Ephemeral Firmament

Green Metropolis II Is Coming Soon

David Owen is one of those stealth New Yorker writers who is actually among the best on staff, in his modestly idiosyncratic way, whether he's writing on light pollution or George Meyer. My favorite Owen piece became an excellent book called Green Metropolis, both built around the challenging but (to me) pretty indisputable proposition that the most environmentally friendly terrain in America is not the rolling farmland of Vermont but the dense, car-unfriendly grid of Manhattan.

Now, thanks to the New Yorker's Book Bench, I see that he has a sequel of sorts to Green Metropolis coming out in February, called The Conundrum (also based on a NYer piece of his), which argues that the more efficient and energy-saving we make our machines the more we will use them, leading to no drop in overall energy consumption. Here's the punchy trailer:

Green Metropolis was sharper in its critique than in its solutions, and with a throw-up-your-hands title like The Conundrum, the new one might be too (and as an environmental writer who has written most frequently on golf and who still lives in suburban Connecticut despite his advocacy for the city, Owen does know about conundrums), but in each case he does argue that our route out of our dilemma is already within our grasp. I'm looking forward to reading more, regardless.

Thinking of Fall in Summer, Especially Alan Hollinghurst

October is shaping up to be a hell of a month for big literary fiction: there's The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides's first novel since Middlesex, coming October 11, and 1Q84, Haruki Murakami's epic, which sold a zillion or so copies in Japan in a few hours, coming in English on October 25. I'm really looking forward to the Eugenides (though--true confession--I still haven't read most of Middlesex), and though I've yet to get onto Murakami's wavelength despite a couple of tries, 1Q84 is the kind of ambitious, intrigue-shrouded project that makes me want to read or at least buy it (with just the sort of dreamily cryptic alphanumeric title that whets my appetite further).

But the October novel I'm most excited about is Alan Hollinghurst's new one, The Stranger's Child, which releases in the States on the same day as The Marriage Plot but [gnashing of teeth] will be available in the UK well ahead of that, just a few days from now. Even if the early reviews from the UK weren't fairly (if not incandescently) glowing, I'd have it at the top of my list, since Hollinghurst is really about as good as it gets these days, at least based on the two of his books I've loved, The Folding Star and The Line of Beauty (I know, I still haven't read The Swimming-Pool Library), which are elegant and intense, surprising and ambitious. When the Guardian (in the most ambivalent of those reviews above) says, "Hollinghurst has a strong, perhaps unassailable claim to be the best English novelist working today," I have to agree myself, although I doubt he'd be the first name that came to the tongue of most readers (Zadie? Mitchell? Ishiguro? McEwan? Peace? Mieville? Waters?).

And so the anticipation begins (the subject of the book, a family story of England across the past century, is almost beside the point). And a reader (at least this reader) can in the meantime idly focus attention on one of the first parts of the book to present itself, the cover--or, rather, covers. I've put the US and UK jackets at the top of the page. What do you think?

I really have nothing against the UK cover--I rather like its near-abstraction that also evokes class distinctions and the social drama of the country house (also The Shining and, vaguely, a swastika)--but the cover that makes me hungry to hold it is the US one, from Knopf. In part it's just the pretty, vibrant pastels, and the stronger, less familiar display font, but mostly it's the painted man, whose features are smudged out in a way that recalls the more layered and geometric (and to my mind less appealing) facial obscuring that, for instance, Knopf designer Peter Mendelsund likes to work with (I don't know if he did this one too).

Is it a painting I should know? I don't, but I love the active artist's hand that it evokes: the smudges don't look unfinished, but rather smeared into obscurity by the painter out of dissatisfaction with his own ability (or out of hostility toward his subject). That's a story, in its vague intimations, that I want to read!

The Greatest Book Cover of All Time Is in My House Now

Look what just arrived in the mail! For someone who hasn't actually read his books, I certainly have had a thing for David Peace the last year or two. I think it started with hearing about this book, but suddenly I was seeing his name everywhere and he sounded like one of the most interesting writers going, from his historical thrillers set in Tokyo (Tokyo Year Zero and Occupied City) to his Red Riding Quartet (1974, 1977, 1980, 1983--oh good lord how I love a book titled with a number, and how I especially love a book titled with a year!) to GB84 (another swoony title), and of course to the deliriously attractive item to the right. And then there's the British TV trilogization of the Red Riding books, which none other than David Thomson called "better than The Godfather." (There's also a movie version of The Damned United, which is damned from the get-go for me because it spells out "United"--see below. Also, it stars Michael Sheen, who seems to be on an odd mission to play every contemporary British figure, mostly Tony Blair--like Zelig, but with Woody Allen playing all the other roles.)

"Peace" has become the first place I look in the fiction shelves in a bookstore, and despite all those appealing titles, the thing I am really looking for is The Damned Utd, more particularly this edition of The Damned Utd. Here's my problem: not having read The Damned Utd is causing a substantial logjam in my cultural consumption. I'm fairly desperate to watch the Red Riding TV trilogy, but first I want to read the Red Riding books (and I have 1974 sitting on my shelf, beckoning me). But I really can't read those books until I read The Damned Utd, because it is more or less the most appealing book I can imagine, in large part because it is wrapped by the Greatest Book Cover of All Time.

Really? The Greatest? Oh, let me count the ways:

• The title. The sort-of internal rhyme of "Damned" and "United," the incongruity of a football club being cursed by God (or his representatives), and, absolutely, the abbreviation "Utd," which just further compresses and mystifies the already compressed and mystifying poetry of it.
• The blacked-out eyes. Why are they blacked out? These are famous men, right? What did they do wrong? Or are they innocents given a fig leaf of anonymity as an apologetic gesture for being dragged into this terrible drama? I don't know! It's, at least, a perfect visual metaphor for the liberties taken with real people by historical fiction, but somehow it evokes so much more. (Or is it just a reference to this AC/DC album cover?)
• The gentlemen themselves. The brutal, grim players in their period warmups and working-class hairdos, bearing no resemblance to the pretty-boy millionaire footballers of our day, led by a man whose dapper style sets himself in a class apart and almost out of time.
• The review blurbs. A humdrum cover element, no doubt, but how can a quote like this, from a source as venerable as The Times, fail to whet the appetite: "Probably the best novel ever written about sport"?
• The fascination of another culture's pop culture. The other review quote, from the Observer, reads "The book that brought the legend back to life." To which my own reaction is, "What legend?" No doubt for a UK reader, especially of my own age or thereabouts, just dropping the names "Leeds United" (the Utd in question) and "Brian Clough" (the fellow in the suit, I assume) evokes the same sort of swarm of associations that saying "New York Yankees" and "Billy Martin" does for me. Would I be equally fascinated by a novel called The Damned Yanks, with Martin, Graig Nettles, Roy White, and Reggie Jackson walking across the cover with blacked-out eyes? Ah, hell, I'd probably buy that book too. Nevertheless, as someone who has burned out a little on the big American sports and has turned to soccer for the freshness (to me) of its endlessly complicated and passionate parallel history, I love the idea of reading about a legend I didn't even know was a legend.

So why, after all this, did I not have a copy of my own of The Damned Utd until today? Well, it's pretty hard to find in the States--it has yet to be picked up by a U.S. publisher, I believe. I could have ordered a copy on Amazon via a third-party seller, but I don't know, I wanted an absolutely new edition of the Greatest Cover Ever. Or I could have ordered from Amazon.co.uk, but maybe I'm just lazy or cheap or still don't actually believe you can get things from another continent, or maybe I just preferred the anticipation to the actual thing. But when I stopped by the Amazon page the other day and saw a single copy of the UK paperback listed as being in stock, somewhere in Amazon's U.S. warehouses, destiny was calling to me, and I could no longer resist. (Now that my copy has been shipped to me, the listing says "Temporarily Out of Stock"--I'm not sure how that one copy found its way into the inventory, but I'm glad it did.)

And now, how can the actual book possibly live up to all that build-up? I can't imagine it can, but rather than have it sit around making my mouth water, as I often do, I'm going to read this one right away, as soon as I finish Tess. I'll report back.