The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

You probably know what this book is about even if you haven’t read it, since it’s been on at the top of the bestseller lists for about a hundred weeks. But if you don’t, The Help is a story about the black maids of civil rights-era Jackson, Mississippi, and the white woman who decides to write a controversial book about their lives. That sentence is boring, right? That’s because you can read it and instantly know exactly what you’re going to get from this book: aging white debutantes who care only about appearance and the Junior League; black maids who run the ever-nuanced Black Woman in the South gamut from saintly to sassy. Now, I think The Help is a relatively well-written book about a subject that’s tricky to portray, and it’s a pleasure to read: great plot, lively, with a note of unexpectedness that keeps it out of Oprah territory. But unless you’re a sort of unwitting racist type and it helps you come to the revelation that yes, white people have (in general) historically been very cruel to those “beneath” them–The Help is really not as insightful or important as people seem to find it.

Kathryn Stockett, who is herself white (a fact that becomes pretty obvious as soon as you start reading), wrote this book out of guilt and affection for the black woman who raised her as a child in Jackson. She’s great at writing from the perspective of Skeeter, the awkward and mildly subversive white girl (who is repeatedly described as not-cute in the book but is obviously going to be played by Emma Stone in the movie version). Considering the touchiness of what she’s trying to do, she’s not too bad writing as either of her two black narrators, who were originally intended to be the only narrators before Stockett decided it was too weird.

But as a Duke professor asked, “Who gets to tell these stories in a way that they earn public attention?” We trust the filter of a white female author; we’re comfortable with the fact that she writes the black characters in dialect, while the white characters’ accents were probably just as strong. There’s a significant, subconscious current of nostalgia in the writing, and I suspect there’s a bit of old-South nostalgia in the reading of it too. But also, no one said that every book involving black people has to be Invisible Man. So kudos to Kathryn Stockett here for attempting to write about something real. I can overlook tacky earth-mama sentences like “Truth. It feels cool, like water washing over my sticky-hot body. Cooling a heat that’s been burning me up all my life” for that.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid

I used to spend a lot more time poking around the Internet for random information about the books I review. Circumstances, namely the circumstance of having no Internet, prevent me from doing that these days. But I still always try to look up the author on Wikipedia, out of both interest in writers’ lives and jealousy of all those who publish things. After reading Mohsin Hamid’s entry, the latter is dominating my brain.

Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was born in Pakistan and wrote the first draft of his eventual first novel in a Princeton writing workshop taught by Toni Morrison. He then went to Harvard Law School, and after graduation worked for McKinsey in New York. On his three months off per year, he finished the novel, Moth Smoke. It made waves in 2000, The Reluctant Fundamentalist then made bigger waves in 2007, and now Hamid divides his time between Lahore, London, and “various Mediterranean islands.”

Now, hold up. Aside from this whole Mediterranean island thing, how did this man get McKinsey to give him three months off per year to write? What the fuck? Does McKinsey still do that? Hey all my friends that work for McKinsey, can you inquire about getting me a consulting job that allows me to write for three months a year? I can write a lot here, but, I mean, money is also nice.

I suppose the answer is that Mohsin Hamid is brilliant. He’s certainly a good writer. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an elegant and simple novella, the story of a man who falls in love with the merit system and rises swiftly through the ranks of the American elite. He begins to realize at some point that the vaunted diversity of Manhattan has an edge–his ethnicity is celebrated as long as it’s clean-shaven, good-looking, and British-accented–but it’s not till 9/11 that he begins to understand that American fundamentalism is equal to that which attacked it. Seeing the flags covering the city, he wonders “what manner of host would sally forth from so great a castle.” In his ponderous state he grows a beard and scares everyone at the office, his WASPy lover Erica (get it?) pulls vaguely away from him, and this cloudy feeling of having been fooled takes him over. It’s told as as a dramatic monologue, addressed to an American listener who never talks and may or may not shoot the narrator in the end.

It’s great, it’s subtle and pertinent, and it’s now given out as pre-entry reading at several universities. It’s almost enough to quell my jealousy. Almost.

Dancer, by Colum McCann

Dancer, by Colum McCann, is one of the best books I’ve read since being here. I’d read short works of McCann’s in magazines–essays and stories that combine a solid traditional realism with a slightly unhinged, free quality that instantly locates him in the twenty-first century. This book, a loose and free-form biography of Rudolf Nureyev, a Russian dance prodigy whose life was like a firecracker that had once been planted in shit, takes those two characteristics and blows them up wonderfully.

The postmodern license to be “formally innovative” is easily misused. I’m thinking specifically of when people call Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs an actual book, but minor travesties occur all the time when people use lists or white space or rabidly circular stream-of-consciousness to celebrate not having to write the hard parts. But Dancer reminded me of how fitting and expansive the collage effect can be. The book starts with a list of things that were thrown onstage during “his” first season in Paris. Then jumps to a company of soldiers marching through Russia–”Four winters. They built roads through drifts with horses, pitching them forward into the snow until the horses died, and then they ate the horsemeat with great sadness.” Then to a woman who bathes these soldiers when they come bleeding into town. Then to a boy dancing in a shack. Then through the perspectives of all the people who get Rudi out of the Soviet exile village into a ballet school.

Then Rudi’s notes to himself, or his inner monologue–”Music sheets. Piano lesson. Talk re. military conscription. Special salts for bathing feet. Shorten lunchtime for barre work on extension. Take empty room. Sasha: Perfection is the duty. Work work work. In difficulty is ecstasy.”

Then through reviews, diaries, letters, and generally beautifully told stories of people connected to Rudi’s strange and kind of miraculous life–Kruschev orders him executed, he hangs out with Andy Warhol, etc–the story continues. It ends with a summary of an auction of Nureyev’s possessions after his death (“Six pairs of ballet boots, $44, 648 to Mr. and Mrs. Albert Cohen”).

I was sad to see this book end. I recommend it. Especially to anyone who has spent a large amount of time getting stoned and watching dance videos on YouTube over and over. Whoever those people might be.

You Cannot Hate Twilight Like I Hate Twilight

I was planning to write about Twilight at some point. First of all, it’s stupid as shit. Second, it’s about time; people have been going nuts over it for a couple of years, and the fuss is even dying down (thank God). But the reason I haven’t reviewed the book is–a reason that is probably already obvious–is that I hate Twilight so much that I can’t think about it without getting into Evil Grandpa levels of cranky. I know plenty of people I like have a fondness for Twilight but it’s just: why this of all things? Why a vampire romance? Why why why?

But I’m running low on ideas for books that most people have read (send me some!) so today I thought I would just take the plunge. I searched “twilight” on my computer because I knew I had gotten high and written a rant about Twilight at some point fourth year. Instead, I found this gem, which I had completely forgotten about and don’t remember writing. The reason for this is as follows: I turned in my thesis on March 31st and after that, I had not a thing due until May 3rd, when I had a ten-page criticism paper due. And so, in accordance with the way that I spent the whole intervening month, it turns out I did get high and write a rant about Twilight. Rereading it I was half angry that this is what I ended up doing in college, and half totally jealous of myself for taking classes that permitted me to get on my high horse like this.

The paper is called “Edward Cullen and To-Be-Looked-At-Ness: Reversal of the Cinematic Gaze in Twilight.” A) Ridiculous and B) I remember telling my dear friend Walt about it, and he said, “That sounds interesting but what is the reversal of the gays?” Generally it is a thick, silly essay, dripping with formal indignation and feminist rage and the writing of a person who has been drunk and wearing a bathing suit for two weeks. I feel like I have about ten friends who would think it’s funny so I’m posting it.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get to Twilight after all, it’s just so irritating to me. Here are my views in a nutshell: Bella is boring and sucks. Girls only like her because Edward likes her and they want to be her, which is a harmful way to think, because Edward sucks too. Twilight, like a Taylor Swift song but to a much larger degree, seems innocuous and perfectly contemporary but is really passive/objectifying/repressive and most importantly, lame. It’s the same hundred words recycled over and over again (Bella said Edward stared glitter vampire brooding attraction flying werewolf gaze rain silent powerful etc), which again, is just like Taylor Swift (fifteen boy date car eyes window dream love princess etc). And I heard that in the last book Bella has some sort of alien baby that tries to eat her. Yeah, America. This one’s on you.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower

You know when you’re trying to find a song that feels like what you want to listen to, and you keep shuffling through iTunes/pressing next on Pandora till it tells you that you’ve maxed out for the hour, and everything either hurts your ears or feels wrongly suggestive of emotion, so you put on Led Zeppelin or Beach House because they’re neutral and by the third song you’re remembering that it shouldn’t be an effort to find the music you want to listen to because some things always sound right.

Well, not that that emo rant made sense, but it’s the same thing for me when I’m trying to pick out a book. I’m usually overly aware of how gendered the book feels, and I’m almost never in the mood to read something intensely slanted one way or another, like Graham Greene or Alice Munro; like with music, I want the middle ground, something artful but devoid of visible construction, something that doesn’t need to be read late at night to make its full impact. All that is to say, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is pitch-perfect. It’s one of the best short story collections I’ve ever read, I think, and it always fits that neutral wish; I could read this any day, in any mood. Two important reasons for this: Wells Tower (what a name) understands both men and women, and he understands how to invisibly deconstruct ordinariness to make it vulnerable, universal, and smart.

Oh, also, the “blood eagle,” from the title story, which, being about crazy pirate Vikings, is an anomaly within the collection (but a pretty incredible one). Read this image, of a man’s lungs being pulled out his back: the blood eagle.

“He placed the point of his sword to one side of Naddod’s spine. He leaned into it and worked the steel in gingerly, delicately crunching through one rib at a time until he’d made an incision about a foot long, then he knelt and put his hands into the cuts. He fumbled around in there a second, and then drew Naddod’s lungs out through the slits. As Naddod huffed and gasped, the lungs flapped, looking sort of like a pair of wings. I had to turn away myself.”

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

Why are American book titles so stupid? I thought it was supposed to be the other way around, like how  Dirty Dancing was released in Asia as like, Baby Loses Her Virginity. But consider, with Harry Potter, Philosopher’s Stone to Sorcerer’s Stone. Whatever focus group was like “Uhhh philosopher sounds kind of lame” is–well–stupid, but representative of the general population, so let’s move on.

But from Men Who Hate Women to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: really, that’s silly. Considering how many people carry this distinctively-colored book around in airports, I would have read this book a lot sooner if it had had its original title. It’s a lot more telling about the cultural scope of the story, and the sort of understated, flatly-put drama of the plot. Stieg Larsson was a journalist, and his thriller gets directly at the high Swedish rate of violence against women (the sections begin with chilling statistics like “92% of women have not reported their latest sexual assault to police”), dormant Naziism, bad big business, et cetera.

There’s a blurb on the back cover comparing it to Bergman films, which, you know, that’s pretty ridiculous. But this book, while not what I’d recommend for an example of great writing, is still very well-crafted in terms of plot. The mystery loops and tightens in the perfect way, the characters–including the women–are delightfully free of that thriller disease where everyone become reducible to stock descriptions about powerful muscles and “slender, attractive” figures and smoldering green eyes, and the psychology of the villains (and victims) is as complicated and interesting as it appears to come. I’m glad these Stieg Larsson books have become such bestsellers. Everyone who reads Dan Brown should switch.

An enigmatic extra fact: you know how all the Harry Potter books are kind of all about socks? This book is the same way about sandwiches.

The Believers, by Zoe Heller

The amount of press that this book has gotten for not containing any likable characters is quite interesting to me. As a young person I can offer no answer to this question, but it’s something to think about: has “relatability” become a lot more important in fiction than it used to be? Certainly this question is only applicable to books above a certain level of creativity; most genres (anything religious, pulpy, thrilling, romantic, or self-helpish) are solely meant to please, soothe, or indulge the reader. And you can think about “relatability” in two different ways. There’s the inane, literal relatability of blank-slate Bella in the Twilight books (the same kind of insert-me-in-this-book-so-I-can-feel-how-that-kiss-felt relatability of every chick-lit protagonist), and there’s the likable-character kind of relatability, which often branches into the categories of Noble and Underdog (as a story on NPR puts it, “the dumbed-down midcult notion that every novel must contain an Atticus Finch in order to secure readers’ attention”).

I feel like I’m talking about people now, which I guess I always am. But my point is that a book has to be pretty smart if it’s not going to have any relatable characters. It has nothing to fall back on, no shortcuts; it’s like meeting someone at a cocktail party and not having a common enemy, not even an abstract one, like the chirpy girl on those Progressive car insurance commercials. And it’s a very deliberate thing to have totally un-relatable, unsympathetic characters. They have to be cold, history-less, unaffected, and self-serving–which in the ever-reflexive novel world, usually means white, upper-class, navel-gazing, limousine-liberal New Yorkers. I’m thinking of The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud, and this book.

But the characters in The Believers are all unlikable because of one reason: they all believe in something too strongly. As Zoe Heller says in a NYT interview, “All of us invest our identities in what we believe.” Obvious, but a bit of a scary thing to think about when put that way. This book is fantastic, though. Like A Gate at the Stairs, it’s ended up on a ton of best-of-the-year lists. It goes quickly, it’s sharply observant, so precisely written that small observations seem deathly truthful. From a random page: “She looked pleased, as if the family’s failure to be amused were flattering confirmation of her challenging, unorthodox sensibility.”

A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore

Now that my bookshelf is no longer arranged by color, I can’t find my Best American Short Stories 1999, the first of that collection that I ever read–containing the most lovely story of all time (“The Hermit’s Story,” by Rick Bass: really, it makes me feel like I’m flying) as well as “The Sun, The Moon, The Stars” by Junot Diaz, “Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri, and “Save the Reaper” by Alice Munro. If I could find it, I could verify that the Lorrie Moore story it contains (“Real Estate”) also contains the line “mashing the old pink button,” which went way past what Judy Blume ever could as far as teaching ten-year-old me what masturbation truly entails.

That is an unverified memory, but I am proud to imagine that my education of that sort came from Lorrie Moore and not Deenie. Because I love Lorrie Moore. She’s a cross of Sylvia Plath, Raymond Carver, and Cathy from that comic strip–and I don’t mean that last bit disparagingly, just that she’s female and neurotic in a particularly female way–but she never puts things in a way you’ve heard before, and her neuroses are absurd, strict, vulnerable, and revelatory. In college, one of my roommates and I had to read a lot of Lorrie Moore in a short period of time, and we nearly always disagreed about her. I think Lorrie Moore can be scary because she writes in the space that most people would like to forget in the interest of forming more acceptable thoughts; she writes the electrical impulses, the wildly disgusting flashes of selfish desire. She writes about things we’d like to pretend we don’t understand at all.

A Gate at the Stairs is really good. It’s on almost every Top 10 Books of 2009 list, and it seems like the work of a novelist and not a short story writer, which is great: unlike Moore’s Anagrams, it’s linear, has space to breathe, and it’s not so tensed-up in its observances. Here Moore’s style reflects less of her own neuroses and more of the endless self-consciousness that comes from trying to understand your own bitty life in the reflection of the world; for a coming-of-age story set in the Midwest, it brushes right up against (this is a long list, but really) race, religion, liberalism, terror, death, guilt, and ethics. “Tragedies were a luxury,” her young protagonist thinks. “They were constructions of an affluent society, full of sorrow and truth but without moral function… this was awe-inspiring, wounding entertainment told usefully and in comfort at tables full of love and money.”

Drown, by Junot Diaz

Now this is a book that people who don’t like to read should read. If they assigned this book in high school (although they certainly would never have assigned it in mine: too much sex, and perhaps worse, too many glimpses of contemporary “minority issues” that might persuade people to reconsider or at the very least consider their own conservatism; no, only the best Noble Savage bullshit for the Baptists)–anyway, if they assigned this book in high school, I bet kids would actually read it. And like it. Or love it and become obsessed, because Drown speaks directly to the emotional, social extremes that teenagers might most want to read about–sex, of course, but also drugs, danger, insecurity, isolation, trying to be cool. And I don’t intend to say that this book is best for adolescents, because it’s not. It’s well-engineered and completely mature as a collection, with no easy messages or themes, and the writing is killer.

I’m pretty obsessed with Junot Diaz. Like when I was trying to think of things to do after I graduated, I considered trying to stalk him for a year and then writing a book called My Year Stalking Junot Diaz. And although I didn’t do that (there’s still time!), I wrote a chapter of my thesis on The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and doing the research really cemented my love. Diaz is socially conscious in a powerful, organic way: like, in one interview, he says “I just can’t imagine that one is a writer in the Americas and not in some way directly confronting the colossal power of the United States…. no matter how much you try, you are going to graze up against the question, what does it mean to live in a world where there’s one country that is so asymmetrically powerful and what are the consequences of that power?” Notice that he says “no matter how much you try.” I love that: it’s like, he wants to write about drugs or comic books or juvie, but it’s written into his conscience that all of that is wrapped up with global politics. And he pulls it off, talking about both.

I could go on for years about Junot Diaz. But okay, this is one last example of how he routinely accomplishes another fairly extreme juxtaposition–this one mixed up with masculinity and softness, gritty distance and then intimacy. In “Aurora,” a story in Drown, he describes the room where he’s hooking up with a girl: “concrete with splotches of oil, a drain hole in the corner where we throw our cigs and condoms.” Next page, “She picks off my glasses and kisses the parts of my face that almost never get touched, the skin under the glass and frame.” Almost nothing, but extraordinary.

On Beauty, by Zadie Smith

Occasionally, usually after reading something mediocre, I will get incredibly annoyed and slip into a zone where I can completely understand the thought process of people who don’t like “literature” at all. Because fiction can seem completely irritating as a concept: there are so many zillions of minor events occurring in every house in every city in every country that it gets ridiculous to even consider the numbers of novels that have tried, ever-awkwardly, to crystallize something important out of the great big world of human experience.

And so many bad ones too–think of how many floundering paperbacks exist with only a Powells.com blurb to bolster them, some back-cover bullshit reading something like, “Maine is a deadly place with a big secret. In Flapper McBoyle’s astonishing sophomore novel, we meet Alice, a single mother coming home for the first time in ten years only to discover that the midwife who delivered her holds the key to the entire town’s past” etc.–and it’s like, WHO CARES?!?!?!?! Who CARES about all these little stories! Stop describing things that don’t exist!

Well, it’s a good thing that there are so many legitimately tremendous writers out there. Zadie Smith is a talent for sure, and On Beauty is wonderful. It’s an academic satire novel, which is a genre that has lately become underdeveloped. And it is so good and naturally empathetic and honest that all of a sudden, reading fiction seems to make perfect sense. You realize the very simple reason you started liking to read books the first place, back when you were a kid–fiction is the thing that, above all other forms, allows you to understand what it is to be another person. And that ability and privilege is funny, eye-opening, humbling, and necessary. If more conservative people read books, we’d have universal health care in America like that.