The Third Reich
By Roberto Bolano, 2011
It's essentially a warm-up book, in that the best bits (like the weird rhythms of male friendships that can ultimately make the "bad times" indistinguishable from the "good times") all eventually made it into Bolano's later, better books. It's totally understandable that the Bolano translation squad want this older, less polished material out there, but good God, it really is unnecessary stuff if you aren't a grad student. Featuring an obnoxious, role-playing-game obsessive as he goes through a coming-of-age experience way too late in life, Third Reich's only local claim to fame is that it provided this reader as a graphic, painful reminder of how incredibly irritating it is when self-righteous prigs yammer incessantly about their geeky hobbies. Udo Berger--the jackass at the heart of this novel--never stops telling people about the dice and paper war game he's so awesome at, and he never stops believing that the only thing preventing people from caring is an all-encompassing "they just don't get it" If you ever wanted to experience the serious literature version of cringe comedy (without any comedy to lessen the sting), then this one's for you. Otherwise, just knuckle down and start 2666 all over again.
Zone One
By Colson Whitehead, 2011
I came to this one with the expectation level set a bit too high, and that's not fair to Whitehead. However, I still found this book was ultimately a failure, as it's attempts to toss some "ideas" at zombie fiction ended up being no different from the type of commercialism critique that George Romero pulled off in Dawn of the Dead, and Whitehead's seemingly bottomless disdain for action sequences became impossible to stomach. It's totally fine, and maybe even laudable to throw a forearm up in the face of genre's continued advance, but doing so within the confines of a zombie novel? It's absurd, and yet that's exactly what Whitehead does, over and over again, with nearly every scene featuring a battle strip mined of anything approaching excitement or human feeling, with the absolute worst portion being the sequence near the end where its happening to one of the only two characters that Whitehead has built up enough for us to care about. As with almost any genre story, one is so starved for endings that it's hard not to finish reading the thing, but that's more the luck of the field than it is any skill on Whitehead's part. At this point, an Intuitionist sequel no longer seems too much to ask. Please?
Cain
By Jose Saramago, 2011
On paper, Cain sounds like it would be a stunt book, an insubstantial trick--the Old Testament, retold from the point of view of what 2012 calls "snark merchant" and what Adam called Son. But with Saramago at the helm, the experiment takes on heft, and all that serial under-casing stands without a whiff of pretension. More than anything else, it's just funny--not on every page, but consistently enough so that the narrative never flags. Short, but excellent.
Do The Work
By Steven Pressfield, 2011
Complete nonsense, but pleasant nonsense. This is not really a book, it's a hardcover collection of a guy poking you to finish projects and follow your bliss, but in a masochistic, manly way that will appeal to people skeeved out by A Course In Miracles and The Artist's Way. The most interesting thing about is pure speculation of the Faked Moon Landing variety, and that's this: the book is published by something called the Domino Project, which is some sort of Amazon funded enterprise, and if there's one place that would love for more people to churn out nonsense that other hopeful nonsense-churners will buy cheap eBook editions of, it's Amazon. I couldn't prove it (and won't be trying, because that would ruin the fun) but I would be that the primary consumer of shitty first-draft e-published novels by wanna-bes is, hands down, other shitty first-draft novel producing wanna-bes. At least, that better be true. My future children's health insurance is depending on it.
Nobody's Perfect
By Anthony Lane, 2002
Second time all the way through this brick, which consists mostly of Anthony Lane's movie reviews. Tom Spurgeon has tried to convince me that Lane isn't all that great due to the man's feelings toward the Speed films: my apologies, but it'll never work. Nobody writes as sublimely as Lane, with the only exception to that "nobody" being the wonderful Joe McCulloch, who could probably teach me to love I Am Curious Yellow, which would be no mean feat. Alongside Ignatiy Vishnevtsky, Lane is the writer who I most fervently wish I could someday become, if only because theirs are the tastes I find myself most closely sharing, to say nothing of how much more passionately I find their writing.
This time around, I was able to look past the stylistic twists and specificity of the various value judgments a bit and see that one of Lane's most laudable habits is his total unwillingness to permit the personal failings of the artist or author to derail his feelings toward the work itself. It's a challenge that seems to have become far, far too prevalent in discussion today, with critics and artists scanning twitter and facebook constantly to confirm that neither side is getting too out there with their political or social commenting. Lane dispenses with it constantly in this collection, essay after essay, displaying patent refusal to allow the likes of Evelyn Waugh's shitty personal behavior to ruin the sentences he created, and Lane''s able to do it (and this is the hard part, I think) without letting each instance turn into a treatise on why you have to do that. (To be specific, he never even tries: he just tells you he doesn't care, and then he continues forward.) It's a tough act to pull off, to tell us you aren't going to care without forcing us to decide whether we care too, and then lead us back to the work that matters in the first place. The best example is his essay on Harold Bloom; coincidentally, there's no better example of a man whose longtime critical work has been stuck on the rocks of responding to his critics (while criticizing other critics at the same time, like a caged animal laying waste to those who are only trying to help free him) instead of focusing on the work that got him there in the first place.
It's a difficult path to follow, what Lane's doing. He's here to talk about the books, and yet he's got to address the problem that the author faces--in Bloom's case, it's how impossible he finds it to ignore the cries of sexism, amongst others, that land upon his back--without the entire essay becoming a study in those conversations. It's a tough trick, as sexism is like super-hero comics or "least favorite tv shows", in that its a subject that tends to dominate the conversation the second it enters the room, with everyone striving to have the last word. Lane manages it with grace, but I'd be goddamned if I could tell you how he does it. The only thing I can confirm is that it's a trick he's mastered, as he pulls it off everytime he needs to.
Honestly, I thought I might grow out of this guy. Ten years later, I'm delighted to find out that will probably never be the case.
-Tucker Stone, 2012
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