The Elegant Variation

R.I.P. EVEL KNIEVEL

Evel Knievel has died, which isn't remotely literary but represents a part of our youth.  It dates us for sure, but this was one of our favorite toys.

TEV GIVEAWAY: THE GATHERING

Once again, TEV readers get to benefit from our ineptitude.  Via some combination of addlemindedness and sheer disorganization, we've ended up with two copies of Anne Enright's Man Booker Prize winning novel The Gathering.  (Somehow, we didn't remember receiving a copy, so we went out and supported our local bookstore, only to return home to find our advance copy, sent to us by the kind folks at Black Cat.)  The book probably requires no introduction to you, but just in case, here is what AL Kennedy had to say about it for the Guardian:

And, of course, The Gathering isn't a simple thing at all - it's a genuine attempt to stare down both love and death, to anatomise their pains and fears and peculiar pleasures. At which point I ought to talk about the sheer physicality of Enright's writing. The one word roar recurs though the text, as if to remind us of the din within each of her characters: strangers meet in a hotel and share the presence of potential nakedness without a touch; Liam's thirst for alcohol rages while Veronica's pads along behind her through insomniac nights; a moustache can barely be noticed before its description moves on to the idea of tickled thighs. Sex - for Enright, as for John Banville - is a kind of gleefully appalling slapstick that dogs humanity and leaves it betrayed. This is a world where fidelity is impossible and sex is absurd, but love is forever, like a scar. And it isn't only sex that works on the body - death is both a comfort and a rapist. The fear and bewilderment it brings the living echo through flesh, and Enright is unflinching as she documents all the physical symptoms of emotion and memory. Bones and words always lurk under the skin, equally stark and disturbing.

You gotta love the Banville comparison, right?  So, we all know the steps to this dance.  Drop us an email, subject line "SLAPSTICK DOGS" and, as ever, you must include your full mailing address or else, you know, we'll just get annoyed.  Yes, we'll ship to international winners.  Previous winners remain ineligible.  We'll take entries until 10 p.m. PST at which point the Random Number Generator will do its deed.

UPDATE: We always like it when the RNG selects someone who's been trying for a while.  Congratulations to Susannah Butters of Chapel Hill!

HARRY, REVISED - THE NOVEMBER UPDATE

I'm hard at work on another copyedit of Harry, Revised. About a week ago I received a package containing the typeset manuscript. Now, one thing I've learned is that just when I've experienced what seems like the most memorable moment in this process, another one comes along and knocks it out of the park. So, although I won't claim that this has been the best moment to date, seeing this sure as hell ranks up there:

A few weeks ago, I reviewed some style samples where we looked at how the type would be set and where the various type elements would fall. The only decision we made at that time was to do away with drop caps. I do like them, but I have a handful of chapters that begin with one line paragraphs, and those came out looking terribly skewed. We talked about rewriting a little bit to make them work, but I decided I didn't want to rewrite simply to accommodate type elements. And on closer study, I decided there was something understated that I preferred if we eliminated them. Here's the typeset version of the page I recently displayed in my copyediting post:

I admit that I deflated a bit at the prospect of reading my book yet again – you read your work dozens and dozens of times, after all – but there's something I find about seeing it in this close-to-finished form that makes it genuine fun to tackle – it's not quite a finished book, to be sure, but it looks close to the real thing enough now that it's no longer just a Word file sitting on my computer, and I find I read with renewed distance and enthusiasm.

So now my trusty red pen is out and I'm going through it line by line. I'm also pleased that, which each pass, the edits become smaller and smaller, generally reduced to cleaning up infelicitous turns of phrase or streamlining things. (No Trimalchio-scale revisions here, I'm relieved to report.)  For example, I have a horrible crutch word – a word upon which one overrelies – which is "clearly". (I probably have more than one, but this one really leaps out.)  And I've come to realize it's such a meaningless qualifier – after all, if something is clearly anything, there's no need to state the "clearly," is there? That's the kind of clean up I'm working on.

Another interesting thing I've learned – galleys are made from the first pass typeset copy, apparently. So these changes I'm working on will not be on the galleys, which I'm told are a few weeks away now.  That kills the perfectionist in me, and I sort of wish that wasn't the case but it is what it is.

Another exciting development is that Bloomsbury issued the new catalog containing the listing for Harry, Revised. The catalog goes to booksellers, reviewers, bloggers, et alia and is an important sales tool. It's also something I got to weigh in on, and you can see it here  – and you'll also have your first chance to see the book's early blurbs, which are also now up at my personal website.

Part of the catalog process included cover design review – and getting your cover proposals is another one of those incredible, landmark days when things start to feel incredibly real. One hears tales about cover hassles but on that front, I've been wonderfully happy with the work that Bloomsbury's art team came up with – honestly, the hardest thing was picking a favorite from a bunch of great ideas.

Oh, I've noticed that the release date on Amazon has now been moved up to April 15. I'm not sure that being released on tax day is a fantastic association, but on the other hand, I can see the campaign now – spend your refund on Harry.

And so I return to the dotting of the i's and the crossing of the t's. I have one more bit of rather exciting news on tap but that one will have to wait for a few days.   Please stay tuned.

SIDEBAR UPDATE

If you read TEV through an RSS feed, you probably don't get notice of sidebar updates, so you'll want to pop over in person and have a look at our "Recommended" sidebar, where we've just added J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year.

NBCC'S BEST RECOMMENDED LIST

For years now, we've lamented the arbitrary silliness of most "Best of" lists.  They crop up with alarming frequency around this time of the year, generally making sweeping claims of Greatness while divulging little about the selection process.  The NBCC has unveiled a new feature today that we're watching with enough interest that we're going to support the endeavor by setting up a sidebar before the week is out to track it - namely, their well considered (if oddly named) Best Recommended List.  NBCC President John Freeman has described it thus:

"What if a best seller's list was made up of books people read rather than books they simply bought? What if it was a list of books you just had to read rather than books that were just good reads. And what if the matrix for recommending those books wasn't cash-registers, but the opinion of award-winning poets, novelists, biographers, novelists, critics and readers? These are the utopian ideas that prompted the National Book Critics Circle to create a monthly Best Recommended List. Polling our 800 members, as well as the former finalists and winners of our book prize, we asked, What 2007 books have you read that you have truly loved?

Nearly 500 voters-from John Updike and Robert Hass to Carolyn Forche, Anne Tyler, Jane Smiley, Jonathan Raban, and Cynthia Ozick-answered the call. Here is the list of books that writers and critics are most often recommending to each other. Starting in 2008, we plan to offer our Best Recommended List every month, as a kind of barometer for taste -- where it's going, and where it's been."

Now, the following is the part we think is particularly interesting.  Freeman continues:

"We're excited to post this on the web because we know lists of 5 are nowhere near complete. So in addition to posting a list of all the books which received multiple votes, each day at the NBCC blog we'll be posting votes from critics and writers who participated, to widen the scope of the conversation and to hopefully present a little bit of how much is out there."

Which we think is potentially cool as hell as it will tap into the reading habits of a fascinating group of readers and writers and is likely to offer up some overlooked jewels.  As for the picks themselves, the inaugural five in the fiction category are:

1) Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead) 2) Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 3) Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (HarperCollins) 4) Philip Roth, Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin) 5) Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses (Graywolf)

In non-fiction, the top five are:

1) Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf) 2) Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (St. Martin’s) 3) Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (Metropolitan) 4) David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts (HarperCollins) 5) Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes (Doubleday)

And in poetry, with a three-way tie for first place:

1) Robert Hass, Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005* 2) Zbigniew Herbert, Collected Poems: 1956-1998 (Ecco)* 3) Robert Pinsky, Gulf Music (Farrar Straus & Giroux)* 4) Rae Armantrout, Next Life (Wesleyan) 5) Mary Jo Bang, Elegy (Graywolf)

We also wanted to partake in the promised widened conversation, so we're happy to have a pair of special commentators weigh in here.  First up, NBCC finalist David Leavitt - whose The Indian Clerk we've championed here - talks about what book he voted for and why:

"Of the novels I read in 2007, Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach is the one that has stayed with me most viscerally. The story of a honeymooning couple doomed by sexual terror and inexperience to make decisions that will affect their entire lives, On Chesil Beach provides a pitch-perfect rendering of England in the early sixties while telling a cautionary tale of misjudgment and misplaced pride that fits it squarely into the English tradition initiated, centuries before, by Jane Austen. There are moments in this book that made me wince with the most uncomfortable sensations of recognition, as well as moments when McEwan seemed to be bringing me almost too close to his characters. In the end, though, what I felt most acutely was the proximity of redemption--political, historical, and personal--that is McEwan's great theme and perhaps his great quest."

We're also pleased to have the thoughts of the renowned animation historian and critic (and NBCC finalist for Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation) Charles Solomon (seen below, appropriately, in caricature), who takes a slightly different approach, talking about a category the NBCC doesn't yet have under consideration - manga.  But if it were a category, here's what Solomon - a contributor to the New York Times, TV Guide, Newsweek (Japan), Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, Film Comment, the Hollywood Reporter, the Manchester Guardian, and others - thinks we should be reading:

"Manga (Japanese graphic novels) is the fastest growing area of American publishing. For most adults, the manga aisle of the local bookstore may seem as unfamiliar as Cathay or Cipango, but for adolescents, teen-agers and college students, it's a welcome and familiar harbor. Most manga begin in Japan as serials published in magazines that are later reissued in book form. In the US, manga are rapidly becoming what "Nancy Drew," "Henry Huggins" and "Tintin" were for earlier generations. The combination of words and pictures speaks to younger readers in ways other books don't.

Fullmetal Alchemist,Volumes 1-15 by Hiromu Arakawa (Viz: $9.99 each, paperback): Young Alphonse and Edward Elric violated the laws of alchemy when they tried to to bring their mother back from the dead, and paid a terrible price for that transgression. Edward lost a leg and Al nearly died, but Ed sacrificed his right arm to preserve his brother's soul in a suit of armor. Ed's robotic prostheses make him The Fullmetal Alchemist. The Elric brothers wander far and wide in search of the Philosopher's Stone, which they believe can restore their damaged bodies. Five juvenile novels about the "Fullmetal Alchemist" characters have been published in the US: the most recent is "Under the Faraway Sky" by Makoto Inoue (Viz: $9.99, paperback).

Mushi-Shi, Volumes 1-4 by Yuki Urushibara (Del Rey: $12.95 each, paperback) In contrast to the dynamic adventures of the Elric Brothers, the stories in Mushi-Shi unfold at a cool, measured pace that recalls traditional folk tales. Mysterious creatures that represent "life in its purest form," Mushiare more ancient than plants and animals. Neither good nor evil, they just exist. Ginko, the chain-smoking Mushi-Shi("MushiMaster"), roams Japan, studying Mushiand their interactions with humanity. Urushibara's manga won the Kodansha Award in 2006, and is rapidly building a following in the US.

Naruto, Volumes 1-29 by Masashi Kishimoto (Viz: $7.95 each, paperback) The wildly popular Naruto series has spawned a small publishing industry: in addition to the original manga, there are calendars, novelizations, "Art of" books, game guides, and fan books. Audiences can't get enough of the misadventures of knuckle-headed ninja-in-training Naruto Uzumaki. These rollicking adventures combine feats of daring-do, exotic jutsu (magical techniques) and broad, slapstick comedy. The animated series enjoys an equal popularity."

Special thanks to our guest contributors and note to the NBCC: Consider simply calling the thing TBR - after all, "To Be Read" is a near universal designation among readers, isn't it?  If you've got a great idea for a name, please feel free to weigh in.

OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: WILLESDEN HERALD INTERNATIONAL SHORT STORY PRIZE

There's no shortage of short story competitions out there but not many have Zadie Smith selecting the winner.  For the third year running, she will award the Willesden Herald International Short Story Prize, and apparently the prize has been upgraded from a "rare inscribed mug" to £5,000 (which looks even better than normal on this side of the Atlantic).  We're advised that "Entry remains free, as does the ethos of a competition, which is designed to encourage emerging talent in the literary short story." 

The deadline for entry is December 21 and you can learn more here.

TUESDAY MARGINALIA

* The group blog hosted by the gang at the Kenyon Review is routinely excellent and worth your time, but our favorite contributions seem to come from the delightfully named Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky who, we think, nails precisely what's wrong with Amazon customer reviews.

Positive reviews are, not surprisingly, more thoughtful in tone: the typical 5-star review averages three paragraphs, while 1-star reviews tend to dismiss a book in a few angry sentences. And that’s the key to understanding the system: those 1-star readers are angry. They didn’t choose to read this novel; they were forced to read it by teachers who assured them that Beloved is a great novel. They’re frustrated by the story, the style, and the simple fact that they don’t get it. “The hype and hyperbole over Morrison is a perfect example of literary snobbism,” one enraged culture warrior thunders. “This book is incomprehensible, therefore, that small group that either understands it [or pretends to] struts and preens and deem themselves to be the arbiters of taste for American literature.” And this anger doesn’t fade: several of these reviewers note that they “had to read it in college.” The past tense is significant: they’ve taken the time to post this scathing review months, or even years, after they tossed the book aside. It’s a chance to get even, anonymously, with the novelist, the teacher, and the “snobbish” literary culture that forced them to confront the limits of their own understanding.

* It's that time of the year, so let's all get it up for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

* European literary critics meet in Munich.

* Laila Lalami reviews Joan Scott's The Politics of the Veil for the Nation.

In her keenly observed book The Politics of the Veil, historian Joan Wallach Scott examines the particular French obsession with the foulard, which culminated in March 2004 with the adoption of a law that made it illegal for students to display any "conspicuous signs" of religious affiliation. The law further specified that the Muslim headscarf, the Jewish skullcap and large crosses were not to be worn but that "medallions, small crosses, stars of David, hands of Fatima, and small Korans" were permitted. Despite the multireligious contortions, it was very clear, of course, that the law was primarily aimed at Muslim schoolgirls.

* Increasingly, one gets what one pays for at Comment is Free.  Most recently: An inelegant iteration of the age-old tired tirade against literary fiction.

* Luminaries of every stripe weigh in on the best thing they've read all year over at the Guardian.

MJ Hyland

Callisto (Atlantic) by Torsten Krol. Although it's sometimes flawed, I admire almost everything about it. It's a well-made story, often funny, often suspenseful, a wonderfully strange tale about, among other things, a young, gormless man who lands in a Guantanamo Bay-style prison for no sane or good reason. Callisto is a shrewd satire on the 'war on terror'; a subtle and moving account of a nationalistic paranoia induced by unexamined fear and phobia. The lack of attention it has received says something grim about the sheep-like nature of the making and following of literary trends.

(We've actually heard great things about Callisto since last year's BEA but haven't yet laid hands on it.)

* A.L. Kennedy has been shortlisted for the Costa Book Award.

* Happy birthday to the Missouri Review.

* The LA Weekly weighs in at some length on the whole "Was Bukowski a Nazi" nuttiness.

The charge seemed to arrive out of nowhere. Bukowski was born in Germany, and in his semiautobiographical novel Ham on Rye he writes that he used to harangue classmates and teachers at L.A. City College with fascist diatribes to antagonize them. But Buk a full-fledged Nazi?

“That’s ridiculous,” says longtime Black Sparrow publisher John Martin on the phone from his home in Santa Rosa. “Bukowski wasn’t a Nazi, he was a contrarian. Anything he could say to get people’s goat, he’d say — especially when he was young.”

* Want to go from blog to book?  Tod Goldberg tells you everything you need to know.

* And, finally, we strongly recommend David Wolpe's fine, fine essay "On the tricky question of 'who is a Jew[ish writer]?'," something much on our minds just now.

So modern Jewish literature is afflicted by category confusion, following the pattern of Ring Lardner's horseman, who jumped on his steed and rode off in all directions. Much of it draws on the power of the past; Nicole Krauss' "History of Love" is a palmipsest, where the modern love story is charged with the electricity of what came before. Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &Clay" uses the immigrant experience and so does Ozick's "Heir to the Glimmering World." The writing of Thane Rosenbaum and Melvin Bukiet reprises Holocaust themes, often to powerful effect. But who brings news of today? Is there news to bring? Sept. 11 looms increasingly as a modern catastrophe with ever unfolding consequences, and the turn to Sept. 11 novels is an indication of how powerful the need for a scaffolding of historical consequence to build an enduring novel.

THE SOPHISTRY OF CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

I'm back from my internet-free weekend and, on the whole, found it restorative and recommend the exercise highly.  Unfortunately, I returned to find Christopher Hitchens's predictable - and predictably asinine - defense of his chum and fellow traveler Martin Amis.  The most generous thing to be said about this incoherent ramble is that it's nice to stick up for one's friends.

Honestly, it's a bit difficult to know where to begin.  I've watched Hitchens's deterioration over the years with genuine dismay.  It's true that there are some who argue that he was never much as literary critic to begin with - Dan Green makes the point especially firmly - but I don't agree.  I think many of the essays in Unacknowledged Legislation are excellent, and I've lamented the gradual decline of what was once an astute literary mind.

But I'm here to bury Hitchens, not to praise him.  And his response to Ronan Bennett's essay - to which I linked approvingly just before the holiday - shows him at his absolute worst, clearly underscoring what a caricature he's become.  To wit:

Ronan Bennett's clumsy tirade against Martin Amis in G2 on Monday will not have been a complete waste of space if it allows us to revisit the words "discriminate" or "discrimination". In a public quarrel that originated between two professors of English (Amis and Terry Eagleton) it ought not to be necessary to remind people that these terms are, at root, complimentary. To have a discriminating palate, for example, is to enjoy good taste. I have argued for years that the concept is absurd when applied to racists. "Discrimination" is something that they just can't manage. Indeed, it is the very thing of all things that they cannot, by definition, manage. A racist is a racist precisely because he can't distinguish between a Jew and another Jew, or an Asian or West Indian or Chechen. The "out" groups are all made up of generalised amalgams and there can be no exceptions.

Thus to accuse Martin Amis of being a racist is to say that he can't tell the difference between, say, one Irishman and another. Now, a moment's thought on the part of his worst enemy would reveal that accusation to be silly and vicious, and baseless on its face. I am not writing as Amis's worst enemy. In fact, I am writing as a friend who also took issue with what he said, in unscripted conversation with a Times reporter, a short while after the ghastly assault by Muslim fanatics on our public transport system. (By the way, yes, I do think that the word "fanatic" requires that prefix in this case.) I wrote my article last autumn and it was published in the Manhattan City Journal last January, so Mr Bennett need not congratulate himself so warmly on being the only one apart from Eagleton with the nerve to raise the issue.

This is what passes for Christopher Hithchen's critical engagement these days.  Word games and outlandish assertions, with a dash of reductio ad absurdum, that hoariest of rhetorical crutches.  Honestly, does anyone other than Hitchens really believe that Bennett was suggesting that that Amis "can't tell the difference between, say, one Irishman and another any of this."  Of course not - he neither said nor hinted in the general direction of any such thing, nor would any reasonable human being extrapolate any of this.  It's the worst kind sophistry, pure and simple, the rhetorical flourishes of an intellectually bankrupt gasbag who can no longer trade in the facts.  I'd say it was beneath Hitchens but, sadly, nothing seems beneath him any longer. 

Years ago, I saw Tariq Aziz interviewed on Charlie Rose where he somehow managed to insist with a straight face that the first Iraq War was the result of American aggression.  It was a riveting performance and Hitchens's ludicrous assertions brought it back to mind.  But in some ways that's apt, as Hitchens is no longer a thinker or a critic - he's a propagandist.  What else to make of his risible assertion that "A racist is a racist precisely because he can't distinguish between a Jew and another Jew, or an Asian or West Indian or Chechen." 

The propagandist, after all, trades in his inciting soundbites even as he knows the truth lies elsewhere.  Like the cheap magician, it's all about the misdirection.  But a man of Hitchens's education cannot possibly be unfamiliar with, to cite merely the best known example, The Nuremberg Laws which were careful to distinguish mischlinge - Jews of mixed parentage - down to agonizingly specific degrees.  This assertion - which underpins much of Hitchens's racial "philosophy" - is something he frequently leans on and is so patently absurd - more sophistry from the master - that it scarcely requires repudiation.

Except that Amis and Hitchens both do require repudiation, most firmly perhaps for floating this insidious notion of a "thought experiment."  This was anything but.  This was the expression of a particularly ugly strain of racism from which Amis was clever enough to try to deflect criticism by prophylactically suggesting, in essence, "I don't really mean this, of course, but ... "  And that's total shit and he should not be allowed to get away with giving himself a very clever cover from which to spew this invective.  There were surely a lot of "thought experiments" taking place in interwar Germany, as well.  Here Hitchens goes so totally off the rails that it's clear that 9/11 and Islamophobia have permanently deranged him.

The problem with the notion of a thought experiment - aside from the sheer, calculating disingenousness of the thing - is that it also provides cover not just to Amis but to plenty of others who have, perhaps, experienced similar thoughts and feelings.  But instead of summoning our better angels to challenge ourselves on why such beliefs, though seductive, are finally simplistic and repugnant emotional responses, Amis creates a safe harbor for indulging in this kind of trash.  And Hitchens should know better than to deploy his considerable rhetorical gifts to, as the headlines of his piece has it, "defending the indefensible." 

But the sad truth I've come around to at last is that Hitchens no longer knows better.  He has been irredeemably and irretrievably twisted by world events and has drowned in his own Kool-aid.  The greatest loss is that, for all his considerable gifts, he can no longer persuade.  He aims his salvos to the like-minded rabble in the cheap seats, and walks off the stage patting himself on the back for his cleverness without converting a single mind.  This trait infects all his work these days - God is Not Great, while occasionally splenetically entertaining, will not sway a single undecided.  And isn't that at least one key measure against which a true rhetorician or polemicist measures success?

Reading Hitchens's essay, I was reminded of a line from Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, in which the protagonist Henry expresses his frustration at another piece of considerably less elegant political hackery.  "Words don't deserve that kind of malarkey," he says.  "They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos."  It's been years since Hitchens built a bridge to anything, and it's hard to believe the same man could still write like this as recently as 2000:

"There's a quavering note here which, ironically in its way, contrasts with Abe Ravelstein's robust and amoral and defiant and very American style; a style redeemed from being merely reactionary by its understanding of the ancients, and the understanding (to which it incidentally or accidentally assists us) that intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilized man."

Well, Hitchens hasn't adopted that particular pose, that's for certain.  And if you accept Churchill's definition of a fanatic as one who won't change his mind and can't change the subject, it seems that Hitchens has finally crossed over to the side he so despises.  And I, for one, lament the loss.

HELP VILLAGE BOOKS

We heart our local bookstore and buy there frequently.  If you're anywhere on the westside of L.A., please come up and visit Village Books and lend your support.  It's astonishing to me that this neighborhood can't support such a wonderful independent.  If you're an author perhaps you'll consider an event here.

OUTTA HERE

We're done and starting our holiday weekend, with a fair pile of reading including the aforementioned The Brothers Karamazov as well as the new Benjamin Black, Peter Carey and a thick choking stack of back periodicals.  Plus another copyedit pass at Harry, Revised.  So we wish you all a safe, happy holiday as we step out into our completely internet-free, computer-free weekend.  We'll see you back in these parts on Monday.