Book Review: & Sons by David Gilbert

I have finally put the pieces together.  You see, for years I have forced myself to read long, rambling, pointless novels that I was not enjoying simply because the literary establishment hailed the writer as the latest and greatest.  All along I figured something must be wrong with me - am I lacking literary sophistication? do I just not get it?  But now I have put together the pieces of this puzzle, and am glad to announce what picture it forms.

Let's take David Gilbert's & Sons (yes, the ampersand is part of the title, which makes life difficult in this computer age - Amazon has it listed as "And Sons" and you can't tweet #&sons but must spell it out as #andsons - but I digress) along with two similar writers, Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon. You probably remember Franzen from his dispute with Oprah when he spat on her selection of his 2001 novel, The Corrections, for her book club; and perhaps you saw the film version of Chabon's Wonder Boys.

These three have much in common: rugged yet soft good looks (Chabon's crystal blue eyes account for 72% of his book sales, and that's A REAL STATISTIC), a high literary bent, and long, rambling works with frustratingly inconclusive and meaningless endings.  (Their latest novels run an average of 554 pages.)  And they win prizes.  Franzen, for example, has collected the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and even a coveted spot in Oprah's revamped book club (they made up a decade after their initial spat).  I read Franzen's Freedom when it was the flavor of the month, Chabon's Wonder Boys a few years ago, and recently Gilbert's & Sons.

In all three cases, I suffered through their works like I would a trip to renew my license - tedious, barren, yet unavoidable.  Several times I tried to read other works by these modern masters (Time magazine labelled Franzen the "Great American Novelist") but could not stand more than 50 or 100 pages before giving up to read something more interesting, like the new issue of Wired or the ad copy on the back of the store brand granola bars.

The characters in these novels all have horrible relationships with everyone around them, especially family, and the plot just plods along without the characters learning or changing or even recognizing their self-defeating foibles.  Is that their point, then?  That humans are doomed to egotistical futility?  Seems so.  Why, then, are these writers so highly acclaimed?

That's what Gilbert's work helped me decipher.  You see, he and the others are superb wordsmiths - they can bang out sentence upon paragraph upon chapter of mellifluous prose.  It really is high-flying poetic writing.  But they are like potters who turn massive sculptures that, though technically exquisite, are repugnant and useless.  & Sons, for example, culminates with the narrator shoving the object of his jealousy in front of a bus because, if he cannot be an insider in the family he idolizes (foolishly), then he will cut off its flowering branch so the whole tree withers.  Really.  That's how it ends.  Oh, and the central character dies of old age without reconciling with any of the people he's hurt.  Now, modern fiction need not moralize or teach Sunday school lessons, but this work lacks the scope of tragedy, comedy, or drama - it just slouches from boring event to boring event until there is no story left to tell.

I am now free.  I no longer need force myself to read these high literary works which garner prize and praise for their beautiful prose when they leave the reader feeling drained of soul rather than filled.  Don't get me wrong: I don't yearn for happy endings and neat tyings-up á la Dickens or Irving; I simply want to enjoy reading fiction, even with a troubled intellectual pleasure.  Is that too much to ask?

Book Review: Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea

The first recommendation for this book is its publisher: McSweeney's.  No other publishing house today - or in any time - is so serious about literature, so quirky, so willing to invest in promising young authors, and so darned successful at doing so.  Dave Eggers is their flagship writer, and their periodicals - the Quarterly Concern and The Believer - define innovation in both writing and design. And if you enjoy laughing so uncontrollably that chocolate milk shoots out of your nose even though you're not drinking chocolate milk, you must check out their Internet Tendency.

Michelle Tea's Mermaid in Chelsea Creek is perfect for McSweeney's because it defies categorization.  Much like Neil Gaiman's last book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Mermaid has all the trappings of a young adult title but is far more disturbing than what we'd want our young ones reading (at least I think, but in these days of Twilight and such, maybe that red line has shifted as well).  We have a young girl as the main character, an ordinary girl who discovers that she actually comes from a secret lineage of magical beings - a pretty common theme from Harry Potter to, um, other stuff like that.

However, the story owes a much larger debt to Neil Gaiman, and through him, to Diana Wynne Jones - indeed, even the main character's name, Sophie, comes straight from Howl's Moving Castle.

Stranger, though, was when I jumped to Michelle Tea's wikipedia page to learn a little more about the author.  At first I thought, oh, this must be someone else with the same name because this person "toured with the Sex Worker's Art Show" and "is the co-writer of the weekly astrology column Double Team Psychic Dream."  Couldn't possibly be the author of this delightful YA novel, however disturbing it may be at times.  But it is the same person.  Oh.  Interesting.

On an unrelated note, my one gripe with this book - surprising given the publisher's high standards for design - is the horrendous quality of the illustrations.  They appear to have been drawn by someone who simply cannot draw - each depiction of Sophie looks rather different from the rest, and his depictions of pigeons are so strained you can see the sweat drips on the page.  Illustrator Jason Polan's wikipedia page brags that he has been published in The New Yorker, but that was a single cartoon back in 2006 - something I'm sure his mother was quite proud of, but he's no James Thurber, and that's saying an awful lot.

But back to the book.  Mermaid is best suited for adults like you and I who now and then need to put aside Syria and global warming and our tribulations at work and home and indulge in a sweeping, gripping fantasy.  It veers off course unexpectedly and ends up galaxies away from where it seemed to be headed.  And it starts right on page one.  Sophie and her quasi-friend Ella are playing the pass-out game, where they take turns helping each other asphyxiate into unconsciousness.  While buzzing back to the world, Sophie sees a mermaid in the horribly polluted creek, and then is struck by a strange desire:

Suddenly, Sophie craved salt.  In the dry cave of her mouth, down her throat, which felt strange and thick, into her tumbling tummy, she craved a bag of pretzels, the rocky salt collected at the bottom, tipped straight back into her mouth - the reward, she thought, for polishing off the snack. ... Faster than her best friend could cry out in disgust, Sophie tugged her still-shimmering body to the edge of the water and plunged her face into it, mouth open, inhaling the dirty creek into her, the perfect, necessary salt of it obliterating the darker flavors of things she'd rather not think about.  The sharpest taste, salt; she felt it travel through her like a delicious knife, the shock of it cutting through her, making her want more more more.  She sucked at the creek hungrily, like a wild animal digging into its kill ... 

So right on the first few pages we have several things we wouldn't want our daughters doing, but written in the most captivating manner imaginable.  And that's the core of this book - the story truly captures your imagination and leaves you hungering for more; like Sophia and her salt craving, you'll find yourself tipping back the pretzel bag to enjoy the last, sharply stinging bits of this book.  Fortunately, Tea has promised this to be the first in a trilogy, so we have those tangy treats to look forward to.

Book Review: Ungifted by Scott Barry Kaufman

While I grew up loving reading, not until I hit my late teens did I become a reader, the sort of creature who prefers the company of books to the company of people.  At the time, I felt such a fierce devotion to books as whole, contained works of art, that I could never skip sections or abandon even the driest read.

But now I have no such trouble - indeed, I often check books out of the library with no intention of finishing them, of just reading the first few chapters (The Signal and the Noise, anyone?).

And that's how I recommend you read Scott Barry Kaufman's important new book, Ungifted.  In sections.  Or maybe just the first few chapters.  Though you may want, like I did, to wade all the way through its deepest waters.

Early on, at the end of the first chapter, he develops and lays out his central premise: "Greatness is not born, but takes time to develop, and there are many paths to greatness."  Emphasizing that educational labels can not only influence but derail children's self-concept and thereby shape their destiny, Kaufman argues against simplistic definitions of intelligence that draw, in our president's phrasing, a red line separating the gifted children from the ungifted - that by calling a select few (less than ten percent at my school) gifted, you define the other ninety percent as not gifted.

The book draws upon and is interwoven with Kaufman's own experience as a bright young man who did not perform well on his IQ test and ended up in the euphemistically named Resource Room across the hall from the kids he felt a strong and justified affinity for, the gifted students.  And, as a teacher of gifted students myself, I sympathize with Kaufman's negative opinion of the gifted label: I start each year by explaining to my gifted group and their classmates that every one of them has many gifts, but we only have tests for certain types of reading, mathematical, and creative abilities.

Here's where you get to chapter skipping, though, if you'd like.  Remember how Gore lost popularity points because he was, as journalists pegged him, a policy wonk?  Well, Kaufman is a neurological psychology wonk.  The bulk of the book is clogged with dense research reporting, as such:

Without activation of the lateral prefrontal cortex, the spontaneous generation of ideas can bypass executive control and flow directly through the anterior cingulate pathway into the motor system to produce a creative response.  According to the researchers, "deactivation [of the lateral prefrontal cortex] may have allowed a defocused, free-floating attention that permits spontaneous unplanned associations and sudden insights.

Right.  Of course.  And these two heavyweight sentences are about, of all things, how jazz improvisation works.  So maybe check out after chapter four, if your pulse does not quicken at phrases such as "reduced latent inhibition" and "lateralization of brain functions."

But don't let the headiness of the book detract from the brilliance of Kaufman's message: "children who are stamped with an enduring label are being fed a fixed theory of intelligence, which dramatically influences their motivation, how they approach learning, and how they handle setbacks.  Many important skills aren't being developed because we are cultivating erroneous beliefs about how abilities develop."

So, when you read Ungifted, feel free to skim over some of the dense research reporting, but don't skip so much that you miss Kaufman's call to action.  We need to challenge and change our concepts of what constitutes intelligence - make them scientifically based - and start recognizing the gifts in all our children.