Jonathan Franzen. Perhaps you have heard of him.

More importantly, hopefully you have read the various words he has strung together. Perhaps you recall his Oprah Book Club snub for the very good “The Corrections.” Perhaps you are aware of his new book, “Freedom,” and the glowing praise it has received.

A masterpiece of American fiction???

Well, certain females have taken issue with such gratuitous and potentially sexist adulation.

Jennifer Weiner, in particular, put out a call for non-Franzen novels that deal with similarly Franzen themes of family, identity, and love. I assume she is looking for novels written by the non-Franzen gender as well.

So Authwhore humbly endorses Sophie Dahl’s Playing With The Grown-Ups.

On the other end of the spectrum is of course Marisha Pessl. Remember that atrocity?

Jodi Picoult too has been implicated in this controversy. I am loose, eager, and easy when it comes to reading, so get ready for my assessment of Picoult’s contribution in this matter.

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“Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.” – George Orwell

Good thing books won’t be around much longer.

What a relief.

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This is the very best of books.

Hilarious. Superbly written. Short.

As I did with Millhauser’s Martin Dressler, I will not needlessly carry on. It is the mark of a poor work that so much need be said about it. I shall not gild the lily.

But Dangerous Laughter is damn fine. Damn fine.

The stories “Cat ‘N’ Mouse” and “Here at the Historical Society” are funnier than anything written by David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, Augusten Burroughs, etc, etc, et al.

(I mean, who are the “funny” writers these days? Carl Hiassen? George Saunders? Chuck Klosterman?

Steven Millhauser is not only funnier. He’s better.)

In the titular story, youth engage in secretive drug-esque “laughter parties.” They soon experiment with crying.

In “Here at the Historical Society,” said members defend their recent exhibits detailing the “New Past,” i.e. the minutiae pertaining to the immediate just now.

In “A Change in Fashion,” woman’s fashion is parodied to the point of featuring a 3-story dress.

Are you not entertained?

Steven Millhauser’s appeal lays in his style. His diction is plain and straightforward. He is a master of the subtle. His language is descriptive and “literary” but in a simple manner that hints at humanity’s self-absorption and importance. Everything is relayed in the most thoughtful, perfect manner. Stories retain elements of the surreal and otherworldly, the quirky and impossible even, but the language is straightforward and respectful, never revealing the impossibility and joy of, well, life itself I suppose.

In an era where I feel as if each book I read may be the last printed with ink and bound in glue, Steven Millhauser is refreshing. His prose is classic yet modern. Straightforward and matter of fact. It is confident and severe but playful and entertaining. Millhauser is a reminder that mere words (thoughts) can be quite entertaining and incisive. There are no burdensome devices or unnecessary attention-getters. It is all about the language with Millhauser. Whether he is writing about a cartoon cat and mouse or an ambitious young man, he does so simply and evocatively.

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Despite my initial enthusiasm, I Hotel is not a good book.

Do not read it. It is long. It is boring. It is disappointing. It is safe. It is easy. It is pointless. It has no edge.

2010 ytd, I can only recommend Reality Hunger.

And White Hotel. But that’s from 1981. The ’80s generated a lot of marvelous creations, yours truly being one of the many significant yet underrated entities in question from that special time.

I Hotel is cumbersome, disjointed, schizophrenic, frustratingly sprawling, and lacking in cohesion. There are no compelling protagonists. There is a lot of telling and very little storytelling. It’s just all over the place and entirely overwhelming in the worst of ways. It is a big book of very little, suffering from what must certainly be at this point some kind of Asian-American authorial cliche to engage in sprawling multi-generational sagas.

Acknowledging this irrefutable mediocrity, Yamashita apologizes in the Afterword: “Thus the structure I chose for the book is based on such multiple perspectives, divided into ten novellas or ten “hotels.” Multiple novellas allowed me to tell parallel stories, to experiment with various resonant narrative voices, and to honor the complex architecture of a time, a movement, a hotel, and its people.”

First of all: hogwash. Borrring! Obnoxious MFA semantic posturing. You should honor the complex architecture of your novel!

Second of all: The afterword is better written than the novel.

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Finally.

It takes a publication more mainstream than Authwhore to make such things official, but whatever. The novella is back. According to this beast and the Daily Beast. And flavorpill.

It’s about time the publishing industry and the other 7 readers in the country catch up to Authwhore’s sophisticated taste. I like novellas because I have a short attention span. I’m easily bored. Short story collections are always favored, but novellas are nice too. Do yourself a favor and indulge in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Memories of My Melancholy Whores.” 128 pages. You’re in, you’re out. And it’s just not a good title unless there’s a whore in it…

Books. Novels. Such boring, stodgy connotations they have. Novella is smooth and sexy. But most importantly short. With all the good elements of novels without any of the bad components of poetry.

flavorpill’s list of classic novellas should get us started…

Man, the more I think about it, the more I hate long books. And long movies, long meetings, long lines, and long hair.

Cut your hair you hippies!

Parse your words you writers!!

My sensibilities would be truly satisfied if we can get some decent works published in mass market. There’s a few out there, but not enough. I love mass market paperbacks. I can go and do things with a mass market that would ruin a Nookindle.

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Thanks, February 2008, for publishing the funniest thing I’ve read all year. From Steven Millhauser’s short story “Cat ‘N’ Mouse” in Dangerous Laughter:

“The mouse is sitting in his chair with his feet on the hassock and his open book facedown on his lap. A mood of melancholy has invaded him, as if the brown tones of his room had seeped into his brain. He feels stale and out of sorts: he moves within the narrow compass of his mind, utterly devoid of fresh ideas. Is he perhaps too much alone? He thinks of the cat and wonders whether there is some dim and distant possibility of a connection, perhaps a companionship. Is it possible that they might become friends? Perhaps he could teach the cat to appreciate the things of the mind, and learn from the cat to enjoy life’s simpler pleasures. Perhaps the cat, too, feels an occasional sting of loneliness. Haven’t they much in common, after all? Both are bachelors, indoor sorts, who enjoy the comforts of a cozy domesticity; both are secretive ; both take pleasure in plots and schemes. The more the mouse pursues this line of thought, the more it seems to him that the cat is a large, soft mouse. He imagines the cat with mouse ears and gentle mouse paws, wearing a white bib, sitting across from him at the kitchen table, lifting to his mouth a fork at the end of which is a piece of cheese.”

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The inevitable satire to the insanely successful Eat, Pray, Love.

It is of similar pseudo-lit as Augusten Burroughs or Tucker Max. Casual, metaphor-laden writing saved only by occasionally humorous anecdotes and imagery. It’s not a complete waste of time as it is short. Take it to the beach or take it on a plane and finish it there.

And leave it there.

Hollywood will inevitably turn Drink, Play, F@#k into a vehicle for Steve Carrell or Vince Vaughn or Paul Rudd.

When will they adapt Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores?

Casting ideas? I’m thinking Peter O’Toole…

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As a matter of principle, I avoid hotels, in any form, at all costs. But I Hotel, like the ones in Vegas, I just couldn’t seem to resist.

The publishers refer to Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel as “This dazzling, multi-voiced fusion of fiction, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy [that] spins an epic tale…”

On other matters of principle, I am always cautious when the word “epic” gets thrown around like blame after an oil spill. But flipping through its pages, I Hotel does appear to have graphic and stylistic elements in the realm of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, House of Leaves, and VAS.

Which makes me excited. It’s the future of literary storytelling. Language and ideas still dominate, but there is no reason why the form cannot evolve to be more nuanced, interesting, and visual. Novelists have been keeping too many tools in the toolbox for too long.

I’m going to just come out and say it: I am pro e-reader. I’d love to read I Hotel on one. Because the only negative thing about the experience thus far has been holding the damn book up. Because despite its modernist underpinnings, I Hotel is a veritable work in the classic sense. It is not for the easily distracted, weak, or dumb. The paperback I borrowed is over 600 pages.

And isn’t the title clever? Like iPod or MymaxiPad.

The prose, too, is fine. Nibble on this, from page 2:

“Who are we to know that our black daddy Martin with a dream and our little white father Bobby will take bullets to their brains? By the end of the year, we are monkey orphans let loose, raising havoc; no daddies to pull the stops, temper the member; got those wired tails swinging from every rafter, we are free at last, brother, free at last.”

I particularly like “black daddy Martin with a dream,” and “temper the member.”

And here’s some of that philosophy they were talking about earlier:

“There exists an unscientific attitude toward language that results in doctrinal disagreements. We must understand that problems are formulated in words, and that a change in the attitude toward language can help us become understanding listeners.”

She need not continue the obvious: “and therefore fix our fucking problems!”

I’m really looking forward to this one…

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