Giving a whole new meaning to the word "plot"

I already copped to not being a morning person, but today I brought it on myself. I got home at 1:45AM and should have gone straight to bed, but I had a chapter of Jincy Willett's novel THE WRITING CLASS left... well, you know how it goes. I had to finish it, there was a murderer on the loose!

Like the classic Agatha Christie mystery TEN LITTLE INDIANS, THE WRITING CLASS examines a group which discovers one of its members is a killer. I wasn't familiar with this term before, but the instructor in the book, a former novelist named Amy Gallup, calls this a "locked-room mystery" because the number of suspects are limited by geography. The prankster's trail indicates that he or she has to be someone in the workshop, which includes the usual suspects of thriller-writing doctor, bored twentysomething, over-eager course repeater... and a psychopath.

I cannot remember for the life of me which blogger recommended this to me, but if you're out there -- thank you. I could set it down and pick it up between shows and I still managed to keep up with the mystery, although the satire of the group writing class piqued my interest more since I have been in fiction writing classes like this. (Well, not exactly like this -- no one ever drew obscene things on any of my manuscripts.) There's also a funny subplot about Amy's blog, which she names "Go Away" and uses to post about the sexiest letter in the alphabet and her homegrown movie-book hybrids.

I don't see myself reading it again but I'd definitely be interested in checking out Willett's short stories and her novel WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD.

My Question For Tom Wolfe

Remember how I wrote about Haruki Murakami taking questions for TIME Magazine? Tom Wolfe, celebrated author and man in white, is doing the same TIME series and I couldn't help joining in. So here's my question:

Mr. Wolfe, who would win in a rap battle, you reading the lyrics which you wrote for Doctor Dis in I AM CHARLOTTE SIMMONS, or Jay-Z? Fine print: by answering this question you are in fact agreeing to participate in this rap battle with Jay-Z, although we will give you a 16-measure boost from Lil'Wayne.

Hmm. Maybe you can do better than me. But how could you not want to see that? By the way, I have read ...CHARLOTTE SIMMONS but I didn't like it as much as THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST, which I will always associate with a family vacation to Brazil where I devoured it in a hammock.

Amy Shearn, Morning Person

I don't like mornings. I remember the torture of staying in my room until 6AM as a little kid, but I recently started setting my alarm for 7, and it hurts. For the first few hours I'm a coffee-seeking missile, although -- as hoped -- modestly more productive during the day overall. (That's still an hour-plus later than I used to get up in high school, after staying up all night on AOL IM! Ah, youth.)

So I was impressed by writer Amy Shearn's confession in an interview with Claire Zulkey that she wrote her first novel, HOW FAR IS THE OCEAN FROM HERE, before work every day:

I write in the mornings before work, from 5:30-7:43, because at 7:43 I need to watch Pat Kiernan on In the Papers or my whole day feels sad and empty. Then I go to work... I think you have to treat it like a job. Even if you have a job already.

(Kiernan is a NY1 anchor, which I didn't know before.)

I had requested to review Shearn's novel, and it didn't work out, but I'm definitely interested in checking it out now. As it turns out, she is giving a free writing class in New York City tonight, at the Lincoln Center Barnes and Noble. I wish I could make it, but being otherwise occupied I will have to catch her when she gives another on October 5th.

Filmbook Extra: I'd Buy That Shirt

At an outdoor performance of "Hamlet" at the Cloisters, Fort Tryon Park: A tween girl wearing a T-shirt that read "Never judge a book by its movie."

So true! Hope she enjoyed the show (presented by Gorilla Rep) -- I did.

Fringe benefit

Friday was the official start of the biggest event of the year for a certain sub-section of theatre critics and theatregoers. I speak of course of the New York International Fringe Festival, a smorgasbord of performance-related things which officially kicked off Friday. My first Fringe show of approximately 15 (I keep adding and dropping, much like course shopping period in college) was yesterday and the thought of seeing all that theatre is still exciting -- if a little exhausting.

But I'll probably get a ton of reading done. Not during the shows, I mean, but while we're seated and waiting (I usually show up half an hour in advance), between shows on nights I'm covering more than one, and the inevitable post-work pre-show void. I won't have my laptop with me and I don't have a Blackberry, but I have a stack of books specifically marked for intra-Fringe consumption. It is suddenly clear to me why my parents always tried to get me books for long car trips: If I have a book, I can wait for eons.

If you are reading this and in the Fringe Festival, I salute you! It takes a terrific amount of time to get these shows up and audience sizes can be variable through no fault of your own. (And sometimes there are snakes like me hidden in them.) As for everyone else, I'll be in my seat, reading.

Unbookening, unnormally

Yes, I know "unnormally" isn't a word.

This month's Unbookening is going to be a little different. As of August 2nd I stopped adding books to my Bookmooch inventory for the month, because... I'm giving all of this month's books away to someone I don't know. Specifically, a Peace Corps friend of a friend who posted a plea for any and all reading materials in English for herself and her fellow corps member.

I've never met her and I want this donation to be a surprise, so I'm not linking to her right now, but I will later! I'm hoping to send her a box of 10-12 books along with a few "comforts of home" which she requested. If she's already read them, perhaps she can share or trade with other people there. I have enough Bookmooch points, and I can't imagine living in a place with zero availability of English books. The cost of shipping a flat-rate box will probably be around what I would normally spend on Bookmooch in a month anyway.

Locals, if you have anything you want to stick into the box, let me know. (I won't count that towards my totals.)

Mary Cantwell's MANHATTAN MEMOIR

A serendipitous find in the Mulberry Street branch of the New York Public Library, an exquisite box that smells like a yoga studio. The book I checked out actually holds 3 memoirs by the long time writer and editor; AMERICAN GIRL chronicles her childhood in Bristol, Rhode Island; MANHATTAN, WHEN I WAS YOUNG is about the launch of her career as a magazine girl, marriage and children, and SPEAKING WITH STRANGERS follows her into midlife with the personal frustrations of being a single mother.

Cantwell wrote her memoirs in the '90s, and she must have realized how closely her experiences mirrored those of many other women in her generation, coming of age right after World War II and interlacing city life and small-town values. This is especially evident in her discussion of the divorce; she was crushed to have to go through it, but her husband "B." had after years of tumult fallen in love with his secretary and wanted to marry her. Her Catholic upbringing rebelled against both the idea of divorce and the notion of finding love again; she eventually had a long and tortured affair with a married Southern novelist, from whom she felt she couldn't extricate herself. (But such is her discretion that she only refers to him as "the balding man." If you want to know who the lover was, read her Times obit. Kind of mean of them to do given that she worked for the Times!)

Unlike a lot of memoirs that look back at New York, Cantwell's latter two volumes hardly addresses the changes in the city, except when they affect her directly. Still, I found it fascinating to compare her life to mine even in details as minute as what her first apartment looked like and where it was proper for "magazine girls" to eat lunch. Her small-town upbringing I also related to in some respects, although I found that memoir alone a little dull compared to the rest. (Was born, played, switched schools, was teased; got older, had boyfriend, felt town was stifling; escaped. That's the lot of it.) SPEAKING WITH STRANGERS is almost a travel memoir, given the space Cantwell devotes to her trips all over the world -- ending with a bizarre stop in Hawaii -- but she remains emotionally tethered to her daughters and to a lesser extent "the balding man" in New York.

This book also gives the lie to the notion that work-life balance is a new issue for anyone. Cantwell never seriously considers quitting her job, but even before her daughters are born she struggles with trying to be the best wife and the best employee. She doesn't come to any broad revelation about how to fit all those pieces together, but in SPEAKING WITH STRANGERS she has at least made peace with the pieces.

59. Max Beerbohm, ZULEIKA DOBSON

Boy meets girl. Boy loves girl, but girl is cruel to boy. So boy decides to kill himself. Girl changes her mind and decides to love him so boy will change his mind, but when boy changes his mind, girl goes back to her original attitude, and thus boy and girl are never quite in concert.

We know the protagonists of Max Beerbohm's ZULEIKA DOBSON are shallow, because the narrator makes this clear from the start. Zuleika is a rich dilettante known mostly for her traveling show of magic tricks, who has come to stay with her grandfather at Oxford at the fictional Judas College.* When her path crosses with the Duke of Dorset, they could be a perfectly shallow match: He's an indifferent scholar for whom his vast wealth is really no big deal, who enjoys drinking with his club the Junta. But he decides that Zuleika must be his -- and, embarrassed by his elaborate declaration of love (involving sheep, no less!), she rejects him with a sniff. The Duke retreats to his friends, expecting them to cheer him up, but they declare they are in love with Zuleika too -- and if she won't have them, they won't have anyone.

ZULEIKA DOBSON is Beerbohm's only novel and I wish he had written more fascinating little dark fables like this one. What the Duke decides to do, and the way he and Zuleika ping-pong between trying to figure out their feelings and act how their breeding dictates they should, is so bizarre and switchback-filled that abruptly in the middle of the book I realized that I wasn't engrossed in boy meets girl any more. I was lost in a much greater allegory which delivered a peculiar punch at the end.

Progress of LN VS. ML: 48 read, 52 unread.

Next up on LNVSML: Joseph Conrad's THE SECRET AGENT (#46). Read it on Dailylit, like me!

*As I discovered by perusing this list of fictional Oxford colleges. Is it because of libel laws that English writers are so loath to set their works in colleges that exist?

ToTT Tuesday: My Personal Finance Toolbox

My review of Farnoosh Torabi's YOU'RE SO MONEY on Talk of the Town with Parker Sunshine airs August 27. Yay!

I got interested in Farnoosh Torabi's YOU'RE SO MONEY because, as I wrote last week, I'm getting used to organizing my own finances and plan for an uncertain future. So I thought it might be useful to share what my money reading looks like right now as the background I'm taking into this book.

I Read
Suze Orman, THE MONEY BOOK FOR THE YOUNG, FABULOUS AND BROKE. The title's a little silly, but "Suze" is in the self-esteem business as well as the personal finance business, which is why this was the finance book I gave my sister for graduation as part of a "Welcome to the Real World, Too Late To Retreat" package.
Michelle Goodman, THE ANTI 9-TO-5 GUIDE. This book specifically covers freelance personal finance, and that's not all it discusses, but I'm proud after reading it last month to add it to my arsenal.
Dave Ramsey, THE TOTAL MONEY MAKEOVER. In some ways Ramsey's advice counters Orman's, especially about getting into debt, but I like Ramsey's wherever-you-are approach to improving your financial situation. When I started listening to his radio show (which streams at daveramsey.com) I wasn't in the dire straits that many of his callers describe, but I was content to not keep track of where my money was and to let the chips fall where they may. If nothing else this book will make you keep track of your spending.

I Follow
Personal finance blogs, especially Her Every Cent Counts, Give Me Back My Five Bucks, Escape Brooklyn and SF Money Musings (now Soul-Searching 20something On a Mission). These are all blogs by women around my age who are dealing with career changes, establishing good savings habits and learning when to splurge. I admire them because I'm not remotely brave enough to share my financial life with the world, even anonymously.

I also listen to NPR's Marketplace and Marketplace Money, which doesn't always cover personal finance but is a great way to ease into the scary category of business news.

So where do you get your personal finance information? From the brokerage of Mom and Dad? (Hey, I still ask them for advice a lot.) From an outside advisor? From your savvy friend?

Subway Storytelling

"If a Los Angeleno's SUV is a culturally sterile environment, a New York subway is a veritable petri dish, swarming with life. Sometimes it's too much; sometimes the peddlers and the mooch artists and the nodding junkies and the militant nonbathers are more than one can bear, and all one wants to do is hide behind a newspaper and tune it all out. But it's life, it's the city, and in a very real sense it's why most of us live here--not for the theater, not for free concerts in the park, but for the urgent pulse of the metropolis."
--Lawrence Block

Everyone who lives in New York for any length of time has a library of subway stories -- bizarre, scary or funny things that happened to them or that they witnessed on the subway. It's inevitable when you jumble that many people together that stuff happens. I nearly became a character in someone else's subway story last summer when, stricken by a bug on the way to Philadelphia, I was trying to conceal how sick I felt until the next stop so no one would pull the emergency stop and make my fellow passengers angry. (I made it... thank goodness. No one wants to be responsible for a train delay, it's worse than being violently ill.)

The essay collection THE SUBWAY CHRONICLES won't give non-New Yorkers the history of the subways, except when it's incidental to the story. But it will give you the experience of riding it as described by many writers over many different lines. Johnny Temple's "The First Annual Three-Borough Subway Party" is a story of a non-story, because the party, despite exquisite planning, never actually took place. Patrick Flynn's "Parnassus Underground" argues that he likes his super-long commute that takes him from bus to subway to subway; Stan Fischler describes his awe of the subway as a young boy growing up in midcentury Brooklyn. Garret Chaffin-Quiray gave me a lot of fodder for my Netflix queue with a discussion of movies that have subway scenes or rely on the subway (like "The Warriors," which makes an appearance in Jonathan Lethem's piece as well).

But my favorite essay was Robert Lanham's "Straphanger Doppelganger," a chillingly hilarious account of what happens when you meet the person who looks just like you and has been going around making you look bad. In Lanham's case, his doppelganger had been taking out mysterious women, causing reports to trickle back to his wife, so Lanham decided to find the guy who "resembled some weird amalgamation of Jon Voight, circa 'Midnight Cowboy,' and the guy with the unfortunate bangs from 'Logan's Run.'" I haven't found my own subway twin, but I'm sure she's out there somewhere.

Spoiling James Frey (If He Weren't Already)

There's a word I try to avoid using to review books 'round these parts, or in general. I think it's overused in life, and books of a certain caliber attract the tag just by what they set out to do in general. But if there's one word I would use to describe James Frey's first "official" novel BRIGHT SHINY MORNING, it would be: pretentious. If that's all you need to know, I urge you to go forth and use that estimation of the book at dinner parties. If you need specific examples, read on.

I hadn't even expected that as I kept the book out of the library for a good six weeks, putting it off in favor of more fun reads. I anticipated badly written, and there's some of that. I suspected generalization, and there's a lot of that. But pretension, I was not on guard for that. So here's your Wormbook whitepaper on how not to make your book pretentious, with spoilers. You've been warned:

• We may or may not be in a recession, but there is no shortage of periods in this country. Frey writes all his sentences like this jams them together in an unhappy alliance. It's meant to move the speed of the book along it makes the book seem like it hasn't been proofread. I hope you are getting irritated already there were 400-plus pages of this. I don't know what's wrong with short sentences breaking your thoughts in half is not a big deal. Maybe it works for a memoir maybe it was designed for me to want to copy-edit my library book.
  

• Adding one detail to your stock character does not make him or her less of a stock character. A daughter of hard-working immigrants who is forced to take a demeaning job to get by has a source of secret pain -- her thighs! Esperanza (and don't get me started on how bad books have ruined this lovely name for me) virtually goes into hiding after her dress accidentally flips up at a graduation party and lots of men get a look at the thighs she hates. So, what do you know, eventually she meets a nice man who loves them (and who happens to be the son of her mean employer). Another example: He's not just a wino, he's a wino who only drinks Chablis!
  

• When bad things happen to stock characters, it's not Indicative of the Terrible Burden Of The City. It's an indication that the 19-year-old runaway trying to support his girlfriend shouldn't have stolen from the biker gang. Much has been made about the book's Los Angeles setting, and while there are cool things that can be done with it, BRIGHT SHINY MORNING really uses the city the way "Entourage" uses Hollywood -- as a shortcut to load a particular view in your mind so the author won't have to do the heavy lifting. I'm sure if you stole from a Minneapolis biker gang, they too would hunt you down and leave your pregnant wife to cry alone in an apartment she can't afford.

• That said, there was one L.A. character I thought was well drawn. Naturally, he's a real person. Seriously, when are we going to get the Great American Perez Hilton novel? Minus half a point on the Pretensiometer for the 4-page excerpt on the gossip columnist America reads and pretends not to know about. Out of any profile I've read of Hilton (alias Mario Lavandeira) Frey's biography of him is probably the most succinct if not the best sourced. But it's pretentious to give us this glimpse of What Might Have Been. The fame-hungry, writing of the fame-hungry?
  

• Non-diegetic sections get annoying the minute they start calling attention to themselves. I didn't bother to check the facts that Frey wrote into the book between chapters, because I assume they're a little skewed if not incredibly skewed. But there is one section where it really works, and I apologize in advance to you MOBY DICK fans out there: The section on the Los Angeles freeway system -- a largely narrator-free explanation of the different major highways, their local names and reputations -- was this book's "Whiteness of the Whale" moment, but (for me) actually interesting. So when Frey decides to later serve up multiple chapters of "Fun Facts Los Angeles," it just seems like he got too lazy to knit them into coherent discussions. And when you introduce a chapter with "Every city can be fun, and every city has certain elements, or facts, about it that are fun," I just want to hit you. We get it! You're so cool you don't care that this completely interrupts the narratives I didn't care about anyway!

I have read BRIGHT SHINY MORNING. Now let us never speak of it again.

Celebrity author sighting!

This just in: Camus is having dinner with his parents in Princeton, New Jersey mere feet away from Toni Morrison. Not exactly surprising since she teaches at Princeton, but he notes she is "rocking the white dreads."

Unbookening Month 6: Hmm, That Didn't Work

3 books gotten on Bookmooch
16 books checked out of the library
6 books received for review
Borrowed 4 books from home
Got one book as a present (ALL WE EVER WANTED WAS EVERYTHING)
Bought 1 book
= 31 books in.

9 books given away on BookMooch
14 books returned to the library
Gave away 5 books
Lent 1 book (THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO, to my mom)
= 29 books out.

Two notes on this month:
1. Now that Nick Hornby has retired his "What I'm Reading" column for The Believer, maybe I should switch to his format of books bought/ books read. Of course, that would defeat the purpose of trying to get books out of my house and telling the Internet what a failure I am at said getting.
2. This blog is now the first and only Google search result for "Ainslie Copper."

Books I read this month
80. Rachel Kushner, TELEX FROM CUBA
81. Jennifer Traig, WELL ENOUGH ALONE
82. Shawn Stewart Ruff, FINLATER
83. Bernard Malamud, THE NATURAL
84. [Ainslie Copper]
85. [Ainslie Copper]
86. Jancee Dunn, DON'T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME
87. [Ainslie Copper]
88. Shira Boss, GREEN WITH ENVY
89. Elizabeth Warren, THE TWO-INCOME TRAP
90. Jess Winfield, THE BOOK OF WILL
91. Joanne Passet, SEX VARIANT WOMAN
92. Jacquelin Cangro (ed.), THE SUBWAY CHRONICLES (review to come next week)
93. John Darnton, BLACK AND WHITE AND DEAD ALL OVER
94. James Frey, BRIGHT SHINY MORNING
95. Glinda Bridgforth and Gail Perry-Mason, GIRL, MAKE YOUR MONEY GROW!
96. Roger Kahn, THE BOYS OF SUMMER
97. M.P. Dunleavy, MONEY CAN BUY HAPPINESS
98. Max Beerbohm, ZULEIKA DOBSON (lnvsml)
99. Buzz Bissinger, THREE NIGHTS IN AUGUST
100. Michael Lewis, MONEYBALL

Baseball Week: Stats Are Fun!

Every baseball player comes packaged with a set of statistics, but are they the right ones? That's the central question of Michael Lewis' MONEYBALL, which follows a season with the Oakland A's as they run a team, well, rather differently than others are currently been run.

Team manager Billy Beane, a former baseball player, read the works of a rogue statistician and baseball fan named Bill James, which intended to find out what stats really reveal how valuable a player is to the team. Those stats drive Beane's approach to buying players on the second-lowest budget in Major League Baseball, on which he was somehow able to improve the team's record substantially even after losing its best known players to free agency. So, it's THREE NIGHTS IN AUGUST meets FREAKONOMICS, more or less.

I'm not going to pretend that I understood the statistics in the book well enough to challenge them. Heck, I didn't even know where the word "sabermetrics" came from or what it meant before I read this book. (It's from the Society for American Baseball Research, which James was a major part of and which promoted these new statistics.) I have a feeling that someone better with numbers than I would be able to poke holes in Lewis' explanations, but for me I found them sufficient and easy to understand for the layperson. And like THREE NIGHTS IN AUGUST, Lewis clearly spent a lot of time with the team, just hanging out and observing how these management changes -- especially a shift away from traditional scouting methods -- have affected the team.

At the same time, I can see why some people who cover baseball would disparage the book, and not because they are just jealous. Lewis even pinpoints the primary weakness of the sabermetrics approach: It only takes into account past performance, not future potential. In this model a player is no better than he has been earlier, so a slow starter in the pros would probably never get a shot under the James/Beane model. But the team that Beane assembles makes this evident, as players who join the team don't quite perform as they have on paper. One could also argue that sabermetrics reduce players to numbers, but not in a way that the stats don't already do. I don't think that MONEYBALL's numbers will ruin the way I watch baseball; if anything, it will make me more curious about the stats I usually ignore.

Previously
Dugout Jitters
Is This The Great American Baseball Novel?
Filmbook: "The Natural" (1984)
Roger Kahn, A Boy Among Boys

Off in a lonely Netherland

I didn't end up seeing Richard Price and Charles Bock last night, although I don't doubt that I would have had a great time hearing them read. Instead I went down to Union Square to catch the Booker longlisted Joseph O'Neill read from his third novel NETHERLAND. To be fair, he wasn't the only draw, though: O'Neill was reading as part of the Barnes & Noble "Upstairs at the Square" series which unites writers and musicians once a month, the accompanying musician in this case being singer Aimee Mann.

I don't think even host Katherine Lanpher realized how well O'Neill and Mann were suited to each other, although as Lanpher pointed out Mann is often described as a "literary" songwriter: "I think if you write a song and you put more than three details in it, you're described as literary," Mann responded. It later came up in conversation that the author had listened to some Aimee Mann songs while he was writing; Mann offered to have him sing along with her, but he said he didn't listen to the lyrics, so there was a little good-natured heckling. Beyond those connections, O'Neill's book is about a Dutch loner in New York City who plays cricket; Mann soundtracks people's alienation, whether literally on the "Magnolia" soundtrack or in more intimate settings.

I haven't been able to read it yet -- waiting for a library copy to come through -- but I'm looking forward to digging into NETHERLAND with Aimee's new album "!@$#$@^# Smilers" ringing in my ears. I wish B&N would go ahead and post the next Upstairs at the Square event!