[Please note that this review does include spoilers.]

I will admit that before I read The Bonfire of the Vanities I only knew two things about it: that it was made into a movie that no one walking this earth seemed to truly enjoy, and that the story involved Wall Street traders and trading. That’s really about it. Needless to say I didn’t have very high expectations when I decided to pick up this book when I was suddenly seized by the desire to read a well-known ’80′s book that was not written by Bret Easton Ellis or Jay McInerney. The book does include a Wall Street trader (in so much as one of the main characters, Sherman McCoy, is a trader) and trading, but that facet of it, especially when it comes to any details about Wall Street and the company that McCoy works for, comprises only a small percentage of the book. As for the movie, I still have not seen it and have no desire to do so. But as far as the book goes, it is deserving of some praise. This is a very good novel, a very good window into the NYC of the ’80′s, and an all-around fun read by Mr. Wolfe. And by fun I mean fun in like a paint-by-numbers kind of way. I’ll expand on this later.

What I don’t want you to think is that book consists of actual fun, because it does not. It has its moments of humor for sure but the center of The Bonfire of the Vanities revolves around racial tension, class wars, wealth, and the ease in which the poor can manipulated into being pawns for the media and for the neighborhood organizations who are trying to keep up in the political games of the city. With regards to the last point I found myself thinking at times that Wolfe had done a wonderful job of re-examining the same things that Ellison was interested with Invisible Man and Dostoevsky with The Possessed (but with Wolfe giving it an ’80′s, macro application of makeup to it instead of the literary and more serious lens that the aforementioned books use).

The Bonfire of the Vanities centers around Sherman McCoy missing the interstate exit back into Manhattan after he picks up his mistress, Maria Ruskin, from the airport. The two find themselves lost in the Bronx (in McCoy’s new luxury coupe) and wind up near an exit ramp that will take them back on to the interstate, but the ramp has been blocked by some garbage cans and tires. Two black males approach the car and Sherman and Maria assume that they are going to attack them and, through a series of events that are first described in the novel from Sherman and Maria’s POV and then from the people on the street’s POV, Maria takes control of the car and backs into one of the black males and he winds up going into a coma at a nearby hospital (the same hospital that released him the night of the accident after only looking at his wrist).

From here, the novel takes some predictable turns (young black male put in coma by rich white people and their rich white people automobile becomes a sensationalistic story and cause célèbre; caricatures are created in the media and in the streets pitting Park Avenue against The Ghetto) and introduces some predictable characters (McCoy, the clueless rich guy who can’t possibly understand why a crowd of angry black people are yelling in front of his Park Avenue apartment; the District Attorney who is so idealistic it’s almost sickening). But Wolfe takes these (and other) predictable elements and still churns out a really well-written and engaging book. Almost every passage involving Reverend Bacon, the black minister whose hands are in many of the community groups in the Bronx, is superb—especially the conversation he has with a lawyer in which he talks about the house that they are sitting in. The way that Peter Fallow, the drunken Brit who works at a tabloid and is chosen to be the first to write about the black kid in the coma, is written and the whole British vs. American angle that seems to consume the back of his head came across as believable and nicely fleshed out. (In the epilogue of the novel, we learn that Fallow won a Pulitzer for his reporting on the McCoy case and he’s basically living the American Dream, no doubt muttering his disdain for the whole charade to himself and being more vocal about it amongst his ex-pat friends while dining in expensive, Brit-frequented restaurants.)

The Bonfire of the Vanities is a novel that I would definitely recommend for anyone who has a diverse reading palette; someone who will see Wolfe’s tics (his overuse of ellipses and exclamation marks in the beginning) and embrace some of its flaws (it does a feel a little dated but still strong, like a first season episode of Law & Order) with care and forgiveness.

Which brings me back to my paint-by-numbers remark at the beginning of this review.

What I mean by that remark is that a paint-by-numbers piece is fun because you know what it’s going to look like in the end. The flip side to a paint-by-number piece is that it’s not always fun to do (because you know what it’s going to look like). When you read this novel you know that Sherman McCoy is going to get nailed; you know that Maria is going to sell him out; you know that the D.A.’s office is going to play dirty; you know that McCoy’s lawyer are going to play dirty; you know that the racial stuff will be a little maddening (Wolfe does an outstanding job of hitting the right notes when writing about both sides of the fight for the boy in the coma). The Bonfire of the Vanities is a 690 page novel, a somewhat demanding paint-by-numbers piece.

There are many aspects of this novel that I genuinely enjoyed. The fact that it is a nearly 700 page novel that, to me, read like a 300 page novel is a feat not easily accomplished and one that I have to tip my hat to. I really enjoyed this novel and would recommend it to anyone who is not scared by books that exceed the 500 page barrier, or to anyone who is in the mood to revisit the ’80′s.

In a spiritual context, I would hazard a guess and say that the phrase “the world to come” implies the encroachment towards heaven for most people. To me, it seems to imply a departure of this world and a deliverance to another—which, when looked at in that respect, probably causes whatever notions of heaven to come to mind when asked for first associations upon hearing that phrase. (Obviously, I could be wrong as I am admittedly generalizing here.)

Dara Horn’s The World to Come is at its root a novel that deals with spirituality, authenticity (in a fundamental way, not in a Brooklyn hipster searching for fringe delights kind of way), and cultural inheritance. Because of the spiritual element it is the type of novel that if I were to explain the plot with a good amount of detail, I would imagine that a lot of people would shut down and shrug and think of a polite way of saying Why would I ever want to read that? Which then puts me in the awkward position of trying to be descriptive of the novel in this review without overstepping my bounds and causing the reader to become deaf and blind to this unexpectedly great discovery of a book. I myself would have probably passed on this book if I knew more about it. The only thing I knew about the book was that it revolved around Benjamin Ziskind stealing a print by Marc Chagall from a museum because he believed that it was stolen from his family (the print hung in his house and he thought that someone had taken it after his mother died). I knew that the book was about Ben and Sara Ziskind, twin brother and sister, and their search through their family history spurred on by the events that happened at the museum, and I assumed that the book would center around Jewish life (and mythology) dating back to the times of Chagall leading up to the present day.

But I didn’t anticipate the thickness of the spiritual themes and religious imagery and symbolism. And I certainly didn’t anticipate that I would like the book all the more because of their inclusion. The World to Come is full of bridges, angels, heaven, and the duality of life. But again, I’m cautious about going into great detail for fear of turning people off. If I had read a full review of the book that includes details of what occurs in the last 100 pages I probably would’ve passed too. And I wouldn’t have passed on it because of the inclusion of the spiritual symbols and themes of the book, but because the inclusion of these things in a novel can be boring or overly didactic or allegorical to read if written by the wrong hands.

Dara Horn does a fantastic job with writing this novel. The World to Come does a good job of balancing the serious (Jewish life in eastern Europe pre- and post-WWII; the life of Der Nister; what happened to Sara and Ben’s father in Vietnam), the typical (the story of Ben and Sara and, to a degree, the people tied directly to them), and the surreal (the end of the novel, with its imagery of eating paintings and drinking books). My biggest gripe with this book was that I never fully believed the relationships that Ben and Sara have with their girlfriend and husband, respectively, but since these story lines aren’t central to the book it didn’t bother me too much.

As I said earlier, this is a book that I would recommend—especially as a summertime read as it reads pretty quick and is only a hair over 300 pages long—but one in which I don’t want to reveal too much of. So with this in mind I will end this review with an excerpt; an excerpt that I feel does a good job in not only showing off Horn’s writing ability but also because it does a great job of balancing the joyous with the sad. For this book does have, to me, an unexpected amount of death in it. (But like any book worth its salt that deals with death it redeems itself at the end, which is why I think Horn swung for the fences with the ending that she went with.)

Below is the excerpt, a brief passage about Ben and his thoughts about his pregnant twin Sara:

But now he thought of Sara and remembered all the biology facts he had gathered for American Genius, the DNA and RNA and chromosomal combinations and matching nucleotides and Punnett squares and probabilities and genetic futures. Tiny secret blueprints of their parents were floating within her, growing invisible and silent, engineering a soul. Every pregnant woman was carrying the dead.

The World to Come is not a perfect book. But as is sometimes the case, it’s not always the perfect books that resonate but rather the unexpected ones.

“What I do is minimum effort, but maximum pleasure. That’s part of being Hawaiian, brah.”
— Israel Kamakawiwo’ole

“ [...] its delicate beauty, its guileless reimagining of the standards, and its 4 a.m. willingness to go over the top in search of the sublime.”
— Dan Kois, describing the medley “Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What A Wonderful World”

********************

If you are reading this there is a good chance that the name Israel Kamakawiwo’ole and the album Facing Future mean nothing to you. In fact, there is a good chance that if I were to ask you who the artist is or if you had ever heard of the album you would look back at me with a puzzled physiognomy. And if that were the case I would say that Israel Kamakawiwo’ole is the Hawaiian man who performed a cover of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” with just his vocals and a ‘ukulele, and Facing Future is the album on which said cover was originally released on. And to us Mainlanders that would be the end of the story, for the most part. We Mainlanders would mostly agree that Israel’s version of that song is the very definition of the words delicate and beautiful, and probably even the phrase delicately beautiful—even in spite of its lyrical missteps. His version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is the prototypical great cover song: a recognizable and transcendent version of a song which has a uniqueness that instantly conveys timelessness. A song that a gigantic Hawaiian man performed in a small studio at four o’clock in the morning, five years before it was to be released on Facing Future and many years before it would generate word-of-mouth buzz when being used in commercials and movies, this is the song that could very well replace Judy Garland’s iconic version with many people in future generations. It is the very definition of timeless.

But what are we, the Mainlanders, to make of Kamakawiwo’ole, his legacy, and his most popular album? Dan Kois (last name rhymes with Joyce) aims to break this down and provide answers to this in his 33 1/3 entry.^[1] To us, Kamakawiwo’ole is a curiosity not unlike that of a circus freak variety: when he died, he weighed 1,000 pounds; his voice didn’t match the image of him in the slightest sense. Upon hearing of Israel’s version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”—whether it be on the commercial for the now-defunct eToys or during the closing scenes of Finding Forrester—many people bought Facing Future (it’s the highest-selling Hawaiian album ever produced) and were probably alarmed that every other song didn’t sound like it. It wouldn’t be outlandish to assume that most people thought of him as a novelty.

Kois, who lived in Hawaii for a couple years, goes back to the islands and attempts to put in perspective what Israel (or Iz, as he’s known amongst many of his bruddahs) means to Hawaii and what Facing Future means to the American island state that has always had a strong sense of nationalism, and disaffection with the Mainland. Kois not only breaks down the songs themselves into categories (Hapa Haole Songs and Hawaiian/Jawaiian Songs^[2]) but he also delves into the history of Iz himself and the history of Hawaii.

The end result is a book that any piece of music criticism and literature aspires to: when you are done reading it you will want to buy this album. I will purposely leave out the details of what Kois writes about Iz, the people associated with him, and the history of Hawaiian nationalism (most notably tied to the song “Hawaii ’78″) because they are things that should be read and appreciated first-hand. This book not only does the artist and the album an immense amount of justice but it is, most importantly, a poignant portrait of everything that is connected to Iz—a man who is like an amalgam of Elvis, Bob Dylan, and John Lennon to the citizens of Hawaii. Multi-faceted and insightful, Kois’s book about Facing Future is a must-read for anyone that loves this album, wants to read great music criticism, or is simply curious about the artist and our (arguably) most misunderstood state.

[1] If you have never heard of the 33 1/3 series, they are pocket-sized paperbacks about albums written by a wide variety of writers (no writer has ever written two books). You can go the official 33 1/3 page and browse their catalog. I highly recommend this series (especially the entry on Harvest by Neil Young, if you like/love that album).

[2] Hapa Haole means “English-language songs played Hawaiian style”. Jawaiian is slang for Hawaiian reggae.

“If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.”

— Richard Yates, when asked about the central theme of his novels

**********

The best thing about “The American Dream” is that its duality is so perfect. On the one hand, The American Dream^[1] is great in that it is, at root, an idea that has numerous dreams and incentives already built-in: you can buy that house; you can get that car; you can Have It All. And it does all of this in a (mostly) secular way—instead of praying to God or Jesus for the deliverance of things, you can simply worship an ideology and an economy- and market-based way of life. On the other hand, The American Dream^[2] provides such fertile ground and fuel for outstanding counterpoints, opinion, writing, deconstruction, and commentary. This is based on a secular methodology too—why pray for answers when they’re right in front of everyone’s face, decodable by irony instead of archaic texts? Why blindly praise things and writings when there’s more to be learned by taking it apart?

And so because of the second way you can say the words “the American dream” you had many writers and voices beginning in the ’50′s starting to dissect things like the suburbs, marriage, promiscuity, and a litany of other things previously deemed taboo in mainstream American culture. (If you are reading this and you over the age of sixteen you probably already know this.) So, if I were to tell you that here is this book, and it’s called Revolutionary Road and it was published in 1961 and the story takes place in 1955 and it follows the crumbling marriage of Frank and April Wheeler and one of the satellite storylines of the novel revolves around abortion and the central storyline focuses on the crumbling of a marriage: you would probably be able to easily imagine—to some broad extent—what this novel will entail. You will probably be able to picture uncomfortable scenes involving fights between the Wheeler’s and Frank’s descent into irritability with his career, all amongst a backdrop commentary showing that life can sometimes suck in the suburbs; that the suburbs do not always live up to its projection and marketing of an idyllic zone of happiness.

And you would be correct in assuming and picturing those things. Yates is certainly not reinventing the wheel, from a thematic perspective, with this novel. But what he does do with this novel is fill it with some truly wonderful writing; writing that treads a very careful line, one that never comes too close to embracing all-out discomfort but one that feels realistic enough as to not ever feel terribly dated. For example, below is an excerpt from late in the book. April Wheeler is at a bar with the Wheeler’s friend Shep Campbell while her husband has driven Shep’s wife home (Shep’s car was blocked in at the parking lot so they agreed that Frank would take Shep’s wife home in his car and then Shep would drive April after his car was free). April and Frank had a huge fight earlier in the day and, while drunk, she has sex with Shep in the back of his car. Look at how Yates writes April’s inner monologue—it’s engrossing and complex, and parts of it will smack you in the face with its realism (a down-to-earth realism at that too; nothing so complex as to only be enjoyed literary circle members):

“So it hadn’t been wrong or dishonest of her to say no this morning, when he asked if she hated him, any more than it had been wrong or dishonest to serve him the elaborate breakfast and to show the elaborate interest in his work, and to kiss him goodbye. The kiss, for that matter, had been exactly right—a perfectly fair, friendly kiss, a kiss for a boy you’d just met at a party, a boy who’d danced with you and made you laugh and walked you home afterwards, talking about himself all the way.

“And how could anyone else be blamed for that?”

To be sure, this style of writing—this communion of omniscient and second person narratives—has become quite common when deconstructing characters’ thoughts, especially when it comes to the modern deconstruction of The American Dream (say it in whatever voice you deem fit). But look at the way Yates writes that passage: how April views Frank as a boy when she kisses him, the concision in how the dots are connected that shows the unraveling of their marriage. It’s wonderfully constructed and gets its point across easily. Its doom has poignancy. (Which makes me wonder why the hell anyone would even attempt to make this into a movie. Seriously, how do you capture the above excerpt and attempt to transfer it to film? Why even try? It seems like such a Sisyphean task.)

Speaking of movies, I am sure that we all have a few personal favorite movies that are personal favorites because the writing and/or the acting are so good and so brilliant that it doesn’t matter to us that the actual story of the movie is less than stellar. Two examples for me are The Shawshank Redemption and Sunshine Cleaning. From a dispassionate point of view, both movies have mundane stories: the former is about a wrongly accused man, the latter is about two women who clean up crime scenes. And from a dispassionate eye, the writing in both of these movies is not awe-inspiring. But… in the former you have Morgan Freeman’s presence (both in his acting and in his narration) and some transcendent scenes (the opera album/prison yard scene and anything involving Brooks after prison), and in the latter you have Amy Adams who owns just about every scene in a thoroughly relatable way (the scene where she sits next to the old woman on her porch is beyond touching). The writing in these movies is good, don’t get me wrong. But it’s the actors and the other intangibles that really sell it all, for me anyway. Whereas with books that are my personal favorites the opposite is true: if the writing is great enough, it can outshine the characters and the story to the point that I’m not really bothered if the story isn’t technically interesting.

And this is what Revolutionary Road did for me. The writing is outstanding, to the point that I don’t really care that Frank Wheeler, as a character, isn’t fundamentally interesting. I don’t really care that April is mostly kind of unlikable. And I don’t care about these things because the framework and the writing of the novel are so damn great. The novel begins with April in an acting troupe performing on their first night, and it ends with two different neighbors talking about the aftermath of what happened to April, how it effected Frank, and where he moved to. By framing it this way, you are asked to see the Wheeler’s through other people’s eyes. Just like you see your neighbors. Again, Yates did not invent this style of writing—he just did a helluva job executing it with this novel.

On the back of the edition of this novel that I have there is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut and it reads: “The Great Gatsby of my time… One of the best books by a member of my generation.” This is not hyperbole.

Revolutionary Road is not an uplifting book. It is about people who mortgage their dreams in exchange for overlooking everything that is around them. It is the type of book that probably won’t be an attractive read for many people. But if this story (or this review of it) has piqued any interest, buy the book. You will not be disappointed.

[1] You should read this phrasing of “The American Dream” in your head with a very ’50′s-sounding politician’s, or commercial actor’s, voice; very polished, with gleaming white teeth exposed.

[2] You should read this phrasing of “The American Dream” in your head with a very modern-sounding snarkiness and ironic detachment. You should mentally roll your eyes as you say it, and possibly even curse George W. Bush immediately afterwards while you’re at it if only because it feels sensible to do that too.

Reading Lolita is like listening to the most technically perfect guitarist perform. The technically perfect guitarist will wow you with his precision and render any complexity into a shell of a joke. The guitarist’s fingers will hit all of their marks on the fretboard with frightening and spidery ease; their other hand will glide over the strings like a wizard hitting their perfectly tuned chords. Their music won’t be seen as music per se by their adoring audience, but something that transcends “music”; it will be explained as being more a manifestation of atmosphere and an exercise of perfection rather than mere performance. (In fact, to call it a performance would probably be insulting.)

There is one other caveat to watching, or listening to, a technically perfect guitarist perform, and the same caveat applies to reading Lolita: its perfection and its essence begins to transition into boredom.

To me, Lolita is the example by which a case could be made for a literary Uncanny Valley; its prose and its structure was so well-executed that it actually became more and more disorienting to read the further I got into the book. The prose tried so hard, too hard, that I found myself thinking that the book was like a printed version of an animated movie by Robert Zemeckis—in its attempt to be as real-looking as possible, it only amplified the minor flaws I was picking out and caused more thoughts of annoyance rather than praise to infiltrate my head.

To put it another way: this book comes across as a little too professorial. Maybe if I took a semester course that only focused on this novel, with a professor that kept my interest, I would have been in the proper mindset to adequately worship this book. But then again, therein lies the rub. I actually do admire this novel. I do realize what it’s strengths are. I do recognize its significance. I do recognize that it is Important, and deserving of a spot in the canon of modern American literature alongside Invisible Man and To Kill A Mockingbird and Infinite Jest. I stood in awe of some of the writing. I understand now why Nabokov worshippers exist and I have begun to understand their platform. I will admit that this book should be on the list of novels you should read before you die.

That said, I just didn’t like this novel.

The primary reason I did not like this novel is because it ultimately wants to be too many things throughout its pages. It is a book that wants to be treated like an experience, filled with double entendres, word play, and psychological and subconscious observations of tyranny, and the objectification of girls. I get that. I would guess that this is exactly why the people who love this book love it so much: because, technically speaking, you can dissect many parts of it and be amazed at its individual structure and prose as well as marvel at the cohesive whole. Me? I found the cohesive whole—specifically, the second part of the novel—to be just mostly uninteresting. I found myself getting bored by the technically wonderful prose… just like how I begin to get bored by the technically wonderful and perfect and classically-trained guitarist. It becomes too much too care about.

The first part of the novel (excluding the foreword) is brilliant, make no mistake about it. It’s uncomfortable and it attempts (successfully, I think) to force you to care about Humbert Humbert, one of the most grotesque characters in modern literary history. It wants you to feel sorry for—or, at the very least, quell our knee-jerk predispositions—about a pedophile, and it wants us to do this in a fundamental sense but to still care about it through the lens of the pedophile himself, even when we know that his narration goes through valleys of fog and outright lying. The second part of the novel? Again, the prose is so good from a technical aspect but I also found it to be suffocating. At times, I wanted to throw the book against the wall and scream Get on with the story already! Stop being so fucking scholarly with your prose! Sometimes, the book felt more like a writing project than an accessible story.

Before I end this review I must repeat an earlier clarification: though I didn’t like this book, I still respect its “classic” status. It is a very smart and complex novel. If nothing else it is amazing to read how Nabokov wrote a story about pedophilia, a story in which he is prevented from giving you any real details about the act that Humbert so desperately craves; an act that is central to the story. It is truly impressive. It’s just that this novel spoke to me on maybe one or two levels rather than the five, six, or eleven levels that classic novels usually speak to you on. So, yes, I did not like Lolita but I would be the first to recommend that everyone include it on their “to read before I die” list of books. The flashes of brilliance in this book are remarkable—remarkable enough that having to wade through its oceans of boredom in the second part are worth it.

Six years ago this month my wife and I went and saw Million Dollar Baby at the theater. Amongst a myriad of other things that I thought about after seeing that film, one of them was that I needed to read some boxing nonfiction if for no other reason that boxing seems like such a profound metaphor for life. (It is funny how boxing movies and essays can be such visceral things to see/read and, yet, to watch an actual match is typically banal and uninteresting.) To me, Million Dollar Baby is a beautifully painful movie and when I found out that it was partly inspired by and adapted from Rope Burns, a collection of short stories by Jerry Boyd (pen name, F.X. Toole), I was going to buy that book. But it was out of print. And so I looked for other boxing-related books and found that Joyce Carol Oates had written some essays during the ’80′s in a collection called On Boxing. But it was out of print too.^[1]

And then I got sidetracked from boxing altogether, opting instead to discover and consume nonfiction from Gladwell and Klosterman and Wallace and Orlean.

Then, a few weeks ago I saw The Fighter.^[2] And afterwards I went immediately to the bookstore and picked up a recently republished edition of Joyce Carol Oates’s On Boxing. On Boxing consists of six essays, starting with the 118 page eponymous essay. (Note: it is not a full 118 pages, as random full-page pictures of boxing images are scattered throughout.) The essay “On Boxing” is nothing short of brilliant. Filled with Oates’s own insights that at times have a real air of profundity to them, quotes from boxers throughout the 20th century, and an overall feeling of a literary (yet still accessible) critique of the sport, “On Boxing” is on the short list of greatest pieces of sports writing I have ever read. Think I am exaggerating? Here is an excerpt from pages 12-13:

“Boxing’s claim is that it is superior to life in that it is, ideally, superior to all accident. It contains nothing that is not fully willed.

“The boxer meets an opponent who is a dream-distortion of himself in the sense that his weaknesses, his capacity to fail and to be seriously hurt, his intellectual miscalculations—all can be interpreted as strengths belonging to the Other; the parameters of his private being are nothing less than boundless assertions of the Other’s self. This is dream, or nightmare: my strengths are not fully my own, but my opponent’s weaknesses; my failure is not fully my own, but my opponent’s triumph. He is my shadow-self, not my (mere) shadow. The boxing match as “serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude”—to refer to Aristotle’s definition of tragedy—is an event that necessarily subsumes both boxers, as any ceremony subsumes its participants. (Which is why one can say, for instance, that the greatest fight of Muhammad Ali’s career was one of the few fights Ali lost—the first heroic match with Frazier.)”

To be sure, this excerpt (and this collection of essays as a whole) does not redefine, or shift any paradigms of, sports writing. (Not that Oates is trying to anyway.) Sports writing in general is founded on trying to show you the sport(s) in question in a new, different light—or it attempts to give you the human side of its participants. Or both. And because of this, we as fans and audience are just as capable of caring about the losers and the runners-up in a neutral match/event than we do about the winners and the champions. And, to be sure, this is nothing new. We not only love underdog stories but we love seeing spotlights on new sports, as well as spotlights on the sports we already like/love. Our attachment to these things was why Wide World of Sports ran for so long, why Sports Illustrated is still functioning, and why ESPN was ever allowed to grow from its original plankton form to the whale form that it is today.

At the end of the day, how we digest sports writing—like any other form of review or criticism—depends greatly on presentation. And with these essays, the presentation that Joyce Carol Oates gives is truly outstanding. Outstanding because she is not only a gifted and educated writer and spectator of boxing, but because her insights into boxing and all of its history and its index of metaphors are so precise. “On Boxing” is so thoughtful, so cared for, and so interesting there were many moments where I thought to myself I don’t think that that thought, or observation, can be written any more perfectly. (These are the exact thoughts that went through my head while reading David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again too: I’ll probably never read anything in my life about fiction, irony, and cruises that will surpass what is in that collection of essays.)

On Boxing includes five other essays with topics such as Mike Tyson (from 1987), Muhammad Ali and Jack Johnson. These essays are indeed terrific, but they were written after “On Boxing” and thus borrow from that source material from time to time. The other essays are definitely worth a read but it is the eponymous essay that is the must-read, the crown jewel of the set.

Even if you are not interested in boxing, On Boxing is something that should be added to your reading queue at some point. The goal as readers when we pick up a piece of nonfiction is to become immersed in someone else’s passion, to see things differently; to read something we’ve never read before and to have it make such naked sense that we feel silly to have never thought of it that way before. “On Boxing” achieves this with ease.

[1] A few words about Million Dollar Baby. Maybe you didn’t like it or maybe you were impartial to it. And I will grant you that the tragedy that befalls Hillary Swank’s Maggie Fitzgerald is maybe a little too unbelievable and/or melodramatic. Whatever. Everything that happens before it, and especially everything that happens after it, is perfect. And when the movie ends with its final shot and Morgan Freeman’s Eddie “Scrap”‘s final narration of the letter that he wrote to Eastwood’s daughter, my wife and I left the theater having our faith restored in Hollywood. (Because, to me at least, movies had taken a considerable collective nose dive in quality after 1999.)

[2] A few words about The Fighter. Overall, a very solid movie. I thought Christian Bale and Amy Adams were outstanding, and that Mark Wahlberg was believable. (Though whenever Mark Wahlberg plays the “underdog” character I find it very hard to separate it from his role as Dirk Diggler.) I thought that the movie did a good job of exploring how family and external forces can potentially ruin an athlete. It shouldn’t win an Oscar for Best Picture but it’s worthy of the price of tickets and popcorn for sure.

[Please note that this review does include spoilers.]

Microserfs is one of those types of books that is somewhat difficult to properly categorize, because to do so would cause one to start using contradictions as the basis for its review. Some examples: this book is dated, yet it still reads (and feels) like a book that is still pertinent in the here and now of the second decade of the 21st century; this book is a work of fiction but much of the time it feels like nonfiction; the characters in the book, for the most part, are quite insulated yet they also seem fully fleshed out and level-headed too; there is not a terrible amount of character complexity in this novel, but you do feel as if you know these people.

In summary: this book does excel at being a microcosm of the early ’90′s tech arena—itself a series of charming and bewitching contradictions, in which practicality was overlooked in favor of stock purchase plans and level-headed business acumen was ditched in favor of the “we can do anything now, we’re in the midst of a technological revolution”-type naivete with which countless suburban kids dreaming of one day becoming an astronaut in the ’60′s used to have instilled in them. (Except that, you know, not everyone gets to be an astronaut. And the flying car and the kitchen that will make your food for you while you’re at work is a myth too. Just a heads up.) The moment that the first version of the Mosaic browser was released, there were quite literally a million new ideas born overnight. A practical graphical web browser coming to fruition was, in many respects, on par with man’s taming of the moon.

But because the release of the Mosaic browser was not a televised event, the Internet became a series of buzzwords and acronyms, all of which came together to create a hyper-frenetic world in which many people believed that quite literally anything was possible. And since few people in the mainstream knew how most of the tech stuff worked anyway, they pretty much had to nod in agreement with it all not unlike many in the ’70′s had to just nod to most of the theoretical technology that NASA spoke of; they did send a man to the moon—all limits were off, right? There are many, many similarities to the space boom of the ’60′s and the computer boom of the ’90′s but the biggest difference is that the space boom was brought to you (mostly) by the government. Which is to say that there was not a stock bust when people lost interest in aeronautics.

Microserfs does a very good job of putting you inside of the 1993-94 versions of Redmond, Washington and Silicon Valley. The book uses a digital epistolary (blog) format via the main character Daniel. Daniel and his friends, Todd, Bug, Karla, and Abe, all live in a “geek house” near the Microsoft campus in Redmond. All of them (and some other friends) eventually leave Microsoft to follow one of their co-workers, Michael, when he decides to form his own start-up in California. The strength of Microserfs is how it handles the characters’ lives once they have moved to the Valley. A lesser book would have focused on the new business, or become an allegory for the blind and vapid desire of all of them to make as much money as possible.

Instead, the book focuses on how all of these characters begin to grow as a group and as individuals. Their identity of being directly tied to their work or their project eventually begins to bend. Daniel and Karla have a real relationship. Bug announces his homosexuality. Todd, the bodybuilding geek, meets another bodybuilder and they have a child together.

Another strength of this book is that it can be externally projected upon in a few different ways. A friend of mine loaned me this book and one of the things he told me was that he thought it provided a good glimpse of the hedonism of the ’90′s. I never got a strong whiff of hedonism in these pages but at the same time I can completely understand why others would detect it. Microserfs is an elastic, dynamic book containing everything from glimpses into the tech sector of the early ’90′s to the kind of crazily intelligent observations about technology that stoners in the ’70′s might have said with embarrassment but were now being said with total honesty:

“[a description about a video game Michael developed] It was a game about a beautiful kingdom on the edge of the world that saw time coming to an end.

“Michael said the citizens of the kingdom were all allowed to do this because they had made it to the end of history without ever having had the blood of war spill on their soil. He said that it would have been an affront to all good souls who had worked for a better world over the millennia not to engineer a system for preserving finer thoughts after the millennium arrived and all ideologies died and people became animals once more.”

In many ways, this book is elastic as the mindset of the ’90′s itself. And while I like that the book ended on a solid personal note (everyone rallying around and helping Daniel’s mother after her stroke), and while I thought that, conversely, the ending was ruined slightly because it relied a bit on a hammer-to-the-head type of observation about technology (as in Look, technology can help the sick in different ways!), I also fully realize that trying to be humanistic without irony is not an easy thing to do. And if that is this book’s only failing, then it is ultimately a minuscule flaw.

It is fitting that Jonathan Franzen has one of his main characters (Patty Berglund) reading War and Peace, and that he intermittently references Tolstoy’s epic masterpiece here and there throughout Freedom. It is fitting because the way Franzen maps out his characters’ lives in this book, and how they try to navigate themselves out of their own fate and undoing, is as close to being Tolstoy-ian as I have read. Note: I am not saying that Franzen is as great as Tolstoy, or that he deserves to be joined with Tolstoy when speaking about the greatest writers of all time. I am saying that the way he writes about his characters’ unhappiness and their inner monologues is very Tolstoy-esque. Under normal circumstances, I am loathe to compare, however abstractly or directly, modern writers (or artists or musicians) to any classic counterparts but in this case making a dotted line connecting Franzen’s writing ability to Tolstoy’s writing ability, albeit in a very static sense, is something that I will stand by.

Yes, Freedom is that great.

Jonathan Franzen did an excellent job of writing about a family with all sorts of problems in his previous novel The Corrections, a novel that was met with enough critical praise to fill the New York Times Building. (Full disclosure: as much as I loved and was thoroughly blown away by much of the writing in The Corrections, I found the ending to be cold. I was rather disappointed by it, almost to the point of retroactively being indifferent to the novel as a whole. I was afraid that Franzen is to writing what the Coen Brothers are to moviemaking: extraordinarily gifted, but incapable of producing satisfying endings.) And while The Corrections and Freedom have some similarities—both focus on the shifts and minor (and major) self-inflicted destructions that can happen to a family, both have a male child going to a foreign country because of their job, both have at their core an attempt by Franzen to try and reconcile the differences (and similarities) between people near his generation’s age and his parents’ generation, etc.,—the biggest difference is that Freedom focuses mostly on the parents, Walter and Patty Berglund, throughout the novel whereas The Corrections focuses mostly on the Lambert children, Gary, Chip, and Denise, and makes the parents, Alfred and Enid, appear to be quite plastic at times. To put it a different way: The Corrections is like John Lennon; Freedom is like Paul McCartney. The former will probably always be more popular and have signifiers like genius thrown around because that art has been deemed to be Important (when, in actuality, a lot of it is kind of self-gratifying and a little too-cool-for-the-room), whereas the latter is more upfront in its greatness. This is the part where I tell you that I’ll take McCartney over Lennon; “Rocky Raccoon” over “Revolution 9,” “Wonderful Christmastime” over “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).”

Freedom follows the lives of Walter and Patty Berglund, from the University of Minnesota where they met to Nameless Lake to Washington, D.C., and everywhere in between. Patty is a tall girl, a scholarship basketball player for the Gophers, whose athletic gifts were at natural odds in her New York household growing up, living with a political mom and a lawyer father who would have rather championed their other kids’ Bohemian-style artistic creativity than Patty’s ill-fitting talents. Initially, Patty is attracted to Walter’s college roommate and frontman of the local band The Traumatics, Richard Katz. (Katz is described at one point as being a more attractive version of Muammar Gaddafi.)

Walter, on the other hand, is from Minnesota. His childhood involved an alcoholic father, a mother who seemed fated to be unhappy, and siblings that were purposely useless and seem to always be looking for the easiest paths in life to take. Walter spends countless hours working at and fixing up the family business, a sorta run-down motel. Walter is inherently good, is smart, and is capable of making a very good amount of money; Patty reaches a point where she just wants to get married, have kids, and stay at home. They get married. And you can probably guess that most of the novel involves unhappiness and poor choices, just based on this and the previous paragraph. The rest of the novel unfolds with an organized chaos of events that anyone who seeks out and loves great fiction will enjoy immensely.

We have somewhere in our minds a default image of what we think a writer looks like. Some of us may think of an older-looking man from a different time writing on sheets of paper and pausing to dip his pen in the bottle of ink. Some of us may think of a Jack Kerouac type slaving over a typewriter. Reading this book, the image I had of Franzen writing was of him sitting in an oversized room with one or two giant whiteboards, which would have numerous connecting points and notes to create a large map of this novel. Everything in this novel comes across on the pages as if everything were rigorously thought out in advance. Every word in this novel seems to have a definite purpose because Franzen routinely cross-references things that are split apart by tens or hundreds of pages with ease.

I will refrain from going into any great detail about the story for fear of ruining even the slightest part or sub-plot for you. But I will say that my one main criticism of the novel is that the parts that are written from Patty’s point of view (she writes an autobiography as part of a therapy exercise) seem to be a little too similar to that of the omniscient narrative voice throughout the rest of the book. I would have liked to have seen Franzen change it up a little bit more and given Patty a slightly more distinctive voice. But at the end of the day this is nitpicking. Buy this book and read it. Now. It more than lives up to the hype and praise that it has received.

And the ending is great.

The first forty pages of Carter Beats the Devil has some of the best and genuinely intoxicating writing to read. Within these pages you have the wonderfully flowing introduction of magician Charles Carter (or, Charles The Great, as he’s known at this point) and a summary of his roots leading up to his performance on the night that would turn out to be the last night that President Warren G. Harding was alive. Gold’s prose in describing Carter’s three acts and, specifically, the third act which is called “Carter Beats the Devil” and involves Carter having a magical duel with the Devil culminating with Carter catching the Devil cheating at a card game, is truly wonderful and entertaining and masterful. This writing is on par with some of the best blocks of writing from Michael Chabon’s The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a book that is one of my all time favorite novels and one that is on many reader’s short list of best novels of the previous decade.

After this prologue, the novel dives into Act I and the background of Charles Carter and how he was introduced to magic, and how his mother was more or less addicted to whatever was new in the field of psychology, and how his father had made a nice name for himself and made a fair amount of money, and the differences between Charles and his brother James, etc., etc. Throughout the three acts in the novel one can very easily pick up on the fact that Glen David Gold is a very good writer, but his biggest problem with this book is that he seemed to want to put too much into this story. And, unfortunately, this sense of not knowing when to quit is something that I picked up on very easily too.

Carter Beats the Devil is historical fiction, and historical fiction when it is done well can be one of the most rewarding fiction sub-genres to read because it can be used (whether intentional or not) as a reference point to show, sometimes counterintuitively, how similar the past is compared to the present. Example: there is a scene in the last 1/3 of the book in which Philo Farnsworth, a pioneer in the development of the television, is pitching his invention to an auditorium of private businessmen, students from technical schools nearby, and other professionals from the nascent world of technology. This scene instantaneously serves two purposes very well–one is obvious (that Farnsworth’s invention, television, must have looked like a magic trick to those in attendance), the other is more subtle (when Farnsworth tells the audience that television will eliminate wars). The former helps create an image of Farnsworth as a solo magician with only one assistant, his wife, performing an illusion that is so grand that almost everyone in the audience is dubious and skeptical of what they are seeing (even though it’s plainly right in front of them). The latter falls into why I think historical fiction can wake us up to our own surroundings.

I have no idea if Philo Farnsworth ever said in real life that television would eliminate all wars, or if he ever said in real life that his basis for his belief was that if people throughout the world could see live, moving pictures of people who live many miles away from them, that this would result in a tangible feeling of knowing that everyone else is no different from ourselves–thus, why would we ever go to war if we were able to humanize strangers in an instant? But this scene was written in the book, and I couldn’t help thinking of the grandiose plans of the Internet before it reached its ubiquitous status in our society. The comparisons may not be one-to-one but good historical fiction can cause you to think of connecting dots like this, and anything that causes you to want to connect disparate dots is usually a good thing.

But as I noted before my problem with this book is that Gold seemed to want to put in too much. The Farnsworth stuff was good, but was all of it necessary? There was an intangible feeling that gnawed at me quite frequently that said that this book should have been pared down a little. Because here’s the other kicker: the last forty pages are terrific. So, essentially, you have here a book with a great 40 pages to begin it, a great 40 pages to end it, and some great writing in between but, ultimately, this is a book that becomes a little directionless at times. Because Gold is sitting on a great ending, he seems okay with stretching out the story to make the reveal and payoff worth as much as possible. And, to a point, it is successful in this respect; I legitimately enjoyed reading this book. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was reading a B- novel that should have been an A.

Sometimes, the best illusions are the ones without all of the smoke and mirrors.

[Please note that this review does include spoilers.]

The brilliance of The Time Traveler’s Wife is, like all diamonds and other shiny gems, a multi-faceted one. Here you have a book that not only deals with time travel—a potentially murky and confusing and (from the author’s execution) selfishly convenient plot device to choose to go with—but also uses as its axis the ideas of The Everlasting Love, The Triumph of Love, and all of the other romantic ideals that can polarize a reading audience (i.e.–women will buy this book, men will stay away from it). Here also is a book that, if it had been done in a different manner, could easily read like a blatant invitation for a feminist’s ennui (or outright anger) because it’s main female character, Clare, waits around a lot for Henry. Finally, here is a book that is written in two first-person narratives; it relies heavily on dialog and the inner monologues of its two main characters—two things that, if left in the hands of lesser writer (hello, Stephenie Meyer), can be disastrous. In short: this is a book that had a few big things stacked against it from the onset (to say nothing of the fact that this is also a debut novel). And yet… This is a really outstanding book. All of the traps that you might expect it to fall into, it avoids beautifully. It is an exceptional love story, and an exceptional time travel story. It is a truly great modern story, one that gracefully weaves metaphor with genuine emotion, and depth with humor.

One of the main strengths of The Time Traveler’s Wife is that author Audrey Niffenegger knows exactly how to handle the time travel and love aspects of the story: the former is handled with wonderful balance—it is detailed with regards to its dates and times and the scope is large, but the science of it is perfectly minimal; the latter is handled with great care so that the weight and emotion of the ending is earned (even though you have a pretty good idea you know exactly what will happen anyway). Henry and Clare DeTamble will never replace Romeo and Juliet as the de facto fictional couple we think of when we think of love stories, but they can certainly lay claim to an early spot on the Greatest Fictional Couples In 21st Century Fiction list.

The best quality of this book is its use of metaphor. Niffenegger has stated that this novel acts as a metaphor for her failed relationships; that by taking an inventory (for lack of a better term) of the men who have disappeared from her life, the idea of Henry and Clare became much easier to flesh out. That in and of itself is a terrific and poignant (and wonderfully self-aware) metaphor. The other great metaphors in the novel revolve specifically around Henry’s time travel: that stress causes him to physically disappear, and that his mother’s death is the event that he revisits the most. A quick summary of each metaphor and why I think that they are quite brilliant:

Stress causes Henry DeTamble to disappear — Within the realm of science fiction (or stories that lean slightly on sci-fi, or are outright fantasy stories), the poor behavior of men is usually symbolized with monster imagery. Bruce Banner gets stressed and the introduction of the Hulk is just a few seconds away; Frankenstein represented not only Science becoming unstable, but also Man; Mr. Hyde plays upon the dark side that resides in all men, etc. If you were to take these devices and mix them with the accepted modern day notion that men might jump out of a relationship at the first sign of trouble, this metaphor acts as a nice update. Henry isn’t a monster, but his lack of control causes him to literally slip away from Clare.

The death of his mother is his time traveling anchor — At one point Henry tells Clare that the death of his mother is like the center of gravity for him. He has witnessed his mother dying in the same car crash from multiple angles. He has seen her many times before she died. What I found to be so great about this wrinkle is that, whether Niffenegger realized it or not, it does a terrific job of summing up men in general and their relation to women. A guy’s mom is in the overall scheme of things more of an anchor than their dad, regardless of whether or not one or both of them left them or died at a young age. There’s a reason why a woman’s first question to her newly-dating friend is oftentimes “How does he treat his mother?” It’s also worth noting that Henry never once tries to prevent the crash, or talk to his mom before she dies—something that I think most men would do (because they wouldn’t want to tamper with the events that did unfold) but most women would be unable to refrain from trying to do. This indirectly maps out a kind of feminine vs. masculine device.

Most of the time, in literary criticism, props are given to men who write about women and/or feminist themes in a technically sound way but, oftentimes, the rules of vice versa rarely applies. When men write a great story involving strong female characters it often receives the Important label. Yet when women write about men or masculine themes it still usually gets filed under Chick Lit.^[1] Despite its subject matter and inherent imagery, The Time Traveler’s Wife is actually a pretty masculine story.

Niffenegger has created a character in Henry DeTamble that easily resonates with women, complete with many of the usual Perfect Guy tropes. But she has written a subtly complex character too in Henry: because he is naked when he time travels, he has to steal and beat up people routinely if he arrives in a public place; additionally, he still sleeps with other women during his present tense youth. The latter is a function of the time travel plot that dictates that the present tense Henry has no idea what future (and past) Henry know. It might sound gimmicky to some people but I found it to be kind of refreshing that Niffenegger did not put up a story in front of the reader starring two virgins.

As for Clare, as I mentioned early in the review, it would be really easy for some to view Clare as a kind of updated damsel simply waiting for her man but I think that that would be too shallow or short-sighted. Even though Niffenegger has stated that she is not like Clare in real life (the author has said before that she wouldn’t wait around like Clare did) she has nonetheless created a dynamic and unforgettable female character. Clare’s dynamic qualities, like Henry’s, mostly reside beneath the surface. Does a majority of Clare’s life involve waiting? Yes. Is it unfair that her daughter gets to see Henry while Clare does not? Probably. But really great art and fiction takes abstract (or even outright fantastical) things and tries to apply some humanity to them.

Maybe the book would have had more gravity if Clare lived her life more fully but that’s not really the point. The point is that if you knew without a shadow of a doubt that the love of your life would reappear throughout your life, you would wait too. Regardless of how ludicrous it looked or sounded.

The Time Traveler’s Wife plays on this notion to beautiful effect.

[1] This was one of the many reasons I found the writings and interviews from women like Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult to be so fascinating during the release of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom earlier this year. It wasn’t so much that they were calling out The New York Times (they were), but they were also (more importantly) marking their territory. Underneath the surface complaint of the favoritism towards white male authors was the notion that a) not everything written by women about relationships is Chick Lit and b) there should be more perspective when books by women are reviewed—not everything will be up to the same level as The Corrections (few books by men will even reach that level), but not everything by female authors needs to be treated like it’s a feminized, beach reading version of Dan Brown either. I’ve not yet read any books by Weiner or Picoult, but I have a hell of a lot of respect for both of them in speaking their minds in the way that they did.