Then We Came to the End / The Dinner Party

I just read Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris and  loved it. It’s written – uniquely – in the collective first person; a device which was well sustained through the book and never felt gimmicky. Then We Came to the End takes place in an office amid the global recession, and is satirical of office life, and extremely funny.

I met Joshua Ferris at a recent Bookslam event, where he was reading from his new book, The Unnamed (now in a queue on my shelf), and he signed my book. He was very gracious and sincere; was grateful when I complimented him!

I’d like my next book to be a kind of Credit Crunch Catch-22, and I hope it can be half as good as this book.

I first discovered Joshua Ferris through this story, one of my favourite published in The New Yorker during 2008. Enjoy.

“She was game, his wife. She spoke to him in bad taste freely and he considered it one of her best qualities.”

Complicity by Julian Barnes

Possibly my favourite short story in The New Yorker this year.

I love how intimate the story is, how artfully Barnes draws you into it with his narrator’s digressions and remembrances; how he makes you complicit in his story (complicit per his definition, which I also prefer!)

Some great insights too – like the best fiction, it is true.

I haven’t read any Julian Barnes before, but intend to now.

The printed page is the best place for words

Anyone who knows me will recognise the black bag I carry with me anywhere and everywhere (FYI: it’s always a black bag from my favourite comic shop Gosh!, but not always the same bag). The bag contains the novel I am reading at any point, and I am always reading a novel.

In fact, I have a fierce aversion to going on public transport without a book. It isn’t so much that I have a short attention span as that I hate to waste time I could be using to read (I read while brushing my teeth). Anyway, this morning – horror of horrors – I somehow (who knows how) – managed to leave my book at home.

Luckily, in anticipation of just such an eventuality, I have saved several books in electronic form on my iPhone, and so I read a chunk of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson which I thoroughly enjoyed, not having read it since I was nine or ten.

However, I didn’t enjoy reading it half so much as I would have if it had been in paper format. Call me a sad old technophobe, but I love books in printed, paper format. The late, great John Updike said it best here. The printed page is the best place for words.

I don’t need books to be printed forever. Just another 50 years or so.

Daniel Handler “Adverbs” 9/10

Loved Adverbs when I saw its Daniel Clowes cover and read the reviews on the inner cover and was not at all disappointed when I read it.

Handler has an original post-modernist voice, is funny and clever. 

The structure of the novel is unlike anything I have read before: Seventeen short stories about love, set in San Francisco (with adverb titles), with seemingly recurrent characters, which taken together form a sort of novel.

Try this, from the first page, which shows his kooky style:

“Andrea was tall and angry. I was shorter. She smoked cigarettes. I worked in a store that sold things”

Or better yet, in the second story, adolescent ‘Joe’ gives this (possibly imaginary) speech:

“It’s obvious she’s a person to love and obviously I love her. Love is this clear thing of revering her, lending your chivalry to her pretty pants and the way she tosses her hair up behind her on rare sunny days and those gray eyes, the luscious gray of them like when the clouds are beautiful even if you’re not buzzed, so how fucking dare you, Keith.”

Liked this review, from Dave Eggers, the most:

“With Adverbs, Daniel Handler, who’s always been a great stylist, goes ten steps further, to become something like an American Nabakov. He and the Russian man share a rapturous love of words, a quick and delicate wit, and a lyrical elegance that makes every single sentence silly with pleasure. On a broader level, Adverbs describes adolescence, friendship, and love with such freshness and power that you feel drunk and beaten up but still wanting to leave your own world, and enter the one Handler’s created. Anyone who lives to read gorgeous writing will want to lick this book and sleep with it between their legs.”

RIP John Updike

This New Yorker piece on John Updike is golden.

I adored his Rabbit novels and many of his short stories.

And this is one of the most beautiful pieces of sports writing I’ve ever read. “Gods do not answer letters”.

Dennis Lehane “A Drink Before the War” [3/10]

I got on to Dennis Lehane because he has written for The Wire, which automatically awards him the status of golden god in my book. Also, two of his novels have been made into films, and I enjoyed both very much (Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River and recently, Gone Baby Gone, directed by Ben Affleck). A Drink before the War is apparently his breakthrough book, and the first to feature his regular protagonists, private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro (who also feature in Gone Baby Gone).

It’s written in the first person, from Kenzie’s point of view, in a Raymond Chandler, hard-boiled private eye way. So for example we have Kenzie telling us about his gun: ‘My gun is, as Angie would say, “not a fuck-around thing.” It’s a .44 magnum automatic – an “automag,” they call it gleefully in Soldier of Fortune and like publications – and I didn’t purchase it out of penis envy or Eastwood envy or because I wanted to own the goddamned biggest gun on the block. I bought it for one simple reason: I’m a lousy shot. I need to know that if I ever have to use it, I hit what I’m aiming at and I hit it hard enough to knock it down and keep it there.’

 Kenzie is just a little bit too cool. The thing about Chandler’s Marlowe, by way of comparison, is that he’s cool in many respects (great detective, tough guy, very very witty, chicks sometimes dig him) but he’s also quite a tragic character: his absolute dedication to his own moral code often works out very badly for him, he has no friends, no family, no life outside his job, and actually he generally has very bad luck. (PS I love Chandler).

Kenzie, on the other hand, seems to have a perfect life: not only is a great detective, tough guy, witty, chicks dig him, but he has an incredibly hot partner, a Porsche, plus a massive selection of loyal, useful cool friends of every ethnicity, moral code and organization… Also, his relationship with Angie is completely unrealistic. It’s a will-they-won’t-they type thing, but the only reason they’re not together is apparently her deadbeat, wife-beating husband who in addition to being an obviously wholly unlikable chap is completely one dimensional in the book.

Actually, this one dimensionality afflicts many of the characters. Once Lehane has found the main characteristic of each player he milks it, amplifies it; becomes hyperbolic. It is not enough that Kenzie’s pal Bubba is tough. He must be the Toughest, Hardest, Most Kick-Ass Man That Ever Lived, and Lehane must tell us this Every Time Bubba comes up in the story. The two hard-drinking tough-as-nails cops Oscar and Devin had “each taken a bullet for each other”, and in one scene even “both had splotches of blood on their shorts and coffee cups in their hands.”

Kenzie is also not as funny as what Lehane thinks he is, is in fact not funny at all.

Even worse, Lehane sometimes tries to introduce some weightier thinking, with deeply embarrassing results. At times I had to look away, for example this exchange between Kenzie and his cool black journalist buddy:

‘So what you’re saying is I got a hundred thirty-five black guys to be wary of.’

He put the glass down on the desk. ‘Don’t turn this into a “black thing,” Kenzie.”

“My friends call me Patrick.’

‘I’m not your friend when I hear shit like that come out of your mouth.’

I was angry and damned tired, and I wanted someone to blame. My emotions were running hard along open nerve endings that stopped just short of breaking my skin, and I was feeling stubborn, I said, ‘Tell me about a white gang that runs around with Uzis and I’ll be afraid of white people too, Richie. But until then-’

Richie banged his fist down on the desk, ‘The fuck you call the Mafia? Huh?’

The conversation goes on for a few pages in this vein – Noddy and Big Ears debate issues of crime and race in American cities – before culminating in:

I said, ‘So where’s that leave us, Rich?’

He held up his glass. ‘Crying into our scotch at the end of another day.’

There are things to admire about this book. The constant references to Boston as the backdrop to the novel enrich it considerably. The book is well paced and well plotted and a simple piece of escapism it is an enjoyable, quick, light read. But it is not, alas, The Wire.

Ian McEwan “On Chesil Beach” [7/10]

This is a very small (166 pages) and beautiful book which takes place mainly over one night, the wedding night of a young couple in the early 60s. Told from both their points of view, with some mental recaps as to how they got together, and a brief aftermath, the book is remarkably well-observed and invests each little scene with significance and weight. McEwan is as ever word-perfect, and completely captures the two characters; their every detailed thought, word and action are authentic to me.

“At the memory of that touch, that sweet sensation, fresh sharp-edged arousal began to distract him, enticing him from those hardened thoughts, tempting him to start forgiving her. But he resisted, he had found his theme and he pushed on. He sensed there was a weightier matter just ahead, and here it was, he had it at last, he burst into it, like a miner breaking through the sides of a wider tunnel, a gloomy thoroughfare broad enough for his gathering fury.”

The lead characters are not so interesting that they would have carried a longer book, but I found this tragic love story compelling and enjoyable.

Ian McEwan “In Between the Sheets” [3/10]

I have loved most of the McEwan books I’ve read – Amsterdam, Atonement, The Cement Garden… but I did not like this at all. 

Published in 1978, In Between the Sheets is a collection of, mostly, sex-themed short stories. I think the stories are intended to shock and titillate but I found them juvenile, obvious, and uninteresting.

The first story is about two nurses who are sleeping, unknowingly, with the same (nasty) man. They find out, and trick him into getting tied up so that they can perform revenge surgery on his genitals. This is the arena of ‘Torture porn’ horror films (Saw), not good literature. Also, it’s a boring and obvious idea.

Later there are stories about a man who falls in love with a Mannequin (see the film Mannequin from 1987 with Andrew McCarthy and Kim Cattrall – it’s actually better!) and a story narrated by a sentient ape who a woman keeps as her lover. Just plain dull.

The book is redeemed only by the title story, about a divorced man whose daughter, with a friend, comes to visit him. It really gets into the man’s head, his fears and inner turmoil, in a way that is interesting and revealing.