Modern Master

For the first fifty or so pages of Teju Cole’s first novel, I wasn’t sure I’d have the patience to get all the way through. I knew I was in the hands of a masterful writer, but the lack of discernible plot wore on me. It wasn’t the book itself; I was feeling impatient with the protagonist’s rambling walks through Manhattan. I wasn’t feeling particularly meditative, and this book is a meditation before it is anything else.

Then all of a sudden I was hooked. The main character went to Brussels for an extended winter holiday, and I realized that I was reading not only a masterful writer, but a masterful storyteller. I relaxed along with the character. Cole knows what he’s doing, every sentence has a purpose. He writes in a way that not many people write these days; his matter-of-fact first-person style reminds me of canonical writers but he comes from a different angle. He writes about humanity and immigration and race; about the pressure of expectations arising from our tenuous connections to each other and about the consequences of rejecting these connections.

Open City is set in the inner landscape of one man’s mind, with access to all those thoughts that generally stay beneath the surface. It is gritty without being showy, honest without being braggadocio. Pull out your patient reader and get to work.

All I Can Do Is Show You The Path

I read for different reasons at different times, and I believe in working to find the right book at the right time. I also believe in not reading a book that doesn’t feel right. If I’m not enjoying a book by page fifty, I put it down and find something else. This doesn’t mean I have to like it; so maybe I should say if I’m not compelled by a book by page fifty I put it down. The Corrections, for example, I hated like I’ve hated no other book, but for some reason I could not stop reading it. I think I enjoyed hating it. I had as much disdain for the writer as I sensed the writer had for his characters.

At any rate. I usually read because I like to; I read to learn; I read to escape; I read for all the reasons we all read. But the reason I read like an addiction is because when I was a kid I read The Chronicles of Narnia or Harriet the Spy or The Boxcar Kids, whichever one came first, and it gave me that feeling (cause all those books gave me that feeling), the one where you get real irritated when you’re reading and someone talks to you, calls you to dinner and won’t let you read at the table, tries to get you to pay attention to something in school. As a grown-up I get that feeling less often, that rush of wanting nothing more than to sit and let a story consume me. I always enjoy reading, but there’s a different kind of urgency I get every so often, a physical pull in my body that makes me need to stay in a story.

That’s one hell of a long lead in to tell you about The Passage. I heard about it at BEA, there was all this hype, and I’m really not into hype. I’m naturally too super cool to buy into whatever you tell me I need to buy into, so I kept looking at it and walking past it and not picking it up and not reading it. This weekend I let myself take a little peek. I read the first page and a half and put it back on the shelf. I walked to the other side of the bookstore and experimented with not thinking about it. It didn’t work. 

We went home together and we’ve been inseparable ever since. In fact, the only reason I’m writing this right now and not reading is because my insane desire for this book is so strong that it’s compelled me to tell you all to go by it, or download it on your silly kindle or whatever. I don’t care how you do it. It’s the right time.

the reading is the book

(I'm reposting this because the book is finally out. Go buy it at your local independent, or if you don't have one, get it here: http://politics-prose.com/book/9780393068160)

Rifling desperately through the galleys at my all-too-part-time bookstore gig, I came upon Nick Flynn’s new memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb.

Ok, I thought, so you can come up with some good titles. (Referencing his first memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which I hadn’t read mostly because every other bookseller I worked with at the time had read it. I felt like the market was saturated and I should give my time to something that needed more attention. I never denied that it was a brilliant title.)

Right, so we’ve established the good titles, but the author photo is really bad. Nick Flynn, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but you look like a bit of a douche in your author photo. And you’re a poet. And this is your second memoir. Is there really any way, I wonder, that this book is as good as the title? But, my access to fresh galleys is so short at this point I’m like a junkie, shoving all promising titles into my bag until it bulges. In you go.

I go through phases where I don’t read that much, and phases where all I do is read, and right now I’m in an intensive reading period. So I picked up Nick Flynn’s book shortly after bringing it home and opened it with a healthy dose of skepticism.

And wow. Wow. I’m sorry to be writing about this now, because it’s not published until January 2010, and I don’t really want to loan you my copy, because you won’t want to give it back, and I’m not ready to part with it. I read it too damn fast.

You probably want to know what it’s about. I’ve already said that it doesn’t matter what a book is about, but if you have to know, it’s about torture, and fatherhood. It’s about Flynn’s father and it’s about Flynn becoming a father, and it’s about Flynn’s mother’s suicide. It’s about Abu Ghraib and bearing witness. It’s about walking through addiction, about being your addiction, about giving in or not giving in to addiction. It’s about learning how to ask for help and learning how to accept it once you’ve asked. It is beautiful, excruciating, honest writing.

Whatever; I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter what it’s about. What matters is how it makes you feel. The Ticking is the Bomb blew a hole in my stomach, and then filled it, and then ran out before I was ready for it to be gone. Can you get that? Like chain smoking. I wanted to run out and buy Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and read it immediately (more, I need more!), and simultaneously wanted to save it (hoarding is addictive behavior, too). I don’t want to be left with no other books by Nick Flynn to read .

Looks like I’m going to have to start reading poetry. It had to happen eventually.

  

Nothing Foretold Anything

The next book you read is going to be The Slynx, by Tatyana Tolstaya. Trust me on this. Your bookstore or library might not have it in stock, so you'll have to be patient while they order it. It's worth the wait.

(You were not expecting this book.)

Once it's in your hands, get yourself to a nice, quiet spot with no distractions. Wait till the kids are in bed or whatever, because this book requires that you
Pay
Close
Attention.

If you don't, you will miss something vital, and I know you don't want that to happen.

Before you know it you'll be smiling out loud, if you get me; looking around to see who you can pull into your pleasure, but you can't, it's your own private joke--
only, it's not really a joke--
and it keeps getting better.

At first, you don't know what's going on or where you are, what you're reading, you just know that it's wicked and funny in a way you've not experienced before, and that you can't stop reading.

Later, some things become clear and more get muddy, messy, ugly--it doesn't matter, you're hooked, you're sunk.

Enough--enough. It's your turn. Enjoy.

Nothing About Love or Pity

You think your life is shit, and then you read Nami Mun’s debut novel, Miles From Nowhere, and you realize you don’t even know what shit is. I read this book in a feverish haze, while sick, and reflected on the comforts of reading about other people’s misery.

(I don’t go in too often for miserable movies; I was pissed as hell at Bjork for Dancer in the Dark, but had it been a book I would have loved it.)

Miles from Nowhere is one of those books that blurbs call “gritty” and “unsentimental” and “bleak” because it deals with homelessness and prostitution, needles and relapses and misplaced love, and it deals with these things honestly. It’s an urban tale about (and by) a Korean woman who moved to the Bronx when she was a girl with a family on the edge of dissolution. It's not that you haven't heard the story before, but have you heard it from a beautiful Korean woman? Mun acknowledges the incongruity and moves on.

I still have a head full of cold, so I'm doing my favorites in bullet point style:

Joon struggles with her addiction (“I was proud of myself for having shot up exactly the right amount. Just enough to see the world without being in it.”);

She struggles with others’ expectations (“I didn’t know what to do with all their hope…Failure had better odds.”);

She struggles with her own expectations (“I had created a new life for myself but I didn’t know what to do with it. Like staring at a finished jigsaw puzzle, where the only thing left to do was mess it up again”). 

It’s maybe not your life, but it’s real life. If you don’t like it, I hear Dan Brown has a new book out.

the reading is the book

Rifling desperately through the galleys at my all-too-part-time bookstore gig, I came upon Nick Flynn’s new memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb.

Ok, I thought, so you can come up with some good titles. (Referencing his first memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which I hadn’t read mostly because every other bookseller I worked with at the time had read it. I felt like the market was saturated and I should give my time to something that needed more attention. I never denied that it was a brilliant title.)

Right, so we’ve established the good titles, but the author photo is really bad. Nick Flynn, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but you look like a bit of a douche in your author photo. And you’re a poet. And this is your second memoir. Is there really any way, I wonder, that this book is as good as the title? But, my access to fresh galleys is so short at this point I’m like a junkie, shoving all promising titles into my bag until it bulges. In you go.

I go through phases where I don’t read that much, and phases where all I do is read, and right now I’m in an intensive reading period. So I picked up Nick Flynn’s book shortly after bringing it home and opened it with a healthy dose of skepticism.

And wow. Wow. I’m sorry to be writing about this now, because it’s not published until January 2010, and I don’t really want to loan you my copy, because you won’t want to give it back, and I’m not ready to part with it. I read it too damn fast.

You probably want to know what it’s about. I’ve already said that it doesn’t matter what a book is about, but if you have to know, it’s about torture, and fatherhood. It’s about Flynn’s father and it’s about Flynn becoming a father, and it’s about Flynn’s mother’s suicide. It’s about Abu Ghraib and bearing witness. It’s about walking through addiction, about being your addiction, about giving in or not giving in to addiction. It’s about learning how to ask for help and learning how to accept it once you’ve asked. It is beautiful, excruciating, honest writing.

Whatever; I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter what it’s about. What matters is how it makes you feel. The Ticking is the Bomb blew a hole in my stomach, and then filled it, and then ran out before I was ready for it to be gone. Can you get that? Like chain smoking. Like how coffee is always gone before I know it. I wanted to run out and buy Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and read it immediately (more, I need more!), and simultaneously wanted to save it (hoarding is addictive behavior, too). I don’t want to be left with no other books by Nick Flynn to read .

Looks like I’m going to have to start reading poetry. It had to happen eventually.

  

Gidget Meets Henry Miller

I’ve been trying to write this blog post for months now. It’s been hard because it’s about someone I know and admire, and it’s about a book I really enjoyed, and I want to do it justice, I want to do her justice, and I want it to be more than a book review.

I met Reverend Jen in early 2008 at our mutual day job on the Lower East Side. I went to one of her open mic nights at Bowery Poetry Club (“If you want to see some real avant-garde theater, come to my open mic”). It was raucous and wild and everything I had imagined about New York (I’d been here maybe 4 months).

I continued attending Rev’s shows, but I felt peripheral to the Art Star scene, being new, and not an Art Star, and shy. When I heard about her book deal, I made her promise me a galley, and when I got one, I read it in three days. Live Nude Elf showed me Reverend Jen the person, the one behind Reverend Jen the personality. It’s full of sex, sure, but it’s also full of life and love and pain and passion (for art, for sex, for people).

Reverend Jen, Patron Saint of Art Stars, Patron Saint of Shy Girls, Patron Saint of Anyone Making Their Own Damn Way. Check her out (www.revjen.com), read her book, and if you're in New York, come to her open mic at Bowery Poetry on the last Wednesday of every month or visit the Troll Museum in her apartment. She’s everything you think she is, and a whole lot more, besides.