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By Mike Beeman, on May 5th, 2010  The New York Times has done it again. When Michiko Kakutani savaged Beatrice and Virgil in the Times‘s regular books section, I jokingly predicted that the paper would print a second, less harsh review within two weeks. Looks like I should have put this in writing, and bet Nico five dollars. Exactly two weeks later, Robert Hanks would have made me some money.
The Hanks write-up is more of a detailed summary than a review, and the analysis is limited to two pretty tepid sentences:
Although his ambition is admirable, the literary complexity and the simplicity of feeling Martel is aiming for don’t comfortably mesh. “Beatrice and Virgil” has its rewards, but the frustrations are what stick in the mind.
Contrast that with this from the Kakutani review:
Though Virgil and Beatrice are sweetly engaging characters, the play in which they appear remains a derivative recycling of Beckett, and Mr. Martel’s efforts to turn their tale into a kind of philosophical meditation on the Holocaust result in a botched and at times cringe-making fable.
And, later
…they are another awkward element in this disappointing and often perverse novel.
These shenanigans are all too common in the Times. Akin to what reviewer Garth Risk Hallberg dubbed “The Kakutani Two-Step,” this might be called the Sunday Switcheroo. I first noticed this with Kakutani’s savage review of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, which she called a “tedious, overstuffed novel” full of “a lot of pompous hot air.”
Ten days later, in the Sunday Book Review, there was this glowing review, in which Gregory Cowles calls Chronic City “turbocharged,” “astonishing,” and “intricate and seamless.”
The old switcheroo!
Imagine these quotes next to each other on the dust jacket, and you’ll see the problem.
In both reviews, I agree with Kakutani more than the apology-review that follows. But I disagree with the practice. Readers look to influential reviews in the NYT, WSJ, PW, Chamberfour, etc., to find out if a book is good first and foremost. From time to time, certain books will be controversial and warrant reviews from those who both love and hate them. Lolita is such a book, as is American Psycho and, recently, Jonathon Little’s The Kindly Ones. These seem more like back-pedaling to undercut vitriolic reviews. Readers find Kakutani’s review in the regular Arts section, where she savages the successful author, and the second piece—by an unknown reviewer in the Sunday Book Review—weeks later. Which review are we supposed to believe?
Maybe issuing conflicting reviews is a NY Times policy, but it sure is confusing to readers (not to mention how confusing it must be for the authors…”They called my book “Intricate and seamless” and “a tedious, overstuffed novel?”).
But if it works for the New York Times, it may work for C4. In the days to come, you can look for favorable reviews to off-set our least favorite books. Sean will rave about Going Rogue. Nico will put up a post touting the value of the Amish-slice-of-life genre in Plain Pursuit. And Eric Markowsky, long missing in action, will come back from retirement to praise the works of Douglas Preston. Stay tuned!
By Nico Vreeland, on April 26th, 2010 Drop everything and read Vernon God Little, by DBC Pierre, now. See other entries in this series here.
 DBC Pierre is a Mexican author from Australia; his parents are English and he grew up largely in Texas. He was a cartoonist and a drug addict for a while, then he became an award-winning novelist on the first try. He’s not so easy to categorize, and neither is his work.
Pierre’s debut novel, Vernon God Little, won the Booker when he was 42. In it, our hero and narrator is Vernon Little, an awkward teenager in the small town of Martirio, Texas. Vernon’s voice is a mix of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye and Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces. In other words, funny, quirky, cutting, perceptive, and with a realistic hillbilly twang.
Before the novel begins, Vernon’s best friend, Jesus Navarro, opened fire in the middle of the high school and killed many people before turning the gun on himself. Since Jesus is gone, the town wants someone else to blame, and they settle on Vernon.
Those previous two paragraphs don’t seem to work too well together. But Pierre somehow pulls it off and Vernon God Little is the funniest book about a school shooting that you’ll ever read. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on April 21st, 2010  Starting this week, we’re using a new tag, babytown frolics. Basically, it’s the opposite of our Great Reads category. Where the Great Read designation recognizes outstanding literature that the reviewer thinks everyone should read, the babytown frolics tag designates awful literature that the reviewer thinks no one should read.
We’re not trying to pick on authors with this tag. Our contributors pick all their own books to review, nothing is assigned or required. So when a contributor writes a negative review, that reviewer genuinely thought he or she would like the book. Still, we make every effort to be even-handed and objective, and highlight the strengths of a book every bit as much as the weaknesses.
However, when a reviewer uses the babytown frolics tag, that means he or she thinks the book should never have been published. That means something in the book-producing, -marketing, -buying, and -reading process has gone seriously, seriously wrong.
All too often these days, certain publishers care about their bottom line, not just more than the quality of the books they produce, but to the exclusion of quality. A very important role in the publishing world is that of gatekeeper, the entity that keeps utter drivel from reaching the hands of innocent readers. Since publishers don’t seem to want this job anymore, we try to do our part to keep out the drivel. Most of the time we try to use a velvet rope, but sometimes we have to break out the tear gas. “Babytown frolics” is our way of trying to have fun while getting the dirty work done.
Occasionally, we might also drop the tag on an author whose ego and sense of entitlement has outgrown his talent (I’m looking at you, Douglas Preston).
The phrase “babytown frolics” comes from the pilot episode of the very funny animated show, Archer.
By Nico Vreeland, on April 7th, 2010 Some news about books and ebooks from around the web:
- Here is an article from the NYT about literature and cognitive science. Basically, it’s about how empathy relates to reading fiction, and how readers process interrelated or overlapping points of view. Or “what the scholars call levels of intentionality.” Read it.
Obligatory iPad and Amazon news—and lots of other stuff—after the break. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on April 2nd, 2010  "The Girl She Used to Be" is the laziest novel I've read in a long, long time A few weeks ago, I saw this post in the Guardian (same title as this post, here, that you’re reading). The Guardian post was a good-humored response to a silly little thing in the American Book Review which contended that such books as The Great Gatsby and All the Pretty Horses (and even Let the Great World Spin) were among the forty worst books of all time. Their chief criterion for the list was that the bad books on it had to be worthy enemies—by which they meant interesting books that people cared about.
As someone who primarily reads contemporary novels, I see a worthy enemy in the suffocating glut of miserable fiction flooding our bookstores and minds every second of every day.
So I’d like to present my own theory of what makes a bad book bad. It’s quite simple: lazy writing makes bad books bad. (The problems I’m about to outline could also come from a simple lack of talent, but I’ll give bad writers the benefit of the doubt.)
Now, I’m not saying that hard work magically creates great fiction—after all, great fiction is much more than the absence of bad writing—but when it comes to genuine garbage, nothing churns it out better than laziness.
What makes laziness so bad? How, specifically, does laziness impact storytelling? Where does laziness intersect with unbelievability and artifice in a half-assed pentagram of unholy awfulness?
I’m so glad you asked. Let’s find out. …
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By C. S. Clark, on March 29th, 2010 Drop everything and read these books by Lewis Caroll now. See other entries in this series here.
 We all know the story. But if you have not read the book, do so. If it is not too late, don’t spend $23 to see a computerized smile come flying at you in 3D and Johnny Depp in yet another role where you cannot help think pedophile. Instead, pick up a used copy of the book on Amazon for a penny (actual price) and go to the park and read it. Better yet, patronize your local library…and hope you don’t encounter that pedophilic character after all.
The story we know as Alice in Wonderland is actually an amalgamation of the two books Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I originally considered writing about just one of the two, but each are not much more than 100 pages and the font is bigger then I’m sure the numbers on the phone the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” lady couldn’t reach, so I’m cool with treating them as one. …
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By Chase Hautau, on March 22nd, 2010 Drop everything and read One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, now. See other entries in this series here.
 Gabriel García Márquez does not blend fantasy and reality into one surreal realm. Mr.Márquez creates instead an environment where each sphere vies for dominance. The reader might forget whether the novel takes place on the Earth the reader understands viscerally until he or she stumbles upon one ethereal scene that impresses upon the reader the book’s dual nature before it dissolves and allows reality to resume. However, I defy the reader to confess that he or she did not feel Mr. Márquez’s universe as the reader feels his or her flesh.
He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places.
This narrative manifests for the reader physical and emotional impressions as deeply as a rifle’s butt dully collapsing a soldier’s skull. It is not whimsy that makes so powerful the author’s writing. It is intent. To doubt that Mr. Márquez did not want to thrust a people’s reality into the reader’s side is to miss his motivation. …
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Drop everything and read Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann now. See other entries in this series here.
 The book ended, dammit. It ended and I’ve been ruined for novels since.
I can’t even tell you if it’s anything like McCann’s other books. I’ve tried to read one, but always I close it after a few sentences, because its prose—adept enough, beautiful enough, intriguing enough—is breaking my heart. Just because it isn’t Let the Great World Spin.
I know people who’ve gone to see “Avatar” two, three, four times, because they can’t handle the shock of being thrust back into the real world. I get that impulse. But—screw the too-pretty, vapid, light-wreathed world o’ the giant Smurfs. Let the Great World Spin in the world I want to stay in, because it’s messy and human and hard and true.
Did that sound like a cliché? My apologies, but I am not alone. You need only glance at the reviews for this book to realize that attempting to describe it reduces people to vague, grasping hyperbole and lots of uses of the word “human.” Even basic description seems to elude reviewers. It’s a New York novel! That opens in Ireland. It’s about Philippe Petit’s famous tightrope walk across between the Twin Towers! Not “about,” not really. It’s written in the voices of several unconnected characters! Define “unconnected.” It’s a 9/11 novel! That takes place decades before the towers fell. (And yet it is, sort of: Before those planes flew into the towers, no one imagined they really could. And before a man strung a wire between the two towers and walked across, well, no one dared imagine that, either.)
A friend who had not seen the documentary movie “Man on Wire” told me she thought the tightrope walker a metaphor for God, the way beauty and wonder (and terror, anything that grand in its ambition) exist all around us, utterly unconcerned with us. Our lives are steeped in them, but we rarely notice.
True, but it’s McCann who’s the god here, his orchestration that adept. The characters in Let the Great World Spin are rarely physically alone. They share rooms and scenes despite different genders, different ethnicities, different ages, and McCann slides into each of their voices as though to say see, we really are all just human. But the effect never lets you forget that each is—that we all are—alone, suspended in our individual consciousnesses and mortal.
It’s not a perfect book. As other reviewers have pointed out, some of the voices—particularly the prostitutes’—are a little forced, some of the coincidences a little too coincidental. Perhaps I should make this urgent a case only for a perfect book. But what is perfection? How human would that be? At the book’s heart is the messy complexity of life. At its heart is that full impulse, that full drive.
Read it, it will make you happy to be alive.
And then it will end, and you will be ruined for awhile.
I truly am sorry about that.
.
(Somewhat) Similar reads: Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathon Safren Foer; Things I Like About America: Personal Narratives by Poe Ballantine; the short story “Future Emergencies” by Nicole Krauss. And, of course, a documentary: “Man on Wire.”
By Nico Vreeland, on March 10th, 2010
 What do these three have in common? They all have absolutely no business writing or "writing" books. News about books and ebooks from around the web:
- Vapidity will continue to rule the bestseller list. Sarah Palin plans to “write” another book (get ready, Marcos), Lindsay Lohan has plans to hawk her crazed mutterings, and Hilary Duff just signed a contract to write a series of young-adult Da Vinci Code-style caper novels (I kid you not). Previously, we learned about reality star Lauren Conrad, who’s writing novels (plural) despite having never read a whole book in her life (which you should do, if you want to write one). Then there’s always Dan Brown, a terrible writer of stupid books (even his website wants to be a movie)… but he has 80,000,000 readers. And let’s never forget Douglas Preston, a horrible writer who’s so overprivileged and out of touch that he attacked his own readers for not paying exorbitant prices for his crappy books. Please help me solve this. If you like any of those writers, do me a personal favor: stop buying their books and watch TV instead. TV does mindless entertainment much better than books, and then books can go back to being carefully crafted works of the imagination, and not just paycheck tickets cranked out by illiterate uncaring morons and vapid celebrities trying to cash in on their fleeting fame. Publishing industry: I hate you. To wrap up this rant, here is a grossly unreadable article about nothing, written by an editor from Knopf. It’s a joke, right? Nobody’s that bad a writer, especially not a professional editor, right? Right?
- Borders is broke and starting heavy layoffs. Three months ago, while discussing the Nook, I noticed that Borders notably had no plans to release its own ereader/ebookstore. I said this about it: “Oh, and also… remember Borders? I’d say they have about 2 years of financial solvency left. It’s going to be like a brontosaurus dying.” Based on my understanding of the financial gobbledygook in the article in that first link, that timeline was just slightly generous. Ebooks are the way of the future, bookstores. Don’t be shy.
- Two weeks ago, the NY Times published this article by Motoko Rich about the prices of ebooks vs. paper books. It included this chart, which got everybody in a huff because it claimed that ebooks selling for as low as $9.99 will provide as much profit to publishers (not authors) as full-price, $26 hardcover books. Among the respondents: Gizmodo, GalleyCat, John August, and almost everybody else in the world. I just have one thing to add. Rich estimates the costs of printing and shipping at $3.25. Since online hardcover prices max out at about $15, that means, logically, ebook prices should max out at about $12. Since some new, hardcover, guaranteed bestsellers go for even less (like Stieg Larsson’s next one, pre-selling at Amazon for $11.50), ebook editions of those should come in at sub-$10. Which means maybe readers asking for $9.99 ebooks wasn’t so astonishingly entitled after all. Maybe the Macmillan/Amazon kerfuffle lost Macmillan more than it gained them. Maybe publishers should shut up about prices and windowing and all those other caveats, and just put their weight behind ebooks. Stop treating your customers like enemies, and maybe everything will turn out OK.
By Sean Clark, on March 8th, 2010 Put aside everything you’re doing and read The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, by Steven Millhauser, immediately. (See the other entries in this series here.)
 For the record, my favorite, favorite book ever and a book I truly think any reader should drop everything for is Lolita. But I’ve harped on it on this site again and again already. I read a lot of books, though, and there are a ton I think every reader should read. Steven Millhauser has written a number of these and The Knife Thrower and Other Stories is my favorite of his. Read it now.
Millhauser was one of a handful of excellent professors I had in college, so I’m a little biased. If you’re reading this site, I’d be a little surprised you’ve never heard of him. But if somehow you haven’t read him, you should. He is undeniably one of the most precise and imaginative writers writing today. He is a fabulist and a natural storyteller with a knack for writing stories that are at once cerebral and accessible. …
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The New York Times has done it again. When Michiko Kakutani savaged Beatrice and Virgil in the Times‘s regular books section, I jokingly predicted that the paper would print a second, less harsh review within two weeks. Looks like I should have put this in writing, and bet Nico five dollars. Exactly two weeks later, Robert Hanks would have made me some money.
