“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.
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.
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.
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…
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…
Never mind how I managed to have this on the shelf in the first place, upon learning of its significance to Susan Orleans The White Hotel immediately jumped rank and became The Next Read.
It was not a contentious promotion. I had long been intrigued by the artwork that adorned the pages inside the front cover:
To Susan Orleans, veritable author of The Orchid Thief, The White Hotel is one of 40 books that changed her world.
To me, veritable scribe of hope and vengeance, The White Hotel is one of the better books I’ve read in a while.
I’m not done with it yet and am not holding out much hope for it to change my world. No worries, however. Books are personal treasures and like good drugs, do different things for different people at different times.
But at least for now, I am absolutely enjoying the hell out of The White Hotel. Thanks probably to low expectations and ignorance. I spread these pages knowing nothing of D.M. Thomas nor the concerns of his novel in question, other than that which could be gleamed from the picture above. I have since been surprised, humored, intrigued, entertained and a myriad of emotions I hope we all occasionally encounter upon interacting with a work.
Do yourself a favor, read this book. Visit Mr. Thomas’s website and blog. Do your very best to track down the delightful paperback that I found:
Haha!
These book thingies are fun!!
“Titans of the information age walk around comparing the size of their predictions.”
The titular phrase Bobo has not caught on in the cultural lexicon as has hippie, yuppie, hipster, tween, millennial, etc, etc, et al.
It’s too bad, but understandable. Bobo is an abbreviated conflation of Bourgeois Bohemian and has the linguistic resonance of an Icelandic volcano. Though written way back in 2000 by David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise identifies a crucial element of our modern culture that is so pervasive it seems odd not to refer to it chidingly as often as we do hippies, yuppies, hipsters, etc. If anything, this book is more relevant and timely now than when it was written 10 years ago since the Bobo element has certainly reached its hegemonic stride.
Bobos are the educated, ruling class. They are a polymorphous, ill-definable demographic, but to get an initial grasp of this ilk, imagine an entity somewhere between Steve Jobs and your friend who wears a water-proof, reversible North Face fleece vest but never hikes, camps, bivouacs, or even spends much time outdoors, therefore successfully executing Rule #2 of the Bobo Code of Financial Correctness: “It is perfectly acceptable to spend lots of money on anything that is of ‘professional quality,’ even if it has nothing to do with your profession.”
Bobos are an element of our contemporary population that we can all probably identify in a vague way, but David Brooks has observed, reported, investigated, inquired, examined, and lionized the Bobo caste. Prior to reading this, the Bobos were merely an anomaly, mere coincidences and unaccountable convergences. It took this book to properly frame and explain a key segment of modern population that was until this reading, unnamed.
So who the hell are Bobos?
Read the book, you lazy slob.
Bobos are those who embody both the social liberalism of bohemians and the economic/political conservatism of the bourgeois. But unfortunately “Gone are the sixties-era things that were fun and of interest to teenagers, like Free Love, and retained are all the things that might be of interest to middle-aged hypochondriacs, like whole grains.”
Bobos are wholesomely ambitious. They are temperate and responsible. They are bureaucratic and utilitarian. They value organization, edification, purpose and connoisseurship. They are educated. They are affluent. They are Charlie Rose and David Geffen and Ken Burns and Al Gore and George W. Bush. They are NPR, Starbucks, Anthropologie, REI, Gap, Restoration Hardware, Weekly Standard, New Yorker, and Barnes & Noble.
Bobos know that “the best kind of money is incidental money. It’s the kind of money you just happen to earn while you are pursuing your creative vision.” And to be a Bobo, “not only do you have to show some income results; you have to perform a series of feints to show how little your worldly success means to you.”
Despite this demographics’ significance and impact on our lives, why after 10 years has “Bobo” not caught on?
Perhaps the name is simply too clunky.
Perhaps they are too big and too diverse of a group. We tend to obsess over outliers and homogenous groups who can be easily defined and therefore easily persecuted and/or praised.
Perhaps they are too moderate. In a way that the hippies and evangelicals and other radical groups can be lambasted and accused of committing deviant and unwelcome behavior, the Bobos are a pretty boring group. They can’t really be accused of being good or bad.
They just are. Dangerously innocuous in a way.
I propose that we revive the term Bobo as a slur. Or come up with a better one to slander this vile group. It has been during the Bobo rule that, “The rewards for intellectual capital have increased while the rewards for physical capital have not.” Except for athletes I suppose?
And it was the old order that asked, “Who are you?” But now the new (Bobo) order asks, “What do you do?”
They used to want our labor. But the Bobos want our soul.
Quick. Everyone run out and read this book. Right now.
But good luck. Because I was at a Books, Inc. recently (“The West’s Oldest Independent Bookstore”) and they did not have it.
Which is bullshit.
The one on Haight Street no less. (Books, Inc.: may your souls be forever tormented by the violent retribution of the peyote-clenching two-thumbed fist).
Why are bookstores going out of business?
Because they suck. They are not selling anything anyone wants to buy.
I don’t care how good your customer service is if you’re not selling anything I want.
“The external focus of Books Inc. is now and always has been customer service. The internal objective is to train the next generation of booksellers.”
You might as well train the next generation of elevator operators.
So here I am, I’ve already read the damned book, for free, from the public library, and actually liked it so much that I wanted to buy it, but couldn’t!
Can you believe that? I wanted to part with my hard, hard, hard-earned money for a bunch of ink and paper. A compendium of mere thoughts. Made up shit. Cash in exchange for thoughts from a stranger? Ridiculous, right?
But I couldn’t.
Yet the building of socialism had it. For free. Weeks earlier.
No amount of customer service is going to change or fix that.
FUCK customer service. I loath the phrase.
But seriously, go read Reality Hunger. I don’t think I have ever, ever finished a book and immediately turned back to the first page to begin reading again.
Until this book.
But you may not be as concerned with its contents as much as I so I will prepare you.
It is a manifesto.
Cool word, right?
I know. I think so too.
You want to say it slow.
Manifesto.
Make it seem mysterious and intimidating.
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto is a work concerned with the modern relevance of books, stories, and the written word. It is a stirring call to arms, a refreshing and inspiring evaluation of contemporary storytelling and myth and the status of novels. It is about books. It is about art. It is about rap. It is about collage and graffiti and lying and stealing and history and reality television and making shit up and the value that all of it has on our culture.
Here’s the rub:
“An artistic movement, albeit an organic and as-yet-unstated one, is forming. What are its key components? A deliberate unartiness: “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional. Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity: artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity, self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography; a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real.”
For me, Reality Hunger read like the best of dreams. In an intellectual way. Not a sexual way.
But then again, I’ve always found intellectualism quite sexy.
Have you seen my head mast? I’m quite sophisticated.
But all joking aside, go read David Shields’ previous book, The Thing About Life is That One Day You’ll Be Dead.
Cause you will. I’ve seen it happen.
And to recoup, aren’t public libraries rad?
Can you keep it simple?
Can you let the snare crack?
Sophomore efforts are always interesting to read. The consumption of such is inevitably unfair as consumers compare it to the Freshman offering. It is an unavoidable and completely understandable circumstance. And so it was with my reading of Joshua Ferris’s second novel. If you have not read the first, Then We Came to the End, you should. It’s good. So good that its excellence and enjoyment was the only reason I read The Unnamed.
The inside flap of the hardcover of The Unnamed tells us all we need to know about the protagonist and plot of The Unnamed:
“He loves his wife, his family, his work, his home.
“And then one day he stands up and walks out. And keeps walking.”
‘Oh, one of those books’…my wife said to me when I read the synopsis to her. I agreed. One of those books indeed. I am a newlywed whose last novels read have been Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterly’s Lover. I expected the coincidental and not entirely welcome themes of marital crisis and infidelity to continue.
The Unnamed is not one of those books however.
It is reminiscent of Then We Came to the End with its elements of workplace and departs into the realm of domesticity and marriage as well. But it is the thirdly prevalent elements of science fiction and mystery that lend it its true character. Because The Unnamed is not ‘one of those books.’ You should read it yourself to determine exactly what kind of book it is, but I will tell you that it is well written in a plain, straightforward style that reminded me of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. It is moody and brooding and fractured and intriguing.
So Joshua Ferris is a fine writer and I eagerly await the Junior and Senior and post-Graduate publications.
But what bothers me about this book, and most books, and the publishing industry in general is the mediocre and thoughtless writing slapped on such finely crafted works by the publishers.
If you recall, “And then one day he stands up and walks out. And keeps walking.”
And as I recall, having actually read this book, such action does not take place until 2/3, 3/4s into the story. Such copy is greatly disappointing, reckless, ill-advised, and inappropriate.
Ferris is lucky enough to be such an accomplished writer that the revelation of plot points does not hinder the enjoyment of his work.
But seriously…
I am a dog person.
As mentioned in my review of Marley & Me, being a dog person and a book person, I am methodically reading every book on the topic.
Ted Kerasote’s Merle’s Door was the next dog book that managed to bark loud enough for me to pet it. There’s more to this metaphor. Much as I like the smell of books, I too enjoy the sweet, nutty aroma of my pooch.
Near the end of Merle’s Door, Kerasote quotes philosopher Raymond Gaita: “ ‘we do not write biographies of animals’ because they do not have ‘distinctive identities’ and cannot make or fail ‘to make something of their lives.’ Consequently, they are unable to find in their lives a ‘reason for joy and gratitude.’”
Kerasote mentions this of course to contradict it, which he has been doing, quite entertainingly, for 341 pages. Because Merle’s Door stands as a great biography. Of a dog.
Though filled with cutting-edge canine research and expertise and charming doggy anecdotes, Merle’s Door focuses on the inherently symbiotic dog-human relationship that rebukes the philosophy of popular television personalities and dog trainers who preach an entirely unilateral mandate of “pack leader” dominance over dogs.
Guilty of his own innocent anthropomorphizing, Kerasote’s books stands as a testament to the enormously positive condition of the human-canine relationship at a time when such companionship has been perverted by an ever-changing world that is dominated by man’s technology over the natural world order.
And it stands as a testament to the sheer power, eloquence, and persuasion that can be achieved by writing simply and passionately about what one observes, learns, and feels.