The Elegant Variation: LATBR THUMBNAIL®

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May 02, 2005

LATBR THUMBNAIL® - MAY 1, 2005

Despite a great NYC visit filled with all sorts of smart book people (including a brief introduction to the legendary Nan Talese, and a 90-minute sit-down with Sam Tanenhaus, from which the only thing we can divulge is that he did receive his brownie), we're pleased as punch to be home again and not even another bland outing of the LA Times Book Review can diminish that. Bs and Cs abound but there are a few precipitous plunges and a general air of "so what?" hanging over the proceedings. Only one AI ALERT (that's for Authorial Intrusion) of note, and no real home runs this week. OK, on to the grades, as we type betwixt yawns:

STATS
Full length fiction reviews: 4
Full length non-fiction reviews: 5
Columns: Discoveries and First Fiction
Giving credit where it's due, we do note that the fiction/non-fiction balance seems about right for once, and the fiction covered is actually fiction worth writing about, not the usual bland grab-bag of thrillers.

TITLES, AUTHORS & REVIEWERS
The Riot Inside Me by Wanda Coleman. Reviewed by Jonathan Kirsch Grade: B
Zorro by Isabel Allende. Reviewed by Yxta Maya Murray Grade: F
John Brown, Abolitionist by David S. Reynolds. Reviewed by Eric Foner Grade: C+
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. Reviewed by Richard Eder. Grade: B+
Dictionary Days by Ilan Stavans. Reviewed by Marc Weingarten. Grade: B+
A Theological Miscellany by T.J. McTavish. Reviewed by Nick Owchar. Grade: C-
The Triumph of Numbers by I.B. Cohen. Reviewed by Anthony Day. Grade: D-
Charley's War by Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun. Reviewed by Laurel Maury. Grade: C
Courtroom 302 by Steve Bogira. Reviewed by Jonathan Shapiro. Grade: C+ A.I. ALERT!
First Fiction Column: The Coast of Akron by Adrienne Miller; and The Missing Person by Alix Ohlin. Reviewed by James Marcus. Grade: B
Discoveries Column: Adios Hemingway by Leonarda Padura Fuentes; The Foundling by Charlotte Bronte; and Midnight's Gate by Bei Dao. Reviewed by Susan Salter Reynolds. Grade: B-
Last Night by James Salter. Reviewed by Jane Ciabattari. Grade: B-

WHAT WE LIKE ...
You could have knocked us over with the proverbial feather this week as Jonathan Kirsch rose to the occasion of the Wanda Coleman essay collection and turned in a fine, serious piece of work (We were shocked and dismayed to learn of her banishment from Eso Won Books, even as we lauded her clear-eyed appraisal of Maya Angelou as "a sloppily written fake") ... Richard Eder's thoughtful review of The History of Love is a much-needed corrective to the Foer backlash that's afflicted most reviewers (Laura Miller's dumb-shit outing in the Times being the ne plus ultra of the collapse of critical rigor surrounding the Krauss-Foers.), although even he can't resist a comparison to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ... and Dictionary Days sounds like the kind of quirky title that we're suckers for ... Perhaps we're just feeling generous today but the balance of the B minuses went to reviews that were workmanlike and solid if not terribly involving ... The back page columns remain solidly written as always but the choices didn't particularly move us this week, although the Miller novel is on our desk. (And were we the only ones to note its somewhat unseemly promotion in the pages of Esquire this month, given that Adrienne Miller is Esquire's fiction editor? But we digress.)

WHAT WE DON'T ...
Yxta Maya Murray's breathless review of the Allende is just awful ... Overwrought, overstated, overcooked ... Murray can't resist pointing out that she's read Nietzsche (he's mentioned three times) .... and her review casts a light on another reviewing pet peeve that, although hardly unique to LAT, runs rampant here. She writes:

"Until that moment [when Diego fights with Moncada] Diego had not been conscious of his dual personality," Allende writes so piquantly of her character. "[O]ne part Diego de la Vega, elegant, affected, hypochondriac, and the other part El Zorro, audacious, daring, playful. He supposed that his true character lay somewhere in between."

That is "so piquantly"? It hardly strikes us as piquant - it rather feels a bit expository and heavy-handed. For some reason, Times reviewers seem to lack the ability to select passages to quote that appropriately support their critical judgments. We see this all the time, and remain baffled that this sort of thing doesn't get smoothed out in the editing process ... Elsewhere, the Stavans, McTavish and Cohen reviews are jammed under the somewhat forced rubric "In pursuit of the trivial and the significant" which seems wholly unnecessary ... The McTavish flunks the "who cares" test (do compendia like this need to be reviewed at all?) ... and the Cohen reads like an earnest high school book report:

"Numbers, according to Cohen, are essential to the analysis of society, the conduct of government, the regulation of daily life, and the understanding of how nature came to be."

Whoa. Really? You think? We're grateful for the penetrating analysis. (Reviewer Day goes on to say "The idea that a theory can be proved false by testing has come to be a hallmark of science." ... Now, correct us if we're wrong, but we've always heard from our scientist friends that you can't prove a theory false (you can't prove a negative) - you can only fail to prove it true ... Of course, we flunked chem, so if someone out there knows better, please drop us a line ... Bogira's book sounds both compelling and important but the review is marred by Shapiro's unwelcome authorial intrustions ...

GRADE: C- Blandness appears to be the order of the day ... Wasserman has likened the review to "an interesting dinner party" ... We're scarcely scintillated by the company this time out, and hope he cobbles up a better guest list for future meals ... But we don't hold our breaths awaiting our invitation.

Posted at 09:57 AM in LATBR Thumbnails | Permalink

Comments

For health reasons I have long ago forsworn reading Laura Miller (not that I am of frail constitution and sensibility) but occasionally I will sample a lead paragraph of her work especially if I find the subject compelling. Having heard seriously good buzz on Nicole Krauss’s second book, I chanced to attempt Miller’s handling of it.

"It would be unfair to liken Nicole Krauss's second novel, ''The History of Love,'' to ''Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,'' the recently published second novel by her better-known husband, Jonathan Safran Foer, except for two things. The first is the deliberate and liberal sprinkling of correspondences between the two books, a system of coy marital cross-referencing that amounts to an engraved invitation to compare and contrast…"

That’s pure crap (forgive my grandiloquence)! The only exception at play is that Miller could attempt this likening, in what seems like unsubtle baiting to hook the reader into a review of a lesser known author by mentioning a well known and controversial one and perhaps a way to spank Foer one more time.

Too bad Ed Champion is off on some rock n roll bingeing (I guess you gotta do what ya gotta do) — as I must now wait for the universally acknowledged definitive assessment of NYTBR content.

Also, weren’t you meeting with Mr. NYTBR? Wha’ happened?

Posted by: birnbaum | May 03, 2005 at 05:07 AM

Too bad Ed Champion is off on some rock n roll bingeing (I guess you gotta do what ya gotta do) — as I must now wait for the universally acknowledged definitive assessment of NYTBR content.

Also, weren’t you meeting with Mr. NYTBR? Wha’ happened?

Posted by: birnbaum | May 03, 2005 at 05:07 AM

I suspect that the reason editors don't call out their reviewers for "lack[ing] the ability to select passages to quote that appropriately support their critical judgments" is because they're just so grateful to have moderately competent writers who remember to quote at all. It's no excuse--you're right to be harsh--but I imagine the editing all happening in some bleary stupor of simply checking for egregious errors, not an editing that deserves the name.

Alas, sad days for all of us...

Posted by: Anne | May 03, 2005 at 06:56 PM

"Now, correct us if we're wrong, but we've always heard from our scientist friends that you can't prove a theory false (you can't prove a negative) - you can only fail to prove it true"

That's wrong. First, Karl Popper's popular philosophy of science says the opposite--that you can't prove theories true, you can only disprove them. Second, in logic you can prove negatives. See, e.g.:

http://www.discord.org/~lippard/debiak.html

and

http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articles/proveanegative.html

Posted by: Jim Lippard | January 18, 2010 at 02:20 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

MY NOVEL

HARRY, REVISED - Get all the details here.

TOUR DATES

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Riemen

This slim volume by the president and founder of the Nexus Institute, a European-based humanist think-tank, stands as the most stirring redoubt against the ascendant forces of know-nothingness that we've come across in a long time. A full-throated, unapologetic defense of the virtues of Western Civ – in which "elite" is not and never should be a dirty word – this inspiring exploration of high art and high ideals is divided into three sections: The first looks at the life of Riemen's great hero Thomas Mann as a model for the examined life. The second imagines a series of conversations from turning points in European intellectual history, populated with the likes of Socrates, Nietzsche and others. The final section, "Be Brave," is nothing less than an exhortation to dig deep, especially in times of risk. The notion of nobility of the spirit might strike some modern ears as quaint but it seems more desperately necessary than ever before, and there are worse ways to read the accessible Nobility of Spirit than as a crash refresher in the Great Thinkers, free of academic jargon and cant. As a meditation on what is at stake when the pursuit of high ideals is elbowed aside by the pursuit of fleeting material gain, however, Nobility of Spirit might well be the most prescient book we've yet read on what's at stake in the current election cycle and in the developing global situation. Agree or disagree with Riemen's profound, ambitious and high-minded plea, you will be thinking about his words for a long time. It's been ages since a work of non-fiction moved us this way. Read it. Discuss it. Argue about it.
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

With rave reviews from James Wood, Michiko Kakutani and Dwight Garner, it might not seem like we need to tell you to drop everything and go read Netherland, but we are telling you, and here's why: The way book coverage works these days, everyone talks about the same book for about two or three weeks, and then they move on and the book is more or less forgotten. Whereas a berth here in the Recommended sidebar keeps noteworthy titles in view for a good, long time, which is the sort of sustained attention this marvelous novel deserves. A Gatsby-like meditation on exclusion and otherness, it's an unforgettable New York story in which the post 9/11 lives of Hans, a Dutch banker estranged from his English wife, and Chuck Ramkissoon, a mysterious cricket entrepreneur, intertwine. The New York City of the immigrant margins is unforgettably invoked in gorgeous, precise prose, and the novel's luminous conclusion is a radiant beacon illuminating one of our essential questions, the question of belonging. Our strongest possible recommendation.
Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick

"History," wrote Henry James in a 1910 letter to his amanuensis Theodora Bosanquet, "is strangely written." This casual aside could easily serve as the epigraph of Cynthia Ozick's superb new collection Dictation, which concerns itself with lost worlds evoked by languages -- languages which separate and obscure as readily as they bind. It can be risky to look for connective tissue between stories written years apart and published in magazines ranging from The Conradian to The New Yorker. But themes of deception, posterity, and above all, the glory of language -- at once malleable and intractable -- knit together this quartet, recasting the whole as the harmonious product of Ozick's formidable talent. Read the entire review here
Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee

Now, on the one hand, you scarcely need us to alert you to the existence of a new J.M. Coetzee novel, or even to have us tell you it's worth reading. But we can tell you - we insist on telling you that Diary of a Bad Year is a triumph, easily Coetzee's most affecting and fully wrought work since Disgrace. Formally inventive, the book intertwines two narratives with the author's own Strong Opinions, a series of seemingly discrete philosophical and political essays. The cumulative effect of this strange trio is deeply moving and thought provoking. It's increasingly rare in this thoroughly post-post-modern age to raise the kind of questions in fiction Coetzee handles so masterfully - right down to what is it, exactly, that we expect (or need) from our novels. It's telling that, for all of his serious pronouncements on subjects ranging from censorship to pedophilia to the use of torture, it's finally a few pages from The Brothers Karamazov that brings him to tears. Moving, wise and - how's this for a surprise - funny and lightly self-mocking, Diary of a Bad Year might well be the book of the year and Coetzee is surely our essential novelist. We haven't stopped thinking about it since we set it down.
The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt

David Leavitt's magnificent new novel tells the story of the unlikely friendship between the British mathematician G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, mathematical autodidact and prodigy who had been working as a clerk in Madras, and who would turn out to be one of the great mathematical minds of the century. Ramanujan reluctantly joined Hardy in England - a move that would ultimately prove to his detriment - and the men set to work on proving the Riemann Hypothesis, one of mathematics' great unsolved problems. The Indian Clerk, an epic and elegant work which spans continents and decades, encompasses a World War, and boasts a cast of characters that includes Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Lytton Strachey. Leavitt renders the complex mathematics in a manner that resonates emotionally as well as intellectually, and writes with crystalline elegance. The metaphor of the prime number – divisible only by one and itself – is beautifully apt for this tale of these two isolated geniuses. Leavitt's control of this dense, sprawling material is impressive – astonishing, at times – and yet despite its scope, he keeps us focused on his great themes of unknowability and identity. The Indian Clerk might be set in the past but it doesn't resemble most so-called "historical fiction." Rather, it's an ageless meditation on the quests for knowledge and for the self – and how frequently the two are intertwined – that is, finally, as timeless as the music of the primes. (View our full week of coverage here.)
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

Joshua Ferris' warm and funny debut novel is an antidote to the sneering likes of The Office and Max Barry's Company. Treating his characters with both affection and respect, Ferris takes us into a Chicago ad agency at the onset of the dot-bomb. Careers are in jeopardy, nerves are frayed and petty turf wars are fought. But there are bigger stakes in the balance, and Ferris' weirdly indeterminate point of view that's mostly first person plural, underscores the shared humanity of everyone who has ever had to sit behind a desk. It's a luminous, affecting debut and you can read the first chapter right here.
Christine Falls by Benjamin Black

Coming to these shores at last, John Banville's thriller, written under the nom de plume Benjamin Black, has drawn rave reviews across the pond since it first appeared last October. Those who feared Banville might turn in an overly literary effort needn't worry. Influenced by Simenon's romans durs (hard stories), Banville unspools a dark mystery set in 1950s Dublin concerning itself with, among other things, the church's trade in orphans. At the heart of the book is the coroner Quirke, a Banvillean creation on par with Alex Cleave and Freddie Montgomery. Dublin is rendered with a damp, creaky specificity – you can almost taste the whisky.
The Paris Review Interviews, I by The Paris Review and Philip Gourevitch

Scanning our Recommended selections, one might conclude we're addicted to interviews, and one would be correct. If author interviews are like crack to us, then the Paris Review author interviews must surely be the gold standard of crack (a comparison Plimpton might not have embraced). The newly issued The Paris Review Interviews, Volume I (Picador) rolls out the heavy hitters. Who can possibly turn away from the likes of Saul Bellow, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, Dorothy Parker, Robert Gottlieb and others? The interviews are formal and thoughtful but never dry and can replace any dozen "how-to" books on writing. What can be more comforting than hearing Bellow, answering a question on preparations and conception, admit "Well, I don't know exactly how it's done.” The best part of this collection? The "Volume I" in the title, with its promise of more volumes to come.
The Dead Fish Museum: Stories by Charles D'Ambrosio

The best short story collection we've read since ... well, certainly since we've started this blog. And we might even say "ever" if Dubliners didn't cast such a long shadow. The short story is not our preferred form but D'Ambrosio's eight brilliant stories are almost enough to convert us. Defy the conventional wisdom that short story collections don't sell and treat yourself to this marvel. (We're especially partial, naturally, to "Screenwriter".)
The Mystery Guest by Grégoire Bouillier
*Now in Paperback*

What would you do if the woman who’d left you high and dry ten years ago called out of the blue to invite you to a party without any further explanation? If you’re French, you’d probably spend a lot of time pondering the Deeper Significance Of It All, which is exactly what Grégoire Bouillier does for the 120 hilarious pages of The Mystery Guest. This slim, witty memoir follows Bouillier through the party from hell, and is a case study in Gallic self-abasement. Before it’s all done, you’ll set fire to any turtleneck hanging in your closet and think twice before buying an expensive Bordeaux as a gift. But fear not – just when it seems that all is, indeed, random and pointless and there is no Deeper Significance, salvation arrives in the unlikely form of Virginia Woolf, and the tale ends on a note of unforced optimism. Parfait.
Ticknor by Sheila Heti

When George Ticknor's Life of William Hickling Prescott was published in 1864, it received rapturous notices, and reviewers were quick to point out that the long-standing friendship between Prescott and Ticknor made the latter an ideal Boswell. Sheila Heti has pulled this obscure leaf from the literary archives and fashioned a mordantly funny anti-history; a pungent and hilarious study of bitterness and promise unfulfilled. As a fretful Ticknor navigates his way through the rain-soaked streets of Boston to Prescott's house ("But I am not a late man. I hate to be late."), he recalls his decidedly one-sided lifelong friendship with his great subject. Unlike the real-life Ticknor, this one is an embittered also-ran, full of plans and intentions never realized, always alive to the fashionable whispers behind his back. Heti seamlessly inhabits Ticknor's fussy 19th-century diction with a feat of virtuoso ventriloquism that puts one in mind of The Remains of the Day. Heti's Ticknor would be insufferable if he weren't so funny, and in the end, the black humor brings a leavening poignancy to this brief tale. But don't let the size fool you — this 109-page first novel is small but scarcely slight; it is as dense and textured as a truffle.
The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers by Vendela Vida

No, your eyes aren't deceiving you and yes, we are recommending a Believer product. Twenty-three interviews (a third presented for the first time) pairing the likes of Zadie Smith with Ian McEwan, Jonathan Lethem with Paul Auster, Edward P. Jones and ZZ Packer, and Adam Thirwell with Tom Stoppard make this collection a must-read. Lifted out of the context of some of the magazine's worst twee excesses, the interviews stand admirably on their own as largely thoughtful dialogues on craft. A handful of interviewers seem more interested in themselves than in their subjects but in the main this collection will prove irresistible to writers of any stripe - struggling or established - and to readers seeking a window into the creative process.
The Sea by John Banville

John Banville's latest novel returns him to the Booker Prize shortlist for the first time since 1989's The Book of Evidence. In The Sea, we find Banville in transition, moving from the icy, restrained narrators of The Untouchable, Eclipse and Shroud toward warmer climes. Max Morden has returned to the vacation spot of his youth as he grieves the death of his wife. Remembering his first, fatal love, Morden works to reconcile himself to his loss. Banville's trademark linguistic virtuosity is everpresent but some of the chilly control is relinquished and Max mourns and rages in ways that mark a new direction for Banville - and there's at least one great twist which you'll never see coming. Given the politicized nature of the British literary scene, Banville's shot at the prize might be hobbled by his controversial McEwan review but we're rooting for our longtime favorite to go all the way at last. UPDATE: Our man won!
Here Is Where We Meet by John Berger

We've been fans of Booker Prize winner John Berger for ages, and we're delighted to have received an early copy of his latest work, Here is Where We Meet. In this lovely, elliptical, melancholy "fictional memoir," Berger traverses European cities from Libson to Geneva to Islington, conversing with shades from his past – He encounters his dead mother on a Lisbon tram, a beloved mentor in a Krakow market. Along the way, we're treated to marvelous and occasionally heart-rending glimpses of an extraordinary life, a lyrical elegy to the 20th century from a man who - in his eighth decade - remains committed to his political beliefs and almost childlike in his openness to people, places and experiences. There's no conventional narrative here, and those seeking plot are advised to look elsewhere. But Here is Where We Meet offers a wise, moving and poetic look at the life of an artist traversing the European century from a novelist whose talent remains undimmed in his twilight years.
Home Land by Sam Lipsyte

In his recent TEV guest review of Home Land, Jim Ruland called Sam Lipsyte the "funniest writer of his generation," and we're quite inclined to agree. We tore through Home Land in two joyful sittings and can't remember the last time we've laughed so hard. Lipsyte's constellation of oddly sympathetic losers is rendered with a sparkling, inspired prose style that's sent us off in search of all his prior work. In Lewis Miner's (a.k.a Teabag) woeful epistolary dispatches to his high school alumni newsletter ("I did not pan out."), we find an anti-hero for the age. Highly, highly recommended.

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Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
The Rider by Tim Krabbe

Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

May 02, 2005

LATBR THUMBNAIL® - MAY 1, 2005

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

May 02, 2005

LATBR THUMBNAIL® - MAY 1, 2005

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism