Toni Morrison's A Mercy and T.R. Reid's Healing of America

I read two really good books lately that have nothing in common.

First, Toni Morrison's A Mercy. She's Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize winner, author of the harrowing and well-respected Beloved. She's also very intimidating, because her recent novels have struck me as long, difficult and dense. So I found her recent novel, A Mercy, tempting, because it was fairly short -- 176 pages -- and the first few pages were intriguing. Read the excerpt; it begins:

Don't be afraid. My telling can't hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark--weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more--but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth. I explain. You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog's profile plays in the steam of a kettle.

The setting is 1682, and the narrator above is Florens, a young enslaved woman, who tells her own story, interweaved with stories of others who live on a Maryland homestead. There are two other enslaved woman, a Dutch trader, his "mail order" wife (probably they didn't call it that back then), two indentured servants, and a free African blacksmith. I don't want to tell too much here, but I'll just emphasize I thought this was a fascinating, poignant gem of a novel, very thought-provoking and beautifully written. And it inspires me to go back and and read Beloved.

The other book I liked was The Healing of America, by T.R. Reid. This is nonfiction, a look at health care systems in other countries and what lessons they might hold for the U.S. Reid was in the unique position of working abroad for many years, and having a stiff, sore shoulder. So he took his shoulder to all the doctors and health systems of the world and wrote about it. (OK, maybe not all the health systems of the world, but the United States, France, England, Germany, Japan and India.) What he finds is pretty interesting. According to Reid's telling, the French seem to have the most hassle-free system for records and billing. In Japan, you don't really need an appointment, you just walk in and get seen. In England, you don't get whatever treatment you want, but whatever you do get is free. India's traditional medicine yielded surprisingly good results. And the United States loves its high-tech surgeries.
Another interesting point Reid makes is that in other countries, doctors get their med school tuition paid for by the state, and then they make more middle-class salaries. This is different from the States. Little insights like these made for a fascinating book, very thought-provoking.
One thing that made me chuckle mordantly is that Reid felt the need to put a brief justification in the book about why he was writing about the medical systems of other countries. Some Americans may feel that we shouldn't consider any information from other countries, because ... why? Because we're better than them? Because they couldn't possibly have anything to teach us? He rejects those ideas, and so do I. I just don't get not being curious about new ideas and ways of doing things. It's kind of an anti-learning mentality, and I can't stand that, as you well know.

The Song is You

I'm always on the look-out for high-quality fiction written about the way we live now. Writing about right now, I imagine, is pretty tough: How can you know what will be tomorrow's important event versus a short-lived trend? A lot of successful fiction is set in the recent past, probably because it's easier for authors to get critical distance.
So I had high hopes for the recent novel The Song is You by Arthur Phillips. Julian, a music-loving an advertising photographer in New York City, is bereft after the collapse of his marriage and the loss of his family life. He's aimless until one night he wanders into a Brooklyn bar and hears a new band with an entrancing lead singer/songwriter. He writes her a series of notes on the back of bar coasters, and she finds his advice penetrating and perceptive for her climb up the rungs to pop-rock stardom. Other communications ensue, and so begins a funny, distant relationship between a fan and his muse.
I liked this novel a good bit, especially the parts where Julian remembers his father's love for the jazz singer Billie Holiday. (A charming setpiece on Billie Holiday opens the novel.) But I wanted to read a lot more about Julian and his relationship with his ex-wife, while the novel was pretty focused on his relationship with the singer. (Is this a guy thing?) Still, The Song is You is an interesting, readable novel of our current moment.
From a librarian perspective, I'd recommend The Song is You as a read-alike for Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, which I think is still the definitive contemporary novel on pop music. (Read-alike is librarian jargon for, "If you liked X, you might also like Y.")

George Saunders and "The Braindead Megaphone"

A lot of books I read are just OK, so it's like a lovely little gem when I read one I really, really love. That was the case with The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders. Here's my short review for the books page:

Saunders' unique aesthetic carries over to his first book of journalism, The Braindead Megaphone, where he reports on illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, the awesome greed and friendliness of international tourism in Dubai, and a meditating teenager in Nepal.

Saunders writes about American fiction like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and, quixotically, the young adult classic Johnny Tremain. His conception of narrative is as complex as a difficult fiction writer like David Foster Wallace, but his own writing style is marvelously direct, much like that of Kurt Vonnegut, whom he praises as a model. He describes Vonnegut's books as a sort of black box that readers enter. "The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some resemblance to 'real life.' What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit."

The nontrivial thing that happens with Saunders is we contemplate the big question he's trying to answer, something along the lines of, How are human beings supposed to live in the world? The final piece is a tongue-in-cheek press release from the organization People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction: "At precisely nine in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously beheading no one. At nine thirty, we embarked upon Phase II, during which our entire membership simultaneously did not force a single man to simulate sex with another man. At ten, Phase III began, during which not a single one of us blew himself/herself up in a crowded public place."

He concludes: "We, in fact, outnumber you. Though you are louder, though you create a momentary ripple on the water of life, we will endure, and prevail."

I like that the book was published directly to paperback, so it's not too expensive -- $9.80 on Powell's for goodness sake!
My mom asked me recently, "What's Powell's?" Well, it's online bookseller much like Amazon. But in my opinion they are more supportive of book culture than Amazon, so I'm linking to them more. Not that there's anything bad or wrong about Amazon, I just like Powell's better. And actually, I buy most of my books at Tampa's independent bookstore, Inkwood Books. Check out their cute little bookshop here.
So I was browsing at Inkwood and ran across the Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, featuring an interview with ... George Saunders! So I picked that up and I'm now looking forward to that too.
In fact, I'm looking forward to reading lots of the interviews. I'm surprised at how many I've read: Zadie Smith (loved On Beauty), John Banville (I picked The Sea for my book group before I left for Ireland), Ian McEwan (I read Saturday), Edward P. Jones (The Known World is probably the best American novel published in the last 10 years), Marilynne Robinson (Gilead might give "The Known World" a run for its money) and Haruki Murakami (how beautiful and trippy was Kafka on the Shore?). OK, I'll stop now. You get the picture.
Now I know what else you're thinking. Spoonreader, look at this long post you've created on a Friday morning! Well I've got a new computer with wireless, so la la la la (singing and skipping). Perhaps this will increase production here at spoonreader.com.

Wallace on YouTube

A YouTube user called dazzlecomm has posted a bunch of video on YouTube from a writers conference held last year in Italy called Le Conversazioni. The attendees last year included my favorite David Foster Wallace along with Zadie Smith, Jeffrey Eugenides, and others. (I vow to finally read Eugenides' Middlesex now that it's Oprah's pic.)

Check out the above clip from David Foster Wallace. I transcribed what he's saying, it's just a short couple of sentences. It seems to be a response to a question about whether he belongs to a school of writers, though we don't get the question. So I'll notate it Wallace-style:

Q.
A. One symptom of what you could call the American disease, is that I don't know any writers who think of themselves as like other writers. Critics often group writers together more than writers do.
I would say that there's a group of American writers who tend to use more the techniques of postmodernism and experimentation, and then there's a group of traditional, sort of more realistic writers. Many of the writers I admire, and (unintelligible) whether I'm one of them, are interested in using postmodern techniques, postmodern aesthetic, but using that to discuss or represent very old, traditional human veritities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community, ideas that the avant-garde would consider very old-fashioned. So that there's a kind of melding -- It's using postmodern formal techniques for very traditional ends.
If there is a group -- and some of whom I think are here this week with me -- If there is such a group, that's the group I want to belong to.

I think that description is right on the money as far as Infinite Jest goes. (Have I mentioned lately that I love that book?) Some of his other writing, I'm not so sure about. The book that continues to vex me is his short story collection "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" -- I just don't know what to make of it. And they're making it into a movie, can you believe that? I think I need to read that book again. I read it at a point in my life when I was very melancholic, and I have often wondered if I saw it through a dark lens, so to speak.
On another issue, in light of the recent New Yorker article on the Ransom Center's literary archive, how does a library preserve video like this? The reason I transcribed the quote is because the video could go away for any number of reasons (not least of which would be complaints from conference organizers or DFW himself). I think it's valuable from a literary-historical point of view to hear what writers have to say about their own writing, and the fledgling librarian in my instinctively says such video should be preserved for research purposes. I wonder if the Ransom center has multimedia archivists? Hmmm ...
On a related note, the spouse is always hassling me to archive this blog is some way, but I'm lazy, and I have confidence that the Google servers will keep chugging along. From an archival point of view, I should print it out though, on acid-free paper and store it in a fire-proof box somewhere. (The difficulties inherent in digital archives are a post for another day; I'll put it on my list of future posts.)

Severance Review and Q-A

I reviewed Severance, the book of short stories of people who have been beheaded, and I got to interview the author.

Decapitation hardly seems like a suitable theme for a collection of elegant short stories, but Robert Olen Butler transcends morbidity while excavating the final thoughts from the lives of the beheaded. John the Baptist recalls the way Jesus smelled at his baptism. Marie Antoinette remembers her parents' royal titles. Nicole Brown Simpson sees O.J. in the faces of her children. And a barnyard chicken dreams of a great white clucking mother: "this at last is the hen who fills the sky, and I am rushing now along the path and the clucking is for me and it is very loud and a great wide road is suddenly before me and she is beyond and I cross."

Read the review here; the interview here.

Hannibal Rising

I loved the novel Silence of the Lambs. But it's not taking anything away from that to say I found its sequel, Hannibal, to be bad. Not just bad, but laughably, Oh, C'mon, bad. Why I found it laughable is a major spoiler, so I will put in that in the comments. Read at your own risk!
Now there's a new Thomas Harris book out, called Hannibal Rising, a prequel that detailsHannibal's origins. Apparently Harris has not managed to stop his books' fall-off, according to the Los Angeles Times. Their headline is "Hannibal, we hardly knew ye — and we liked that."

Little Children, the movie

I don't usually write about movies, even when they're based on books. First, there are too many; it would turn this book blog into a movie blog. Second, books are usually better than the movie, and there's no sense in repeating that over and over. But I'm optimistic about the movie of Little Children, based on the book by Tom Perrotta. I thought the book was a compelling little novel mining rare territory -- boredom and self-obsession in contemporary suburban family life. Movies are pretty comfortable with this landscape (see American Beauty, Edward Scissorhands and The Truman Show, to name but a few). So it will be interesting to see what results.
Here's a bit from a review in the Los Angeles Times. The reviewer seems to differ from me and agree with me in a few ways:

"Little Children" is one of those rare films that transcends its source material. Firmly rooted in the present and in our current frame of mind -- a time and frame of mind that few artists have shown interest in really exploring--— the movie is one of the few films I can think of that examines the baffling combination of smugness, self-abnegation, ceremonial deference and status anxiety that characterizes middle-class Gen X parenting, and find sheer, white-knuckled terror at its core.

Read the whole review here. Perrotta also wrote Election, which was turned into a movie -- a biting satire of the high school student council starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon.
And while I'm going all multi-media on you, I will point out that my favorite band, The Shins, has a new website that shows the band members hanging out at the library. Cool!

Severance

I heard a report on National Public Radio tonight about a new book of (very) short stories called Severance, by Robert Olen Butler. Each story is the thoughts of someone who has just had their head cut off. Each story is short, just enough to capture what they would be thinking as the blade does its work. It sounds interesting: The stories includes John the Baptist, Medusa, Robespierre and a chicken, among others.
It also reminded me of Spoon River Anthology (of course!) which also is a book of people speaking briefly and poetically about their deaths. The difference is that Spoon River's conceit is that it's everyone is in the same graveyard, as opposed to Severance's method of death.
I think I will pick up a copy of Severance soon.