Favorites, and, A New Favorite

I.

The idea of favorites has been bugging me lately. As in, I don't know what mine are. I think it's a matter of definition: somewhere along the line, I maybe bought a little bit into deconstructionism. It makes it hard to pick out absolutes when all you see is difference. You say a favorite is a thing liked the most. I ask: Liked how? Liked when? Liked to what end? It all becomes muddy if you think about it too hard. Which I encourage you not to do. I prefer to be a source of joy, not nasty Tylenol-commercial-level headaches.

Still, tough to talk about things (such as, ooooo-o-o-o-oh, books, to take one purely random example) that can be liked without hinting at the fact that there exists some kind of ultimate Platonic-ideal form of "liking," as well as whatever the opposite of that is. (I skipped out on Philosophy after my 101 college class. The Linguistics class I took really didn't count for much more than my own amusement. I mean, that stuff was sexy and all, pretty to look at, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't exactly accessible to me in any useful way. Which, come to think of it, probably summed up how I saw most campus sorority girls. But that's another post, entirely.) During my reading this week, I came up with an alternate, and practical, way of defining who my favorite authors are. You can play along at home: ask yourself, about a specific author, whether you would drop anything and everything in your hands (excluding babies, and very expensive and fragile crystals, both of which, in a pinch, can be sold on the black market, to enable the purchase of new books) in order to read a new book by that author at the moment of publication.

I rather like the strict black-and-white nature of the question. Off the top of my head, I can only think of a handful of authors I'd say yes to: Kazuo Ishiguro, Jennifer Egan. I mean, duh. Jeff Noon, Steve Erickson, yes. Mary Gaitskill, I think I would like to give the nod to her, here. I'm sure I'm missing plenty of names here (and there are more than a few who I would like to read new books by but who I might feel okay waiting on). I like that it's a small number of names, in any case. Makes me look like a smart chap, the sort who has standards, and is therefore deserving of your trust.

Things get knotty after that: while, for some definition or another, Infinite Jest could be considered one of my favorite novels, David Foster Wallace himself is curiously a no to drop-everything question. But! He will become an unholy-levels-of-dread-and-affirmation level yes the moment I learn that he is going to publish a novel. I suspect the same thing is going on for Jonathan Franzen, too. I suspect it is assholes like me who make it hard for authors like these fellows to publish new novels. For which I apologize, while also shrugging, and saying, hey, what can you do, right?

Some other big TDAOC-endorsed names also get voted no, like William T. Vollmann and Stephen Dixon, though they would be voted yes to another potential (and far more broad) favorites classification question, that of whether you can conceivably see yourself systematically working your way through the author's entire back catalogue, however large it may be, in however much time it might take. This question, perhaps obviously, leads to a far longer list of names, and makes me look like a far less-exacting, more-well-read, quite-likeable sort of chap. Plus it opens the field of play to dead authors, who, like blocks of expensive cheese, are categorically incapable of writing new books, but remain very nice in their own peculiar ways.

I've gone through this little exercise as a lengthy lead-in to an exciting conclusion: I think I've found a new favorite author. And not just in the loose Tier Number Two sense (though, definitely, yes, to that), but in the rather more elite "Whip out your tiki torches and loud shirts because we're having ourselves an up-all-night author party" Tier Number One sense.

Honest. It's really and truly all sorts of exciting. What can I say: some people get the power up and win the game; I fall in love with authors. (Well, when I'm not getting the power up and winning the game, at least, which, yeah, that also sort of rules.)

I just, uh, hope Kazuo Ishiguro and Jennifer Egan aren't jealous types.


II.

A. L. Kennedy.

I read her most recent novel, Paradise, sometime in 2005, and I liked it plenty. I guess it took a long walk through the wilderness to see just how much I liked her writing, though, since I only now got around to reading an earlier novel of hers, Original Bliss. To be certain, I've read plenty of damn fine books in between those two. And yet, after returning to her familiar yet distinct prose, I now feel a little bit more guilty about not getting back to her stuff sooner.

The voice of Original Bliss is sparser than I remember that of Paradise being, which makes sense in that the prose of Paradise had to keep up with the woozy drunken mindset of its narrator, while that of Original Bliss had to work in a much tighter (but hardly less complex) space. Yet it seems to me that the two books share some obvious amount of genetic material. There's some definite sibling-resemblance thing going on there. As if this lurched-in-the-gut feeling both books left me with could have only come about through some family-taught technique.

This is where, were I studious, I'd spill out ten thousand words or so about Original Bliss, the story, the themes, the ideas, and the novel's voice, and I'd point to examples of everything I'm talking about. (Examples of simply amazing writing abound throughout the book. I had to force myself, now and then, to stop adding asterisks to the margins, and acknowledge that really, I just wanted to draw a big huge star on the front cover, because, just, all of it, the whole damn thing. Really.) It's that kind of book. It's a short one, which offers more rewards than it can seemingly contain.

But, you know I'm a lazy blogger and all, so instead I'm going to try to say just one thing about the book here. I love the way Kennedy's prose tosses out these bursts of sudden, devastating color, in a way that seems blunt but breathlessly effortless. It's like she finds holes in her prose and fills them with zigs and zags and a general sense of looseness that, really, how can all that be there, on the page? How can prose feel both like tight structured prose and a real live brain?

Comes down to insane excellence in word choice, I think. There's a point early in the book that, when I reached it, made me pretty much totally lose my shit. The two main characters of the novel are having a conversation. They make an awkward (understatement!) pair, one that probably should never have happened, but somehow did. During their conversation, when things were beginning to go a little more fluidly for them, there was a moment of silence, one that "blundered" between them.

"Blundered," seriously, are you shitting me?

Maybe you had to be there, but it's the kind of moment that, it wasn't so much a word usage, as a thermonuclear gigaton word deployment, it's so deadly, and perfect, and accurate, and summary of not just that moment of the book, but, in effect, every preceding page of the novel. I imagine Kennedy had to get some kind of military clearance before going there. Like, what form do you fill out for that? For tossing a live grenade into the middle of a bubble bath that was already a bit too hot to begin with?

Here's the compliment that, I guess, only makes sense if you're not just a reader, but someone struggling to write your own fiction, as well: that "blundered," it immediately, and almost unfairly, rose the bar I've set for myself and my own fiction writing. Which would be great if I were a published somebody. But I'm not even close to being that yet, so, you know: wow, damn. Discouraging, or challenging? I feel optimistic this week, so I'll go with challenging, but, damn, had I been in a particular down mood, when I'd hit that sentence, I'd have hung up on my writing career before it ever thought about maybe considering giving me a call.

Not that that's the only explosive moment of the book. Through and through, these words breathe, and speak, and make me want to go on, and on, and on about them, but I read another book right after it, one that I also want to say things about, maybe sometime in the next month, and, well. Yeah.

Yeah.

Day, A. L. Kennedy's new book, comes out in April. No idea if that goes for the U.S. or not. I would not mind if it did.