Archives for November 2004

“One of the constant minor joys of reading Trollope is coming across descriptions of little gestures which reveal character in much the same way as a good actor does, either deliberately or half-consciously. There is an example early on in The Way We Live Now in his description of Father John Barham, a young, overenthusiastic, gentlemanly Catholic priest.

My new iTunes program contains a screen called “Top 25 Most Played” that tells me which songs I’ve listened to most frequently since I installed it. Here are the tracks at the top of the current chart:

– Erin McKeown, “A Better Wife”

– Frank Sinatra, “Witchcraft”

– George Strait, “I’ve Come to Expect It from You”

– Toto, “99”

– Marvin Gaye, “Got to Give It Up”

– Ahmad Jamal, “New Rhumba”

– Couperin, “The Mysterious Barricades” (played on guitar by G

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m letting the blogmail pile up, in the hopes of finding buried treasure when I answer it all over the weekend (but mainly because I just don’t have enough steam in the boiler to open it right now).

As always, thanks for your patience. I really don’t like being sick, even when I’m getting better….

In the comments over at Mad Max Perkins’s excellent newish publishing-insider blog, commenter Marjorie offers this startling perspective:

By my reckoning, I read about two books a month. (It used to be more, but children have an odd way of needing a lot of attention.)

My financial adviser informs me that I must die when I am 87 because I will run out of money at that point. So, assuming she is right, at two books a month I will read only 520 books more in my lifetime. Do I want to waste one of those precious allotments on an award-winning book that I find neither enjoyable nor enlightening? I do not.

Screw the awards and their fallible human judges. I start with reviews and word-of-mouth. Then I go to the book jacket and read a page or two at the bookstore or on Amazon. Then I buy it and give it 50 pages. If I’m not laughing, crying, or learning something by page 50, out it goes, guilt-free. Life is too short to read a book that doesn’t give me something in return for my time, energy, and money.

520: astonishingly finite and sobering, that figure. I’m reminded of last year, when the Booker Prize went to a book I’d never heard of by a writer also unknown to me. On impulse, I ducked into a bookstore on my way home the day of the announcement and bought a cloth copy of D.B.C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little. I would never get beyond chapter 2. So at least I still had my time, save a few minutes. But had I held off and read a few of the reviews that soon followed, I would also still have that particular $20. Whoops.

My own expected number of books-yet-to-be-read is higher than 520. But that doesn’t make it any less stark, wherever it may fall. This is why I want to know if Critic X didn’t think a book was the best of the year as reputed, and why I don’t want critics to pull their punches. It doesn’t mean I implicitly trust any one critic’s judgment (well, maybe Wood’s, tried and true), but, like Marjorie, I do want as much varied input as possible, and I want critics to write with readers, not authors, in mind. The 2003 Booker showed me that awards committees can be every bit as fallible as critics; I hasten to add that the converse is also true. All we can ask of each is frank and searching judgment, and to please keep in mind the (shudder) 520.

I’ve suspected for the past couple of days that I was on the mend, but one important thing was missing: a good night’s sleep. Though I slept for twelve hours on Saturday, it was the kind of shallow, disordered sleep that fails to refresh an ailing mind and body, and I hardly slept at all the next night, a dead giveaway that I hadn’t quite turned the corner.

Yesterday was different. I was double-booked–a movie in the afternoon, a play in the evening–and by the time I finally got home I was so exhausted that I threw my coat on the floor, curled up in a ball on the couch, and turned on the TV to unwind. I quickly found myself nodding off, so instead of following my usual end-of-day blogging routine, I went straight to bed to read. The book fell out of my hands after a few minutes and landed on my face, and I stayed conscious just long enough to turn out the light. There followed nearly ten hours of deep, restorative sleep, the kind in which you dream so intensely and continuously that you’re aware of it while it’s happening. At one point I actually dreamed that I was hanging out with a bass-playing friend of mine in the carport of a ranch house in Smalltown, U.S.A., telling her about how deeply I’d slept the night before. I remember verbatim one thing I said to her: “It felt as though I had an electric plug sticking in one ear.” That’s exactly how it felt–like I was recharging an empty battery.

I felt stunned when I woke up a half-hour ago, but in a good way. Gradually my wits returned to me. I remembered that I had a Wall Street Journal review to write this morning, plus a bit of blog-tending. I remembered that I’d cancelled my lunch with Maud so that I’d be fresh for tonight’s appearance at Barnes & Noble. Under other circumstances I might have gone screaming into action immediately, but today I know better. My next move will be to sit down at the kitchen table with a bagel and some fruit, clear my head of the lingering fumes of deep sleep, and permit myself to revel in the sensation of starting to feel better. The world can wait.

If you don’t have anything better to do, come see me hold forth this evening. (For details, click on the link.) I may look a little pale around the edges, but I’m pretty much myself again. That’s the one worthwhile thing about having been sick: it feels so good to get well.

UPDATE: Look at page 87 of this week’s New Yorker, in the middle of David Denby’s piece about Pedro Almod

“For me there are two salves to apply when I feel spiritually bruised–listening to a Haydn symphony or sonata (his clear common sense always penetrates) and seeking out something in Montaigne’s essays. This morning, in spite of the promise of a bright cloudless day, I woke curmudgeonly and disapproving of the world and most of its inhabitants. Montaigne pulled me up sharply.

Last week I had the pleasure of hearing the poet and Johns Hopkins English professor Allen Grossman read from his work. He is a thoroughly arresting speaker and reader, and appears at the University of Chicago this Thursday, November 18th. Highly recommended to you Chicagoans.

Here’s the poem I liked best in the reading, “Lending Library (Mpls. Xmas, 1943).”

At her Lending Library on Lake Street, Minnepaolis,

mother Beatrice rented out books to ladies.

But she read them first. That way she knew whether

there was not, or (better still) was, anything “disgraceful”

in any of the books. (There were two kinds of ladies.)

The result was mother owned the second and third volume

of many novels (e.g., Scott’s Ivanhoe), but not the first


which was gratefully taken to heart by her customers.

That’s why I know a lot about how things come out

and don’t know very much about how they begin.

But mother Beatrice (“B” for short) never read

the book called GOLDEN MEXICO (because

it was not to be loaned or sold)–until Xmas, 1943,

when a voice, out of the blue, said: “‘B,’ read that one.“


After she read it, “B” said: “How things look in the heart

of Jesus I don’t know and, frankly, don’t want to know.

But I do know that only those Jews who are stirred

by the question of their own existence can

answer the claim he makes…. Allen, my dear, who does

know? To whose sentence can we say, “Yes! That’s true“

–and add to the wonder of it belief.“


“Beatrice,” I asked her, “what do you really want to know?”

“Allen, what was the first book you ever read?”

“Beatrice, before I learned to read I could not read;

but I did know about reading, and it never happened

(thanks to you, for good or ill) that there wasn’t any book.

But I could not read in the heart of Jesus,

so the first book I read was GOLDEN MEXICO.


Now I read because light does not reveal itself

(not even on a bright wash day), but it lies hidden

in a cloud until summoned–like the heart.

It was the gold cover of the book named

GOLDEN MEXICO that drew me in at first. Then,

I added what I could add to that wonder.

No book I read was ever written until I added that.”


Outside the Lending Library, Xmas 1943, a voice–

maddening, relentless, phonographic–began to sing

“Silent Night,” and did not stop at “heavenly peace”

but started over, again, and again, and again.

It was the ladies’ triumph–a best seller,

a virgin birth, the babe who added to the

wonder of it all, belief. Three days of that


drove “B” crazy. Beatrice stood up, gathered her books,

and locked the door of her Lending Library. “Let them buy,”

she said. And her voice was heard, despite the singing,

across the gentile lake by itinerant Thoreau

where he rested on the far shore, high up the cliff

on a rock and caught the cold that killed him.

–There’s no Lending Library on Lake St., Mpls., any more.


How then ever know the way things begin,

remembering as we do nothing! None of our books

will tell, certainly not this one. But take the question

to heart, nonetheless, because I write the wonder of it all

and by the poem called LENDING LIBRARY solicit belief:

There was a road by which we came this way.

There is another by which we shall depart.

Everybody in the blogosphere seems to have something to say about this year’s National Book Award fiction nominees (Our Girl weighed in last week, and Maud links to some of the latest reactions here). I’ve said nothing, for the very good reason that I haven’t read any of the novels in question, nor am I familiar with the past work of any of the authors. Nor have I said anything about this year’s nonfiction nominees, for the equally good reason that I was one of the five judges on last year’s panel. To comment on the work of my successors would be just plain rude.

Having said all that, I confess to being puzzled by certain aspects of the ongoing hoopla. Maud also links to MobyLives’ speculative spoof about the thinking of a prominent member of the fiction panel:

I slapped him hard across the face. It was enjoyable so I did it again. “Snap out of it!” I told him. “Now start from the beginning. What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know!” he cried. “I thought we were doing what they said. I mean, they said not to pick more than one token book from a small or independent press, because that would decentralize power and be good for the book business on the whole, which they just can’t have, because everybody knows that diversity just blows…”

Once again, I have no opinion about any of this. I don’t know Rick Moody or any of the other fiction judges, nor do I have any continuing contact with the National Book Foundation. (Once you’ve served as a judge, you’re never asked to do so again.) Still, I can’t help but recall the experience of picking last year’s nonfiction winner, which I described in this space shortly after the fact:

We considered 436 books (some of them very, very briefly, but they all got talked about at some point in the past few months). We never raised our voices, never argued with one another, never got angry. Our deliberations were civilized, collegial, and great fun. When we met yesterday afternoon to make our final selection, it was the first time all five of us had been in the same room at once–we mostly deliberated via e-mail and in conference calls–and the atmosphere, far from being tense, was positively festive.

What we didn’t do was engage in horsetrading or logrolling, speculate on how our picks would be received by the literary community, or attempt to Make a Statement. I don’t mean to sound like Pollyanna in Bookland–I know such things do happen, and always will–but in our case they didn’t, period. We simply tried to choose a wide-ranging slate of worthy nominees, and to pick from them the one book we thought best.

Perhaps we missed a bet, since neither our nominees nor our final selection attracted more than a modest amount of attention from the press. All anybody seemed to want to do was talk about Stephen King and Shirley Hazzard. Nevertheless, we thought we did a good job. To be sure, Carlos Eire may not have been on the literary world’s collective lips in the wake of our deliberations, but my guess is that Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy will be read and remembered long after the current controversy over the NBA fiction nominees is filed and forgotten.

I think we did our job the way such jobs ought to be done, and I like to think that’s the way most literary judges endeavor to go about their difficult business. Don’t ask me, though: I’d never before served on such a panel, nor have I since. Maybe we were all Pollyannas.