Towards the end of bookstores. That terrible sense of finality

When I was a student, I browsed though bookstores in awe at the world revealing itself to me within those walls. Two days ago, on the escalators at the Barnes and Noble bookstore in Union Square, New York, I was hit by the terrible sense of finality that comes with visiting a place for what might very well be the last time. I made it a point to visit all four floors of the bookstore, café and magazine racks included, because I thought: I may never see a four-floor bookstore again. The next time I am in New York, there may very well be a clothing store here. And any other bookstore with four floors I may encounter in my travels is doomed. I am sorry but I want to be factual: the large cathedral of the non-specialized bookstore is over.

The writing has been on the walls, of course, for years. I have browsed through many fewer bookstores since Jeff Bezos started international shipping. I have watched museum bookstores convert into design and gift stores. Even airport bookstores, once the refuge of the bored traveler, have become much less necessary. It obviously isn’t true yet, but the other day at Barnes and Noble’s I felt like I could choose any book on any of the four floors and have it downloaded onto one of the devices in my backpack in less than fifteen seconds. (I also felt tempted to add a Nook to my gadget collection, but didn’t. I left the store without making any purchases.)

It is pointless to bemoan the disappearance of the trusted bookseller, supplanted by the faceless algorithm. It is just a fact. The other day, as I prepared to leave the store, I felt as if I were standing in an emptied house that I knew I was never going to return to. Or kissing a loved one for the last time.

The Hunger Games, from dystopian novel to Hollywood movie

I have a friend who is seriously into the fantasy book genre, and I usually take her book recommendations with a pinch of salt. But I am seriously into what I call the end-of-civilization genre, and critics refer to as the “post-apocalyptic” or “dystopian” novel. So, when my friend recommended the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins – supposedly, a “young adult” work, no matter how bleak -, I read it and enjoyed it as shamelessly as Harry Potter fans have enjoyed the J. K. Rowling series.

I learned today that the first book of the Hunger Games trilogy is now a movie. And the actress in the lead role, Jennifer Lawrence, comes with serious credentials as teenage heroine from the gritty, dark Winter’s Bone, which led her to an Academy Award nomination for Best leading actress (who won that year? Oh yeah. Natalie Portman won), and which you should watch by all means if you haven’t yet. District 12 is, after all, a fictional version of the Ozarks. Enjoy.

Junot Diaz on writing, on luck and on women

I tore off a page from the South China Morning Post’s Post Magazine when I was in transit in Hong Kong, because it carried an interview with Junot Diaz, the author of one of the best novels ever written about the long shadows of dictatorship, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

On writing:

When I was 26, I published one story in one magazine which was seen by one agent, and I hit the literary jackpot. [...] When I sold my first book [the short story collection Drown], in 1995, I was working at a job making photocopies and living in an unheated apartment in Brooklyn. I quit my job right there. I just walked out. [...] My novel took 11 years to write and it was hell. There are people who come under hardship and do everything possible to make their lives easier. I came under hardship and decided to make my life, and those of the people around me, harder. [...] Basically, I bit off a story that required me to become a different person to finish it. The guy who conceived of Oscar Wao is not the guy who would have been capable of finishing it.

On luck:

I look at my childhood and nothing proves to me more the utter randomness and arbitrariness of what we call success. I hear that word and in my mind I flash to every single person who was better than me and who, through a complete accident, wasn’t served what I was served. I’m here because of an incredible amount of luck. You’ve got to work hard and you have to turn everything you’ve experienced into some kind of vision, but none of that is enough. 

On women:

I would never have been a writer if I hadn’t gone to college and met feminists. The feminist project is absolutely essential to writing good literature. A large part of the planet is encouraged to view women as partial human beings. You can always tell a good writer because, whether they’re male or female, they effortfully resist that idea. 

Sometimes it all became too much. Fiction from Pakistan

And yet, though she insisted that she loved Pakistan, sometimes it all became too much. “I hate it, everyone’s a crook, nothing works here!” she would sob, fighting with her husband.

This is Sonya, an American woman who married a Pakistani man, and a minor character in Daniyal Mueenuddin‘s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders – one of the best works of fiction I’ve read in quite some time.

There is quite a lot of quality stuff being written in English by Pakistanis who’ve lived in America, gone to school and perhaps studied creative writing there. Another one coming to mind is Mohsin Hamid, author of Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

I sometimes wonder whether this will be the path forward for Italian fiction, as well: to be led by writers who belong both here and somewhere else, or neither here not there.

Lunar mining: “Limit” and “Moon”

Fiction, as you know, is one addiction I nurture with pride. Over a recent long weekend, I was able to read Frank Schätzing’s Limit, at 1,300 pages a doorstopper of a science-fiction thriller that I am told is the author’s worst book so far, but that I rather enjoyed, to the point of claiming that Schätzing was Dan Brown for people with brains.

Limit is set in 2025. Its earthly locations are Shanghai, Berlin, and a few others; notably, a remarkable digression projects into 2025 the wretched history and politics of Equatorial Guinea, which I recommend you read about in Ken Silverstein’s recent Foreign Policy story. But much of the action takes place on a colonized Moon, where Julian Orley, a distinctly Richard-Bransonish entrepreneur, is giving his VIP guests a preview of an unprecedented space tourism experience. Orley has also set up a massive and successful mining operation on the Moon to extract helium-3 from lunar regolith, largely solving our dependence on terrestrial fossil fuels and leaving the world’s oil companies to scramble for an alliance with him or wither and die. Things, of course, will go wrong; but I won’t spoil them for you, dear readers.

In our reality, according to contributors to the Wikipedia page, it turns out that the premise of helium-3 as a power generation fuel has been explored, that the isotope is indeed present on the Moon, and that Chinese and Russian sources have expressed an interest in mining it.

A few days later, I watched Moon, Duncan Jones‘s well-regarded film debut. In Moon, there is lunar mining of helium-3, just like described by Schätzing in Limit, but there is no space tourism; and indeed, the loneliness and isolation of the astronaut manning the mining operation plays out in a rather unexpected plot twist.

The connections between book and movie do not end here. Jones’s father, David Bowie, appears as a character in Limit, playing guitar in the evening for his friend Julian Orley and declining an invitation to join the trip to the moon. He is just too old, he says, and he has found that his calling was on Earth all along. Limit, as fiction, does have its limitations; yet, Bowie’s wistful appearance lends it a true touch of poetry.

Five American Writers

I have been asked to make a list of five books I recommend for a full immersion into the best of American writing from the ’80s to today.

It is not, of course, an easy task.

To cram more books into the list, I have picked five, but also provided notes on what else you might like if you liked that book (and no, there is no collaborative filtering algorithm here – I just went through the titles I had tagged with “American fiction” on LibraryThing, and made some hard and very personal choices). So, here’s my take. What’s yours?

1. Philip Roth, American Pastoral. Swede Levov and his troubled daughter are among the most unforgettable characters of our time.
   If you like this, you may also like: Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater; Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin (see also here and here); Jonathan Franzen, Freedom; Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex. I don’t know what all these books have in common, except a sense of the family as the place where mistakes are made and people’s lives go wrong.
2. Joyce Carol Oates, What I Lived For. This is not Oates’s best-known book, but her portrait of Corky Corcoran struck me – when I read the book, years ago – with her ability to get inside a man’s head (hey, I’m a woman, so I know I might well be wrong).
   What I Lived For takes place in the kind of upstate New York town that is past its prime and not yet willing to admit it. If you like this, you may also like two novels about even more downtrodden places: Empire Falls, by Richard Russo (a small town in Maine); American Rust, by Philipp Meyer (rural Pennsylvania).
3. Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I loved this novel for its inventiveness, scope and ease at tying all sorts of things together from the Prague Rabbi’s Golem to comic-book superheroes.
   If you like this, you may also like other sprawling novels of unforeseen outcomes, such as John Irving’s deservedly popular The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. Or, if you’d like to go for more of an intellectual stretch, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the definitive novel about addiction in America.
4. Paul Auster, Leviathan. I’ve picked one of his early novels, but I could equally have picked The Music of Chance, In the Country of Last Things, or Moon Palace. And if you like them, you will also like The Red Notebook. Auster is, in a way, his own planet – love him or hate him.
5. David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Yes, this last item is the non-fiction corner, and in the last 25 years nobody packed more brilliance into American non-fiction than DFW. See also here, here and here (DFW could employ rhetorical devices of the highest order and at the same time leave you thinking he was speaking from an inner source of simple truth).
   If you like this, you will also like Consider the Lobster, another set of collected essays by David Foster Wallace; Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis, an iconic look at Wall Street in the ’80s; and Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, which reads like a horror story, except that it happened.

What are your five books? Remember, it’s just a list. You can pick anything by Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, or Jeffery Deaver and I won’t think less of you. In fact, genre fiction has its own rewards – but that’s a topic for another post.

Underachievement, irresponsibility, disease: some recent fiction

Everything is interconnected, or so it seems, reflecting on recently published fiction I’ve read over this past few weeks; some topics capture the Zeitgeist more than others.
Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall and Paul Auster’s Sunset Park both feature protagonists haunted by their brother’s premature death. The Great Gatsby is quoted in By Nightfall, and is a plot device in Sunset Park. In their own way, Sunset Park, Chang-Rae Lee’s The Surrendered and Philip Roth’s Nemesis all feature a deliberately underachieving male character: Miles in Sunset Park, Hector in The Surrendered, Bucky – after his disease – in Nemesis.
And disease is a protagonist in Nemesis, as polio; in The Surrendered and in So Much for That, by the excellent Lionel Shriver, as variations on the theme of abdominal cancer, plus a rare genetic condition in So Much for That; and as cervical cancer in Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, my only non-fiction selection of the season.
Asbestos plays a major role in So Much for That, but also makes an appearance in Henrietta Lacks. Both Glynis in So Much for That and Patty in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, at one point, start working jobs below their abilities in order to spite their husbands. And both So Much for That and Freedom feature a major character’s irresponsibly underachieving artsy sister, a documentary filmmaker named Beryl for Glynis’s husband Shep and an avant-garde theater actress named Abigail for Patty.
Everything talks to everything else, I think sometimes.

Two book launch events

Click through for the full experience (jazz funk hip hop punjabi soundtrack included) of the invitation to the launch party of The Dragonfly Effect by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith, and for the presentation of Regole (Rules) by Roger Abravanel and Luca D’Agnese.

But even from the snapshots below, I guess you can tell that Stanford University in California and Bocconi University in Milano, Italy have two very different styles in inviting people to talk about books.

Something I’ve been meaning to tell you. Alice Munro

Something I’ve been meaning to tell you is a short story collection by Alice Munro, published in 1974.  I earmarked for myself the page, towards the end of the story titled “Executioners”, where this passage appears:

“[I was] reminded of my childhood, which seemed so long ago, and full of panic and disgrace. For I had changed, things had changed for me, I believed that with luck and good management I could turn out to seem like anybody else. And this is in fact what I have done.”

The roots of the subprime mortgage crisis, and everything that followed. From a David Foster Wallace article

One reads David Foster Wallace‘s long-form journalism collected in Consider the Lobster slowly and with care, knowing there won’t be any more of his pieces for Harper’s, The New York Observer, Premiere and so on. (Incidentally, Gourmet, the magazine that commissioned the title story, has recently ceased to exist, too.) One of these pieces, appearing in this collection in its full uncut glory, got a brief revival in the 2008 elections: it is “Up, Simba”, where DFW got to cover on behalf of Rolling Stone none other than John McCain on the campaign trail in the 2000 Republican primary, which McCain lost to George W. Bush after a non-inconsiderable amount of “negative advertising”.

“Host”, the piece that closes the collection, profiles for the Atlantic Monthly a conservative radio talk show host named John Ziegler working at KFI in Los Angeles, and it is insightful and probing and sad. I just wanted to notice one little thing, and point it out to you. When the host is off the air, the writer’s ear does not tune out to the mindless chatter of the advertising segments. The writer keeps listening. And (this is 2004) he observes that there is quite a bit more of a certain type of radio advertising than there used to be.

As of spring ’04, though, the most frequent and concussive spots on KFI are for mortgage and home-refi companies. In just a few slumped, glazed hours of listening, a member of this station’s audience can hear both canned and live-read ads for Green Light Financial, HMS Capital, Home Field Financial, Benchmark Lending. Over and over. Pacific Home Financial, Lenox National Lending, U.S. Mortgage Capital, Crestline Funding, Home Savings Mortgage, Advantix Lending, Reverse mortgages, negative amortization, adjustable rates, APR, FICO… where did all these firms come from? What were these guys doing five years ago? Why is KFI’s audience seen as so especially ripe and ready for refi? Betterloans.com, lendingtree.com, Union Bank of California, bethebroker.net, on and on and on.

I don’t want to attribute any prescience to DFW’s words. While he might be read as implying that nothing good would come of it, this may very well be just our interpretation as readers in 2010, with the privilege of what we know today. As a writer, he merely observed and reported. May we observe the world around us with the same open-mindedness and insight.