Red Sox Quote of the Day, vol. 1

"We still have to continue to go out and play our game and worry about ourselves. We lost tonight. Good thing we play later today." -- Catcher Jason Varitek What's going on here? Well, many book blogs have been making a foray into politics. I haven't (other than to say VOTE OBAMA) but since the boys from Boston are in the playoffs I'm going to revive my fall tradition, all of one year old, started last year when I was doing the Solares Hill blog.

So yeah, good thing, Jason. Hope you guys are getting to sleep in today. Especially the pitchers.

In review

I finally wrote up my review of "Maps and Legends," Michael Chabon's essay collection -- it's in today's edition of Solares Hill (which is a PDF online) and on The Citizen's website (you can find the past few weeks' SH reviews there under the Arts & Entertainment tab, then select book reviews). I liked it. Here's the review:

From Michael Chabon's first novel, "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," it was obvious he was the real thing -- and what a relief that was if you were a young person with literary aspirations in the 1980s. Previously, I feared that my generation was going to be led by the likes of Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz. This was not a good feeling.

Reading "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," on the other hand, gave me a very good feeling. It was the same feeling that helped make me an addicted reader in the first place, of not wanting to put a book down, refusing to set it aside for a meal or sleep. Chabon has since gone through the usual stations of literary establishment -- a book made into a movie ("Wonder Boys") and a Pulitzer Prize ("The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay"). Now, two decades into his writing career, he has come clean with his real literary love: What is condescendingly called genre fiction, otherwise known as stories people actually want to read.

This is in contrast to the higher brow reading matter that often feels like the literary equivalent of vitamins and wheat germ. You know it's supposed to be good for you, but it's not much fun to take in.

Chabon reveals that when he started writing, he wanted to write science fiction. But he learned in college that to be a Serious Writer he had to go "literary." "A good science fiction novel appeared to have an infinite reach -- it could take you to the place where the universe bent back on itself -- but somehow in the end it ended up being the shared passion of just you and that guy at the Record Graveyard on Forbes Avenue who was really into Hawkwind."

In fairness, Chabon acknowledges here and in interviews, a lot of genre fiction is crap. But, he points out, so is a lot of literary stuff.

"Maps and Legends" is not a manifesto. It's an essay collection. But it has a common thread running throughout: Chabon's love for the written word and defense of forms that have been dismissed into genre ghettoes not worthy of the attention of our finest writers.

It wasn't always thus. That school anthology stalwart Edgar Allan Poe, remember, wrote horror stories -- and the plots of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amontillado" have stuck with me far longer than those of any number of Hemingway fishing stories. What is "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson if not horror? Literature didn't start out as fodder for academics to tear apart and dissect, looking for various forms of social oppression. And it didn't start out as a way for middle class people to describe their discontents ad nauseum. It started out as entertainment with occasional flashes of enlightenment. For some of us it still works that way.

Or, as Chabon writes, "all literature, highbrow or low, from the 'Aeneid' onward, is fan fiction." I knew I wasn't the only kid who invented sequels or alternative endings for my favorite books, imagining the continuing adventures of Laura Ingalls Wilder or the characters from Narnia.

Chabon does fear, though, that we might be the last generation of kids who were free to compose such sequels on our own (if only in our heads). How many children today run around unsupervised in backyards and barns, ride their bikes on streets and through towns? Wouldn't we arrest their parents if they did? And the adults -- that's us, I'm afraid -- have appropriated our favorite childhood totems, as the recent explosion in graphic novels demonstrates. "Some people," Chabon writes, "have been wondering: what if there were comic books for children?"

Of course, kids today have all sorts of amusements we didn't when we were reading Richie Rich and Batman comic books. So we pore over the Watchmen and read "Persepolis" while young Madison updates MySpace via Twitter and Tyler plays GuitarHero or whatever kids do. Even by 1996, Chabon found that reading comics in the daily paper was, "for those of us who still bother, half melancholy habit and half sentimental adherence to duty, a daily running up of a discredited flag in a forsaken outpost of an empire that has collapsed." (A completely tangential rant: Why don't comic strips die with their creators? I agree Charles Schultz was some kind of genius at the time, but unless strips move aside no new blood ever gets any ink and we're stuck with Beetle Bailey's 1940's gender and racial stereotypes well into the new millenium -- it's not natural.)

Because this book is a collection of essays written for different occasions and differing publications, it varies quite a bit but it's all pretty easy going down (did I mention Chabon is a damn good writer?). I liked his essay about golems, but it didn't resonate for me nearly as strongly as his piece about "Norse Gods and Giants" -- now known as "D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths" -- which Chabon loved as a child. My sister taught me to read from that book and I can still see the illustrations of the cow licking the universe into existence, and the three Norns, who are sort of like fates, spinning strands of yarn that represent human lives. I won't even go into the trickster god Loki and his repellent ship covered in toenail clippings.

Other pieces in "Maps and Legends" point to new reading opportunities currently buried in old anthologies, particularly a ghost story writer named M.R. James, whom Chabon refers to as "the other James." Henry gets all the love now but back in the day it was M.R. who got the readers and Chabon thinks he should get some back. "For the central story of M.R. James ... is ultimately the breathtaking fragility of life, of 'reality,' of all the structures that we have erected to defend ourselves from our constant nagging suspicion that underlying everything is chaos, brutal and unreasoning." That sounds like real literature to me.

As a still-recovering English major I particularly appreciate smart, appreciative, nonturgid literary criticism. I still don't get why anyone wants to spend her life in the field of literary studies merely to tear apart her subject. Chabon not only loves literature, he wants to be read and understood and not just by a few PhDs who have learned a particular, incomprehensible, ugly jargon. For that, I thank him. And I hope he helps a new generation love their literature without shame. I'm going to do my part by looking up the works of M.R. James.

Surfacing

I reviewed a couple of diving books -- Titanic's Last Secrets and Diving Into Darkness -- for the Miami Herald and the review ran on Sunday. Since one of them was about the two guys from Shadow Divers, I felt compelled to read that first. And watch the two-hour Nova special on their quest to identify the German U-Boat. All of which means -- even though these were all pretty good reads, I'm glad to be reading something different. Lately I've been exploiting my position at the library to read some really good new releases as they come in (mostly, these days, through our lease service, called McNaughton -- they're the ones with the green labels). The first was a graphic novel called American Widow by Alissa Torres. Though it's really not a novel; it's a graphic memoir, I guess, about a woman whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11. It's heartbreaking but, for me, suffered a little because I had so recently read Alison Bechdel's Fun Home -- hands down, the best graphic novel/memoir/anything I've ever read and one of the best memoirs I've read, period. Plus Bechdel does her own artwork. Another recent McNaughton I read was The Heretic's Daughter, an engrossing novel about the Salem witch trials and, just this weekend, When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson, the third in her series sort of centering on soldier-turned-cop-turned-private-eye-turned-rich-guy Jackson Brodie. Like the previous two, it was terrific. And yesterday I zipped through the excellently named Pagan Kennedy's collection of mostly profiles, The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex, which I snagged through Library Thing's Early Reviewers program. (Having access to review copies when I was a newspaper editor may have ruined me -- when the mailman delivered a package on Saturday, my husband just handed it to me, saying "You are such a book whore." I took it as a compliment. I'm pretty sure he meant it that way.)

September has been a big reading month so far -- it's good to cancel the cable! But I've got a couple doorstops on the horizon -- the new Dennis Lehane, The Given Day, arrived at the library today and I've got Tom Gjelten's book on the Bacardis at home, waiting for a review read.

By the way, Happy Banned Books Week! In the event that Sarah Palin does not impose her personal view of appropriate reading material on the nation, we should be able to keep celebrating the freedom to read: we at FKCC are celebrating; you can read about it on our blog.

DFW RIP

Over the weekend, the world learned that writer David Foster Wallace hanged himself on Friday at his home in California. I haven't read his mammoth novel Infinite Jest -- and I doubt I ever will just because I almost never commit that kind of time and attention to a work of fiction, for some reason -- but I was a big fan of his nonfiction, especially his essays for Harper's that are collected in the book "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (that book, along with "Infinite Jest" and most of his other work is available at the Monroe County library).  The title essay describes Wallace taking a cruise and attempting to interview the captain about the crew's working conditions and it's hysterically funny, although the cruise industry probably didn't think so. Another piece in that book describes Wallace visiting the Illinois State Fair in all its Midwestern glory. I've also enjoyed his more recent work, collected in "Consider the Lobster" -- the title essay from that book caused a huge flap when it was published in Gourmet magazine. Maybe I'll add "Infinite Jest" to the list of books to take on a six-month RV trip, along with the Shelby Foote Civil War trilogy. My theory on that has always been you'd want to keep  yourself occupied for a long time with the number of books you can fit in a milk crate.

Recent reading

Some stormy weather meant my employer was closed for a couple days this week -- and I got to read, when not evaluating storm preparedness and/or keeping the dog amused. Since I happened to post some reviews of this recent reading on Library Thing, I figured I might as well post them here: The Open Door by Elizabeth Maguire

A slim, engaging novel about real people -- primarily Constance Fenimore Woolson, who has gone down in history as a minor writer who pursued Henry James. According to this book, she was a lot more and I'd like to believe this version, if only because she seems like a remarkable, determined and admirable woman. It was especially interesting to read this fairly soon after reading "The Five of Hearts" by Patricia O'Toole, which includes several of the same people, especially Clarence King. It may or may not be relevant, but the novel does deal with the main character's awareness of and acceptance of mortality -- and the author reportedly completed it just before she died of ovarian cancer at a way-too-young age.

The Whiskey Rebels: A Novel by David Liss

Historical hindsight tends to carry the air of the inevitable. Because we’ve all known so long about the American Revolution and worshiped the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, we assume it was meant to be, that fate decreed our nation would turn out the way it has. Historical fiction is a useful reminder that these developments were not so inevitable, and that our history turned on human actions, decisions, chance, opportunity and intelligence. “The Whiskey Rebels” is a fine addition to the American story. The novel takes place in a mostly unexamined period, immediately after American independence had been won but the course of the young country was not yet determined. The government, headed by the Revolutionary hero George Washington, is in Philadelphia. Two members of his Cabinet – Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson – are bitter enemies, struggling over whether the country will have a strong federal government or serve as a looser association of states. But the book’s main characters are fictional. The novel has, at first, two separate threads. The first, starting in 1792, follows Capt. Ethan Saunders, a wreck of a man who served as a spy for the American forces but was drummed out of the Army after he and his mentor were accused of treachery. His mentor’s daughter, whom Saunders loved, marries another man when he refuses to associate her with his shame. And he’s been drowning his sorrows in taverns. But Saunders gets drawn back in to national affairs, when his lost love’s husband goes missing and he determines to make sure she is in no danger from her husband’s attempts at financial speculation. The other storyline follows Joan Maycott, a young woman who marries a Revolutionary War veteran and tries to make a go of life on the western Pennsylvania frontier. That story begins in 1781 and at first appears totally unrelated. Maycott and her husband struggle to survive and she secretly harbors grander ambitions: to write the first real American novel. Meanwhile, it turns out her husband has a knack for distilling good whiskey. Naturally, characters and eventually plot start to intersect and the two main characters eventually meet and interact. Despite the complexity, Liss does a good job setting the scene of Philadelphia as the capital of the new nation, with a form of government the men were basically making up as they went along and Hamilton and Jefferson engaged in their titanic struggle for the direction of the country. People like the Maycotts, who believe in their new country, are collateral damage when Hamilton determines to raise funds by taxing whiskey, a primary currency on the frontier but one that’s used in barter and thus does not generate cash profits to pay the tax. The settlers, many of them Revolutionary War veterans, see Hamilton’s national bank as a replica of the British system they fought so hard to escape, and see his national bank as “the harbiner of doom, the sign that the American project had failed.” Meanwhile, back in the coastal cities, nefarious men are plotting to use the new bank to corner the entire nascent American economy. As one character says of these men, their plots are “the dark side of liberty … A man is not hindered by what cannot be done, so twisted men like Duer apply that liberty to their greed.” Liss, whose background is in historical financial thrillers, does a good job describing the financial machinations and even if you don’t follow every strategic nuance, it’s an enjoyable thriller. Liss does an especially good job setting the scene, in taverns and boarding houses and respectable homes, and occasionally turns an especially nice phrase, like “Pigs roamed freely and grunted their courage at passing carriages.” Our heroes are sympathetic but human, flawed and understandable, and you find yourself rooting for both of them even when their goals are at odds.