Ephemeral Firmament

Russell Hoban, 1925-2011

Many of the best readers I know have enthusiastically recommended to me the novels of Russell Hoban, who died Tuesday, in particular Riddley Walker and Turtle Diary. I don't know why I haven't taken them up on it--I do mean to, I just haven't.

Maybe the made-up language of Riddley Walker has kept me from diving in, but it could also be that I've already found my ideal Russell Hoban books. As I've written here before, reading a great book often causes me to stop reading books by that author, not read more, in part because I'm afraid of marring the perfection of that masterpiece. And I've read a few Hoban books that would be hard to top, even with a tour-de-force, post-apocalyptic classic: Bread and Jam for Frances, A Baby Sister for Frances, A Birthday for Frances, and A Bargain for Frances. I was a little surprised that Hoban's Times obit was headlined "Russell Hoban, 'Frances' Author, Dies at 86," given what a rabid following Riddley Walker has, but "'Frances' Author" is indeed how I think of him too.

The Frances books are, of course, picture books about a family of badgers. Why are they so great? There's the deadpan humor, the modesty, the wonderful match between Hoban's words and his then-wife Lillian's homey pencil illustrations. And, dare I say it, there's the morality. Children's books often bear the burden of didacticism: they carry lessons like lozenges, and often they taste like medicine going down. The Frances books are as shameless and earnest in their moral tales as any Berenstain Bears dreck, but they work, because of their humor and their patience and their modesty, all modeled by Frances's parents, who sit on the living room sofa talking fondly of missing their daughter Frances, who has dealt with the arrival of her baby sister by running away to live under the dining room table, until Frances finally comes back of her own accord, and who let Frances eat bread and jam for every meal until she gets sick of it herself.

Perhaps best of all, though, are the lists. Hoban is right up there with Nabokov and Amis among the great listmakers of the English language, and his capture the toddler's desperate pleasure in ordering things. There's Frances packing her knapsack to run away, with her tiny special blanket and her alligator doll, all her nickels and pennies, a box of prunes, and five chocolate sandwich cookies. There's Frances's sharp little friend Thelma, blandly enumerating the qualities of her tea set: plastic that does not break, pretty red flowers, all the cups and saucers, the sugar bowl, the cream pitcher, and the teapot.

And best of all, in one of the great scenes of silent drama and comedy in all of art, Albert's lunch, which he lays out on his school desk while Frances waits to eat her bread and jam:

Albert took a napkin

and tucked it under his chin.

He arranged his lunch neatly.

"I like cream cheese with cucumber

and tomatoes on rye," said Albert.

With his spoon he cracked the egg.

He sprinkled salt on the yolk.

He took a bite of sandwich,

a bite of egg, and a drink of milk.

Then he went around again.

Albert made the sandwich,

the egg, and the milk come out even.

I can testify that this scene is delicious to read out loud, as is Frances's own lunch list that comes out even at the end of the book: tomato soup, lobster-salad sandwich, celery, carrot sticks, black olives, plums, cherries, and vanilla pudding. The only delight missing? A Chompo Bar, the central object of A Birthday for Frances, and as evocative a talisman as you could hope for, especially when Frances squeezes it just a little, or sings, "Happy Chompo to me / Is how it ought to be."

I'm always in awe of the triple threats and the Renaissance men (or women), the multitalented artists who succeed in a number of fields, and Hoban, who hopped from picture books to novels, from science fiction to realist stories, already qualified, even before I found out today that he had an early career as a painter and illustrator, making regular appearances in the late '50s and early '60s on the pages, and the covers, of Time and Sports Illustrated, including cover portraits for Time of Joan Baez and Jackie Gleason that the subjects apparently disliked. Earlier this year Chris Bell wrote a wonderfully thorough post on Hoban's art career, with many sample images, including one he drew of photographer Fred Eberstadt [see left, from American Artist], who, as I suspected, was indeed the father of Fernanda Eberstadt, whose novels--and author photos--I've admired here recently. (I love when my obsessions circle around and meet each other.) And something more to track down, a 1959 picture book that Hoban himself illustrated, called What Does It Do and How Does It Work?, with wonderfully vibrant images of dump trucks, backhoes, and the like. Vintage copies are currently available on Amazon for between $5 and $250.

Two Things I Liked This Weekend in the LA Review of Books

I get a little caught up in having to say something when posting something here--what Calvin Trillin, in his recent NYer piece on his limited cookery, called the "value added"--which keeps me from sharing things I like. I guess that's what Twitter is for now, the sharing without the value added, and that's what I use it for, but tweets float off into the ether, plus it gets quiet around here when I can't think of a value to add. So here are two things I liked this weekend that I don't have much extra to say about. Both of them, not coincidentally, appeared in the LA Review of Books.

First, something I read just now, although it's been online since Thanksgiving, which is more or less forever. It's the sixth installment of the LARoB's Writers on Teachers series--I think I'm going to read the rest of them, but not tonight because I have to write the rest of this and then fold laundry while I watch yesterday morning's UNC-Kentucky game [ed. note from the next morning: Wow, those kids can play!]--called "My Dinner with Marianne," by Jeffrey Kindley. I don't know as much about Marianne Moore as I should (I feel like I've heard the anecdote about her making up fanciful car names for Ford like the "Utopian Turtletop" as many times as I've heard all other stories about her combined), but I'm getting the feeling it must have been hard not to write a good profile of Miss Moore, who provides such great copy (I can see her style infecting this very post). But Kindley, about whom I knew nothing and still don't know much, does even better than that in writing about the time the great lady invited him to come down from his Columbia dorm for cocoa and dinner in Fort Greene. An excellent paragraph:

The “certain items” to be ordered as our appetizer were, alas, cherrystone clams. I had never eaten a clam in my life, and the prospect of sliding one down my throat made my gorge rise. But here I was in Brooklyn, in a restaurant with Marianne Moore. I was determined not to throw up.

Meanwhile, the reason I was on the LARoB site in the first place was a piece I read yesterday, by the novelist Glen David Gold. It's on "parsing the aspirational nature of literary friendship," which in itself is a subject I am beginning to understand the weirdness of, now that I've finally developed some literary friendships that are both truly friendships but are, inevitably, professional as well. His conclusion on the subject ("it's the work which is a commodity, not you") is worthwhile though inevitably slippery and tough to put into practice, but it's almost beside the point.

What's great about the piece is the historical artifact he unearthed to discuss, and the skillful and dramatic way he draws out the elements of his artifact. The artifact is a 1961 letter William Faulkner wrote to a young writer named Joan Williams, explaining why he wouldn't give her a rave blurb for her first novel. Fair enough--it's the sort of letter just about every writer of any consequence must have to write from time to time (or at least imply, by not writing). But this letter turns out to hold much more, indeed to pack in as much narrative power per square inch as any of Faulkner's stories, and much of the pleasure of the piece comes from the way Gold draws out its surprising elements in sequence.

It's not the sort of effect easy to capture in excerpt, of course, so I'll give you this but ask you to read the whole thing (it's certainly worth it):

He has already looked over her shoulder for external enemies (editors, and we love them for it, are transactional by job description), and dismissed the possibility it was a self-motivated request. Is this something like rescuing her? Telegraphing that if she were truly compassionate about her friendship with William Faulkner, she would know not to commodify it?

Hard to say, as his snap-of-a-rubber-band-against-the-wrist response is so awful. He has done something only a man who has toiled in Hollywood, turned bitter, and won could do: written a blurb that he must know a smart editor could turn into this: “A compassionate and hopeful first novel” — William Faulkner.

But his genius runs deeper than that. He knows the acceptable blurb is writhing just out of reach, if all Joan Williams needed to do was hand it over, shrinking and humiliated, but also aware that she had landed a big fish. 

This is early in the discussion. It--and the letter--get even better. (And one side note about a relevant but unmentioned detail about literary relationships that many readers will bring to the situation: Mr. Gold, an admired novelist in his own right, is married to Alice Sebold, the author of The Lovely Bones and no doubt an even more sought-after blurb-giver than himself.)

*--The photo above is of the plot outline of A Fable, as relettered by Faulkner himself on the wall of his writing room after his wife had it painted over, taken on my visit to Rowan Oak this summer.

My Lost Ritual: Amazon's Best Books of 2011

This is the first year in the last eight when I haven't organized--or at least had a say in--Amazon's editors' picks for the top books of the year, which came out yesterday. The beginning of November was one of the two poles of my editorial year (along with my author-interview frenzy at BookExpo in the spring): the other Books editors and I spent the year reading with our year-end list in mind, and October especially was a blur of reading and recommending and rereading, and meeting after meeting that sometimes gave me headaches but were always fascinating and spirited discussions among book lovers (who just sometimes didn't agree on which books were most lovable).

I mostly loved the process, and the results. At its most basic level, we were doing what booksellers most like to do--put books in the hands of readers we know will enjoy them--and we also knew the list would help authors we admired sell a few more of their books. Plus I'm a dork for lists, and for year-end ceremonial hoo-ha. But this year I got out of the new-releases game early in the year and watched October go by with other stressful things to focus on, doing a smidge of lobbying from afar for a favorite book or two but otherwise out of the process. I just haven't read enough new books this year to have a strong opinion on the best, and so I find myself approaching the list (and all the other top 10 category lists on the page) not as a bookseller or a critic, but as a reader who is looking for a few recommendations.

You can see the Top 100 for yourself, but here's the top 20:

1. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
2. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
3. What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes (his second straight year at #3)
4. In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larsen
5. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
6. Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor
7. Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson
8. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
9. Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zukoff
10. The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht
11. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
12. Bossypants by Tina Fey
13. Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
14. We the Animals by Justin Torres
15. Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
16. The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan
17. The Greater Journey by David McCullough
18. Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks
19. Maphead by Ken Jennings
20. The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

There are a lot of the most talked-about books of the year on the list (this year's PW top 10, the other big one announced this early in the season, is a little more eclectic), and I've actually read five of them (1, 4, 12, 15, 19), all of which I enjoyed, although I wasn't swept away by The Art of Fielding the way many good readers I know were. In my limited 2011 reading my clear favorite was Andre Dubus III's Townie, which I've raved about here in passing before, which made the list at #27. And I was also glad to see Malcolm X, The Empty Family, Fire Season, Hark! A Vagrant, and Pulphead on the list, and especially Orientation, my old friend Dan Orozco's long-awaited first book. No to mention not one but two former Jeopardy! champs, Arthur Phillips as well as Mr. Jennings, which encourages me that there may be a life after hanging up the signaling device.

If I was still in the meetings there are a few more from early in the year I would have plumped for: Edward Hoagland's Sex and the River Styx, Teju Cole's Open City, Ben Katchor's Cardboard Valise. I'm a third of the way through Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child and it certainly seems like top 100 material so far. And there are some others that would have been high on my must-check-out-before-we-decide list, like Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods, Hector Tobar's Barbarian Nurseries, Charles Mann's 1493, 2008 #1 pick Philip Hensher's King of the Badgers, and Lethem's Ecstasy of Influence.

But I must remember, I'm skimming the lists as a prospective reader now, and there are plenty of books, both on the main list and the category ones, that I've bookmarked for my to-read list (which seems to have only grown longer now that I don't have to stick to a 90% new-releases diet). The Marriage Plot, Habibi, and Blue Nights are already on the short stack at my elbow, and The Sisters Brothers and Mr. Fox have been waiting patiently there too. And now I'm adding a few more to them: We the Animals, Ondaatje's Cat's Table, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts, Donald Ray Pollock's The Devil All the Time (I still have to catch up with Knockemstiff), Diane Keaton's Then Again, Anders Nilsen's Big Questions, and the nonfiction comic book, The Green River Killer. But the ones I will likely read first are the ones I bought just now, two books in the Kindle Singles top 10, The Saint and Let the Great Axe Fall. I'm still not much of a Kindle reader, but the Singles seem perfect uses for the medium. (I guess the Singles list was limited to pieces in that Amazon-published program, but it would have been a great place to include Keith Gessen's How a Book Is Born, the ideal back-story companion to the #1 pick on the main list, The Art of Fielding--it's the reason I finally read the book in the first place.)

And then there's Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan's new essay collection that I have a sneaking suspicion will be one of my favorite books of the year once I get my hands on it. Having already marveled at some of its varied contents online--on living with the last Fugitive, Andrew Lytle, on smoking pot at Disneyworld, on Axl Rose and Michael Jackson--I've been thrilled to see the Sullivan fans come out of the woodwork when the book came out this month. He really is one of the most thrillingly talented writers working these days.

Yooper Heaven: Tom Bissell on Jim Harrison

It's only fitting that at the end of a day of researching Michigan literature I would come across a profile of one of the great old men of Michigan lit by someone who makes as good a claim as anyone to be the great young man of same: Tom Bissell's piece on Jim Harrison in the October issue of Outside. As Mittenlit, where I found the link, said, Harrison is such a compelling character that a profile "almost writes itself," but I thought Bissell made as much of this gift as you might hope, with a half-dozen lines worth stopping and writing down. (Here's one: "His head looks as though it belongs on the end of something a Viking would use to knock down a medieval Danish gate.") That Harrison's an old Upper Peninsula hunting friend of his father's also gives Bissell's impulse to look to him as a mentor an authentic background. And, toughest to pull off, there's a nicely underplayed moment late in the piece where he puts to work the lesson he had learned from Harrison earlier, about not claiming to know anything you don't:

The assumption of false authority is a ­use­ful writing trick, one I have used again and again, but maybe it’s also insidious. ­After all, it actually means something to know what things are called. You cannot share anything worth knowing unless you make it clear what you do not know. Harrison refuses to hide his research. If he reads a book to learn about something, the characters in his novels will invariably read the same book. It makes the stuff Harrison does know that much more striking.

By the end of the piece, Bissell spends a whole long paragraph just laying open his ignorance, asking Harrison about the trees, the bushes, the deer around his Montana home the way a four-year-old might and the way most grownups would be too prideful to do.

It's the sort of lesson someone, like me, embarking on a project to tell people about the best books to read about parts of the country he's never been to, e.g. the Upper Peninsula, would do well to keep in mind.

"So, Am I in the Club?"

It's fascinating to watch a generation congeal into literary history, and see figures like Franzen, DFW, Mary Karr, and Eugenides, who I once knew mostly as names on books and guys who were uncomfortable at their own readings, harden into the polished subjects of literary anecdotes, like those Gertrude Stein and Scott Fitzgerald figurines we know so well. I have half a mind to rewrite Midnight in Paris as Midnight in Somerville and Syracuse, with me in the Owen Wilson role. The next best thing, I guess, is to read The Marriage Plot, which is indeed next on my reading list.

I'm speaking of Evan Hughes's new piece in New York, on the aforementioned and their friends:

Karr was teaching at Syracuse by this point, as she still does, and in Lit she describes Wallace’s coming there with “a pal” to scout out places to live in ’92. The pal was Franzen, who had taken a road trip up from Philadelphia with Wallace. They slept in Karr’s attic guest room in her house in the university ghetto. It was the last weekend of the NCAA basketball tournament, the year Christian Laettner hit the turnaround shot to beat Kentucky. Though his focus was clearly on Karr, Wallace was floating the idea that he and Franzen could both move to Syracuse. Franzen was open to it, but lost interest when it started snowing in April. They all went out for cheap Chinese and talked for hours, Karr writes, “till fortune-cookie slips confettied the linoleum booth top.” Karr’s marriage was on its last legs. They were three disheartened people.

Is it just the passage of time that makes this summing up possible, or is it that one of them died? If The Marriage Plot and Freedom can both be read as veiled portraits of DFW, then maybe his death is becoming the 9/11 of that literary generation, the event they all feel they must reckon with. Frankly, it's a subject I'm more interested in.

Why I Have 3,600 Books in My House and Only Eight on My Kindle

Earlier this week Mark O'Connell posted "The E-Reader of Sand" at the Millions, a thoughtful and entertaining entry in the new and burgeoning genre of why-I-love-or-don't-love-my-Kindle articles. This, I guess, is my own entry in same.

Like O'Connell, I have too many books for the space I live in. Like O'Connell, this doesn't stop me from bringing more books into the house. And like O'Connell, this is a "source of mild tension" with my dear wife.

Also like O'Connell, I like--really like--the physical elements of a book: the slap, the weight, the tang, the space they take up. I also like something he doesn't mention but many others have: the way the unique physical characteristics of a book help to place a book, and your reading of it, in memory. (As a bestselling book I recently read in physical form reminded me, memory is strongly rooted in visual associations.)

And like O'Connell, I have a Kindle (in fact, thanks to my old job I was, if not an early adopter, at least an early tester). But unlike him, I don't really like mine. He writes as a fan of physical books who already finds the conveniences and Borgesian infinitude of the ebook reader tempting him away, and he worries that his own desires as a consumer will hasten the death of the old-fashioned books he loves. My own desires, by comparison, aren't there yet: if it were just up to me, we'd still be killing trees left and right so I could have a house even more crammed with bound paper.

There are a number of lesser reasons why I still prefer physical books (the object-ness of the book, the sense of ownership that you don't get with ebooks that are really just leased from Amazon), but the main reason is that the Kindle doesn't fit the way I read. The Kindle, as constructed now, is a very linear machine: you feel as though you are walking through a tunnel with a torch that's able to only illuminate a screen's worth of words at a time, and you can only go forward or back in one-page increments. (I know that's not entirely true: you can go to the table of contents in many books or, if you know the exact text you're looking for, search.) It's a very good way to read the only books I've read in full on my Kindle (actually in the Kindle app on my phone, for the most part): the three Stieg Larsson books. I've loved having them sitting on my phone as what my wife and I have always called, when we remind each other not to leave the house without a book, an "emergency sit-down," and it was a pleasure to whip through their pages.

But one of the underheralded beauties of a physical book is that it can be a linear machine, but doesn't have to be. If you've read a book already, you can jump back and forth in the blink of an eye to sections you want to look back at (sections your visual memory has a good intuitive sense for finding). And if you haven't read it yet, you can step in at any point and get a taste of it, with the better-than-random method that a longtime book reader has for getting the spirit of a book in a few well-chosen glances. And these days, much of my reading is done in one or the other of these ways: either I am reading a book hard, so I can write about it or just further think about it--not only reading the pages in order, but returning to some of them and jumping ahead to others; or I am reading it lightly, opening it from curiosity or in search of inspiration or distraction, without ever planning to read it through from A to Z. And the Kindle, as currently designed, can't hold a candle to the codex for either sort of reading.

Which gets back to my post from yesterday, and why I love having 3,600 books in my house. It's not just the fetishist and obsessive collector in me (though I confess both demons do exist)--it's that I love having so many books at hand for easy access. From the desk where I'm writing this I can reach over a hundred books without leaving my seat, and I'm a short walk away (well, two floors in some cases) from a few thousand more. Does that give me easier access than the Borgesian infinite elibrary that, in theory--though at quite a cost at this point!--could be contained in my Kindle? Hard to believe in the age of Google, but yes--the perfect complement to the searchable world available on my laptop or my phone is this collection of physical objects, which my visual-sorting and -remembering mind has surprising powers for navigating quickly through. I'm a magpie as a writer and a reader, and a magpie thrives on the chance discovery as well as the planned one. Having a large but well-curated collection close at hand provides an almost ideal environment to make such chance discoveries (or, even better, rediscoveries) fruitful and frequent.

Is that sort of movement within and between books possible on the Kindle? In theory yes, but in practice, as anyone who has tried to navigate quickly within their personal elibrary or within a particular ebook, not at all. That's not to say, though, that the creators of the Kindle, or some competing device, will not find ways to recreate electronically some of the features that I love about my physical library, through multiple windows, visual cues, note-taking, etc. I have no doubt that there are folks in South Lake Union working on that right now, in fact. But for me the Kindle as it stands can't offer the experiences of reading I like best, so for now my love of physical books still matches my base consumer desires, and the 3,600 will likely continue to grow faster than the eight.

P.S. That all said, as I was writing this post I decided to see if I could order a Kindle book or two to take into the woods for the next couple of weeks, along with the knee-high stack of books I already have packed (and, more importantly, to have as my next emergency backup books on my phone). I looked for some promising linear candidates (they call them "page-turners" for a reason), and ended up downloading Richard Stark's first Parker book, The Hunter, and the stranger-than-fiction skullduggery tale, Charlie Wilson's War. I'd still rather have the physical versions (and I'm sure I could find used copies of each for less), but in the interest of space, and further experimentation, and having a book to jump into when I'm stuck somewhere in line, I bit on both. We'll see...

P.P.S. As close readers of the previous P.S. might have guessed, yes, this will be my last post for the next two weeks, during which I'll be off the grid and, one hopes, reading.

Putting My House (in Other Words, My Books) in Order

I have a lot of books: 3,642 when I last counted, although I bought three more today. On the other hand, I've actually set aside a couple hundred of those to get rid of in the last week, which may seem like a drop in the bucket to you but feels like a pound of flesh to me. I've spent most of the last week or so in a task I and my wife have been looking forward to for some time: putting our books in some sort of order. For years, books have been sitting around in boxes brought home from work and in piles on tables and the floor. That may make it sound worse than it was--the house remained navigable and more or less presentable throughout--but it was driving us--mostly her--a low grade of crazy.

Now there are still some piles on the floor, because I haven't quite finished the job (I need to build some more shelves to fit the last few dozen!), but for the most part everything is in its place, which took longer and exhausted me more than I imagined, in part because I had the bright idea of putting the books in order in the basement, where there was room to lay them out, which added a floor or two of climbing with every stack I brought down and then back up.

Here is how the basement looked at its peak. The nonfiction room (there were some more stacks around the corner):

And the fiction (or at least B, C, D, E, J, K, L, M):

For tears my/our books (my wife reads plenty and has brought a fair number of them into the house, but we all know that I'm the one with the problem) were organized by a simple but idiosyncratic method of which I was, for a time, quite proud: alphabetically by title. I had tried a few failed systems before that--by publication date (too hard to maintain), by color (made me nauseous)--so I was very pleased when I found one that I believed in, and I was quite happy to explain its merits at length (and often did).

But that arrangement wore out its novelty and its welcome, and in my older age I've turned back to tradition: the fiction is now alphabetical by author, the nonfiction by subject (and fairly standard subjects at that, aside from a few personal specialties like Cities, Money, New Yorker Writers, Fake Memoirs (you know who you are!), and Nixon). And now Laura might actually be able to find the Alice Munro book she's looking for, rather than having them scattered about the house. (Can you remember the titles of Alice Munro books? No one can. It's the one thing she can't write well. Speaking of which, it's always bothered and/or fascinated me that The Lives of Girls and Women, the one of her titles seemingly most suitable, in its plurality, for the title of a story collection--although nearly indistinguishable from the later The Love of a Good Woman--is actually the name of her only novel.)

I expect this won't be the last you'll hear about the Big Reorg--in particular, Mark O'Connell had a nice piece on personal libraries in the age of e-books on the Millions earlier this week that I hope to respond to--but in the meantime, I'll leave you with before and after images of another special section, my dear NYRB Classics (which Laura will also be happy to have in one place for a change):