Neal Stephenson, Anathem

It has been awhile since I’ve written about a book on these pages, although I haven’t stopped reading.  I continued my foray through some of Neil Gaimon’s work: Anansi Boys (good but not great), Fragile Things (some gems in this short story collection), and Good Omens (cowritten with Terry Pratchett and rather disappointing).  Perhaps the best book I read recently was Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma.  I never thought I would be riveted by chapters on grain, but Pollan is such an engaging writer, he could have written about almost anything.  His book is essential reading for everyone.

No work of fiction, though, compares to Neal Stephenson’s monumental novel, Anathem.  Every once in awhile I read a book that I keep thinking about all day (and unfortunately in this case, even all night), and for Anathem, I was drawn both to the story and to the philosophical questions positioned throughout.  It’s tough to condense this novel, clocking in at nearly 1,000 pages, but in a nutshell . . . . Anathem’s world is divided between secular and “avout,” the latter of whom are isolated from secular society and who spend their time exploring philosophical and intellectual rather than narrowly-defined religious ideas.  I don’t want to give anything away, so I’ll add that events happen that cause this society to question this division before an apocalyptic event.

Anyone who merely reads for escapism and a good plot should avoid this novel.  There are loose ends and questions that remain, characters who never fully develop, and dozens of pages spent examining the avout’s consideration of philosophical quandries.  But for those who read for an intellectual challenge with an engaging plot on the side, for those who do not mind working a bit while reading, then do yourself a favor and read Anathem.  Or if you want to see more information before you take the plunge (and what a plunge it is), check out Stephenson’s web site, http://www.nealstephenson.com/anathem/, which comes complete with a “trailer” for the book.

This is one of the best novels I’ve read since Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, and I dare give it some of the highest praise I can by stating that Anathem has the epic quality of Moby-Dick, for me the pinnicle of novel writing.  Like Melville’s masterpiece, Anathem is rough and, at times, messy, but it is much more than a novel–it is a profound reading event.  Enjoy!

Brocke Clarke, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England

Sam Pulsifer made me furious. Pulsifer, the narrator of Clarke’s thoroughly engaging novel An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, simply refuses to act according to common sense when he encounters life-changing events. The two biggies–getting kicked out of his house and finding his parents in an “interesting” state–should have allowed the wronged Pulsifer to correct his mistake-riddled life. Alas, he doesn’t do so, and I’m left at times comparing Pulsifer to Thomas Covenant, the weak-kneed character from Stephen R. Donaldson’s sci/fi series. Couple this character trait with inexplicable circumstances–particularly involving Thomas Coleman, the orphan I wanted to punch–and I’m left scratching my head. But perhaps these elements are what make the novel so engaging and funny.

Yes, that’s right, funny. What’s not to laugh about a book that begins with Emily Dickinson’s house burning down–as long as we know it didn’t really happen. [If the arsonist went after Hawthorne's Old Manse, I would have jumped through the pages to stop it, but that speaks more to my own neurosis.] Clarke performs an amazing feat here: he takes a horrific set of circumstances, pushes us back for a different view, and allows us to see the silliness of it all. After Pulsifer destroys Dickinson’s house and is released from prison, we follow him through a bizarre path that allows him to both create and destroy his life. Now that’s comedy. At its best, Clarke’s writing echoes the strength of other writers–the gallows humor of T. C. Boyle, the funny academic caricature of Richard Russo, the Dupin-esque detective work of Poe, if Dupin were more of a bumbler.

Beyond the plot, though, Clarke has much to say about storytelling itself, and it is through these moments–even if they are far too few for my taste–that Clarke really shines. The central question Pulsifer draws from his experiences is, What is the effect of a story? That is, does a story directly affect a reader? At one point, he concludes, “Of course a story could produce a direct effect. Why would anyone tell one if it didn’t?” And at another moment, a reader tells him that she likes the memoir she is reading because “It’s so useful,” a statement that sends him past the pitiful fiction-section of a bookstore to the memoirs, only to put one of these books back with sadness: “I was grateful to the books for teaching me . . . that there were people in the world more desperate, more self-absorbed, more boring than I was.” What then is the effect of a story? Perhaps, he later notes, people read “not so that they would feel less lonely, but so that other people would think they looked less lonely with a book in their hands and therefore not pity them and leave them alone.” That’s a sad claim I should think about the next time I find myself perusing the customers at a coffee shop. While not the metafiction of, say, John Barth, these moments certainly beg us to ask ourselves why we read and why we write. Clarke never offers a direct answer, but the questions continue to resonate even after I turned the last page.

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

A colleague of mine lent me this wonderful novel, which won the National Book Foundation Award for Young People’s Literature. With the exception of the Harry Potter collection, I don’t find myself reading too many books aimed for readers in grades 6-10, so I didn’t know what to expect. Would this be a silly, flattened version of Alexie’s otherwise powerful writing, or would he infuse this novel with smart, nuanced ideas engaging to young and old readers alike? I can say emphatically that the latter is the case. I will admit that I have a bias here–I find Alexie to be one of the strongest writers today, and I teach his work nearly every semester. I also thoroughly enjoyed his other 2007 novel, Flight, which draws together fantasy with history and an alarming ability to deftly (if briefly) show how different historical figures experienced cultural clash and destruction.

I was therefore happy to see that in The Absolutely True Diary Alexie refuses to play it safe for younger readers and instead offers a moving account of a boy torn between his family and friends on the Spokane Indian Reservation and his decision to attend a primarily-white school off the rez. At once humorous and moving, the novel begs us to view the complex world through Junior’s eyes, and by the end, rather than erasing doubt from a young reader’s imagination, Alexie has somehow managed to leave Junior’s world as frightening, funny, and sad as it began. That is, he concludes the novel convincingly without silencing any of the powerful ambiguities that define his “adult” fiction, which is what I had feared going into this novel.

I would also add that there is little new here, and while “recycling” material might be a reason to dismiss some writers, for this novel it serves as a welcome addition to the characters and settings that populate Alexie’s canon. We have Junior, of course, who figures into Alexie’s other works, alongside an alcoholic father (sometimes pleasant and other times destructive), a caring if troubled mother, a cluster of friends–drunk and not, friendly and not–and a reservation that is, at once, both home and prison. We have seen these elements before, most notably in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, but for some reason they remain disturbingly fresh. I can only hope that The Absolutely True Diary serves to introduce a new generation of readers to the power and potential of Sherman Alexie’s writing.

J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

First published in 1980, this novel, like Gilead years later, won a major literary prize (the Nobel rather than the Pulitzer), and, again like Gilead, it won for a very good reason. Coetzee deftly creates a powerful account of an empire in fear from those beyond its borders, a darker-skinned, shadowy group that supposedly poses a threat both to security and moral righteousness. What I found most powerful about this short novel, though, was its resonances in 2007, and indeed this timeless novel, set in an unknown land, begs us to situate this understanding of threatened power and coercion through fear wherever we may. We all know who the “barbarians” in this novel are, even if this account pushes its different readers around the globe and back and forth through centuries. I strongly recommend this book and wonder if there will ever be a time when it will cease to be so sadly pertinent.

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

I could summarize this review in two words: read Gilead.  Now I know what you might be thinking—I’m not taking much of a risk in lauding a Pulitzer Prize winner, but I’m not always on the same page, so to speak, with the judges of such awards.  For the most recent instance, I found Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to be tiresome and repetitive, despite the strength of his other work; alas, it wins the Pulitzer.  (Is there a reason he ignores apostrophes, or is McCarthy simply waiting for a master’s thesis explaining it?)

 

Anyway, I was stunned by Robinson’s book, despite my initial reluctance to read it.  The synopsis put forth by reviewers was this: a dying minister in Iowa writes a memoir to his son.  How does that synopsis sell novels?  I got bored reading that summary. Well, apparently it did sell novels, and for good reason.  John Ames is an engaging, powerful, and vulnerable character, and perhaps it is the latter trait that makes him—and the novel—so engaging.  I was caught off guard so many times by his self-aware insecurities that I quickly lost my predisposition to ignore “preachy” types.  Yet moments arise when he says something so profound, and in a quiet manner, that I was forced to stop reading and contemplate his words.  And no, I am not religious, which is why my reaction to the book surprised me.  I won’t quote any such moments for two reasons: first, that would remove them from the context of the rest of his words, a context that establishes the profundity of his statement; second, readers will clearly find such passages on their own without my hand-holding.

 

I also found that this novel steered my reading; more specifically, John Ames forced me to slow down, stop flipping pages to “see what happens,” and simply dwell on his words.  This is one mark of an excellent book—like the unparalleled Moby-Dick, Gilead teaches us how to read, how to wrestle with the language and ideas rather than rushing through to get to the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next page.  (I now see, on the back cover blurb, that a reviewer for the New York Times makes a similar claim—and s/he says it much better than I do—but I’m keeping my comments because they bear repeating.) 

 

Perhaps most surprisingly, I felt humbled after reading this novel.  I’m not sure if younger readers will “get” it, as the novel seems to mandate a certain intellectual and spiritual experience and vain surety that must be broken down, but it is well worth the effort for anyone to try.

William Gibson’s Spook Country

For this first book review, I have chosen to start with a new book by one of my favorite writers, William Gibson. Even if we bracket his position as coining and developing the word (and concept) “cyberspace,” Gibson remains one of the most powerful voices in American fiction today. In particular, his previous novel, Pattern Recognition, was one of the best books I have read in awhile. His ability to engage with advertising and consumption, pinpoint the role of the Web in information distribution, explore technological developments from Curta calculators to the edited “footage,” and trace the porous boundaries of nations and cultures in one novel was an incredible feat, and it was with great anticipation that I awaited his follow-up, Spook Country.

I won’t say I was disappointed, because the novel was, well, acceptable, but it didn’t have the same energy as Pattern Recognition, even though it too explored technology, porous national boundaries, technological developments, etc. It seemed instead like a Pattern Recognition lite, almost as if it (Spook Country) should have preceded its predecessor, like an opening band before the headliner. I won’t try to summarize the plot (its publisher has a hard enough time making sense of the various strands) but I will note that as interesting as all the strands are—the musician turned reporter turned pawn (but whose pawn?) or the junkie/hostage who translates Russian, for instance—they never fully work. They could have, but not in this novel. While the various elements come together at the end in Gibson’s familiar Vancouver, it’s not in a way that is particularly striking or exciting. It works, somewhat, but it’s not what I had hoped for after Pattern Recognition.

I will also add that I better understand my students’ trouble in “getting” Gibson, particularly his language. At times, it seems like Gibson is trying too hard to make an interesting observation, and instead of creating a unique image, he instead belabors the point. Take this example: “The world outside the restaurant’s windows, beyond words in a red plastic Cantonese neither of them could read, was the color of a silver coin, misplaced for decades in a drawer.” This example, together with others scattered around, becomes cumbersome rather than enlightening and slows the pace of the novel. Luckily, these heady images gradually disappear after the first quarter of the novel, almost as if the plot, once set in motion, loosens up his language, like a muscle after a warm up, slightly bathed in a gym’s florescent light, one whose glare has dimmed over time and shaded by the incandescent mist of . . . oh, you get the point.

I will say, though, that the most interesting element of the novel for me was not the idea of surveillance or people who work in the gray area between the law and crime, but in his perception of locative art. If Neuromancer unveiled cyberspace to mass readership, then Spook Country will do the same for locative art. Driven by GPS, locative art allows artists to create virtual works that are present only in particular places and only to those who have the proper apparatus to see them. Thus, Gibson shows one artist creating an image of River Phoenix outside of the Viper Room, allowing the viewers to witness the dead star whenever they look at the actual nightclub. To me, this is where Gibson’s vision is most acute, and this is why this novel will resonate. It is not his best book, but it reveals once more Gibson’s ability to show us where we might be headed.