I just finished reading the combined output January 2012 output of Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Apex, and Strange Horizons….err…except for the reprints*. I chose four stories this month, and they are below.

“Scattered Along The River Of Heaven” by Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld) – This story is simultaneously about a woman leading a rebellion against an interstellar colonizer and about her granddaughter coming to an exile community to witness her heroic grandmother’s funeral. While I was reading this story, I thought, “Hmm, this is pretty good…but I’m not sure it’s going to be one of the ones that I blog about.” The story is beautifully written, and there is something very delicate about the very carefully calibrated narrative distance from which it’s told. However, the plot seemed banal. And then I got to the end. It has a great ending. A perfect ending. The ending ties up every strand in the story in one arresting image, and manages to comment powerfully on exile and assimilation.

“How Many Miles To Babylon?” by Megan Arkenberg (Lightspeed) – Okay, so sometimes I read a story, and even though it seems pretty good, I keep thinking, “What’s the point of this story? Why does it exist? What makes this story original?” and then, other times, I read a story and I think, “Holy crap, this story is awesome”. This story is one of the latter ones. It’s a man and a woman driving across a perpetually-darkened Earth, and perpetually under attack from these devilish pseudo-Biblical creatures. It’s full of arresting images: a civilization subsumed by rotting, leafless trees; a town on fire, with skeletal figures writing in the sky above…

But, do you see the problem? None of that stuff is exactly new. The hellish landscape is a mélange of Hieronymous Bosch, Hellboy, South Park, and everyone else who’s ever treated the subject. And the central plot of two survivors making a line-drive through a hostile environment to the supposed safety of some last redoubt has also been done a large number of times. And yet, I don’t care. I still really like this story. It’s weird biblical-horror tone and intense pace was enough for me. This makes me wonder whether I actually dislike stories for their unoriginality or whether I find them unoriginal because I dislike them.

“The Five Elements Of The Heart Mind” by Ken Liu (Lightspeed) – Sometimes I forget that there is such a thing as a science fiction story which hinges upon some interesting scientific concept. Most SF stories don’t have too much to do with science. They’re either about playing around with mythopeic tropes (aliens, robots, generation ships, immortality, etc) or they’re about gadgetry and futurismic speculation. This story is about an interstellar traveler who is marooned on a planet that happens to contain a long-lost colony that has regressed, technologically, into the Iron Age. There, she falls in love with a local villager. Now, that would be a pretty dull story (although it is very engagingly written), if it didn’t have a super amazing scientific speculation at its heart. I don’t even want to tell you what the speculation is, for fear that it will ruin the story. And what’s more impressive, the scientific speculation provides new vigor to the castaway plot. The whole thing really works. I was very impressed.

“The Chastisement Of Your Peace” by Tracy Canfield (Strange Horizons) - Okay, so this one is pure jealousy. Astute fans of mine might perhaps have noticed that doubling is one of my themes. I’ve written about office-slave clones (“Ted Agonistes”); a British Navy staffed entirely by parallel universe versions of Admiral Nelson (“Death’s Flag Is Never At Half-Mast”); a society created by the discarded nanotech replicas of one man (“The Association Of The Dead”); and a tiny cockroach that gives birth to replicas of itself (“What Everyone Remembers”). I don’t know why, okay. I just love doubles. And I have so many more unpublished stories and story ideas that involve doubles. If I published them all, I could literally populate a whole collection of doubles stories. And when I read Tracy’s story about a world populated entirely by parallel universe versions of Jenny Sirico (just one random woman), I thought, “Damn, I wish I’d witten this one.” It’s not only an idea that I love, but it’s treated in exactly the manner that I love. It’s full of all these fun little flourishes that give the Jenny-world the illusion of being as rigorously logical as (we hope) the real world is. And I like the direction that the actual story went, too. Everything about the story really clicks. It feels like, given this setting, the story used the exact right character and told the exact right story.

*I’m sure that some people enjoy reading the reprints, but I am not one of those people. I kind of feel like the only reason to read a monthly fiction magazine is to get a glimpse of what’s new…these stories are literally the latest thing that is happening in the SF/F world. The reprints are probably pretty good, but they’re just not new, and hence they’re hard for me to get excited about. Whenever I want to read reprinted short stories, I prefer to read them in a Year’s Best or single-author collection.

But this week it was Anthony Trollope’s The Warden. I think there are very few books that I’ve enjoyed as thoroughly as I enjoyed this one.

First of all, it’s got the sort of tiny, funny little plot that I really love: the priest who’s attached to this 19th century British old age home comes under public attack because he gets way more money from the trust (which was established by a 14th century wool merchant) than the twelve pensioners who are its supposed beneficiaries do.

And it has a wonderful, interventionary narrator: an omniscient first person voice that interjects into all the doings of the characters and comments upon them…as in the following description of a novelist (called Mr. Popular Sentiment) who’s a thinly veiled caricature of Charles Dickens:

Of all such reformers Mr. Sentiment is the most powerful. It is incredible the number of evil practices he has put down: it is to be feared he will soon lack subjects, and that when he has made the working classes comfortable, and got bitter beer put into proper-sized pint bottles, there will be nothing further for him left to do. Mr. Sentiment is certainly a very powerful man, and perhaps not the less so that his good poor people are so very good; his hard rich people so very hard; and the genuinely honest so very honest.

And, finally, the characters are delightful. The titular warden is a fuzzy-headed old man who’s living quite happily, without any concerns about the source of his income, until the newspapers stir up his conscience and he realizes that, actually, he’s not entitled to any of it. And his prime antagonist in this novel is not the reformer who stirs up all this public feeling against him; it’s his extremely pragmatic son-in-law, who he’s completely terrified of.

Oh, and there are sooooo many good set-pieces. For instance, aforementioned reformer is sort of sort of in love with the warden’s youngest daughter. And at one point the reformer’s sister goes into a spiel where he berates him for acting like a fool:

“Pray, pray, for my sake, John, give it up. You know how dearly you love her.” And she came and knelt before him on the rug. “Pray give it up. You are going to make yourself, and her, and her father miserable: you are going to make us all miserable. And for what? For a dream of justice. You will never make those twelve men happier than they now are.”

“You don’t understand it, my dear girl,” said he, smoothing her hair with his hand.

“I do understand it, John. I understand that this is a chimera,—a dream that you have got. I know well that no duty can require you to do this mad—this suicidal thing. I know you love Eleanor Harding with all your heart, and I tell you now that she loves you as well. If there was a plain, a positive duty before you, I would be the last to bid you neglect it for any woman’s love; but this—; oh, think again, before you do anything to make it necessary that you and Mr Harding should be at variance.”

So much drama. So many scenes. It’s just…it’s a perfect little book. Oh yeah, did I mention that the book is little, too? It’s really short. Like, under seventy thousand words. For a nineteenth century British novel, that’s practically a short story.

And I didn’t know anything about it! No friend of mine had ever told me, “Dude, you have to go read The Warden, because it is so very charming.” I just picked its name out of a list of ‘great books’ that I occasionally use to select my reading.

Now I am correcting that silence. You guys should read this book. It is so very charming.

That’s because the ‘favorite book’ question is a trap! All serious bibliophiles know that it’s super uncool to have a favorite book. We know that if you have a favorite book, it’s probably because you don’t read very many books. Having a ‘favorite book’ not only betrays you as a non-reader, it also betrays what kind of non-reader you are. A down-to-earth non-reader will usually admit that their favorite book is the only book that they’ve read in the last few years– usually the Da Vinci Code or Twilight–while a snooty non-reader will say that their favorite book was Catcher in the Rye or The Great Gatsby or whatever other book they sort of enjoyed when they were forced to read it for class.

Except, you know what? That’s all a load of hogwash. Because not only do I have a favorite book…it’s also the most titanically embarrassing favorite book ever. My favorite book not only disqualifies me from making fun of anyone else for having a favorite book…it also cannot help but raise serious concerns about my literary acumen and moral hygiene.

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            I first read Atlas Shrugged when I was an eighth-grader who was travelling with my mom through India. I completely fell in love with it. Since then, I’ve probably read it 10 times. I’ve owned several paperback copies of Atlas Shrugged that have literally fallen apart at the seams. Several times in my life, I have experienced moments of great psychic pain that I tried to salve by re-reading Atlas Shrugged.

If you know anything about the novel, I think you understand why I find it to be an intolerable ‘favorite novel’ candidate. Atlas Shrugged is a 1000-page novel about a group of leading industrialists who—fed up with being leeched upon by incompetent second-raters (i.e. you and me) and a redistributionist government—decide to withdraw the priceless fruits of their mental labor from the world. These industrialists and scientists go on “strike”. They disappear, and subsequently the world comes crashing down. The government finds that there is no more wealth to redistribute. America literally crumbles: factories shut down; railroad transportation becomes unreliable; starvation becomes endemic. At the end, America is reduced to medieval times: all industry has vanished; people are reduced to subsistence agriculture.

Atlas Shrugged is an extremely popular book. Sixty years after its publication, it continues to sell hundreds of thousands of copies each year. And, as far as I can tell, the primary reason for its popularity is because most of its readers identify very strongly with its industrialist heroes. These readers also feel as if they contribute much more to society than they gain from it. They feel that their lives would be better off without government interference. They feel a terrible sense of oppression: a pervasive feeling that the machinery of society runs upon the fuel of their life’s blood. Most of the lovers of Atlas Shrugged tend to be misanthropes who believe in some flavor of libertarianism. This is unsurprising. The political philosophy of the book is completely undisguised. It contains numerous 1000+ word speeches that expound on its ideal political, philosophical, and moral system (which the book’s author called ‘Objectivism,’ since she believed it to be objectively true). Most famously, it ends with a 25,000 word radio broadcast about how the prevailing philosophy of the world (that the primary purpose of one’s life should be to help other people) is sick, irrational, and cowardly. The political system advocated by the author of Atlas Shrugged (a woman named Ayn Rand) is a laissez faire capitalism in which the government’s powers are limited to defense, policing, and enforcing contracts. In her philosophical system, the highest aim of a man should be to achieve some super awesome goal (usually building something, like a railroad, or skyscraper; but her heroes also include composers, actors, judges, financiers, etc.). Basically, her heroes include anyone who might get profiled by Forbes or Fortune magazine.

I think it’s possible that when I was thirteen, for maybe a month or so, I flirted with the notion of myself as a Randian superhero (In addition to being geniuses, the heroes of her novels are always beautiful, athletic, rigorously honest, totally free of jealousy, and wonderful at all the incidentals, like fashion, sports, music, etc.) However, I don’t think Rand’s political or philosophical beliefs have strongly influenced my own thinking.

If anything, I am very suspicious of the whole notion of heroism. My bias is that people’s lives are strongly determined by their economic and social circumstances. If anyone is ‘heroic’ it is only because society has put them in a space where heroism is expected of them.

Furthermore, I am extremely skeptical of Rand’s notion that economic and intellectual progress is the product of heroic effort. For instance, in the field of scientific progress, it seems like it’s more common than not for things to be invented multiple times, independently (e.g., the television; the airplane; differential calculus; the laws of genetic inheritance; and the theory of evolution by natural selection).

For me, the entire structure of Atlas Shrugged is founded on a rotten edifice. I consider its political and philosophical theories to be nonsense. If that wasn’t bad enough, most of its biggest fans are people whom I find to be frightening and incomprehensible, and many of its detractors–people who say that the book has no artistic merit–are people whose literary judgment I respect. And that’s why I’d slowly been moving away from considering it to be my favorite book. Over the last three years, I’ve significantly expanded my reading, and I have purposefully steered clear of re-reading Atlas Shrugged. I had hoped to expand my tastes and eventually reach the point where I perceived (and was disgusted by) all the qualities that have landed the book in such disrepute amongst literary circles.

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            Which brings us to four days ago.

Sometimes I get a very visceral sense of the likely odds that my life is going to be a failure. I suddenly realize that it’s more likely than not that I will never produce a worthwhile novel or story. I start to imagine myself as a 35 or 40 year old who has wasted his most productive years: a future Rahul who will be considered a failure by all his friends and family. Once, when I had a similar feeling in college, I combated this feeling by reading Atlas Shrugged.

That’s what I decided to do four days ago.

First of all, it worked. That sick dread disappeared.

Second of all, I was able to see flaws that I hadn’t seen before. The most egregious one is that the final third of the book is superfluous. The character’s arcs are not furthered by the action of the last third of the novel. The only fun of this section is in getting to see the U.S. collapse in a rather long and drawn out (albeit very exciting) fashion.  Furthermore, the ending feels…wrong. The book has a really taut, stirring first third, where the heroine (the Operations Vice President of a railroad) and the hero (the owner of a steel company and the inventor of a new, lighter, totes-better form of steel) fight–against government interference and public opprobrium–to build a desperately-needed rail-line out of the new steel. This first third seems to give the book the traditional structure of a naturalistic novel; one in which the heroes almost achieve success in the first act, and then are slowly crushed into paste by society during the second and third act. In this case, the set-up for the crushing is clear. The hero and heroine are struggling to avoid joining the ‘strike’. They’re unable to let their companies collapse, even though their success in running those companies is fuelling the government’s expropriatory greed. In the end of the novel, they ought to be defeated…sucked dry and discarded by the government. Instead, they eventually decide to join the strike, and then the book sort of totters onwards for another hundred and fifty thousand words.

Also, although the book’s prose isn’t without a certain elegance, it can be sloppy. People act in a rather melodramatic fashion and they make bodily motions that it’s hard to imagine them  making in real life. There’s rather a lot of people collapsing to their knees and lying prostrate and  making the kinds of gestures that, if you try to block them out in your mind, look fairly silly. Furthermore, most of the dialogue (although it works okay on the page) would sound abominable if spoken out loud (which the recent Atlas Shrugged movie proved pretty comprehensively). There’s a lot of people intuiting very complex emotions from another person’s eyes and there are a lot of visuals that don’t actually look like anything. As in, if you try to imagine them, you come up with a blank. But, none of that is really unforgiveable. The book has a clipped yet overwrought style, like each sentence is a rivet being pounded into the novel by a jackhammer, that I found to be very engaging.

And, oh yeah, the book is definitely still my favorite novel.

I don’t know. It’s unaccountable. I guess the only thing I can say is that when I was a few hundred pages into the book, I realized that Atlas Shrugged is not a realist novel; it’s not even a polemic; it’s a myth.

And myths play by different rules.

I mean, there never was a king who was as good as King Arthur. 90% of Kings—even (especially!) the ‘Good’s and ‘Great’s—were ruthless bastards. Almost every king was a sly crook who lived by extracting backbreaking rents from his subjects. The whole monarchical institution was, from top to bottom, extremely corrupt, and it was a wonderful day for the world when it finally disappeared. But…that doesn’t stop us from enjoying the legend of King Arthur.

You can say the same thing about any myth. They’re all full of grotesque lessons. The Lord of the Rings (as many commentators have pointed out) is pretty much a war of racial genocide: orcs deserve to die simply because they’re orcs. And, yet, we love LotR not in spite of that, but because of it. We love LotR because of the moral clarity provided by its slanted set-up. There never was a war in the real world that was quite so perfectly justified as the war of Gondor against Mordor….and that’s why there was never a real-world war that felt quite as heroic as LotR’s.

In the same way, the real world does not contain capitalist superheroes. But it should. Wouldn’t we rather live in a world where our corporations were run by beautiful inventor-geniuses?

The heroism of Atlas Shrugged is accessible to us. It’s composed of the same elements as our own lives. The heroes of Rand’s novels struggle to build things; they decide that it would be excellent and beautiful for something to exist, and then they make it exist. And the enemy that they struggle with is of the same type as the enemies we encounter in our lives. The typical Randian villain is a faceless, mindless bureaucrat or an indifferent, blankly-staring crowd. In the same way, we encounter very few concrete villains when we set out to do something; usually our obstacle is just a sort of global indifference…no one in the world really cares whether we succeed or not…the world is composed of actors who are pursuing their own aims and who, in the course of doing so, happen to erect obstacles against us.

When I am a 35 year old failure, it won’t be because Sauron invaded my kingdom and blackened my fields and destroyed my castles. It will be because I wrote stories that no one cared about. It will be because I released work into the world and received only silence. It will be because thousands of readers read the first few pages of my book and then put it back on the shelf.

To me, there’s something mythologically powerful in Rand’s rendering of these malevolent forces as a horde of thoughtless, cliché-spouted government buffoons.            There’s something that captures the imagination about beautiful business tycoons working with all their strength and intelligence and then being spit upon by an ungrateful public.

Not only that, she also creates such beautiful mirages. Her heroes and heroines are utterly self-contained. They might be thwarted, but they are never unhappy. They never feel shame. They never feel jealousy. They are perfectly secure in their own perfection.

There is something supercharged about them. They’re like airbrushed models: they’re more beautiful than anything that can exist in reality…but that doesn’t stop us from being susceptible to that beauty.

And they’re dangerous in the same way that airbrushed models are dangerous. Because her heroes and heroines act so powerfully on our senses—on our sense of the way that people should be—we can get too caught up in chasing after these mirages. The end result is blindness to the real conditions of the world.

But I don’t think it is a flaw in a work of art to be too successful at creating a fantastic illusion, and I don’t think it’s a flaw in myself that I am susceptible to that illusion.

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            Of course, it’s pretty clear that this is not the way Ayn Rand intended her book to be understood. In the last line of the version I read (in the Author Notes), she writes: “Let no one tell me that these men don’t exist. I have met them.”

She wanted her work to be taken literally. And she wanted it to touch off a movement for political reform. In fact, there’s a whole section of the book where the composer Richard Halley says that he only wants fans who appreciate his music in the way it was meant to be understood…that he’s tired of buffoons who have an emotional reaction to his work without appreciating it intellectually.

To Ayn Rand, people like me would be the fools. But, whatever, she’s dead. And the book is a lot better for her absence.

Atlas Shrugged is a tremendously powerful work that’s a victim of its own specificity. If she’d eliminated the speeches and allowed a little more room for nuance (in the way that, say, Tolstoy did in Anna Karenina), I think it would be seen as the great work of literature that it is. And I think there is a chance that someday the political situation in the U.S. will change in such a way that appreciation for Atlas Shrugged is not politically distasteful in the ways that I mentioned in the first third of this essay. If that happens, I think that there is a significant chance that there will be a critical reappraisal of the book’s literary merits. And, if I (through some miracle) am not a failure, then I will lead that reappraisal.

And after Ayn Rand takes her place in the canon (that she hated), I will go and dance on her grave.

This year, I increased the number of capsule reactions (1-2 paragraph write-ups) of books I read. Thus, I ended up writing about way more books than I ever have before. All told, I wrote 123 books. I’ve listed them below, along with links to the relevant blog posts. In a surprisingly large number of these cases (particularly Working, Burmese Days, Fun Home, and Frankenstein), the links go to full blog posts that discuss the work in question. In most of the others, the link goes to a page that aggregated my reactions to many books. Finally, some of the book-links go to blog posts that are mostly about other things, where I also off-handedly mentioned book and my reaction to it.

My Favorites (Amongst The Books I Blogged About)

The Other Books I Blogged About (Which Were Mostly Pretty Good Too)

Fifteen Other Books That I Read This Year And Also Liked Alot

After assembling the above lists, I realized that I had also read a bunch (100+) other books and not posted about them. In some cases (as for Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!) this was because I couldn’t think of something interesting to say about them. In other cases (like Orwell’s Fifty Essays and Charles Yu’s How To Live Safely In A Science-Fictional Universe) I had tons of stuff to say, but I never got around to sitting down and writing it all down. In any case, these unwritten-about books are not unloved.  Some of my favorite books of the year are in the below category (particularly Jeffrey Eugenides’ Virgin Suicides, on which I would paste a gold-star, if I had any).

Something Happened by Joseph Heller – I really liked Catch-22, when I finally got around to reading it last year. This book is nothing like Catch-22. For starters, it’s not really very funny. It’s a book that’s hard to describe. It’s a 1950s businessman (basically Don Draper) monologuing for 200,000 words about his life (how he’s driven to cheat on his wife, how his daughter hates him, how he’s worried that his son is growing to grow up and lose his vitality). The reminisces are not chronological and none of the book takes place in scene, except for short snippets of reported dialogue. The narration is manic and insane. It sounds like a man ranting to you while under the influence of heavy doses of amphetamines. But it’s also hypnotic. It’s a man trying his best (and failing) to gain some understanding of his own life.

Dropsie Avenue by Will Eisner - A pretty awesome graphic novel covering two hundred or so years in the life of a street in the Bronx. You see ethnic groups jockey with each other and then move on, giving way to the next group. You see the architecture and the zoning and the economics of the place change. In its portrayal of any given era and group it might be a little simplified (and sometimes seems to come close to stereotyping), but the epic sweep of the thing makes the book worthwhile.

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – This book is by a hedge fund manager who claims that we’re terrible about predicting the future because none of our projections allow for ‘black swan’ events, which are huge, discontinuous events that change everything (like, 9/11, or the Harry Potter phenomenon). That part is pretty interesting and even somewhat convincing. What’s more fun, though, is the narrative tone of the book. The author comes off sounding like a megalomaniac and an amazing dick. He sounds like such an asshole that he almost feels fictional. It’s as if Taleb was writing a very experimental novel where a fictional persona expounds upon a science-fictional idea. It’s a really engaging book.

Candy Girl by Diablo Cody – This is Academy-Award winning screenwriter Diablo Cody’s memoir about her year as a Minneapolis stripper. I was really sick when I read this book, okay, but I still enjoyed it. It goes into all the proper anthropological detail about what being a stripper is like…and I am sucker for that kind of stuff.

Paying For It by Chester Brown – There are a surprising number of graphic novels about the author’s sexual dysfunction, but I think this own stands out even in that crowd. For years (decades?) the author has been patronizing prostitutes exclusively (as in, he has not been pursuing any other kind of sexual relationship) and in the course of this pursuit, the author has developed all these theories about why patronizing prostitutes is a sensible alternative (for people like him) to romance. The book covers his odyssey, beginning with his first visit and ending with him happily ensconced in an exclusive (though still monetary) relationship with one prostitute. It ends with fifty pages of appendixes in which he details his views on prostitution. Oh, and for some weird artistic reason, he never shows the faces of any of the prostitutes he visits! They are always turned away, or their faces are hidden. The book is really bizarre, but it was also really good.

The Professor’s House by Willa Cather – This is a series of three linked novellas that doesn’t sound like it ought to cohere at all. The first is about an elderly professor reflecting on his family and on the son-in-law (who died in the war) who was the only person he felt close to. The second is a flashback to the summer that the son-in-law spent excavating a New Mexico plateau that held a Native American city. The third is about the professor’s lonely summer without his wife and daughter (they’re vacationing in Paris). And yet, somehow, it all does come together. It’s about excitement, and the intellectual life, and loss. It has a very wistful tone, which avoids being cloying because it’s broken up with the very exciting, adventurous middle. Also, maybe I just love Willa Cather so much that I can even enjoy her minor novels.

Portrait of the Addict As A Young Man by William Clegg – Literary agent Bill Clegg’s memoir about a two month $70,000 crack cocaine binge. I don’t know why this was so entertaining. I think it’s because the dreamlike tedium of the narrative kind of echoed the tedium of the binge: the endless succession of hits in an endless succession of five-star hotel rooms. Also, I was really sick when I read it.

Local by Brian Wood – If there’s anything I’ve learned this year, it’s that I am a sucker for graphic novels about shiftless twentysomethings. In each of this series of twelve comics, the main character, Megan, ages by one year and moves to a new city (and grows up a little). There’s one about her having a horrible roommate in New York and one about her being a fairly creepy movie theater clerk in Nova Scotia and…well…if you like this sort of thing, you’ll really like this series: it is wanksty early-20s at their most elemental.

Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey – Reading this book made me realize what I dislike about biographies. They’re too long. You know, I’m only going to read maybe (at most) 10,000 books in the whole rest of my life. It seems like a huge waste to devote a whole .01% of that to learning about a single person. What have all these famous dead people ever done for me? Why do they deserve so much of my headspace? This book neatly solves that problem through the novella form autobiography. I’d probably never read a full book about Florence Nightingale, but I will definitely read a novella about her. There’s definitely room for biographies at a length somewhere above a Wikipedia entry and somewhere below a full book.

Stumbling On Happiness by Daniel Gilbert – This title makes the book sound like a self-help guide or a memoir, but it’s actually a sedate work of science popularization. This is a nonfiction book about why we’re unable to accurately assess what things will make us happy (and then achieve those things) because our brains basically our imaginations are not very accurate. When we are asked to imagine how we will feel in a given situation, we feel like come up with a pretty good simulacrum of that feeling, but actually, we’re totally wrong. In fact, the book is kind of pessimistic about whether human beings will ever (or should ever) overcome these failures of imagination. However, the most important thing to know about this book is that it’s one of the best written works of non-fiction I’ve ever read. There’s a certain non-fictional tone—one exemplified by humorous political books (like those of Michael Moore or Al Franken) or by travelogues for sedate people (like those of Bill Bryson) or science popularization books for teens (like those of Isaac Asimov) – that I find to be very cutesy and twee, and this book has a tone which is very much like that tone, except it is exciting and sharp. On a prose level, the book continually upsets your expectations (and it is very funny). It was only after finishing the book that I read (on the back flap) that the author (who is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard) has also published stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Does anyone know anything about that? I would really like to read those stories.

 Tell Them Who I Am by Elliot Liebow – The author of this book was an anthropologist (the head of the NIH’s National Institute for Mental Health) who was diagnosed with terminal cancer, quit his job, realized he wasn’t going to die, started volunteering at a women’s homeless shelter, and ended up writing a participant-observer study about the shelter’s homeless women. It’s a very powerful and fascinating book about the day to day lives of these homeless womens: how they spend their time, their friendships, their romantic relationships, their monetary situation, and all kinds of other stuff. As a bonus, it is annotated with footnotes by two of the women (so they’re literally speaking at you and sometimes disagreeing with the author). It was really cool. I don’t know how generalizable the study is, but it’s always cool to get a glimpse into someone’s life, even if it’s just twenty women who lived on the streets, twenty years ago.

 Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington – When I read this memoir, last December, I had tons of things to say about it. I had reams and reams of quotations marked out for the blog post I was gonna write. But then my Kindle crashed and I never got around to it. The first third of this book is about Booker T. Washington’s own struggle. It’s a fascinating portrait of a person and a people who are only one generation out of slavery (Washington was born a slave and was freed by the thirteenth amendment when he was like three or four). Washington got his education at a black teacher’s college and then went to go run his own college (The Tuskeegee Institute) and develop his own theories regarding the further socioeconomic development of his race (which are set out in the rest of the book). It’s well known that Washington did not view things the way that people do now. In some ways, his writings are kind of unbelievable. At one point he claims that he had never had a single experience of racism from a white Southerner. I wonder to what extent he self-censored himself because he knew he was writing for a mostly white audience. Still, there’s a tremendous moral force in his writing. In my recollection, every page of the book contained something exciting, beautiful, or startling. He reminds me of Gandhi (another great man who had some very simplistic views).

 The Organization Man by William Whyte – This was Whyte’s 1950s indictment of the way that modern American men were becoming homogenous and risk-averse. This is truly an obsolete document. In 2011, there are no more Organization Men. Nowadays, no one has job security. Nowadays, sucking up the boys upstairs and expressing only the right opinions and living in only the right neighborhoods will not get you nearly the rewards that it gave you in the fifties. Still, this book is very interesting as a historical document. It’s a portrait of what can happen to the human spirit in a very affluent society. I have no doubt that if the good days ever come again (and, economically speaking, the fifties were very good days, with huge growth in wages, GDP, and opportunity), that we will start to see some of these conformity pressures once more.

 Germinal by Emile Zola – I kept meaning to write a comprehensive post about Emile Zola. So far this year, I’ve read six of his novels, and each one has impressed me with its grotesqueness and power. Germinal is the one that I read first, though, and it’s still my favorite. This novel is about a labor strike at a coal mine in 1860s France. Most of Zola’s novels are about how human beings are horrible and wicked and love to do terrible things to each other, but they paint that world in tremendously grand and heroic strokes. The typical Zola is a series of grand set-pieces: one chapter will be a mob riot; another will be a series of workers excavating for coal deep underground; another will be three morally bankrupt children picking flowers. He’s one of the few naturalist-type authors who is as exciting for his artistry as for his content. No one writes crowd scenes like Zola. And, although it still ends in death and despair, Germinal is actually a lot more hopeful than most of Zola’s novels. At least this one shows the heroism in united action (although the typical sexual and moral sordidness of Zola-world is also on display).

I can’t tell whether the final book is actually better than all of the previous books or if I only enjoyed it more because the previous books had taught me how to read Proust, but I think this book contains three of the most delightful set-pieces in the whole septology.

Firstly, roughly the first third of the book contains a discussion of Paris during war-time (and the activities of some of the characters during the war). I’ve always thought of Proust as being a very domestic sort of novelist, but he’s surprised me time and again. Throughout the series, he devotes considerable attention to political matters (such as the Dreyfus affairs) and technological ones (such as lengthy meditations on first the telephone and then the airplane). But, considering that he began the novel during peace-time, in 1907, I think it showed a lot of courage for him to incorporate the war into the work, and I think he does a really good job of using it to start wrapping up a lot of his threads about patriotism, nationalism, and masculinity.

The next fourth of the book balloons outward from when the narrator steps on an uneven pair of cobblestones and immediately remembers another uneven pair of cobblestones mentioned earlier in the novel (I know that this kind of seems like a joke about navel-gazing French novels, but that’s really how it goes down) and realizes that in the circumscribed span of time between the two events—the present moment and the event he’s remembering—he’s found the grand theme of the literary work that he’s been thinking about writing for the past 3500 pages (the narrator is an aspiring writer).

The next sixty pages basically contain Proust’s guide to the themes and aims of the book that you’re holding in your hand. I’m sure I’m going to garble this, but he basically writes about how we live primarily in our own memories, and how, in remembering, we resurrect the past, but we also fill it with a kind of goldenness that didn’t exist at the time. He writes about how he can be filled with exhilaration by the memory of his childhood, even though it was actually filled with boredom and anxiety. That’s because the moment is kind of a mishmash of sensory perception, but in our memory, we craft a sort of more idealized, more artistic moment. We select the stimuli we will remember, and we create something beautiful out of our raw impressions. He thinks that the purpose of his literary work will be to capture these intervals of time and allow the reader to not only live within them, but also teach the reader how to recapture his (or her) own past and own memories and reanimate those as well.

The rest of the book is given over to a description of a dinner party where Proust highlights how everyone has aged by describing them as if they are actors who are wearing makeup. It’s one of the best 100 page dinner parties of a book that has at least six or seven 100 page dinner parties. You get to see what everyone is doing and how they ended up. You get to see characters whom you met as youths and see how they’ve been transformed into old women.

For me, the prime joy of this series was always in its characterization. Proust doesn’t pay attention to any of the normal ways of making a character arcs. His characters don’t progress from one goal to another, from one personality quirk to another. Instead, his characters are discontinuous. He spends fifty pages sketching a static portrait of a character, and then, two books later, he’ll spend another fifty pages sketching a portrait of that character is mostly, though not entirely, different.

Proust is the only novelist who shows people from multiple angles. Like, you know how when serial killers get caught, their wives and neighbors will often describe them as alright guys? Well, that’s not just because they’re putting up a façade. It’s also because we are simply different people at different times and places. That’s why Proust can show someone like his maid Francoise as being devoted to correcting anything that might even slightly inconvenience him, and then later show her as being selfish and bitter and cruel. Even though they can be contradictory, his portraits retain enough overlap, and resonate strongly enough with each other, that they never seem arbitrary.

I don’t think any other novelist has yet done anything like Proust. In a way, it’s kind of demoralizing, because it exposes how much of ordinary novel format is a kind of consensus fiction. We know that humans are really much more complicated than the way they’re shown in novels, but we accept that as “reality” just because we’ve been taught to.

Still, his work is not something that can be followed up or built upon. It’s hard to imagine imitating its structure. Actually, I’m surprised that even Proust managed to do it. This is the kind of work that seems like it ought to be forever unfinished. However, even though he never managed to edit the last four volumes, I think that the series comes to a satisfactory conclusion. Part of me would like to see someone try to give the Proustian treatment to something other than fin de siècle French high society, but I don’t think that anyone else can or will try.

Anyways, when I started reading Swann’s Way, I was like, “Holy shit, I am going to have to read all the rest of these now, aren’t I?” and when I read the next book In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower and saw how interconnected it was with Swann’s Way, I realized that I was going to have to read the whole series in a pretty short timespan, if I wasn’t going to forget who everyone was. So I did, and it was pretty decent. If anyone wants my tips on reading the series, I offer them as follows:

·         I have absolutely no opinion on which translation is the right one to read. I chose the more recent Penguin translations because I had a suspicion that the Moncrieff translations (from the 30s) might bowdlerize the homosexual content (which I was particularly interested in). The last two volumes of the Penguin translation are not available (due to copyright issues) in the U.S. I ordered them from amazon.co.uk because I figured that I might as well.

• If you’re not sure whether you’ll like the series, then I recommend that you read the middle section of Swann’s Way (entitled Swann In Love) first. It’s about 200 pages long. If you like it, you’ll probably like the rest. It’s kind of the whole series in miniature.
• You can’t really skim Proust, since it doesn’t go anywhere. There’s no point rushing to reach a destination that won’t give you any satisfaction when you reach it, since the main pleasures of the book don’t arise from resolution of plot threads or character development. Whatever pleasure you derive from each page is pretty much it. The sum is not much greater than the parts. However, I do recommend that you don’t read too closely (unless that kind of reading comes naturally to you, of course). The writing is very dense, and it’s easy to read and reread the same passage, but I didn’t find that very rewarding. I found that whatever I didn’t quite get on my first read-through of a page was unlikely to reveal itself on a subsequent read-through of the same page. I tried, as much as possible, to read it like a regular book, and to keep going through it at a reasonable clip, finishing each book in a week, at most.
• Read the books in rapid succession. Even ten months between the first and last book was almost too much. There were allusions in the final book to events that I didn’t remember from previous books.
• Don’t worry if you get bored sometimes. Sometimes I’d be reading the book and I’d start thinking about something else, and I’d read several pages without retaining a word of them. I don’t think the solution to boredom is to keep re-reading the boring part until you remember it; I think the solution is to read onwards until you reach an interesting part.

Similarly, I recently read Franz Kafka’s The Castle and tweeted:

            Reading Kafka and thinking, “Wow, if there is an award in Heaven for best friend anyone’s ever had, it should definitely go to Max Brod.”

Because it’s hard for me to read Kafka without thinking about how abominably unfair it all is. I mean, here’s a guy who kept most of his work in the drawer and then, when he died, his best friend (a very successful novelist in his own right) went out and published it all and basically devoted his whole life to hustling in order to preserve Kafka’s legacy. Kafka didn’t even have to finish his three novels. Don’t you think Max Brod got a little resentful about how little cooperation Kafka gave him? Kafka didn’t even say (the way, for instance, John Kennedy Toole did), “Hey Max, I have this finished novel in my desk drawer. I think it’s pretty good, but all these publishers disagreed. Can you please get it published?”

No, he was more like, “Hey Max, these unfinished scraps are awful. Please burn them (wink, wink).” And then Max had to shovel that stuff together, assemble it into a finished-looking novel, hawk it to publishers, and then endure being called an awful person for years by scholars who objected to the way he’d edited his friend’s work.

Meanwhile, is there anyone reading Max’s work? On Amazon, the only in-print English translation of a book by Brod is his memoir about his relationship with Franz Kafka (oh, okay, this also looks like it’s still in print: Tycho Brahe’s Path To God).

If there’s anyone who deserves to be obscure, its Kafka. He didn’t even try. It’s kind of a truism that there are way more great books than there are famous books. Given that, why does an unfinished book that someone left in his desk drawer get to be a famous book?

Here is normally where I say that, of course, the book deserves the plaudits its received. But I am not sure that’s true. The Castle is unquestionably a great book. It’s very entertaining and it does lots of interesting things. I especially like the way it’s told primarily through monologues. Some of the monologues are really breathless and masterful, particularly Olga’s, near the end of the book. I enjoyed the book a lot. But I did not get the sense that this book ‘deserved’ the incredibly extravagant reward it received. I could understand it if this book had dandied itself up and combed its hair and thrown itself over a publisher’s transom like a good little boy. If the book had submitted itself to honest competition, I wouldn’t begrudge its success. But the book did no such thing!

Instead, was a misshapen ugly thing, born of a neglectful parent who threw it in a trunk. It lolled around for years, doing nothing, and then got rescued by a fairy godmother. The book is basically the Cinderella of books. What book could deserve that kind of luck?

More important, what did Kafka do to deserve his phenomenal luck? Isn’t the saying, “winners make their own luck”? How did Kafka make his own luck? While the rest of us are out here hustling for a break, Kafka just worked his cushy insurance job and did a lil’ scribbling in the early AM, and if he didn’t like what he wrote then he just didn’t send it out, or even bother to finish it. Of course, Kafka did have a few instances of bad luck in his life, like his horrible, early death–starving to death at age 40 because tuberculosis had screwed up his throat–but still, plenty of people suffer from horrible, early deaths…whereas only two people in all of history have been resurrected and acclaimed as world-class artists after telling their executors to burn all their work because they were annoying perfectionists who didn’t think it was that good (the other being, of course, Emily Dickinson).

If it had only happened once, then we’d know that Kafka was a fluke. However, since it’s happened twice, I think we can safely assume that there must be hundreds or thousands of  ’great’ novels locked away in other desk drawers. My only consolation for the grotesque injustice of Kafka’s fate is imagining all the hundreds of Kafkas whose Max Brods looked at their novels and said, “Gee, this is interesting stuff. Shame he never finished it,” and then chucked the unfinished garbage into the fire. Some people would call that a tragedy. Not me. Those Kafkas deserved what they got.

I’m not categorically saying that I would refuse to help out a dead homie who told me to “burn” his manuscripts, all I’m saying is…well…yeah, I think that is what I am saying. I will slap a magnet on your hard drive and not lose a moment of sleep over it.

But I’ve always been a little mystified by comedic novels. I mean, I’ve read and enjoyed fair number of ostensibly comedic novels….but I haven’t found them funny.

I find it easy to recognize some kind of similarity between the feeling I get from a good joke (even if I don’t laugh at it) and a comedic song. But that feeling seems, to me, to be so different from the feeling that I get from comedic novels that I hesitate to call them the same feeling.

Out of all the prose works I’ve read, there aren’t more than a handful that I’ve found to be really funny: Simon Rich’s Ant Farm; Pratchett and Gaiman’s Good Omens; and (at least when I read it like ten years ago) Dave Barry’s Big Trouble.

Almost all the other comedic novels I’ve read have seemed to me to possess nothing more or less than the typical qualities of a novel: complicated characters, interesting situations, well-observed social dynamics, etc. It’s true that in ostensibly-comedic novels, these things are exaggerated in certain ways, but most novels make heavy use of exaggeration and satirical elements as well.

For instance, 1984 is not considered a comedic novel, but in its cartoonish depiction of a world of doublethink, Big Brother, two-minute hates, and the like, the novel seems to be satirizing real world institutions in exactly the same way as, say, Catch-22.

As another example, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye (and, to some extent, Franny And Zooey) is about an intelligent but deluded fool who feels very estranged from the world in which he lives and goes wandering around a large city and criticizing everything around him; that’s also the same premise and technique of John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy Of Dunces. But the former is rarely described as a comic novel, while the latter is frequently described as one.

And that would be fine, if the latter novel was funny and the former was not. However, I don’t perceive that distinction. To me, 1984 and Catcher in the Rye are good in pretty much the same way that Catch-22 and Confederacy of Dunces are good.

I don’t recognize comedic novels as being funny, but there is something that I enjoy about them. I like their niceness and miniaturization. Most of life isn’t heart-rending and life-altering. Most of it is tea parties and little arguments. I think that ‘comedic’ novels tend to capture that pretty well and, in some ways, they feel more true than more ostensibly realistic novels.

The closest thing to a comedic novel is probably the romantic comedy film. Rom-coms are generally not that funny. Instead, they’re cute. They’re romances without passion. They’re dramas without bite. When I say it that way, it kind of sounds like I am slamming them, but I actually like the absence of passion and drama. I think that it’s an interesting way of portraying life. And since we don’t know quite what to call things that are ‘cute’ or ‘nice’ in this way, we call them ‘comedies.’

Recently, I have read five extremely good comedic novels and I am going to summarize my reactions to them below.

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh – One of the best books I’ve read this year. It’s a very fast-paced novel about petty English gentry in the inter-war period. I don’t think I’ve ever read another novel that was about precisely this milieu and time period. Or rather, perhaps I have (most of the Bloomsbury Group’s novels must be about these folks) but I haven’t recognized it because no one else has so skillfully drawn out matters of money and social relationships. This book is also told in a really interesting way. It’s composed primarily of very short–less than 500 word–scenes and has very abrupt transitions between scenes.

Decline And Fall by Evelyn Waugh – This is Waugh’s first novel (and my introduction to his work). I’m always surprised at the gall of some authors. Waugh wrote a novel that’s basically about an Oxford student who gets kicked out of college and goes on to do a bunch of things that are sort of like what Waugh did (like teach at a private school) but, of course, a lot sillier. I don’t think fiction ought to imitate real life in this way, because real life generally makes very little sense. This comes through pretty well in the novel. The only reason the main character does the next thing is because the author wants to talk about the next thing. Still, the novel turned out well (but I bet most novels that are like this one are pretty horrible). Also, Waugh’s

novels also tend to have horrific subplots that you should look for. People die between scenes for no good reason.

Our Man In Havana by Graham Greene – Because of his daughter’s extravagant pecuniary demands, a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana agrees to become an informant for a British spy agency. But because he’s lazy, he just sends back doctored reports. This is only barely comic. Informants actually do this kind of thing all the time. But there’s something in the twisting desperation of the informant to manufacture a good life for himself and his daughter that is really interesting.

Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene - This book is about a boring fifty year old man (a retired bank manager) who meets his septuagenarian aunt for the first time and starts going on crazy world-spanning adventures with her. The most interesting thing about this novel is its sense of restraint. If I (or any other imitator) was to write a character like the aunt, we’d make her backstory outrageous and diverse. We’d put in everything into her backstory. We’d have her taming lions in Senegal and blasting off to outer space and saving the President from assassins in Tulsa. She’d basically be Pippi Longstocking. But although Graham Greene doesn’t reveal her entire past, he basically allows the reader to reconstruct a very coherent timeline from the aunt’s stories. Although she’s still a ridiculous character, her comprehensibility makes her seem much more realistic; she’s not just some crazy awesome Chuck Norris type who no real person could ever live up to.

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh – I also read Scoop. But I am blanking on what to say about it right now, so instead I’ll just transition directly into:

ASIDE: Is Dickens supposed to be comedic or what? I mean, do people find him funny? Do people find him dramatic? Dickens is so weird. It’s hard to know what to think about him. He’s pretty much his own entirely inimitable blend of the absurd and the dramatic. Nothing about Dickens is real and nothing about him is funny, but when you see his mannequins walk around, some kind of real emotion oozes up out of you. I guess that he’s sort of like a musical. If you stop to think about what musicals are (stories about people who just burst out into song in the most ordinary situations) then they start to seem really ridiculous. Maybe most forms and genres of media are pretty ridiculous if you’re not willing to embrace their conventions.