[Please note that this review does include spoilers.]

Gonna try something new this month. Instead of reading a book (in this case, The Corrections) then writing about it solo like I have the previously, I am going to team up with my friend Chuck Kennedy. We are both going to start The Corrections at the same time and then every 100 pages or so we are going to add our thoughts/criticisms on the comments section of this post. Feel free to join in, or you can simply watch the back-and-forth between us unfold; either way, click on the comments icon to the left of the title of this post to view—or add to—the conversation.

Summary of the novel from the publisher: After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson’s disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man-or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.

At 11:10a MDT on April 20, 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris arrived at Columbine High School. At 11:19a they began shooting at their fellow classmates in the cafeteria during lunch. They would proceed to shoot and throw pipe bombs at their classmates and teachers both inside and outside of the school until approximately 12:08p, when Harris and Klebold killed themselves in the library. In just under one hour they killed 13 people (12 students and 1 teacher) and injured 24 others.

It is the worst school shooting at a high school in American history. And if Eric Harris knew how to properly wire the propane bombs he set up, it would have been the worst public shooting of any sort in American history save for a Civil War battle.

The original plan that Eric and Dylan had hatched for April 20th was to detonate a propane bomb (a bomb made out of a propane tank you would use for your outdoor grill) in a residential area about a mile away from the school. This would throw off the cops while the two committed mass murder inside of the school. Once in the school, propane bombs would be set near the columns of the cafeteria. If they had detonated properly the blast would have been enough to collapse the columns, causing the library to fall onto the cafeteria killing hundreds of people in one fell swoop. From here, Eric and Dylan were going to go to their cars in the parking lot. Their cars were parked strategically so that they would be able to shoot at any people running out of the exit they were closest to. (They had put enough thought into how they parked that they would have been able to shoot their automatic weapons in a back-and-forth motion without fear of hitting one another; their positions mirrored a tactical military position.) After they picked off enough kids running towards them (and once the police, paramedics, and media started to flock to the high school en masse) their final step was to drive their cars—containing a few more propane tank bombs—towards the gathering mob of press and police and paramedics, killing as many people as possible before blowing up their cars.

Instead, the bombs in the cafeteria never exploded (even after Eric shot at them later on) and the two boys essentially ad-libbed most of the shooting.

Reading Dave Cullen’s Columbine 11 years after the shooting I found myself not only re-remembering things that I had forgotten about the shooting (aspects of the original plan, that Cassie Bernall was never asked about her Christianity by Eric Harris before he killed her), but I was also reminded of how fundamentally inept the media is when it comes to stories like this. The immediate national coverage of the story was any (or all) of the following:

“This killing was the result of bullying.” “This was the result of a couple of outcasts lashing out against jocks.” “Music played a role in shaping their aggression.” “Marilyn Manson is to blame.” “Is the Goth subculture rising? Why are they so angry and violent?” “They called themselves ‘the trench coat mafia.’” “Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were insane.”

And herein lies the reason why Columbine is such a good and interesting read: because there is a good chance that your memories of the shooting is half-filled (or at least quarter-filled) with things that were later ruled out, or were never adequately explained in the first place. And the biggest thing that the media misreported (and what we misinterpret in general) was that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were somehow inherently crazy, or insane with rage.

Cullen delves into psychopathy and profiling with such ease and such great and succinct detail that you begin to see the real picture unfold before your eyes, and that picture is that Eric Harris was a psychopath and Dylan Klebold was a depressive. Harris had a supremely inflated God complex, Klebold was mostly a good kid but when he got angry he would intensely snap for a short amount of time. The two fed off of each perfectly.

Revisiting the psychopathy angle, to many people the fragment “Eric Harris was a psychopath” from a previous sentence usually equates to thoughts of insanity. Again, Cullen does a terrific job explaining what a psychopath is.

“Psychopathic brains don’t function like those in other groups, but they are consistently similar to one another. Eric killed for two reasons: to demonstrate his superiority and to enjoy it.

“To a psychopath, both motives make sense. ‘Psychopaths are capable of behavior that normal people find not only horrific but baffling,’ wrote Dr. Robert Hare, the leading authority on psychopaths. ‘They can torture and mutilate their victims with about the same sense of concern that we feel when we carve a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.’

“Eric saw humans as chemical compounds with an inflated sense of their own worth. ‘its just all nature, chemistry, and math,’ he [Harris] wrote. ‘you die. burn, melt, evaporate, decay.’”

The end of the book also goes into some detail about how the Columbine attacks forced local, state, and federal agencies to change not only their attitudes towards profiling kids (don’t single out the outcasts, and killers of this nature rarely come from broken homes) but to completely overhaul how they handle these situations.

When the Columbine attacks had begun, the local authorities and the FBI had no updated schematic of the school, had no access to anyone who could disarm the fire alarm, and stuck to the plan of solidifying the perimeter. Consequently, the FBI and S.W.A.T. teams were entering from the wrong side of the building and were trying to work in an environment in which the fire alarms were going off for hours, the floors were flooded from the sprinklers running for hours, and were so overly cautious that they did not reach the library until almost 4 hours after Harris and Klebold had committed suicide. Nowadays, there is no “protecting the perimeter.” If there’s a shooter, the police (or the FBI or S.W.A.T.) immediately hone in and try to take him out, even if it means walking over wounded or dying civilians. (It is believed that this practice of mass convergence prevented countless other lives from being lost when the Virginia Tech shooter opened fire on campus a few years ago.)

While the subject matter is certainly not cheery and some of the details eye-opening^[1] Columbine is worth your time. It is one of the best nonfiction books I have read in a couple of years and it is unbiased and objective look into one of the most tragic days in recent American history.

Finally, if you are interested in Cullen’s previous writing about Columbine I highly recommend reading the seminal article he wrote for the 5th anniversary of the shooting on Slate titled “The Depressive and The Psychopath.”

[1] As in some of Eric Harris’s writing and journals that were found afterwards that suggest that if Eric had lived longer he would have surely grown up to be a serial murderer and/or rapist. One of the journal entries found referenced a future desire to trick girls into sleeping with him so that he could later kill them.

____________________

[Note: the next book to be reviewed will be The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Myself and Chuck Kennedy will be reading it and adding our own critiques and thoughts about it every 100 or so pages.]

If I had to choose 5 books that not only represents the canon of American literature—while also defining what America is for someone who only had a remedial knowledge of our country—To Kill A Mockingbird easily cracks that list for me.^[1] It might be the perfect American novel, not because it was groundbreaking or because Harper Lee’s prose outshines everyone before and after her. It’s the perfect American novel because of Atticus Finch—the classic Ideal Man—and Scout Finch—a wonderful character that mirrors social metamorphosis perfectly.

I usually give no weight to all-time lists of any sort when it comes to movies but a few years ago the American Film Institute had their 50 greatest heroes list and Atticus Finch was number one, beating out a myriad of heroes that either required weapons (Indiana Jones, James Bond), or became significantly larger than life within their story (Rocky Balboa, Jefferson Smith).

This is not an accident.

Atticus Finch, I think, is one of the few characters in American literature (and cinema) that everyone wishes they could be on a certain level. We wish that we had his stoicism and unimpeded objectivity. We wish that we would do the right thing more often. The best thing about the novel—the thing that makes it so identifiable to generations of people—is that Harper Lee thoroughly humanizes Atticus Finch. He is entirely relatable, regardless if you grew up in the ’30′s or ten years ago. He is not overly idealized to a fault, or more metaphor than character (see: John Galt).

To me, one of the greatest scenes in the book is when Atticus and the kids stay at Jack’s house. (Jack is Atticus’s brother.) Atticus and Jack are talking about the trial of Tom Robinson and Atticus’s fears of what the aftermath might bring to his family:

“‘[...] But do you think I could face my children otherwise? You know what’s going to happen as well as I do, Jack, and I hope and pray I can get Jem and Scout through it without bitterness, and most of all, without catching Maycomb’s usual disease. Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don’t pretend to understand… I just hope that Jem and Scout come to me for their answers instead of listening to the town. I hope they trust me enough… Jean Louise?’

“My scalp jumped. I stuck my head around the corner. ‘Sir?’

“‘Go to bed.’

“I scurried to my room and went to bed. [...] But I never figured out how Atticus knew I was listening, and it was not until many years later that I realized he wanted me to hear every word he said.”

This passage perfectly displays not only the relationship between a father and his daughter, but also the very essence of both: Atticus and his instinctive nature to protect his family, and Scout and her wonderful naivete that acts as the lens by which we see the story unfold. Finally, the fact that the book is written from the perspective of Scout as an adult providing us with a story from her childhood makes the last half of the last sentence from the above passage all the more flawless.

Before I delve any further into this review, here is a summary of the book (in case you have forgotten, or are one of the few people who weren’t required to read it in high school). To Kill A Mockingbird is set in Maycomb, Alabama in the early 1930′s. It follows the Finch’s (Atticus, Jem, and Scout, and their maid Calpurnia; the kids’ mother died when they were young) up until 1936, the year in which the trial of Tom Robinson—a black man accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell—took place and in which Mayella’s father Bob tried to take revenge on Atticus for defending a black man. Before the trial starts, the book is primarily about Jem and Scout and their interactions and experiences with people ranging from the enigmatic (the unseen, walking rumor mill, specter of a man, Boo Radley) to the walks-of-life characters like their summertime friend Dill and other characters like Miss Maudie and Aunt Alexandra.

The trial is the turning point of the book for obvious reasons: even though Scout and Jem are 10 and 14 respectively, the trial’s verdict and aftermath provide Lee with enough to explore themes involving death of innocence, gender roles, and a questioning of how certain wrongs can exist in a society that holds freedom and humanity as default values.

Mark Twain realized many decades previously that the best way to handle race is to put a child square in the middle of it, and let them be the lens by which adults are forced to look at things, and Harper Lee with this book does a job on par with Twain in this respect. When Atticus sits in front of the jail by himself at night to ensure that no one attempts to get to Tom Robinson, Lee inserts Jem and Scout directly into the scene. The kids are the ones who cause the five men who have arrived to get Tom to turn back around. The men can’t bear to bust in, not when children are looking at them in the face and asking why they are here. And in the hands of a lesser writer this scene would probably have been too ham-fisted or possibly even grossly preachy, but Harper Lee wrote it in such a way that felt real because Scout’s voice was already so wonderful and so textured that we as readers knew that the men were probably not going to hurt Atticus and his children. But what was unexpected about it was its matter-of-factness. Were they going to hurt you, Atticus? the children wondered. No, they just wanted to scare me; these men, they might’ve been acting differently tonight but in the morning they’ll still be the same good people. You can’t damn people who become temporarily misguided, Atticus explains.

I read this book in sophomore year English class and I liked it a lot. I had planned on re-reading it again a couple times previous to this but each time I found another book that caught my eye. Going into this reading I knew that I would probably still like it, that it would still resonate with me. But I was really surprised with how much I unequivocally love this book. Which leads me to a few words about Harper Lee.

To Kill A Mockingbird is the only book that she ever published. Like J.D. Salinger, she became a recluse (how many people know that she is still alive?) and as she got older she refused to talk about the book even if she allowed someone to speak with her. It is truly unbelievable that not only was Lee’s first book a huge success (it won the Pulitzer, as well as it being a point of reference during the Civil Rights era) but it was also remade into a perfect and iconic movie.^[2]

Has the success of Mockingbird provided more negatives than positives for Harper Lee? Why won’t she talk about the book? Did Truman Capote (Lee’s childhood friend and basis for the character Dill) help write the novel? I don’t know any of those answers. And the fact is that when Harper Lee dies, none of that will really matter. She left us one gift—a timeless, socially relevant gift—and we will always have it to use as a basis to better explain (and learn from) a particular era of American history.

[1] The other four books (in no particular order): The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, and Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Rounding out the top 10 would be (again, in no particular order): The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, and flip a coin between The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.

[2] I think the only major thing left out from the book in the movie is Atticus hinting at incest during his cross-examination of Mayella. Other than that, the movie is practically a carbon copy of the book.

There is only one word I can use to properly describe The Book of Basketball, the latest book from ESPN’s The Sports Guy (Bill Simmons): maddening.

His maddening use of long-winded metaphors (David Robinson is like a maître d’ at a really fancy, upscale restaurant who happens to really nice, even though there’s a part of us that respects mean maître d’s more than we do nice ones).^[1] His maddening use of plural first person style of writing. (We’ll always remember Rick Barry being a dick. We’ll always remember how Bob Petit shouldn’t have won the ’59 MVP. Actually, I won’t remember those things. Sorry.) His maddening inconsistency when it comes to his five chapter section on the 96 greatest players in the history of the NBA (the worst: the piece on Vince Carter that was nothing more than an excuse to rip on the guy;^[2] the best: the piece on Elgin Baylor, which was posted in its entirety on espn.com when Baylor was fired from the Clippers^[3]). His maddening inability to write things in a larger, objective context: like when he acts genuinely dumbfounded as to why the NBA went so long without a TV contract. Five words for you Bill: college football, pro football, baseball. The NFL did not receive a truly lucrative TV contract until the ’70′s, how could anyone possibly wonder why the NBA did not receive one until later—a sport that has never been more popular than the NFL for any stretch of time? Finally, his maddening (and transparent) ability to constantly wink at the reader.

What I mean is: Bill Simmons, at times, goes out of his way to show you that this book was written by The Real Bill Simmons and not The Edited, ESPN Friendly Bill Simmons. And, apparently, this means that The Real Bill Simmons likes dick jokes and porn references/jokes.

None of this should really be shocking (“A sports writer who likes porn jokes? Next you’ll tell me that politicians lie.”) but it seems as though Simmons is desperately craving an image that he thinks will come across as real, but seems forced. Maybe it’s just me but I got too much of a “look at me, I’m swearing and talking about tits!” vibe throughout the book. Which is to say that some of the book comes across as immature and overly subjective.^[4]

On the whole, The Book of Basketball is recommended reading for anyone who is a fan of the NBA. While I found a few parts of it to be tiresome, inconsistent, and unnecessary I think this has more to do with the fact that I’ve been reading Simmons’ writing since he first landed on the Page 2 section on espn.com. And maybe that’s the overall point I’m trying to make here: if you’ve only recently started reading The Sports Guy this book will probably hit you in all the right places; otherwise, you can kinda see some of the jokes and analysis coming a mile away.

Or, to put it another way (and to borrow a page from Simmons on how to write a long-winded analogy): Bill Simmons is like a comedian that you’ve been following since they came up and you know all of their tells and rhythms and bits so that when you see them live fifteen years later you feel disappointed when they re-hash their old jokes.

Especially jokes about Teen Wolf.

[1] I made this one up, but it seems like it would have fit perfectly in the book.

[2] Look, I agree with ripping on Vince Carter. I thought he was overrated when he played at UNC, and he’s a notoriously soft player (though I think the media giving him shit for attending his graduation—the audacity!—on the same day as a Game 7 kinda permanently messed him up). But don’t put him on a list of greatest NBA players then bash the guy. It’s bad writing and it comes off as petulant.

[3] His pieces on Scottie Pippen and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were terrific too.

[4] Don’t get me wrong: I love me some immature and overly subjective opinions and humor. But it needs to be en-ter-tain-ing. Some of Simmons’ jokes and subjectivity can be groan-inducing. (Like when he wrote that Moses Malone was the Marilyn Chambers of rebounding: he was insatiable.)

[Please note that this review does include spoilers.]

I went into this year with a New Year’s reading resolution: I was going to make it a point to primarily read fiction from the last decade. I started out by reading Susan Gregg Gilmore’s Looking For Salvation At The Dairy Queen, which is a book I would recommend for summer reading. The narrator’s voice is good, it is light and breezy, and reads like a book that would make for a good movie if put in the hands of a caring director and producers who are faithful to the tone of the book. (So why didn’t I write a review of this book here? I never found the time to do so. It’s a bad excuse, I know, but it’s the truth too.) I then proceeded to tackle The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which was the previous book to be reviewed here. Next up on the fiction-of-the-’00′s theme is Never Let Me Go, the unsuspecting (and almost disguised) sci-fi novel from Kazuo Ishiguro published in 2005.

[Before I get into the meat of my criticism of this book, let me just say that this book is written in first-person narrative, and that, for me, first-person narrative is a tricky proposition because it becomes that much harder for me to warm up to the narrator. Personally, I think it is harder to love a first-person narrator, and, conversely, it is easier to love a third-person narrator. First-person by default allows for certain traps to be uncovered easily; a third-person narrative can conceal almost everything and still be engrossing. Again, these are just my opinions and tastes regarding the two styles.]

Never Let Me Go is written in first-person by Kathy, a carer who went to a school called Hailsham in Britain. From the sound of it early on Hailsham seems akin to an Ivy League school: its prestige can also create an image of elitism to people who are not alumni. Hailsham’s main purpose as a school seems to be its ability to churn out carers—a kind of nurse that comforts and takes care of people who donate organs and body parts.

The first half of the book revolves around Kathy and her friends, Ruth and Tommy, at Hailsham; the second half revolving mostly around the three of them at a post-Hailsham place called The Cottages. The second half of the book is also where the book’s central story unfolds itself in earnest: you find out that the students of Hailsham are actually clones, essentially created to be organ donors for human beings later on down the line. Additionally, you find out that Hailsham was established with the goal of showing society that the clones—the students—had true human qualities and something akin to a soul. All throughout their time at Hailsham, a couple of times a year an older woman simply named Madame would come to the school and take art that the students had produced. None of them ever knew why she did it or what it meant. It turns out that the art was taken and brought to exhibitions as a means of proving that the clones had a sense of curiosity, creativity, and artfulness.

On the whole Never Let Me Go is written very well but I found the overall story to simply be kind of uninteresting. I felt as though I got to know Kathy pretty well—the first-person narration here is strong, which is a good thing—but I never found her story to be enthralling. I will, however, concede that two parts of the book were quite brilliant:

1) the idea that the clones seem to inherently believe that their human counterparts are hookers, strippers, and drug dealers. Once they move to the Cottages Kathy begins to dabble in casual sex, which isn’t terribly unusual especially if you think of the Cottages as a metaphor for college. Except that whenever Kathy has sex she feels a palpable desire to have sex right now, almost like a low-level, abstract nymphomania, which causes her to believe temporarily that she must have been copied from a prostitute and that this sexual desire is residual from the cloning process. I thought that this was a great metaphor for a particular type of confusion that afflicts most everyone as young adults: a confusion born of sexual freedom that makes you question why you are having sex with the people that you are. It is also a confusion that seems very female-centric, as casual hookups seem to cause women to question themselves more than men do.

2) the part about the porn magazines at the Cottages. Midway through the book there is a brief passage about a former student named Steve and the only thing anyone remembered or knew about him was that he had a soft-core pornography collection. Subsequently, any time a porn magazine was discovered, everyone would a) say something to the effect of “here’s another of Steve’s magazines” and b) pretend to be bored and annoyed by their presence. And, yet, no one ever threw them out and whenever someone found one of them they would disappear for about 30 minutes. Of all the many ways it could have been written that the clones and humans were linked together behaviorally I kind of love that Ishiguro decided to write that the clones were just as naturally susceptible as we humans are to playing weird social roles amongst friends and strangers (as opposed to safe things like “they both can feel pain” or “they both yearn to fall in love”).

All in all, though, Never Let Me Go just didn’t do it for me. If you really like first-person narratives and English writing and low-level sci-fi you may like it a lot more than I did. I found the story to be kind of dull and therefore would not recommend it to anyone looking for some general reading to submerse themselves in.

“Forget about what you are escaping from [...] Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.“

The above quote is so central to Michael Chabon’s (pronounced SHAY-bahn, in case you’re wondering) masterful and thoroughly wonderful, Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. This 630+ page novel which, on the surface, is about comic books and Jewish mythology is really about escape—whether it be about escaping from Prague before the Nazis begin their march into control of the city, or the escape from your true self so that you can establish a temporary normalcy, or the escape that so many kids took part in with their comics during and after WWII. I have never read a piece of fiction that deals so magnificently with escape (and doesn’t take place in an all-out fantasy setting).

On the surface, a novel that uses comic books as a way to expand on the themes of escape, of love, of identity—you would be justified in fearing that this book could succumb to a disease of clichés and repetition. One might worry that the comics are used in a manner we are already familiar with: that the superheroes represent virtue and a quest for justice, that the villains are metaphors for daily evils and compromises, that the sidekick represents the idea that a friend is invaluable, etc. What Chabon so brilliantly does here instead is seamlessly lays the world of comic books onto an already established linear story. The idea of comics snaps on to the story, rather than the other way around. And, yes, you do have your clichéd bits about comics here but they are written and handled perfectly. (Considering that Hollywood is going to suck every last drop of blood out of the comics industry by releasing comics-based movie until 2023, let’s just say that it was refreshing to read something about comics and marvel at how well it was handled.)

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a story about Joe (Josef) Kavalier and Sammy Clay (née Klayman)—two cousins who are suddenly thrown together when Josef arrives at Sammy’s house one day after fleeing from Prague when the writing was on the walls regarding Hitler’s desire to take over Europe. Sammy is fatherless and mostly friendless; he spends most of his free time reading comics or writing. Sammy is stationary, but would love to go all over the place (his father was an entertainer on the Vaudeville circuit and ultimately chose that over his family). By the time he arrives in New York, Joe has gone many places and done many things that a typical teenage boy probably shouldn’t have to go to or do.

Joe grew up being amazed by the life (and idea) of Harry Houdini. He would eventually become friends Bernard Kornblum, a well-respected elder of the magician/escapist/entertainer world. Kornblum taught Joe how to pick locks so as to escape from such setups like: having your arms chained behind your back while inside of a bag and thrown into a river. He was a mentor and when Joe started showing high proficiency in this field of work, it coincided at a time when Kornblum was asked to find the Golem of Prague and move it so that the Nazis would never find it or destroy it.

From here, the novel continues to explore many more levels on the theme of escape: Joe’s physical escape from Czechoslovakia; Sammy’s escape when dealing with his sexuality; Joe’s setting aside of money so that he can pay for his family to brought to the U.S., and the daydreams associated with that idea; the mental escapes that both Sammy and Joe have to perform in order to come up with characters and story lines for the comics they are creating; the physical escapes that Joe chooses to do during and after WWII.

Kavalier & Clay is a great, nuanced book (I haven’t even gotten to Rosa Saks, the woman who would play a role in Sammy’s and Joe’s lives) that treats its characters and story with real love. It is a book that mixes comedy, heartbreak, wonder, and defeat with ease. Here are two great excerpts that show Chabon’s impeccable writing ability. The first excerpt is a great example of wonder, as you’re reading the back story of Judy Dark, a.k.a. The Luna Moth (a female character based on Rosa Saks). Notice the depth of playfulness and movement, two cornerstones of any story in which a seemingly banal character becomes charged with a great power that can help save humanity:

“So much has been written and sung about the bright lights and ballrooms of Empire City—that dazzling town!—about her nightclubs and jazz joints, her avenues of neon and chrome, and her swank hotels, their rooftop tea gardens in the summertime with paper lanterns. On this steely autumn afternoon, however, our destination is a place a long way from the horns and the hoohah. Tonight we are going down, under the ground, to a room that lies far beneath the high heels and the jackhammers, lower than the rats and the legendary alligators, lower even than the bones of Algonquins and dire wolves—to Office 99, a small, neat cubicle, airless and white, at the end of a corridor in the third subbasement of the Empire City Public Library. Here, at a desk that lies deeper in the earth than even the subway tracks, sits young Miss Judy Dark, Under-Assistant Cataloguer of Decommissioned Volumes. The nameplate on her desk so identifies her. She is a thin, pale thing, in a plain gray suit, and life is clearly passing her by. Twice a week a man with skin the color of boiled newspaper comes by her office to cart away the books that she has officially pronounced dead. Every ten minutes or so her walls are shaken by the thunder of the uptown local racing overhead.

“Poor Judy Dark! Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big black eyeglasses!”

The second excerpt illustrates the bluntness of heartbreak in the book when Joe finds out the ship (the Ark of Miriam) he was able to get his family on headed for the U.S. was sunk by the Nazis shortly after it left a port in Portugal. The first sentence here is what Rosa reads from a paper’s account of the sinking; the remainder of the excerpt is what really happened:

“[...] A German U-boat assigned to one of the dreaded ‘wolf packs’ that were tormenting Allied shipping in the Atlantic had set upon the innocent ship and sent it to the bottom with all hands.

“This account, it later developed, was not quite true. When, after the war, he was put on trials for other crimes, the commander of U-328, an intelligent and cultivated career officer named Gottfried Halse, was able to produce ample evidence and testimony to prove that, in full accordance with Admiral Dönitz’s ‘Prize Regulations,’ he had attacked the ship within ten miles of land—the island of Corvo in the Azores—and given ample warning to the captain of the Ark of Miriam. The evacuation had proceeded in an orderly fashion, and the transfer of all passengers to the lifeboats might have been effected safely and without incident if, immediately after the firing of the torpedoes, a storm had not appeared out of the northeast, overwhelming the boats so quickly that the crew of U-328 had no time to help. It was only luck that Halse and his crew of forty to escape with their own lives. If he had known that the ship carried children, Halse was asked, a good many of them unable to swim, would he still have proceeded with the attack? Halse’s reply is preserved in the transcript of his trial without comment or any notation as to whether his tone was one of irony, resignation, or sorrow.

“‘They were children,’ he said. ‘We were wolves.’”

This is one of the best fiction books I have read, and it is one that everyone should read before they die.

An excerpt from the chapter titled “The Best Response”:

“The best response to being arrested for carrying an unlicensed handgun into a nightclub and accidentally shooting yourself in the leg, thereby jeopardizing your pro football career.

“First of all, you people probably don’t know anyone who’s been shot. I, however, know lots of people who’ve been shot. I know lots of people who claim they want to shoot me, and some of those people are technically my friends. So that’s why I carry a gun. Second, you people probably trust the government, and you probably trust it because your personal experience with law enforcement has been positive. I’ve had the opposite experience all my life. I’m afraid of the government. I’m afraid of the world, and you can’t give me one valid reason why I shouldn’t be. So that’s why I did not apply for a gun license. Third, I shot myself in the leg, which is both painful and humiliating. What else do I need to go through in order to satiate your desire to see me chastised? The penalty for carrying an unlicensed weapon is insane. How can carrying an unlicensed firearm be worse than firing a licensed one? I broke the law, but the law I broke is a bad law. Would you be satisfied if the penalty for unlawful gun possession was getting shot in the leg? Because that already fucking happened!”

If you are unfamiliar with the Plaxico Burress story from a few months ago this excerpt is probably lost on you. But if you knew what this excerpt was all about once you started reading it, you will probably agree with how perfectly written and well thought out it is (even if you agreed with the stance of the state of New York throughout the trial as it was happening). The chapter “The Best Response” probably best sums up Eating The Dinosaur, Klosterman’s fourth book of original essays that in many various ways aims to find out why people choose to reveal themselves in the way(s) that they do.

Or, as Klosterman states in the opening essay “Something Out Of Nothing”:

“For the past five years, I’ve spent more time being interviewed than conducting interviews with other people. I am not complaining about this, nor am I proud of it—it’s just the way things worked out, mostly by chance. But the experience has been confusing. Though I always understand why people ask the same collection of questions, I never know why I answer them. Frankly, I don’t know why anyone answers anything.”

What unfolds throughout the rest of the book is a collection of essays that deal with: the similarities between David Koresh and the Branch Davidians and the recording of Nirvana’s In Utero; why ABBA became popular again recently (and why they were never truly unpopular to begin with); the similarities between the NFL and the Fox News Channel, and why it escapes everyone—even hard-core NFL fans—that the NFL is constructed almost entirely on Socialist thought, yet is presented as the most Conservative sport in the country; why Americans love advertising; the morality of time travel, just to name a few.

And if you are wondering to yourself, “What the hell do any of the aforementioned essays have to do with trying to peel away the meaning of reality, or why people answer questions, or why we sometimes apply more weight to public opinion rather than private knowledge?” you will just have to read the book. While I still think Sex, Drugs, And Cocoa Puffs is his best book, Eating The Dinosaur shows that Klosterman is still in his prime and is showing no signs of falling out of it anytime soon. At his best (like with the aforementioned NFL essay), Klosterman is like a succinct and more humorous conglomeration of Malcolm Gladwell and David Foster Wallace.

This is one of the best non-fiction books of the ’00′s.

John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer” opens with a flowing description of alcohol and its effect on those whose Sunday mornings are particularly trying because of it:

“It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night.’ You might have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church, heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the vesitarium, heard it from the golf links and the tennis courts, heard it from the wildlife preserve where the leader of the Audubon group was suffering from a terrible hangover. ‘I drank too much,’ said Donald Westerhazy. ‘We all drank too much,’ said Lucinda Merrill. ‘It must have been the wine,’ said Helen Westerhazy. ‘I drank too much of that claret.’”^[1]

This one paragraph—this one innocent paragraph describing something we have all most likely been subject to—sets up the short story perfectly. Because not even a mere paragraph later, the story’s main character, Neddy Merrill, has decided in his drunken haze to swim to his house via all of the swimming pools that lie in between where he is currently at, the Westerhazy’s, and his home roughly eight miles away. He even decides to name this route he is about to follow the Lucinda River, named for his wife.

After planning for the best path to take (“The only maps and charts he had to go by were remembered or imaginary but these were clear enough. First there were the Grahams, the Hammers, the Lears, the Howlands, and the Crosscups [...]“), Neddy embarks on his new man-made journey back to his house. When he arrives at some pools there is a party in full swing, whereas other pools are either empty or are in poor condition because the homeowners have moved away. As the story progresses Neddy finds that the weather has gotten colder, that he has become weaker to the point of having trouble just getting out of the last few pools, and that the trees have lost their leaves. When Neddy finally arrives at his house he finds that it is empty and has been sold.

While “The Swimmer” is founded firmly in surrealism (even Mickey Mantle in his drunken prime on a summer day would have made it to his home eight miles away before Autumn set in) it is a surrealism that is identifiable. You may not have yet met someone like Neddy Merrill—a man who overindulges in alcohol, holds social rank as an important virtue, and has had an affair with a younger woman—but it is very easy to picture him as a real person if only in segments. For instance, Neddy arrives at the Biswanger’s house (the third to last pool on his route) while a party is in full swing and he walks over to the bar, completely unaware of the gravity of Grace Biswanger calling him a gate crasher as well as being unable to decipher why the bartender at this party gives him condescending glares. It is quite simple to think of this scene and assimilate it to someone we know, or to a friend or relative of a friend.

As for the story in a contextual whole, is the life of Neddy Merrill ultimately one worth reading about? Is there any redemption to his story? What is the message of the story? At nine pages in length, “The Swimmer” primarily exists as a story that provides a shard of a man’s life. And while there is no redemption here per se, “The Swimmer” acts a well-crafted metaphor and cautionary tale about how quickly one’s life can be derailed by their own doing.

We are not given the full background of Neddy’s life leading up to the days of his “swimming” odyssey (as opposed to, say, how Willy Loman is rendered for us) but the story is nonetheless tragic in its short portrayal of a man who is completely unaware of the insulated world he has created around him. He mentions his daughters but he never speaks to them in the story. He is completely unaware that at least two different people have told him that they will not loan him any money as soon as they see him.

“The Swimmer” is an excellent foray into one of the greatest faults that can plague and consume anyone—fooling yourself into a series of bad choices and not even being consciously aware that everything has fallen apart around you.

[1] For what it’s worth, this opening passage reminded me immediately of the lines in “Sunday Morning” by The Velvet Underground that go “Sunday morning/And I’m falling/I’ve got a feeling I don’t want to know.”

Everything That Rises Must Converge is a collection of nine short stories that Flannery O’Connor wrote before she died in 1964 and was released posthumously a year later. In some way each story deals with themes of race, religion, and morality amongst tragically flawed characters inside of combustible settings. “The Lame Shall Enter First” is a short story (alongside two others in the collection) that ends with a character being killed.  It is also a story that best exemplifies the way in which O’Connor forces an uneasiness on the reader: we know that everything is going to end very badly early on, while one of the main characters—the father—is absolutely clueless as to all the negative warning signs.

The story follows a father, Sheppard, and his son Norton.  Sheppard’s official title is City Recreational Director, but on Saturdays he works pro bono as a counselor at a reformatory.  His wife recently passed away.

At the reformatory he meets a club-footed teenage black boy named Rufus Johnson.  Sheppard is taken back by Rufus’ intelligence and personal history, which includes physical abuse at the hands of his grandfather.  And so Sheppard—a man who not only has not gotten over the death of his wife, but who also has a young son who has never experienced any of the hardships that Rufus has been through (“Do you have any idea what it means to share?” he asks his only son)—not only gives Rufus a key to their house to come and go as he pleases, but also tries at every turn to lavish praise and education on Rufus over Norton.

However, it turns out that Rufus is an extremely bad kid.  While he and Norton are home alone he bosses Norton around with relish, and eventually goes through Norton’s mother’s things (clothes, a comb, a brush) even as Norton yells at him not to.  From here, the story becomes a bit predictable in terms of how it logically unfolds (Sheppard continues to want to help Rufus while pushing Norton away, Rufus refuses the special shoe Sheppard wants to buy for him, Rufus continues to get in trouble with the police but Sheppard always vouches for him) but O’Connor was a master architect of constructing stories that seemed to follow a certain blueprint, only to have scenes of tragic gravity arise unexpectedly as if to make you forget to look for a whiff of foreshadowing.

For example, the way that O’Connor writes into the story that Norton has a telescope in the attic of the home.  So that when Sheppard takes Rufus upstairs and shows him the instrument and uses it as a means to try to convey to Rufus that we’re living in the space age now and that anything is possible; that this instrument—the telescope—is a physical manifestation of man’s triumph over his existence and that you, Rufus, should see this as a metaphor for how to overcome your own situation because, well, you are so smart and can do anything…  This, combined with Rufus’ caustic appeasement of Norton’s naïveté towards space, heaven, and his mother’s death—

“When I’m dead will I go to hell or where she is?” Norton asked.
“Right now you’d go where she is,” Johnson said, “but if you live long enough, you’ll go to hell.”

—lead to Norton’s tragic decision at the end of the story, which heartbreakingly coincides almost exactly with Sheppard’s moment of clarity in which he finally realizes his unconditional love for his son.

“The Lame Shall Enter First” is most certainly not an uplifting story.  But as a vehicle in which to explore religion, race, and the desire to selfishly help others in the supposed name of unselfishness, it is an astonishingly lucid portrait.  To some, this may not be a good thing but as far as short fiction writing goes you would be hard-pressed to find fault in this exploration.

Before I listened to the Slate Audio Book Club’s critique of “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” a few weeks back, the only thing I knew about Flannery O’Connor was that Jacob was reading All That Rises Must Converge while John Locke was being thrown out the window by his father in the two-part finale of the last season of Lost. Truth be told, I just assumed that, with a name like Flannery O’Connor, that O’Connor was, like James Joyce, an Irish writer. Instead, O’Connor was a woman who lived in the Deep South who wrote two novels and thirty two short stories that primarily revolved around grotesque characters that projected O’Connor’s own battles with her faith, and asked the reader to deal with situations that were fraught with moral and ethical imbalances. Basically, I could not have been more wrong in my assumption of who the writer was.

“A Good Man Is Hard To Find” is the first short story of the collection that bears its eponymous name. It is about a family that goes on a road trip from their home in Georgia to Florida for a vacation. The family consists of the grandmother (whose name is never mentioned), her son Bailey and his wife (who is also not named), and their kids–John Wesley, June Star, and a newborn baby (again, not named). The grandmother shows Bailey a story in the paper about a killer named The Misfit who has escaped from a federal prison in Florida; this, combined with the fact that she grew up in east Tennessee, the grandmother tries to convince the family to go there instead of Florida but her lobbying falls on deaf ears and the family departs south. Along the way they stop at The Tower for lunch and the grandmother winds up talking to the proprietor, Red Sammy, and they both lament about how nowadays there are no good men around (Red Sammy tells the story of how he was recently ripped off by some young men that he thought he could trust).

When the family is back on the road the grandmother asks Bailey if he would pull off course for a quick spell so that she could look at an old plantation house that she loved to see when she was younger. She is able to get the kids to go for it as well by saying that the house has all sorts of treasures stored away inside of it. On their way to this house they get into an accident and are ultimately found by The Misfit and his two accomplices. The two other men first kill Bailey and John Wesley, then the mother, June Star, and the baby by walking them into a nearby forest and shooting them. The grandmother and The Misfit talk for a little while before he kills her.

That is the nutshell version of the story but it is so much more complex, especially with regards to the grandmother. For one thing, it is very subtly implied that she may have been senile and that she is ultimately the reason why they were all killed. The obvious example of this is that in the aftermath of the accident she realizes that the plantation house that she had Bailey drive around and look for was actually in Tennessee and nowhere near where they were. But during the first reading of the story you could chalk that up to the shock of the crash itself–maybe she is still coming around and this is just the first thing comes across her mind as she attempts re-align herself. But tucked away and subtly dropped in on the second page of the story are the following lines between the grandmother and the kids:

The fact that June Star tells the grandmother that her hair is naturally curly has a weight to it that is really easy to overlook on first read. The same goes for how June Star says the grandmother “wouldn’t stay home for a million bucks” and how she’d be “afraid she’d miss something” if she was not with the family. O’Connor very subtly renders the grandmother as someone who is both bossy and forgetful, an extremely dangerous combination that foreshadows the fate of the family.

Another facet of the grandmother is her antiquated worldview, the stereotypical Deep South outlook. Because the grandmother is really the only member of the family who speaks throughout the story, she is the only person with whom we are allowed any insight into. So that when she is confronted by The Misfit all of her thoughts and reasonings are so vapid and pointless that everything leading up to her murder is tragic and frightening.

The Misfit and his two accomplices, Hiram and Bobby Lee, are nearby and see the accident occur when the family is on its way to the plantation house (the one that doesn’t exist where they are at). The grandmother recognizes The Misfit from his picture in the paper. His two accomplices take Bailey and John Wesley into the woods and kill them, followed by inducing the same fate on the mother, June Star, and the baby. During this whole time the grandmother and The Misfit talk and she pleas to him that he is good man and that he shouldn’t be doing this (“I know you’re a good man. You don’t look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people!”) and that he should find Jesus. The Misfit calmly and coldly replies to everything she has to say, and some of his replies are simply chilling and haunting. For example: when the grandmother tells him that she will give him all the money she has, he says,

“Lady, there never was a body that gave the undertaker a tip.”

When she implores him to pray to Jesus and spare her life, he gives her this speech [the misspellings are verbatim],

“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead and He shouldn’t have done it. He thown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can–by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness.”

By this point in the story, The Misfit is wearing Bailey’s shirt–it being removed from him before he was killed. As the two continue to talk about Jesus raising the dead, the grandmother suddenly says, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” and reaches out and touches his shoulder. The Misfit springs back (“as if bitten by a snake”) at her touch and shoots her three times. This is where I think the grandmother’s senility comes full circle as I interpreted this scene as being that she thought she was looking at Bailey–completely forgetting who was wearing the shirt.

The story ends with the following exchange between the three criminals:

“‘She was a talker, wasn’t she?’ Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel.
‘She would of been a good woman,’ The Misfit said, ‘if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.’
‘Some fun!’ Bobby Lee said.
‘Shut up, Bobby Lee,’ The Misfit said. ‘It’s no real pleasure in life.’”

“A Good Man Is Hard To Find” is the short story that put Flannery O’Connor on the literary map. It is dark, it is tragic, and, like a lot of her other works, revolves around the struggle to uphold faith in a chaotic world in which causeless murder occurs, and remorseless con men prey on people.

I found this story to be thoroughly excellent, tragic and dark story and all. This should be required reading at the high school level if for no other reason than to illustrate that a deeply complex and chilling story can be written in under twenty five pages.