's prose conjures the restless winds of the llano and the peaceful land of the Lunas, his story reads like the dullest of memoirs. Antonio relates everyday details at great length, dwelling on minutiae to the point that the reader has no sense of the narrative thrust of the novel. All of Antonio's struggles to stay faithful, innocent, and good lead us nowhere but to muddled emotions and the sense that the novel has been left unfinished.

I say more magic might help.

new contributor!!

Interwebs, let me me introduce Alana, the newest member of Your Next Favorite Book. She, like Adam and I, reads books and has opinions about them. Enjoy!