I read a Michael Chabon novel after finishing his book of essays (Maps and Legends). The novel in question was The Final Solution. Novella might be a more appropriate term--it was pretty short.
It was pretty good. An ancient Sherlock Holmes, obviously in his last days, helps a young boy German Jew, displaced by the second World War, to find his stolen parrot. As stories go, it shows what you can achieve by not over explaining the plot. Chabon refuses to explicate everything for us; instead we, as readers, have to participate in making some sense out of the novella's events. Combined with the elaborate descriptions, the result is feeling like you are actually present for the story. And not in that irritating way that I've seen in some recent novels, where you get the feeling the author has one eye on a film option as they are typing (The Historian, I'm looking in your direction). I don't mean that you see the action, but rather you feel like you are present for it. Considering that one chapter is in the third person limited perspective of a parrot, this is a trick.
Some of the things that I found mildly annoying about the novel can actually be excused because of this. Chabon, for instance, refuses to name Holmes, instead referring to him as the 'old man' and forcing the reader to deduce who the old man actually is. I couldn't decide if I found that little feature annoying or charming. I settled on teasing after awhile. And some of the prose--when describing certain physical details--felt a little overwritten. Adjective happy, I might say, if it was handed to me in an undergraduate paper. But as I think about the overall effect I think I see what Chabon was going for. The overall result--the intense physical descriptions, the refusal to interpret events and plot points, even the coyness over the name of a central character--is that you are thrust into the novel's action, much like you are thrown into life. You are bombarded with sense detail and forced to make a coherent interpretation of it. Considering the vocation of the main character, this seems appropriate.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Monday, June 23, 2008
My favorite Star Trek episode is the one with Joan Collins--"The City on the Edge of Forever"
Tonight I finished reading a collection of essays by Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends. The sticker on the back tells me that it is his first book of nonfiction, and then lists a bunch of the novels he has written. I've heard of them; two of them are on our bookshelves, but I haven't read them yet. I did see the film version of Wonder Boys, which I now understand was based on a novel he wrote.
Anyway, it was good. Several essays on comic books/strips, and there were a couple of rants about biases against popular genre fiction, so he had me pretty much from the time he pointed out that science-fiction gets relegated to the generic ghetto just behind the bourgeois suburb of realism. Sometimes I think he may have overstated the case just a bit--sci-fi and detective fiction have been coming up in the world of academia. But I also suspect this may come from our different perspectives. Chabon is a product of an MFA program; I'm a product of literature graduate programs. MFA students always strike me as desperate to be taken seriously; literature students--some of them anyway--always strike me as desperate not to be taken for the snobs we actually are. So literature students drop pointed references to Buffy, the X-Men, and discuss the narrative virtues of video games--even if they do their academic work on Jonathan Swift or Chaucer. MFA students keep writing earnest realism, or even more painfully earnest poetry, and turn their noses up at any narrative with a spaceship or a detective in it. Gross oversimplification, I'm sure, but I've seen enough of graduate school to suspect that it's a rough guide to how things work in your local English department.
The last essay--a kind of digression within an essay within an memoir within a religious reflection--was especially good. It's about a lot of things, but early on Chabon talks about finding a book entitled Strangely Enough! on the YA rack at his local library. The book sounds like a lot of books I remember reading avidly as a kid; the cheap paper back with chapters on UFOs, the possibility of time travel, what made the dinosaurs go extinct, Nostradamus, etc. That portion of the essay evoked some of the real pleasure that reading gave me as a child; memories of long summer afternoons, comic books, Godzilla movies on my grandmother's TV, and choose-your-own adventure books came flooding back. I've been watching some Twilight Zone reruns at night recently, and they've been producing the same effect. One of these nights the wife is going to come out and catch me reading Ray Bradbury and inhaling Fig Newtons. Oh wait. . . .
Anyway--where does that pleasure go? I still enjoy reading. I've made reading literature my life's work. But the trouble with gorging yourself, I suppose, is that you always run the risk of satiation, even cynicism. I haven't become cynical just yet--today I caught myself actually enjoying reviewing some Wordsworth poetry for a class I'm preparing for the fall. But it gets difficult to access that unalloyed pleasure of the text that you had when were a child. You catch yourself--in the middle of a hokey Star Trek rerun--reflecting on the cold war politics that must have shaped the way that the Romulans were written into that show.
But of course, that's a pleasure in and of itself too.
Anyway, it was good. Several essays on comic books/strips, and there were a couple of rants about biases against popular genre fiction, so he had me pretty much from the time he pointed out that science-fiction gets relegated to the generic ghetto just behind the bourgeois suburb of realism. Sometimes I think he may have overstated the case just a bit--sci-fi and detective fiction have been coming up in the world of academia. But I also suspect this may come from our different perspectives. Chabon is a product of an MFA program; I'm a product of literature graduate programs. MFA students always strike me as desperate to be taken seriously; literature students--some of them anyway--always strike me as desperate not to be taken for the snobs we actually are. So literature students drop pointed references to Buffy, the X-Men, and discuss the narrative virtues of video games--even if they do their academic work on Jonathan Swift or Chaucer. MFA students keep writing earnest realism, or even more painfully earnest poetry, and turn their noses up at any narrative with a spaceship or a detective in it. Gross oversimplification, I'm sure, but I've seen enough of graduate school to suspect that it's a rough guide to how things work in your local English department.
The last essay--a kind of digression within an essay within an memoir within a religious reflection--was especially good. It's about a lot of things, but early on Chabon talks about finding a book entitled Strangely Enough! on the YA rack at his local library. The book sounds like a lot of books I remember reading avidly as a kid; the cheap paper back with chapters on UFOs, the possibility of time travel, what made the dinosaurs go extinct, Nostradamus, etc. That portion of the essay evoked some of the real pleasure that reading gave me as a child; memories of long summer afternoons, comic books, Godzilla movies on my grandmother's TV, and choose-your-own adventure books came flooding back. I've been watching some Twilight Zone reruns at night recently, and they've been producing the same effect. One of these nights the wife is going to come out and catch me reading Ray Bradbury and inhaling Fig Newtons. Oh wait. . . .
Anyway--where does that pleasure go? I still enjoy reading. I've made reading literature my life's work. But the trouble with gorging yourself, I suppose, is that you always run the risk of satiation, even cynicism. I haven't become cynical just yet--today I caught myself actually enjoying reviewing some Wordsworth poetry for a class I'm preparing for the fall. But it gets difficult to access that unalloyed pleasure of the text that you had when were a child. You catch yourself--in the middle of a hokey Star Trek rerun--reflecting on the cold war politics that must have shaped the way that the Romulans were written into that show.
But of course, that's a pleasure in and of itself too.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Why you should probably take it easy after a marathon. . .
So last Friday, I went out for a run. The plan; a five or six mile run at a pretty relaxed pace; my muscles were still protesting a bit if I try to put too much stress on them; the marathon was only two weeks into the past. The plan didn't work out.
One mile in, I stopped where the path crosses a fairly busy road, and was promptly slammed with pain. Later, people in the ER would ask: is it a dull pain, a stabbing pain? It was both, and more. I could hardly stand up, and it was difficult to breath. I ended up sitting down on the path for a bit, trying to figure out what was happening. The obvious occurred to me too, and I felt for my pulse. It was fine; good even, considering I'd just run a mile, it was downright slow. It was difficult to believe I was having a heart attack. After a bit, I managed to get up and walk, very slowly home.
The pain persisted at home, and the wife persisted that I needed to visit the ER. The pain was bad enough, and random enough, and I was scared enough, that I eventually agreed. The ER took me in and promptly hooked me up to all kinds of machines, after shaving two little bald spots in my chest hair. They put an IV hook up in my arm. At this point the wife went from looking concerned to downright terrified.
Anyway--to get to how this story turns out--the ER decided it was 'chest wall pain' which I thought was one of those hoax diagnoses. "Doctor, my arm hurts," I say. "Yes, I am a doctor, and I went to medical school where I learned that you have what is called--in the medical community--ARM PAIN! Take some Advil. Call me next week. That will be a billion dollars." That's kind of what happened.
Well, not quite. To be fair, the staff at the ER was extremely competent, and did all kinds of tests to rule out heart attack, cardiac arrest, blood clots, etc. I looked up 'chest wall pain' on the Google machine, and it turns out that it is this odd syndrome that no one seems to know much about. Since people don't really die of it--I guess--there isn't a lot of research money being funneled that way.
So I spent Saturday of last week flat on my back popping Advil every few hours while this Bob Seger tribute band played outside my apartment window. I did the reverse stages of grief with that band. When they first started playing at noon I accepted it, and was grateful that they were at least competent. By 8pm, the fourth or fifth repetition of "Still the Same" was wearing thin, and I was both angry and in denial at the same time. By 9pm I was in a very dark emotional hole.
The lesson kids? Don't lift a bunch of weights and go for a mile and half swim at a brisk pace shortly after running a marathon. And don't live across from the site of a motorcycle rally with questionable taste in hiring tribute bands if you can help it.
One mile in, I stopped where the path crosses a fairly busy road, and was promptly slammed with pain. Later, people in the ER would ask: is it a dull pain, a stabbing pain? It was both, and more. I could hardly stand up, and it was difficult to breath. I ended up sitting down on the path for a bit, trying to figure out what was happening. The obvious occurred to me too, and I felt for my pulse. It was fine; good even, considering I'd just run a mile, it was downright slow. It was difficult to believe I was having a heart attack. After a bit, I managed to get up and walk, very slowly home.
The pain persisted at home, and the wife persisted that I needed to visit the ER. The pain was bad enough, and random enough, and I was scared enough, that I eventually agreed. The ER took me in and promptly hooked me up to all kinds of machines, after shaving two little bald spots in my chest hair. They put an IV hook up in my arm. At this point the wife went from looking concerned to downright terrified.
Anyway--to get to how this story turns out--the ER decided it was 'chest wall pain' which I thought was one of those hoax diagnoses. "Doctor, my arm hurts," I say. "Yes, I am a doctor, and I went to medical school where I learned that you have what is called--in the medical community--ARM PAIN! Take some Advil. Call me next week. That will be a billion dollars." That's kind of what happened.
Well, not quite. To be fair, the staff at the ER was extremely competent, and did all kinds of tests to rule out heart attack, cardiac arrest, blood clots, etc. I looked up 'chest wall pain' on the Google machine, and it turns out that it is this odd syndrome that no one seems to know much about. Since people don't really die of it--I guess--there isn't a lot of research money being funneled that way.
So I spent Saturday of last week flat on my back popping Advil every few hours while this Bob Seger tribute band played outside my apartment window. I did the reverse stages of grief with that band. When they first started playing at noon I accepted it, and was grateful that they were at least competent. By 8pm, the fourth or fifth repetition of "Still the Same" was wearing thin, and I was both angry and in denial at the same time. By 9pm I was in a very dark emotional hole.
The lesson kids? Don't lift a bunch of weights and go for a mile and half swim at a brisk pace shortly after running a marathon. And don't live across from the site of a motorcycle rally with questionable taste in hiring tribute bands if you can help it.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
The art of racing in the heat
The marathon did not go as hoped.
Let me explain. I'd run two marathons previous to this one. In 2005 (Chicago), my first, I finished in about 4 hours and 51 minutes. Not great, I'll grant you, but it was my first, and I'd only been running with any kind of seriousness for about a year and half or so. In the fall of 2006, I ran a marathon in Grand Rapids, and finished in 4:27. It was better, but not enough better. I really wanted to finish in under four hours. That was the goal. I decided I'd try again in the spring of 2007, here in South Bend. For various reasons, that didn't work out, and I ended up scaling back to the half. So that's the marathon history.
But then there is the half marathon history. In April I ran a half in 1:41. Last fall, I ran one in 1:45. I've run a couple of others in 1:48 and 1:53. Looking at those handy charts I sometimes find, I was led to believe that my 1:41 half in April meant that I was potentially capable of a 3:31 full in late May. I didn't really believe that, but I thought that a 1:41 half meant a cake walk to a sub 4:00 marathon. Or, as much as any full marathon can be cake walk.
But no. 4:26. Barely an improvement on last time. A lot went wrong. It was 70 degrees out at the 6:00 start time. I went out too hard, too fast. As is always the case with the Sunburst, we got the first viciously hot day of the summer on race day. My great half time in April may have been the problem as well; it may not have been a great idea to go all out back in April in the middle of marathon training.
Next time, marathon. Next time.
So, the next day after the race, I drove to Georgia. On the trip, I read The Art of Racing in the Rain. It was really very good. The novel's first person narrator is a dog named Enzo who belongs to an aspiring race car driver. The dog--educated by a PBS documentary on dogs in Mongolia--firmly believes that this existence is his last before he is granted a human life in the next existence.
It all sounds a bit precious. But the author--whose name escapes me at the moment--pulls it off brilliantly. And the novel is not solely about being a dog or a race car driver. Enzo's owner gets married, has a child, watches his wife die from a brain tumor, and has a drawn out custody battle with his in-laws for his daughter.
One of the the things that marks a great writer, I think, is the ability to make you care about something you didn't care about. I've always found auto racing a bit odd--a car doing laps? Really? But The Art of Racing in the Rain made auto racing make sense for me. The competition, the strategy, the machines, the speed, all became clear to me in a few beautifully written passages. Towards the end of the novel, the dog watches his owner racing karts with his six year old daughter, and the investment in racing descriptions pays. The pride the father feels in his six year old's driving skills, and the importance of that pride in that section of the novel, makes for a compelling scene. And the writer can leave it understated to some degree, because he's already put the reader in the position of understanding racing, parenthood, and loss.
Let me explain. I'd run two marathons previous to this one. In 2005 (Chicago), my first, I finished in about 4 hours and 51 minutes. Not great, I'll grant you, but it was my first, and I'd only been running with any kind of seriousness for about a year and half or so. In the fall of 2006, I ran a marathon in Grand Rapids, and finished in 4:27. It was better, but not enough better. I really wanted to finish in under four hours. That was the goal. I decided I'd try again in the spring of 2007, here in South Bend. For various reasons, that didn't work out, and I ended up scaling back to the half. So that's the marathon history.
But then there is the half marathon history. In April I ran a half in 1:41. Last fall, I ran one in 1:45. I've run a couple of others in 1:48 and 1:53. Looking at those handy charts I sometimes find, I was led to believe that my 1:41 half in April meant that I was potentially capable of a 3:31 full in late May. I didn't really believe that, but I thought that a 1:41 half meant a cake walk to a sub 4:00 marathon. Or, as much as any full marathon can be cake walk.
But no. 4:26. Barely an improvement on last time. A lot went wrong. It was 70 degrees out at the 6:00 start time. I went out too hard, too fast. As is always the case with the Sunburst, we got the first viciously hot day of the summer on race day. My great half time in April may have been the problem as well; it may not have been a great idea to go all out back in April in the middle of marathon training.
Next time, marathon. Next time.
So, the next day after the race, I drove to Georgia. On the trip, I read The Art of Racing in the Rain. It was really very good. The novel's first person narrator is a dog named Enzo who belongs to an aspiring race car driver. The dog--educated by a PBS documentary on dogs in Mongolia--firmly believes that this existence is his last before he is granted a human life in the next existence.
It all sounds a bit precious. But the author--whose name escapes me at the moment--pulls it off brilliantly. And the novel is not solely about being a dog or a race car driver. Enzo's owner gets married, has a child, watches his wife die from a brain tumor, and has a drawn out custody battle with his in-laws for his daughter.
One of the the things that marks a great writer, I think, is the ability to make you care about something you didn't care about. I've always found auto racing a bit odd--a car doing laps? Really? But The Art of Racing in the Rain made auto racing make sense for me. The competition, the strategy, the machines, the speed, all became clear to me in a few beautifully written passages. Towards the end of the novel, the dog watches his owner racing karts with his six year old daughter, and the investment in racing descriptions pays. The pride the father feels in his six year old's driving skills, and the importance of that pride in that section of the novel, makes for a compelling scene. And the writer can leave it understated to some degree, because he's already put the reader in the position of understanding racing, parenthood, and loss.
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