Staff Shelf: Catching Up

It's been a while since my last post to Staff Shelf, so I'm playing catch-up -- posting takes on some of what I've been reading these past four or five months. First up, not even takes but simply 1-10 ratings on 5 titles: 

• The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman (Picador, 353 pages, $15): 9/10 
• Making Sense of Wine, by Matthew Kramer (Running Press, 240 pages, $19.95): 8/10 
• A Hedonist in the Cellar, by Jay McInerney (Vintage, 272 pages, $15): 8/10 
• Angels and Ages, by Adam Gopnik (Knopf, 224 pages, $24.95): 9/10 
• The Battle for Wine and Love, by Alice Feiring (Mariner, 288 pages, $13.95); 6/10 

Now, a few words on a few other titles (all of which I received as review copies):

Jan Kjaerstad's Wergeland Trilogy (Books 2 and 3 by Open Letter; Translated by Barbara Haveland; 2009) 

This has to be one of the most highly crafted, in-many-ways-appealing literary projects on which I've thrown in the readerly towel. This year, the promising new international press Open Letter, based at the University of Rochester, published both The Conqueror (481 pages, $17.95) and The Discoverer (448 pages, $17.95), the final two novels in a trilogy from decorated Norwegian author Jan Kjaerstad. Open Letter didn't publish the 600-page opening novel, The Seducer, though I bought a used copy and skimmed it. (Open Letter says the novels can in fact stand on their own.) 

More than six months later, I've (possibly forever, possibly not) shelved the books, having finished The Conqueror and gotten through about the first third of The Discoverer. Kjaerstad's writing, as translated by Barbara Haveland, is superb: crisp, intelligent, utterly controlled. I've simply lost interest in the story -- the life of esteemed Norwegian television celebrity Jonas Wergeland, who's convicted of murdering his wife -- and in the author's always-circling-back telling of it. (Actually, the books are narrated by different characters, but that's for a more thorough reviewer to discuss.) Over the many hundreds of pages, there are moments of real narrative grip. But I was eventually worn down by the almost endless flow of anecdotes about Wergeland's life, which Kjaerstad doles out as he moves the story forward, back...forward, back even farther... I often felt like I was listening to an album on a turntable, and just as I was ready to move to the next section, someone lifted the needle and moved it back several inches. Straight chronology isn't something I demand from fiction, or course, so I can't attribute everything to that. In the end, I just didn't have it in me. (Announcing this on Twitter, by the way, only increased my guilt. A Swedish friend and writer, who'd told me the trilogy was "like a Scandinavian DeLillo, maybe.... It's the quintessential Norwegian contemporary saga, in my view," spotted news of my towel-throwing and scolded, "Come on! You can do it! It only gets better." Sorry, Jens. Maybe next year.) 

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Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters, by Scott Rosenberg (Crown, 359 pages, $26, 2009) 

I enjoyed this one more than I expected to. Rosenberg, co-founder of Salon.com and author of Dreaming of Code, makes a compelling presentation of how integral blogging (and web publishing of all kinds) has been to the last dozen years of developments (political, cultural, personal, and beyond). For anyone who's interested in how even a small few are able to make a living at this (including Jason Kottke and Heather "Dooce" Armstrong, two of my favorites whose stories are retold in the book), Say Everything's interesting reading. Rosenberg takes us back to some critical moments: Daily Kos switching from Movable Type to a system called Scoop, which allowed visitors to post their own diaries or blogs (something Kos doubted they'd actually do); Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo leading the reporting that would bring down Trent Lott; Rathergate. While there are some comic tidbits sprinkled throughout (two bloggers at Jezebel: "Megan: Like, oh my God, Ana, when are bloggers going to get ethics like real journalists?" "Ana Marie: As soon as we gain enough power to mislead a country into a stupid war"), Rosenberg is capable of more thorough examinations and reflections, as in this retort to Nicholas Lemann, who had written in The New Yorker in 2006 that "none of [Internet journalism] yet rises to the level of a journalistic culture rich enough to compete in a serious way with the old media—to function as a replacement rather than an addendum": 

That was a defensible position; it was also a straw man. Lemann failed to acknowledge that the overwhelming preponderance of bloggers neither desired to replace journalists nor claimed they could serve as an acceptable substitute. Most bloggers had a visceral understanding that they participated in a complex informational ecosystem, in which their relationship with traditional media was essentially symbiotic. Maybe they were like the profusion of forest-floor flora, dependent on the environment shaped by the big trees, but also fighting for their own patches of light. Or maybe, as the big institutions began failing, they were like the termites feeding on the fallen media tree trunks. 

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A Gate at the End of the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore (Knopf, 322 pages, $25.95, 2009) 

A disappointment from a writer I admire. I've found a handful of Moore's short stories nearly perfect -- among them "Terrific Mother," from the collection Birds of America, and "The Juniper Tree," published in The New Yorker in 2005 -- and I've often recommended her short novel, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, to high school teachers open to teaching contemporary fiction. Moore's best stuff is original and funny and moving, and it seems effortlessly created. This new novel, though -- her first book in 11 years -- let me down. The set-up is certainly interesting: a kind but flip farm girl spends a post-9/11 year in a liberal university town (basically Madison, where Moore teaches), working part-time as a nanny for an eccentric chef who's just adopted a baby. But the book's occasional pleasures are overshadowed by what frustrated me throughout: too many stabs at what might be called college-town clever (bumper stickers and t-shirts, coffee-shop names, themed menus at the chef's trendy restaurant ["Invasive Species Night," with "Steamed Zebra Mussels"]); and Moore's habit of splitting a description down the middle and hanging onto either side ("It was both aptly and inaptly named"; "Adoption seemed both a cruel joke and a lovely day dream"; "the wing seemed fitted together both randomly and intricately"; "Sarah was both pathetic and game"; "Schoolwork was alternately tedious and mesmerizing"). These are more quibbles than major structural problems, and a persuasive editor could have certainly freed Moore from these overuses. The greater disappointment for me was the author's plotting in the second half of the book. I will avoid spoiling anything and just say that I found the two most pivotal turns a bit shoehorned in -- perhaps in part because Moore gave the story's first half a natural, enjoyable momentum. For as down on this book as I sound (and I did laugh and smile between its covers, despite my complaints), I still consider Lorrie Moore one of the country's great fiction writers. And whenever her next book -- or story -- comes out, I will be reading it. Optimistically. 

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Reborn: Journals & Notebooks, 1947-1963, by Susan Sontag (Picador; Edited by David Rieff; 320 pages; $15) 

I'm just now catching up with this 2008 release in paperback. It's the first of three volumes to be published, all of them edited by David Rieff, Sontag's only child. (He's also a respected journalist and writer in his own right.) The "Notebooks" part of the title should be taken seriously -- the pages here do contain some formulated thoughts and ideas, but they're also often just a scratchpad -- with lists of books Sontag wants to read, instructions for self-improvement ("Have better posture"), and bulleted recaps of days just ended. But Sontag is one serious young woman, and her severe engagement with life makes for memorable reading. "This is a journal where art is seen as life and death, where irony is assumed to be a vice, not a virtue, and where seriousness is the greatest good," Rieff writes in the preface. This first volume begins when Sontag's just 15, and if you thought you might first have to wade through some school-girl doodles, you are corrected with the first sentence: "I believe: (a) That there is no personal god or life after death...." Other Big Subjects follow: sex (Sontag found her bisexuality early); marriage ("Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor"; literature ("One is either an outside [Homer, Tolstoy] or an inside [Kafka] writer. The world or madness"). For every compelling nugget, though, there's a line of mundane material. But I'm guessing the next two volumes will get only richer and more absorbing, as Sontag herself lived an increasingly rich intellectual life until her death, of cancer, in 2004. -- Stephen Schenkenberg