As mentioned in our first "Staff Shelf" post last week, SLM editors will occasionally be writing on Look/Listen about what we're reading, whether the books have a St. Louis element or not. In an effort to catch up with 2008 and start fresh for 2009, I thought I'd post a brief year-end wrap-up kind of thing. All but a few obscure novels can likely be found at the bookstore closest to where you're reading this. — Stephen Schenkenberg
Books Not Released This Year
• The best book I read all year was James Joyce by Richard Ellmann (Oxford University Press, 1983). It's widely considered the model literary biography, and it's nice to finally know why.
• It probably wasn't fair to read Sheldon M. Novick's Henry James: The Young Master (Random House, 2007) around the same time, because it basically sat in Ellmann's shadow (as James did in Joyce's).
• That David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is one of my very favorite novels doesn't mean I'd have had a halfway steady hand guiding readers around its world. But Greg Carlisle wasn't intimidated; his Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (SSMG Press, 2007) is helpful in the most basic sense — Oh, that connects to that 400 pages later — but incisive as well. May Wallace, a gentle-giant genius who ended his life in September, rest in peace.
• I'm embarrassingly behind on learning Bosnian—the native language of my wife and in-laws—but I'm slowly educating myself on its history. On that front, Roger Cohen'sHearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo (Random House, 1998), is a major, forceful achievement. For those St. Louisans wanting to learn more about the war that was part of bringing 50,000 Bosnians here, this is the best book I've found so far.
• Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (Random House, 2007) was fascinating — and both heady and dishy.
• My summer vacation was improved by two enjoyable wine books:The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World (North Point, 2005), by a funny, adventurous, and never self-serious writer named Lawrence Osborne; and Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris tasting That Revolutionized Wine (Scribner, 2006), in which George M. Taber proves that a compelling book can be made out of a single afternoon. (A movie this year called Bottle Shock, which I wasn't persuaded to see, was about that same tasting.)
• Lastly, I finally got around to reading a book my father bought me back in 2001 about one of his intellectual and scientific heroes: Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for the New Millennium (St. Martin's Press, 2001). Interest in Bucky has only increased since then—the Whitney opened a major exhibition this summer—and this book's value is that it offers the architect/thinker's own writing, and that of his peers and students as well. Fuller called for a "world that works for everyone"—and did his own original best to try and make it happen.
Books Released This Year
The list of this year's releases I want to read is still very long: the Naipaul bio, the Sontag journals, the Barnes memoir, the Mayer torture book, and the novels A Mercy, Netherland, and 2666, just to name a few. But here are some thoughts on a few of those I got to.
• (Not that You Asked): Rants, Exploits and Obsessions, by Steve Almond (Random House): A caffeinated, often happily puerile collection about pop culture and sex and youth and growing up. Almond can fall easily into not-quite-punch-line formulas, but in two longer pieces — "Blog Love," about his bout with a literary blogger; and "Demagogue Days," about resigning from a teaching gig in protest — he proves that if the subject matter's something he takes halfway seriously, so can we of him.
• Personal Days, by Ed Park (Random House): This debut novel from a founding editor of The Believer follows the nine-to-five lives of a family of NYC office workers (their actual work's almost never described). The collective narration is casual and understated, the humor dry: "We dress like we don't make much money, which is true for at least half of us. The trick is figuring out which half." Turns out, this who-really-knows shoulder-shrug is the novel's central device: of someone who couldn't handle his keyboard correctly, the narrators write, "Maybe his hands were too big or too small"; one co-worker wears "strange blue pants that look like jeans but aren't"; elsewhere, "They were joking but they weren't joking"; "It both was and wasn't sleazy." We've long had narrators deemed 'unreliable,' but so indecisive? Ah, perhaps Park's point about his generation. Personal Days has very little narrative force — it's more of a past-tense play-by-play — but the novel did win me over in parts, mostly because it provided several out-loud laughs that were real and earned and of today.
• The Paris Review Interviews, Volume III, edited by Philip Gourevitch (Picador): Volumes I and II in this series were tremendously satisfying — informative, instructive, juicy. So is III. I could quote writer (Ellison) after writer (Cheever) after writer (Carver), but that would delay you simply adding this book to your shelf. And as a paperback original, the book's price is right.
• Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, by Edmund White (Atlas): Coming 8 years after Graham Robb's rich, authoritative biography of Rimbaud, White's slim volume offers a digest version. And early on a personal one: White recalls his younger days reading Rimbaud as "an unhappy adolescent, stifled by boredom and sexual frustration and paralyzed by self-hatred." He turns some memorable phrases in describing the odd couple of Paul Verlaine ("indisputably ugly" and "a homicidal alcoholic") and Rimbaud, who arrived into the former's life "like an invited catastrophe." Anyone who enjoys this should next head to Robb.
• The Mirror in the Well, by Micheline Aharonian Marcom (Dalkey Archive): Marcom's bracingly graphic novel — we hazily follow a highly sexual affair between a married mother and a man — almost feels like a dare in its directness. And yet it's not simply daring — it's often beautifully poetic. After an explicit build-up of one afternoon of passion, the author closes the shade: "And the language of it is lost to it." Have a long walk through this striking passage: “... ( … she will recall this image of herself in the mirror, of you behind her, of her sorrow like an amulet but not only for the ended marriage, something else which she can’t fathom or unfathomably put consonant and vowels to (yet?), some silence unletterable alongside her sorrow, some things and nothings which she tries to grasp with the edges of breaths (to make, or to find—like a man makes a tunnel for his underground passage).)” It's impressive, challenging stuff, and I've already added Marcom's earlier novels to my must-buy list.
• Home, by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): What luck to have Robinson revisit some of the characters and the setting of Gilead, her extraordinary novel published in 2004 to rightful acclaim. In Home, Glory Boughton has returned to the small Iowa town to care for her dying—and difficult—father; they're soon joined by prodigal son Jack, who's lead a drifting—and difficult—life. Few novelists get to their characters' depths so quietly, so wisely, and with so little authorial show: "Jack said, 'You coming, Glory?' and paused to let her go ahead of him. He had that cautious, distant look, absent the calculation she had learned to recognize as hope." The family's trying to relearn how to be one, and, correctly, there are no easy answers. There are, though, terribly moving questions, like this one in Glory's mind as her brother drifts away yet again: "Who would bother to be kind to him?"
• Reflections of a Wine Merchant: On a Lifetime in the Vineyards and Cellars of France and Italy, by Neal I. Rosenthal (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux): This respected, openly principled wine importer gets his caveat out of the way early, admitting that he's got a "firmly held prejudice" against most New World wines and a deep-seated loyalty to "traditionally made wines crafted at limited-production family-owned vineyards in France and Italy." He considers the former blunt-force whore wines (as another writer once put it), high in alcohol, low in acid, fakely flavored, and devoid of finesse; the latter—especially burgundy—are just the opposite. Rosenthal's a purist, and if you can bear being preached to, his recounting of his years in the biz has some memorable moments.
• Living Without God: New Directions for Atheists, Agnostics, Secularists, and the Undecided, by Ronald Aronson (Counterpoint): Leaving the huffing and puffing to Harris and Hitchens, Aronson (a history professor who's written books about philosophy) would like to actually create something — specifically, "coherent secular popular philosophies that effectively answer life's vital questions." On his mind are subjects like gratitude, aging, responsibility and hope. But as a call to arms, the book's arms are folded gently across its chest. The author—while always informed and respectful—can meander, and the book ends up feeling more admirable than truly engaging.
• The Flying Troutmans, by Miriam Toews (Counterpoint): An eccentric-family-on-the-road novel, with an aunt briefly steering the lives of her spunky niece ("Thebes said that if she was eighteen and old enough to drink she's start a book club") and brooding nephew (Logan, who carves things like ""If I was a band I'd be breaking up" into the dashboard of the Ford Aerostar they're driving from Canada to the U.S.). It's not an especially great novel, but Toews' voice is original and she built her characters strongly enough to sustain the eccentricities thrust upon them.
• Nobody's Home: Essays, Dubravka Ugresic (Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac; Open Letter): The wry, sharp ex-Yugoslavian essayist/novelist is back with another collection, one of the first books from a new American non-profit press focused solely on literary translation. The volume's first section is a series of riffs, really — "feuilletons," brief diary-like notes commissioned for a Swiss newspaper during the late 1990s. They're filled with anecdotes and observations (about exile, culture, ethnicity, history) and some small, smart sayings ('If we say that our age is obsessed with youth, what we really mean is that it is obsessed with age"). The same subjects are covered in the book's best longer essay, "What Is European About European Literature?", in which Ugresic describes the surreal snags involved with being a writer from a country that no longer exists. When the war broke out, the Croats handed her a Croatian passport, but then soon excluded her feisty presence from their cultural ranks. "Croatian passport in hand," she writes, "I abandoned both my newly acquired and formerly demolished homeland and set out into the world. With impassioned, Eurosong-like glee, the rest of the world identified me as a Croatian writer. I became a literary representative of a place that no longer wanted me." With her endless supply of small-scene stories, Ugresic reminds us that the world is large. And often nuts.
