On falling out of love with an author

This post isn’t about any one book in particular, but about that most tragic of reading phenomena: when you read a book you really love and then read another book by that author and you don’t love it. It’s a strange thing, perhaps, to expect that an author you like once is someone you will always like, because there are so many elements to liking a book (as I discussed a few posts ago). With non-fiction, I’m not surprised if I enjoy a historian’s account of the Underground Railroad but am less interested in a thorough look at the Greek royal family. But, particularly with fiction, I tend to assume that once I find an author whose flavor I enjoy, I’ll continue to enjoy it in all its incarnations, and that’s not always true.

The disappointment can come in a few says. First, you have the one-hit wonders: those authors who write a stellar first novel but it turns out that was all they had to say that was any good. I’m looking at you, Joseph Heller, and my stupid decision to buy “Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man.” Then you have authors who write a lot but it turns out they’re just writing the same book over and over — so, no matter where you start, you think they’re good, but there are severely diminishing returns. Hello, Pat Conroy, and your semi-autobiographical abused Southern men. Or, serialized authors who set up a great premise and an intriguing question, but draw out answering it for so long that you want to, and sometimes do, give up — particularly prevalent, of course, in fantasy fiction, like Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series that he actually died before finishing, but not before writing some 11 books, some of which just seemed designed to create new problems to delay resolving the series. Then there are the radical shifters, who move about with abandon but it’s just hit or miss. I loved A.S. Byatt’s Possession, which used shifts in perspective and form to tell a few deeply personal stories. But The Children’s Book was a horrible slog that moved way too slowly, except when it suddenly would decide to skip ahead a few years. The subject matter – a couple of interrelated families of artists, writers, and revolutionaries in early 20th century England, might have been the problem, but even more so, I actually disliked every single character and kind of wanted them to die. Which some of them did, but always off the page. With these kinds of hit-and-miss authors, it’s really hard to decide whether to delve back in, and if so how to decide which books might be any good (I should note  that The Children’s Book was shortlisted for the Booker, so I can safely conclude at least for myself that accolades are not a good indicator). Finally, and saddest of all, are the authors who inexorably drift away from you. I vociferously loved the first two books of Sarah Vowell’s that I read – Partly Cloudy Patriot and Assassination Vacation. They were funny, and informative, and appealed to me so much because, like me, she seemed to find learning things to be fun, and wanted to share that with the readers. But I found Wordy Shipmates, about the Puritans, to be bad – all of her attempts at humor seemed forced, and I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm about the subject matter, which was odd because beforehand I would have guessed I would be more interested in Cotton Mather than in Garfield’s assassin. And while Unfamiliar Fishes was more interesting, she just seems to have lost her spark – or, rather, whatever direction she’s heading, I’m just not following, and it makes me sad.

Matchbook: The diary of a modern-day matchmaker -by- Samantha Daniels

Oh, sweet Georgia Brown, this book was execrable. First, I have to explain why I checked it out of the library. It was just after I had finished doing all my grading for the semester and I was supposed to be home, hard at work on my own writing and research, but I had a book due back to the library so I grunged my way out the door looking not very well put together and, of course, the first person I see at the library is one of my former students. So I got so busy trying to look respectable and like the sort of person who should be assigning grades that I lost all ability to browse. I just wandered over into the Dewey Decimal 300s (Social Sciences) and picked this book up. I also checked out “The Naked Lady who Stood on Her Head” (by a psychiatrist about some of his more unusual patients) so it was clear from the beginning that things were not going to go well.

But this book. Jeez. I’m sure that the author is a perfectly fine matchmaker and that her clients are happy. I’m positive that she knows more about dating than me – although there are rudimentary life forms that haven’t figured out respiration that know more about dating than me. But by fifty pages in, it was clear to me that all of the things that she loves about herself are things that I hate about her. Which is to say, she comes across to me as a dreadful human being who is proud of all the things that make her dreadful. Her premise is that she’s only going to work with people who are “socially adept and desirable” – according to her standards, of course, which means wealthy, mainly. One of the early meetings she describes is with a client who, during their first meeting, explains that he’s an FTM. Now, understandably, this might be a challenge for a matchmaker, but she presents this story as a horrific tragedy for her: “What was I supposed to do, send around an e-mail to my conservative, mainstream crowd in New York and ask if anyone was interested in going out with a guy who used to be a girl, used to have a vagina, and now has a penis and wants to have sex with women?” Well, yes. That would kind of be the reason he went to a matchmaker.

She barrels through the book, describing the people she’s trying to set up and the mistakes they make, and how she helps. Perhaps the most maddening part is how she talks about her own relationships. She’s the queen of the complaint/brag: I’ve got the worst ex! He sends me first class tickets to Paris for the weekend because he can’t live without me, but he wasn’t ready to commit so it’s just awful! Then this ex calls to tell her he’s in therapy, and invites her to go to therapy with him. She does, for a few months, then sleeps with him and when he doesn’t call the next day she decides she’s through with him and leaves him an angry message. She calls the therapist and the therapist talks her into one last session, for closure, but when she shows up, the therapist isn’t there and the ex has filled the room with flowers and is proposing. She says no, which is fine, but the whole story is clearly a fabrication. What licensed therapist would participate in tricking a client, or even a client’s significant other, into coming down to their office for a surprise proposal? So, then, she’s decided to present this fictional story here either because that’s legitimately how she believes things happens, or because she thinks it presents her in some fabulous light. Very troubling. Of course, this is at the end of the book, at which point I already kind of hated her.

All of which leaves the question of why I read to the end of the book, to which I have no good answer other than I was procrastinating about editing my own work, and it’s much more satisfying to loathe someone else’s writing than to loathe one’s own.

Game of Thrones -by- George R. R. Martin

I think maybe I need some structure if I’m going to get back into being a Rosenthal who Reads, so let’s try this one on for size. I’ll look at my four main criteria for a good book and try and discuss each one in turn. For reference, plot is generally my main seller, but the other three have veto power and can submarine a book real quick. I’ll have to think up something else clever if I tackle any non-fiction, I suppose.
Plot: Game of Thrones is a wrinkly epic or maybe three different epics rolled up into one, bouncing around its fictional world to follow the machinations of nobles, knights, usurpers and rightful heirs to the throne. The previous king was overthrown himself and it becomes increasingly apparent that the dust from that revolution hasn’t settled – even if most of the protagonists don’t even know yet that there’s an heir to the Dragon Throne plotting revenge in the second parallel story. And the book starts with, drops some ominous hints about, and then largely refuses to develop a storyline about an ominous, otherworldly threat from the north that comes armed with zombies and glowing eyes. But Martin moves between them in a way that allows each to develop independently while contributing to the looming, and sure to be apocalyptic, specter of their convergence. However, with three plots and a richly populated and painstakingly stratified world, there were certainly moments when the plot got weighed down by too many characters with too many relationships with each other. While I applaud the verisimilitude of the political liaisons, I lost interest in – and track of – whose daughter had married whose great nephew and made whom the heir to which lordship. Fortunately, as long as you can keep track of the basic thread of Starks (yay!) and Lannisters (boo!) (for the most part), it’s probably OK to confuse a couple of members of the Night Watch or a few noble houses.
Structure: Game of Thrones’s structure is one thing that sets it apart from many other instances of the swords-and-dragons fantasy genre. Rather than following the adventure of a single hero, Martin moves his focus between several protagonists. We don’t bounce from first-person account to first-person account, but instead move our omniscient eye and third-person narration around. Which isn’t to say that the different sections don’t acquire the personality of their foci: I was particularly struck by how Martin adapted the tone of the narration to suit the perspectives of the three young women the story follows. While the adult characters and even the young men are all predominantly stoic above all else, the girls’ naiveté, desperation, idealism, and fear all come through even the filter of the omniscient narrator, so that the different sections don’t just serve to give us access to different events and places, but also new perspectives on what it would be like to try and survive a coup without having a clue about what was going on.
Characterization: I don’t quite know what I’ve been reading for me to have developed such a strong prejudice about this, but I’m really tired of authors introducing incest as a shorthand for demonstrating that a character is evil. I mean, yes, I get that it indexes a willingness to flout society’s rules for one’s own pleasure, and it evokes a wild degree of narcissism in the implication that one can only find satisfaction with the closest version of oneself. But, really, it’s so absurd and exaggeratedly evil and Martin uses it not once, but twice, to telegraph those characters that we’re really really supposed to hate. Which is particularly disappointing because he also goes out of his way to give nuance to some other characters. The spoiled oldest Stark daughter does some unforgivable things but her motivations are clear throughout and she’s not doing anything for the sake of being evil. The younger Lannister son, a dwarf, often finds himself in opposition to our heroes, but his struggle for survival and acceptance mean that we understand why he does (most of) what he does. And Martin is working hard to build a kind of sympathy for the woman who is poised to come back, try and claim the crown, and probably fight lots of really blood battles with some characters we’ve come to know and respect. So, generally a strong showing on characters, with the exception of the excess of stoicism and the totally unnecessary incest.
Language: Not much to say about this here, except that he generally avoids the more twee affectations that can plague fantasy novels. It’s enough for me that it wasn’t a distraction.
Stray thoughts:
I know HBO is doing a miniseries (series?) based on this and as soon as they introduced the dwarf I thought, that’s a few years of steady work for Peter Dinklage. And I was right.
George R.R. Martin? Is this an homage to J.R.R. Tolkien or just happy coincidence? I, mean, he’s obviously an influence as he is on all fantasy writers, but the name thing made me roll my eyes a little bit at the introduction of a rolly polly sidekick named Samwell.

Empire Falls by Richard Russo

My review in under 50 words (under 100 if you count parentheticals):

It was a lot like Nobody’s Fool, only with a more robust plot and less Paul Newman (not because he wasn’t in the movie adaptation, which apparently he was, but because I hadn’t seen it and thus couldn’t properly picture him while I was reading). Still thoroughly enjoyable, though, if you enjoy stories about economicaly decrepit towns where the residents have rich if depressing interior lives.

Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo

I’ve been told by a reputable source that this book can be really hard to get into. And it really does lack any of those clingy hooks that make you feel committed to finishing a book whether you like it or not. It’s unrelentingly smooth, actually, with Russo rubbing the edges off the moments of drama by doing things like removing the main characters from the moment or even removing the event from the direct line of the narrative: instead of handing the reader a scene with an angry husband, a rifle and some punching, Russo literally stops the narration just before anything happens, and only shares the resulting chaos in ensuing casual conversations among the characters, and when something does finally happen at the horsetrack, our protagonist is in jail and misses the whole event. Although they’re all eventually revealed to us in the slow but inexorable way that gossip moves, we miss out on a steamy phone call between a mother and her son’s mistress, more than one affair and a death and only learn retrospectively about a little boy’s penis getting slammed by a toilet seat.
So it’s not that nothing happens, so much, as that the protagonist, a kind of charming and kind of jerky, down on his luck 60-something jack-of-all trades named Sully, doesn’t really see the point in worrying about it when big things do happen. He slips from mishap to mishap, occasionally punctuated by a bout of good luck and usually dulled by a steady diet of beer and greasy spoon food and often commented on by the townspeople who either despair of, rely on, or dismay of his very presence. I found the lack of self interest, on the part of Sully and on the part of the book as a whole, utterly charming – although it didn’t hurt that I know that he was played by Paul Newman in the movie, and nothing says charming like Paul Newman, RIP. It’s not a book worth slogging through, but only because slogging is so antithetical to the very nature of the book.

The King in the Tree by Steven Millhauser

This book was a surprising treat.  The format is three novellas, two of which are re-imaginings of the lives of literary characters Don Juan and Tristan and Isolde (Ysold in this novella).  I don’t know much about the origins of either of these stories, so the re-imaginings were fresh tales for me.  Both novellas were beautifully written and Millhauser evokes incredible visual images through his writing.

In An Adventure of Don Juan Don Juan travels to England to escape his reputation and find refuge at the estate of an acquaintance, Augustus Hood.  The Don is weary of his existence and seeks a truly new experience.  Hood is an eccentric Englishman who’s life work appears to be overseeing the creation of various worlds within his four thousand acre property.  Millhauser describes these undertakings in detail and the reader is drawn quickly into this beautiful but artificial life.  Amidst all the fake scenery Don Juan begins to experience true emotion as he has never been able to in his life thus far.  The results are painful and though the story of Don Juan is dated, the human emotion in this novella is poignant and ageless.

The King in the Tree is the novella based on the story of Tristan and Ysold.  Again Millhauser brings alive an ancient story by infusing it with undeniable emotion.  Each character is sympathetic and real, but the love triangle they are caught in begs the reader to choose sides.

The first novella in this book, Revenge, is the only one that stands alone without a historic tale as its basis.  The story is told in 2nd person which normally drives me mad.  However, Millhauser makes it work in this seemingly innocuous story that grows more complicated with each room the narrator takes us into on her tour through her home.

One thing I really liked about this book was that each story really gained in momentum and substance as you got deeper into it.  This worked well for me because I did not want to rush through the book as I am wont to do.  The pacing allowed me to put the stories down and then get more deeply involved the next time I picked it up.  I am looking forward to reading more of this author’s work.

The Mill on the Floss –by- George Eliot

The afterword to this copy of The Mill on the Floss describes it as “earnest, moral, and long” which, I have to say, aren’t necessarily my three favorite literary adjectives. But I was 80% sure that there wouldn’t be any dragons, and I figured I was due for an earnest novel after wallowing in fantasy and all that modern ironic stuff. I also really loved Middlemarch, although I read that a long time ago and on a train across Greece, which may have impacted my state of mind.
The Mill on the Floss is, as promised, an earnest story about Maggie Tulliver, a young girl growing up in semi-rural England in the early 1800s, faced with a temperament that is strictly at odds with the rest of her family, an intellectual curiosity that is rarely fed and, as time goes on, financial problems with her family and a remarkable number of romantic complications for a book that ends before she hits her 20s. Throughout the book, Maggie strives to align her desires and views of the world with those of her family and lovers (used throughout the book in the least physical way possible) and constantly comes up short; it is in many ways an epic story of her vacillating between passion and asceticism and never finding a balance that wins her the approbation of the brother she loves kind of desperately – indeed, she seems to sink from one social mistake to the next pretty rapidly.
The most curious part of reading this book for me was how little I was able to root for any of the characters. I’m not sure if I couldn’t pull myself into alignment with a Victorian sensibility, or if Eliot wrote them as intentionally unsympathetic, which is sometimes the sense I got from her narrative voice, or if she was just trying to capture the reality that some situations are just untenable, that when a young girl is asked to accept or reject the friendship of her father’s enemy’s son that it’s impossible to pick a side between the virtues of friendship and those of family responsibility.  Maggie is faced with a series of harshly unpleasant choices, particularly for a sensitive teenager (a category that didn’t really exist in the 1820s, of course), and rather than wanting desperately for her to make one choice or the other – if she makes the happy one, it’s a romantic novel, if she makes the unhappy one it’s a tragedy – the reader instead must suffer alongside her as she dreads making either one. (Apparently George Eliot herself had a long relationship with a married man, making her something of an expert in these inescapable moral and emotional quandaries). I’ll agree that the book is earnest (and long!) but it’s certainly not moral an Aesopian, proscriptive kind of way: rather, it exposes the fragile emotional center of morality and how it fails to take into account the complicated relationship between personal desires and social demands. It’s pretty emotionally gripping, but if you need resolution, prepare to be disappointed.

The Dragonbone Chair -by- Tad Williams

Normally, I wouldn’t review a fantasy novel, largely because I often feel a tiny bit shameful about reading them. I think it’s because I spent such a large portion of my pre-teenage years gleefully reading and re-reading, well, books that had dragons in them (and other things! I also read other things about, like, Okies or Vietnam or depressed poets). As this was the same time that I listened to New Kids on the Block and pegged my jeans and had giant, pink, plastic-framed glasses, I am suspect about all of my judgment from that time. Also, the library tends to shelve romance, science-fiction, fantasy, and mystery paperbacks altogether in the side of the main room they might as well label “books for people we assume don’t enjoy real literature.” So, I’ve tried to hide my recommendations under the labels of cyberpunk (Gibson) or indefinably good (Bull), but the sordid truth remains that sometimes I really do enjoy a long, epic saga and sometimes those come with magic or ogres or, yes, a dragon or two.
The Dragonbone Chair, and its attendant sequels, is really not as dragon-y as the title would suggest: it’s (as the genre demands) the very long story about an unlikely hero (a kitchen scullion named Simon) and a bunch of his unlikely companions (a princess, a troll and his wolf, a bunch of dukes and knights, and some mysterious immortal folks) trying to save their moderately unlikely world from total annihilation. Despite his twee tendencies toward the names in his alternate universe (do you really have to you’re your winter months ‘Novander” and “Decander’?) and an unappealing tendency to including the lyrics to ballads his characters are singing to pass the time, Williams actually avoids a lot of the pitfalls that can come from following the strict boundaries of the genre (and, believe you me, in that misspent youth I read plenty of books that wallowed in those pitfalls). He compelling conveys that characters can have doubts and misgivings without being paralyzed from action and he doesn’t shy away from the absolute misery of participating in an epic quest – lots of eating crappy food and sleeping in the forest and getting lost in the dark and not knowing if your loved ones are safe. And he tries to keep the dei ex machina to a bare minimum, which is quite a feat if you’re going to include immortals and dragons and the like.
Phew. I feel so much better for having gotten this secret reading habit off my chest. Maybe I’ll go dig out some peasant blouses and listen to Paula Abdul.

Stranger Than Fiction -and- Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk, whose name I have really no idea how to spell and even less idea how to pronounce, is best known for writing the book Fight Club, but I also think fondly of him as a local literary superstar from when I lived in Portland. In addition to his novels and non-fiction essays, he’s also written some travel guides of the Northwest and made more than one appearance at Powell’s while I was in the area.
Lullaby is a super dark short novel about an investigative journalist with a tragic and shady past who gets caught up following clues he’s found at the home of six infants who died of SIDS and ends up having to confront the power of his own suppressed emotions – but in rapid, action packed way. Along the way, he meets up with a real estate agent who sells haunted homes, her new-age, semi-nudist assistant and the assistant’s anarchist boyfriend. Palahniuk doesn’t spend much time lingering on emotional fallout but, like his narrator, pays attention to the tiniest details and paints a vivid picture of people’s internal lives nonetheless; I was particularly struck by the simmering rage he manages to convey as the real estate agent marks a path through a furniture warehouse by gouging deep lines and arrows into furniture with her expensive rings. Palahniuk doesn’t worry too much about making the characters loveable or charmingly quirky, but they do come across as depressingly real possibilities – not the kind of people you like to think of yourself as, but the kind of people you worry you just might be if you weren’t able to get your priorities quite in order.
Stranger Than Fiction is a collection of essays which Palahniuk groups into “People Together,” “Portraits,” and “Personal” – which is to say, stories about groups, stories about individuals, and stories about Chuck. Like Lullaby, the writing is crisp and spare, short sentences in short paragraphs and not really dripping with adjectives. I found the style slightly hit-or-miss in this context. “The People Can,” about life on a navy submarine, really benefited from the style, which felt like it captured the constrained life of six months under water, but “Frontiers,” about steroid use, just felt herky-jerky and unfinished and “In Her Own Words,” based on an interview with Juliette Lewis, just made me feel like Lewis was kind of a jerk – which I imagine was not the intention of the piece. Still, Palahniuk (I think I’m finally getting the hang of typing that) really endeared himself to me over the course of the book, which gives a charming view of what his life has been like, struggling to be a writer and then being faced with unexpected success, dealing with his father’s murder and trying to make sense of what people do to make themselves happy. And the book is worth reading if only for the introduction, which is a really insightful take on whether or not writing is a solitary venture.

Complete Tales of the Unexpected by Roald Dahl

I have many happy memories of devouring Dahl’s young-adult novels and short stories – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, of course, but also Matilda and James and the Giant Peach and The Witches. They were all particularly satisfying for a child because they coupled fairy-tale-level evil adults (child-eating witches and child-torturing headmistresses and child-abusing aunts) with charmingly realistic, if astonishingly clever, children who managed to wrestle happy endings out of horrid situations. In his short stories written for an adult audience, Dahl maintains the same cleverness but gleefully abandons happy endings for brutal irony of the type O. Henry would have appreciated.
Forgive me for ruining one of the stories in the service of a review, but if I may illustrate: the contrast is most distinct when one compares the short story “Champion of the World” with the children’s book “Danny, Champion of the World,” which offer two permutations of the same plot, about poachers catching pheasants by feeding them raisins stuffed with sleeping pills. The plan is clever and seems to go off well for both sets of protagonists, but no one seems to have planned for what will happen when the birds wake up. While “Danny” (as I recall, aided by Wikipedia) ends with some absolution for our plucky youngster, who is able to still get his revenge on the evil pheasant hunters and walks away with a few pheasants for dinner, in the short story an infant (in whose carriage the sleeping birds were hidden) is terrified by a cloud of pecking pheasants and the poachers resign themselves to a failed endeavor.
And so it goes for Dahl’s heroes: hoisted by their own petard, generally, with a real “n” shaped story line. Someone is down on their luck, plots himself into good fortune and then, inevitably, runs afoul of the laws of the universe. The form could get a little repetitive, and as a reader you quickly find yourself looking for the flaw in the plan, trying  to anticipate how a scheme to buy antiques off of unwitting farmers or extort money from widows or store one’s brain after death could go awry. But Dahl is really an enjoyable writer, and unfailingly just that much more clever than the protagonist and so the stories fly by but still evoke a pained wince at each final turn.
This collection also contains a very different genre of stories, from his collection “Over to You,” which are realistic (and presumably semi-autobiographical) recountings of British pilots during WWII. While they’re also well-written and richly characterized, I found myself skimming them in a haste to get back to the more dramatically ironic stories in the rest of the book.