Reading the “Missed Connections” section of Craigslist is procrastination worthy of a writer: those missives from one lonely heart seeking another, fleetingly glimpsed, practically beg to be written into stories. BookRiot has done the opposite—taking well-known literary characters and writing their ads—and the results are hilarious:

the roof, the roof – w4m (Thornfield Hall) I spotted you from my window as you delivered wood to the house – I swear our eyes locked briefly for a second. Did you feel it, too? Come back to the Hall on Thursday night – I’ll create a diversion so I can escape. I just know we’d get along like a house on fire.

AWAY IN A MANGER – m4w (NEW HAMPSHIRE) YOU WERE IN THE AUDIENCE AT A PERFORMANCE OF THE NATIVITY, LOOKING BORED. I WAS BABY JESUS. I LIKED YOUR SPARKLY BLACK SWEATER. DO YOU LIKE BASEBALL? MAYBE WE CAN GET TOGETHER AND THROW A BALL AROUND SOME TIME.

Handsome fella in the town square – w4m (Boston) You helped me when I dropped my scarf in the mud. You looked so embarrassed when our fingers touched briefly – your cheeks turned scarlet. I’d enjoy sharing a cup of tea sometime. Ask anyone – when it comes to loving, I get an ‘A’.

sexy hobbitses – m4w (misty mountain) oh precious precious hobbitses! we loves your chubby fingers and furry feets. we will gives you a ring. we loves you, we loves you, we loves you forever!

For the identities of the “writers”—and the full list—visit BookRiot. Got a literary missed connection of your own? Share it below in the comments.

My desire to stop kissing and resume reading shook me, considering that the Hungarian women in The Angel Makers fixate on ridding themselves of inconvenient men. Which might be amusing, in a certain vein of black comedy, were it not so gritty and grounded in actual fact. This factuality gives the book its claws, though it’s Gregson’s headlong prose and craftsmanship that truly rivet her reader.

She begins in 1914: the Hungarian village of Falucska, threaded with well-worn paths and huddled by a fast-running river, stands so far from anywhere else that no one expects to leave the village during his or her lifetime.

They mostly don’t. The women keep marrying at fifteen or sixteen, bearing children in or out of wedlock, dying in childbirth or suicide or any number of domestic disputes; the men keep grinding through the fields and alcohol bottles. In short, the village’s little world spins along in dusty rhythms “until one day, suddenly, the earth coughs and all the yellowed leaves fall off the trees to lie on the ground like shells,” and WWI blows all the young men off to eardrum-shattering battle lines unimaginably far away.

Without the war, Sari, the novel’s protagonist, would have clung to an outsider’s life, the only village girl able to read both Magyar and German, the only one with second sight, the only one nimble and knowledgeable enough to wrest a living from the medicinal herbs hidden in the forest surrounding the village.

Yet the war grants her a reprieve from being the village’s strange-eyed outcast. It also gives the other village women a break from the abuse and neglect their men dole out.

But, as Gregson reminds us, “…you can’t have beauty without a bit of terror.”

Once Hungary waves the white flag, the truce Sari and the villagers have been so giddily savoring shatters. As the men stream back, the women begin to learn the art of angel-making (aka, husband poisoning).

But what really caught my attention is the artfulness with which Gregson creates tension. One can feel the hoofbeats of something bad coming from a long way away; but Gregson still surprises with exactly how the drama unfolds. Readers who recall Scott Smith’s row of increasingly gruesome, domino-like events in A Simple Plan will be familiar with this sort of calculating, mounting horror. Those new to the art of soul-crushing dread will be treated to the uncomfortable pleasure of literary collusion as Death starts to gain traction.

Like the village’s river itself, the weight of individual decisions gather speed and depth, building suspense through expert pacing. Gregson boldly skips months or years, trusting well-placed anecdotes to span the elapsed time, but she’s equally willing to hunker down among careful details.

Accused women of Nagyrév, via Hungarian National Museum

She understands that events—especially ones of the shocking nature she relates—require careful groundwork before they make psychological sense to a reader. Since her novel is based on fact, one could accuse history of doing her heavy lifting; after all, she’s only embellishing a few details here and there, right?

But as anyone who has tried her hand at historic fiction knows, actual events often seem the most improbable of all. And the Nagyrév poisoning epidemic, which forms the skeleton of The Angel Makers, does seem ripped from a B-class thriller. (Second confession: straightaway after finishing the last page, I leaped onto the Internet to track down what “really” happened.)

So it’s a testament to Gregson’s skill that she lures readers on board and makes us believe—even cheer on—the grisly twists. She might get away with it because she’s so careful with her pacing and character development. She doesn’t race straight to the guts; she instead gives us enough of village life to hook us, make us believe, make us care about Sari’s strangeness, and the village’s general sicknesses and plucky misery, before any angels are made. Furthermore, Gregson possesses an enviable talent for delivering a full character in just a few lines, though her word choice occasionally borders on the lurid.

Still, her prose hangs together well overall and demonstrates an elegant ability to shift perspective, an acuity with handling the passage of time, and a touch for simple, transformative moments of beauty like the farmhouse ceiling that “seems to shimmer slightly and become translucent, letting in the dusty, smoky light of the moon.”

We see little of the men’s side. A few scenes give us a quick peek into the victims’ possible experiences, but this is decidedly Sari and the other women’s story. Still, the men loom large in the historical backdrop. Even though almost everything takes place in insular Falucska, war as a theme is very present, including, obviously, the war between the men and women, as well as the region’s war with poverty and the fallout of desolation, ignorance, and moral ambiguity. All this warfare, the book seems to hint, leads finally to the black-humored weariness of survivors. As Judit comments:

[W]hen you’ve been alive as long as I have, you realize how pointless everything is, how little any of this matters. So you start either laughing at nothing, or laughing at everything. And it’s a lot more agreeable to laugh at everything.

Yes, this book had me laughing. And gulping down a few catches in my throat. I won’t soon be forgetting a certain Hungarian village taking desperate measures in the horrors and beauties of 1918.

Further Links and Resources

• Listen to radio program Between The Ears (BBC) about the Nagyrév murders.
• Hear Jessica Gregson discuss The Angel Makers on The Noon Show:

New York Public Library (CC)

Last summer, I worked a few blocks away from the regal main branch of the New York Public Library near Bryant Park. During the interlude between the end of the work day and the start of a class I was taking, I’d sometimes take refuge in the humbling building, its architectural beauty and breathtaking murals never ceasing to amaze me. So when I came across the story of a young girl aiming to keep the city’s libraries open by writing comical postcards to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, I was not only amused but also grateful that someone else, too, couldn’t imagine New York without its famed literary landmark.

The tween, called “Tara” by New York City public librarian and “Screwy Decimal” blogger Rita Meade, drafted a series of postcards with creative threats to Mayor Bloomberg when funding for the city’s public libraries was in jeopardy late last month.

Here’s one of them:

via ScrewyDecimal

Explains the Village Voice:

Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer of Sunnyside, Queens, initiated a postcard campaign to express to Mayor Bloomberg how important it is that the libraries continue to receive full funding. Librarians and library supporters had people fill out and collected the postcards.

And while Tara’s intimidations might have been cause for concern if they hadn’t come from a ten-year-old girl, the motive behind them was simply a love for books and the city’s public libraries. So I’m sure Mayor Bloomberg wasn’t alarmed once he realized this most innocent of intentions.

On her blog, Meade chronicled several of Tara’s postcards. In another postcard draft, Tara wrote that she would organize a school protest:

Image via Screwy Decimal

Meade encouraged Tara to try again:

Well, I thought the idea of a school protest was wonderful, so I was completely in Tara’s corner until the ‘six feet under’ comment. (Which was followed by maniacal laughter on Tara’s part, by the way.) Since she had escalated her message from a vague threat to more of a thinly-veiled threat, Tara scrapped that postcard and filled out yet another one.

After yet another draft that included Tara writing that she “will scream [her] bloody head off and put it on a golden platter” if the library system’s budget is reduced, Tara and Meade settled on a final postcard:

Image via Screwy Decimal

Lucky for Tara and other public library lovers, the New York Public Library system, which was facing a $40 million funding reduction, ultimately was not put on the chopping block. But even after hearing the good news, Tara wasn’t ready to give Mayor Bloomberg a break just yet. After learning her library branch would remain open, Tara said:

“Bring it ON! Let’s see this mayor. If he comes here, I’m gonna give him a piece of my mind.”

Meade added:

“I couldn’t help but laugh, even as I explained that the Mayor and City Council voted to restore most of the library’s funding. (Although, truth be told, I wouldn’t mind someone giving the Mayor a piece of his/her mind for doing this ridiculous budget game every year.)

Thank you, Tara, for defending the New York Public Library, your humor, and your steadfast desire to keep reading. The next time I’m in New York walking up those magnificent marble steps, I’ll think of your postcards, laugh quietly to myself I’m sure, and have a new appreciation for the city’s literary gem.

… to change a lightbulb?

For the answer to this, undoubtedly the pinnacle of Cormac McCarthy–related jokes, visit Your Monkey Called.

Serious bookworms don’t read just on the train. They read anytime they have a minute—sometimes at their peril. The father of a certain Fiction-Writers-Review-editor-who-shall-not-be-named has been known to read the newspaper while driving. And in high school, I knew a girl who read books while walking: down the hallway AND down the sidewalk. I was never quite able to master this skill.

As usual, technology has come to the rescue. Inkstone Software has added the “Walk N’ Read HUD (Heads-Up Display)” feature to their e-reader MegaReader—and it does just what it says on the box. Explains the company’s press release:

Walk n’Read HUD is the first ebook reader which uses the iPhone’s rear facing camera to let you read books and documents on the move while staying aware of hazardous obstacles in your path.

The press release cites a New York Times article on the hazards of “distracted walking,” as well as several specific incidences where texters fell into manholes or fountains, as cautionary tales.

Lest you think Inkstone takes itself too seriously, though, the company offers the following tongue-in-cheek tips:

Inkstone has also released a short guide for people who regularly walk and read, in the hopes that safe reading will become a byword across the nation.

• Before going out on the street, practice reading safely while strolling around your own home. Feel free to hum.
• Keep your phone at a safe distance from your face, to avoid unsightly secondary impact lesions in the event of an unfortunate accident.
• Even while using Walk n’Read HUD, keep your peripheral vision alert at all times. You never know when danger might strike from an angle!
• Walk a little slower than you usually do, to maximize your evasive reaction time.
• Loitering cats, especially black, usually mean trouble. Be prepared.
• Never attempt to pilot a high speed vehicle, or bicycle, while using Walk n’Read HUD.
• Never read while crossing a road, fast flowing river or other unpredictably tricky obstacle.

Anyone out there tried the Walk N’ Read app? Tell us how it worked out in the comments—but please, email us from a safely seated position.

Via.

Each weekday, Dan Wilbur’s blog Better Book Titles features one book, retitled more honestly—and hilariously. Some of my favorites:

Cynical? A little, but many of the Better Book Titles strike right to the heart of a book’s theme. Like this one:

Visit the blog here, and don’t miss the archive.

Rick Moody, via mtkr on Flickr

I recently read a somewhat widely-discussed online takedown of fifteen prominent fiction-writers and poets who, the post’s author proposed, were badly overrated. Specifically, the most overrated in all of American letters. Now, I happened to enjoy this post for what it seemed to be—an enfilade of displeasure opened onto the ranks of contemporary writers who enjoy a larger readership and more critical admiration than do some other underappreciated writers (for instance, the author of the post); but after finishing the piece I scrolled down to have a look at the readers’ comments. Your thinking web-trawler usually avoids the comments thread, as it tends to be depressing on a number of fronts. But as I waded through a few hundred or so of the more recent entries in this unmoderated debate, feeling increasingly agitated and dismayed, I was once again reminded how easy it is in such a forum to dismiss a rival opinion without substantively addressing its merits or faults.

Which is to suggest that if you seek out perspectives on Rick Moody—who did not make this author’s list of unworthies but over the years has certainly had some disparagement hurled his way—perhaps with the intent to make an educated decision about purchasing his new seven-hundred-plus-page epic tome, you’ll likely encounter the usual pastiche of disfavor: stylistic quibbling, with particular attention to the sentences’ tendency toward multiple-dependent-clause sprawl; broader accusations of general excess— too much unbridled self-license; frustration with the frequent formal gymnastics; distaste for that canon-spanning streak of unseemly, Puritanical guilt—the whole range of critical objection that seems to attend discussions of Rick Moody’s work. Some of this criticism will be thoughtful, thorough, and carefully expressed; much of it will be considerably less so. And it’s almost certain you’ll find someone resorting to that stratagem favored by so many among the anti-Rick set, the ad hominem attack. Because it certainly seems like the real problem some critics have had with Rick Moody’s work is a healthy distaste for the man.¹

But why is giving Rick Moody the casual kick to the groin such popular sport? Possibly it has to do with his being such a good target for that go-to mode of contemporary discourse, snark. It’s pretty easy to snark on Rick Moody. In interviews he seems to take himself a bit seriously and isn’t all that hiply self-aware (witness the possibly apocryphal account of him taking part in a panel discussion on contemporary literature with David Foster Wallace circa 2002: on being asked to name the best novels of the past ten years, he graciously cites Infinite Jest… before going on to remark that he supposes if he were feeling particularly generous, he’d have to include Purple America in the group);² he’s of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Northeastern stock; I don’t know that he was inordinately wealthy growing up, but he wasn’t exactly urban poor; he studied at Columbia and Brown; he’s remarkably prolific (nine books in eighteen years; two of the last three topping five-hundred pages), and never seems to let the stretches of doubt and insecurity that tend to plague other writers keep him down for very long; he’s in a band (Wikipedia describes his occupation as follows: Novelist, short story writer, essayist, composer); he resides, at least part of the time, in that bastion of literary irritants, Brooklyn;³ owes at least part of his career’s triumphant ascent to Ang Lee’s decision to adapt his second novel for film; his given name is Hiram…. And so on.

This personal data is available to any opinion-wrangler inclined toward the dominant rhetorical mode, which some days strikes me as just about 99% of all writers working on the Web, which is of course the easiest place to begin any quest for information or opinion. And there’s a real potency inherent in this ubiquitous snark, this tone ready-made for the new millennium’s premium on instantaneous response—ideally via witty riposte—in our age of perpetual information barrage. Because snark makes it easy to express contempt without having to bother with the more annoyingly substantive issues of justifying your contempt for its particular object. And it’s just a whole lot easier to snark on Rick Moody, or to smirk along with some clever commenter’s effortless dismissal than it is to read one of his better books and articulate a compelling case for what it might be about the books that makes the guy so hard to like.

Because even in his pages he can on occasion be difficult to like. Notwithstanding the triumphal tenor these notes will directly assume, I have paused, a handful of times, on looking up from one of those quintessential bad-Moody paragraphs—the self-congratulation oozing from the tail of some joke that wasn’t all that good, the clusterfuck of fancy synonyms, the overlong by several pages Psalmic invocation of light—to reflect that maybe Dale Peck was right. And even if Moody isn’t the worst writer of his generation,⁴ he’s certainly high on the list of those most liable to get on their readers’ nerves. Why is this? Some superficial reasons are suggested above. But the more relevant point, I think, is that a tension exists between the occasional hint of self-satisfaction you detect in these lesser passages of his work, the pleasure he seems to take in his prodigious gifts, and the reality that Moody simply hasn’t written a book that delivers on the promise of his better passages, those frequently astonishing exhibitions of raw compositional verve that compel you to revisit the paragraph’s (or sentence’s, as is often the case with Moody, he of the several-page-spanning end-stop-less incantation) start, or at least flag the page or something. Moody can make you smile, make you retrace a passage multiple times to savor its uncanny delight, can even make you cry, at least he has done so to me. So why can’t he be more consistently great?

In almost all of his books, Moody is frequently masterful, is transparently possessed of a masterly set of skills, exhibits easy mastery of the formidable range of gifts he’s got at his command; and yet he hasn’t once written a masterpiece. Not one book isn’t flawed in its own frustrating way. The Black Veil’s many bursts of intense, lyrical sorrow were potent enough to punch through the Sebald-lite⁵ obfuscation of its ruminative sprawl, but it was still a haphazard, erratically written, strange piece of work that I’m not sure ever quite came together in the way Moody seems to have envisioned. The Diviners, which I found heartbreaking at times, plus remarkable for its database-like compendium of fin de siècle American voices jostling for narrative space, was nonetheless grimly unfunny for far-too-long stretches where Rick seemed really hell-bent on making his joke. Demonology’s title piece is one of the ten best short stories I’ve ever read; and the collection opens with a brutal, poignant paean to a strain of suburban lifesickness that a young Rick Moody might have divined as the unappealing alternative to a successful literary career; but the middle of that book is in places a peat bog of narrative murk and uninspired formal fooling-around (although the somewhat notorious “story” that is actually an album catalog is not nearly as off-putting as its description makes it sound). And The Ice Storm’s recurring bodily-discharge gags soil that novel’s stark time-capsule sadness just like the semen in question soils the garter belt that appears far more often than is either necessary or dramatically plausible. And so on. Rick Moody writes good books, in my view, books I certainly don’t regret having read, books that all have their moments, many of them; but not a masterpiece in the bunch.

Until now.⁶ It’s unlikely that this enthusiastic proclamation will secure notoriety for me in the way a certain prior instance of equally-enthused aspersion sent its source careering into modest renown, but in light of how much negative ink has been splashed the Moody canon’s way (granting, obviously, that he’s also done pretty well for himself, and is not exactly in a position to require or maybe even want a paladin at this stage of his career) I think it’s only fair to acknowledge the man in success: The Four Fingers of Death is a triumph. It’s not just Rick Moody’s finest achievement and a total exhibition of his myriad strengths, it’s the best contemporary novel I’ve read in years.⁷ The final three-hundred pages are a glorious tour de force, just one long, unrelenting roar. And speaking of roars: may I note just how stunned I was to find Moody suddenly, unprecedentedly funny here? So that I was at least nearly roaring, with laughter, mornings on the Nishitetsu train, disturbing and possibly terrifying my native co-passengers on our daily commute; and then at work, where for over a week I contrived to sneak off to our high school’s abandoned “language lab,” where I could read for hours on end and chuckle unselfconsciously without worrying about ruining the other teachers’ days … how did this happen? Did I change? Did he?

I’d read about Moody’s comedic gifts in plenty of back-cover blurbs but found them sort of meagerly accounted for in his actual texts. I was never convinced that Moody quite got how humor worked, some people just don’t—my wife, for instance, has pointed out that although I can appreciate humor, and can even participate in the communal experience of a shared multiphase joke, as a rule I don’t tend to be the initiator of these comic exchanges. There exists an executive gulf between understanding that something is funny and being able to make other people laugh; my wife has kindly put up with this shortcoming in me, but I don’t walk around with blurbs on my back heralding my “comedic gifts.” Moody, while I think possessed of the comic sensibility’s intuitive appreciation for the absurd, never really struck me as having a go-to funny mode, a reliable method of pointing up the sheer senselessness of human suffering that’s at the heart of all humor into writing that could elicit an actual laugh,⁸ so that you could sense that there was something funny in or maybe underneath the material that found its way onto Moody’s copious pages, but the pages themselves often weren’t all that funny. Only now he’s uproariously on point.

How did this happen? I suspect he experienced something like liberation in the madcap sensibility and scope of the project itself, but I really can’t say. The book is dedicated to Kurt Vonnegut, and there’s a note of his zany pessimism in Moody’s technofuturistic decay, but the greater debt is to Thomas Pynchon, he of the anarchic romps across continents in ungoverned upheaval, through war-ravaged states, with his bottomless bag of antic pranks . . . except imagine if Thomas Pynchon didn’t sometimes seem a touch sophomoric, if he didn’t once in a while come off as a guy with an enormous vocabulary, unmatched comic gifts, and an encyclopedic comprehension of the shadow-congregations of Power steadfastly guiding modern history toward some apocalyptic end who also really liked cartoons, and then try to picture the byzantine syntax of your prototypal Pynchonian sentence kitted out with a mid-career Don DeLillo’s bladelike precision of phrase, except now further imagine that a novel conjuring a whole world akin to those found in these authors’ large-order dramas of galloping Capital and a geopolitical order held corporate-hostage racing toward annihilation with credit-cards raised, the institutional insights of Gravity’s Rainbow and Mao II, Lot 49 and White Noise, fictions that confront the large, implacable forces that dictate the careening vectors of modern life—governments, corporations, bureaucracies, militaries, crowds—imagine such a novel were to do all of this well, and yet still in the end reveal that its real allegiance was to its individual people, the ones lost in its chaos and decline, that what it cared about most was their longing and suffering, their joy and their pain, that its myriad individual people could speak, that it might wear the mask of a postmodern dystopian epic but that it was really a book about love, which just shouldn’t be possible to tease out from the chaos of its midnight-in-America carnival on-stage, but somehow it is, the book pulses with it, with love, try to picture all this—and then you’ll start to have an idea of the kind of book Moody’s managed to produce.

But then, too, it’s still really funny! The high-octane hilarity in these pages in place of previous efforts’ sputtering attempts is a good microcosmic illustration of what’s happening here: for whatever reason—right palette? Right canvas? Right time of his life?—where every previous book seemed to promise more than it could ultimately pay off, in The Four Fingers of Death just about everything works.

Consider the following passage:

And he couldn’t think of what to say about whether there was something he wanted, so he said he wanted Coca-Cola, which was the most recognized and widely circulated American product, and he had read somewhere that the word was the most commonly understood English-language word, after the word okay, and so maybe Coca-Cola, whatever that was, would make him feel okay, and so he sat in the car, with his hand on Noelle’s shoulder, awaiting his Coca-Cola, and she was so good to let him keep his hand there, as he looked out the window at the desperate and slovenly humans coming and going at the not very convenient convenience store, placating their addictions to small things, that Morton wept, because if he tried to mate with Noelle, the hole in him would spill over across the species boundary, because love was the hole as well as the thing that repaired the hole.

Image Credit: Flickr

A word regarding the notoriously well-embellished language: One critic,⁹ in expressing his displeasure with Moody’s relentless impulse toward the maximalistic,¹⁰ citing a particularly verbose indignation from the latest book, takes Moody to task for his commission of the sort of mistake they teach you how to avoid in “Comp 101.”

Image Credit: Flickr

Now, having taught a few sections of Comp 101 myself, or writing courses roughly akin, I am willing to concede that this is the sort of thing some of us teach. I have encouraged students, as much as possible, to convey with clarity and concision exactly what they think they want to say, and to pare away excess verbiage wherever they can. But it’s worth bearing in mind what sort of composition we’re talking about in your typical section of “Comp 101”; my instruction tends to stop shy of the 725-page sprawling post-modern opus, because with two or three classes a week and, say, eighteen weeks in a semester, you aren’t likely to have the time. You can teach just about anyone literate—maybe even a consciousness-awakened chimpanzee—how to construct an argument over three-to-five pages. But I’m not sure how much Thomas Pynchon, for example, might have benefited from bi-weekly sessions wherein an adjunct professor offered useful tips on how to rein in those pesky run-on sentences, take it easy on the rumbling metaphors, or, perhaps more broadly, try to focus a little more clearly on his theme.

This “Comp 101” objection struck me as a variety of fruit gone bad, the particularly acetic variety that says “There are rules, and I have to follow the rules: this man is breaking the rules and I can prove it!” Maybe Moody’s apparent quest to pack as much high-grade twenty-first-century English between his book’s covers¹¹ isn’t for everyone, but, even granting that, yes, the occasional sentence does slip up, I for one found the prose a kind of resistless thrill, and actually started worrying, as I moved into the high-five-hundreds, page-wise, about where I’d find substitute sentences to feed the linguistic brain-centers once Death’s were all gone.

You may have heard snippets of data regarding aspects of the book’s structure, as well as hints about its story and place. It is true that our story begins in an unpleasant but likely enough near-future in which the sun sets over the western states of the former global hegemon, now in the late stages of serious economic decline and imperial decay; and it is true that The Four Fingers of Death is actually the title of a novel written within the novel you are reading circa 2011 by a citizen of this blighted future American Southwest, a writer of minimalist fictions with a fatally lung-afflicted wife who’s decided for a number of perhaps not entirely well-established reasons (the rickety preface is by far the novel’s weakest bit, though you’ll just have to trust me when I swear that it does get better, and, more importantly, when looking back on the whole novel you see how the afterword it dovetails with to close the metafictional frame is necessary and effective, or at least makes a certain degree of sense) to try his hand at novelizing the screenplay of an identically titled pulp horror film;¹³ and then it’s also true that much of the first half of this textual artifact, the embedded Four Fingers of Death, takes place on Mars, and that a certain microbiotic strain encountered on that red planet acts as a prime agent of subsequent narrative motion.

I should also clear up any confusion with respect to the title, i.e., in case you were wondering, it is not an embarrassingly bad metaphorical gesture on Moody’s part, but is a reference to a critical development in the reality of the book-within-the-book, viz., a severed human arm, diseased and with only four fingers to its hand; but I refuse to say a word more about the more or less preposterous—in this word’s most glorious sense—rampaging chimpanzee that in the novel-within-the-novel passes for plot, because to reveal anything is to potentially undermine the impact of any number of ludicrous comic set pieces.

Image Credit: Flickr

Further Links and Resources

Still concerned about any lingering bad blood between Peck and Moody? This video should make you feel better:

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Endnotes

1. As just one for-instance I seem to recall an occasion when a critic, by way of a mostly-unrelated tangent, remarked that a philosophical topic in something Moody wrote had been thoroughly investigated by far more formidable thinkers than Rick Moody: a rather thorough dismissal, when you think about it, not just of Moody’s writing but of his brain—only which thinkers, in particular, did this critic have in mind? Richard Wagner? William James? Bertrand Russel? Albert Einstein? Jesus Christ? And what were his criteria when comparing these allegedly discrepant levels of cognitive strength? Was his contention for something empirical, like a measurably lower Intelligent Quotient than these eminences on Rick Moody’s part? How did he obtain his information, assuming he had information? What could this brisk dismissal have actually meant? Who knows? But the insidious thing about this method of rhetorical attack is how well it can work. For years I approached Rick Moody (not Rick Moody the man or even strictly the books of the man, but the notion of Moody, Moody the literary idea) with some hesitation or reserve; after all, here was a preeningly ambitious, vainglorious young author operating with the absolute conviction of his first-rate authorial talent who apparently hadn’t been informed that he lacked the prerequisite cognitive firepower, at least this was the perspective I’d somehow managed to absorb from the one glib dismissal without once really stopping to consider what it might—or even could—actually mean.

2.The clip I’d need to watch to verify that this actually happened has apparently been taken down, but I really hope it did.

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3.N.b.: I love Brooklyn, and if I can afford it will almost certainly look for an apartment therein whenever I decide to come back from Japan; there are furthermore plenty of fantastic writers and artists of all sorts populating that proud antithesis to Manhattan’s general decline; I’m just noting as plenty of other folks have that it’s also home to a lot of self-satisfaction and artisanal cheese.

4. Generation being a sort of permeable quadrant, though, no? Who, exactly, gets included? Certainly I’ve encountered passages in contemporary novels that were a great deal less successful than many of the most book-chuck-prompting moments in the worst passages of Moody’s worst book (which I actually don’t think I could name; despite their flaws, I do like aspects of all of them).

5. i.e., W. G. Sebald, whom one imagines Moody had been reading a bit of around the time he started working on his “Memoir with Digressions.”

6. Who’s not familiar with the Rick Moody trademark italics? Though it’s worth noting that he’s really toned it down for this outing, and the few instances where he does resort to his old emphatic tricks tend, for the most part, to work.

7. Okay: I read the new Franzen between penning this essay and sitting down to revise it, and while the assessment of Death still holds, I should probably add that Freedom is a comparable behemoth; but who says two books can’t wear the same crown?

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8. One possible exception being the early work’s rampant italicization, but that starts to lose its edge once you recognize it’s coming.

9. Sam Sacks of the Wall Street Journal, in review of Moody’s book called “Writing as Recycling”

10. And, to be fair, be warned in advance that precious little in the way of what might potentially be expressed, here, or pretty much anywhere in the Moody oeuvre, but especially here, runs a real risk of going under-expressed; Moody seems insatiable in his need for fresh expression, he’s an enthusiastic user of the so-called “elegant variation” (a term that has been unfairly relegated to the deprecatory side of the barricade—and perhaps the inexperienced writer is well-advised to stick to comfortable lexical territory so as to avoid the boneheaded solecisms of ignorance, but no less a figure than good old Don DeLillo is on-record as saying “there’s always another word”): if a substitutable word exists, he’s out to find and deploy it, so that I do sometimes wonder if he hasn’t either memorized large swathes of Roget’s or else isn’t in a state of perpetual consultation, while drafting.

11. Adorned with, in what is becoming something of a Moody tradition, the hardcover edition’s hideously unappealing cover art; does anyone have an explanation for the huge aesthetic gulf between hardcover and paperback editions? Isn’t the purpose of this graphic representation to allure browsers who might then be persuaded by the printed matter between the covers to go ahead and purchase the book?¹²)

12. Though, again, I haven’t exactly been getting calls from Moody’s people, asking for marketing tips.

13. The screenplay is actually a remake of a film called The Crawling Hand that winningly exists in both our and Death’s world. I’m told you can watch this gem on Hulu, but Hulu access has been restricted in the Land of the &c.
*Editor’s Note: If you do live in the land of Hulu, and have a spare hour and 28 minutes, watch The Crawling Hand here.

14. Believer, 2006.

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]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/essays/what%e2%80%99s-the-deal-with-rick-moody/feed 6 http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/this-is-where-i-leave-you-by-jonathan-tropper http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/this-is-where-i-leave-you-by-jonathan-tropper#comments Thu, 26 Aug 2010 01:48:43 +0000 Lee Goldberg http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=11122 This is Where I Leave You (paperback: Plume, July 2010), mines the hilarity from dysfunction in a belated coming-of-age story. After patriarch Mort Foxman passes away, the Foxman clan is forced to sit through what might be the craziest shiva of all time. ]]> In his latest novel, This is Where I Leave You (paperback: Plume, July 2010), Jonathan Tropper mines the hilarity from dysfunction in a belated coming-of-age story.

After patriarch Mort Foxman passes away, the Foxman clan is forced to sit through what might be the craziest shiva of all time. Narrating this mess of mourning is Judd Foxman, a sad sack with a great comic voice. Just before his father’s death, Judd came home with a birthday cake for his wife, only to find her “lying spread-eagle on the bed, with some guy’s wide, doughy ass hovering above her.” The fact that “some guy” is Judd’s radio-shock-jock boss doesn’t stop Judd from attacking with “a chocolate-strawberry cheesecake with thirty-three burning candles.”

This forces his marriage to end “the way things do: with paramedics and cheesecake.”

Alone and resentful, newly single Judd returns to his childhood home in Knob’s End, New York. Even though his father was not religious, Mort’s dying wish was that his family would reunite to sit shiva for a full week. This family includes: Inappropriate Mom, a bestselling author on child rearing, who favors too-revealing blouses; Phillip, the baby of the family, who dates a cougar therapist; Wendy, the oldest sister, who’s raising three kids in a sexless marriage; and Paul, the oldest brother, who lost his college baseball scholarship after a Rottweiler incident. Presiding over the shiva is family friend Boner, a young rabbi trying to make Judaism cool by wearing Armani suits and diamond studs.

Over the course of the shiva, the brothers give each other black eyes, Judd realizes his adulterous wife is pregnant, and his mother begins an affair with the woman who lives across the street. Some twists and gags are a bit far-fetched—smoking a joint in temple, the brothers cause the sprinklers to turn on—and the author’s need for each character to reach a meaningful epiphany feels forced. But overall, this novel and its narrator’s voice are so smart and funny, they make its flaws seem negligible.

Jonathan Tropper

In one of Tropper’s finest (and most brutal) passages, Judd slams the parade of shiva callers coming through the doors:

“These middle-aged women in the early stages of disrepair…genetics help some more than others, but they are all like melting ice cream bars, slowly sliding down the stick as they come apart.”

Judd’s observations might seem cruel, but they are also startlingly specific, keenly true.

The novel’s real triumph is in transcending mere laugh-out-loud moments with the poignancy of Judd’s descriptions. Seeing (and mocking) others, he can’t help but examine himself. He grapples with questions of his own mortality and options: what should he do next? He loved his wife and was good to her, but still their marriage disintegrated. Like the rest of the Foxman clan, he’s not where he thought or hoped he would be as middle age approaches. But by the book’s end, Judd realizes that “anything can happen,” that the future isn’t mapped out. That it wouldn’t be interesting if it were. And if there’s an epiphany worth believing in, it’s Judd’s: Even (and especially) after a swinging bout of dysfunction, even if you can’t stand the sight of your family, deep down you know, you can always go home.

Further Resources

- Via the New York Times, read an excerpt from This is Where I Leave You.

- Listen to today’s interview (8-25-2010) with Jonathan Tropper on WAMC.

- In this Penguin video, Tropper introduces his latest novel and discusses the challenge of “setting an entire novel in the framework of seven days”:

- Watch and read an interview and Q&A with Tropper at Bookbrowse. And here’s a feature/interview with Tropper in TimeOut New York.

- Over drinks at Brooklyn Public House, Asylum editor Anthony Layser talks with Tropper about This Is Where I Leave You. Does Tropper have a Matthew McConaughey clause protecting his book from sappy romantic comedy adaptations? Is his description of getting kicked in the balls the best of its literary kind? Watch and learn…

- Find out more about Tropper’s other books on his website: How to Talk to a Widower, Everything Changes, The Book of Joe, and Plan B.

- Browse excerpts from The Book of Joe on Random House’s website.

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/this-is-where-i-leave-you-by-jonathan-tropper/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/in-defense-of-comic-novels-part-ii http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/in-defense-of-comic-novels-part-ii#comments Mon, 29 Mar 2010 05:53:58 +0000 Celeste Ng http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=7549

Lipsyte cites Wells Tower as one writer who isn't afraid to make readers laugh

Recently we discussed a Times article about why comic novels often get overlooked when it comes to literary awards. Over at BlackBook, author and Columbia professor Sam Lipsyte adds his thoughts on the status of funny fiction today:

Do you feel that literary fiction is afraid to make people laugh these days?

I think there’s a worry that if it’s funny then perhaps there’s something slight about it. That it’s not as important as a deeply researched, earnest, historical novel, or a kind of humorless tale of contemporary life. I think there possibly was a moment in the ‘60s and ‘70s when the serious books tended to be pretty funny. I don’t know if that’s as true these days. [...]

Who do you think is still doing that?

Well, Padgett Powell is still doing it, Barry Hannah is still doing it. Ben Marcus can be hilarious. Gary Lutz, Deb Olin Unferth. These are all people that are really dead serious and dead funny, and I’m interested in that as well. Wells Tower. I think it’s being done, but it’s not as front and center, not as widely read as it used to be, fiction that does that sort of thing. Maybe it’s also linked to readerships, how they’ve changed over the years. Or maybe it all got eaten up by Harry Potter and Twilight. I think, more and more, that’s what adults read now. All the people we’ve talked about are people who write hilarious, heartwrenching, and often horrific fiction, and they wrote for grown-ups. Maybe there aren’t enough grownups who want to read that sort of thing anymore.

Read the full interview, including Lipsyte’s thoughts on getting an arts education, reality TV, and his latest novel, The Ask, here. Via TEV.

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/in-defense-of-comic-novels-part-ii/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/in-defense-of-comic-novels http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/in-defense-of-comic-novels#comments Wed, 24 Mar 2010 03:58:31 +0000 Celeste Ng http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=7521 In the art world, comedy seldom gets its dues: if it’s funny, many assume, it can’t also be “real” art. At the Oscars a couple of years back, Will Ferrell, Jack Black, and John C. Reilly lamented the plight of “A Comedian at the Oscars”: “the saddest man of all / Your movies may make millions, but your name they’ll never call.”

Something similar happens in literature, Erica Wagner points out in the UK’s Times:

Comic novels — let’s call them terrific novels that happen to be funny — tend to fall through the cracks, especially where prizes are concerned. Publishers have to choose which books from their list to submit for a prize such as the Orange: is a book that makes a reader laugh really worthy of a prize? Or is it just, well, not serious enough?

But Wagner points out that being funny and being good are not mutually exclusive:

The thing about being funny is that it’s really hard. It’s a lot harder than being serious. It requires wit, grace, agility, sensitivity; it requires knowing how hard to push and when to stop on a dime. The reason the classic comic novels — such as Lucky Jim, or Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, or Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, or Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle — stand the test of time is not because they are great comic novels: it’s because they are great novels, full stop. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22: comic novel or serious novel? Doesn’t matter. Brilliant novel.

To support her case, Wagner lists her top 10 comic novels, including Deaf Sentence by David Lodge and Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (”Yes, it’s about the Holocaust. But it’s really funny, too.”)

Are you convinced? And do you ever write funny, or do you stick to the serious route?

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