David Brooks' Novel Apparently Really, Really Sucks

Via friend of the blog Ned Resnikoff, P.Z. Myers' devastating review of what sounds like it might really be the worst novel ever written:

I made it almost a third of the way through the arid wasteland of David Brooks' didactic novel, "The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement," before I succumbed. I had begun reading it determined to be dispassionate and analytic and fair, but I couldn't bear it for long: I learned to loathe Harold and Erica, the two upscale avatars of upper-middle-class values that Brooks marches through life in the story. And then I began to resent the omniscient narrator who narrates this exercise in unthinking consumption and privilege that is, supposedly, the ideal of happiness; it's like watching a creepy middle-aged man fuss over his Barbie and Ken dolls, posing them in their expensive accessories and cars and houses and occasionally wiggling them in simulated carnal relations (have no worries, though: Like Barbie and Ken, no genitals appear anywhere in the book), while periodically pausing to tell his audience how cool it all is, and what is going on inside his dolls' soft plastic heads.


So what is this book about? It's a bizarre chimera, an unholy grafting together of a novel, the story of Harold's and Erica's lives, and an ideological, psychological, neurological and pseudo-scientific collection of materialist explanations for their happy situation. Every chapter whipsaws the reader between a fictional narrative about some exemplary event in their history -- birth, education, being attractive and popular, careers, relationships, corporate revenues, morality, European vacations and other such universal concerns -- and a pedagogical and often facile digression into the supposed neural substrates that drive and reward decisions that will make these two happy and fulfilled. Neither part stands alone, and together ... I'm sure there were delusions of a soaring synergy that would drive deep insights, but instead it's a battle between two clashing fairy tales to see which one would bore us or infuriate us first.  

Curio is now an ebook.

Laura Ellen Scott has been kind enough to provide ebook versions of Curio in mobi format for kindle and epub format for everything else. These were expertly designed by her boyfriend Dean, who apparently knows more about making proper ebooks than most professional publishing houses. I mean, really, these are nice looking and very usable, to the point that even if you've read the stories already you'll probably enjoy reading them again in the new format.

What do they cost? Nothing at all -- just a tweet or a "like" on Facebook. So go get 'em and tell your friends. My original PDF version is now available for free as well.

Update: There was a problem with the ePub link, which I believe is now fixed. Let me know if anything gives you trouble.

Women Who Write: Sandy Florian

Did a little Google hunt for today's installment, and ended up following Sandy Florian from Action Books (Telescope, The Tree of No) to Tarpaulin Sky (32 Pedals and 47 Stops) to the horse less review, from which this excerpt comes:

19

A slowly shrinking man and a large stuffed condor squat side-by-side on a large cornice. The man, shriveling like a dead nut inside a shell, flaps his arms like wings whenever someone enters the room. The condor, an enormous bird with a featherless neck, remains motionless in the monumental position. Each has wrinkled skin. Each has a knobbly body. Each uses the same hourglass chamberpot. Beyond the pair, large eggs dressed in cotton wool lay shivering in their baskets. Ornithological experiments, the eggs come from Hamberg, Holland, and zoological stations in Africa.

Someone enters the room. It is The Moment. To The Moment, the man and the condor are irresistible twins of a maddened plan. To the man, The Moment is a black cockroach wriggling its tangle of legs. The man still flaps his arms whenever someone enters the room, but now The Moment crawls on the floor of the attic room.

Between the slowly shrinking man and the condor there is bird’s eye view. To each, the other seems a Buddhist sage replete with dignity, honor and grace. Hence, when The Moment flutters its antennas, the man looks at the condor and flies.

You Fall Away From the Fall.

You Become Formless From Form.

You are Fallow.

You are Fallacious.

You are the Topaz of Falsification.

horse less review / 2

Room v. Bad Marie

I don't intend to blog all these matches, but this morning after I read Marcy Dermansky's tweet re: the Tournament of Books--"Ouch. Ouch. Ouch."--I thought, Well, okay.

Today, Dermansky's Bad Marie is pitted against Emma Donoghue's Room, making for a matchup of

Two stories about kids in peril, two novels with a microscopic focus on the details that make up a preschooler's life: mac-and-cheese lunches and naptime rituals, insipid kiddie books about anthropomorphized construction machinery, and how to tell if you've breast-fed for too long.

Jennifer Weiner judges, and builds cases for both novels. Despite an imbalance in Room's two halves, she grants it the victory; she finds Bad Marie to be a good read, but pervasively flawed by the obviousness of its construction, by the visible hand of its author in its understated prose and in the plot "plagued by improbable coincidences:"

The author of Marie’s all-time favorite book—the one she found in the prison library which, bien sûr, stocks French fiction in translation—is married to her childhood frenemy, a cardboard-thin workaholic named Ellen. That Ellen and Benoit have no reason to share as much as a cup of coffee, let alone a life, is something even Marie is forced to acknowledge. Wealthy movie stars, flush with cash and with spare bedrooms at the ready, appear at the precise moment the plot requires them.

I read Bad Marie last December and loved it, but I noticed the same things Weiner notices here. The book favors atmosphere, internal and external, over all else, and regularly gets a good mood going at the expense of real credibility. The trade-off feels . . . recognized, though, maybe even intentional, and it makes for a fun, fast story about what happens when we get what we want so regularly that we no longer know what we want, or how to handle it. I, like Weiner, raced through the end to find the conclusion.

Freedom v. Kapitoil

Today a Melville House entry on my Twitter feed let me know that The Morning News's Tournament of Books has begun. I clicked over to see if I would care and noticed that the first matchup is between Freedom and Kapitoil, which seems terrible, a fight between a scrappy cat and a dump truck. I'm not arguing that Franzen's novel is a dump-truck-load better than Wayne's (I haven't read either of these books, but I have read and enjoyed other things by both these writers), but it certainly hauls a dump-truck-load more weight behind it, after all the hooraying and hate vomiting that followed its release. It's hard to imagine Kapitoil beating Freedom, and it doesn't. Sarah Manguso dissects the former's stylistic tics with precision ("Karim tends to misuse corporate-speak outside the corporate milieu; I counted 24 recurring terms") and determines that once the conceits are removed the book's spirit is gone, the novel has turned into a thin sheet draped over off-putting people,

one male coworker who is always a jerk while the other is always kind; a female coworker who is always moody; Karim's mother, a dead saint; Karim's friend the cabbie, behind whose rough demeanor is a heart of gold, and Karim's sister, his ideal woman, their relationship forever untainted by sex.

Manguso digs Franzen's project much more fully. She does lay down a criticism or two, but finds that, in the end,

Despite erratic pacing and an endpoint that seems somewhat arbitrary--why not 300 more pages, or 300 less?--the book satisfies its worthy ambitions.

I wouldn't fault Manguso's criticism here; she engages carefully with both books, and is passionate about her dissection of them. Anyway, I'm sure it wasn't her who threw these two novels together into the blood pit. What sensible person would? Kapitoil is a first novel, and Freedom got its author on the cover of Time.

I have only read two of the books scheduled for upcoming days--Marcy Dermansky's Bad Marie and James Hynes's Next--and although I enjoyed both I'm already sort of . . . afraid of being spattered in gore if I read on. These are both novels that focus intensely on the inner lives of single characters, while pinballing them through wild but muted chaos, and I hope they're appropriately matched. Judge for yourself here.

Reading for pleasure + creative writing canons

 

Robbie mentions below how excited he is about reading for pleasure. I couldn't agree more. I was home-schooled through high school, and by the end my education had become extremely informal, consisting largely of my reading whatever books I found interesting at the library. There was perhaps too much fiction on that list but it seems to have worked out okay. I had a lot of time then, in fact nothing but time, for reading. 

I've been in college studying books for the last seven years, and if you study books full-time you know how little time that leaves for plain-old-reading. Sure, there's your leisure time, but after a day of reading what someone else chose for you, it becomes, perversely, more difficult to set aside time for something you might actually choose for yourself. I've tried to do better about this in grad school, but it's not easy when you often have several classes that expect you to finish substantial works in a matter of days and come out the other end prepared for deep discussion.

The most frustrating thing about this dynamic is the way that your instructors will often ask, having chosen the bulk of your reading material for the last year, "Have you read Major Book X?" and then look at you like you're a crazy person when you shake your head. The idea that I should not only spend my reading time for class on their favorite books, but then go on to read those books on my own time, seems ludicrous: do they see any value in exploring one's own interests? At what point in the year am I supposed to pursue what I love?

The value of canons is of course the common vocabulary they build among those who share them. This is not to be dismissed as a value for students of creative writing: it's good that we can talk about the works of Flannery O'Connor or Hemingway or whomever when we want to talk about a certain technique. But of course canons are chosen by certain people in certain moments, and too rarely revised or expanded. Most of graduate school's official-unofficial reading list consists of rich or middle-class white men writing moralizing literary realism. If you want to break outside that mold, you can read Barthelme or Saunders. These are your options. If you want to go really experimental, they will suggest Alice Munro, and no, I am not kidding.

Because I do see the value of a canon, I would like to see programs make lists of the books they expect students to read on their own time in addition to those assigned in class. This would be nice because then a) students would know, and b) it would require instructors to scrutinize their own choices and expectations more publicly and explicitly. It's very easy to continue perpetuating our stale canons if we never have to examine them collectively, only mentioning one over-similar author after another. If we were to explicitly make a list, we could be challenged on our choices, our expectations, our values. If we never say what we value, if we simply assume that everyone shares our preferences -- as has been the prerogative of middle- and upper-class whiteness for time immemorial, and as is now, not coincidentally, the prerogative of literary realists -- then we never have to question ourselves.

Personally, when I get done here I plan to read some David Markson. I plan to read some Ursela Le Guin. I plan to read genre again. I plan to read comics. I plan to read the Brian Evenson collection that has been sitting on my second couch, neglected, since AWP. I plan to have some fun, which is a value too many writers forget in their reading, and ultimately their writing.

5 Things About Which I'm Pumped

1.  Getting to read for fun

I haven't read a book for fun since Christmas.  The birth of baby Jesus 2,000 years ago made my school close and they didn't make me read books so I read All The Pretty Horses.  I think of it as On The Road for cowboys.  I want to read some comic books and the subtitles for shitty video games.  Baby Jesus dies in April, so, another break.

2.  Getting to write for fun

I haven't really wrote anything new since last semester when I was writing some sort of collaborative poems with a friend.  I want to write a new book.  I want to write blog posts again.  I want to write on bathroom walls without feeling guilty for not working on my god-damned thesis.  I feel like George Lucas and Star Wars.  Return of the Jedi is over, now I can fucking make the shit out of Howard the Duck.

3.  Some Thing Black

Seriously love this book.  I picked it up because my advisor said it is like my manuscript, and it is.  Some Thing Black was written by Jacques Roubaud, whose wife, a photographer by the name of Alix Cleo Roubaud, dies.  He thinks/suspects/wishes that she haunts him through her self-portraits which are beautiful and scary.  Every poem is nine verse paragraphs/stanzas long.  In the back of the book is about 15 pages of her photography.  This is what it looks like:

4.  Asweetassconcert

Yeah, any real show in Marfa is a great reason to go there.  Artsy folks out there should be shamed into going to Marfa.  I was down with going when it was just Mumford and Sons and Old Crow Medicine Show, but I love Edward Sharp.  Wishing I could stay at the Rock Hudson Suite, but it's booked up.

5.

Women Who Write: Jillian Clark

Apologies for last week's hiatus. We're coming off last-minute thesis panics and nightly play rehearsals, so our normal posting schedule should soon resume. Thanks to Tim for keeping things alive during our absence!

Today I wanted to look at Abjective, and I wanted to look at something like poetry. I found Jillian Clark's "blind contour poem, 12:01 a.m." and thought I'd share:

I.

you said you'd rather be working with your hands

like Hemingway and I don't remember anything

about your hands except that they were writer's hands

and the way they looked both bored + frantic when

you were applauding something

Abjective / September 30, 2010

Next

After I wrote about the Believer's love for James Hynes's Next, I decided to actually pick up the book, and read it this weekend. It is a strange thing--real almost to the point of absurdity, attentive to low-level details and actions that we shouldn't care about but that we do because of how they're related, jumbled in with the protagonist's nostalgia for fifty-some years of family and lovers. This is a book obsessed with middle-aged lust-fueled longing, the kind that is desperate but that also laughs at its own desperation. I wouldn't say the last sixth of the book is as wild-fresh-new as some other reviewers have, but I will say that it's daring, and would be difficult to write, and takes everything that came before and makes it seem far more important than it might.

Now I am going to read Pym, which I am looking forward to. NPR talks it up here.

Family in Fiction

Several years ago, when I was first here at NMSU, I wrote a story called "Brother." It was published at Mud Luscious. The story was about a man who discovers he absorbed his twin in the womb. This was the first time I realized the power of family in fiction. One of my biggest challenges as a writer is the problem of empathy. I think that my readers should be free and easy with their empathy: that if I show them a human being and I give that human being a name, then that should be more or less enough. Readers who ask me why they should care about a character infuriate me, usually -- of course sometimes the question is valid, but really, why should you care about anyone? Because they're people. Fictional people should be no different even though they don't exist, as I see it. You knew what you were getting into; why be stingy with your love?

This becomes a particular problem for me because I like to extend the empathy of readers, to make them care about things they are not accustomed to caring for. I don't recall if it was Shelley or Coleridge or some other romantic poet who suggested that the main task of writers was to draw into connection, through metaphor, new objects, but I liked the idea, and furthermore I like the idea of drawing people into connection with new people, new objects, new visions of themselves. To empathize unexpectedly is one of my favorite experiences. My novel is about the two atom bombs reincarnated as people. They remain bombs, in a sense, throughout the book. One particularly hostile reader said he could no more identify with bombs than he could a bowie knife -- he asked me, what could a weapon tell him about being human? Well, that's the question isn't it.

What I've learned, though, is that characters can capture empathy by the way they exist in relationship to each other. The bombs in this novel are brothers. This is important to them. They are important to each other. The novel I'm planning to write next is also about brothers. I've had ideas for stories about sisters, also, about mothers, about fathers and sons. In Battlestar Galactica there's a sort of soap opera element to the scripts deriving from the fact of a single family at the story's center. Other people join this family and leave it, become friends with the family and lose those friendships. The family's relationships are a subtext in many of the most dramatic scenes. This can be a little silly sometimes, but it's also useful: it tells us why they care about each other so much.

Fiction is constantly attempting to enlighten us by insisting that deep down we're all essentially the same. This is why so many writers and readers alike are fond of talking about "the human condition," as if there were one human condition. This has always stuck me as both wrong and immoral: wrong in the sense that I believe there is a wider range of human experience than such discourse can contain, and immoral in the sense that all this insisting on our fundamental similarity implies that anyone who is actually different doesn't deserve our love. 

Family is a useful way of dealing with this problem -- a way of helping readers to care about people they might otherwise not care for. We're used to the idea of identifying with our family in spite of difference and alienation. No matter how strange our family seems to us, no matter how totally alien our mothers or fathers or siblings seem to be, we feel strongly -- we are trained to believe -- that we share something with them. It doesn't matter if we can't name the thing. It doesn't matter even if we hate them. We're supposed to care. We're expected to care. We are required to care. And so we do.

And so I am in the habit now of making my characters siblings, wives, and so on. The power of a word like "brother" is the poignancy of it, of being forced to empathize with someone who might be a stranger. It is unreasoning love. Love being my goal, as a writer. My hope. My need.

Ever Grittier

What I dread more than any other act of writing, more than growing bored with characters or losing the words to describe a scene or coming to the end of a project and looking back to find it unworkable, is writing a plot summary for a query letter. It is fortunate that plot summaries for short fiction are not only unexpected, but discouraged, because if I had to summarize short pieces I would probably never send them out. "This story features a person who accidentally clones himself, then decides to farm and eat the clones," I would write. "After his hippie girlfriend leaves him, X makes homemade soap and hopes the scent will attract her back; the soap is so powerful that it cleans through his hands and through the floor and into the apartment below." "A grown man remembers waking in the night as a child to find a man tugging on his foot in an attempt to stretch one leg."

So, okay, I guess those are okay. But I have a terrible time summing up longer things (as I'm sure many people do) in ways that capture their scope without running to four or twelve paragraphs. It's all a problem of choice, of knowing what people to include, and how to describe them, and how to describe how they connect, and what interactions to put in, and what conflicts, and how to set up payoffs that otherwise will not seem like payoffs. And of course the summary is the introduction to the project, going before, bravely, trying to throw down a good impression, smile just the right width, reveal just the right buzz of creep behind the teeth. I used to write very watery summaries; now last night an agent wrote a generous rejection for a query for my last novel, explaining that it sounded too gritty for her, and I feel somewhat okay with that. Bring on the grit. Better than the boredom, I should hope.

That rejection was the impetus for this post, but another influence was a description for James Hynes's Next. Of the five books on the Believer Book Award shortlist, Next gets the best line:

The book's final section is one of the most daring and hyper-realistic endings in recent contemporary fiction.

Man, sounds pretty good, right? And pretty . . . potentially overblown. What can it possibly mean to have one of the most daring and hyper-realistic endings in fiction? Is there a lot of gore? Or does the action wind down as the characters look at each other, grow old, face small diseases, make bad investments, suffer layoffs, eat too much, get drunk and rearrange their homes, burn themselves cooking, buy each other drinks after sex, learn new ways to fix bicycle tires? Well, whatever it means, it was a sufficient summary description to send me to Amazon to read that Hynes

. . . pushes the plot into uncharged territory. The final 50 pages are unlike anything in the recent literature of our response to terrorism--a tour de force of people ennobled in the face of random horror.

Which is more descriptive but less intriguing. Now I care less about the end of the book. Is it bad in a summary, then, to include actual details? Probably not; I agree with everything Mike wrote about expressing aboutness in contemporary literature, that a writer who can tell a reader what a set of words is about has a better and more earned chance of snagging that reader's attention. I just wish I could figure out the right way to do it.

Parallel Universe Birth Certificate

I was going to write a serious post about writing nonfiction, but I got distracted by this Mother Jones interview with two attorneys about the legal implications of superhero actions. It's called "Would Superman Pass the Birther Test?".

Maybe some day there would be not a birther contingent, but a "dimensioner" contingent [saying] "show us the parallel universal birth certificate," or whatever.