I’m doing it again. I realized I’d only read 30 books this year and I feel like that’s just not enough when the world is so full of great books to read.
The categories I’m considering:
Filed under 100 Books of 2011
I resisted posting this image of the interconnection of characters – and chapters – from Jennifer Eagn’s *A Visit From the Goon Squad* because part of what makes the book SO GOOD is its use of form – chapters narrated by different characters, at different points in time, who are all, loosely connected to one another through this odd web – to mirror how we (or me, at least) experience social life and memory. My experience of friendship, family and connection is one of loose recollection that ‘oh yes, I was at a party with so-and-so once’ or ‘I remember you from where exactly?’ but also that there are people who weave in and out of our lives with varying degrees of impact – some who spend short periods and leave (as they say) lasting impressions. And so I don’t want this image because it makes it easier to remember who everyone is and how they are connected than they have any right to be: our memory of these characters *should be* scattered and fragmented and pieced together with glimmers, because that’s how we go about remember people (again, I might be speaking for my own failing memory here).
So too the brilliance of the passage of time in these layered and asynchronous chapters. Midway through the first chapter I had a horrifying thought that perhaps I had started reading a short story collection (the record is quite clear on how I feel about short stories) because the plotting was so dense, the characters so rich and the evocative images, well, evocative. When I realized in the second chapter that no, perhaps these were *linked* short stories, and then as the thematic resonances and character repetitions continued I decided that I was, in fact, reading a novel, what became clear – through the muddy plot and disappearing/reappearing characters – is that our lives and our memories function in much the same way: we have crystallized memories that appear ‘out of time’ but that feel full and colourful, and then there are long blanks of no connection or seeming non-event. What we recollect – the sensational, the exceptional *and* the utterly banal – stays with us for reasons unclear (to me), but stays with us all the same in these sharp moments so beautifully and expertly captured by Egan.
I have nothing but praise for this incredible novel that so beautifully weaves characters together. I loved the questions it raises about what we decide to make of our lives, how we go about making decisions, overcoming grief, regret and our own impetus for self-destruction, how we decide to create *anything* in a world so bent toward massification, how we believe in the possibility of unique individuality in an era that simultaneously promises and scorns such a chance. It is a beautiful novel full of reasonable hope that we might do well with the little, parcelled time we have and that we might impress our lives and our singularity on those around us.
I realize I’ve made it sound overly optimistic or some kind of “audacity of hope” sort of thing. It’s not that. It doesn’t ignore or gloss the failures, the inadequacies, the regrets, but it also doesn’t *dwell* in these spaces, or declare these states to be the de facto position for humanity. It asks whether we might do something different (if not something more) with the little time we’re allotted.
So read it, okay?
I did it again. I’m midway through my next book and am now posting on *Middlesex* with the inevitable consequence that a lot of the thoughtful commentary I had stored up for this novel has seeped into the pages of the next. Oh well. Such is the life of this reader, and so you’ll be left with this less than fullsome review of what is a tremendous novel.
Principally tremendous because of its narration. The first person narrator, Cal(lie), weaves her (fictional) autobiography with the biographies of her parents and grandparents in the style of the best of these genres: stories not so much about the people themselves, but about the eras in which they live and the collective movements that shape their individual experiences. So it is that with Cal(lie) we traverse the economic booms and depressions of Detroit – in one of the better novels-of-a-city I’ve come across), the civil rights movement and the emergence of a queer politics in San Francisco.
Not only that, but the narrator’s willingness to imagine the perspective of others allows a quasi third person limited narration that glimpses at the reaction of her family members. An subtle, but powerful narrative move, too, comes as the narrative shifts to a conscious third person – you know the sort teenagers use when they’re telling their friends something funny – but in this case it’s not for comic effect, but rather because the narrator is so far removed from what is happening to his body and his identity that he fully loses “voice” of these sections of the narrative.
The story itself is compelling enough without the masterful narration, but the compelling plot – hermaphrodite man raised as girl discovers his masculinity in a painful climax of scientific/medicinal control over the body and the hegemony of the “normal body” – certainly provides a rich space for the narrative voice to reverberate.
And it’s true, nearly a week after finishing *Middlesex* I’m still struck by the singularity of Cal(lie), not as a “monstrous” body (as some characters in the book describe him), nor as an exceptional story of medicinal mishap and the ubiquity of the intersexed child, but rather as a singular expression of the bildungsroman. I can think of no better narrative exploration of the challenges, delights, horrors and ecstasies of coming-of-age. Descriptions of Cal(lie)’s attraction to the “Obscure Object” and the hesitating, sputtering, development of their relationship is quite simply brilliant.
So yeah. I really liked this one. I didn’t think I would. I should say that it sat on my shelf for years. I guess I thought it would be some kind of obsessive trip into gender/sexuality politics and that the whole book would be about the “monstrous” hermaphrodite body, but really it’s a book about growing up, about falling in love, about finding yourself, about fitting in to your family, about self-acceptance, *and* a book about being a hermaphrodite in a world that doesn’t always know exactly what to do with slippery identities.
Filed under American literature, Fiction, Prize Winner
Here’s how I think it happened:
Ann Patchett read Conrad’s *Heart of Darkness* and thought, “hey – there’s something interesting going on here: snakes make neat metaphors!” And she entirely missed the bits about colonialism.
So she set *State of Wonder* in the present day Amazon and made it about the quest for a pharmaceutical way to prolong fertility. The premise sounds so rich and so fruitful (kind of like the jungle?!) with all kinds of ethical questions about whether fertility ought to be extended, about the exploitation of the environment and indigenous cultures for the benefit of consumption and about the relationship between science and nature. Not to mention the usual colonial questions that *Heart of Darkness* invites.
But what the reader gets is a mystery plot with a well written setting and a jumble of thematic questions that don’t come out anywhere close to coherent. With the hodgepodge of symbols and the patchwork and the wavering attempt at taking on moral questions it reads as a mess. And annoying mess for the lost potential.
Filed under Book I'll Forget I Read, Mystery, Worst Books
 | Anonymous on The Black Wolf: I hate to say… |
| Anonymous on The Correspondent: The courage… |
| Anonymous on The Correspondent: The courage… |
| Anonymous on The Life Cycle of the Common O… |
| Anonymous on Bear Town: Almost as bad as be… |
Literary Vice 