It happened at Costco.
I hadn't had breakfast, but I had been eating from the buffet of free samples throughout the store. My blood sugar started to drop and I started making poor decisions, such as picking up a Value Pack of Häagen-Dasz ice cream bars.
It was while I was in my low blood-sugar stupor that I passed the giant pile-o-books near the sweat pants and chocolate bars.
Because this was Costco, the books were all sold in shrink-wrapped Value Packs. On one side of the table there were shrink-wrapped series: Game of Thrones, 50 Shades of Shit, Twilight, Hunger Games; on the other side of the table were books shrink-wrapped by author: John Grisham, Michael Crichton, Dan Brown, John Green.
When I saw the John Green collection I thought, "Hey.. Doesn't everyone love John Green? I wonder why. Wasn't An Abundance of Katherines banned or something? Maybe I should read his stuff." I decided to pick it up, along with a Value Pack of Kinder Bueno Bars so I'd have something to snack on on my way home.
Once I got home and ate something other than a Kinder Bueno bar, I started feeling buyer's remorse. I started wondering who I could gift The Fault in Our Stars to; I really did not feel like reading that book. I was going to read An Abundance of Katherines only because it had been banned, but I had no intention of reading the other two books: Paper Towns and Looking for Alaska (though I did in the end, but that's a different blog post).
Anyways: the book.
It wasn't bad.
I wouldn't say it was the world's best book, or even one of the better books I've ever read, but it was OK.
The plot is that this guy Colin is some kind of genius, but he shows promise without making good on it. He's apparently been dumped by 19 Katherines (hence the title of the book) and is now trying to crack some bizarre mathematical Katherine-heart-winning code to win Katherine #19's heart back. Of course we all know that that isn't going to happen. Some contrivance does happen to get him to go on a road trip and then meet a girl who's boyfriend's name just so happens to also be Colin. The girl is more or less a Manic Pixie Dream Girl with some extra personality and depth of character, and things go on as you'd expect these things to go because this book has all the depth of a shallow wading pool.
Now, that said, it's a pretty cute book. The writing is well-done; it's funny; it's fun. Because it's well-written and the characters are well-developed, you get fairly involved with them, and you start to care for them as deeply as you will ever care for somewhat shallow teen protagonists.
There really is no twist to this book. It's a straight up road-trip-come-romance. There's no deep meaning, no metaphors for anything, and no insights into the human condition. It's basically the equivalent of good quality chocolate-vanilla-swirl soft serve. How this book managed to get banned is entirely beyond me.
Monday, August 10, 2015
Monday, August 03, 2015
Charlotte Street: A Cheap Ripoff of High Fidelity
If there were any justice in this world, someone would have called out Charlotte Street for the cheap ripoff of High Fidelity it is.
Unfortunately, there is no justice. Instead we have people saying that Danny Wallace was "influenced" by High Fidelity, or "drew inspiration" from it, or that Charlotte Street is "reminiscent" of High Fidelity. But believe you me, this is a cheap ripoff if I ever saw one. If this were a song, it would be on Rob From High Fidelity's List of Five Hit Songs That Were Cheap Ripoffs of Genius Originals.
Charlotte Street isn't even a clever cover or reimagining like Clueless (Emma), or 10 Things I Hate About You (Taming of the Shrew), or Arctic Monkey's cover of Drake's Going
Home, or anything by Weird Al; no, it's just a cheap ripoff, like My Sweet Lord, or Blurred Lines, or Led Zeppelin's entire catalogue (let's see if anyone is actually reading this). The damned book even has the same "twists" as High Fidelity. What it doesn't have that High Fidelity does is insight, wit, character development, and excellent writing; and what it does have that High Fidelity doesn't is two-dimensional characters, a pointless road trip, a stupid scene at a wedding, and a pat happy ending.
If the book had been tremendously good or spectacularly bad, I may not have regretted buying it, but it's a mediocre book that appears to have been written for the purpose of being made into a movie script. It has all the depth and charm of The Help, but with less suspense because you've already read this book.
Charlotte Street angers me more and more as I think about it. I wish I could ask for my money back.
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| What blurred lines? |
Charlotte Street isn't even a clever cover or reimagining like Clueless (Emma), or 10 Things I Hate About You (Taming of the Shrew), or Arctic Monkey's cover of Drake's Going
Home, or anything by Weird Al; no, it's just a cheap ripoff, like My Sweet Lord, or Blurred Lines, or Led Zeppelin's entire catalogue (let's see if anyone is actually reading this). The damned book even has the same "twists" as High Fidelity. What it doesn't have that High Fidelity does is insight, wit, character development, and excellent writing; and what it does have that High Fidelity doesn't is two-dimensional characters, a pointless road trip, a stupid scene at a wedding, and a pat happy ending.
If the book had been tremendously good or spectacularly bad, I may not have regretted buying it, but it's a mediocre book that appears to have been written for the purpose of being made into a movie script. It has all the depth and charm of The Help, but with less suspense because you've already read this book.
Charlotte Street angers me more and more as I think about it. I wish I could ask for my money back.
Monday, February 02, 2015
Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World: It Gets Better
The most heartbreaking story you can tell is that of love rebuffed, because it isn't just that the person doesn't love you back: it's that they refuse your love, and then use it against you, mocking you with it.
It's all going along swimmingly until a few months before high school graduation when Stephen realizes that he's in love with Mark. Then it all goes south, and fast.
The real strength of CTatEotW is the way Janet E. Cameron captures what it's like to suddenly realize that you're different and that you're in love with the wrong person: the self-doubt; the self-destruction; the anger; the sadness; the heartbreak. But most importantly, the dawning that everyone knew what was going on before you even did. That sinking feeling that everyone was in on the joke except you -- that everyone has been talking about you your whole life without your knowledge.
It's a feeling that anyone who's ever come out is familiar with. That feeling of the floor falling out from below you as you realize that everyone has known and has been talking about you for years. When that feeling is compounded with the rebuffed feelings, it's so much more devastating.
But it's not all gloom and teen angst: there's fun and games and making out and telling off parents and partying with friends. And each of the supporting characters in Stephen's story are fully realized, real human beings: his mother, who had to raise him on her own; his absentee father, who is just your typical self-involved academic; Lana; Lana's boyfriend; Mark; and even Mark's girlfriend, Stacey. They all have motivations, back stories, feelings, ambitions, and regrets. None of them feel like stand-ins or place-holders. They're all characters in their own right. You almost want entire novels written telling their stories.
CTatEotW is more than just a few months spent with Stephen as he finally becomes who he is and stops pretending to be someone else. It's the story of how his self-discovery is felt by everyone around him, too, making this a really great coming of age novel.
Oh, the other good thing is that the story has a happy ending: like the song and video for Small Town Boy, he moves to a city and leaves the homophobic asshats behind.
Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World (CTatEotW) does a great job of telling the story of complete and utter emotional devastation that is love rebuffed.
Stephen spends the first seven years of his life living on a hippy commune, getting homeschooled. His family then moves to a small town where he doesn't fit in and is ill-equipped to interact with the kids in school. He gets picked on a lot until he gets a champion in the form of Mark, a tough kid who needs help with his homework.
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| Cinnamon toast is really tasty, btw. |
It's the 1980s, so no one is out yet -- not even George Michael or the guys from Frankie Goes to Hollywood. It probably isn't even a hate crime yet to beat up people simply for being gay. In other words, regardless of what Our Man Jeff would lead you to believe, it is not the best time to discover you're gay.
Stephen has a terrible time coming to grips with the reality of who he is. And he feels he can't tell anyone. He doesn't know if the person he tells will be supportive or revolted by his revelation. He confides in only one person: his other best friend, Lana. But then Stephen goes down a self-destructive spiral and betrays her, leaving him even more isolated and alone than he was previously.
It's a feeling that anyone who's ever come out is familiar with. That feeling of the floor falling out from below you as you realize that everyone has known and has been talking about you for years. When that feeling is compounded with the rebuffed feelings, it's so much more devastating.
But it's not all gloom and teen angst: there's fun and games and making out and telling off parents and partying with friends. And each of the supporting characters in Stephen's story are fully realized, real human beings: his mother, who had to raise him on her own; his absentee father, who is just your typical self-involved academic; Lana; Lana's boyfriend; Mark; and even Mark's girlfriend, Stacey. They all have motivations, back stories, feelings, ambitions, and regrets. None of them feel like stand-ins or place-holders. They're all characters in their own right. You almost want entire novels written telling their stories.
CTatEotW is more than just a few months spent with Stephen as he finally becomes who he is and stops pretending to be someone else. It's the story of how his self-discovery is felt by everyone around him, too, making this a really great coming of age novel.
The Bell Jar: I Feel Nothing
The Bell Jar is one of those books that everyone tells you you need to read: "You must read The Bell Jar!" "What do you mean you've never read The Bell Jar?" "How could you not have read The Bell Jar?!"
So I read The Bell Jar. And it did nothing for me.
In case you're like me and had only heard of The Bell Jar from references in pop culture, it's the story of Esther, a discontented college-aged woman in the 1950s. Esther's got this cushy internship at a women's magazine, but she thinks it's bullshit. She has these friend she goes out with, but she thinks they're shallow. She wants to get laid (well, actually, she decides that getting laid is something she wants to do), but has no idea how to go about it. And, finally, she hasn't gotten into the program of her choice in college.
Basically, she might as well be a character in any movie about twentysomethings ever made, except with fewer yucks and more ptomaine poisoning.
Basically, she might as well be a character in any movie about twentysomethings ever made, except with fewer yucks and more ptomaine poisoning.
Anyways, she decides she needs to commit suicide with the same dreary determination as she decides that she needs to get laid.
After a few failed attempts (I can't decide if they were supposed to be funny or tragic or just lame), she almost manages. Unfortunately for all of us someone finds her before she's completely dead and the book doesn't end there.
After a few failed attempts (I can't decide if they were supposed to be funny or tragic or just lame), she almost manages. Unfortunately for all of us someone finds her before she's completely dead and the book doesn't end there.
This is where we get into Phase 2 of The Bell Jar where she spends some time in an asylum where she gets electroshock therapy. She meets more random people. I care for everyone even less than previously. No one seems to get better or grow as a character. I feel incredibly numb and start to wonder if I'm not suffering from depression myself. Then someone dies. And then I really hope that all the characters eventually die so that the book will end.
But then Esther starts feeling better -- or the doctors say she's feeling better -- and then the book ends.
And then I think about how much I really do not care whether or not Esther is going to be OK.
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| That space invader is more compelling. |
She's basically unhappy.
It would have been more poignant if they had institutionalized her for being unhappy. But as it stands, they institutionalized her for trying to kill herself, which is not unreasonable.
I think my biggest obstacle to feeling anything about The Bell Jar was that I really didn't care about Esther. Esther wasn't developed enough as a character for me to care about her at all. She was like my coworker's niece's next door neighbour's cousin who lost an internship and didn't get into college and then ended up in the hospital for a psych evaluation. That's really sad, and I'm really sorry for her, but I've gotta go grab some lunch, so we'll talk later.
Sunday, September 21, 2014
Green Girl: Accidental Brutalism
Bad Things happened after I finished reading Middlesex.
Middlesex was such a long, pointless, arduous, frustrating, and unsatisfying read that I was actually disoriented after I read it. I was like, "where do I go from here?"
Green Girl had been sitting on my night table for months, partially read, but prettymuch abandoned. I wasn't sure whether I liked the book or not, and I was pretty sure I hated the author. But I couldn't bring myself to read anything else. My usual literary palate cleansers -- Bridget Jones's Diary; Tales of the City; Bachelor Brothers' Bed and Breakfast Pillow Book -- seemed too flighty and lighthearted to lift the malaise I felt after reading Middlesex.
That's why I decided to finish off Green Girl.
Before I get into Green Girl, I want to tell you -- if you exist; if anyone is reading this anymore -- about the building where I worked during my graduate degree. The building was brand-new. It had been designed by a famous architect. It had been profiled in the newspaper. It won an award. The only problem with the stupid building was that it was totally inadequate for actual people. The rooms were small and awkward, with the occasional column appearing smack in the middle of a room. No one who worked in the building liked it, so when an architecture student wanted to interview us about the building, we all jumped at the opportunity.
It turned out that the architecture student really didn't care how we felt about the building. She just wanted to write a fan piece about her favourite architect, and her favourite building. During the course of my conversation with her, I said that the building wasn't just unusable, it also looked sloppy. "The columns aren't even finished," I complained. "They still have the scribbles the construction crews left on them!"
The architecture student wasn't deterred. She went to the column in the room we were in (it was awkwardly located in a corner where a desk could have gone) and lovingly caressed it. "You don't understand," she said. "They were supposed to be finished, but when they unmolded them, the architect saw how beautiful the concrete was, and decided to keep them raw."
I get the idea that raw concrete can be beautiful. I'm probably one of the few people on the planet who doesn't hate Brutalism. If you're not familiar with the term, Brutalism is the architectural style that celebrates raw concrete. It was all the rage sometime from the late sixties to the early eighties. There is probably at least one out-of-place Brutalist structure in your city, sticking out like a sore thumb.
Anyways, the thing with Brutalism is that the concrete is textured and left unfinished intentionally. Columns aren't left unfinished after the fact, quasi-accidentally. And Brutalist esthetics usually don't mix well with modern glass-and-steel buildings.
Now that we got that out of the way...
I really felt like Green Girl was a bit of accidental Brutalism.
The book is ostensibly about Ruth, a cute American chick, living from paycheck-to-paycheck in London. She moved to London after a bad breakup, I think. She lives a pretty pointless existence as a shopgirl, going out to bars with her roommate, going on random hookups, and basically not doing much. You're not sure what's up with her family aside from her mother being dead. You feel that she's probably slightly depressed.
Anyways, none of that matters because it seems that how the book is written is more important than what it's about. It's a kind of post-modern, experimental novel with the author, Kate Zambreno, hanging around, like some bad version of that movie, Stranger Than Fiction. Zambreno's voice is right there in the book. It's not just narrating the story; it's narrating the author's intent. It's telling you how much the author hates Ruth; it's telling you that the author is purposefully giving Ruth a hard time; it's basically telling you that Zambreno really, really, doesn't like cute girls and thinks that they're all vacant idiots who refuse to be anything but something to be owned or admired. You can feel the contempt oozing from the author's voice.
To be honest, it feels like Zambreno was writing through writer's block. She wrote for herself, putting down notes and comments for herself, telling herself how she felt about Ruth and the situation and what to do next. Then, as she re-read her draft, she decided to leave the notes and comments in the text because it was so beautiful. Just like the architect of the building where I did my research.
Now Jeffrey Eugenides's novels could be grouped together in a volume entitle, All About Jeff, but he at least made some kind of crazy attempt to pretend that that's not what's happening. Zambreno, though, has actually put herself in the novel, front and centre, to the point where I started to wonder if she wasn't the subject of the book. She wants the reader to see how the sausage is made. "See how clever and post-modern I am," you almost hear her scream over the din of the boring prose.
Green Girl is like the TV show Girls if Lena Dunham had decided to just narrate the show instead of star in it, and if she told you how shallow and pointless her friends were instead of making a statement about how we all feel rudderless and unmoored in our twenties.
I wouldn't say reading it was a waste of my time, but I probably won't be recommending it to anyone.
Middlesex was such a long, pointless, arduous, frustrating, and unsatisfying read that I was actually disoriented after I read it. I was like, "where do I go from here?"
Green Girl had been sitting on my night table for months, partially read, but prettymuch abandoned. I wasn't sure whether I liked the book or not, and I was pretty sure I hated the author. But I couldn't bring myself to read anything else. My usual literary palate cleansers -- Bridget Jones's Diary; Tales of the City; Bachelor Brothers' Bed and Breakfast Pillow Book -- seemed too flighty and lighthearted to lift the malaise I felt after reading Middlesex.
That's why I decided to finish off Green Girl.
Before I get into Green Girl, I want to tell you -- if you exist; if anyone is reading this anymore -- about the building where I worked during my graduate degree. The building was brand-new. It had been designed by a famous architect. It had been profiled in the newspaper. It won an award. The only problem with the stupid building was that it was totally inadequate for actual people. The rooms were small and awkward, with the occasional column appearing smack in the middle of a room. No one who worked in the building liked it, so when an architecture student wanted to interview us about the building, we all jumped at the opportunity.
It turned out that the architecture student really didn't care how we felt about the building. She just wanted to write a fan piece about her favourite architect, and her favourite building. During the course of my conversation with her, I said that the building wasn't just unusable, it also looked sloppy. "The columns aren't even finished," I complained. "They still have the scribbles the construction crews left on them!"
The architecture student wasn't deterred. She went to the column in the room we were in (it was awkwardly located in a corner where a desk could have gone) and lovingly caressed it. "You don't understand," she said. "They were supposed to be finished, but when they unmolded them, the architect saw how beautiful the concrete was, and decided to keep them raw."
I get the idea that raw concrete can be beautiful. I'm probably one of the few people on the planet who doesn't hate Brutalism. If you're not familiar with the term, Brutalism is the architectural style that celebrates raw concrete. It was all the rage sometime from the late sixties to the early eighties. There is probably at least one out-of-place Brutalist structure in your city, sticking out like a sore thumb.
Anyways, the thing with Brutalism is that the concrete is textured and left unfinished intentionally. Columns aren't left unfinished after the fact, quasi-accidentally. And Brutalist esthetics usually don't mix well with modern glass-and-steel buildings.
Now that we got that out of the way...
I really felt like Green Girl was a bit of accidental Brutalism.
The book is ostensibly about Ruth, a cute American chick, living from paycheck-to-paycheck in London. She moved to London after a bad breakup, I think. She lives a pretty pointless existence as a shopgirl, going out to bars with her roommate, going on random hookups, and basically not doing much. You're not sure what's up with her family aside from her mother being dead. You feel that she's probably slightly depressed.
Anyways, none of that matters because it seems that how the book is written is more important than what it's about. It's a kind of post-modern, experimental novel with the author, Kate Zambreno, hanging around, like some bad version of that movie, Stranger Than Fiction. Zambreno's voice is right there in the book. It's not just narrating the story; it's narrating the author's intent. It's telling you how much the author hates Ruth; it's telling you that the author is purposefully giving Ruth a hard time; it's basically telling you that Zambreno really, really, doesn't like cute girls and thinks that they're all vacant idiots who refuse to be anything but something to be owned or admired. You can feel the contempt oozing from the author's voice.
To be honest, it feels like Zambreno was writing through writer's block. She wrote for herself, putting down notes and comments for herself, telling herself how she felt about Ruth and the situation and what to do next. Then, as she re-read her draft, she decided to leave the notes and comments in the text because it was so beautiful. Just like the architect of the building where I did my research.
Now Jeffrey Eugenides's novels could be grouped together in a volume entitle, All About Jeff, but he at least made some kind of crazy attempt to pretend that that's not what's happening. Zambreno, though, has actually put herself in the novel, front and centre, to the point where I started to wonder if she wasn't the subject of the book. She wants the reader to see how the sausage is made. "See how clever and post-modern I am," you almost hear her scream over the din of the boring prose.
Green Girl is like the TV show Girls if Lena Dunham had decided to just narrate the show instead of star in it, and if she told you how shallow and pointless her friends were instead of making a statement about how we all feel rudderless and unmoored in our twenties.
I wouldn't say reading it was a waste of my time, but I probably won't be recommending it to anyone.
Sunday, April 13, 2014
Middlesex: Two (Sucky) Novels in One
It's two novels,
two novels in one
it's the novel it wants to be
and the novel it's become
That prettymuch sums up Middlesex, the giant mess of a novel Jeffrey Eugenides (our man Jeff!) put out between the Ode to Obsession that was The Virgin Suicides, and the I-Want-A-Cookie tantrum that was The Marriage Plot.
Middlesex is the story of hardship and woe that is the immigrant Greek experience. The sad story of eviction, destruction, exile, belonging, and rebuilding. It's like a Greek version of Gone With The Wind, except with a less than compelling love story, and fewer feisty heroines. (Disclosure: I never read Gone With The Wind. I only saw the movie. But still.)
Middlesex is the story of an intersexed man named Cal, who tells the story of how he was brought up as a girl named Calliope, or Callie for short. His is a story of discovery of self. A bildungsroman, if you will.
Middlesex is both those books, and neither is particularly good. When shmooshed together in a kind of black-and-white cookie of a novel, they're even worse.
I know Jeff was trying to be clever in creating a book that is two things at once, like Cal, the narrator and (kinda) protagonist of the book because he said so in a longwinded interview he gave to a fawning journalist. But really, if he needs to tell you that, then he has screwed up the execution. It should be obvious by reading the book that that's what the book is.
Anyways, I probably could have overlooked all of this had the writing been any good, but the writing was amateurish and ham-handed, and the book was duller than one of those chapters Dickens wrote because he had to.
And yet Jeff won a Pulitzer Prize for this mess.
sigh
Anyways, in that same longwinded interview with the fawning journalist, Jeff said that he wanted Middlesex to be critiqued for the book it is, rather than for the book people wished it were. If this were the book I wished it were, this would be a much shorter blog entry. This would also be a blog entry where I'd say, "OMG! This book was awesome and it truly captured the gender confusion that comes from being raised as a girl and then being told at puberty that you're really a boy!"
However, this is not the book it is. The book Middlesex is is not a very good book.
For all of the research Jeff put into writing Novel #1 about the Greek Immigrant Experience - let's call it "Jeff: A Fictionalized Family History of my Dad's Side of The Family" ("Jeff: AFFH") - he really didn't put much effort into finding out what it meant to live as a girl in a traditional Greek family in the late 60s and early 70s.
In Jeff:AFFH, which takes up the bulk of the book entitled "Middlesex", Cal tells us about how his grandparents ended up in Detroit. He tells of how they left their tiny town, headed for Smyrna just in time to watch it burn down, and got on a boat headed for America.
Cal, our first person narrator, seems to know every detail about what happened to his (incestuous) grandparents, right down to their innermost thoughts and feelings for each other - innermost thoughts and feelings that his grandparents never shared with the rest of the family. Ever.
Cal also knows the details of the life of family friend, family physician, and co-refugee of Cal's grandparents, Dr Philobosian (the token Armenian for the sake of acknowledging the Armenian genocide).
It's very interesting that Cal knows the details of Dr Philobosian's history because Cal admits that Dr Philobosian never told anyone about what happened to his family. In fact, Cal doesn't just know the general outline of what happened to Dr Philobosian's family; he knows the gory details!
Cal knows that Dr Philobosian had gone out during the sacking of Smyrna and came home to his entire family slaughtered - including his daughter's who'd been violated and maimed.
How the fuck could Cal know this if Dr Philobosian never told anyone, not even Cal's grandparents?
Well, in the longwinded interview with the fawning journalist, Jeff claimed that it's obvious that sometimes Cal is making shit up because there's no way he could know the things he's recounting.
And to that I say, "whatever".
Cal's narration is not written in the style of someone who is taking liberties with the truth. I think Cal says at some point that he will be filling in the gaps with his own imaginings, but his narration is not actually written that way.
Cal's narration is written with certainty and clarity. There is no indication that any of it is made up. There's no wink to the reader. No, "I can only imagine why Dr Philobosian threw himself into the frigid waters in the port of Smyrna." No, instead it's a very certain "this is why he did it."
But let's, for the sake of argument, assume that Cal is making this shit up and this is his flight of fancy. Why the fuck would he invent such a gruesome death for Dr Philobosian's family, and especially his young daughters?
Actually, let's step back a minute and think about the decision Jeff made when he wrote that in.
Authors make choices. It's true that their characters have to ring true and be true to themselves, but authors can choose what they're going to do with a narrative.
In the case of showing that war is hell, an author can choose for the humble doctor to be attending to all kinds of emergencies all night as the invading army destroys his city. Each time he shows up to a call, though, he either finds dead people, or people so badly off that he can't possibly help them. Maybe at some point he's in a house at the same time as the soldiers and witnesses them murder some people. The doctor manages to escape from the house, but he's so scared that he immediately runs off to the port to escape the city, abandoning his family to whatever awful fate awaits them. He gets to the port, but he's consumed by guilt. He throws himself into the water hoping to die, only to be rescued by a Greek couple who are also fleeing. He wishes they hadn't saved him. His guilt gnaws at him his whole life, and even informs his behaviour as a physician once he gets to the US.
On the other hand, the author can be cheap and do what every made-for-TV movie, pulp novel, comic book, and cheap video game does, and have the doctor find his wife and daughters raped, and the entire family murdered. Basically, introducing a whole set of characters for the sake of killing them off to provide a motivation for the doctor.
I can just see some dumbass editor saying "this is so powerful" as they read this part of the book, insisting that it be kept in even though Dr Philobosian's story prettymuch begins and ends right there.
Sure Dr Philobosian tags along with Cal's grandparents to Detroit and becomes their family physician, but for the rest of Jeff: AFFH he's just some background character mentioned in passing. There really was no point in giving him this backstory. He was just there to show that war is hell, and that there was an Armenian genocide.
The rest of Jeff:AFFH is duller than dirt. It just outlines the establishment of businesses, the purchase of houses and Cadillacs, and the forceful entry of the family into middle class American society. It doesn't really go anywhere, and it isn't really told with enough depth to allow the reader to get invested in the plight of these characters.
And, on top of it all, Jeff channels his inner M. Night Shyamalan and throws in a twist or two. Unlike M. Night Shyamalan twists, though, these twists are entirely pointless. So let's move on to the second novel, Cal: The Dude with Ambiguous Genitalia ("Cal:TDAG").
The only thing good I can say about Cal:TDAG is that at least the writing wasn't as flabby as it was in Jeff:AFFH.
As someone who writes technical documents no one reads, I'm not actually allowed to call myself a writer. However, there's an art to writing good technical documents. If you want your document to be readable and usable, the writing has to be tight. That means that after you've written the document, you have to make the world's most boring edits: removing passive language; removing adverbs; removing unnecessary words; removing unnecessary information.
I spend my work days making sure that you can't pinch an inch on my writing, so I feel insulted to come home to the rolling mounds of flab that is Middlesex. Every paragraph in the book could have been trimmed and made about 1/3 as long.
I understand that Cal is supposedly the one "writing" this book, and he's in love with his own voice, but just because your narrator/writer is a bad writer, doesn't mean you have to let them take over your novel. Unless (a) you didn't realize this was happening, or (b) you actually don't think that this person is a bad writer.
Which brings me to the same problem I had with The Marriage Plot: does Jeff know what he's done? Does Jeff know that Cal is an asshole? Does Jeff know that Cal can't write? Did Jeff do this on purpose, or was this an accident? Or, more scarily, did Jeff not realize at all that Cal is an asshole who can't write?
I have no idea.
In any case, the novel picks up its pace in Cal:TDAG. It gets a little tighter, and becomes slightly less boring.
Unfortunately, Cal:TDAG is about as believable as Letters to Penthouse.
Jeff has apparently been grossly misinformed about what it means to be brought up as a girl. He appears to think that girls growing up in Greek families in the 1970s had perfectly idyllic existences, except for having to have their body and facial hair removed. Girls raised in nice Greek families never wondered why they had to set the table while their brothers got to watch TV. They never felt that hot sense of inequality as they watched their freedom slowly disappear as they got older, while the opposite happened to their brothers.
This was not on their mind. All they really noticed was that they needed to get waxed.
Maybe Cal doesn't remember resenting his brother. I mean, that's possible, right? I mean, just because he can recount his (possibly fictionalized?) family history in glorious detail doesn't mean he can remember his own story? Right?
Though Cal does remember that he felt that his brother getting drafted into the army was sexist. Because that's really the heart of sexism right there.
Did I not mention that Cal has a brother? He's referred to as "Chapter Eleven" for the entirety of the book with no mention as to why.
Because apparently Cal knows all and reveals all, except that.
sigh
Anyways.
So we have Callie learning to be a woman by going to get waxed, and it seems that Jeff has also been misinformed about what a waxing salon is like. He seems to believe that women lie naked on beds in a communal room as they are being waxed.
This is not true except in letters to Penthouse or maybe in Lesbian porn made for heterosexual males.
Jeff apparently also learned about girls' locker rooms from teen movies from the 1980s. In real life, though, girls in high school locker rooms do not walk around completely naked. They usually hide behind towels and curtains. Most girls learn how to change clothes without ever exposing their breasts or vulvas to the world. It's a skill women use forever, actually. It comes in handy at the gym, or when you have to participate in the office squash tournament.
And, finally, SWEET CHEESUS ON A CHEESESTICK, JEFF, OBVIOUSLY CALLIE WOULD HAVE FELT WEIRD ABOUT CRUSHING ON A GIRL! Prior to, say, the past five years or so, there has been no time in history when a girl would crush on another girl and not worry that she wasn't normal. There were after-school specials, Very Special Episodes of sitcoms, and scenes in teen movies about this very topic because IT WAS CONSIDERED SOMEWHAT OFF-NORM!
But none of this matters because Callie's really a boy.
All the sexual ambiguity Callie experiences gets wrapped up nicely by the reveal that Callie is in reality a straight dude. Lucky for him. And lucky for Jeff because he would have been in big trouble had Callie expressed an interest in boys. I don't think Jeff would have been able to write through that. His brain would have exploded if he had to move away from his own reality.
Now, as for the matter of the gender ambiguity, apparently that isn't really an issue either. Cal realizes he's a boy and presto he's a boy! He gets a haircut, buys a suit, learns to swagger, and voilà: instant boy!
It doesn't matter that he's been a girl his whole life. No! He's a boy! He likes girls. He… I don't know what he does. But he definitely is a boy. He knows he's a boy because a piece of paper said he was a boy. He never doubts that maybe the doctor is full of shit. He never thinks, "OMG! How can I be a boy? I like dresses! I'm bad at sports!" Nope. He just runs away from home to become a boy.
And once he is reunited with his family, they're totally cool with his transformation.
I'm guessing that what Jeff meant that people shouldn't judge the book for what it isn't, is that they shouldn't say, "In real life this would never have happened", but accept that the family accepted Cal's change.
I could have accepted it, you know, if it had been covered in more than a couple of paragraphs. I could not accept it, though, as it was written. It was just glossed over, and brushed aside, like Jeff had no idea how this would even play out. The scenes between Cal and his brother especially feel lazy. I can accept that Cal's brother would accept Cal, but I need more than a single stilted conversation.
The writing in Cal:TDAG was so lazy at the end that I didn't care about Cal or his family.
All I actually cared about was why Chapter Eleven was called "Chapter Eleven".
Monday, November 18, 2013
Eleanor & Park: Preferable to The Scarlet Letter
I can't remember how I heard about Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell, but somehow I did. At the time I didn't know it was a Young Adult (YA) novel. Nothing about it suggested that it was a YA novel other than the fact that the main characters are teenagers. I had picked it up on a whim and it wasn't in the YA section of the bookstore.
I only found out it was a YA novel when a "mom" who is "also a librarian" told me it was. At first I thought she was mistaken because she had never heard of Daniel Handler, nor his alter-ego, Lemony Snicket. What kind of librarian has never heard of Daniel Handler? (Answer: Librarian Moms Who Live In The Suburbs.) But then I looked it up and found out that not only was it a YA novel, but it was a smutty, evil, banned YA novel! In that case I had to read it!
YA novels and I never really got along. Here is an incomplete list of the YA novels I read between the ages of 12 and 17, including what I thought of the books at the time:
After a while, I also realized that YA novels were incredibly poorly-written. YA, trash, and science fiction/fantasy all suffer from the problems of excessive exposition, poor character development, and shoehorned endings. They aren't your best books. This is probably why your teen will usually move from YA to trash, or YA to scifi/fantasy before reading something that's actually good.
Unless they never read anything actually good and instead contribute to the popularity of 50 Shades of Shit.
But I digress.
Eleanor&Park isn't that kind of YA novel. It's better written than most books you run into in the "regular" lit genre, and the plot is neither moralizing nor saccharine. And yes, there is swearing because teenagers swear. I hated those YA novels (and Teen TV Shows) where teens didn't swear or talk to each other in ways that they'd never be caught dead talking to their parents. Like, really, your teens are going to talk like characters out of Leave It To Beaver, and yet learn Important Lessons about why you shouldn't drink? I don't think so. (Can I just take a moment to hate Degrassi Jr High? Thank you.)
The story of Eleanor&Park isn't anything that hasn't been covered on A Very Special Episode of Any Teen Show (I'm pretty sure some '80s sitcoms even covered this). Eleanor is a kinda chubby misfit from a bad family. She's new in town, and the local kids pick on her. Her stepfather is an abusive asshole who's kicked her out once before and now makes her life hell. She has no place where she feels safe. Fortunately, though, she meets Park, who's also kind of a misfit. He's half Korean. His father looks like Tom Selleck, but he doesn't. He does martial arts, but loves comics and post-punk rock.
Eleanor and Park fall in teen-love and Park defends Eleanor against the raging lunatic haters in the school, and, ultimately, against her raging lunatic stepfather.
Of course, all good things must come to an end and so does Eleanor and Park's relationship.
It's a really cute book. Some parents may get their knickers in a knot because the book describes Eleanor and Park's make-out sessions, but personally I'd be more upset if I caught my kid reading Ender's Game, A Game of Thrones, or anything by Piers Anthony.
Or Dune. No kid should ever read Dune.
Actually, no one should read Dune. Ugh.
The one thing that did annoy me a bit about Eleanor&Park was that each chapter alternates between Eleanor and Park's points-of-view, and Rainbow Rowell isn't skilled enough as a writer to pull that off. You can't really tell without reading the title who's point-of-view you're seeing. Eventually I just stopped paying attention to it and let it go. Had this book been as dead inside as The Help, it would have gotten me mad, but fortunately this book has soul. Rainbow Rowell can do emotion without being melodramatic about it.
I want to end on a small note about what my school thought was appropriate teen reading. When I was 13, I had to read The Scarlet Letter for school. I'm sure you know what The Scarlet Letter is about, but in case you don't, here's a quick synopsis:
I only found out it was a YA novel when a "mom" who is "also a librarian" told me it was. At first I thought she was mistaken because she had never heard of Daniel Handler, nor his alter-ego, Lemony Snicket. What kind of librarian has never heard of Daniel Handler? (Answer: Librarian Moms Who Live In The Suburbs.) But then I looked it up and found out that not only was it a YA novel, but it was a smutty, evil, banned YA novel! In that case I had to read it!
- Everything Ever Written By Judy Bloom: That was fun! But why did her menstrual pads need a belt?
- Ask Anybody by Constance C Greene: What does "Meet you at the laundromat, bring suds" mean?
- I Was a 15-Year-Old Blimp by Patti Stren: So don't become bulimic? Got it!
- After The Bomb by Gloria D. Miklowitz: I'm not sleeping for the next 10years, thankyouverymuch.
- Some random book with "Love" in the title: Don't have sex because the guy will cheat on you? Um...that doesn't sound quite right, but OK? Maybe not. This sounds fishy.
- Nancy Drew reboot books: Her friend the athlete sounds hot, but man these books suck.
- A bunch of survival books mostly centred around boys who seem to be having sex with hot chicks: Hey this book has a chapter titled "Post-Coitus"! This is much better! I wonder if there are more of these in the library...There are! Awesome!
After a while, I also realized that YA novels were incredibly poorly-written. YA, trash, and science fiction/fantasy all suffer from the problems of excessive exposition, poor character development, and shoehorned endings. They aren't your best books. This is probably why your teen will usually move from YA to trash, or YA to scifi/fantasy before reading something that's actually good.
Unless they never read anything actually good and instead contribute to the popularity of 50 Shades of Shit.
But I digress.
Eleanor&Park isn't that kind of YA novel. It's better written than most books you run into in the "regular" lit genre, and the plot is neither moralizing nor saccharine. And yes, there is swearing because teenagers swear. I hated those YA novels (and Teen TV Shows) where teens didn't swear or talk to each other in ways that they'd never be caught dead talking to their parents. Like, really, your teens are going to talk like characters out of Leave It To Beaver, and yet learn Important Lessons about why you shouldn't drink? I don't think so. (Can I just take a moment to hate Degrassi Jr High? Thank you.)
The story of Eleanor&Park isn't anything that hasn't been covered on A Very Special Episode of Any Teen Show (I'm pretty sure some '80s sitcoms even covered this). Eleanor is a kinda chubby misfit from a bad family. She's new in town, and the local kids pick on her. Her stepfather is an abusive asshole who's kicked her out once before and now makes her life hell. She has no place where she feels safe. Fortunately, though, she meets Park, who's also kind of a misfit. He's half Korean. His father looks like Tom Selleck, but he doesn't. He does martial arts, but loves comics and post-punk rock.
Eleanor and Park fall in teen-love and Park defends Eleanor against the raging lunatic haters in the school, and, ultimately, against her raging lunatic stepfather.
Of course, all good things must come to an end and so does Eleanor and Park's relationship.
It's a really cute book. Some parents may get their knickers in a knot because the book describes Eleanor and Park's make-out sessions, but personally I'd be more upset if I caught my kid reading Ender's Game, A Game of Thrones, or anything by Piers Anthony.
Or Dune. No kid should ever read Dune.
Actually, no one should read Dune. Ugh.
The one thing that did annoy me a bit about Eleanor&Park was that each chapter alternates between Eleanor and Park's points-of-view, and Rainbow Rowell isn't skilled enough as a writer to pull that off. You can't really tell without reading the title who's point-of-view you're seeing. Eventually I just stopped paying attention to it and let it go. Had this book been as dead inside as The Help, it would have gotten me mad, but fortunately this book has soul. Rainbow Rowell can do emotion without being melodramatic about it.
I want to end on a small note about what my school thought was appropriate teen reading. When I was 13, I had to read The Scarlet Letter for school. I'm sure you know what The Scarlet Letter is about, but in case you don't, here's a quick synopsis:
Hester Prynn is a Puritan living in Massachusetts in 16-something. She's married to some guy she's never met and who hasn't arrived from England yet. Hester gives birth to a baby who is, obviously, not her husband's. The father is the town reverend. Instead of coming clean, the asshole hides the fact that he's the kid's father. Sure he asks Hester to out him, but really dude's a giant coward. Meanwhile Hester's husband arrives, but nobody knows who he is. He proceeds to make everyone's life a living hell because he's that kind of asshole. Everyone goes about their miserable lives feeling guilty for prettymuch everything until they die. The book is a thick, joyless read, full of Piles of Evil.If I had to chose whether to let my thirteen year old read Eleanor&Park or The Scarlet Letter, I'd fucking choose Eleanor&Park any day of the week. At least in Eleanor&Park neither Eleanor nor Park are cowards, and it's pretty damned clear that the assholes making everyone's life hell are the bad guys.
Thursday, November 07, 2013
If On A Winter's Night A Traveler: If On An Afternoon A Reader
If on an afternoon a reader sits down outside to read If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, and the friend she was waiting for arrives and asks her if the book is any good, what should the reader answer? What did the reader answer?
The reader buried her head in the book and sobbed in exasperation, "I don't know!"
I wish I could tell you whether or not I liked If On a Winter's Night A Traveler.
At first it wasn't bad. I was on board with the whole idea that the main character, The Reader, started reading a book, but found that it was missing all but its first chapter because of a binding error. I was OK with the archaic descriptions of tearing apart the pages of the folios of a new book. I have never done this ever, and none of my parents' books -- many of which predated the publish date of If On A Winter's Night A Traveler (IOAWNAT) -- seemed to have had their pages physically ripped apart, but maybe in Italy in 1978 books were still sold with their folios uncut.
And it didn't even irritate me at first that even though the book addressed the actual reader -- i.e. me -- in the second person as if it was telling my story, the main character was a sexist heterosexual male. I mean it's not as if Italo Calvino is unique in portraying women as secondary, undeveloped characters in the stories of men. He wrote the book in 1978, a year when everyone thought it was OK that Tony and his pals weren't arrested for rape and attempted rape, so what can you expect, really?
The entire book is the story of The Reader and his attempt to find the rest of the book he's started reading. Each time he thinks he has the rest of the book, it turns out to be the rest of another book. So he basically keeps reading bits and pieces of different books, never actually finishing any of them.
He's accompanied on his odyssey to get the rest of the book -- any of the books, really -- by Ludmilla. The Reader meets Ludmilla when they both go to the same bookstore to get the rest of the original book they were reading -- which is If On A Winter's Night A Traveler. They decide to read the book together.
At first Ludmilla keeps him at arm's length for reasons he can't glean. For some reason The Reader doesn't realize that he's a creepy guy at a bookstore who just asked her for her number. But hey, it was OK to harass women for their phone numbers in 1978. So we'll let that go.
Eventually, though, Ludmilla starts introducing The Reader to all kinds of scholars and whatnot to get to the bottom of all these books they're reading. It's like a real-life version of going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole: you start at the list of Twilight characters and keep clicking on the links until you end up reading about fricative consonants.
I stopped reading around the time when it turns out Ludmilla is the Sultana that some author or agent or something wrote about in his letters about some manuscript, a manuscript Ludmilla may or may not have a copy of.
Now, just so you understand -- whomever you are -- I didn't stop reading the book because it was too confusing. I was able to follow just fine, thank you. I didn't mind the ride.
What pissed me off was that I wasn't sure if I did or did not like the book!
The problem was that each book excerpt was supposed to be a random passage from a book, but each random passage contained too much backstory to be a random passage. Each passage was like a book written by someone with a love for Exposition Fairies. It became tiresome after a bit.
So I was OK with the attempts by Ludmilla and The Reader to find the books, but I really didn't like reading the books these guys found. They were really crappy books.
On top of it all, each book excerpt was written in almost the same post-moderny baroque style as the rest of the book. Maybe I should blame that on the translator?
So yeah, I can't tell you whether or not I liked On A Winter's Night ATraveler because I liked the story, but not its stories. It was like existential angst in book form, but not in a good way.
The reader buried her head in the book and sobbed in exasperation, "I don't know!"
***
I wish I could tell you whether or not I liked If On a Winter's Night A Traveler.
At first it wasn't bad. I was on board with the whole idea that the main character, The Reader, started reading a book, but found that it was missing all but its first chapter because of a binding error. I was OK with the archaic descriptions of tearing apart the pages of the folios of a new book. I have never done this ever, and none of my parents' books -- many of which predated the publish date of If On A Winter's Night A Traveler (IOAWNAT) -- seemed to have had their pages physically ripped apart, but maybe in Italy in 1978 books were still sold with their folios uncut.
And it didn't even irritate me at first that even though the book addressed the actual reader -- i.e. me -- in the second person as if it was telling my story, the main character was a sexist heterosexual male. I mean it's not as if Italo Calvino is unique in portraying women as secondary, undeveloped characters in the stories of men. He wrote the book in 1978, a year when everyone thought it was OK that Tony and his pals weren't arrested for rape and attempted rape, so what can you expect, really?
The entire book is the story of The Reader and his attempt to find the rest of the book he's started reading. Each time he thinks he has the rest of the book, it turns out to be the rest of another book. So he basically keeps reading bits and pieces of different books, never actually finishing any of them.
He's accompanied on his odyssey to get the rest of the book -- any of the books, really -- by Ludmilla. The Reader meets Ludmilla when they both go to the same bookstore to get the rest of the original book they were reading -- which is If On A Winter's Night A Traveler. They decide to read the book together.
At first Ludmilla keeps him at arm's length for reasons he can't glean. For some reason The Reader doesn't realize that he's a creepy guy at a bookstore who just asked her for her number. But hey, it was OK to harass women for their phone numbers in 1978. So we'll let that go.
Eventually, though, Ludmilla starts introducing The Reader to all kinds of scholars and whatnot to get to the bottom of all these books they're reading. It's like a real-life version of going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole: you start at the list of Twilight characters and keep clicking on the links until you end up reading about fricative consonants.
I stopped reading around the time when it turns out Ludmilla is the Sultana that some author or agent or something wrote about in his letters about some manuscript, a manuscript Ludmilla may or may not have a copy of.
Now, just so you understand -- whomever you are -- I didn't stop reading the book because it was too confusing. I was able to follow just fine, thank you. I didn't mind the ride.
What pissed me off was that I wasn't sure if I did or did not like the book!
The problem was that each book excerpt was supposed to be a random passage from a book, but each random passage contained too much backstory to be a random passage. Each passage was like a book written by someone with a love for Exposition Fairies. It became tiresome after a bit.
So I was OK with the attempts by Ludmilla and The Reader to find the books, but I really didn't like reading the books these guys found. They were really crappy books.
On top of it all, each book excerpt was written in almost the same post-moderny baroque style as the rest of the book. Maybe I should blame that on the translator?
So yeah, I can't tell you whether or not I liked On A Winter's Night ATraveler because I liked the story, but not its stories. It was like existential angst in book form, but not in a good way.
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