Just finished: The Imperfectionists & 3 others 2 Jul 2010

Ten days on the road for my book tour - with no baby that required attending to, and many idle hours in airplanes, airports, and hotel rooms - meant that I had lots of time to read books. It was heaven, though I still didn't manage to work my way through the stack of books I had optimistically packed.

Still, I managed to finish off four books in ten days:

- Behind the Scenes at the Museum, by Kate Atkinson. An older book that a friend recommended, and rightfully so. A magnificent portrait of a family and their dark secrets, with the first person story of a little girl taking prominent position and the family history unspoolling in alternate chapters. What was amazing to me was how little of great importance really happens with this family, and yet how fascinating Atkinson makes it all seem. She draws incredibly memorable characters.

- Shanghai Girls, by Lisa See. I'm a sucker for a historical drama set in WW II Asia, and sure enough, I enjoyed all the parts of this book that took place during the war. Unfortunately, the book fell apart for me once it hit the United States, and became too much like a Chinatown soap opera. Plus, possibly the most annoying cliffhanger ending I've ever come across in a novel.

- Sarah's Key, by Tatiana de Rosay. This was a panicked buy in the airport, when I realized that I had mistakenly just checked all my books in my luggage and had a 5 hour flight ahead of me but nothing to read. The only airport bookstore in my terminal was basically a glorified newsagent with only a few dozen offerings, one of which was this book. I grabbed it, recalling that my mother had loved this book. I, unfortunately, did not. Another WW II drama, and again, enjoyed the historical war parts, hated the contemporary parts, and really found the protagonist truly unbearable. By page 3, I had figured out exactly where this book was going, which made the rest fairly dull. I gritted my teeth on the plane and waded through it, regretting my packing error the whole trip.

- The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman. A novel about the people who work at a failing English-language newspaper in Rome. Marvelously written as a collection of vignettes -- each one with a twist that stabs you in the heart, and most of which involve love and infidelity -- it's also an ode to the lost glory days of the newspaper. Touching and sad (especially for someone who, like me, has worked in the news industry) and also incredibly entertaining.

The books I didn't get time to read, but am eagerly about to dive into: American Rust by Philipp Meyer, A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, and The Believers by Zoe Heller. So many books, so little time.

Just read: Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain 12 May 2010

 .... After a long and curiously rewarding weekend devoted to reading three different Bret Easton Ellis books (a review in the SF Chronicle of his latest is to come), I picked up a little book called Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain, by Kirsten Menger-Anderson. I mean little in the literal sense: It is tiny by design, a good two inches shorter in height (though not in girth) and an inch narrower than the copy of Lunar Park sitting on my desk. Something about cracking open a book that is of such different design than your average brick-like tome made me feel like I was stepping into a different world. With this book, I definitely was - it was Not Your Usual Novel. 

The book is a collection of linked short stories, each one about a descendent of the Steenwycks family of doctors, several of whom are battling a genetic propensity for madness, and all of whom are fascinated with the bizarre medical trends of their eras. The original Dr. Steenwycks, who arrives in New York in 1664, is dissecting brains; later descendents dabble with phrenology, spontaneous combustion, radium therapy, lobotomies, magnetism, mesmerism and plastic surgery. The amount of research that Kirsten Menger-Anderson did is pretty incredible: Not only is the book a fascinating (and occasionally grotesque) tour of the history of pseudoscience and fringe medicine, but the author also captures the evolution of New York City over 350 years. Reading it feels like you've opened a jewel box full of bizarre and magical antiques. 

I mean all this in a good way - it was a great read.

I used to work with Kirsten at Wired, which is why I initially picked this book up. (The stellar reviews it was getting didn't hurt). It's always a thrill to discover that someone you know is actually an extremely talented novelist to boot.  

Lolita, a love story 20 May 2009

Last year, NPR asked me to talk about one of my favorite books. This never aired - it turned out that another author had previously Lolita as one of their favorite books (who woulda thunk it?) and so I had to come up with another book (I chose the post-apocalypse tome The Stand, by Steven King — a piece which still hasn’t aired yet).

But that doesn’t mean I can’t share this with you, dear readers….

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Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

I bought my copy of The Annotated Lolita in a used bookstore just off the Berkeley campus, in 1991. Required reading for the freshman English 110 course, my Lolita was already marked up with a stranger’s highlighter, and stale bread crumbs fell out of the spine when I opened it. Having only recently worked my way through War and Peace, I regarded this book with dread: Another dead Russian author, I figured, another dense and musty tome.

How wrong I was. From the very first line of this tricky, slippery book, I was electrified: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” Eighteen years later, this is still the only opening line of a novel that I can recite by heart. I find it irresistable, capturing, with its thrilling alliterative wordplay, the horror of illicit lust, the magic and the agony of love, the darkness of the heart.

My mother, when I later told her I had read Lolita, responded with surprise: “That nasty little book?” And if you go by the plot synopsis alone, it is a nastly little book: The story of Humbert Humbert, a twisted pervert who essentially kidnaps his precocious twelve year old stepdaughter Lolita, takes her on a road trip across America, and turns her into his sex slave. Not for puritans, this novel. Which is, of course, is why Vladimir Nabokov couldn’t find an American publisher for Lolita – not until 1957, two years after the book had already been published to much acclaim in France.

Even for a self-styled urban college sophisticate like me, Lolita was shocking, the first book I’d read that made me physically uncomfortable with the emotions it dredged up in me. I was, after all, being asked to sympathize with the misdeeds of a pedophile – often, to even laugh at his mishaps. And the genius of Lolita is that I did: I found myself rooting for repellent Humbert Humbert as he tried to win the affection of his poor corrupted nymphet and wreak vengence on his depraved double and sexual competitor Clare Quilty — even as I also loathed him (almost as much as he loathed himself). I spent hours poring over the annotations, trying to deconstruct Nabokov’s literary wordgames – or were they Humbert’s? – and marvelling that something as simple as a list of schoolgirl’s names could be a portal into a whole world where nothing could be trusted and everything suggested something else.

Lolita introduced me to the concept of the unreliable narrator, and it taught me that the most compelling literary journeys are the ones that take us to unnerving places we never would otherwise have gone. As a novelist, even now, deeply flawed characters are still my favorites, both to read about and to write about – not the nice girls and well-behaved boys, but the corrupt and the amoral and the emotionally complex, the Humbert Humberts and the Alexander Portnoys and the Holly Golightlys.

Towards the end of Lolita, Humbert begs the reader: “Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little.” This, for me, is the ultimate manifesto of great literary creations — their plea to be understood; for you to look into their black souls, and to love them anyway, maybe even as much as as Humbert loved his Lolita.

Recommended Reading 8 May 2008

When I was writing All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, I spent a lot of time reading books about suburban malaise and dysfunctional families. These were some of my favorites.

Tom Perotta - Little Children

Such a minimal little book – like all of Tom Perotta’s novels – but it manages to convey with so few words his characters’ feelings of entrapment. He draws, beautifully, the torpid quality of a suburban summer, the small-minded and insular community, the utter boredom of a life of confinement with only children for company. Perotta is a wonderful satirist, probably because he has so much compassion for his subjects. And it’s funny, too.

AM Homes - Music for Torching

This book is the exact antithesis of Tom Perotta. A.M. Homes’ unhappy married couple that burn down their suburban home in an act of petulant childishness are repulsive, unpleasant, selfish people and she seems to find them as distateful as we do. And yet I found this book impossible to put down – both times that I read it. It’s horrifying, surprising, and deeply disturbing.

Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

Franzen’s portrait of the self-destructive Lambert clan is about as brilliant a portrait of contemporary family dysfunction as I’ve read. I love the sprawl, the humor, the surprise, the poignancy, and, ultimately, the hopefulness of this book – which seems to be a rare quality among suburban novels.  I never get bored with this book, no matter how many times I read it.

Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

I saw the movie before I read this book, and was surprised by how busy and raucous the novel was, especially compared to the serenely clinical hush of Ang Lee’s interpretation of the material.  This book is dark, dark, dark, and sad, sad, sad. It makes me so very glad that I didn’t come of age in the 1970s, which truly has to be one of the most confusing eras in our recent history.

Richard Yates - Revolutionary Road

One of my favorite books of all time. Yates carefully dismantles “the great sentimental lie of the suburbs” – that Leave it To Beaver world that never really existed — and sends his unhappily married couple off to their dooms. In post-war America, Mom is trapped at home, Dad can’t live up to work expectation, and their inspired plans to escape it all by running off to France are brought to an abrupt halt by an unwanted pregnancy. Their relationship is beautifully, subtly rendered and incredibly depressing.

The Complete New Yorker

Not a book, exactly – it’s the entire archive of The New Yorker on CD, and I came back to it again and again when I was writing. Here you’ve got all your classic Cheever (including “The Swimmer ” and “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill”) and nearly 200 stories by John Updike – not to mention thousands of other pieces of short fiction by the greatest writers of the last century. When I need inspiration, I like just to browse through randomly and pick out stories I’ve never heard of.