Leif Enger's "So Brave, Young, and Handsome"

I read Leif Enger's latest book over the last few days.

So Brave, Young, and Handsome is set in 1915, and it is very centrally about the closing of the frontier. It is like Lonesome Dove in that respect, although you might say Larry McMurtry's book chronicles the last breaths of the frontier whereas this book is focused more on its death rattle.

There was much to appreciate about the book. Some set pieces and scenes will stick with me for awhile. The characters--Siringo and Glendon especially--will stick. And the story is most definitely a good one.

But I wasn't swept up like I was with Peace Like A River. I'm not sure what the difference was exactly. In so many ways they are similar--the journey across a nostalgic American landscape, the firm hand of the law on the trail as well--but So Brave didn't have the same purpose and drive as his first book. In So Brave the main character was along for the ride so much the moments when he consciously chose his destiny were hard to distinguish.

The book also touched two of my "literary hot buttons." I am growing more and more weary of writers in books/movies/plays. Especially when the writer at the end of the story thinks, "Maybe I should write this down." I could make a HUGE list of these stories, but off the top of my head I can think of: So Brave Young and Handsome, Wonder Boys (the film), Avenue Q (kind of), Stones in his Pockets, Elf (although fortunately he doesn't start as an author).

It's a tired conceit. Becket, in So Brave could have just as easily been a failed singer/songwriter who finally finds himself and begins to sing or write songs again, and it would have been that much better.

And I was also annoyed by the regular end-of-chapter foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is great when the character suddenly gets a sense of dread that he's never going to see his home again. It's more frustrating when the character knows that something in advance and just hints at us. A la: "It seems strange, looking back, that I ever believed I would soon be home again." or "How could I know he was indeed to take flight, and very soon, and that it would be I, and not Redstart, who went with him?"

Ending chapters like this is annoying. It works a shade better with a third-person omniscient narrator--"Little did he know, that this simple, seemingly innocuous act, would result in his imminent death." (That's from Stranger Than Fiction if you didn't recognize it.)

But when you are in a first-person story, you don't like your narrator consciously holding out on you like this. I'm all for dramatic chapter endings (my mystery novel is full of them), but I felt like Becket or Enger was breaking a compact with the reader.

I did enjoy the book, and it was fun to see Northfield's Cannon river at the beginning. It also made me interested in picking up Peace Like A River again. And it makes me look forward to his next book, which I hope comes sooner than 6 years (the space between his first and second books).

So Brave, Young, and Handsome

I can't say exactly why the book "Peace Like a River" touched me as much as it did. But it was a really really good read. So when I saw that Leif Enger had another book out, "So Brave, Young, and Handsome," I was very excited.

And then I happened to see news that he'll be speaking at Carleton and doing a book-signing. The really big news, though--it's set in Northfield! Sweet. Amazon's sending it post-haste.

Kunstler's First Chapter

I started The Long Emergency last night and made it through the first chapter. He's frustrating because he has some good points, but also has a few passages that are so outlandish they are scoffable.

On the first page, he writes, "It is my view, for instance, that in the decades to come the national government wil prove to be so impotent and ineffective in managing the enormous
vicissitudes we face that the United States may not survive as a nation in any meaningful sense but rather will devolve into a set of autonomous regions."

Uh huh.

Then there is this great bit on page 8: "How long might the Long Emergency last? A generation? Ten generations? A millennium? Ten millennia? Take your choice. Of course, after awhile, an emergency becomes the norm and is no longer an emergency."

SayWA? Ten millennia? So we'll still be wrestling with all this in 12008? We only have 5,000 years or so of recorded history, so suggesting we know anything about what we might face twice that length into the future is pretty funny. Even the single millennium guess is funny when you think about it.

As I said there are some good parts in here, but his more fanciful passages make it hard to take.

Did you know?

Did you know that Book 7 of the Harry Potter will be split into 2 films? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 1 comes out in 2010. Part 2 comes out May 2011. That means we'll finish Lost before we finish Harry Potter movies.

That means that from the time Philosopher's Stone was published in June of 1997, 14 years will have passed between the first book and the last movie. That seems like a remarkably short period of time ...

Chabon on Obama

Michael Chabon compares Obama to Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente:

I saw grace, the grace of Robinson and Clemente, in the way Mr. Obama balanced a steadfast refusal to surrender to anger with an equally staunch refusal to deny or repudiate its enduring legacy, for good and ill, in the history of race in America. There was grace in the intelligence and abandon of Robinson running the bases, in the fatal arc of a Clemente throw to home from deep right field, in the steadiness and candor that Mr. Obama brought to bear in making his difficult speech on race in America.

I recommend the whole article. If you've read Summerland, you know Chabon's love of baseball, so it's a natural his mind would go there.

The Black Swan

The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, has been on my nightstand for a little over a week now, and I'm nearly finished. The book makes many interesting points, but the most important is that we, as a species, royally suck at making predictions. We are good at looking back on things that happened and trying our best to tease out a narrative on why that happened. But we are really really bad at looking ahead and guessing.

He says that the highly improbable events that shape are lives are impossible to predict and can shift things dramatically. He of course mentions September 11, which is kind of an obvious example, but he has another point I like a lot as well. There was an interesting graph of the S&P 500 over the last 50 years that charted the actual history of the S&P 500 against the S&P 500 minus its top ten most active days. In 50 years, it turns out that the ten biggest single day jumps (either up or down) changes the graph by more than 40%. Taleb's point is that we act as if those 10 days are abnormalities but in truth, they make up a huge portion of that 50 year history.

His story of the turkey is pretty interesting too. If you're a turkey, let's just say you've had 1,000 days of feeding from your farmer. What possible evidence could you have that the 1,001th day (the day before Thanksgiving), he's going to chop your head off? Taleb is trying to argue that historical data and trends don't have anything to do with what's coming next because whatever's coming next is going to be different, guaranteed.

It's an interesting read. It's not a book like "The Tipping Point" or "Freakonomics" that everyone can pick up and probably enjoy. This one is just a little dense and math/philosophy heavy for that. But it's pretty well put together. I'll be finishing it up shortly, although I'm now in the section he says is for more of the technical reader (AKA, a reader who knows more math than I do) so I'll probably be done with it pretty quickly.

"What do you think you're doing, Dave?"

Arthur C. Clarke died today at the age of 90. I have not actually read anything other than the 4 books of the 2001 series, and I would recommend 2001, 2010, and 3001 to anyone who might like a little sci-fi in their literary diet. 2061 had some good parts and some not-so-good parts.

He wrote some good things. Here's the obit at the New York Times.

The Future

Placing voiceless phone calls ... asking Google a question by thought ... allowing patients of ALS to communicate.

The future is most definitely arriving sooner than we expected. At least sooner than Arthur C. Clarke expected. Some of these things were in his book 3001. We're getting close to them, just 993 years early ...

The Coens and Chabon

This one is for ZestyEnterprise, a big Coen Brothers Fan (you can tell by the name of her blog) who was also not super wild about No Country.

But seeing that she and her SB were at the Michael Chabon lecture last month, I think she'll be excited to hear that the Coen Brothers will shoot an adaptation of The Yiddish Policeman's Union (which I reviewed here for Exit133) after they finish their current project.

I know I'm excited.

Amazon calls an Audible

... and other puns.

I didn't really think it was a big deal when I read that Amazon bought Audible. And then I saw this on the New York Times Bits Blog:

Amazon isn’t saying much about what it will do with the company, but bringing audiobooks directly to its Web site and to the Kindle is the obvious first step.

What comes after that? How about a service that allows you to seamlessly switch from reading a book on your digital device to listening to the same book read aloud as you get in the car, or if your eyes are tired, or if you simply want to hear a crucial scene acted out? And then to switch back to the printed page?

Now that's something that caught my attention. As Amazon and Apple both get better at allowing their customers to move around movies, music, and books, people are going to really start using it more. I love that I can watch TV episodes or movie rentals on my iPhone and my computer. That I can order shows from Amazon at work and have them waiting on my TiVo when I get home. Did you know Toni Morrison loves her Kindle? I thought that was surprising.

Of course, for a counter point, here's David Lynch. (warning, vulgar language ahead).



(I'd just like to add that I agree with Lynch in principle: movies are always always better the bigger you can see them.)

Neverwhere, the novel

Neil Gaiman's book Neverwhere was a good British fantasy, especially for an Anglophile like myself.

The central conceit of the book is that there are two Londons, and our hero has fallen from one to the other. The other London, London Below, is a piecemeal place of sewers and beggars who have fallen on hard times. London Below is full of the mythology that informs the world above, and you know that Gaiman had fun with the names. On Knightsbridge is Night (you should be afraid of the dark). We meet the Earl of Earl's Court, the black friars of Black Friars, the Angel Islington (two Tube stops there no less!).

It's a good fun fantasy trip that finds its own fantasy world (as opposed to knocking off JRR Tolkien yet again).

Good fun.

Another author visit - Alexander McCall Smith

Author Alexander McCall Smith is going to be in Tacoma on April 26, speaking at PLU as part of a Pierce County Reads program.

I just read his first book "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" in October, and after seeing Chabon at Pierce College, I'm excited to go to another author's visit. I got his second and third books as Christmas presents, so I'll probably try to read those before he gets here.

All that said, if Pierce County is going to get into the "everyone read the same book at the same time" program, maybe they should coordinate with Tacoma a bit. Tacoma's book this year is "The Things They Carried," a really wonderful book, and about the only Vietnam story that I really like.

So here's looking forward to a literary trip this spring.

No one reads anymore ... but they didn't used to.

At his lecture last week, Michael Chabon was asked about the decline of reading. He didn't believe that there was actually a decline. He said when he was young and bookish that there were only a couple kids in the class who were the same way and that looking at his son's class, the numbers still held pretty true.

And today I see an article in Harper's by the author and literary critic Ursula K. Le Guin who argues the same thing:

I also want to question the assumption—whether gloomy or faintly gloating—that books are on the way out. I think they’re here to stay. It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?

Perhaps this is the new spin to stop all the stories about the decline of reading. Unfortunately the article is for subscribers only, and I'm not a subscriber, so I didn't get more than 2 paragraphs into the article for her to lay it out more fully.

But I think that it is safe to say that at one point people did read more. Flash back to pre-radio days and I would venture that they read a good deal more. Radio probably cut into the percentage of Americans who read and television and film probably really cut into it. I'm sure it has leveled off since, although the rise of the Internet has almost certainly got people reading more again, just not books.

What's interesting is that theater and books were probably both hurt by television and film but for different reasons.

Theater was hurt because it suddenly lost on the economies of scale and couldn't compete for a family's "entertainment dollar." Enough people chose not to go to the theater that it closed the theaters, and suddenly no one got to go to the theater.

Books aren't like that. Books are hurt by the fact that reading one takes 10 hours, that they can have dense, confusing parts (unlike television), and that, in contrast to sitcoms, can seem relatively boring.

All that is to say, in the last 50 years, I would venture that Chabon and Le Guin are right: reading has probably not declined substantially. But in the last 150 years, I'm sure it has plummeted.

Michael Chabon's in town next week

Not sure if I'm late to the ballgame with this, but the awesome author Michael Chabon (Yiddish Policeman's Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) is at Pierce College January 15 (next Tuesday). Cost for the general public is $15.

How do you say, "I am so there" in Yiddish?

I reviewed The Yiddish Policeman's Union for Exit133 here.

Link to Pierce College Event Page

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope you have a good one.

The Bellarmine mass and pumpkin pie social were both successes, and that's the only way to start out the long Thanksgiving weekend.

I just passed 30,000 words in my novel, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. And speaking of writing, I also got a chance to see "No Country For Old Men" before it opened at the Grand yesterday. My review is on the B Side at Exit133. It's a doosie of the movie.

Who Cares About Dumbledore's Sexuality?

When I first heard that JK Rowling considered Dumbledore as a gay character, I thought--hmm, interesting. That's bound to piss some people off.

For myself, it didn't faze me as important because it's not necessary to the books in any way. Like at all. It makes the boyhood crush Dumbledore had on Grindlewald a little more clear, but it was pretty effective as it stood anyway.

There's an article in the New York Times right now arguing that just because JK thought of him as gay, doesn't mean anyone else has to. But the article ends with this rather interesting point that I rather like. It's just not important:

She sets the epic in a British school long associated with landed privilege and wealth. But throughout she undercuts the claims of that old world. Those who believe in the importance of ancestry and inherited powers turn out to be easily corruptible and morally blind — tools for Voldemort.

Her heroes are the hybrids, the misfits, those of mixed blood, all bearing scars of loss and love: the half-giant Hagrid, the mudblood Hermione (whose parents were not wizards), the poverty-stricken Ron, the orphaned Harry. Perhaps speaking of Dumbledore as gay was just a matter of creating another diverse rebel against orthodoxy.

This is the formula for much popular fiction, but Ms. Rowling refuses to be content with simply rejecting the old order and championing a morally vague multiculturalism. The pure-bloods here are blinded by their pride, but Harry and his friends see something more profound, a threat that goes beyond self-interest and identity. This is why Dumbledore’s supposed gayness is ultimately as unimportant as Ron’s shabby clothes. These wounded outsiders recognize the nature of evil, and finally that is what matters.

Well said.

Reading List

I've been pretty actively making my way through a bunch of mystery and crime novels these past few weeks. Things got underway after I found some early books in the "Dalziel and Pascoe" series at Powell's on our way back from Cannon Beach. I've been through two of those: An Advancement of Learning, and Exit Lines.

I also enjoyed Alexander McCall Smith's "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency." It's a novel, but in practice it reads like a series of short stories. The setting--Botswana--and the characters really make the story work. It's a fun read.

Mary lent me "Murder Must Advertise," a British mystery in the Lord Peter Wimsey series from the 1930s. The language is a bit dated in a few places, but when it really comes down to it, it's a pretty good mystery, full of comedy and cocaine.

And then there was "No Country For Old Men," by Cormac McCarthy. It's a good potboiler written by a great writer. Cormac McCarthy is probably the most likely American author right now to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. A movie version comes out soon, and promises to be a wonderful movie. Ebert called it "perfect" and it was a huge hit at the Toronto Film Festival.

The book reads like a film script.

Which is cool and all, but McCarthy can write great literature, and this just isn't that. But I did finish it in a day, which is something.

Banned Books Art Auction - Raise Your Paddle!

I had a great time at the Banned Books Art Auction tonight. I had some half price appetizers at Doyle's ahead of time and read my book with a nice Stella before heading over.

I was happy to see a number of friends and familiar faces at Kings Books, which was very cool. The art up for auction was creative and fun. As for me and a few friends, we're now going on a studio tour with Beautiful Angle and Springtide Press, which is going to be awesome. Tacoma has some great letterpress art and we're going to see some of the best.

Cool to raise some money for the Scholars and Champions Association. Here's the event notice at Exit133 from earlier in the day that inspired me to check it out.

Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin

I picked up Mark Helprin's book "Winter's Tale" last year, mainly because of its title. I'd been working on a play since 1999 that used Shakespeare's play "A Winter's Tale" as inspiration and as a challenge.

So the title caught my eye and I picked it up.

I finished it this weekend at Cannon Beach. The book is ... wild. It starts in the 1890s or early 1900s and then leaps 100 years forward to 1999. Many characters from the first part come back. A flying white horse runs to the rescue. And the scenery, the imagination, and the joy of discovery are on every page.

It's a fantasy novel, but I cringe to write it that way. It's a fantasy novel, but that's like accusing Dickens of writing fantasy because he had ghosts in A Christmas Carol. It's got some magic and wonder, but shame on the book that doesn't.

Actually, I don't mean that literally. Hardhitting, in your face reality has its place too, but even there is a certain element of wonder, I suppose. I think what I'm defensive about is the term "fantasy novels," which make me think of Tolkien knock-offs and elvish archers on horseback. But there are good novels where the author has imagined a new set of rules that govern the world, and this is one of those.

And it is good. It is weird, too, as you might expect from what I've said so far. Even reading it, and being prepared for it, you're going to be left head-scratching a few times at some truly surprising turns. But it will stick with me for a long while.

Here's the NYT Review from 1983 (when the book came out). Notice it's not behind their firewall anymore. Good for them. The review does contain this rather stellar line:

THERE'S far more that I would wish to say about the book - so much more that I
find myself nervous, to a degree I don't recall in my past as a reviewer, about
failing the work, inadequately displaying its brilliance. ... ''Winter's
Tale'' is a great gift at an hour of great need.

And here's a recent mention of it at the NYT again, when they did a survey trying to find the best work of American fiction in the last 25 years. It received multiple votes.

Here it is on Amazon.

If 700 pages is your kind of read, and if you love New York (or want to) here's a book for you.

Madeleine L'Engle 1918 - 2007

Children's lit author Madeleine L'Engle died yesterday.

Like many a child reader, I loved Madeleine L'Engle's books. "A Wrinkle in Time" was thrilling and exciting and by the time I got to "A Swiftly Tilting Planet" it felt like I was reading a more grown up book. These were wonderful books as a kid.