Tag Archives: novels

June links: libraries edition

June 4, 2008 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Bowker says that “276,649 new titles and editions” appeared in the U.S. in 2007, up slightly from the year before. So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, anyone? (Note: I haven’t actually read Gabriel Zaid’s book yet). And where’s the space for mine? Perhaps being taken up by Tolkien reprints, leading to the next item…

* Nick Owchar reports on still more efforts to wring cash out of J.R.R. Tolkien. The good news, however, is that the publication of Tales from the Perilous Realm will “gather […] several of the master’s shorter works–“Farmer Giles of Ham,” “Leaf by Niggle,” “Smith of Wootton Major” and “Roverandom”–as well as a book of poems, “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.”” In other words, this will make it far easier for those of us who study Tolkien and avoid perhaps the foul smell of Children of Húrin.

* My dream, achieved by someone else. He has 30,000, and I only 260 – 270. It’s not the size, but how you use it, right?

(Hat tip ALN.)

* More personal library reflections from the Wall Street Journal:

I still possess a great many books. I’m not a book collector, though, not at all — and much less a bibliophile. The discreet charms of the first edition have always eluded me, although I can appreciate a nicely bound volume — as a consequence I own many second and third printings, which generally cost about 95% less. When I have a choice I go for interesting jackets, elegant typefaces, acid-free paper, but above all I prize compactness. Whenever possible I go for omnibus editions. The more books can fit in a single volume, the happier I am. And I mourn the passing of the pocket-sized paperback, which was once allowed to contain all sorts of material and is now strictly reserved for the kinds of books that inspire gold-embossed titles and peekaboo die-cuts. I like to carry books in my pockets, and trade paperbacks are an awkward fit, except in the dead of winter.

Anyway, I like the entire variety of books: thin little plaquettes, 16-volume histories, drugstore potboilers, privately printed crank pamphlets, ancient volumes in unknown languages, sleek new art editions with lots of white on the pages, forgotten doctoral dissertations from German universities in the 1880s, pornography bought by sailors in Tijuana, technical publications with wildly recondite diagrams… I remember a cartoon I saw as a child in which the books jumped off the shelves and had themselves a party in the bookstore in the middle of the night.

* XKCD strikes with this comic.

Memorial Day Links

May 25, 2008 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Mark Sarvas appeared in Seattle, as announced, and… no one showed up except yours truly. Way to go. The good news, however, is that the Seattle Times interviewed him. Alas, the interview leads with a reference to a hatchet job in the New York Times, which I won’t deign to link to here. A snippet of the interview:

Q: I worry that the kind of reading, that trancelike state you achieve when you get deep into a book, is going away in favor of a different kind of reading on the Internet. And what do you think is going to happen with book reviews? Will they eventually migrate to the Net, and how will that affect them?

A: There are different kinds of reading. The kind you do on a couch with a book is different from what you do with your blog.

I share your troubled view of the future — but I think it has absolutely nothing to do with the Internet. This is not just about book reviews; it’s about classical music, architecture, movie reviews.

It’s not a crisis in book reviewing; it’s the fact that we live in an age that I find distressingly incurious — interested in material pursuits, unreflective, narcissistic, shallow. An age when the thing that’s on everyone’s mind is … “Did you see ‘American Idol’ last night?”

It’s nothing to do with the Internet or the loss of newspapers. It’s a much wider critical moment, one that I leave to the cultural anthropologists to figure out.

* James Wood further illuminates what he values and what he doesn’t in fiction while simultaneously (and justifiably!) criticizing bloggers for their too-frequent rush to judgment. If you leave this blog to read it and don’t come back because you’ve spent too much time meditating on what he’s said, I won’t blame you. I’ve got a response rumbling in me, but it’s not ready for publication.

(Hat tip TEV.)

* From Anecdotal Evidence, more preaching to the choir. Granted, I agree with the post, but I’m guessing that the people who should most read it won’t, much like the protests at the NBCC and elsewhere regarding the cutbacks in book reviewing, or those endless damning reports about how we don’t, as a society, read much.

(Hat tip Books, Inq.)

* This video isn’t book-related, but watch it anyway.

Henderson the Rain King

May 23, 2008 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Henderson the Rain King is not my favorite Bellow novel: Henderson’s sojourn in Africa is unconvincing and borders on Orientalism, the novel’s symbolism is heavy, and some disjointed sections feel superfluous, as when Henderson writes letters to his wife, Lily, in Chapter 19, or when he discusses the lion hunts with King Dahfu. Still, even Bellow batting below average scores more hits than most writers at their best, and in rereading Henderson I remember why I like Bellow so much—he’s so alive, and his characters ceaselessly try to expand their own lives and learn to encompass this big thing we call life. Granted, they’re always unsuccessful at the latter, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it’s an impossible quest just to understand life—especially humanity in all its varieties—let alone encompassing it, is probably impossible.

This might feed into what Bellow, like some other great novelists, so disliked about academic research and writing, as academics by definition try to define and elucidate, while so much of Bellow’s writing shows why some major factors of life simply can’t be elucidated. Therefore, academics and critics like me are ourselves going on a futile quest in our attempts to comprehend Bellow, who wrote novels like Henderson that show why the explaining isn’t possible; as Sam Tanenhaus wrote regarding the Library of America edition of Bellow, “It may be heretical, or just foolish, for a book review editor to admit it, but there are times when criticism is beside the point.” Indeed, and it makes me wary in writing this. No wonder Bellow liked Blake’s poetry, as I see some of the same defiance of full explanation in Blake, especially his later work. Henderson is a particularly strong example of this tendency, with the protagonist’s constant drive toward something he can’t seem to articulate beyond “I want, I want,” forming a base for the unnameable: what does Henderson want? Life? Experience? Knowledge? Something else?

Much of Henderson is, I think, intended as comic, given its outlandish events. Still, those events, like the lion hunt or the moving of the statue, are too symbolically endowed for my taste. They seem more like a statement of Henderson’s character than necessary events to the novel. Such scenes also parallel to too great a degree Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces. That book came out in 1949 and Henderson in 1959, and during the period between them Bellow might have read or at least heard about Hero. Many of its elements show in farcical ways: the call to adventure is through narcissistic desire that leads to departure from the United States for Africa; failure in the blown-up water cistern; initiation in the form of moving a statute; and eventual success, after a fashion. Henderson is more concerned with himself than anyone or thing else, however, and rather than reconciling himself with his society he thinks that, “this is the payoff of a lifetime of action without thought” when he’s forced to imitate a jungle beast. As he says elsewhere, noting the ridiculousness of his own situation, “If I had to shoot at that cat, if I had to blow up frogs, if I had to pick up Mummah without realizing what I was getting myself into, it was not out of line to crouch on all fours and roar and act the lion.”

Yet in Henderson those comic aspects are also a critique of the quest narrative, as Henderson can’t find wholeness or completion. He searches for an abstraction layer not available through travel, even when elements of home—the United States—follow him: “It was just my luck to think I had found the conditions of life simplified so I could deal with them—finally!—and then to end up in a ramshackle palace reading these advanced medical texts.” The issues keep coming: “And though I’m no expert I guess he’s [King Dahfu] thinking of mankind as a whole, which is tired of itself and needs a short in the arm from animal nature.” If that weren’t enough, he continues: “Anyway, I begin to ask (or perhaps it was more a plea than a question), why is it always near me—why! Why can’t I get away from it awhile? Why, why!” Why indeed: it’s a question religion doesn’t answer, or at least not satisfactorily anymore, and that philosophy seems to have failed at answering despite its numerous and increasingly verbose attempts, and that novels pose and don’t seem to answer. In the mythology Campbell discusses, you come back from your quest whole and ready to take your place in the adult community or you die and uphold the standards of that community or you transcend life; in Henderson and later, ironic texts, your quest is forever incomplete, because like Henderson, you can’t answer that pivotal question that becomes an exclamation: “Why, why!”

Why, why! indeed, and Bellow keeps setting up the questions through exploration without giving answers. The closest he comes, I think, is in Ravelstein, where Chick marvels at the “creature” that is Ravelstein while also being resigned to accept his fate. Whether this is an improvement on the manic energy of earlier Bellow novels or a depressing acceptance of the end is a matter of perspective on which I have no opinion. But, like the master, I will try to frame the issue, even if the issue has a habit of being larger than that frame. And so the critic struggles with Bellow like Itelo wrestling with Henderson, and even champion critics don’t seem able to win. But this preoccupation with trying to explain Bellow stays with me, and this is not, I suspect, my last word on the subject, even if my attempts are as futile as Henderson’s.

Links for May 12

May 12, 2008 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
  • Simon Lipskar, a literary agent whose assistant sent perhaps the nicest and most encouraging rejection letter I’ve ever received, recently gave an excellent interview, in which he most notably said, “Writers should write the books they love. That way, no matter what the market says, their time wasn’t wasted.” I agree, but it would also be nice if the market were interested. The theme of love and market is one you’ll hear more about shortly.

“The New Confessions” is my favorite of Mr. Boyd’s many fine novels, but I recommend all of them. His most recent, “Restless,” a historical spy story published last year, is intelligent and thrilling; its heroine is an old woman. “Any Human Heart,” perhaps Mr. Boyd’s most critically acclaimed novel, is also a fictional autobiography of an English adventurer not so different from John James Todd.

I’ve often wondered why Mr. Boyd hasn’t become a British literary star in America, the way Nick Hornby, Martin Amis and John Mortimer have. He’s as good a writer as any of them. Maybe there’s no rational explanation for why some great writers don’t win the commercial sweepstakes. Maybe it’s just luck.

As if that weren’t enough, she also says:

In my last column I asked for recommendations of chewy modern novels. One reader mentioned “The Echo Maker” by Richard Powers, which I agree is one of those rare books with a plot that races and a thoughtfulness that slows you down. Two other modern novels I found equally provocative were “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell and “Seven Types of Ambiguity” by Elliot Perlman. I have a friend who recently reread “Cloud Atlas.” She said it was even better the second time.

Hmmm, among that, Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch That Ends the Night, and rereading some Saul Bellow, I’m not sure where I’m going to find time in the next few weeks.

  • “The Watch That Ends the Night?” you ask. Terry Teachout says:

At any rate I finally got around to reading The Watch That Ends the Night last week, and I was knocked flat by it, so much so that I had to ration the number of pages I allowed myself each day so that I wouldn’t be distracted from my deadlines. I intend at some point in the next couple of weeks to discuss it in the weekly book column that I write for Commentary’s Web site, so I won’t jump the gun here. Suffice it for the moment to say that I feel inclined to rank it alongside Peter de Vries’ The Blood of the Lamb, an equally ill-remembered novel of similar vintage and subject matter (both books have at their center a woman who is suffering from a fatal illness and are narrated by a man who loves her).

  • Razim questions why modern literature doesn’t appeal to him so much as the past and comes up with a lot of answers that sound, to my ears, vaguely sexist. A more probable answer is this: modern literature—meaning anything published after World War II—is still being sorted out as to what’s worth reading and what’s not, and the cacophony of popular literature has probably drowned out some of the avant garde that will one day be acknowledged as great.

In addition, I think tastes have also shifted and become more dispersed, meaning that multiple kinds of canons are being created, rather than the more singular, dominant kind of past. Finally, I’m not sure the demand shift Razim argues is enough to explain the changes in literature; even if women read most fiction, an absolute number of men read it sufficiently to create their own market. This goes back to the dispersion argument.

(Hat tip Tyler Cowen).

The Inner Circle

May 8, 2008 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

T.C. Boyle’s The Inner Circle is the infrequent novel that improves substantially the second time around to the point of making me reevaluate it altogether. It features Boyle’s mischievous, whimsical prose:

[…] Laura Feeney smiled and before I knew it I was on my way to becoming an initiate in the science of sex, abandoning the ideal for the actual, the dream of Stella (“True, that true beauty if virtue indeed”) for anatomy, physiology and an intimate knowledge of the Bartholin’s glands and labia minora. All of it—all the years of research, the thousands of miles traveled, the histories taken, the delving and rooting and pioneering—spun out like thread from an infinite spool held in the milk-white palm of Laura Feeney on an otherwise ordinary morning in the autumn of 1939.

That’s John Milk speaking, the narrator who is as bland as his name, and an assistant to sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. Notice, however, the cleverness of the long, almost run-on sentences in that quote, with Milk on his way “before I knew it,” and us readers past that idea before we knew, drawn along by the rambling, Bellow-like tide of the sentence. Then, Boyle almost wanders into the cliché of comparing life to a weaver’s loom, which goes all the way back to the Greeks and, more recently, Shakespeare, but he pulls back from it by using Laura’s palm as the focus and playing with the idea of the milk-white of her palm and “Milk” as his name. And he is often played with by others, whether by women or by Kinsey. His central narrative gift is to simultaneously describe his interaction with Kinsey, the great man, while deluding himself concerning the extent of his self-involvement and dependence on Kinsey. After a spurt of initial interest brings Milk to Kinsey, Milk is ruled by the older man, and it’s not Laura’s palm but Kinsey’s that controls Milk.

The Inner Circle has wonderful resonances, with phrases, descriptions, ideas rolling into and referring to one another in a subtle harmony that is difficult to untangle even on a second reading. The philosophical tension between the mind’s creation of love and the body’s needs is always present, along with the push and pull of Kinsey on Milk and whether Milk is his own person. The obvious and probably correct answer is “no,” despite Milk’s protestation to the contrary. He’s self-delusional throughout, and says of a comment made by Mac, Kinsey’s wife, that “I saw the truth of it,” as he thinks he does numerous times. Elsewhere, Milk says that “rumormongers”—note the deliberately anachronistic word—say that Kinsey chooses “the members of his team based on his ability to control and dominate them […]” He does, and the reader sees that even if Milk doesn’t. When Kinsey lightly rebukes Milk for holding up the work because Milk comes in late, our narrator says “Normally I would have been mortified—I hated for anyone to question my devotion and loyalty, especially [Kinsey], to whom I owed everything […]” Does that sound like the voice of an independent man? I thought not.

How much of this description of Kinsey is accurate and how much the artist’s creative prerogative is unclear; outside of what I know from Bonk and popular culture, I’ve never learned anything of Kinsey. Boyle conveniently thanks Kinsey’s various biographers, so one looking for more can find more, but I’m rather content with his story, which is perhaps the truth rather than the facts. And if it isn’t, it doesn’t matter; the device of using Milk as a narrator works: except for his major blindspot regarding his own independence, he serves as a strong vessel for Boyle’s usual panache with words.

To be sure, the novel is not flawless: Iris, who is supposed to act as the counterbalance to Kinsey and a voice encouraging Milk to resist, is never forceful enough, and the major clashes between Iris and Milk are too curt and claustrophobic. Kinsey himself never gets more than the touch of Ahabian madness he really needs; until his own strength is giving out near the end, he doesn’t show how he considers himself the singular figure we suspect he thinks he is. Nonetheless, these flaws are paltry next to The Inner Circle’s verve, and now it surprises me that I didn’t better appreciate it the first time around.

Ten Days in the Hills

May 1, 2008 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills is an easily skippable novel—not in the sense of being easy to ignore altogether, although it is that too, but in the sense of having interwoven character threads with some of those threads more worthwhile than others and too many scenes that consist of unformed and poorly reasoned argument, chiefly over Iraq but occasionally over love. That so much of Ten Days in the Hills is skippable might be a problem for a review, were it not for how the novel’s extraneousness conveys whether it should be read.

When Ten Days in the Hills came out I bought it chiefly based on Jane Smiley’s reputation, as she wrote two wonderful novels—Moo and A Thousand Acres—along with at least one dull novel, Good Faith. Since that impulse purchase, Ten Days in the Hills has sat around till I began foraging for something light and easy while I digest To the Lighthouse. Alas, however, Ten Days in the Hills is light even when it tries to be serious—only at one moment, during a late declaration of love, does it feel like it has some heft—and too heavy when it tries to be light, and not in a positive way like Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

As an exercise in seemingly endless self-reference, Ten Days in the Hills succeeds like the first phase of the Iraq invasion. About ten characters unintentionally gather during March 2003 in the Los Angeles hills as the Iraq war begins. They’re movie types and L.A. wastrels, so they have nothing better to do than tell stories and sleep with one another. The positive news it that Jane Smiley writes unusually good sex scenes, although “unusually good” doesn’t mean “good” in an absolute sense, as I’m not convinced that it is possible to write a good explicit sex scene. The negative news is that most of the novel consists of navel gazing, which is sometimes more interesting and sometimes less so, as in this long bit of dialog:

You want to make a Hollywood movie about an unmarried couple with grown children talking about the Iraq war and making love, with graphic sex? You know better, so this must be a joke. It has every single thing that Hollywood producers hate and despite, and that American audiences hate and despise—fornication, old people, current events, and conversation. You might be able to do it with Clint Eastwood, but unless the girl was forty years younger than he is—

Instead of a movie, we get a book about often unmarried couples with grown children talking about the Iraq war and making love, with graphic sex. A lot of the novel is, I think, a joke, but one that grows old before the punchline, if there is a punchline. Certainly there’s too much movie talk, all of which is more about the book we’re reading than the movies they’re discussing. I’m sure the Iraq war is supposed to function as a metaphor for something, though I’m not sure what that something is. Still, Ten Days in the Hills has its moments, as when a college student describes a ludicrous, idiotic movie idea some of his friends propose and then we find that “it occurred to Stoney [a movie agent] that he should find out who these kids were and see if they had representation.” Many scenes are very L.A., and I’m not surprised that the dust jacket says Smiley lives in Northern California. The crowd she runs with must have its share of conversations like these:

“Okay, how many regular vegetarians?”
Zoe’s hand went up, then Paul shrugged and put his hand up.
“Vegans?”
Only Isabel.
“Anyone lactose-intolerant?”
Delphine nodded.
“Low-fat?”
Max’s hand went up. Cassie said, “What about Charlie?” and Stoney realized he wasn’t present. Max said, “If he isn’t, he should be.”
“Okay, let’s see. How about hot-pepper-intolerant?”
No hands went up.
She said, “Do you care, Elena?”
“No okra.”
Cassie wrote that down, then said, “I don’t like lamb. Hmm.” She showed the list to Delphine. “Simon likes everything?”
Stoney nodded.

As satire goes, it’s pretty good, but with 450 pages, including debate about Iraq at the quality of what I heard in dorm rooms at the time. I’m tempted to quote it—the novel debates, not the dorm room ones—but my capacity for sadism just isn’t that high. Fortunately, when you skip pages, you read quickly and can blast through the Iraq debates, but you’re also reading a book you want to skip large chunks of. Two characters even comment on this:

“That’s Weekend. That’s only one movie. And it’s French. French movies are a special taste. What would you watch?”
She flopped back on the bed. “Nothing. I would read a book. Books move a lot faster.”
“There’s a revolutionary idea.”
“Well, they do. You never have a shot in a book of two people walking down the street in real time, step step step. That drives me crazy […] And you can’t speed it up. You can cut in and out of it, or you can cut to another scene, but otherwise you’re just stuck, because if it moved faster they would be running and that would look weird. If I’m reading a book, it takes a few seconds for my eye to pick up the lines of dialogue that in a movie take much longer to say, and once my eye has picked it up, I can go on to the stuff I’m really interested in, which is what the characters are thinking or whatever. I think books move a lot faster even than a movie everyone thinks is fast, like The Matrix.”

I agree with her analysis and began applying it to Ten Days in the Hills, lightly at first and then with steadily more ruthlessness. This made some characters hard to follow, but fortunately they’re almost all unidimensional, making your own dramatis personae reasonably easy to construct. I will say that Isabel, a 23-year-old who delivered the book philosophy just quoted, and Stoney, her much older lover who is also the agent quoted in the first blockquote, are the strongest characters, and it’s not an accident that I used their quotes as examples. Nonetheless, they can’t sustain a book, even one with its moments of wonderful humor and deep satire, and too much of Ten Days in the Hills is random commentary instead of what Isabel calls “stuff I’m really interested in.”

Links for April 28

April 29, 2008 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
  • The Times Online has an essay about modern classics editions:

    • Today we have heaps of choice and plenty of publishers telling us what we should be reading. As the Oxford World’s Classics series is relaunched this month, its rivals include Penguin and Vintage, as well as enterprises from smaller presses such as Everyman, Wordsworth and Oneworld.

    The present “classics” industry dates back at least to 1906, when Joseph Dent hit on the idea of publishing 1,000 titles by the “best authors” at the (relatively) cheap price of one shilling. This was the Everyman Library. At the beginning of the 20th century there were many new “common readers” as a result of the Elementary Education Act passed in the 1870, and they wanted to own their books. Add to that the establishment of English Literature as a subject in the universities and you had the magic equation – readers wanting books, professors wanting to pontificate on what to read, and booksellers wanting to sell.

If that’s not enough classics for you, they have one more but less interesting piece.

I admit that I’m a fan of the classics genre, as I said in a post about the dubious winners of those tedious year-end prizes. As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been reading To The Lighthouse (more on that shortly, as well as a post on James Wood’s How Fiction Works); Woolf’s novel is one of those that makes me sit up and go “Ah! This is the real thing.”

  • Not long ago the New York Times ran a great essay called It’s Not You, It’s Your Books, and that topic arose independently of the article at a party last night. This week, Rachel Donadio strikes again with You’re an Author? Me Too!:

    It’s well established that Americans are reading fewer books than they used to. A recent report by the National Endowment for the Arts found that 53 percent of Americans surveyed hadn’t read a book in the previous year — a state of affairs that has prompted much soul-searching by anyone with an affection for (or business interest in) turning pages. But even as more people choose the phantasmagoria of the screen over the contemplative pleasures of the page, there’s a parallel phenomenon sweeping the country: collective graphomania.

    In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles. University writing programs are thriving, while writers’ conferences abound, offering aspiring authors a chance to network and “workshop” their work. The blog tracker Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day (with a lucky few bloggers getting book deals). And the same N.E.A. study found that 7 percent of adults polled, or 15 million people, did creative writing, mostly “for personal fulfillment.”

  • Riots, Terrorism etc (no complaints about the punctuation—it’s from the London Review of Books) isn’t except for the lede: “‘Important’ is a cant word in book reviewing: it usually means something like ‘slightly above average’, or ‘I was at university with her,’ or ‘I couldn’t be bothered to read it so I’m giving a quote instead.’ Very occasionally it might be stretched to mean ‘a book likely to be referred to in the future by other people who write about the same subject’.” Alas, the rest of it appears to be on the subject of how the British newspaper industry is doing as poorly as the American one. See here for more on the subject.
  • For pure amusement, check out What is the polite word for “pimp”? in Language Log. The title makes sense in the context of the article, and I won’t give away the joke here.

Life

April 28, 2008 By in Books, Life Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

“What, indeed, if you look from a mountain-top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare. His own little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two, and would then be merged in some bigger light, and that in a bigger still.”

—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Life: Email addict edition

April 26, 2008 By in Life Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

“‘It’s odd that one scarcely gets anything worth having by post, yet one always wants one’s letters.'”

—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

Harry, Revised — Mark Sarvas

April 22, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Mark Sarvas‘ Harry, Revised confounds virtually every criticism I want to throw at it: the callowness of its protagonist, Harry, is more than addressed by its end. The narrative point of view shifts quickly, but that became an aspect of the novel’s internal rhythm. Harry’s friend, Max, is a too-typical sidekick, but Harry and I were the ones fooled when Max announces his plan to move, justifying it by saying: “Thing is, I ask myself, and don’t take this wrong, is what did our friendship really amount to?” It’s a question emblematic of Harry’s dilemmas—most of which are self-imposed—because it’s really a question that asks, “What do you really amount to?”

After these issues have been dealt with, the positive aspects of Harry, Revised, remain: it’s a funny novel that often made me smile at, more often than with, Harry. The wonderful metaphors perk up with wonderful regularity, as when Harry’s dead wife, Anna picks men “out of the field of suitors blackening her front porch like a swarm of death and dung beetles,” or, a slightly more sober note, “[t]ime has lost its shape for [Harry] these days, feeling increasingly like a monochrome jigsaw puzzle.” Such descriptions are reserved for people, however; little is said about the setting of L.A., what Wilshire Boulevard feels like, or how Harry can be a doctor, as his profession seems more window dressing than central aspect of his character. Given the anonymity of L.A., however, it might be appropriate that the land itself is a mere conduit for the plot.

Harry, Revised begins with the newly found object of Harry’s affections, a tattooed 22-year-old waitress named Molly who seems an improbable fit for Harry. Then again, it’s hard to imagine who a probable fit for him would be, including his dead wife, Anna, a woman whose improbable love for Harry is equally improbably, and yet believably, explained. Her first reappearance in a time-shift is jarring—have we just entered a Henry James-esque world of ghosts?—but she is more appealing than her husband in the tradition of Julie in Richard Russo’s Straight Man. Even when the impending revelations about her that you know are coming arrive, she’s still the better person. The time shifts never confuse after the first one, though such devices can be occasionally disorienting. As a narrative game, they’re enjoyable and enhance rather than distract from the novel’s overall effect.

The narrative is unusual in other ways: a third-person genuinely omniscient narrator isn’t found much in modern fiction but is deployed to strong effect here. The present tense is more commonly employed but nonetheless not an everyday occurrence, especially in conjunction with the omniscient narrator, who describes Harry at the beginning—and maybe could describe him at the end—as having “always found it easier to deny, to disavow, and to disengage.” Or is this the free indirect speech much described James Wood, a Sarvas favorite? I’m not sure here: that last word, “disengage,” makes me think the narrator speaks, but perhaps this is also something Harry thinks about himself.

No minor characters are more than flat, which is fine when they’re often so well described: a mortician “was of a type equally at home purveying coffins and caskets or plots of Florida real estate.” Notice the resonance of “at home” followed by the mention of real estate, combined with the idea of caskets or the earth being a final resting home. Two pages later, a theme about Anna gets picked up that is becomes steadily more woven into the narrative: “Fondness-as-finance was the lingua franca of the Weldt family.” The repeated alliteration of the “f” sound brings us through the sentence and the latin phrase that might otherwise be awkward, its “franca” rolling into the “fondness” idea and “family.” Harry himself is perhaps too often described as average, as when “[h]e can’t bear the prospect of the face he knows all too well in all its ordinariness,” but even if Harry is ordinary, his journey is not. Later, “Having, as always, no strong preferences, Harry selects one of the few bottles that’s already open.”

These description make Harry sound unappetizing, and he is, but in yet another example of confounding expectations he’s also likable, perhaps because he recognizes his own failings and tries to surmount them in ways that aren’t going to make him a jerk, which would be the most obvious way to do so. He’s endearing despite occasional repulsiveness (lying, sleeping with prostitutes while married). Again, I have to return to the greatest novelty and the magic of Harry, Revised, which comes from this and from its ability to evade the flaws I want to cite but that just aren’t important.

For example, Harry’s scheme to woo Molly is straight out of high school, or the mind of an emotionally immature man—the two have some overlap—and its implausibility is both irritating and necessary. Clearly Harry is unfamiliar with ladder theory, Neil Strauss’ The Game, or the rest of the caddish, shallow books that, although they are caddish and shallow, nonetheless do impart some useful framework for thinking about and attracting woman. Good buddies of the sort Harry evidently lacks can serve the same function. Hell, even Slate runs stories on the dating market and, implicitly, how it can be manipulated. Instead of evaluating the wisdom of his approach, Harry shows the disadvantages of doing things his way through problems ranging from expense to (in)effectiveness. I diagnose Harry in clinical or economic terms, but his real problems are spiritual and emotional, and at times I marveled at his inability to perceive his own state, like when “[his] thoughts careen and collide in his brain but not amount of effort can move his lips,” or, a few paragraphs later, “The empty words pop like lightbulbs falling to the floor.” There Sarvas is the perfect simile again, the words shattered, no longer illuminating thought but leaving it in darkness. The “splitting” or breaking theme starts with Harry’s last name—rent, and not, I suspect, in the sense of an apartment—and continues as Harry’s life falls apart and is, perhaps, reforged.

The word “perhaps” is important there. As we learn, “Harry doesn’t like this [end of The Count of Monte Cristo], hadn’t reckoned on ambiguity. He likes happy endings, and he wants to see heroes get their due and villains get their just deserts.” As this implies, the ending is not entirely happy. Although I won’t give it away, the end reminds me of T.C. Boyle in the way he likes ending on unexpected, orthogonal vectors that must seem maddening to those who, like Harry, want to see justice meted out—whatever that means. Yet in a world of ambiguity and novels that reflect said ambiguity, discovering who the heroes and villains are and what just deserts means can be vastly harder than dealing those deserts. Yet the shattering of Harry’s complacency is necessary so he can rebuild some new kind of worldview separate from the one be began with; as the subhead to Chapter Thirteen says, “In which our hero begins to put the pieces together.” These chapter summaries are also intentionally archaic, like the ones in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Like the third-person omniscient narrator, however, they come to fit the story and end up concealing more than they reveal: How does Harry put the pieces back together? And does he really? Does Henry Fleming in The Red Badge of Courage become something of a hero or overcome his cowardice and guilt? I’m not sure, and midway through the novel neither is Harry, as when he wonders: “It feels incomplete, this shard of self-knowledge […]”. Self-knowledge is a terrible and wonderful thing to behold. I’m not sure you’ll find completion in Harry, Revised, but I am sure that’s not a bad thing.

As mentioned previously, Sarvas will be at the University Bookstore on May 8 at 7:00 p.m.