Hey gang. My review of Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem is up at Identity Theory. It starts like this.

There was recently an interesting discussion at The Quarterly Conversation about what constitutes good literary criticism. J.C. Hallmann suggests that his fellow critics ought to approach literature not in the way critics do, but in the way writers do, in that writers are “perfectly comfortable saying that they simply liked a book—or disliked it.... Writers set out to celebrate the work rather than exhaust it....” In response, the editors quote Harold Bloom, who “gives us a phrase that is quite possibly the ideal definition of a critic: ‘the strong reader, whose readings will matter to others as well as to himself.’”

Reading these essays helped me find a way to write about Jonathan Lethem’s eighth novel, Chronic City. I think from these essays I took the permission I needed to plainly state here three things that I know already in my head and heart. First, I am not the strong reader I might like to be. Second, I found Chronic City tedious, boring, and uninspiring. Third, the second might find cause in the first.

Head over to Identity Theory for the rest.

"Man, did you miss a big story," he greeted Doc.

"You too, man."

"I'm talkin about sets of fifty-foot waves that wouldn't quit."

"'Fifty,' huh. I'm takin about Charlie Manson gettin popped."

They looked at each other.

"On the face of it," Vehi Fairfield said finally, "two separate worlds, each unaware of the other. But they always connect someplace."

"Manson and the Surge of '69," said Doc.

"I'd be very surprised if they weren't connected," Vehi said.

"That's because you think everything is connected," Sortilege said.

"'Think'?"

- from Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

...all of which, combined with this, (via The Rake, with whom I agree), has me feelin' a might bit pe-cyul-yar...but such is to be expected. This is actually (a third of the way in at least) a straight-forward novel, a novel's novel, if you will, and it's great fun, even if I'm only partially attentive, life being life, and all.

Also, the new Dan Chaon book is really good so far, and is making me glad I'm reading fiction again.

For the Murakami-ites up in this joint: we'll start seeing 1Q84 in 2011. So you've still got time to read the other 186 books of his that have been translated into English before then.

Francine Prose goes a long way toward making me want to actually read that optimistically purchased hardback of 2666 that's been sitting on my shelf for an age and a half now.

The National Book Award finalists for 2009 are out. I haven't read a single one of them. Win! There's still time this year, right? Somewhere?

Dear publishing industry,

Please give me a two-book publishing deal. I hear you are making them available now.

Sincerely,
I Know Some Words

I've recently become obsessed with TED.com which is crack cocaine for modern nerds, I swear. (Somehow I'd never heard of it before, and then in the span of two weeks, it was recommended via two separate channels. I win.) They've just posted a talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It's on the danger of a single story and it's quite good and it makes me feel quite unaccomplished, boo.

I've been reading nerdy books about type and design principles lately, and when I've not been doing that, I've been doing every thing in my power to avoid doing certain assignment-ish things I really ought to have been doing (sorry, Matt), but I'm starting to put a for-the-moment wrap on these initiatives, and I stopped reading the graphic novel I'd been reading that had been my de facto fiction of the moment, because that book sucked hard, and so now I just need to start finishing working my way through Don Watson's American Journeys, which is basically okay so far if not yet entirely revealing to a native American (what are these "racial divides" of which you speak? religion and business are critical to our society, you say?) if yet still somewhat indicative of how we might come across to the occasional outsider, but there is still time, all of which is fine because once that time is up I will feel in-the-clear to go back to reading fiction, which I find quite exciting, because I'm still planning on reading the new Dan Chaon and Thomas Pynchon books, after which I might just give up for the year, because, uh, duh. Knock on wood.

2009, gang:

"It's pretty clear that even though the recession likely has ended, not too many people are likely going to be humming that Bobby McFerrin tune, 'Don't Worry, Be Happy,'" said Sean Snaith, an economist at the University of Central Florida.

It's Banned Books Week. I guess this means we all get to pick some books and ban them? Cool, alright, then, I ban Wuthering Heights, because that book is terrible. What are you banning to celebrate this national time of literary cleansing?

Issue number two of The Collagist, the online literary journal from Dzanc Books, just went live. It includes, in there amongst a lot of other stuff you and I both need to check out, my review of Some Things That Meant the World to Me by Joshua Mohr, which begins like so:

Joshua Mohr’s debut novel, Some Things That Meant the World to Me, is where Michael Gondry would go if he went down a few too many miles of bad desert road. Replace the director’s Science of Sleep-style clouds-of-cotton whimsy with harsh whiskey and hot sand and you get a sense for the dark world Mohr constructs. Dark, yet not pitch black: he pits his vision of ugly realities against one of basic human kindness. It is this tension that gives his engaging novel its emotional power.

Part of me is like, I should be all professional-chill about this, but, whatever: the book excites me and writing about it excited me and The Collagist excites me and being a part of it excites me and yeah.

(Meanwhile, in totally unprofessional shameless fanboy eyes-gaping "If you had told me that one day I would see..." news, if you had told me that one day I would see my name just below Elizabeth Crane's name on a contributors' notes page...)

Lydia Kiesling likes Kazuo Ishiguro.

So: I just read this novel (I'll tell you about it someday) (an actual, as opposed to a typical, promise) that left me...less than pleased. Significantly unentertained, let's call it. This seems to be a theme, not for everything I read (obvs), just, rather, for enough stuff, just enough to be disconcerting.

Anyways, it seems like a fine time to take a brief break from novels. Ish. Sort of. I'm about to start a graphic novel, actually. (Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchell, for those of you keeping score.) (I've also got a couple manga-ish things on my coffee table that I picked up a couple optimistic trips to the library ago. We'll see how that pans out.)

I've also got an advance of the new Alice Munro short story collection, Too Much Happiness, in one of these piles (put there solely as an accidental casualty of the war the various bags I drag back and forth and up and down this city have been conducting on my left shoulder of late), which I just started a few weeks ago, and I liked the first two stories, though I could in fact not yet tell you why. It is--and I say this in the tone of one who realizes that in some circles this may be considered rather outré--my first experience with Munro. I'm possibly maybe a couple stories away just yet from having that sort of weird revelatory experience I had when I finished either Interstate or Frog by Stephen Dixon and I realized how much stuff there was of his to go find and read (and, incidentally, I just read the opening chapter of his post-Frog opus 30 recently, and, I guess I've taken enough of a bit of a break from him by this point that reading that made me want to read the whole rest of the book right then and there?) but I can certainly see how the impulse might be there.

And also in the coming weeks, in the hours that remain between freaking out about this project and freaking out about that project, I'm going to be offering some thoughts on Don Watson's American Journeys, American Journeys being the sort of book they call "non-fiction" and Don Watson being the sort of chap they call "Australian," both of which are things not typically found in my living room, so. I'm reading the book as part of this effort and I know the effort calls for a review post but I think it's going to hard to talk about a book about journeying without doing a little meandering. Should be fun.

(And then once I get through this stuff and the other stuff and some things I'm blowing off fucking everything and I'm reading Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply and it's going to be great and will leave me feeling highly entertained, I think, based on all I've heard to date. So!)

Hey gang. I wrote a review of Laird Hunt's new novel, Ray of the Star. It's up now at Identity Theory.

The review starts like this:

Consider the f-bomb: you can trace the trajectory of the story’s heart by the elegant deployment of that dexterous cuss word across the pages of Ray of the Star, Laird Hunt’s latest (arguably best, unarguably most emotionally engaging) novel. What initially reads with an unsettling, weighty effervescence—comparisons to the massive quantities of sparkling water the characters drink as if it is about to be taxed out of their brackets are certainly appropriate—accumulates context through circumstance so that it grows steadily more sinister with each passing page. By the end, it is razor-sharp, and fast. It cuts.

...and I'm not really sure how the rest goes since it feels like I wrote it in the middle of a blackout fugue-state (this being my first actual published review, for those of you keeping score at home) but from what I gather I rather liked the novel and, if asked for my professional opinion (which, ha ha, I was?) I would (and, ha ha, did?) recommend it to others.

(You can also head over to The Collagist to read an excerpt of Star.)

Genre writers know their audience, and it’s a large one: John Grisham sold 60,742,288 books during the 1990s. That’s certainly nothing to sneeze at, and I won’t do that here. But that audience, for reasons that sometimes seem obvious and sometimes are madly mysterious, is almost universally not interested in the same things we are.

We’re interested in good stories.

Hey, wasn't there a genre flick a while back about some kid who saw self-involved snobs who were the death of all things holy and good about literature only they didn't know they were the death of all things holy and good about literature? It was probably too busy making a lot of money and supporting families to bother having any emotional impact on anybody who saw it though.

Seriously: wha? The mind boggles and the goggles they do nothing. LOLz via.

Speaking of Stephen King, I really could not say it better myself, so, quote: "First of all, our inner 14-year-old is like unto bursting..."

I am a huge Kazuo Ishiguro fan. By the time I die I will have read all of his books at least multiple times; I'm currently two-sevenths there. (Which sounds so much less morbid when it's not put into fractions like that.) As a fan, I've set myself certain stringent restraints as to how I approach Nocturnes, his first short story collection. I will not read all of the stories at once (at least the first time through). Check. This is because he does not publish books often and if one of them is going to be a short story collection--the sort of thing that is built to be savored far more than any novel--then I will take advantage of that to the best of my ability. (I at one point considered reading only one story a year until his next book comes out. I did not consider that for long. Savor, yes. Torture, no.) I will also only read a story if I can sit down, read the story, and then stand up in a single swoop in a single afternoon. Check, so far, at least. I want to have the experience of reading something uninterrupted, of taking in a piece of literature the way I take in a film at the theater: whole, and without interruption. This latter restriction helps reinforce the former in that it's the rare afternoon (it has to be afternoon, as well, because the coffee has kicked in, but the evening is still distant, no threat to the present) these days when there's literally nothing to do but read as if life depended on it. Life always depends on it, but let us not go there.

This past weekend I had one of those afternoons and I read the third story from the collection, "Malvern Hills," and I enjoyed it, in and of itself. It is difficult to speak about the ways it may or may not relate to the other stories in the novel--said reading will have to happen when I do read the whole book all together over the span of a week--beyond the fact that there is music and that there are people and that there is the decided presence of Ishiguroian language made oddly more intriguing (rather than less intriguing as one might fear) by the decided absence of that thing he does--that thing he does in The Remains of the Day and the novels that preceded it, that thing that he does in The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans, that thing he does in Never Let Me Go--as if he set out with the specific intent of writing wonderfully without making any "that thing" of it or critical to it. Though who knows, the second read-through may reveal the unrecognizable skin that holds the bones of the stories to each other; failing to notice this now makes me no less of a fan, and all the more someone who will, or at least fully well expects to, be continuously rewarded by the works of a writer for years to come. Which said, the next story in the book is the title story, and it is the longest story in the book, and perfect afternoons sometimes have to be made, not awaited.

What's great about Generosity by Richard Powers (which comes out in about a month) isn't that it takes a one-note subject of debate like genetic research ("Genetic research will destroy our humanity!" "Genetic research will unlock our humanity!" "Fuck off!" "You too!") and succeeds in making it seem kind of nuanced and interesting; I'd call that merely (if highly) commendable. What's great about it is pretty much everything else that happens in its just-under 300 pages. The fact that it crams a love story and a classroom satire and all the punchy, dramatic, smart language you can handle and a sly look at human literary cliches and a metafictional gambit that succeeds in revealing the ultimate heart of the story while still actually managing to be clever-as-all-get-out (but in a wowee-uneasy-feeling Stephen King Dark Tower series metafictional sort of way) into one book is terrific. Also terrific is the fact that the book manages to talk about today--like, blogs, today, like, NaNoWriMo as a fact of some people's lives, today, like, Google yourself, today, like, the banking industry is imploding, today; today, today--in a way that feels so fresh and current and sharp and like it was written by someone who actually gets all the stupid shit we pass off as modern-day culture and writes about it in a way that shows he gets it without making it clear that he's telling us, hey, guys, I get it; it all just becomes setting, the setting, the only one that for 300 pages matters, the one that makes you look around and think, the hell of it is he's right. For that the book may (will?) age quickly, is at this moment becoming a historical document (and it hasn't even been released yet), and for that I really have to suggest that you should really look into reading it sooner rather than later, because it's a book that's got me all jazzed up and I think you just might a chance at enjoying it a little, yourself, too. By which I mean I am recommending this book. By which I mean: there were chills. Are.

Oh, and I'm halfway through the new Richard Powers book, Generosity: An Enhancement, and I'm pretty sure it rules. Like, get fired from your job because you didn't go in so you could keep reading it, that kind of rules. I scored a free advance copy via Twitter. I hate my life.