Collected Miscellany

I don’t really have anything deep to say about Phillip Roth or Tom Wolfe as novelists and cultural commentators, despite the title to this post, but I do have a couple of links.

As Phil noted earlier, THE FIRST ANNUAL TMN TOURNAMENT OF BOOKS concluded today with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas taking first prize (Ed must be happy).

The latest issue of Policy Review has reviews of two of the novels in the tournament. Tom Wolfe’s latest, I Am Charlotte Simmons, beat out Wake Up, Sir and Birds Without Wings before losing to the eventual champion. Rosecrans Baldwin was clearly a bit conflicted about IACS:

But, but, but . . . I’m being intentionally cruel because Wolfe is so often cruel and manipulative with his characters and I, for all their implausibility, loved them. I loved Charlotte Simmons. During a cross-Atlantic flight I read 400 pages without breaking once to pee. There are dozens of pages so rich and well told it’s remarkable they live in the same story. Wolfe owns frat parties. He owns big-school basketball, particularly the play on the court. He wrote an extremely ambitious novel that’s so often wrong it’s amazing the copy editor didn’t personally demand back Wolfe’s advance (Elmore Leonard should have been brought in to fix dialogue), yet I loved it and the book stuck with me for days.

Continue reading →

I don’t really have anything deep to say about Phillip Roth or Tom Wolfe as novelists and cultural commentators, despite the title to this post, but I do have a couple of links.

As Phil noted earlier, THE FIRST ANNUAL TMN TOURNAMENT OF BOOKS concluded today with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas taking first prize (Ed must be happy).

The latest issue of Policy Review has reviews of two of the novels in the tournament. Tom Wolfe’s latest, I Am Charlotte Simmons, beat out Wake Up, Sir and Birds Without Wings before losing to the eventual champion. Rosecrans Baldwin was clearly a bit conflicted about IACS:

But, but, but . . . I’m being intentionally cruel because Wolfe is so often cruel and manipulative with his characters and I, for all their implausibility, loved them. I loved Charlotte Simmons. During a cross-Atlantic flight I read 400 pages without breaking once to pee. There are dozens of pages so rich and well told it’s remarkable they live in the same story. Wolfe owns frat parties. He owns big-school basketball, particularly the play on the court. He wrote an extremely ambitious novel that’s so often wrong it’s amazing the copy editor didn’t personally demand back Wolfe’s advance (Elmore Leonard should have been brought in to fix dialogue), yet I loved it and the book stuck with me for days.

Continue reading →

“When I have a lull in my life, I write, and that’s fairly often,” Lauren Bacall, 80, said, according to the AFP. “Nothing is ever as good as it is in the beginning,” she added. “I’d suddenly had this fairy-tale life, at such a young age, who would have thought something like that could happen?”

Nominated by the Mystery Writers of America for an Edgar award, Chirs Haslam’s Twelve Step Fandango takes the reader on a fast trip through Spain’s Gibraltor region. Martin Brock, the main character, scratches out a living dealing stepped on cocaine to tourists along the Costa del Sol. Martin’s a despicable guy, whiny, greedy, disloyal; his circle of friends aren’t friends at all, just fellow travelers through a haze of petty crime, fat lines and communal indolence. When Yves, another non-friend shows up, he ignites the story by dying and leaving five keys of cocaine behind. Martin, somewhat guilt-ridden about the corpse, telephones Paris to see if Yves has any family interested in burying the poor guy; he reaches Jean Marc, a thug more interested in the coke than funeral arrangements.

Twelve Step Fandango is a caper novel. Once Jean Marc arrives in Spain Martin’s world explodes in violence and murder. Written in the first person the story belongs to Martin and his quest for the big score. The plot turns nicely around Martin’s character, well established in the novel’s set-up; Haslam delivers some terrific writing while maintaining a tongue-in-cheek tone about the self-inflicted wounds Martin endures. The style clashes at times with the events being described, but remains true to the premise. No character arc here; we leave Martin as we find him which is the point of the story.

Will Chris Haslam win the Edgar for best paperback original? I don’t think so; he’s up against some tough competition like Domenic Stansbury’s The Confession . It’s Oscar weekend so maybe I’m suffering from pundit’s disorder overanalyzing a somewhat predictable process. I look forward to reading Chris Haslam’s next book whether he wins or not.

The First TMN Tournament of Books concludes Monday, and I think it has been successful. I suppose the goal is reader enjoyment, but maybe they are measuring the sale of the competing books at Powells.com, in which case, I don’t know that it succeeded and they may not tell us. Did you read the results? Could you predict the winners? I couldn’t. From what I heard about I Am Charlotte Simmons in the other reviews, I didn’t think it would make it to the semifinals. In fact, the reason it lost to Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas confuses me a bit. Judge Rosecrans Baldwin rails against it’s ignorance of college life, calling the book a “sloppy, obese, enormously awful, loud-mouthed essay-fiction-mutant-whore with moments of insight and honest-to-God wisdom.” But he also says it narrowly lost to Mitchell’s book, which was “wonderful,” “extremely entertaining and frequently thought provoking.” I don’t quite understand that, but despite having not read IACS, I wonder if the root of the complaints lies in individual experience.

Round Two Judge John Warner says the character Charlotte Simmons, “an academically gifted but sheltered girl from Sparta, N.C., is also patently fraudulent. At one point, another character jokes that it’s as if Charlotte is from Mars. I’d say it’s more as if she’s from a small box on the surface of Mars. She is naive to the point of impossibility.” And Baldwin adds, “Charlotte Simmons is a big fat failure, so frequently ignorant of its own cast that it’s impossible to believe in the characters.” Maybe they’re right, but I wonder if Simmons’ naivety is the same genuine innocence I had growing up.

The people on my side of the tracks, as it were, thought innocence was a good thing. We called it purity. We knew, to some degree, that we were sheltered and wanted to avoid the pain or confusion of experiencing those things which were forbidden to us. Of course, we were a pretty small crowd, and we mingled with people who were unsheltered–that is, they were less sheltered than we were. But we could see the tracks. We chose to stay on our side. Maybe the same side Simmons came from. I don’t doubt we all look unbelievable, even freakish, to some on the other side.

Somewhere I’m sure I read The Inimitable Jeeves labeled as a novel. If it is, then it’s a novel in the sense that it’s a book of fiction, not “a sustained work of prose fiction a volume or more in length” as my encyclopedia would have it. This book is close to a collection of short stories, one per chapter, all being somewhat related. It is Wodehouse’s first book on Bertram Wooster and his valet, Jeeves. It was published in 1923. The characters had been introduced in a 1917 story, “Extricating Young Gussie,” from the book, The Man with Two Left Feet

In The Inimitable Jeeves, Bertie spends most of his and Jeeves’ time saving an old school chum, Bingo Little, from nuptial disaster. Bingo has the unfortunate habit of falling in love with every other woman he meets. A few of them are worth his affection, but their merits do not outweigh Bingo’s idiocy or the schemes of ne’er-do-wells who find him an obstacle to their plans.

“If there’s one thing I like,” Bertie says, “it’s a quiet life.” But he doesn’t get it by plotting to impress the wrong girls, betting on the length of sermons, or hosting his Oxford-enrolled cousins during their holiday. How many cats can fit in the guest room of a London flat? You’ll find out in this hilarious book. Two of the stories had me laughing too hard to read.