Pizza meets math.

Lit.

• Good for you Greg Kuntzman, ordering a chicken sandwich when talking to Jonathan Safran Foer.

• Paul Auster has a cool daughter.

• Nextbook announce a new “partnership” with record label, JDub Records.

• The Guardian gives us their books of the decade.

• HTMLGiant picks the most important poetry books of the 00’s.

• An interview with Martin Amis.

New albums

• Titus Andronicus covering the Civil War on their next album.

Interviews

• The Rumpus talks to a Mountain Goat.

Politics

• 22 million missing Bush admin e-mails found.

• Joe Lieberman: Good Jew or bad Jew? We choose shitty Jew.

Well, this weekend was an interesting one for me: a surprise visit from my parents, and loads of surprises on the pages of the two books I flew through this week (one of which I devoured in three hours, but I’ll get to that later).

I think the folks at ABC’s Castle should start paying me — I blog about it way too often, and I’m always talking about how fabulous it is. I think I may have convinced at least 3 of my friends to start watching it after Christmas. In the meantime, I’m such a big fan of the show that I decided that I would allow my curiosity to kill the cat (no mystery there) and go out and buy “Heat Wave” (the book that Richard Castle had been writing on the show, which was actually released). As luck would have it, a friend had given me a $30 gift card for Chapters, and so I could get the book for free, which was the final nudge toward it.

When I found the lone copy of it tucked away on a bottom shelf in the nearest Coles store, I was thrilled: I had a new book and the time to read it! As an added bonus, it wasn’t a super long book, which meant I was all the more likely to finish it quickly. I have a serious issue with books that are more than three-fingers wide — they instantly seem insurmountable to me (I know, I know, I need to get over it. I’m trying!). I bought the book and trotted off back to my house both pleased and slightly embarrassed that I’d given in to a guilty pleasure.

I didn’t get to properly dive into the book until the next day, but dive in I did, and that night I managed to make it all the way to the infamous sex scene between the Detective Nikki Heat and her shadow, Journalist Jameson Rook (which is on page 105, exactly where Castle points it out in an episode of the show). It was at that point that I had to put down the book, for two reasons: 1. It was almost 3am, and I had to work that morning; and 2. It seemed like a good spot to break (it being after a climax and all, you know).

My feelings about the book up to that point had been mixed — I knew it wasn’t going to be high literature (and it wasn’t), but I was absolutely enjoying the banter and jokes, and the mystery involved in what essentially was a full episode of the show translated onto the pages of a novel. There are a few jokes made about Bono, and it turns out that Nikki Heat’s aspirations in life were eerily similar to my own, as she started out her university career doing English and was headed toward doing Theatre, until tragedy struck her life. I found this little detail rather amusing, and it has certainly endeared me to whomever it was who actually wrote the book.

Reading on, after the sex scene, I let myself relax a little and just enjoy what I was reading, which made for a better experience all-’round. Anyone who watches the show will be delighted by how the two lead characters in the novel are with one another, and will find that the story is extremely easily read. Like I said, it’s not high literature or anything, but it’s definitely a lot of fun, and I did find that there was a good deal more suspense involved in reading the particular story-line because it’s not revealed as quickly as the show necessitates it must be. In fact, reading the book whet my appetite for mystery literature, and has encouraged me to broaden my reading horizons, which is actually an excellent segue into some talk about the second book I read this weekend: Martin Amis’s “Night Train”.

There’s a bit of a story that goes along with why I ended up reading Martin Amis when I knew nothing about him, save for the fact that he’d written “London Fields” (a book I haven’t read and know nothing about). I’ve told the story to so many people, but I think I would be remiss in not putting it down in words. Last Wednesday night, I settled down in bed and flicked on my webbernet TV to help me sleep. It was late, and I was tired, but it never hurts to have a little encouragement in the sleep department, and TV does the trick. Anyway, I fell asleep and started to dream. I dreamt that I was in a public place (I feel like it was a library, but it wasn’t really clear) and that there was a very large black board hung on a wall in the building. If you picked up a writing utensil of any sort and wrote on this board, the writing would appear in very vivid, multi-coloured script. In the course of the dream, I began to flirt with a man, and he with me, both of us employing quotations from literary masters, writing them on this big board one after the other, but all the time completely unaware of who the other person was. This continued for some time, and I remember feeling that excitement and sense of nervousness in the pit of my stomach that is so perfect when one is flirting.

I woke the next morning and discovered that I could actually remember the dream (which rarely happens for me), and that there was one detail that stuck out in my mind the most: the only novelist that I could remember being quoted during the dream was Martin Amis. Now, let me stress to you that I really didn’t have any idea what Martin Amis was all about at this point, I just knew that his name kept echoing in my head.

That next day, I came into some more good luck and was given some more book bucks to spend. I went off to Chapters to see what I could find, thinking that I would be flooded with choices of books to buy. When I got there, however, I felt as though I couldn’t find anything that I wanted to read. I found this bizarre, and was determined to find something, so I started looking for interesting books in all corners of the store. Happily, I bent down to look at the bottom shelf in the beginnings of the Fiction and Literature section, and what should be staring at me but three books written by none other than Martin Amis. “Oh,” I thought, “this is just a fabulous coincidence. I think I’ll pick one up and see what this guy is all about.” So, I take a look at the books, and the one that most catches my eye is called “Night Train” and has neon orange on the cover. It’s short, which attracts me, and the design is simple. I flip the book over and read the blurb on the back, which informs me that the book is about a female police detective, working with the NYPD.

AHEM.

Sound familiar to anyone?

Seriously. I’d just finished reading “Heat Wave”, I watch re-runs of Castle on webbernet TV all the time, I dream about Martin Amis (about whom I know nothing) and I end up crouched down in the corner of a bookstore, holding a copy of a book he’s written about a female detective with the NYPD. Tell me that’s not just a little bit eerie.  What’s more, of course, is that I buy the book (how could I not? Really.) and start reading it the next day. I finish it in three hours (likely the fastest I’ve ever read any novel) and now I’m dying for more of this stuff: mystery, suspense, and shady characters.

I wonder now if some higher power (be it God or the literati) is trying to get me to read mystery fiction. Either that, or it’s warning me that I’m going to become an NYPD detective. *insert copious giggles here* Either way, I’m glad it all happened as it did. I was the one who figured Castle was going to get people reading, and (while I’m sure my own thoughts were at work, here) it definitely did, in my case.

…I’ll say it again: EERIE!

Yesterday I posted a link to The Guardian’s suggestions for worst books of the decade. And, boy, did the readers respond. I’ve put together the best reader’s comments about the worst books of the decade. I guarantee you’ll laugh a little too hard.

If there was a book published in the last 10 years someone hated it. And they told The Guardian they hated it. The favorites for worst book of the decade seem to be Ian McEwan for Saturday and Martin Amis for Yellow Dog, but the hate is spread around quite nicely.

As one of the commenters said:

God this page is depressing. I think I’ve spotted all my favourite books above. But then I’m just a casual reader. Reading must be such a painful experience for some of you….

Ian McEwan –

• I think that On Chesil Beach and Saturday are joint winners of he ‘worst book of the decade’ award for me. I’m sure there was worse stuff published, but those are the two worst books I’ve read this decade. unmitigated, smug, self-satisfied rubbish from beginning to end. no redeeming features at all. Yet they still got near-universally good reviews in the broadsheets. What is it going to take for literary journos to wake up to the McEwan myth?
• In a shit -soaked field of its own is Saturday by Ian McEwan. It has it all: smug, self-satisfied and completely unrealistic characters, tediously over-written “research”, plot holes you could drive both Branson’s spaceship and his ego through, quasi political noodling (isn’t it lucky that the central character knows an Iraqi?) and an ending so ludicrous it’s hard not to be personally affronted. Oh and a squash match! A bloody squash match! On Chesil Beach was at least short and provided a good joke on Peep Show.
• Sorry to be unoriginal but Ian McEwan’s Saturday still makes me shake with a mixture of rage and hysteria. What an utterly preposterous piece of nonsense. Stuart has already done the hatchet job so I’ll leave it there. And don’t even get me started on On Chesil Beach…
• McEwan is interesting as most who are critiical of his recent work love his earlier stuff and can’t abide the dull, self-centred and smug author he’s become since Black Dogs. He’s begging for a critical savaging, but no one in the mainstream literary media (with the exception of John Banville) has had the balls to review him closely and with any real critical conviction.
• I’m going to echo what a lot of people are saying: Saturday by Ian McEwan – a hatefully self-important book, and I like a lot of his other novels.
• Another vote for Saturday. Featuring possibly the least interesting McGuffin ever ? oh an aeroplane is crashing, let’s not do anything with that ? and a triumphally dull plot, yet they were nothing compared with the characters. When it became clear that the protagonist’s children were a blues musician and a poet based in France, well, I just laughed and felt pity.
• Ian McEwan’s entire oeuvre. No soul, more middle-aged middle-class male academics, cold, self-satisfied, slimy clumsy prose. He also looks and writes like an MP might.
• Coming after Amsterdam (last decade), Saturday and Chesil Beach proved that Ian McEwan is not only a really bad author, but with every book he can be bad in an exciting new and different way, thus making him truly the only possible winner of this honour.

Chuck Palahniuk -

• Any of the many Chuck Palahniuk books I bought and read despite them all having the same plot. I would say Pygmy is the worst because at least his books are bad but easy to read, Pygmy is bad and unreadable.
• Seconded on Palahniuk. A very bad writer indeed.

Philip Roth –

• But my main vote (I assume we get as many as we like) goes to Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America – it wasn’t all bad, in fact initially it was brilliant, but it fell apart so completely and became just laughable.
• I’m a little afraid of criticizing Philip Roth, but I found Everyman to be depressing and self indulgent.
• The Plot Against America was phenomenally bad, I thought. I was embarrassed reading it.

Martin Amis-

• “Yellow Dog” by Martin Amis has my vote. Not only was it appallingly written – “the sky was the colour of a dog’s nose” – but the plot was meaningless and meandering and the porn industry plot line seemed to be there solely so that Amis could talk dirty.
• Oh yes, Yellow Dog is a stupendously awful book. It has no redeeming features at all.
• I hated Yellow Dog by Martin Amis.
• Tibor Fischer said it all in his infamous review (“like watching your uncle masturbate in a schoolyard”), but if anything, he was probably too kind. Martin Amis has picked up so many bad habits over the years and they’re all present here – silly made-up names, check; complete lack of empathy, check; obsession with porn, check; feeble attempts at impersonating Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, check; facile attempt to impress reader with your piss-poor political insight, check. Shall I go on?
• Changed my mind about worst book: Yellow Dog. Definitely. Anything that causes you to actually punch the book you are reading is in rare territory

Lionel Shriver -

• I completely forgot about Lionel Shriver’s so-bad-it’s-still-bad “The Post-Birthday World”, which is spellbindingly rotten (for the first fifty pages. Others will have to confirm if it keeps its standard, but I’m not hopeful). Jawdroppingly unpublishable.

Paul Auster –

• May I add to the Paul Auster hate? Travels in the Scriptorium was dire: the story of a man in prison reading a story about lots of other Paul Auster novels. Travelled too far up the sphinctorium for me, I’m afraid.
• If so, I’d like to nominate one of my favourite novelists, Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium. It was mind-bendingly ghastly. Sure, I realise I probably didn’t “get” it but this was way off the mark for my taste. Such a disappointment, perhaps more so because I always look forward to the latest Auster (and look forward to his new one Invisible). Oracle Night, The Brooklyn Follies, Man in the Dark and, especially, The Book of Illusions were all written this decade and have all been well worth reading. Scriptorium was a train crash
• Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster – the nadir of long line of so many pretentious, empty, nave;-gazing novels. This caused me to go back and reread the New York Trilogy and suddenly it dawned on me that he had always been rubbish…

Bernhard Schlink –

• The Reader is an absolute shocker isn’t it? Pretentious doesnt begin to describe it..and a revolting thesis too. But I’m heading for shelter now- I know how inexplicably revered this ghastly book is…

Yann Martel

• And I have to join in on Life of Pi. I never actually finished it because I found it so smug, twee, and boring, and then a bit later somebody told me how it ended and I was – wow – this must truly be the worst book ever published. (I notice someone defending it as escapism, which is just another word for nonsense; at least Dan Brown isn’t so cheerfully nice.)
• Life of Pi. An ending a 8 year old would embarassed to submit as homework.
• But stinker of the decade for me is Life of Pi. A trite, trivial turd of a novel.

Monica Ali –

• Brick Lane by Monica Ali. To quote Craig R-H for all Stricly fans out there: d-u-l-l DULL. I can’t believe the amount of hype and praise that surrounded this given how incredibly boring it was. Now I’m all for not having over-ambitious storylines if the writing and language is interesting enough to keep you going, but sadly that wasn’t the case either.
• I rarely abandon a book halfway through, I think I’ve only done it with ‘Brick Lane’, ‘Mill on the Floss’ and the second Harry Potter book (I only finished the first because I got through it in 3 hours).But Brick Lane was astonishing because of the breathtaking gulf between the hype and the reality. Brick Lane is offensively dull.

Michael Crichton -

• I hate to speak ill of the dead, but I once wasted 2 evenings on Michael Crichton’s Timeline. It probably pre-dates 2000 but it’s so bad that it transcends time. Everybody from the printers and the trees that died to create it, to the RNG used to pad the ’story’ should hang their heads in shame.

Michael Chabon –

• For most over-hyped but ultimately pretty average book of the decade I’d have to say The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon, a great example of taking an interesting idea and doing absolutely nothing interesting with it.

Dave Eggers -

• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Self-Indulgence and Utter Tedium

Peter Warren Finlay (DBC Pierre) -

• Those of you who defend Vernon God Little on the basis that it’s just overrated rather than actively bad are wrong. It is bad. Very, very bad indeed. I am mystified by the poster somewhere above who thinks it is a great critique of US culture. Cack-handed satire is not the same thing as critique.
• Vernon God Little – all our sneery prejudices served back to us, cack-handedly written by an author who seemed to have made the whole thing up from watching CNN. “Americans, eh? They’re all, like, shooting guns and eating junk food, aren’t they? And they’re really stupid too.” DBC Pierre (doesn’t that nom de plume just announce “prat”?) was probably the luckiest man ever to win the Booker – nothing about this book convinces, and there’s more social comment to be had in High School Musical 2.

Audrey Niffenegger –

• And how about The Time-Traveller’s Wife? Mind you, perhaps I can’t judge as I threw it across the room in annoyance after about 100 pages.
• Neffeneggers’s The Time Travellers Wife. Creepy idea, unsympathetic characters, and asides to music that seemed just there to show the reader how hip the author is. Rubbish.
• Oh christ yes, someone just reminded me of the Time-Travellers Wife. So badly written I just couldn’t read it – and I read fantasy novels.

Tom Wolfe –

• I was horrified by Tom Wolfe “I am Charlotte Simmons” – a supposedly searing satire on US colleges in the new millenium, seen through the eyes of some 18 year olds. Which will explain why rich girls have new fangled gadgets like fax machines and CD players. It was written by an old man. Go away, Tom Wolfe.

Junot Diaz –

• ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’: probably not the very worst but certainly one of my least favourite. At a loss what to buy people for Christmas this time last year I made the mistake of listening to the pretentious burblings of the critics on Newnight and then made things worse by taking advantage of Waterstone’s three for the price of two offer. Ended up sending a shedload of this drivel off to family members. It is arch, badly written, littered with pointless bits of Spanish, its only possible function is as a tombstone for literature.

Zadie Smith –

• Zadie Smith’s Autograph Man and On Beauty (didn’t read White Teeth). In response to the above, nothing personal, but they are awful books-particuarly the prose, but I am also sick to the teeth of the middle-aged male academic having an affair storyline and she didn’t have anything new to add to it, so tedious. Cardboard cut-out characters. She seems quite nice personally.

Alice Sebold –

• Only The Lovely Bones stands out for me. Horribly sentimental and philosophically bankrupt portrayal of ‘heaven’. In a bizarre scene later on, our dead heroine manages to possess an old friend. So does she tell the world of the living about her still-on-the-loose paedophile murderer? No, she has sex with a boy she fancied at school. Er.
• I would agree with every comment mad about Vernon God Little and I’d like to add The Lovely Bones which I found to be one of the most objectionable books it’s been my misfortune to read.
• I’m surprised that only one other poster has mentioned The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. I’ve never read a more deliberately emotionally manipulative and patronising piece of tosh in my life. I found the whole premise of the book slightly creepy and the narration lacking in authenticity. Its easily the worst book I have ever read. I don’t like being told what conclusions to draw and I don’t like being preached at in a novel. McEwan and Brown and the rest have got nothing on this nonsense.

Stieg Larsson -

• I am surprised no mention yet for the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. 500 pages of boredom. Recurring episodes of gratuitous sexual sadism. A locked box mystery that is solved in a really pedestrian anti-climax halfway through followed by a tedious financial expose non-thriller. Two crap books cleaved together for the price of one.

Orhan Pamuk –

• My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk is surely one of the worst of the decade. Conceited, self-satisfied and just plain dull, dull, dull.

Roberto Bolano -

• Oh and how could I forget the Savage Detectives? I started it on the plane to Mexico City 6 weeks ago to get myself in the mood, slogged through 150 hard-going pages and was actually just starting to enjoy it. Then it went off at a complete right-angle and he brought in all of these other unheard of characters to narrate the story which seemed to evaporate, it was nonsensical. I read two more chapters, gave up and did not reopen it once during a 3 weeks holiday. Last seen on the bedside table of a hostel in Puerto Escondido. 2666 is sitting on my shelf looking heavy, and may yet share the same fate.

John Banville –

• Someone earlier in the thread called Banville’s The Sea “literary onanism”. I’m inclined to agree – it’s a cold pudding of lugubrious prose and what little story there was was rather cliched (adolescent finding love on a seaside holiday? Banville didn’t really add anything to this well-worn scenario). I often like a dense, elegant style, but unless it is matched with a compelling story/character development, it comes across as insufferably “prose for prose’s sake”.
• Glad to see someone’s put John Banville’s The Sea on the list too – I nearly died of boredom reading that. The characters were so dull, they just made me depressed.

Condemning Dan Brown:

• And there is not a worse written book than The Lost Symbol, laughably bad. The cliche on Brown was that he wrote badly but know how to put together a page-turner. Lost Symbol was drab and shockingly predictable as well as appearing to have been written by an illiterate spoon.
• The Da Vinci Code – admittedly, there have been worse. But this one sticks in the throat for the levels of hype and (at the time) the thousands of brainless dullards wittering on about “Doesn’t it make you think/This exposes the truth about the Catholic church!!! OMG!!!”No, you oxygen thieves, it’s a poorly written piece of FICTION. Leave the books to the grown ups, and go and play with some Lego.

Defending Dan Brown:

• In defense of Dan Brown (yeah, I went there) – the DaVinci code is just a crappy potboiler. Thousands like that get cranked out every year. He’s just hated ‘cos that book caught on – again, no-one quite knows why that is but you can hardly blame the guy. (although, God, it was an awful book. Worst part – he has a habit of ending the chapter on a cliffhanger and then immediately resolving it with the first sentence of the next chapter. he never let’s the danger linger. It’s a completely tension free thriller.)
• Oh ffs. I can’t stand this any more. First Mark Lawson on Saturday, now this. Get this: The da Vinci Code is not a “terrible” book. It’s fantastically good and successful at one specific aspect of narrative – suspense, the working of the hermeneutic code by which enigmas are created and resolved. And it sacrifices everything, but everything else at the altar of the hermeneutic code: plausibility, style, characterization, consistency – everything goes. And he flogs that hermeneutic code for all its worth. Masterfully. He does it brilliantly. And he does everything else unpublishably badly. By all means hate Brown if you will. But don’t just label him “terrible”. That suggests a philistine incapacity to understand the fundamental dynamics of narrative.

Miscellaneous -

• And Harry ******* Potter. It’s a children’s book. Why are adults queueing up at midnight to get the new one?? FFS.
• Oh, and that House of Leaves nonsense. Pretentious tosh. Speaking of “disappearing up his own rectum”.
• There are a few “new sensations” from the decade that were and are absolute clunkers. ‘White Teeth’ springs to mind, but ‘Vernon God Little’ is in a whole other category. I’d rather read the collected works of Dan Brown than revisit a paragraph of that. Updike’s ‘Terrorist’ is so bad it makes you doubt the trust you put in him for the Rabbit novels. ‘The Cold Six Thousand’ is so bad it even makes it onto James Ellroy’s *own* list of worst books of the decade. Special non-fiction award for ‘Freakonomics’: a smug, ignorant, dangerous waste of paper.
• There were many atrocious books to be had this past decade, most of which came from pretty and hip young writers of mediocre (at best) talent. Basically anything from Eggers, Zadie, Foer, etc., can safely be skipped.However, the worst book of the decade would have to be the saccharine and vapid novel The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. Just awful, truly.
• So, so glad to find that Vernon God Little rubbed everyone else up the wrong way, too. Dirge. I also despised Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. Shocking stuff. And I like a lot of Patrick McCabe but Call Me the Breeze. Yikes.
• I hated: The Accidental, anything by Paul Auster, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, Labyrinth (it is just a pot-boiler though), The Island, The Sea, Human Traces (Seb, how can you get it so right with Birdsong and then bring me the closet to dying of boredom I’ve ever been???), and also anything by Zadie Smith. And for literary services to evil: Paulo Coelho? Who falls for that crap?

An Honest Self Promoter -

Can I nominate my own book?

http://www.originalwriting.ie/_product_35479/The_Good_Servants

It’s pretty bad!

This month I have mostly been reading:

Money by Martin Amis
Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer
Soldiers of God by Robert D. Kaplan
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway
The Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley
Eastward to Tartary by Robert D. Kaplan
The Other by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Nabokov composed The Original of Laura, or what we have of it, against the clock of doom (a series of sickening falls, then hospital infections, then bronchial collapse). It is not “A novel in fragments”, as the cover states; it is immediately recognisable as a longish short story struggling to become a novella. In this palatial edition, every left-hand page is blank, and every right-hand page reproduces Nabokov’s manuscript (with its robust handwriting and fragile spelling – “bycycle”, “stomack”, “suprize”), plus the text in typed print (and infested with square brackets). It is nice, I dare say, to see those world-famous index cards up close; but in truth there is little in Laura that reverberates in the mind. “Auroral rumbles and bangs had begun jolting the cold misty city”: in this we hear an echo of the Nabokovian music. And in the following we glimpse the funny and fearless Nabokovian disdain for our “abject physicality”: 

“I loathe my belly, that trunkful of bowels, which I have to carry around, and everything connected with it – the wrong food, heartburn, constipation’s leaden load, or else indigestion with a first installment of hot filth pouring out of me in a public toilet . . .” 

Otherwise and in general Laura is somewhere between larva and pupa (to use a lepidopteral metaphor), and very far from the finished imago. 

—from Martin Amis, “The Problem with Nabokov,” The Guardian, Saturday 14 November 2009

The Widows of Eastwick was John Updike’s last novel, a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick published a quarter century earlier. Most reviews of both I’ve read find the latter work a let-down compared to the bubbly mischief of the former, which made much of his reputation. Well, I never read the first, and can’t seem to find it either, so I can’t make any comparison but have a strong suspicion those reviews might be right.  

The Widows, it seems to me, is a last, age-warped window on the best and the worst Updike the novelist had to offer.

Of the forty novels he penned, I’ve read perhaps a fifth, and not one of those I read could qualify as an indisputable masterpiece. Updike couldn’t build a decent plot for shit. When he almost succeeded, what he filleted it with anyway was the sexual mores of suburban middle-class America at bedroom carpet texture level, with distracted references to the weather outside and the times that were – an exercise dangerously close to mainstream romance. For breadth and height and duplicitous sophistication on similar concerns, give me prick-gazing Philip Roth any time.

The Widows’ construction is almost couldn’t-care-less amateurish. The first part is a shameless recycling of travel notes, some of which were already of use in his previous miscarriage of a novel, Terrorist, presumably to fill us in on the three witches’ past and give them geriatric credentials. I forced myself to read through those dreary group tour reports ‒ everything I hate ‒ as they weren’t leavened with any pinch of humour, even though humour is present elsewhere in the book. The second part, in Eastwick, is coherent enough in its whimsicality, including its grotesque coda of gore and flabby naked flesh. And the last part, with its compulsory weird sex scene, telegraphed feel-good twists, nonsensical scientific verbiage, and incoherent turnarounds of at least two of the main characters, seems to be catering for public approval with a smorgasbord of authorial pet ploys. The temptation then is to view the whole exercise as a pastiche – a pastiche wrapped all over the mischievous pastiche of paperback romance novels one of the three hags keeps churning out.

And yet, this is a book I have enjoyed reading, as I have enjoyed all other Updike novels and collections of short stories I’ve managed to lay hands on – for one reason only: the incomparable style of this accomplished wordsmith.

Updike was born with a word spoon in his mouth, it seems. A friend of his once said that, even on top of a ladder screwing in a light bulb, he could keep a lecture going and be word-perfect.

I am a sucker for style, and with Updike, my reader’s pouch is filled. Because, for all his clunky plots and spermatic concerns, John Updike is unrivalled in how a line should clink. It isn’t just about the mot juste, but also about acuity of observation and the vibes that inspired phrasing generates. For this I will hunt his other books and read again those I have – rather than those of other magicians of the word like Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie – whenever, grappling with belaboured prose for a living, I need a gasp of perfection to re-oxygenate my brain.

A critic once labelled Updike ‘a minor novelist with a major style’, and I subscribe fully to this view, whether or not the panache of his prose turns minor concerns into major ones, as some have it.

Martin Amis has a lot to say these days.

Martin Amis’s new novel The Pregnant Widow will explore his belief that the apparent freedom of the sexual revolution actually placed huge pressure on women, with his late sister Sally one of its victims. The author has written his sister – who died in 2000 after periods of depression and alcoholism – into the forthcoming book’s storyline, and has attributed many of her problems to the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s.

“She was pathologically promiscuous. She really had the mental age of someone who was 12 or 13 and I think she was terrified. I think what she was doing was seeking protection from men, but it went the other way, she was often beaten up, abused and she simply used herself up,” Amis is reported by the Evening Standard to have told a London festival audience earlier this week.

“She died at the age of 46, not of anything sudden; she was one of the most spectacular victims of the revolution. It would have needed the Taliban to protect her.”

I think a lot of middle-class guilt has bled over into our era. I think we would be much clearer in our minds about al-Qaedaism if it had originated in Norway, or white South Africa, or the Deep South of America. But they’ve got darker skins than we have and we are rightly drenched in revulsion about singling out people with darker skin. And so we lose sight of the fact that not killing people is better than killing them. Elementary human judgment is put in doubt by this mental habit.

The audience gathered to hear Martin Amis speak were perhaps expecting a sneak preview of his new novel, at the very least an insight into his writing routine.

Instead, the award-winning author lectured the bemused crowd on his latest béte noir – Katie Price.

Reciting from memory, he regaled them with verses from the poem she read to Peter Andre at their ill-fated wedding.

Martin Amis: the sexual revolution killed my sister Sally – Telegraph
Martin Amis says new novel will get him ‘in trouble with the feminists’ | Books | guardian.co.uk
Why Martin Amis won’t shut up about feminism – thestar.com
Martin Amis’s problem is not Katie Price, but women | Books | guardian.co.uk
Jordan is just ‘two bags of silicone’ says Martin Amis – Telegraph
The Saturday Interview: Amis & al-Qaeda
Martin Amis versus the Taliban – The Globe and Mail

a book to write about

This book falls into my category of ‘books i’d like to write about’ rather than ‘books i’ve read and loved’. Its a dark, uncompromising coming of age tale that drove me straight to Google on completion to see what others thought about it. For me, it was the protagonist’s Oxford interview that opened a window on this novel and let in some illuminating light.  The don recognises that Charles is so far deep in his own relentless analysis and critique of everything around him that he fails to have any authentic feelings of his own. True of the literature they discuss and true of the relationship he has with Rachel.  You really could do an interesting, somewhat self-reflexive , essay on the distancing effect of literary criticism in this book.  Martin Amis himself describes this novel as his ‘portrait of a literary critic as a young man’.

Stem cells: the first human trial
The Independent – Steve Connor

American biotechnology firm, Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), have submitted an application to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a new transplant operation involving stem cells.

Scientists have devised the procedure, which takes the cells from spare human embryos, for individuals suffering from macular degeneration. The company is confident its application will succeed and they will be authorised to carry out a live clinical trial on patients in the US, having seen no ill-effects in any of its pre-clinical experiments. The new treatment aims to treat Stargardt’s macular degeneration, which destroys the central part of the retina involved in recognising faces and reading words on a page. ACT hopes their successful application will allow them to follow with a further application designed treat age-related macular degeneration. 

Economics focus: Green with envy
The Economist

A major agreement on the global cutting of carbon emissions, is appearing less and less likely in Copenhagen in December. The focus of the summit instead has switched to tax companies and the exports and imports of the industries producing the most carbon. The Economist claims the imposition of taxes to tackle domestic carbon footprints would help to avoid ‘climate protectionism’ among industrialised nations. 

Amis: How the sexual revolution helped destroy my sister Sally
Evening Standard

Today’s review of Martin Amis’ latest book, notes the author has never won ‘Britain’s most prestigious literary prize, the Booker’. Amis comments on writing ‘Money’, the chairman of the Booker Prize nominated it the worst novel of the year [sic]’. His latest book, The Pregnant Widow, talks openly of the life and death of his sister Sally, whom he claims “was one of the most spectacular victims of the (sexual) revolution”. 

Schumacher on brink of return
The Daily Telegraph – Kevin Garside

Seven-time Formula One world champion, is reportedly a target of Brawn GP. Following last week’s takeover by Mercedes and the departure of World Champion Jenson Button to McLaren, Schumacher is being lined up to form an all-German team with compatriot Nico Rosberg.

Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis

I was just reading a Huffington Post column about The National Book award, which also mentions the scandalous Publisher’s Weekly “best books of 2009” list that includes no women writers. I can’t comment on that, not having read many new books this year, and none of the winners. But the column goes on to revisit past award missteps, including Kingley Amis’s The Old Devils having been chosen over Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

The Handmaid’s Tale bored me and I never finished it; The Old Devils is a great book. The characters are a bunch of aging Welsh alcoholics getting ready for a visit from an old friend who’s made it big in the literary world—a sort of modern Dylan Thomas, but less self-destructive. The ones left behind are the ones falling apart.

The humor is dark and relentless; the depiction of drinking is enough to make you weep with laughter. The men drink gin and whisky in the pub, while the women drink white wine at home (all day). Everyone smokes. The horrors of aging and the horrors of hangovers blend in a way that makes more sense the older I get; I’ve long suspected hangovers are merely bulletins from the front.

Amis’s characters are right wing cranks with romantic underbellies, and he spares them nothing. You don’t have to think you could spend five minutes with one of these people in real life to adore them on the page. They’re hobbled and half deaf, forgetful and losing their teeth, selfish, resentful, envious, and deeply nostalgic for youth. They still have desire, and will behave foolishly for it, and they tell you more about dystopia—the dystopia of everyday life—than Atwood will ever know.

Kingsley Amis famously couldn’t finish any of his son’s books. I’ve liked some of Martin’s Amis’s stuff, but I have more patience than Kingsely. It’s always seemed to me that what the father couldn’t stomach was Amis fils’ pretentiousness. It’s not a killing pretentiousness—Martin Amis has a lot of virtues as a writer—but you can’t ignore it. And there’s nothing a K. Amis books skewers more viciously than pretentiousness.

Of course, being an alcoholic keeps you on the defensive your whole life, no matter how famous you become. When you’re prone to humiliating yourself any night of the week, only a gargantuan sense of humor and an ingrained resistance to human vanity can keep you going.

Alcohol

You do look a little ill.

But we can do something about that, now.

Can’t we.

The fact is you’re a shocking wreck.

Do you hear me.

You aren’t all alone.

And you could use some help today, packing in the
dark, boarding buses north, putting the seat back and
grinning with terror flowing over your legs through
your fingers and hair . . .

I was always waiting, always here.

Know anyone else who can say that.

My advice to you is think of her for what she is:
one more name cut in the scar of your tongue.

What was it you said, “To rather be harmed than
harm, is not abject.”

Please.

Can we be leaving now.

We like bus trips, remember. Together

we could watch these winter fields slip past, and
never care again,

think of it.

I don’t have to be anywhere.

–Franz Wright

“I think you have a duty to contribute, to go on contributing to what Gore Vidal calls ‘book chat.’ For certain self-interested reasons, you want to keep standards up so that when your next book comes out, it’s more likely that people will get the hang of it. I have no admiration for writers who think that at a certain point they can wash their hands of book chat. You should be part of the ongoing debate.”

That’s from Martin Amis’ interview in The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. III. After my last two posts, I keep thinking that I should write something more structured and unified about this collection, add a bit of book chat of my own.

But I don’t have much beyond enthusiasm to contribute, and all these wonderful quotes. It’s nice finding numerous contradictory opinions regarding what a writer should be, how one should write, and so forth, which primarily tell you that the primary thing that writers have in common is that, somehow, some way, they get the writing done and published. Everything else is gravy, random, individual, idiosyncratic. Insert your own analogy to another activity here.

Peter Ackroyd

As soon as you finish Paul Auster’s “Invisible” you want to read it again. And not because, as sometimes with his novels — as with the novels of Georges Perec, one of a handful of other real authors mentioned in the book — you suddenly suspect, at the very end, that you haven’t properly understood a word of what has gone before. You want to reread “Invisible” because it moves quickly, easily, somehow sinuously, and you worry that there were good parts that you read right past, insights that you missed. The prose is contemporary American writing at its best: crisp, elegant, brisk. It has the illusion of effortlessness that comes only with fierce discipline. As often happens when you are in the hands of a master, you read the next sentence almost before you are finished with the previous one. The novel could be read shallowly, because it is such a pleasure to read.

Zadie Smith

Interview on NPR with Zadie Smith:

Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna:

In the end, Kingsolver gives the idea of disappearance a surprising moral dimension. When Shepherd and Violet Brown decry the constant talk in America, the gossip, the radio, the filling in of silences with lies – “God speaks for the silent man” – they risk self-righteousness. Yet a more subtle observation is at stake, and at last it emerges in a conversation they have about the Mayans, and whether they should consider themselves a “failed culture” because they are no longer a dominant one. “No use admiring a thing just because it lasted”, Brown tells Shepherd. Perhaps, she suggests, rather than glorifying the urge of writers and politicians and lovers to be remembered, to impress themselves on the world, “we should admire people the most for living in this jungle without leaving one mark on it”.

Maya Angelou sits down for an interview. David Vann writes an ode to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian:

Representations of hell have always worked to reveal the shapes of our lives, abstract landscapes meant to describe the felt and suspected landscapes within us. The external world is a sign in fiction, all of it responsive: “Under the hooves of the horses the alabaster sand shaped itself in whorls strangely symmetric like iron filings in a field and these shapes flared and drew back again, resonating upon that harmonic ground and then turning to swirl away over the playa. As if the very sediment of things contained yet some residue of sentience. As if in the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even to the uttermost granulation of reality.” The landscape in Blood Meridian is a portrait of us, a secular inferno necessary because, although we may not believe, we still know we are doomed. We shall destroy all we know and then live on.

Vann talks about Legend of A Suicide:

Blake Morrison looks at a century of Poetry Review:

In gathering up the best of 100 years of poetry and debate for this anthology, Fiona Sampson, the current editor of the Poetry Review, doesn’t dwell on the duels and hissy fits. But neither does she pretend that schisms didn’t, or don’t, exist. The first few pieces map out the war zone. On one side, “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” by Rupert Brooke (“And is there honey still for tea?”) and Henry Newbolt on why Robert Bridges is the greatest poet of the age (“The joy that abounds from these poems is from a bluer heaven than any other that has shone over England”). On the other side, Marinetti’s manifesto for futurism and Ezra Pound on his hopes for the poetry of the next decade (“It will be as much like granite as it can be . . . austere, direct, free from emotional slither”). It’s the old guard versus Modernists, with manifestos flying like grenades.

Jane Urquhart

Malcolm Gladwell

The internet is a-twitter with three things this morning: the anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the health care bill, and Maureen Tkacik’s Nation piece,  “Malcolm Gladwell for Dummies.” HTMLGIANT’s Justin Taylor sees the essay as more than just a piece on Gladwell, but also “worth looking at…in light of [the] ongoing discussion of what good criticism can or should look like.”  The Millions wonders if this is “a tipping point for Gladwell haters.”

Berlin Wall

Additionally, Philosopher Slavoj Zizek urges that post-Communist countries should not be written off as “immature.”  Indeed, capitalism did not rise romantically from the rubble of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  The Hegelian-Marxist-Lacanian superstar declares in his NY Times op-ed on today’s anniversary, that we’ve been “deceived by 20th-century Communism and disillusioned with 21st-century capitalism.”

Health Care

Conor Friedersdorf for The Daily Beast points out in light of new steps for the Reform that “neither Republicans nor Democrats adequately acknowledge that it is deeply weird to tie health insurance to one’s job, and even stranger to discuss health-care reform as though it is primarily a matter of getting everyone insured.”

Other interesting notes:

• Fictionaut interviewed Electric Literature.
• The most disappointingly missed Halloween costume of the year: We are all Tao.
• Paris’ Pompidou Center on wheels!  It is literally a circus tent filled not with abused elephants, but masterpieces of modern French art.  The Pompidou Mobile will be created to rove the artistically-deprived “rough” and “rural” areas of France, providing great art for all.  All hail the Pomp-Mobile.
• Martin Amis vs. Katie Price is London’s newest literary feud.
• The Smart Set line-reads William Blake’s “A Sunshine Holiday.”
• Speaking of Blake, The Morgan Library’s exhibitions are on a role this season: first William Blake (which is still there), then Maurice Sendak, now Jane Austen.
• Wikipedia writer/editors are 80% male, 65% single, 85% without children, about 70% under the ago of 30.  Will we soon see the end of the online, democratic encyclopedia? (Thanks Art & Letters Daily)

Most books I’m fine with checking out at the library. Then there are some books I must own. There is no real criteria, but I would imagine one would be the ability to find repeated enjoyment out of it. A book to occasionally show a close friend after a glass of wine. With that, I MUST have Poisoned Pens. I’ve alluded to it twice this week and after reading the review, I’m sure it needs to be with me. (The Telegraph reviews it with a book about literary hoaxes, which would interest me, too.)

As The Telegraph notes, Gary Dexter, the editor of Poisoned Pens keeps his examples at mutual authoricide.

The result is a particularly articulate catalogue of spite and spleen that becomes, when the focus shifts from the page to the person, a real bitch-fest. De Quincey goes for Wordsworth’s legs (‘not a well-made man’); DH Lawrence calls Jane Austen an old maid, and Charlotte Brontë, having written Jane Eyre, a pornographer. However, when Noël Coward says of Oscar Wilde, ‘what a tiresome, affected sod’, you can’t help thinking ‘takes one to know one’.

It is a delight to read Martin Amis at his most destructive because his ability to pinpoint the negatives in an author’s work amounts to criticism of positive value: ‘While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers one fairly serious flaw – that of outright unreadability.’ His annihilation of Michael Crichton’s The Lost World is a masterpiece in itself: ‘Animals … are what he is good at. People are what he is bad at. People, and prose … Out there, beyond the foliage, you see herds of clichés, roaming free.’ It is entirely in keeping with the spirit of his enterprise, and very wicked, for Dexter to end with Tibor Fischer’s wounded, scalding fan letter to Amis himself: ‘Shoot me if I ever produce anything like Yellow Dog.’ No doubt Mr Amis has his imaginary rifle at the ready.

Telling Tales by Melissa Katsoulis and Poisoned Pens by Gary Dexter: review – Telegraph

House of meetings, by Martin Amis, is a story about fraternal and triangular love. It is written as the recollections of the narrator, who has travelled back to Russia to revisit the gulag in which he was imprisoned in the 1950s.

With him in the gulag was his brother, Lev, married to the girl they both loved, Zola.  The book uses love triangle between Lev, Zola, and the narrator to explore the love between the brothers and their attempts to re-establish their lives once released from the gulag. The title refers to a house near the gulag where wives of prisoners came for conjugal visits.

The book is in turn funny, sad, grim, and revolting.  At times the smells and violence of the gulag were enough to make me stop reading and look away.  What is interesting about House of Meetings compared to other gulag books such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, is that the descriptions of life in and after the gulag are written not from the perspective of an intellectual, but that of another class of prisoner.  It describes well the relentlessness and helplessness of life under Soviet Communism, but does not offer hopes of redemption through art.

Amis manages to give his writing a Russian feel without resorting to imitation.  I thought the characters of Lev and the narrator were well developed across the course of this short book, but I found Zola a bit one-dimensional, especially considering she is so pivotal to the plot.  Having read House of Meetings I would be keen to read more of Martin Amis.

House of Meetings
Martin Amis
Vintage, 2007

“But let me tell you something about experience. It outstrips all accounts of it – all ulterior versions. A man having a full scale epileptic fit on the street corner does not mind about the tittering of nearby children. He is involved in his own triage.” – Martin Amis, Experience

While I was adding links to my page, I noticed a cool interview The Times in London did with Paul Auster, one of my favorites. They also had an interesting piece about the creator of Conan The Barbarian as well as Martin Amis recalling meeting John Updike in a hospital. I’ll have to visit there more often.

Paul Auster explains how his work so often mixes the real and imagined – Times Online

Martin Amis recalls his meeting with John Updike — in a Massachusetts hospital – Times Online

The strange life and death of Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian – Times Online

SATURN 3 [1980]

This one gave me nightmares as a kid.  There was something unsettling about the hulking cyborg HECTOR.  With a gleaming humanoid chassis, a pair of electric eyes mounted on a crane-like neck and visible wires and hoses, it was both strange and intimidating.  It was a cross between the visible man models from my childhood, Frankenstein’s monster, an insect, and the Terminator.  Maybe it was its lack of a head.