Microreview: Beside a Burning Sea

Beside a Burning Sea
John Shors
New American Library, 2008

John Shors’ first novel, Beneath a Marble Sky, was a verbose, sentimental, and ripely overwritten historical romance constructed around the history of the Taj Mahal. His new book is slightly different: it’s set in World War II, although for consistency’s sake it’s still verbose, sentimental, and ripely overwritten. That there is a market for such writing is a fact beyond arguing; Beneath a Marble Sky has been a favorite pick of the nation’s innumerable book clubs since its publication, and Beside a Burning Sea, with its enraptured cover blurb from Amy Tan, will quickly join it in those venues.

This enshrinement won’t happen because of the quality of Shors’ prose - any even moderately disinterested reader can tell at a glance that it’s awful, riddled with florid repetitions and easy, crayon-colored emotions. Nor is the plot stunningly original: the Pacific hospital ship Benevolence (yep,  Benevolence) is cracked in half by a Japanese torpedo, and the survivors (including Akira, a wounded Japanese soldier who turns out, of course, to be wise, philosophical, and sexy) wash up on a beautiful nearby island (yep, a nearby island). While swimming there, Akira is tormented (and then comforted) by a vision of a little girl he’d once failed to save:

 The little girl’s eyes met his and she reached out to him - and in her hand was one of the flowers she had found. Weeping like a child, Akira opened his palm and let her place the flower in it. She smiled when he took her gift, nodding to him. He told her that he was so terribly sorry, and she placed a small finger to his lips. She then pointed behind her and he saw a land of immense, enchanting beauty. He wanted to follow her into this lush land, and so he kicked harder as she drew back. He did not want her to leave him. And she did not leave him.

If you can stomach 400 pages of prose like that, prose that never strays from primary colors, that never challenges with its rhythms or word choices, prose that calmly, methodically repeats everything all the time, then you might be one of the legions of readers who will no doubt find rewards in Beside a Burning Sea. You certainly know, from the fact that one of the characters no sooner heaves onto dry land before she’s asking Akira to tell her all about haiku, that you’ll be learning lots of wise, philosophical, and sexy things about Japanese poetry.  Unfortunately, Shors himself has failed to see (or, more likely, is intentionally ignoring) that poetry’s central lesson: less is more.

Microreview: The Red Scarf

The Red Scarf By Kate Furnivall Berkley Books, 2008 The Russian Concubine, Kate Furnivall’s debut work of fiction, was in many ways a classic first novel: bold, almost lurid with detail, and vaultingly ambitious. And it had its share of first novel faults: some overblown writing, some plot malfunctions, some overreaching. Readers loved it, and even I refrained from feeding it to my dogs.

Furnivall’s second novel, The Red Scarf, is a calmer work of historical fiction, less ambitious, more intimate, certainly more accomplished on a purely technical level. If it lacks something of the fire of her first book, this is understandable (and, now that the dreaded sophomore novel is out of her system, correctable), especially given the novel’s setting: the labor camps of 1933 Siberia.

Sofia Morozova is an inmate of one such camp, and her dismal existence there is enlivened by only one thing: the fantastic stories fellow inmate Anna, who regales her with stories of her childhood in Petrograd – and of her love for the fiery idealist Vasily. Sofia eventually escapes the work camp and becomes a hunted fugitive, given refuge by a Gypsy family, where she finds herself drawn to taciturn widower Mikhail, who reminds her of Anna’s Vasily.

The terrors, daily realities, and grinding social changes of the new Soviet state are expertly evoked by Furnivall, whose research is obvious but never obstructive. Mikhail at one point meditates on those changes:

“This motherland of ours has become a crucible, and we’re all caught in it. Men and morals of every kind are being melted down and reshaped. No one can stay the way they were.” He looked at her [Sofia’s] fragile bone structure and wondered what kind of steel held it together. “We all have to re-form ourselves.”

That personal re-forming is an effective tool in Furnivall’s hands, as she deftly explores the interstices where stories and realities meet. By the time The Red Scarf has ended, more than one character we thought we knew turns out to be someone – something – else entirely, and of course there is the eponymous maguffin to deal with. Furnivall handles it all with skill and some genuine flairs of expression. Her third novel will be a thing of great interest.

                                                                                                                                 –Steve Donoghue

Indecency in the Claremont Review of Books!

Algis Valiunas reviews two Edmund Wilson volumes (finally!) produced by the Library of America in the summer issue of the Claremont Review of Books. CRoB is a conservative organ that deals mainly in nonfiction, a “Journal of Political Thought and Statesmanship,” as they subtitle themselves. So the review is naturally a political and moralistic one, and so it naturally brings vomit to the back of the throat. Valiunas doesn’t do without praise. He even crowns Wilson “the finest critic American literature has produced,” at his best “a master of fine distinctions.” But though he was America’s finest critic, “we can only hope for a better,” and “there is a good deal in his work that shames his best” (Who isn’t this true of?) CRoB being politically conservative, it’s with Wilson’s flirtations with communism, his lack of belief and his rather sordid private life that Valiunas finds fault:

The fundamental indecency of Wilson’s personal life does not nullify the quality of his intellectual life, but the flaws in Wilson’s career – the willful dismissal of metaphysical questioning, the political follies – do suggest the limitations of fundamental decency, which is not much more than a spirited and compassionate gentlemanliness, as the foundation of a truly rich mental life.

Wilson’s actual work paints a different picture. The elegies for Christian Gauss and Edna St. Vincent Millay that bookend The Shores of Light (included in the first volume) evince a tender regard for the virtues of human companionship. Much of Wilson’s writing – literary criticism and the rest – bespeaks both a curiosity and an emotional investment in the nature and possibilities of humanity. High standards and a serious morality pervade his work.

And he was no doctrinaire liberal either, as Valiunas is forced to admit in the face of Wilson’s “fine distinctions;” teasing out Dos Passos’ resentful view of humanity, praise for the conservative Bernard De Voto, and learned body blows to Stalinist criticism. That right-wing bugbear, multiculturalism, rears its head as well. Valiunas blames the lack of discrimination (the good kind, of course) apparently shown by today’s critics in part on Wilson and his example of “intellectual omnivorousness.” Putting aside for now the existence of James Wood, it might be apropos to note that Wilson shied away from contemporary fiction in his later decades, preferring to stick to more worn trails of literature. There is a space where Wilson’s voice is sorely missing, and for that at least, we can surely fault him.

                                                                                                                             –Greg Waldmann

Microreview: Something to Tell You

Something to Tell You
By Hanif Kureishi
Scribner, 2008

It should be easy for inveterate enviers to hate Hanif Kureishi, since in his entire career he has never made even one aesthetic misstep. But as long as he keeps delivering work as gorgeous as his screenplay for the Peter O’Toole movie Venus (which got him an Oscar nomination) or his latest novel Something to Tell You, righteous envy will need to exist side-by-side with pleasure and appreciation. Easily his best novel so far and very much his gentlest, Something to Tell You is the story of London psychoanalyst Jamal Khan, who has a busy practice he intensely enjoys, a tense ex-wife and a boy to whom he’s devoted, a larger-than-life theater director as his closest friend (this character, Henry Richardson, handily steals every scene he’s in), and a long-lost first love, Ajita, who becomes a central focus of the novel.

But the main glory here is the pitch-perfect, rippling interactions between Kureishi’s characters. Any long quote will display this very theatrical gift, as in this scene in which Dr. Khan’s ex-wife handles his romantic fixation with little sympathy:

‘So that is Ajita. The one you really loved and were faithful to. The one you kept expecting to return. You would lie there, my darling, “thinking”, with a book open on your chest, and you’d smile to yourself. I knew that’s when you were with her in your mind. I absolutely totally hated you then.’

‘Are you now pleasantly disappointed?’

‘She’s an ordinary woman of a certain age. The age of desperation. But I can see it,’ she said, ‘If I put my glasses on and look hard – what she had. The cuteness, the girlie voice, the desire to please. Unfortunately, I was supposed to feel sorry for her all that time. What sadness you moped about in, which I had to endure! Even to me she seemed mystically important. Wasn’t her damned father murdered during a strike?’

‘Something like that.’

Something to Tell You is an unassuming triumph, far less sardonic than Kureishi’s most famous novel The Buddha of Suburbia, far more redemptive than anything he’s ever written (with the possible exception of parts of Midnight All Day). His many fans will find here a new and stronger version of their author, and newcomers to his work will thrill at their discovery of this wise and knowingly wistful book.

                                                                                                                                  –Steve Donoghue

New in Paperback!

Of the books that have recently appeared in pleasingly portable softcover form, many have been reviewed in these (web) pages: so let Open Letters be your compass as you go a-browsing the New in Paperback tables!

There’s Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur, for instance, a jeremiad against the mighty egalitarian soapbox that is the blogosphere. Greg Waldmann reviewed the book in our September 2007 issue, and had this to say:

Keen laments a future where 2+2 can equal 5, but his looming apocalypse is already our nightmare. Even our most cherished “arbiters of truth” like The New York Times report polls and soap opera-like rows between candidates that would be right at home in US Weekly were the subjects in Hollywood instead of Washington. While every aspect of the internet boom’s involvement is dissected, the social and economic context is left unexplored, and so the argument fails to crystallize. Worse still, the author’s trust in his idols leads him teetering on the edge of inanity. He fears a future where “advertising and public relations are disguised as news,” and feels that already “our trust in conventional advertising is being further compromised.” One can’t imagine.

From the Net to the cortex: Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist is, in the tradition of E.O. Wilson’s Concilience, one of the latest attempts to synthesize the plastic arts with the hard sciences. Lianne Habinek took a look in our December 2007 issue:

[Lehrer hopes] to show “how art and science might be reintegrated into an expansive critical sphere.” It is a noble and necessary cause, and one which Lehrer undertakes with a good deal of enthusiasm. He gathers a handful of nineteenth-century artists—the nineteenth century being both an “age of anxiety” and a “thrilling time to be studying science”—and explains how their work expressed, predicted, anticipated, paralleled, or intuited truths about the brain that modern science has only just proven to be true. Under Lehrer’s rubric, Walt Whitman helped bridge the Cartesian split, George Eliot predicted adult neurogenesis, the chef Auguste Escoffier linked smell and taste to anticipate the sense of deliciousness, Paul Cézanne understood that higher processing centers of our brain force the data our eyes receive into recognizable patterns, Stravinsky forced us to realize that we had to pay attention to music, Gertrude Stein tore down the behaviorist view of language, and Virginia Woolf theorized the emergence of the conscious self from the brain.

More sanguine than these reviewers was Sam Sacks in his piece on Irene Nemirovsky and her short, posthumous novel Fire in the Blood, now out in an attractive paperback from Vintage:

The final chapters of Fire in the Blood are consumed by the fire in the title, but Némirovsky keeps possession of her material and there are few shrill notes to be found. The potency of the prose and the dexterity of the storytelling win the day; with its mature social commentary and surprise twists, Fire in the Blood is a lot like a long late-career story by Edith Wharton, a splendid addition to an already substantial canon.

So shop wisely! And please avail yourself of the comment fields to let us all know what you thought of these or other books.

Chopping Wood

It’s inescapable, the fascination generated when a critic criticizes the work of another critic as has happened in this week’s New York Times Sunday Book Review with Walter Kirn’s kneecapping of James Wood’s How Fiction Works. Kirn accuses Wood of being out of touch with what readers care about when they turn to fiction: “Story, plot and setting” are bypassed in Wood’s diagnosis (says Kirn). What’s important to Wood are the subtle aesthetics that are used to convey the landscapes of the characters’ minds. Kirn thinks that Wood’s clinical dissection of sentences, a method he implies is accepted by the awestruck masses due only to Wood’s “genteel condescension,” makes the art of writing and the joy of reading a dull, mechanical process–quite alien to the experience that lovers of fiction are actually accustomed to.

I made a similar plaint about Wood’s criticism in a November 2007 Peer Review, that often “his disparagement makes books seem interesting and his praise makes them seem dull.” Even so, Kirn’s pillory is loaded with enough nonsense to make a reader appreciate Wood’s careful, pedagogical approach:

“How Fiction Works” is a definitive title, promising much and presuming even more: that anyone, in the age of made-up memoirs and so-called novels whose protagonists share their authors’ biographies and names, still knows what fiction is; that those who do know agree that it resembles a machine or a device, not a mess, a mystery or a miracle; and that once we know how fiction works, we’ll still care about it as an art form rather than merely admire it as an exercise.

We can overlook the weirdly venal accusation that readers are too stupid to know what fiction is, but what about the rest? If Kirn really believes that novels are miracles, mysteries, or messes, isn’t it cynical of him to accept money to review them? Obviously, he’s wrong: novels are artificial, man-made things, and to a great extent they can be taken apart, their strengths lauded, their weaknesses revealed. The task is difficult only because of fiction’s incredible complexity. But there are no holy miracles involved. When Kirn chides Wood for ”presuming” to try to understand how fiction works, he sounds like a Falwell follower denouncing evolutionary biologists and astrophysicists for trying to understand the origins of life and humanity.

Of course, as is often the case, the fascinations surrounding Kirn’s piece are doubled here at Open Letters, since the review revealed some eye-opening parallels with a review of How Fiction Works by Dan Green, found in our current issue. Kirn begins this way:

In the second of two short prefaces to “How Fiction Works,” an old-fashioned primer on literature that also functions as a timely primer on the art of modest self-marketing, the esteemed critic James Wood reaches out to assure “the common reader” (that good fellow from the club who tries to keep up with all things cultural but is forever slightly short on time) that his prose is as free as he can make it of what James Joyce termed “the true scholastic stink” of so much academic writing. After noting his intellectual debts to “the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky” and “the French formalist-­cum-structuralist Roland Barthes,” Wood goes on to compare his “little volume” to the Victorian critic John Ruskin’s musings on the Renaissance painter Tintoretto.

And here is the start of Green’s piece:

The limitations of James Wood’s How Fiction Works become evident in just its first few pages. In his Introduction, Wood tells us that although he admires the critics Victor Shklovsky and Roland Barthes, among their deficiencies was their failure to write as if they expected “to be read and comprehended by any kind of common reader,” a mistake that Wood himself presumably will not make. (“Mindful of the common reader,” he writes a little later, “I have tried to reduce what Joyce calls ‘the true scholastic stink’ to bearable levels.”) But exactly who, or what, is the “common reader”? Is it the reader who keeps up on all the latest mystery novels? Who these days prefers memoir to fiction? Who might be led to read literary fiction if it could be made rather less literary?

The only thing to do, naturally, is click over to Green’s piece and bury yourself in the argumentation. It’s a critic criticizing a critic! You know you can’t resist.

                                                                                                                                         –Sam Sacks

Microreview: Rune Warriors

Rune Warriors
By James Jennewein and Tom S. Parker
HarperCollins, 2008

This new teen historical novel certainly doesn’t begin well. The book opens with a fusillade of atrocious prose so rank as to crinkle the noses even of 15-year-old boys, the title’s ostensible target audience. Our story starts with young Dane out with the men of his Norseman village on the hunt that heralds his entrance into adulthood - a hunt led by Dane’s gruff and enormous father, Voldar the Vile.

But there’s a very snarky, very satisfying strain of humor that quickly bubbles up in the prose, and that humor is the huge saving grace of Rune Warriors. Dane and his rag-tag group of friends must mount a daring rescue of Dane’s would-be lady love Astrid, and every creature they encounter along the way - like this peeved well-troll - feels free to vent in a way you won’t find in the Elder Edda:

“I’m the Wellmaster, nimrod! Fifty winters I’ve been here, listening to people’s problems. Fifty long years! And if you think it’s fun listening to people whine and worry and snivel and snerk about the many foul forms of human misery, then you don’t know pisspots from periwinkles. You name it, I’ve heard it. Bees in the bonnet! Boils on the buttocks! Idiot sons! Wart-ugly daughters! Lost fortunes! Frostbite! Famine! Pestilence! Sick Pets! I’ve heard it all! But the worst, the absolute worst of all, is love!

By far the most enjoyable thing about Rune Warriors is the interplay between Dane and his unforgettable group of friends (there’s a Disney Channel movie to be made starring them, or perhaps an ongoing TV series on some agreeably middle-brow network). They rib each other, they doubt each other, they don’t always like each other, and their scenes are the best part of the book:

All Ulf the Whale wanted to know was if the Romans had really thrown people to the lions. Drott said, yes, they had. Ulf then wondered aloud how many people a lion would have to eat before it was full, and Drott said he wasn’t sure but guessed a dozen at least, maybe more, and Ulf the Whale observed that once his grandsire, Zander the Remarkably Tall, had eaten an entire ox at one sitting, with dipping sauce …

Rune Warriors is quick to cast its spell, and it will leave readers - certainly this reader - hoping for a sequel.

–Steve Donoghue

Traffic Update!

 Since the publication of his book Traffic, Tom Vanderbilt has become what the kids these days call a ‘go-to guy’ on the subject of cars and how people operate them. And surely in contemporary America there is no greater acid test of vehicular knowledge than the grand old city of Boston, known for both for its cramped, zig-zaggy streets and for its willful, obstinate (which is to say, starkly insane) drivers.

Readers will be astonished to learn that in Saturday’s Boston Globe Vanderbilt experiences Beantown traffic on a hot day accompanied by a Globe writer, and he’s not at all intimidated by what he sees. Just the opposite, in fact:

“I’ve read The Boston Driver’s Handbook [by Ira Gershkoff and Richard Trachtman], and it’s a very funny book,” Vanderbilt says, “but I’m not seeing a lot of crazy behavior. Not much honking. I was looking at some statistics that said Boston, per thousand people, has fewer accidents than a number of cities in Massachusetts. Cities are inherently safer - what damage could you do right now? Massachusetts as a state is the safest in the country, based on fatalities per million miles [of driving]. Montana is more dangerous than Massachusetts.”

Boston residents, being congenitally insane, will no doubt take this summary as an insult, but Vanderbilt’s point is well made: populous traffic, congested traffic, is by its very nature calmer traffic than that you tend to find in the wide-open spaces of the western territories. Should this ‘Montana’ place ever achieve statehood, it would do well to install as many rotaries, roundabouts and jerkwad drivers as it can manage, for its own safety. And in the meantime, the rest of us have Tom Vanderbilt and his superbly instructive book to help us make sense of the mess.

Microreview: Traffic - Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What it Says About Us)

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What it Says About Us)
By Tom Vanderbilt
Random House, 2008

Virtually everybody in the world is affected by traffic in some way or other, and it intimately shapes the personal lives of every urban inhabitant. It is a man-made weather that never stops, and Tom Vanderbilt, in his utterly fascinating new book Traffic, charts its every move and mood. He employs a vast amount of research (the book’s end-notes stretch to 100 pages), a master rhetorician’s command of arresting statistics (”Globally, more people take their own lives in an average year - roughly a million - than the total murdered and killed in war”),  and a seasoned reporter’s ability to distill facts into gripping summaries:

Intersections are crash magnets - in the United States, 50 percent of all road crashes occur at intersections. At a four-way intersection, there are a staggering fifty-six potential points of what engineers call “conflict,” or the chance for you to run into someone - thirty-two of these are places where vehicles can hit vehicles, and twenty-four are spots where vehicles can hit pedestrians.

Vanderbilt covers every aspect of his subject - road safety, driver psychology, the difference between a traffic circle and a roundabout, the subtle ways new cars make their drivers careless, the dynamics of parking lots, the various idiocies of pedestrians, and of course the nature and variety of crashes and other road disasters. He writes with an ease and authority that makes for some very enjoyable reading, and he always returns to the root of all traffic safety and danger - the amount of attention drivers pay to what they’re doing:

Economists have a cliched joke: The most effective car-safety instrument would be a dagger mounted on the steering wheel so that it’s aimed at the driver. The incentive to drive safely would be quite high. Given that you are twice as likely to die in a severe car crash if you’re not wearing a seat belt, it would seem that not wearing a seat belt is essentially the same as installing a dangerous dagger in your car.

With fuel prices soaring and many scientists predicting the utter depletion of crude oil stores in the present generation, it would be nice to think a book like Traffic will be the last of its kind, that future generations will look back on the present state of affairs - individuals pouring gas into metal vehicles and then driving them (mostly alone) at high speeds in mass numbers - with confusion and nervous laughter. But whether or not a better, safer, cleaner way ever becomes as popular for moving the masses from point A to point B, Tom Vanderbilt’s delightful and engrossing book will be there, pointing out with a wry smile exactly how the whole messy business was done as of the good year 2008.

                                                                                                                                –Steve Donoghue

Microreview: All-Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder

All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder
Frank Miller, writer, Jim Lee, artist

The character is the toast of tinseltown at the moment, with the movie The Dark Knight bidding fair to overtake Titanic as the highest-grossing film in recent memory, but Batman originated in comics way back in 1939, and he’s flourishing on the printed page as well as at the cineplex. Most notably, comics legend Frank Miller (whose 1986 Batman masterpiece The Dark Knight Returns had a seismic effect on the genre - with obvious ripple-effects on Hollywood) has been writing a regularly-issued comic book with fan favorite Jim Lee doing the art chores, and DC Comics has recently collected the first arc of this run in a slim hardcover.

As the title indicates, Miller’s new storyline centers on Batman’s earliest days as Gotham City’s most feared crime fighter (Dark Knight Returns takes place in dystopian future and features a fifty-something Batman, but All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder is happening shortly after the events chronicled in Miller’s 1987 Batman Year One), when the tragic murder of young Dick Grayson’s parents prompt Batman to “draft” the young orphan into his war on crime:

The Batman in All-Star is yet another Frank Miller departure for the character. The cerebral, tactically brilliant super-planner most readers would recognize is gone - instead, the character is portrayed as a brutal, misogynistic thug, eyes perpetually squinted, teeth perpetually gritted. Jim Lee’s artwork is some of his best to date, fine-lined and extremely detailed, although his Dick Grayson visually morphs from a plump toddler to a svelte pre-teen and back at random. His Batman, however, is entirely consistent: a blockish bruiser, always the biggest thing in any panel.

The dialog is coarse; the action sequences are brutal. Miller is clearly using the title to lay what he sees as the groundwork for the future world he depicts in Dark Knight Returns - several lines from that title are quoted here, and the characterizations (including that of Batman’s fellow superheroes Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and Plastic Man as over-scrupled sissies, with Batman - and, training fast, Robin - being the only hard-nosed realist among them) are all on track to deliver that story.

Still, All-Star Batman and Robin is a gripping, visceral read, an at times wrenching examination of parenting’s human frailties, as one of adventure fiction’s most famous orphans (Superman, Wonder Woman, Tarzan, and Sherlock Holmes would be the others - and Annie, of course) tries in his stumbling way to raise another orphan as his son. Readers will find all the familiar old faces here - Batgirl, Jim Gordon, Catwoman, Alfred the butler, the Joker - given vigorous new incarnations, and the main character himself - more Daniel Craig here than Christian Bale - will rivet attention from start to finish.

                                                                                                                                  –Steve Donoghue