Brevity is the  soul of lit...reviews -- 2016 Part 1
City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg (2015)
"You are infinite. I see you. You are not alone."
I was as excited about Hallberg's debut novel as any in a long time, going back to my appreciation for his criticism over at The Millions. But his 911-page tome dedicated to 1970s New York tries so hard to say anything meaningful that it doesn't really care what that meaningful thing is. Hallberg set out to write a big ideas book without grounding it in any worthwhile ideas.
I read this shortly after watching Master of None, and I was thinking a lot around that time — maybe too much — about whether art earns its message; i.e. does it construct the foundation well enough to merit a cathartic payoff? (In Master's case, I thought not, contrary to most popular opinion.) Similarly, the connections Hallberg fosters among his diverse characters seem haphazard and rarely come together meaningfully. His thesis is this above-quoted line, which concludes the novel and, if we're being frank, is rather passé. I mean, this is the thesis of an awful lot of art (and a lot of awful art), and much of it earns it in a more fulfilling and cathartic way than City of Fire.
The narrative voice is inconsistent; teenage Charlie, in particular, uses a whole host of words I have a hard time seeing teenage Charlie actually using — things like après-ski and sepulchral and "the chaotic stalactites of the sprayed-on ceiling texture." The writing often reeks of effort, with batting gloves "scrunched scrotally" at the base of a nightstand or summer "like a flash of thigh beyond a janitor-propped door." No thanks, on both of those.
This is all coming across rather harsh, when the fact is I read these 900+ pages rather quickly. I don't think Hallberg is a bad writer by any stretch of the imagination. I felt while reading this the way I felt while reading something like Franzen's Twenty-Seventh City. This is the rough draft for what will be a much better and more fulfilling novel.
S by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst (2014)
S is a wonderful idea and engrossing project that, like The Usual Suspects, falls apart with the more scrutiny you apply to it. The dual explorations of a literary mystery and an incipient relationship through the marginalia of a bygone novel? Sign me up.
But by its end, S becomes a victim of its conceit. You can't make the suspense of Jen and Eric's literary discoveries linger if you tell the whole story non-chronologically — as the writing in the margins purports to do. The way around that, then, is to unrealistically limit their most revelatory commentary to the latter stages of Ship of Theseus. It's here where it crosses the line from just contrived enough to too.
The stakes of the literary mystery, which seem so high starting out, gradually decline throughout as you realize Jen and Eric will always be fine, and that the dangers they face can never actually be shown, only told.
Nevertheless, this was as engrossing a book as I read this year.
The Game by Jon Pessah (2015)
Read this in the spring considering it was a CBA year, and it was a fascinating glimpse at the behind-the-scenes owner-union dynamic around the '94 strike. Pessah doesn't hide his allegiances much; I doubt he'd have voted Bud Selig to the Hall of Fame, if you know what I mean. I learned a lot that I didn't know about how Selig gained power, how owners found their way to public money for stadiums and how they played the public relations game when it came to steroids.
My only problem was the incorporation of well-reported though seemingly irrelevant details about George Steinbrenner and the Yankees dynasty.
By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano (2000)
"It's good to love. It's bad to be impressionable."
It has less to do with poetry or The Church than I expected, as it focuses more on the culture of acquiescence, even among artists, around the Pinochet Coup. I won't pretend to know enough about Chilean history — let alone Chilean literary history — to fully absorb the incisiveness of the satire. But holding soirees — and I know it's translated, but man is that the perfect word for the juxtaposition — a floor above torturous interrogations makes for a delicious critique.
Like some of Dostoevsky's works, Bolano can fall prey to a rambling, unlikable protagonist. In this one, though, that comes with the conceit.
Despair by Vladimir Nabokov (1965)
"I lied as a nightingale sings, ecstatically, self-obliviously."
Nabokov is that wonderful mix of fun and literary high-mindedness — an author who never bogs you down while delivering masters courses in how to craft a story. His protagonists make their monstrousness more relatable and often even palatable through their overwhelming self-centeredness — who can't relate to that? — and hilariously searing criticisms of others. Despair is not a masterpiece like Lolita, but it's still a damn good time.
10:04 by Ben Lerner (2014)
"Prosody and grammar as the stuff out of which we build a social world, a way of organizing meaning and time that belongs to nobody in particular but courses through us all."
Like the best shuffleboard players, Lerner pushes right up to the threshold of being too meta without ever falling over the edge. 10:04 starts then to serve as an insight into the writer's process, with its excerpt that was used in The New Yorker explicitly mentioned as being used in The New Yorker. There are still individual scenes that don't work — I don't think I ever like hallucination sequences — but they don't detract from the overall contemplation of conscious experience — what's authentic, what matters.
Lerner's also just really fun and insightful to read. He describes staring straight ahead past a friend as "a condition of our most intimate exchanges," alcohol as a hedge "so that whatever happens only kind of happened" and how "nothing in the world is as old as what was futuristic in the past." An exegesis of Reagan's Challenger speech speaks to the power of words (and to Lerner, poetry) while a scene in which the protagonist donates sperm would fit neatly in a DFW short story.
Of our time, but maybe it transcends it, too.
1984 by George Orwell (1949)
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever."
You will gradually notice a theme emerging in my choices this year, and you will connect it quickly to 2016 events. I'd been meaning to read 1984 for years, and by February, I figured there would never be a better time to digest it.
I don't know what exactly I anticipated, but I know I didn't expect it to be quite this good. I suppose my reservations going in revolved around whether Orwell could construct realistic characters in his world, and whether that world was extrapolated properly.
Orwell does both to a remarkable degree. The manner in which 1984 builds its own vocabulary — and explains its principles in a simplistic appendix — is outstanding and terrifying in its external validity. Crimestop and doublethink seem particularly plausible concepts these days (as do its ideas of "rectifying" the past through historical revision and stripping war of its danger by making it neverending).
The entire novel contains this ambience of utter hopelessness, evidenced by the way parents grew scared of their children's potential as informants or how emotions in general became sterilized over time. Winston and Julia's rebellion is a small transgression, because they knew they couldn't beat the entrenched system.
This was depressing, just like the year was. I was kind of scared before reading 1984 and really scared after it.
Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie (1935)
Man, sometimes after spring training, when you haven't had time to sit down and read something cohesively in a while, you just need a boost. Reading a Christie mystery in an afternoon or two has always done that for me, even if this one isn't as good or as interesting as I remembered from the first time I read it.
The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas (1961)
"At times to be silent is to lie. For silence can be interpreted as acquiescence."
The reason I hadn't read anything cohesively in a while? Because I was trying to tackle this large history of a time period I knew next to nothing about. (My interest in the Spanish Civil War basically dates back to someone justifiably pointing out my extreme ignorance about it — and its impact on the FC Barcelona-Real Madrid rivalry — in a blog comment some years back.)
My main error, if you want to call it that, in choosing this specific history of the war is that I probably didn't need this much depth to satisfy my curiosity. But that's obviously a strength and not a flaw of the book. Thomas places the events in Spain within the larger context of Europe's imminent disintegration, showing it as the proxy/practice war that it was. He's withering in his criticisms of the other powers and their willful impotence: The non-intervention committee among other nations "was to graduate from equivocation to hypocrisy" while the US practiced a policy of "moral aloofness." Â
Thomas does his best to keep the dozens of sides involved in the conflict in order; reading this over the course of two and a half months made that very important indeed. He shows how each side was able to drum up such hatred for the other that compromise was rendered impossible — boy do Catholic murderers come off poorly here — and he's able to draw as straight a line as possible through the convoluted causes and effects during the war, explaining how and why Franco was eventually able to emerge as the key and victorious figure.
The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer (2005)
Reading Moehringer is always fun, but if I'm being honest, I found it hard to justify spending time reading a memoir about him. The stories are excellent, but I just didn't care enough about him or the bar.
