The books of summer, part two

I am very sorry to admit that I finished The Passage. I wish I hadn't bothered. Please don't waste any of your hard-earned dollars on The Passage; or, if you already have, don't finish it. You know what you should do instead? Go out and buy yourself a nice used paperback copy of Stephen King's The Stand. You'll pay maybe two dollars -- I swear there are more copies of The Stand in print than the Bible -- and you'll be way happier.


Years ago, when I was in grad school, my creative writing professor made us read this essay from a back issue of the Atlantic called "A Reader's Manifesto." I wasted all of three seconds hyperlinking the article there, so I really think everyone should read it. I've never agreed with a piece of criticism so much in my life. In the opening paragraph the author writes,

Nothing gives me the feeling of having been born several decades too late quite like the modern "literary" best seller. Give me a time-tested masterpiece or what critics patronizingly call a fun read—Sister Carrie or just plain Carrie. Give me anything, in fact, as long as it doesn't have a recent prize jury's seal of approval on the front and a clutch of precious raves on the back.

Oh, B.R. Myers. You my brother from another mother. I mean, doesn't that just nail it on the head? Fuck fucking Justin Cronin. Apparently winning a PEN/Hemingway gives you the liberty to completely and utterly rip off someone else's work while all the critics whistle Dixie and movie producers bang your door down. Because there's been a rash of post-apocalyptic fiction recently, no critic I've read has compared The Passage to The Stand -- there are so many prize-jury-approved novels to compare it to instead! -- so here, for your pleasure, is a handy-dandy breakdown of every story element Cronin bold-facedly stole from that "fun" classic:

• A top-secret experimental government contagion that, inevitably, gets unloosed upon an unsuspecting society
• A small band of survivors left to fend for themselves in a decimated America
• Another small band of survivors with a different set of values that our original small set of survivors encounters, providing a handy-dandy metaphor for our own polemicized world
• The settings of Las Vegas and the Colorado mountains, plus, for bonus rip-off points, the journey on foot between them
• An atomic bomb left behind by the government that is detonated at a critical moment, deus-ex-machinating the characters we identify with into the sunset
• The suggestion that the cycle will inevitably repeat itself because of mankind's inherent weakness
  

The idea that two books could have so much in common without someone crying plagiarism is insane to me, but that's what old B.R. was warning us about. Books are becoming increasingly dichotomized, to the degree that no one even bothers to compare "literature" with "fun reads." It's like there's this ghetto class of authorship in which all the actual creativity is occurring, and then decades later some namby-pamby Iowa graduate can come along and appropriate ideas from it as his or her own and because he or she is more "literary," it flies. Well, that sucks. I think literary history will back me here. Whose works were more enduring, Shakespeare's or Marlowe's? You know?

So The Passage blew. Moving on:


I'm trying to make a conscious effort to purchase and read more novels by female authors, because let's be real: they're not getting a fair shake. The Elegance of the Hedgehog confirmed this to me before I even cracked it open. I ambled on down to my local independent bookstore, may its doors never close, looking for this particular volume, both because my mom glowingly recommended it and because it's set in Paris, my soul city. After fruitlessly checking the fiction section about seventy times, I inquired about it at the cash register and discovered that it was, in fact, in stock, but was relegated to the "novels in translation" section. I call bullshit: I have purchased two Michel Houellebecq novels, neither of which was as good as Hedgehog, directly out of the fiction section at Skylight. I guess when a man writes it, even if it has to be translated it's not considered "in translation." I'm not trying to get all up on some feminist conspiracy theory here; I'm just stating the facts.

It's been a long time since I both read and enjoyed a book that could be classified as a "novel of ideas," but The Elegance of the Hedgehog broke my streak. I loved it. I loved the story, and I loved the sections when the story wasn't moving at all. Everything about it was terrific. I was so heartbroken at the end that I was visibly morose. I don't know if I was sadder about what transpired in the story or that the story was over. I guess I have less to say about a book when I like it than when I don't, but part of that is because I don't feel bad giving up all of The Passage's secrets. Hedgehog, on the other hand, should be entered into blind and cold, so that everyone can discover all of its many pleasures for themselves.

Continuing on the female novelists tip, I just started:


Being butt buddies with old B.R. as I am, I sometimes steer away from critically acclaimed novels. I just don't tend to like them as much as everyone else. There are exceptions -- here I am thinking specifically of Netherland and A Gate at the Stairs -- but more often than not it's a Special Topics in Calamity Physics situation, where I'm all, "What was everyone THINKING?" I'm not too far into Goon Squad at all, but what I've read is pretty kickass. Most importantly, I am not finding the style problematic in the least. The style is perfect. It's that kind of great modern writing that perfectly identifies a feeling or observation you've almost made yourself a thousand times, but have never quite been able to verbalize; but it does it without calling attention to itself, without screaming "Look at me! I'm a writer! This is a METAPHOR, bitch!" I really wish Jennifer Egan had seen fit to give the book a different title, something a little more hoity-toity and austere, because I feel like she might miss out on some of the readership she deserves with the words "goon" and "squad" both crammed in there. But maybe it'll pay off! I'll be sure to let you know.