fortress of suckitude

so. i didn't really like this book.

well, i really liked the first half. it was kind of meandering and unfocused, but i felt it was good overall. however, the second half kind of just killed it for me. actually, i think the final 50 or so pages kind of ruined it for me.

this book is pretty unlike most of lethem's other stuff. his work tends towards the surreal, post-modern genre mashup like kabo abe or george saunders. this one felt more like a memoir he'd been working up to writing for way too long. and to me, it feels like he gets too involved with the telling of the story and loses himself in details that feel unnecessary at times.

the characters are definitely interesting, but the way the story breaks down at the end feels incomplete to me. it sort of trails off and feels unfinished, like there is something more that needs to be said. maybe i was hoping for a reunion with his mother or i wanted to see mingus and dylan reunited, but it just felt like the story sprialed out of control and kind of gets muddled in its own intentions.

i read it all, though, so i guess it wasn't so terrible, but this isn't something i'll likely revisit again in the future.

I just this minute finished Fortress of Solitude. I liked the second half of the book much better than the first.

I agree with Peter, the first part of the book does feel really familiar. It was interesting, but also awful. I really dislike the micro-examination of a person's own self. I think it's tremendously boring and usually unimportant. I'm not saying that a person isn't allowed to reflect (an unexamined life is supposedly not worth living, after all), but a novel-length meditation on stoopball, graffiti, and comic book characters isn't my idea of profound. Everybody had a childhood. Every adult has little talismans from that childhood. I really don't get the relentless need to explore that stuff. Maybe I just had a super boring childhood, but it to me it seems like on some level that kind of writing is the same thing as I Love the 80s.

But the prose itself I liked. Lethem did a really good job of putting you right inside his protagonist, I thought. You definitely feel like you know him, although the half dozen or so members of the supporting cast in this book weren't really fleshed out, and seemed like they served mostly to illuminate Dylan's personality. We got a pretty thorough back story for Barry in those liner notes, but that was about it. What was Robert like when he wasn't yoking someone? How did Arthur and his mom interact after he turned crazy? I especially would have liked to know more about Abraham, because I thought he, as the silent, looming hermit upstairs, was one of the most interesting characters in the book.

So yeah. I liked how he wrote, just not really what he wrote about. Overall though, the book was enjoyable and I would probably read another by the same author.

Fortress of Togetherness

This book was a bit of a paradox to me because I tore through it, but ended up feeling generally unimpressed for reasons I can’t really identify. One of the things I found mildly irritating was that in one form or another, I feel like the first part of this book seemed really familiar – nerdy white/Jewish reminisces about growing up in a NYC borough, gets picked on and into trouble with juvenile criminal types, but perseveres and as an adult feels an attachment to his old block and its former tenants. It at least reminded me of the book/film Sleepers, about an Irish kid growing up in Hell’s Kitchen – you throw in some superhero shenanigans and send the main character to jail with his friends, and you’ve got a very similar story. That being said, I thought Lethem developed some very interesting characters – characters that are well aware of their flaws, yet carrying on despite being fully aware of the negative consequences of their actions (for example, Abraham’s full devotion to his film, at the expense of his deteriorating family, income, and artistic prestige, and both Dylan and Mingus’s loyalty to their fuck-up friends Robert and Arthur).

This is something I’ll leave to you more insightful literary types, but on the back of the book, our friend Michael Chabon praises Lethem for creating Dylan, “a genuine literary hero”. I exaggerate for the sake of argument, but is it a bit cynical to question why we should bestow this title on a dude whose life accomplishments consist of: Cocaine dealer, college dropout, accessory to prison escape, and writer of liner notes for obscure compilation albums? Generally, his “heroic” deeds seem to be limited to helping out his friends, maintaining a relationship with Mingus, and (mostly unsuccessfully) attempts to stop relatively innocuous crimes from occurring. Or am I confusing a literary hero with an extreme alpha-male hero that shoots down helicopters and deactivates apocalyptic nuclear warheads at the last second, saving humanity? Or maybe that’s precisely a statement of this book – that Superman/save the world types really only exist in comic books, and real heroes may be really flawed, but at least have the balls to try to make a difference where no-one else gives a shit (i.e. saving homeless alcoholics and incarcerated crack-dealers)? Something to think about, anyway…

P.S. I liked Yiddish Policeman's Union - good call, Chilibone.

listen well, sweetness

so for some reason, i held off on reading this book for a long time. lately picking up a book of any substance has been intimidating to me. i think the stress of work and real life make me want to escape into the mindlessness of video games or light comedy like terry pratchett or john hodgman. however, once i started reading this book, i became pretty obsessed with it. i was sitting on park benches on the canal, reading on my lunch break. i would go to coffee shops to read it. i remembered how to just enjoy getting immersed in a great story and enjoying the mystery and living alongside the characters for a little while.

the entire book had such a strange sense of sadness to it. the feeling of existing during the reversion of the jewish land back to america was very powerful. imagine knowing that soon your entire world was going to become a mired mess of confusion and exile, but not really be able to do anything about it.

the little bits of magic and mythology sprinkled throughout the narrative really helped to draw me in as well. i love a good far-fetched fantasy story now and then, but this garcia marquez level of magical realism is pretty much the perfect amount for me. the whole idea of the messiah as a gay junkie is appealing to me, not in a mean-spirited way. i think it is appealing to humanize religion and to temper the divine against the human in a story like this. landsman was always regretting not getting to know shpilman before he died, and i think that feeling was passed on to the reader as well.

after i read this book, i picked up another chabon novel "gentlemen of the road." it's short and easy and great.

May

Hey friends,

The next book on our list shall be (drum roll please!) Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. Sound good? Let me know if you have all read that and I'll pick something different.

Happy reading,
Caitlin

Yiddish Policemen's Union

I'm only halfway done with the book, but I thought I would blog about my thoughts so far to give the site some love and give my friends something to read while they're bored at work.

So at first I really didn't think I was going to like this book. Which is not surprising, because it is true for like 85% of books that I pick up having never read anything by that author before. But I powered through the initial disinterest and now I am totally into it.

Just like with Rabbit, Run, I am finding the supporting cast to be just as, or even more interesting than the protagonist. The down-on-his-luck noir detective is a pretty worn out plot device (see Roger Rabbit, Tracer Bullet, the 1930s) and I thought at first that the character was going to be two-dimensional. Swig from a flask, make a comment about a "dame" or a "broad," run off a string of one-liners, and solve the case. I thought Landsman was going to be simple, basically. But turns out he has a detailed past rife with complications and tragedy, his motivation to keep going is unclear but seems rooted in a general desire to do good work, and he is dirty and gritty without becoming a parody. He's pretty balanced.

Berko the sidekick is pretty awesome too. Pretty much anyone who carries around a giant hammer to scare the shit out of some gangsters with has got my general approval. I think he and Landsman pair very well. Again, at first I thought that as a duo they would be pretty flat, the typical big/little, clean/dirty, Jewish/Alaskan Native dichotomies, but I think they are funny together.

And the idea of a giant Jewish colony in the middle of Alaska is pretty awesome too. Chabon does a really good job of dropping little bits of information about the alternate reality so that you have a little bit of a hint of these past events, but don't get the full story. Like mentioning that the a-bomb fell on Berlin. It gives you a brief, fleeting glimpse. It's like when you're reading Lord of the Rings and Tolkein suddenly drops a reference to Ancalagon the Black, baddest dragon of all time or whatever, but doesn't go on to fully explain it or give the details of events. It's a great author trick that allows them to create this big world but also allows the reader to use some of his or her own ideas to fill it in. Just well done.

The plot, in typical page-turner fashion, is sucking me in. Without giving anything away, I just want to say that I like the twists and turns and the (sometimes excrutiatingly) slow revelations.

So those are my halfway thoughts.

sand county, sad country

the edition of the book that i read was supplemented with photographs by gentlemen who retraced aldo's footsteps and lived on the land where he lived. seeing the landscape as he saw it made it all the more real for me. there were these really haunting images of aldo's grinding stone, laying broken under a tree in different seasons. he died of a heart attack fighting a brush fire on his neighbor's land, did you know that?

living in a city is weird and alien to me. reading this book made me really homesick for a place and time that maybe really only exists in my memory. i grew up on about 50 acres of wooded farmland and feel like i keep moving farther and farther away from that life as i grow older. as i grow older, i romanticize the old farm more and more. i get involved with the local green movements and urban beautification projects, but parts of it seem so masturbatory and filled with this weird sense of self-satisfaction. i feel like some people join these local conservation movements because of the image of it and just spout off this meaningless rhetoric. i appreciate anybody who is involved, but it's a strange, sad simulacrum of the real experience.

being in the country is quiet and leads your mind down quiet roads. i feel like leopold's conservation ethic is borne out of this experience. he focuses on the harmonious co-existence of man and nature, something that a city by its nature defies. i guess the book made me feel dissatisfied with my half-acre plot of city land and small raised vegetable beds. i definitely started feeling like the grass is greener everywhere but here.