Viscounts and bullshit

THE GO-BETWEEN relies on the naïveté of its narrator-protagonist, a boarding school kid about to turn 13, to pull the plot forward, but that's not a problem: the problem emerges with the way he acts when he has been brought to wisdom.

Leo has been invited to spend summer break at a boarding school classmate's house, and goes even though he's not really close friends with the classmate in question (on first reference it's, "I can hardly remember his name now" -- Marcus Maudsley -- you're welcome). The Maudsleys are fairly well off and Leo spends a happy idyll kicking around the grounds, developing a bit of a crush on Marcus' older sister Marian who also dotes on him a little although everyone knows she's going to marry the local viscount, a gentleman who owns a lot of property so is tolerated despite his disfiguring war injury.

Leo's other new friend is a local farmer named Ted who is super-strong and has a haystack suitable for boys to slide down; he also promises to tell Leo about the facts of life (a conversation that goes badly, to say the least). Both the viscount and Ted use Leo to pass notes to Marian, which he gladly does without gandering at their contents. If you have a suspicion about what those notes contain, you are probably not a 13-year-old British boarding-school pupil (any more?)

Thus, Leo's introduction into the ways of the rich, the super-rich and the grown-ups.There's a lot of fascinating material in here about the ways that class is introduced to him, and deference, and how to act around different people; this all comes to a point during a village-manor cricket game that I could only have enjoyed more if I understood cricket better and knew which turn was a good one. For now, I'm going to focus on Leo's perception of the role he plays in the plot, and how unsatisfying I found that.

It's startling how naïve Leo actually is, but plausible that he could be so sheltered (widowed mother, company of boys from a young age) that he wouldn't realize to what he was a party. Here's what bothered me (and this is not a spoiler): Leo narrates this entire book in flashback as an old man, when he has come across his diary from that summer, although the amount that it truthfully reveals about its events is questionable. A likely story, but again, it's a device, there's nothing wrong with it -- until everything that comes after when Leo figures out what he's been doing as the go-between. The way he behaves in the end, I found shocking (and out of character), but he dismisses so quickly it's as if he still isn't taking responsibility for himself. Not that Leo or Hartley would phrase it as such, but this book exemplifies what I would call the "It is what it is" ending. I hate this phrase not only for its absolution but for the sort of cosmic shrug that says, "Eh, well, nobody cares about it any more."

But wait -- I cared about it now. If the ending of this book (which I am furiously writing around) is meant to deliver a moral lesson, then I for one am going against that moral lesson, even though I wouldn't condone what some of these people do. In the end it's Leo that I wanted to be punished. 

Maybe it's because of his obsession with the zodiac that Leo is able to let himself off the hook so easily. Not only is Leo convinced that the zodiac moves all things around him, a bit of a bizarre obsession for a British schoolboy, his name Leo corresponds to the sign of the zodiac under which he was born, feeding his conviction that we all act as we are destined to do -- again, absolution of responsibility. This book relies more on the zodiac than a teenage girl reading the back pages of YM to find out what her crush is thinking. Maybe I wouldn't expect so much of a 13-year-old, but when it comes to the present-day, 70-something Leo, I wanted him to sit up and say "You know what, I did do [X, Y and Z for spoilers]" and either express contrition or take responsibility. That's what adults do.

Your last-minute topical literary Halloween costume

Leonard Bankhead (THE MARRIAGE PLOT): Bandanna, copy of A LOVER'S DISCOURSE to throw at people, self-satisfied smirk.

Ava Bigtree (SWAMPLANDIA!): Plastic alligator spray-painted red. Also, dirt and lots of it.

Lisbeth Salander: Black clothes, spiked hair, drawn-on dragon tattoo in prominent location. Piercings optional.

The Penguin (DEATH AND THE PENGUIN): Tuxedo.

BOSSYPANTS Cover Tina Fey: Hat, tie, large male friend to stand behind you and put his arms through yours (look, you put this off, you figure it out).

Andy with The Death-Ray (THE DEATH-RAY): Tiny megaphone or earhorn, blue shirt, red face paint, indignation that you are not Superman, for the love.

Shakespeare? (THE TRAGEDY OF ARTHUR, "Anonymous," etc.) Printer paper folded accordion-style to make ruff over your 21st-century clothes.

The Terrifying Cover Illustration Of Drew Magary's THE POSTMORTAL: Full-length cloak, cheap scythe broken and glued to the back and front of the cloak.

A Memorizing Genius (MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN): They look just like everybody else!

Girl In A Murakami Book (A WILD SHEEP CHASE, SPUTNIK SWEETHEART, ): Stuffed cat, T-shirt with a cartoon character on it, absent expression. Make sure not to show any emotions, particularly if your friends see you and greet you enthusiastically. 

Owen Wilson's Character Whose Name Has Already Escaped Me From "Midnight In Paris": Tweed jacket with leather elbow patches (can be thrifted); tendency to express every sentence as a question.

A Kindle Fire: Since it's not out yet, any old robot costume should suffice.

#20

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.

Escribir, por ejemplo: «La noche está estrellada,
y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos».

El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso.

En las noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos.
La besé tantas veces bajo el cielo infinito.

Ella me quiso, a veces yo también la quería.
Cómo no haber amado sus grandes ojos fijos.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido.

Oír la noche inmensa, más inmensa sin ella.
Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el rocío.

Qué importa que mi amor no pudiera guardarla.
La noche está estrellada y ella no está conmigo.

Eso es todo. A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos.
Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

Como para acercarla mi mirada la busca.
Mi corazón la busca, y ella no está conmigo.

La misma noche que hace blanquear los mismos árboles.
Nosotros, los de entonces, ya no somos los mismos.

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero cuánto la quise.
Mi voz buscaba el viento para tocar su oído.

De otro. Será de otro. Como antes de mis besos.
Su voz, su cuerpo claro. Sus ojos infinitos.

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.
Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.

Porque en noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos,
Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

Aunque éste sea el último dolor que ella me causa,
y éstos sean los últimos versos que yo le escribo.

--Pablo Neruda (Unsatisfying, but translation here.)

John Hodgman's Star-Packed Trailer for THAT IS ALL

THAT IS ALL from John Hodgman

The Ascot, my God! What a madman.

7. Joseph Heller, CATCH-22

I don't know if I can do justice to how terrific this book is... so here's my pitch for why you should read it if you haven't already, because maybe you made the same mistake I did.

This is the 50th anniversary year of the publication of CATCH-22 and I can't speak to whether the military is more absurd than it was 50 years ago, but I'm comfortable with the grand assertion that modern life is more absurd than it was 50 years ago.


I knew CATCH-22 was about World War II; I knew it was funny but dark, somewhere along the lines of SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE (I can address the accuracy of that in a bit); and I knew what a Catch-22 was, as one of those cultural gems one picks up. I assumed that based on those facts, I pretty much knew what this book was going to be "about"...

...omitting of course that the absurdity of Catch-22, as revealed in perhaps the first 50 pages of this book, is deepened and multiplied throughout the book, to the extent that you realize that you also are living under the obscure military rule that gives the book its name (trivia alert! It was originally Catch-18) and that it's not just "oh, how funny, what is one to do!" but that it can make you crazy... just not crazy enough for you to exempt yourself from it.

And the only way to express that there are stakes to that is to set that story of contradiction against a literally life-or-death backdrop, where Yossarian may actually have to die in order to get out of combat missions (and even that's not enough, given that he still lives with a dead man! Or does he.)


This past weekend I was reading a review of Nathaniel Philbrick's new book WHY READ MOBY DICK?, making the case for Melville's book as the ur-text of American literature. I can't lie, my first reaction to this wave of press was "But I diiiiiiid." Is Melville that unknown to people in America as a whole? Did this book really need a champion? (All this I say without actually having read Philbrick's book, which I might yet do anyway.) From there I jumped to which book I would choose, cycling through old favorites like THE HOUSE OF MIRTH and THE GREAT GATSBY and at-first-overlooked novels like THE SUN ALSO RISES and OUR TOWN. And out of all of those, I realized that the one I would pick would be CATCH-22, in spite of its baggy middle and the mild injury that there isn't more Major Major in it (wordplay!)

This book ought to be to young-ish adults what ON THE ROAD is to teenagers. The fact that Heller wrote a particular sort of book better than I ever will is somehow not dampening to the spirit. This is a book to be celebrated. Why read CATCH-22? Because you're already in it -- that's why.

"Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being crazy. Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts and the question is: What does a sane man do in an insane society?" --Joseph Heller

Ellen vs. ML: 56 read, 44 unread

Next up: I skipped FROM HERE TO ETERNITY for this, so probably that?

Filmbook: The Great Prestige Circus of Book Adaptations, Fall 2011

Now playing: "Moneyball," based on the Michael Lewis book of the same name, already receiving Oscar buzz; "The Three Musketeers," adaptation approximately #2745, not receiving any Oscar buzz whatsoever.

Opens Oct. 28: "The Rum Diary" (Johnny Depp) based on the Hunter S. Thompson book about Puerto Rico. I mistweeted when I said the only NY Public Library copy available to me was in Spanish and called DIARIOS DE RON (trans. RUM DIARIES); it's actually DIAS DE RON (RUM DAYS). I probably won't see the movie till I read that but I expect Peter W. Knox will have something up as soon as it opens. Also 10/28: "Anonymous" (I saw it already and blogged about it here), "Sleeping Beauty" (an adaptation of sorts).

Opens Nov. 18: "The Descendants," Alexander Payne's long awaited return to our screens (since 2004's "Sideways" or his heartbreaking segment in 2006's "Paris, je t'aime") -- it's George Clooney! It's Hawaii! It's sur...prisingly heartfelt? Highly anticipated by me in any case. Based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings. Also week of 11/18: "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1" (fourth of the planned 5 "Twilight" movies, in case you're keeping score)

Opens Nov. 24: "Hugo," based on the Caldecott Award-winning THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET by Brian Selznick. So it's a kids' movie, fine, but what if I told you that it was a kids' movie directed by Martin Scorsese starring such casual players as Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer, Christopher Lee, Johnny Depp (again?) and Michael "Deserves to Be Slightly More Famous" Pitt? Also, the book is spectacular (about the invention of film in turn-of-the-century Paris), but I'm trying to focus on what you want. Take your small cousins or something. It's a mitzvah. Also week of 11/24: "A Dangerous Method," based on the John Kerr nonfiction book of the same name about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, starring Viggo Mortenson and Michael Fassbender and I don't know why he keeps coming up either, it's a mystery, and "My Week With Marilyn," based on a memoir by one of Monroe's studio escorts while shooting in London (with Michelle Williams as Monroe).

Opens December 9: "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," based on the John le Carre novel of the same name about Cold War espionage and the search for a plant, starring Colin "Hey do you remember when I won an Academy Award last year? That was awesome" Firth and Tom "Universal Mancrush" Hardy. Hey, did you know this book is almost impossible to find in used bookstores? Also 12/9: "We Need To Talk About Kevin," Toronto-buzzed feature based on the Lionel Shriver novel.

Opens December 16: "Carnage" (dir. R. Polanski), which is technically based on a play by Yasmina Reza but I'm propping it up because the four-handed cast is terrific and there will be fireworks. Also 12/16: "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows" (a tenuous adaptation at best but will probably live up to the "silly but fun" I gave the first movie).

Opens December 23: "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," U.S. adaptation, tracked here for almost two years.If you think you're going to hate David Fincher's take with Daniel Craig as Mikael "Kalle Bastard" Blomkvist, you could always rent or buy the Swedish trilogy as insurance. Also 12/23: "The Adventures of Tintin," 'starring' Simon Pegg because this is one of those creepy real-ish animation jobs, and "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," adapting the Jonathan Safran Foer novel in what will probably be an all too realistic 9/11 tearjerker. You have plenty of time to read this book, which I regard very highly, before it comes out. Not much up to Christmas but more holidays anyway.

New favorite holiday?

It's St. Crispin's Day, so I'm going to reprint the most famous motivational speech ever:

This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say, "To-morrow is Saint Crispian."
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say, "These wounds I had on Crispin's day."
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words,
Harry the King, Bedford, and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day."

Of course, "Henry V" IV.iii. Eat your heart out, Every Sports Movie In Existence.

William Carlos Williams famously (apocryphally?) wrote first drafts of
his poems on prescription pads at the office where he worked as a
doctor. What medium would a 21st-century WCW use? Excel? Twitter?
PowerPoint? Post-Its?

Or one really excellent sandwich

Just for kicks I looked up the value of my hand-me-down Kindle on Amazon's new trade-in site. Of course it works like a charm and everyone on the block covets its "'80s computer gray" palette, so I have no interest in actually trading it in for a sad amount of cash.

The best part of this listing is that every other Kindle pictured is set against a white background with a human hand (or two) holding it, while the original gets the Extreme Halo Treatment. (Damn right.)

Writing Advice I Love (From A Teacher I Hated)

Here are a few accusations I wish to level against my eighth-grade English teacher:

• Ruined LORD OF THE FLIES for me
• Almost ruined TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD for me
• Insisted the classroom window be kept open all year... including in January... in Wisconsin... knowing full well I wasn't allowed to wear my coat to class
• Told my parents at conferences that I wasn't trying that hard (with consequences)
• Picked on everyone in the class, but one day really ripped into a friend of mine for using a word I had used in an earlier assignment, making me want to fold up into my desk and disappear
• Introduced New Criticism to us in the worst possible way, by making it look idiotic instead of meaningful
• Forced us to write 2-word rhyming papers which is a stupid assignment for the 8th grade
• Forced us to write 1-sentence papers, see above
• Told my parents at later conferences that I was really starting to shape up thanks to all he taught me, which was nothing
• Spent 5-10 minutes at the top of class playing with a basketball instead of teaching...
• Ruined Fleetwood Mac for me for about 9 years, which is either a small crime or a large crime, depending on how you view that band
• At the end of the year, made us write evaluations of him including grades...
• ...and told us they would be anonymous, but collected them in alphabetical order. (Ever wary of a trap, I gave him a B+ but now I would give him a D-.)

Sorry I'm not sorry, I did a little dance when I found out this august gentleman had left teaching and is now working privately.

And yet, there is one thing he taught us that has always stuck with me, that I try to remember in my own writing and tell my students (paraphrased). In my memory he told us this on the first day and I wrote it in my notebook, underlining each word separately -- one of the only notes I would take in his class all year. Here is the teaching: Writers make conscious choices. It doesn't matter how caught up they get while writing or how "naturally" one scene needs to flow toward another, the writer is always in control, for better or worse (and sometimes it's definitely worse). When Homer wrote "Sing to me of the man, Muse," he decided THE ODYSSEY was going to start there and not with "When Odysseus walked in the front door after 20 years the first thing he saw was his son, but he couldn't tell it was him" or "Once upon a time, when men were men" or "Odysseus had 99 problems, but his wife wasn't one."

When I teach writing now and my students throw up their hands and say "That's the end!" I goad them: What happened next? Where did it go after that? How did the character feel? How did others react? Sometimes it's as little as taking a story that travels from A to B, and nudging it in the direction of C, but that is always within their power.

I'm not going to say it was worth it, but I'm grateful for that piece.

Tom Wolfe: "I was 54 years old when I wrote my first piece of _intentional_ fiction."

Check out those socks. Gentlemen, please all wear these socks when seasonably appropriate.

"Another harsh critic [of the emoticon] is Michele Farinet, a parent coordinator in an elementary school in Manhattan who spends much of her days answering and responding to e-mails of the (largely professional) body of parents. The whole subject touches a raw nerve.

"'To me, it's like bad moviemaking, where as soon as Dad grabs the puppy, the shot immediately goes to Junior's teary face — like the director does not trust the audience to have an appropriately developed emotion by itself,' Ms. Farinet wrote in an e-mail. 'That's what emoticons do. PLEASE don't 'show' me that I should be happy-faced or sad-faced or that you are sad-faced or happy-faced.

"'Can you imagine,' wrote Ms. Farinet, 'reading the end of THE GREAT GATSBY like that?: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past :-( '"

--New York Times, "If You're Happy And You Know It, Must I Know Too?" Now I feel like an emoticon moderate in comparison...

Filmbook: HBO might buy your book but where will it go?

Sarah Weinman (Publishers Marketplace, plus a ton of other places) has been keeping a running list of books purchased to adapt by HBO this year -- to which we can add, recently, THE CORRECTIONS and SWAMPLANDIA! (A few other properties we're keeping an eye on, although they weren't from 2011: THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS, coproduced by Oprah; I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR BAND, produced by Will Ferrell, starring Lizzy "Did you have an awesome time?" Caplan; AMERICAN TABLOID, coproduced by Tom Hanks.)

These are great buys provided that they actually get made, and forgive me for being a little skeptical about that. HBO is currently airing, by my count, 3 book adaptations -- "Game of Thrones," "Boardwalk Empire" and "True Blood." "True Blood" is rounding up on its fifth season (in '12) but the other two are only in their 2nd seasons. How many adaptations are they realistically going to run in a year? I'm not in their target audience (never subscribed to HBO, don't have basic cable) so maybe there's a clamor for it, but at the rate they're going we all will have had time to read all these books before they go up onscreen. Of course, A GAME OF THRONES was published in 1996... so either Franzen or Gaiman ought to be next.

Just to show I'm not a hater, my casting for "The Art Of Fielding" on HBO, ready, go: Liam Neeson as Guert, Max Greenfield plus about 30 pounds as Mike, Jessica Chastain as Pella (she's having a moment), Darren Criss as Owen (ditto) and blond American-accented Ben Whishaw as Henry. Do it this year, gents.

But you don't have to take my word for it

Every so often after I've reviewed a book, I read another review of the same book that makes me want to jump up and down because it's so incisive (and, okay, confirms what I've already said about it). This week, may I direct you to Thomas Mallon on THE STRANGER'S CHILD in the New York Times Book Review. The news at the bottom that Mallon has a new book out soon (February!) is an extra treat.

The latest person to show a lack of respect to Roberto Bolaño

From, unsurprisingly, an Esquire piece about James Frey:

Richardson: But ultimately it's the stories, right? The stories that you're telling are genre fiction. You got your vampire story, you got your witch story. But the real stuff is gonna come from an individual who's sitting there working it out on his own with great ambition. It's not gonna be somebody who says, "I think I can do a pretty good rom-com."

Frey: But my point is there aren't really any Henry Millers left. Tell me one person in the world you think is doing that.

Richardson: Roberto Bolaño.

Frey: But Roberto Bolaño is dead.

Richardson: Recently.

Frey: But again, you're saying that one thing is somehow more valid or more important than the other.

Richardson: Yes, Roberto Bolaño is better than Teenage Action Ranger Force. Yes. I am saying that.

Frey: Who do you think has done more to keep the culture of books alive, Roberto Bolaño or J. K. Rowling?

Richardson: It's really kind of apples and oranges.

Frey: It's not apples and oranges at all. It's a pretty cut-and-dry answer.

Richardson: Really? Who do you think is more important: Picasso or Mickey Mouse?

Frey: Probably Mickey Mouse.

Richardson: So if you had a choice to buy something and put it on your wall, you'd choose Mickey Mouse instead of Picasso?

Frey: No, but —

Richardson: Then you're lying!

Frey: No I'm not!

Richardson: You're making a choice. You're making a distinction between what's good and bad.

Frey: No I'm not. I didn't say Picasso's more important than Mickey Mouse. I don't even necessarily think he is. He's just different.

Richardson: But when it comes time to put your money on it, you're choosing Picasso — and so collapses your entire flimsy edifice of self-justification.

Frey [visibly gritting his teeth]: You may think I'm a dick or arrogant or delusional or whatever, and frankly it doesn't matter to me. I've written four books. Published in thirty-nine languages. I sold millions and millions and millions of copies. Do I want to be more famous? I could give a shit. Do I want to publish in more languages? There are a few left. What matters to me is a hundred years from now when people look back at our time, what writers are they gonna say, "Holy fuck!" I think I am and will be one of those people.