Adjectives on the typewriter, he moves his words like a prizefighter

A few years ago in the New Yorker, Nora Ephron wrote about the pain of losing her rent-controlled apartment at the venerable Apthorp building in an essay more moving, to me, than any of her movies. Freshly divorced with two children, Ephron "was planning to live there forever," but as her neighbors changed and her rent went up, she resigned herself to living somewhere that just wasn't as special. It describes the process by which one becomes attached to a place perfectly, and it's why I still make a point of walking past the Apthorp and peeking into its curved entryway now and then.

The place he lives is also a central preoccupation of Harry Lesser, one of the titulars in Bernard Malamud's 1971 novel THE TENANTS. As with Ephron, keeping his sixth-floor apartment is more than just trying to avoid the hassle of moving: Lesser is running out of money after spending the last ten years writing his third novel, which he needs to be great because his second was a commercial disappointment. The building's owner, Levenspiel, is trying to tear it down and build a new and expensive one, but Levenspiel can't legally evict Lesser so long as he pays his miniscule rent -- he can only come by and offer him buyouts which Lesser inevitably declines. (Incidentally, his building is placed at 31st St. and 3rd Ave. in the charmless Murray Hill -- but there is a six-floor building there on one of the corners.)

Convinced he can't finish the book anywhere, Lesser watches the rest of the building fall into ruin around him and tries to write. Then one day, another writer moves in next door -- an African-American squatter named Willie Spearmint, who parks his typewriter there to get away from his actress girlfriend and work on his semi-autobiographical novel (which at one point is titled BLACK WRITER). Lesser, who rarely leaves the building because of fears as to what Levenspiel will do while he's out, gets drawn into Willie's life to a degree neither man is comfortable with.

I picked up THE TENANTS because of New York magazine's New York Books Canon, which yet again would make an excellent path to follow for a book club. Reading its synopsis though, I can't help thinking the editors got it just a little wrong. This book addresses "the existential precariousness of New York real estate," but I could suggest several just as good, and just might get around to same. The building Lesser is clinging to is just the dilapidated stage on which a larger conflict is set the day Willie asks Lesser to read his book and give him advice on it. The men don't share a class, a race or a lifestyle, but their most fervent clashes spring from the approaches they take to their parallel work. Nothing about that conflict feels dated, or even particularly New Yorkish.

Not surprisingly, I enjoyed this book more than my last Malamud experience with THE NATURAL, although the ending similarly left me a little unsatisfied. The author is probably spinning in his grave knowing that in a 2005 movie adaptation, the tenants were portrayed by the (so not Jewish) Dylan McDermott and Snoop Dogg.

Jennifer Weiner, BEST FRIENDS FOREVER: I used to know you when we were young

From the day they found out they were living next door to each other, Valerie and Addie were inseparable... until senior year in high school, when something happened. The glamorous cheerleader and the dumpy outcast hadn't had much in common before something happened, but after that, they barely spoke. Now Val's a local weather anchor with her face on billboards and Addie's a lonely single artist who still lives in her dead parents' house. Thanksgiving weekend, Val leaves their high school reunion to find Addie, because she's the only one she can trust.

There's always a whoosh of disappointment when an author you generally like delivers something not up to her game. After tearing through Weiner's last book in record fashion, I struggled to even finish this one, which felt in a lot of places derivative of her other books. Addie goes through the same transformation as the heroine of GOOD IN BED, but in a manner that the book builds up to like it's going to be a huge surprise what happens to her, and it's not; in a B-plot, the local police officer takes an undue interest in where the missing man is, which is like GOODNIGHT NOBODY but feels contrived. There is a getaway of sorts, just like in IN HER SHOES but not as resonant, and like CERTAIN GIRLS, there is a last-10-pages-twist that made me feel only vaguely pissed that I hadn't guessed it beforehand. With the something that happened I didn't even get to that level of outrage; it's hinted at so predictably at the beginning, and approximately every 15 minutes thereafter that the revelation is rendered completely pointless.

I might have been able to overlook all those flaws, though, if the central relationship had been better fleshed out. Starting from two people who used to be very close and then had a falling out is an emotional gold mine, particularly when it's rooted in adolescence. You could write a million novels from that place and each one would be different. But since Addie narrates most chapters, and Val doesn't at all, I never bought that Val would seek her out for help, nor that she wasn't just using her for her own purposes. At some point, and this isn't really a spoiler, you are asked to trust that their old bonds are strong enough to be reactivated in a time of trouble, and I couldn't make that leap.

I don't think Weiner is going to start repeating herself; maybe this one just wasn't for me. I'm passing it on to my mom, who went on a tear with her books earlier this year (P.S. it rhymes with whiner, not... yeah) and want to see if she notices the resemblance.

Where my Zeldas at?

She doesn't just bob her hair, drink dubious gin and horrify her parents: Flappers have feelings too! Janet Flanner's THE CUBICAL CITY is the only flapper problem novel I have ever read, and the fact that it wasn't successful at its time doesn't surprise me considering how it is both arch and melancholy.

A longtime writer for the New Yorker, in her life Flanner palled around with the Lost Generation as a correspondent in Paris, took many a lover of either gender and once tried to stop Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal from fighting. 1926's THE CUBICAL CITY was her only novel, written in medias res, and it disappeared till being revived in the '70s (from whence my yellowed mass-market copy dates).

I couldn't help reading it more as an artifact than a novel on its own, but in that state I found it fascinating. Flanner's writing lacks the punch of a Parker, and most of the fun her heroine Delia Poole has takes places offstage so to speak. We know Delia, a successful illustrator and a great beauty, is always out on the town, but we join her (literally and figuratively) in the wee hours when the doubts take over. She considers but rejects a marriage proposal from a nice boy who wants her to move to the Philippines for him; she attempts to help her parents after her father is cut out of his own business; she watches her Jewish boss (whose portrayal w.r.t. his appetite for success and his fear of going back to the tenements was just this side of offensive) stake his fortune on a project she feels is ridiculous.

These scenes are punctuated by Forsteresque, almost aphoristic statements that comment on the action. Early in the book, Delia and Paul (the nice boy) have just spent the night together and he exclaims how he can't wait to tell his mother that he met her. Delia's actual response is "Tell her if you wish," but then:

"Love did not unite people once they were out from the privacy of the alcove retreat where for long hours two individuals seemed honestly to share ideas and theories, the members of the mind seeming like members of the body over which agreement was part of passion, contact with streets, hose fronts, pedestrians, public lights, disengaged the individual brains again as actively as it disengaged lips and knees and if indeed no struggle resulted, there came at any rate a feeling of isolation which nurtured either generosity or retreat."

The undercurrent of isolation in Delia's life leads her to continually question why she makes the choices she does, but we don't like our flappers to think. I'm sure Hemingway would have hated this book with all its messy feelings, none of which are in Jake Barnes' pants. But I took her seriously, even if no one in her own time did. There are elements of GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT and THE BELL JAR in here as well as its contemporary, MRS. DALLOWAY; if you're interested in those books it's worth digging around for a copy.

Passing Mrs. Dalloway on the street

Anna Quindlen struggles to justify in her book IMAGINED LONDON: A TOUR OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST FICTIONAL CITY why, having loved English literature her whole life, she never visited London till well into adulthood and writerly fame. Perhaps she was worried about living out the oft-quoted Samuel Johnson aphorism about a man being tired of life when he is tired of London as she paced its blocks looking for the characters she studied and loved; judging by the book, she should have stayed longer.

Quindlen clearly did her reading before she left: IMAGINED LONDON is peppered with Brit-lit tidbits from Shakespeare on up and offers a wealth of recommendation for the armchair and otherwise traveler. (I especially appreciated her section of novels about Blitz-era London and her description of VANITY FAIR's Becky Sharp as a latter-day W.A.G.) But for a writer who paints herself in the book as a writer of details, she resorts too often to generalities to tackle the city itself. She quotes her mother saying about Dickens that he "describes every leaf on every tree in every street in every town," then floats statements like "London is a city of bookshops" and "No one in London will stop and give you directions."

At crucial moments, she seems almost reluctant to engage with the books she's read on the page, preferring Gentle Reader to have read them and know instinctively what she's talking about. Unlike Dickens, she probably wasn't paid by the word for this book, but why apologize for quoting MRS. DALLOWAY at length in a passage about the view to Big Ben? That's what we're here for! She begins a chapter on THE FORSYTE SAGA by disparaging it for being middle-class, then goes on to write about it at length anyway. (She also in passing slags off two things I love, the "Muppet Christmas Carol" and the Tate Modern, and if loving them both is a contradiction, very well then I contradict myself.)

The book may have disappointed me but I'm still curious to check out others in the series it belongs to, in which National Geographic paired writers like Ariel Dorfman and Oliver Sacks with places to write about. Most of them don't have an explicitly literary focus, so maybe I would find less to nitpick in them. (My trip to London was not at all literary except for a night out at the New Globe for "Hamlet," which was magical.) I am grateful to Quindlen for giving me the descriptor "autogeographical," to describe a novel that takes place in a real space with correct identifiable landmarks. Fidelity to the real world isn't always desirable or necessary, but still fun to catch.

Think about it! Um, they're looking left, and we're running right. Bang! We score! We win.

With a bit of tinkering, two brand-new sections have been added to the sidebar, The Chattering Classes (most-commented recent posts) and Blogmigos (friends, countrymen, the otherwise not to be missed), where they will be joined by the newly restored Goodreads widget. These will hopefully entertain you while I'm away and auto-posting most of this week. See what I did there? This concludes your semi-annual metablog.

Sixteen candles

Hey, did you know Jeffrey Eugenides' THE VIRGIN SUICIDES was published 16 years ago? The Daily Beast tracked down the rarely interviewed author, who was just in the news as his second book was optioned by HBO (summer is for reruns!), for a look back.

THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is one of those books I'm not sure I would have liked so much had it not reached me at a particular moment. I ought to re-read it and re-watch the movie now that I'm not in high school, etc., and see if it still resonates.

Off to the beach today

...putting the "summer" in Infinite Summer. (Photo taken yesterday while packrastinating.) It's probably not a suitable book, but after I factored in the travel time it seemed to make sense. New Jersey here I come!

Primed for bookbuying

Remember Unbookening Hero Jessa Crispin who was preparing for a move to Berlin? She revealed on Bookslut that she got her collection of about 1500 volumes down to 17. Incredible! And also kind of scary. Crispin writes:

It's actually nice to admit to yourself that really, if we're all being honest here, you are not going to read WAR AND PEACE, probably ever, so give it to someone who might. It was just that, over and over again. Then you drink your vodka and watch nice young men come over and take your books away in crates and hope the books find better lives.

It's the admitting part where I run into trouble. I still believe I will get around to THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG and VANITY FAIR and THE COLLECTED STORIES OF RICHARD YATES*, so it would be foolish to give any of those away. I've got a lot of good reading years left! As does Crispin, which is why I hope she's out doing a massive rebookening right now. (Or would it be just a bookening? Will someone please adjudicate my fake words?)

*My most spectacular used score of the year so far, out of print and practically pristine from Kaboom Books in Houston, but also a hardcover rivaling INFINITE JEST in size. On the bright side, I'm used to carrying around IJ now, a habit that could be transferred to other books.

NYC: Nathan Rabin reading tonight!

My fellow AV Clubber Nathan Rabin is reading from his new book THE BIG REWIND: A MEMOIR BROUGHT TO YOU BY POP CULTURE tonight in New York. I'm clearly biased, but it made me laugh, added some entries to my cultural to-do list and gave me a lot to think about otherwise.

I'm so disappointed that I can't make to the reading, but you can! It's 7PM at the (not yet dead) Borders in Columbus Circle. His next and last tour stop, since I know there are left coasters in the audience, is July 30 in Los Angeles.

Infinite July: Why

(Second part of a two-part post on my INFINITE JEST experience so far; here's the first. Again, carte blanche to skip this, it's mostly for me.)

So as I mentioned, I started INFINITE JEST the weekend of the Wimbledon semis and finals, which seemed like a cosmic "This Way" signpost to keep me reading. (I haven't gotten tired of the tennis stuff so far; it reminds me of John Feinstein's HARD COURTS, a great piece of nonfiction despite being extremely dated now.) For a spell there it felt like I kept hitting all these references that said move forward, move forward, but I realized about 50 pages ago that there are so many references in this book, to movies or other books or bits of cultural detritus, that naturally as you read it you will pick up pieces that seem targeted just to you.

At the same time, these pieces more than the development of plot have pulled me into the book thus far. What has happened so far in terms of "action" would be extremely hard to describe; I'm not sure why the jacket copy doesn't just say "Nice try, sucker! Read the damn thing!" I keep reading because I'm sure those pieces will all lock into place someday, but for now I'm enjoying the exuberance of something so rich and playful in language.

I was beginning to despair of finding an example of Wallace's prose till I hit this one which some of you may recognize. Take it away, page 226:

The Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed was unofficially founded in London in B.S. 1940 in London U.K. by the cross-eyed, palate-clefted, and wildly carbuncular wife of a junior member of the House of Commons, a lady whom Sir Winston Churchill, P.M.U.K., having had several glasses of port plus a toddy at a reception for an American Lend-Lease administrator, had addressed in a fashion wholly inappropriate to social intercourse between civilized gentlemen and ladies. Unwittingly all but authoring the Union designed to afford the scopophobic empathetic fellowship and the genesis of sturdy inner resources through shame-free and unconstrained concealment, W. Churchill -- when the lady, no person's doormat, informed him with prim asperity that he appeared to be woefully inebriated -- made the anecdotally famous reply that while, yes, yea verily, he was indeed inebriated, he would the following A.M. be once again sober, while she, dear lady, would tomorrow still be hideously and improbably deformed. Churchill, doubtless under weighty emotional pressures during this period in history, had then proceeded to extinguish his cigar in the lady's sherry and to place a finger-bowl napkin delicately over the ruined features of her flaming visage. The laminated non-photo U.H.I.D. membership card Joelle showed the interested old black gentleman related this data and more in a point-size so tiny the card looked somehow both blank and defaced.

(I had to type that whole thing up because it wasn't Googleable. You're welcome, Internet.)

That's perhaps a third of a paragraph, and well, just look at it. Is it overwritten, especially compared to the original joke? Absolutely -- any newspaper editor would strike the repetition of the word London in the first sentence first without batting an eye. But it's not the periphrastic scramble of a student trying to finish a paper; it's all deliberate. How different a world the characters of INFINITE JEST live in from our own, I'm not sure, but Wallace has created it and I'm just living in it.

New Yorker critic James Wood coined the term "hysterical realism" to describe this kind of prose as seen in the "big, ambitious" novels of Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and DFW himself. Know what those authors have in common? The ones I've read deep enough into to know, I love. I came across the term a while ago but never have I thrown it around with such loving abandon as I have in my Infinite Summer. I want to buy that T-shirt and join that team. I am that which Wood fears! What a feeling.

In mentally preparing myself for the Long Book, I didn't stop to contemplate why people read INFINITE JEST. I anticipated that it would "get good" eventually. I didn't realize it was going to be funny almost from the beginning in the wry vein that I love. I actually laughed out loud where Hal says to Orin, "Everybody said you'd regret not coming to the funeral. But I don't think this is what they meant." And that's in one of the most harrowing sections so far! (And if I explain it, it will not be funny any more.)

Even amid those torrents of prose, little gems like that turn up. The one bit of DFW warming-up I did was reading his Harpers essay "Shipping Out"(PDF version available here) which became the title essay of A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN. In a passage about cruise-ship dining options, Wallace describes one as offering "the sort of coffee you marry somebody for being able to make." I carried that phrase around with me for weeks. I can dig a long, long way for phrases like that.

ETA 7.27: Welcome to everyone coming over from Infinite Summer. Tonight I had dinner with a family whose three children are nationally ranked tennis players, and it was all I could do to not start spouting off about the Enfield Tennis Academy and Eschaton. I'm sure you can relate! Anyway, thank you so much for reading, please make yourselves at home.

"There is some selfishness involved, because I figure that if everyone reads a lot there’ll be more people to have intelligent conversations with. What’s more, if someone reads a book that I haven’t read yet, they can tell me about it and I can learn whether or not I’m interested."

-- Russell Wattenberg, founder of the Baltimore Book Thing, a nonprofit giving away free books in David Simon's favorite city. I don't know, Elizabeth, he sounds like a non-scoundrel to me! (Via non-scoundrel Paul Brady.)

Infinite July: How

It's been a month since Infinite Summer began. How am I doing? ...I am in the thick of it. Specifically, page 259 of the thick of it, slightly behind the group, not quite a third of the way -- but I think we can all agree, definitely in the thick.

There are so many ways I could write about my experience with this book so far; the Wallacean method would be to write about all of them, but I have a lot to get through yet! So instead, today I will comment on the process of beginning this long book and where to find the time. Tomorrow I'll talk about narrative and style a little bit with an eye to exposing those of you who haven't read the book to what it is, in the most general sense, "about."

(Also, I give you carte blanche to skip this post if you truly don't care; somewhat more so than others here, I'm getting this down so I can remember and go back to it later.)

xxxxx

The truth is that even after living on my bookshelf for two and a half years, INFINITE JEST then spent two weeks on my nightstand being slowly buried by magazines and library books, just another sedimentary layer. Then I was heading home for the Fourth of July, and well, what was the point of bringing it, I had so many other things to read, who brings a 1000-plus page book on a 3-day trip along with other stuff?

I took the book. I read the intro, in which Dave Eggers wrote that he read it at the same age I am now. I will not be defeated by an Eggers! I started reading, and then a glorious thing happened: I really enjoyed it. It didn't hurt that I had a few blocks of unscheduled time or that I hit a tennis section just after watching the Epic Battle of the Andies from this year's Wimbledon. (More on that later.)

Yesterday on the Infinite Summer blog, Brittney Gilbert, who blogs for a living, wrote about the immersive experience she had had in reading the novel, which she strove to "really commit to... the way one commits to a college course or a part-time job or a new lover." She describes taking it into a quiet room, closing the door, lighting some candles. That's her approach, whereas mine, to extend the metaphor, is dragging the book into a coat room at a party for a couple of pages. (Not that I've literally done that with the book. Yet.)

What I'll do is take it with me everywhere for a few days when I don't have an imminent review due, and get as far as I can in those few days. The night I did the biggest chunk was the night I got home from a concert with my ears ringing past the point of sleep. I have read it in a number of morally indefensible public places, including on the subway during rush hour and in the lobby of a movie theatre before watching "Brüno." (There's probably a law against that.) At some point, I wanted to read it more than I wanted to not be self-conscious, and it's amazing when a book can do that, isn't it?

I haven't lost the romance of reading, but to treat this book differently from everything else I read would go against the plot of this blog. Of course I worry about whether the book is being polluted by giving it less than my full attention, but I have determined to draw the line when that worrying cuts into my reading time. My fellow Infinite Summerers, how are you coping?

And the rest of you, what was the last book you wanted to take with you everywhere?

ETA 7/27: Welcome to everyone coming over from Infinite Summer! Here's a funny story: I told my mom about the project a few weeks ago and today I found out she had picked up a copy of INFINITE JEST on vacation, only she hadn't started it yet because "it's not the sort of book you can read in 2 minutes here or there." I was still proud. Anyway, thank you so much for reading and make yourselves at home.

Falling through the cracks from last week: According to the New York Times, LIFE OF PI author Yann Martel just sold his next book for a not-shabby $3 million. The description in the article is not very appealing, so let's skip to the good stuff, connected under the category "whimsical novels about animals": "[WATER FOR ELEPHANTS author Sara] Gruen is working on APE HOUSE, a novel about bonobo apes who star in a reality television show." Oh my.

Regarding Borders

I have ignored reports of the imminent demise of Borders Books for a long time now, mostly for personal reasons. As a suburban teen staying out of trouble I spent a lot of time at my local Borders because they were open late and didn't require you to buy anything. In sociological terms, it was a "third place," and they tend to pop up when you need them.

Then this weekend two things happened: First, I got a slightly too useful coupon from them offering a free book (list price $8 or lower) with purchase of a new hardcover. I didn't indulge, but I've never seen them offer a free book, and that could be gamed in magnificent fashion with a little strategy. And second, I saw on Reading Matters that Borders UK closed five of its stores, allowing for a spectacular clean-up but not boding well for the chain in general. Included in the closing was its Oxford Street flagship, and that seems like a bellwether.

Even if I hadn't already striped it in the colors of nostalgia, there is a case to be made that big-box bookstores have done some good for America. They're bad for independent booksellers, but what about those towns that didn't have a locally owned bookstore when they got their mall Borders or Barnes & Noble? Like the dinosaurs, they might not be able to adapt to the current climate, but eventually we'll miss them.

Post-Its: Frank McCourt Memorial Edition

ETA 9/23: The public memorial service for Frank McCourt will be held on October 6 at 5PM at Symphony Space (2537 Broadway) in New York. According to their site, a limited number of tickets will be available at the box office between 3 and 5PM that day, or you can stream it online at symphonyspace.org. Malachy McCourt mentioned the memorial earlier in an August 5 article in the Irish Echo, where he also said authors Peter Quinn and Colum McCann would be in attendance. I'm not affiliated with the McCourt family, Symphony Space or Stuyvesant HS; I'm just trying to help!

---

Even if you didn't like his books (or don't remember what you thought about them when you read them, ahem), the ANGELA'S ASHES author put in 30 years as a New York City public school teacher and that is nothing to sniff at. Here's a nice recollection from RAPTURE READY author Daniel Radosh. We choose to honor this Irish-American with Brits who are sad, drunk and barely legal:

• Another week, another book list. The L.A. Times runs down the best postmodern books from "Hamlet" (yes, that one) to I AM NOT SIDNEY POITIER. (Two cheers in this corner for THE BLIND ASSASSIN and REMAINDER.) This list is flawed in ways that the commenters have already started pointing out, but I still want to do it. Book club, anyone?
  


• "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" opened this past week atop the box office despite being, tonally speaking, a complete mess. If you have any interest in this movie, you'll probably get these not-for-children Harry Potter "Yo Mama" jokes. (via Cristin Stickles on Twitter)
  


• From the Department Of What Nick Hornby Is Up To: His new movie, "An Education," out in limited cities October 9:
  
  Looks like a British version of a movie I once walked out of, but I will withhold judgment. (via lindsayism)
  


• Same department, via Emily of The General Point, here's a link to Dominic West reading from HIGH FIDELITY. Oh, that brow.
  


• Thanks to Joe Queenan in the New York Times, I'm officially adding literary escort to my list of fantasy jobs, since I love books and am not above playing cruise director. In fact, electronic shingle: If you are an author coming to New York City inexplicably reading this blog and you need a literary escort, drop me a line. I speak Midwestern nice and I know where things are.


• Finally, I can't remember where I saw Dude Watchin' With The Brontës first, but I love it, particularly every expression on Anne's face. Anne, I'm sorry I never read any of your books.