Howevermany Books Challenge Round-up #5

Yeah, I know, it's only been a couple weeks since my last round-up; and I do not begrudge you your right to question my motives in succumbing to the temptation of timeliness. In my defense I can only say that the book I'm reading right now is going to own my soul for at least the next couple weeks, the fallout from which makes this the last possible best moment to say anything semi-intelligible (never mind intelligent) about the last few books I've read. Plus, reading books and then talking about them? It's sort of what I claim as my "thing". (Though, yes, talking about books I haven't read is, certainly, more immediately entertaining.)

Also, it's as great a time as any to point out that I'm now number one (I'm number one! I'm number one! I'm number one!) on Google for use of the word "howevermany", further proof that I make reality a more awesome place to be.

Let's dance.

63. Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore.
    
    I already said stuff about this book.
    
    ...
    
    Oh, man. This is going to be the worst round-up ever.



64. Gilbert Sorrentino, Aberration of Starlight.
    
    Oh good! I didn't say anything about this one yet. Woo! Remember, kids: you can slack now or you can slack later, but you can't slack retroactively!
    
    Here's the thing, here's how I can forcefully destroy any belief you have that I know lots of things and am therefore justified in making broad sweeping claims about literature (which I'll make with or without justification): I didn't know anything about Gilbert Sorrentino before this month. I knew he had a name; and I knew I'd heard his name before--fairly often, in fact; and I knew that the tone in which people spoke or wrote his name was laden with respect; and yet, none of that ever got through the lead bucket I call my skull to trigger anything electric in the loose collection of burnt out light bulbs I call my brain. My obliviousness is amazing, in restrospect; I didn't even realize until after I finished the book that Sorrentino passed away earlier this year, so I can't say I'm reading his stuff now because of that.
    
    What finally set my synapses synapsing about Sorrentino was an article by Gerald Howard (available online) in a back issue of Bookforum, an unread-since-delivered stack of which I restlessly flipped through one sleepless night in an attempt to gain at least some return on the optimistic investment I'd once made in a year's subscription. (Gerald Howard himself might be the Jay-Z of modern literary essays for all I know, all I know being the Sorrentino article and an earlier essay about Thomas Pynchon and Gravity's Rainbow, also available online, both of which are entertaining, fascinating pieces of writing-about-writers-and-writing, the connection between the two in their sharing an author being as accidental a discovery on my part as anything else I've ever noted.) The Howard article on Sorrentino did a good job of getting me to pay attention to some basic information about the writer: his work is modernist or pomo or formalist or whatever we're calling whatever these days; he wrote a lot of books; he sounded damned fascinating; his writing was not what you might call "mainstream". More important, the article lodged within me a sharp desire to read his stuff myself. Of course, "Sorrentino presents a daunting number of points of entry to the interested newbie reader," as Howard says, before suggesting two books, Aberration of Starlight being the first.
    
    And so with Aberration I started. And, yeah, it's a real good book. The problem is is that on my end it felt sort of like I was reading less a book in its own right than I was reading a missing link in a chain I sometimes don't remember exists. Reading this book felt like I was seeing one of many possible connections between the more experimental or post-modern writers of the old school--your Pynchons, your Faulkners, your Joyces, whoever else I'm blanking on and should be mentioning here--with the descendant writers of the current (or, well, 1990s) school--your David Foster Wallaces, your Mark Z. Danielewskis, your Dave Eggerses. What I'm trying to say is it felt a little like history homework, in the way so many things (winners, losers, and formal stylistic techniques) seem obvious in retrospect.
    
    It wasn't until after I finished the book that I realized, wait, that was a really fascinating piece of fiction. It was emotionally engaging, entirely without regard to whatever came before or after it. In other words, I sort of feel like a jackass for reading it with such critical detachment. (Maybe I'm being harsh on myself; it wasn't like I was wearing a lab coat and handling the book with tongs.) What makes the book work, what makes it good? Gerald Howard's the guy who got me into it, and he puts it much better than I could, so I'll let him tell you. There's not much I think I could add to this:
    
    

    Everything about the book tends toward the paradoxical. The Rashomon-like perspectives, rather than fragmenting one's sense of the events, coalesce to give the reader a sense of a larger, sadder unity than any standard approach could possibly yield. The shopworn phrases in which the characters speak and think never rise above the level of banal period cliché--a chicken with its head cut off, like it or lump it, butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, etc.--their dead speech rendering the proceedings more convincing and more poignant than any "original" language would. The formal scheme, once grasped, rather than feeling arbitrary, channels the emotional force of the book's events in poignant fashion. Sorrentino performs in this book a miracle of art, transmuting an episode that in anyone else's hands would be small and tawdry and amusing, at best, into a window onto four lives that feel too sad to be anything but real.

    
    
    ("Sad" is so the perfect word, there.)
    
    Based on Aberration, I do look forward to reading other books by Sorrentino. You can add him to the list of authors whose back catalogues I'll work my way steadily, if randomly, through, over time.



65. Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
    
    Reading Francine Prose writing about literature is like watching Rachel Ray cook a thirty minute meal. It all goes well enough at the time, and that's fine, that's cool. It's not until afterwards, when you think about what you just saw, that you realize how impressive it is she was able to do so many different things simultaneously without lopping off a finger.
    
    I'll leave explication of the Rachel Ray portion of this equation as an exercise for the reader. (Hint: Yours Truly can't even talk and walk simultaneously without slamming into walls.) What Prose excels at is demonstrating the "no rules" limits of literature by grabbing examples from a wide range of sources, and hyping the virtue of close reading while making the distance between what you feel in your gut when you read a book and how you would explain the reasons for those feelings seem atomically insubstantial. It's what she doesn't fess up to in the book, that she's really damn good at explaining what's happening in any given excerpt in a way that, when you read what she writes, feels like exactly like what you would have said, if you'd bothered to set yourself to the task of saying it yourself. In this respect there is still a difference between close reading and good writing about literature--a difference that, if it didn't exist, would mean litbloggers would have nothing to bitch about when they read the Sunday newspaper book review sections. Even in the reading of and talking about books, there will always be room for practice.
    
    I did like Prose's book well enough. I zipped through it a bit quicker than a book which extols the virtue of slow, close reading might deserve. It's not a prescriptive text; she's more interested in showing you things you might consider looking for in a book than in telling you exactly how to do it. (Think "Keep your eye on the ball" vs. "Keep your hands an inch from the base of the bat, keep your feet shoulder-width apart, and relax your grip". Or, non-metaphorically, think "Keep your eye on the words" vs. "Here's how you diagram a sentence.") As I said somewhere up there, a strength of her approach comes in the breadth of examples she offers, and in reading her dissections of what happens in those examples, all of which serve the goal of showing that, in fiction, lots of things happen in lots of different ways. (Also note she sticks to positive examples, for the most part; for the one or two "Whoa, that's a horrible thing to do" rules she lays out, there's a hundred "Hey, this is totally sweet" examples.) So, no, it's not exactly anything the busy beaver reader doesn't already know, in theory; yet, it's great stuff to be reminded of, now and then, and so I think this is a book I'll come back to, now and then (once I pick up a paperback copy), as it would likely hold additional value as a book to pull off the shelf when stuck in a writing jam, or stuck between other reading books.
    
    Oh, and something else Prose is great at, is tricking you into wanting to read a lot of stuff she uses excerpts from. Yeah, my To Be Read list was longer coming out of this book than it was going into it.



66. Mark Z. Danielewski, Only Revolutions.
    
    I read this book and I said essentially good things about it. And while I haven't gone back and read all the reviews yet, you know a book like this, there's going to be some nasty things said about it. Like, get your orange vests ready, because Danielewski just opened up hunting season; that kind of nasty.
    
    Over at LitKicks, Jamelah Earle opens fire. I can't really respond to her argument, which basically amounts to "too hard, not rewarding"; it's fair enough. I think I can safely say that we agree that House of Leaves is the better of the two books; it's certainly the one I'm more interested in re-reading all the time, even though I didn't get the "natural woman" vibe off it. I guess you could say it made me want to go to Sears to fondle power tools with one hand while shaving my face with the other.
    
    Uhm, anyways, go read Only Revolutions and make up your own mind. Nobody's going to say anything truly, stunningly intelligent about it for a while yet, anyway, so you've got time.



67. Gilbert Sorrentino, Red the Fiend.
    
    Like you, like any sensible human being, I enjoy being punched in the face. I like it when complete strangers walk up to me on the street and curl their fingers into a fist which they quickly and forcefully jab into my eye. What sucks though is that on an especially prolific day, when it seems like everybody I meet follows the "Punch me in the face" instructions on the sign that I perpetually wear around my neck, there comes a point when the punching, it stops being fun. After forty or so uppercuts, one-twos, and haymakers, you become a little numb. You secretly wish people would stop punching you in the face, while committing yourself to enduring what remaining punches the day has to offer, in the hope that maybe by the time you lay your bruised, broken head on your pillow, someone will remind you of how awesome being punched in the face can be.
    
    It's pretty much the same thing with Red the Fiend, the other book Gerald Howard recommended as a starting point down the Sorrentino trail. For about forty pages, it's brutally brilliant stuff. After that, I didn't care anymore. There's a brief spate of the book that focuses on the grandfather, and that's good, but it's nothing I'd recommend anyone else fight their way forward far enough to experience themselves. If you like Aberration, it's worth reading some of Red just to get what it is about the grandmother character from the first book (Red being a spiritual sequel to Aberration) that so messed up everyone around her. But once you grow bored with the sickness and violence of it, go ahead and put the book down, because you're not missing much else after that point.



68. Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone.
    
    I know I'm supposed to hate it. I know I'm supposed to be all irate that this isn't a novel, and it's all self-important and self-involved, and blah blah blah, but you know what? When you cut through the crap (cough cough, shut up already about Oprah, cough cough), the guy writes great prose. I don't care that the book "suffers from a lack of intensity and mundane source material" because in this case his sentences are all candy sans calories and therefore tasty and harmless. That's it. That's all. Treat it less like a Jonathan Franzen Book and more like that bonus disc of out-takes and rarities that came with the main album (cough cough, The Corrections, cough cough). You know the disc I'm talking about: the one you listen to once before forgetting it exists. It's okay, it's what we all do.