Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson

"Wait a minute--this snow crash thing, is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?" Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?"

Snow Crash is not a good book. It somehow made it onto the Time Top 100 novels list, it’s widely considered one of the best of the science fiction genre, but it’s so full of missteps, poorly thought out ideas, and convoluted writing that I’m at a loss to explain why.

First, the good: Snow Crash, in the early going, serves as a pretty funny satire of cyberpunk in the style of William Gibson. It follows a samurai pizza delivery guy, Hiro Protagonist (haha), who’s a slacker in the real world but a hero in the “Metaverse”, a virtual world that seems Stephenson’s answer to Gibson’s Sprawl. It’s silly, but for the first half of the book, the silliness at least seems intentional. However, when the titular “snow crash”, a drug that is chemical, physical, and digital, is introduced, the book strives for a more serious tone that fits it very poorly.

Introducing elements of linguistics, Christianity, and microbiology through reams and reams of dialog-based exposition, Stephenson lays out the science behind the ideas which is ultimately far too far-fetched (and, for anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of Christianity, factually inaccurate) for me to buy into. It reads like Stephenson had a lot of ideas, but rather than organically integrate them into the narrative, they are shared in endless dialogs between Hiro and a computerized librarian. I was also fairly skeeved by the sexualization of the 15 year old co-protagonist, Y.T., which includes a fairly explicit maybe not-quite-consensual sex scene.

On a more personal note, I was somewhat offended by Stephenson’s dismissal of Christianity. The following exchange, between Hiro and Juanita, a self-described devout Catholic, is so condescending that it makes my condescending organ ache:

"Do you believe in Jesus?"

"Definitely, but not in the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus.", said Juanita.

"How can you be a Christian without believing it?"

"I would say, how can you be a Christian with it? Anybody who takes the time to study the gospels can see that the bodily resurrection is a myth that was tacked onto a real story several years after it was written. It's so National Enquirer-esque, don't you think?"

Snow Crash climaxes with a battle between two characters that are introduced in the last 70 pages of the novel, but it somehow seemed fitting: after a book full of characters with no real humanity, it's appropriate that the ending should feel like it doesn’t mean much at all.

Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence

He was brooding now, staring out over the country from under sullen brows. The little, interesting diversity of shapes had vanished from the scene; all that remained was a vast, dark matrix of sorrow and tragedy, the same in all the houses and the river-flats and the people and the birds; they were only shapen differently. And now that the forms seemed to have metled away, there remained the mass from which all the landscape was composed, a dark mass of struggle and pain. The factory, the girls, his mother, the large, uplifted church, the thicket of the town, merged into one atmosphere--dark, brooding, and sorrowful, every bit.

Paul Morel loves his mother. Saddled with a violent, unhappy marriage to an uncouth coal-miner, she dotes on her son, with whom she forms a tight friendship. As Paul grows to become handsome and ambitious, he becomes attached to two different girls, which strains his relationship with his mother. The grammatical ambiguity of the title is no accident; at times Paul seems more like a boyfriend to his mother than a son, and more a son to his girlfriends than a lover. It is difficult, Paul shows us, to inhabit these social roles at the same time, which threaten to cleave you into parts and prevent you from devoting all of your being to anyone, even yourself.

Sons and Lovers hits many of the same settings and themes as Lady Chatterley's Lover, but it is also hugely different. The latter book is a paean to the physical act of love, which frees Constance Chatterley into herself, but sex in Sons and Lovers is (accurately, I might add) a messy, confusing affair. Paul resists giving himself physically to his lover, Miriam, until very late in the book, and it is not an unqualified success:

And afterwards he loved her--loved her to the last fibre of her being. He loved her. But he wanted, somehow, to cry. There was something he could not bear for her sake. He stayed with her till quite late at night. As he rode home he felt that he was finally initiated. He was a youth no longer. But why had he the dull pain in his soul? Why did the thought of death, the after-life, seem so sweet and consoling?

I thought that Lady Chatterley's Lover seemed strangely void of the Christian mysticism that Lawrence is known for. Sons and Lovers has it in spades, and though I'm sure others have taken to forming a precise catechism of Lawrence's religious philosophy, I must admit that such an endeavor is beyond me. There is the "sweet and consoling" after-life, and the paradoxical life that comes with being still (unlike Lady Chatterley!), and much to do with images of size and importance:

All the while the peewits were screaming in the field. When he came to, he wondered what was near his eyes, curving and strong with life in the dark, and what voice it was speaking. Then he realised it was the grass, and the peewit was calling. The warmth was Clara's breathing heaving. He lifted his head, and looked into her eyes. They were dark and shining and strange, life wild at the source staring into his life, stranger to him, yet meeting him; and he put his face down on her throat, afraid. What was she? A strong, strange, wild life, that breathed with his in the darkness through this hour. It was all so much bigger than thamselves that hewas hushed. They had met, and included in their meeting the thrust of the manifold grass stems, the cry of the peewit, the wheel of the stars.

But mostly I enjoyed reading Sons and Lovers more than Lady Chatterley because it is a novel more in tune with its protagonist's psychology, more interested in human detail. Lady Chatterley's reputation as pornographic, I feel, may have as much to do with its positivity about sex as its graphicality. Most of us, I think, simply have never felt as unabashedly pure and overjoyed about human intimacy as Connie does--though if you feel otherwise, I am quite happy for you. I feel much more in tune with the confused, needy, insolent Paul, who says things like this:

"You know," he said, with an effort, "if one person loves, the other does."

"Ah!" she answered. "Like mother said to me when I was little, 'Love begets love.'"

"Yes, something like that, I think it must be."

"I hope so, because, if it were not, love might be a very terrible thing," she said.

"Yes, but it is--at least with most people," he answered.

Love is a terrible thing, as Paul will find out, at least terrible in capability. Paul is never able to give himself wholly to either Miriam or Clara because the prospect is too frightening; he uses words like "freedom" but the subtext is of diminishing, of vanishing into the other, which is both appealing and horrifying.

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

One question after this only remained undecided between them; one difficulty only was to be overcome. They were brought together by mutual affection, with the warmest approbation of their real friends; their intimate knowledge of each other seemed to make their happiness certain, and they only wanted something to live upon... they were neither of them quite enough in love to think that three hundred and fifty pounds a year would supply them with the comforts of life.

(Spoiler alert!) Marianne Dashwood is all feeling, and quite hot-headed; her sister Elinor is reasonable, pragmatic and cool. Sense and Sensibility is about the difficulty of both of them to procure a husband with either approach, as Marianne allows herself to be suckered into a passionate relationship with a cad and Elinor must suffer silently from the knowledge that her intended is secretly engaged to someone else. The Dashwoods are, in fact, so much the obvious precursors of the Schlegel sisters from Howards End that it makes me retroactively enjoy the latter book a little less.

That is my first observation about Sense and Sensibility. The second is this: Sense and Sensibility is, of the four Austen novels I've read, the strongest condemnation of the connection between marriage and money among them. No one wants to see Elizabeth Bennet marry Mr. Collins just for the stability, but it's awfully convenient that Mr. Darcy just happens to be a bazillionaire. And it is hard to condemn her friend Charlotte, who has few of Elizabeth's charms, for marrying Mr. Collins in a fit of practicality.

In Sense and Sensibility, however, everyone who marries for love is a saint and everyone who marries for money is a scoundrel. Marianne's tempestuous dalliance with Willoughby finally ends when he marries an heiress. Edward Ferrars, whom Elinor loves, is disowned by his wealthy family for his proposed marriage to Lucy Steele, and his inheritance promised to his brother Robert, who first appears in the novel buying a toothpick-case:

At last the affair was decided. The ivory, the gold, and the pearls, all received their appointment; and the gentleman having named the last day on which his existence could be continued without the possession of the tooth-pick case, drew on his gloves with leisurely care, and bestowing another glance on the Miss Dashwoods, but such a one as seemed rather to demand than express admiration, walked off with a happy air of real conceit and affected indifference.

I dare you to find a better (and funnier) sentence that so perfectly captures the shallowness and the selfishness of the supremely wealthy.

There are no Charlottes in this book. Even Elinor's practicality can't prevent her from marrying Edward when his engagement falls apart, though she understands perfectly the difficult road ahead of her. That Edward is provided with a living as a priest is fortunate, but it needn't have happened, and it's significant that Elinor, unlike Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, or Anne Elliot, takes a real risk for love.

Yet Sense and Sensibility is not quite the equal of those books. The characters are weaker (you can say almost nothing about Edward Ferrars except that he's a better man than his brother and Elinor loves him) and the plot forced, as when Austen foists a sudden illness on Marianne to bring Willoughby back into the picture. I hope for better from Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

"What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for."

"Anything worth living for," said Nately, "is worth dying for."

"And everything worth dying for," answered the sacrilegious old man, "is certainly worth living for."

When Joseph Heller was asked, late in life, why he had never written another book as good as Catch-22, he responded, “Who has?” Cocky, perhaps, but not unjustified—Catch-22 is certainly one of the densest, funniest, most rewarding books I’ve ever read.

The plot ostensibly follows Yossarian, a bombardier captain in the waning days of World War II, who wants nothing more to be sent home. He first tries completing the required missions, but his captain keeps raising the number. He carries on, faking sickness, faux insanity, and even talking to his largely inept or uncaring superiors, but nothing works—he is caught in a catch 22, a term that is never directly defined in the novel, but which has passed into popular usage as an impossible situation, and is exemplified throughout the novel, both explicitly and more subtly. Defining the novel as Yossarian’s story is misleading though, as any first-time reader will quickly learn.

Structurally--and I’m a serious geek for structure--it’s right up there with Ulysses and As I Lay Dying, completely unique and sometimes bewildering in its presentation. Chapters jump from person to person and place to place, sometimes in mid-scene. The novel is constantly folding in on itself, jumping through timelines, shifting perspectives, and recasting previous events as the backstories and motivations of supporting characters become more fully fleshed out. There’s really no way to explain how all this works; it just does. It brings to mind the film technique of showing a character, say, looking into a mirror, and when the camera pulls back, the character’s face is now on a photograph being held by someone else. It’s remarkably effective, both comedically and dramatically, throughout Catch-22, and I’m fairly certain I’ve never seen another novel use it. Nothing is unimportant or frivolous—even the most insignificant character arc pays off as the story goes on. As the disparate strings were woven together, it was honestly pretty amazing.

Catch-22 has a reputation as a funny book, and it definitely is, for much of its bulk, laugh out loud funny. Even the pervasive humor, however, works toward the novel’s unexpected final third, where everything comes together in a way that’s both nightmarish and bleakly (VERY bleakly) hilarious. It’s a scathing satire not just on the military or the long-term futility of war, but on the very core American values. Nothing escapes unscathed—God, country, capitalism, government—but the satire isn't without buried affection, and the ending is almost joyful, relative to the very bad things leading to it.

Still, this is a challenging book. Anyone expecting a comic novel to be an easy read will probably be put off fairly quickly—just check out some of the scathing Amazon reviews for proof—but this is serious literature covered in a thin candy shell, and it deserves to read that way. It’s almost a Catch-22 itself.

Othello by William Shakespeare

IAGO: ...Divinity of hell! When devils will the blackest sins put on,
They do suggest at first with heavenly shows
As I do now. For whiles this honest fool
Plies Desdemona to repair his fortunes
And she for him pleads strongly to the Moor,
I'll pour this pestilence into his ear:
That she repeals him for her body's lust,
And by how much she strives to do him good,
She shall undo her credit with the Moor.
So I will turn her virtue into pitch,
And out of her own goodness make the net
That shall enmesh them all.

As is sometimes true in Shakespeare, Othello is not really the main character of his title tragedy. The tragedy, to be sure, is his, but we are never so close to him as we are to Iago, who is nearly as accomplished a soliloquist as Hamlet, and who dominates the play. Othello himself is, as A. C. Bradley points out, "the most romantic figure among Shakespeare's heroes" and becomes something like a ruined fairytale, distantly horrific, while we hew more closely to his destroyer. This is, I think, the genius stroke of Othello: Nowhere else in Shakespeare, even in Macbeth, are we so close to evil.

The guiding sentiment of the play is jealousy. It is not, at first, Othello's; he is, as he says at the end, "not easily jealous." But Iago harbors a deep jealousy for Cassio, Othello's newly chosen lieutenant, and it is this jealousy which he manages to push, like a disease-carrier or an accomplished politician, on to Othello. Conventional wisdom holds that Iago has no motivation for his jealousy, but as I read it, Iago has several, including the fact that Othello passed over Iago for Cassio's position and that Iago has suspected Cassio of sleeping with his wife, Emilia. At one point, Iago makes this startling statement:

If Cassio do remain
He hath a daily beauty in his life
That makes me ugly...

I find this fascinating--Iago, who has chosen evil as his good and constantly touts the power of his will, retains a deeply held jealousy for those who make the opposite choice.

The creature that Iago reduces Othello to is like Iago in the seething bitterness of its envy, but in its shallowness and foolishness it resembles also Iago's companion Roderigo, who is deeply in love with Othello's wife, Desdemona. There is some irony to the spectacle of Othello, the romantic warrior-prince, reduced to insanity at the idea that his wife is not his completely:

I had rather be a toad
And live upon the vapour of a dungeon
Than keep a corner in the thing I love
For others' uses.

What is most frightening about Othello is that Othello--just, valiant, accomplished, romantic--is turned into a weapon against himself--

No, my heart is turned to stone. I strike it and it hurts my hand.

--not through any flaw of his own, but because he is overpowered by a stronger will. In any other play, Othello should have towered over every other character, but his misjudging of Iago extends not only to his dishonesty but also his immense intelligence and power. I would venture to say that Iago is the strongest of all personalities in Shakespeare, and that no one but he could have left behind the ruin that he does, extending even to himself. He is like the witches of Macbeth, but more frightening because he is more human.

A Man Could Stand Up-- by Ford Madox Ford

Coming into the square was like being suddenly dead, it was so silent and so still to one so lately jostled by the innumerable crowd and deafened by unceasing shouts. The shouting had continued for so long that it had assumed the appearance of being a solid and unvarying thing, like life. So the silence appeared like Death; and now she had death in her heart. She was going to confront a madman in a stripped house. And the empty house stood in an empty square all of whose houses were so eighteenth-century and silver grey and rigid and serene that they ought all to be empty too and contain dead, mad men. And was this the errand? For to-day when all the world was mad with joy? To become bear-ward to a man who had got rid of all his furniture and did not know the porter--mad without joy!

Three books and over 500 pages into the Parade's End (1 2) novels, we get out first glimpse of real combat. For Christopher Tietjens, it has been a steady spiral to the bottom, from a high-ranking government position to quartermaster to the front lines, rejected at each step of the way because those around him cannot bear his stoic goodness, which is increasingly an anachronism. At the front, Tietjens is mentally unraveling:

It was like being a dwarf at a conversation, a conflict--of mastodons. There was so much noise it seemed to grow dark. It was a mental darkness. You could not think. A Dark Age! The earth moved.

Ford's dexterity as a novelist continues to amaze me. There is so much packed in here--the literal darkness of the world, which is at that moment being bombed, the "mental darkness" which is also the darkness, like the Dark Age, of human civilization. The cunning em-dash, which somehow expresses perfectly the stumbling gait of Tietjens' (once nimble) mind. The absurd matter-of-fact statement, "The earth moved."

Tietjens' middle portion is bookended by two sections dominated by his unspoken love object, Valentine Wannop, on Armistice Day. Valentine's excitement over the end of the war is tempered by the return of Tietjens, whom she loves, but has reportedly gone mad:

What was the coming together that was offered her? Nothing, on the face of it, but being dragged again into that man's intolerable worries as unfortunate machinists are dragged into wheels by belts -- and all the flesh torn off their bones! Upon her word that had been her first thought. She was afraid, afraid, afraid! She suddenly appreciated the advantages of nunlike seclusion. Besides she wanted to be bashing policemen with bladders in celebration of Eleven Eleven!

What is it, I found myself wondering, that makes the Tietjens and Valentine of A Man Could Stand Up-- different from those of Some Do Not...? I think we are rightly meant to respect their decision not to become lovers in that first novel, a decision which they reverse toward the end of this book. It is partly excused, I think, by the sense that Sylvia has abandoned Tietjens (though this is not explicit, her absence is peculiar). And also that both have simply earned their rest and companionship; Tietjens for his suffering, and Valentine for her willingness to become Tietjens' nursemaid if he turns out to truly be mad. (As John Dowell does for Nancy Rufford in The Good Soldier.)

Happily, this is not the case. I am struck by the strange optimism of A Man Could Stand Up--. There is the strong suggestion that Tietjens and Valentine come out on the other side of WWI better than they entered; not that something irrevocable has been lost or the world has been disfigured, as Modernist literature commonly regards the war, but that life can be instead rebuilt. I think Ford draws a sharp line between social consequences and personal ones, and notes that the couple's happiness can really only be found apart from the culture of war and spiritual emptiness:

A man could now stand up on a hill, so he and she could surely get into some hole together!

This is the third of the four Parade's End novels; I know that the fourth is a horse of a different color. A Man Could Stand Up-- carries a sense of closure, and so I feel comfortable calling it--gasp--a "happy ending."

Translation is like sex.

...or at least, that's what Julian Barnes seems to be implying in this article about the difficulties of translating Madame Bovary. Witness:

1.) If you go to the website of the restaurant L’Huîtrière (3, rue des Chats Bossus, Lille) and click on ‘translate’, the zealous automaton you have stirred up will instantly render everything into English, including the address. And it comes out as ‘3 street cats humped’. Translation is clearly too important a task to be left to machines.

2.) Then we make a key decision: should this translator be ancient or modern? Flaubert’s contemporary, or ours? After a little thought, we might plump for an Englishwoman of Flaubert’s time, whose prose would inevitably be free of anachronism or other style-jarringness. And if she was of the time, then might we not reasonably imagine the author helping her? Let’s push it further: the translator not only knows the author, but lives in his house, able to observe his spoken as well as his written French. They might work side by side on the text for as long as it takes. And now let’s push it to the limit: the female English translator might become the Frenchman’s lover – they always say that the best way to learn a language is through pillow talk.

3.) Madame Bovary is many things – a perfect piece of fictional machinery, the pinnacle of realism, the slaughterer of Romanticism, a complex study of failure – but it is also the first great shopping and fucking novel.

4.) When my novel Flaubert’s Parrot was being translated into German, my editor in Zurich modestly suggested some additional flourishes: for instance, a pun on Flaubert as a ‘flea-bear’, and a German slang phrase for masturbation which literally means ‘to shake from the palm tree’. Since Flaubert, at this point of my novel, was being masturbated in Egypt, this felt like a happy improvement on the English text.

What's the connection? My guess: Translating literature is like sex because two writers come together to create one new work, and you can never tell how ugly (or not) it's going to turn out.

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

Very often, as his hay-knife crunched down among the sweet-smelling grassy stems, he would survey mankind and say to himself: "Here and everywhere be folk dying before their time like frosted leaves, though wanted by their families, the country, and the world: while I, an outcast, an encumberer of the ground, wanted by nobody, and despised by all, live on against my will!"

Spoiler alert!

The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a scene of remarkable cruelty: Michael Henchard, drunk on rum, sells his wife and daughter at a county fair. The book immediately fast-forwards eighteen years to the point at which Henchard, still distraught at his actions, has become a profitable businessman and mayor. When his wife and daughter return to find him, it presents him with, he hopes, an opportunity for redemption.

As it happens, at that same moment Henchard has made a purchase of bad grain (ohmygod there's so much in this book about grain) which prompts this exchange:

"But what are you going to do to repay us for the past?" inquired the man who had before spoken, and who seemed to be a baker or miller. "Will you replace the grown flour we've still got by sound grain?"

Henchard's face had become still more stern at these interruptions, and he drank from his tumbler of water as if to calm himself or gain time. Instead of vouchsafing a direct reply, he stiffly observed--

"If anybody will tell me how to turn grown wheat into wholesome wheat I'll take it back with pleasure. But it can't be done."

This is a bit on the nose for me, but it sets up the B-story, in which Henchard hires a young Scotsman named Donald Farfrae to run his grain business. Farfrae, as it happens, has invented a process that turns "grown wheat into wholesome wheat" and so offers Henchard a different kind of redemption.

But redemption is elusive. Henchard's wife soon dies, and leaves him with his daughter, who does not know she is Henchard's offspring. To make matters worse, his wife leaves him a letter that confesses she's not actually his, but that their daughter died in infancy and she named her next daughter after the first. Feeling cheated, he spurns her at the same time that his reliance on Farfrae turns to jealousy, and they become bitter rivals.

Casterbridge is a story about a man who works tirelessly to redeem himself, but cannot get out of his own way. As his place in society declines, he blames bad luck and the machinations of Farfrae, but cannot see that his pettiness, viciousness, and pride are what unravel his successes, just as they severed his marriage. After the sale he imposes a 21-year tee-totaling sentence on himself, but alcohol is not to blame for his powerful vices.

I did not find Casterbridge to be a success on the order of Far From the Madding Crowd (though the jacket erroneously calls it his "first masterpiece"). The prose is comparatively muted, and without the high-toned whimsicality of Crowd it is difficult to ignore how over-plotted it is. But it had me by the end, where Henchard, destitute, estranged from his "daughter" Elizabeth-Jane (who has married Farfrae!), has died and left this as a will:

MICHAEL HENCHARD'S WILL

"That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me.
"& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground.
"& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
"& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
"& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
"& that no flours be planted on my grave.
"& that no man remember me.
"To this I put my name.

Jesus.

A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel

Two things I don’t care for much are memoirs and audiobooks. The people that read the audiobooks either speak too slowly or get the voices all wrong. With memoirs, it’s always the doom and gloom factor that gets me—someone was abused or has some problem with addiction or—you get the point, and in the end you can’t put it down and know it’s just fabricated like you can with fiction. The last memoir I tried to listen to, Unbearable Lightness, made me want to give up on the whole consuming food thing all together. My mother gave me a memoir on audiobook and despite all of the many ways that could go wrong I had to listen to it because it was a gift. If I had known the only problem with it would be trying not to laugh hysterically in my cubicle at work, I would have listened to A Girl Named Zippy months ago.

The catch about Zippy is that it’s a memoir of a happy childhood. Like all childhoods, there are the scattered introductions to heartbreak, but there's nothing basement-level-sorrow-inducing here. In her case, it’s finding that the chicken she loved had been killed by some local dogs and watching other friends experience family woes and grief and not quite knowing how to handle it. Other than those two things, her biggest problems (on the page, at least) were obstacles like having to reclaim her best elementary school friend from the cool new kid from LA that brought culture and a leather jacket to their small town of Mooreland, Indiana and trying to talk her way out of going to the Quaker church with her mom each Sunday morning. Her stories are mostly centered around the quirky cast of characters from the town they live in and her family, who swore they bought her from a pack of traveling gypsies. The novel is full of normal childhood moments that were relatable to my own childhood: the attempted séances at slumber parties, simultaneously hating and worshiping older siblings, going crazy over decoupage and crafts only to discover that you aren’t particularly talented in the art department, and having major crises over the state of one’s hair. There was also a period where she recorded everything she could on a little cassette tape, which I vaguely remember trying to do with a YakBak without much success.

The thing that I enjoyed the most about the book was Kimmel’s ability to narrate everything from the voice of her childhood self without dumbing down the content. While I obviously can’t speak to the accuracy of that voice as I didn’t know her twenty some years ago, I can say with certainty that it’s believable:

"I figure heaven will be a scratch-and-sniff sort of place, and one of my first requests will be the Driftwood in its prime, while it was filled with our life. And later I will ask for the smell of my dad's truck, which was a combination of basic truck (nearly universal), plus his cologne (Old Spice), unfiltered Lucky Strikes, and when I was very lucky, leaded gasoline. If I could have gotten my nose close enough I would have inhaled leaded gasoline until I was retarded. The tendency seemed to run in my family; as a boy my uncle Crandall had an ongoing relationship with a gas can he kept in the barn. Later he married and divorced the same woman four times, sometimes marrying other women in between, including one whose name was, honestly, Squirrelly."

See what I mean?

The thing that got me the most about the book, though, was Kimmel’s relationship with her father. She knows he only gets drunk at work but she’s not quite sure if he works or what he does. He plays the best prank on their neighbors I’ve ever heard of in my life. When someone messes with his kids, he gets pay back. While he doesn’t agree with a lot of things the mother says or does, he still backs her, regularly giving Kimmel a look she says means, “I respect every way in which you are a troublemaker, but get up and do what your mother says."

While her parents are genuinely good people and actively show her love and support, they aren’t always the most involved or strict and usually don’t exactly know what’s she’s up to. After visiting a friend’s home and witnessing a different family dynamic, she says, "They did a lot of cleaning in their house, which I considered to be a sign of immoral parenting. The job of parents, as I saw it, was to watch television and step into a child's life only when absolutely necessary, like in the event of a tornado or a potential kidnapping." This is probably because her Dad is usually doing something smart assed and her mother is constantly just making her dent in the couch bigger, rereading science fiction, which leads to a misunderstanding where Kimmel thinks her mother is having an affair with Isaac Asmov. (This leads to Kimmel's second memoir, She Got Up Off the Couch, which details her mother finally doing just that.)

The best part of the book (for me) was the scene where the father tells Kimmel he’s going to take her to his church since neither of them believe in God so she can see his version of religion. When he takes her out to the middle of a campground to sit in the woods, she gets confused, because there’s no proper pews or minister or singing. He asks her, “What does the Bible say about where one or more are gathered?” and she tells him that equals fellowship, but there aren’t any people out there for fellowship. He points out the Bible doesn’t say one or more people, just one or more in general, and he’s having fellowship with this group of trees and that group of birds… that there's one or more of a lot of things to have fellowship with out in nature. While the school aged Kimmel is no devoted Quaker like her mother, she doesn’t seem to be able to get behind her dad’s brand of religion either, but there in the woods they make the most of it. It reminded me quite a bit of some moments I shared off the parkway with my college friends up in the mountains. (Unfortunately, somehow those moments also usually involved them being high and/or naked, but that’s neither here nor there.)

While Kimmel finds every excuse in the book not to go to church with her mother, at one point she decides she wants to bond with a girl she considers to be holy that informs Kimmel that in order to be a good Christian, you’ve got to do good works. Feeling put upon, she reconsiders that friendship after her quests to do good deeds turn into minor disasters. Later, she decides she wants Jesus to be her boyfriend, and she says of him, "On Jesus: "Everyone around me was flat-out in love with him, and who wouldn't be? He was good with animals, he loved his mother, and he wasn't afraid of blind people." She waits for boyfriend Jesus in the woods and her family doesn’t discourage her because they think it’s finally an act of dedication. Since she seemed earnest about it and she was only a kid, I laughed endlessly at this without feeling like I was cracking up over something sacrilegious. Kimmel eventually went to study theology at a divinity school but I'm not sure where she stands on faith now.

The last two best things about Kimmel are that she studied creative writing at NCSU and she currently lives in my home state which I appreciate because this means there’s finally an author I like that I may be able to realistically catch at a book signing. (How I always manage to miss Sedaris has become an ongoing point for frustration. Also, don't point out that he writes memoirs, becuase they are in the fiction section.)

Dog Run by Arthur Nersesian

"Soon as I hung up, I suffered the acute and divine epiphany of being jobless. It was the modern equivalent to what medieval monks recorded after weeks and even months of starvation and sensory deprivation. I lay in bed and watched moments break into phenomenal particles of panic and could actually see the divine crack of God’s ass as he completely turned his back on me. I rose, dressed, grabbed doggy, and went to the ATM where I checked my balance. Doing some basic math, I realized that I had about three weeks before I would be in debt. I got a New York Times and a cup of coffee and brought the dog back home. Flipping through the classifieds, I looked for employment. I saw a couple of lousy-looking, tele-sale jobs and realized that this was going to be a real disaster. I cringed at the thought of having to start the whole job search again, updating my bogus resume, finding a costume that made me look responsible and professional, and then, worse of all, making calls and going for torturous interviews. Instead I turned on the TV and watched some white-trash sex nuts charging at each other on the Jerry Springer Show. For all the country’s political sensitivity and moral outrage, we secretly hungered for pornographic gladiator fights. Numb put her chin on my knee just like she used to do with Primo."

I can tell a book that’s been spat out from the fine folks at MTV Books a mile away because their jacket designs make me salivate even though I have to be automatically skeptical about them due to the company behind their imprint. To be fair, these are the same people that brought us the angsty gem Perks of Being a Wallflower. Dog Run by Arthur Nersesian beckoned to me while I was recovering from too much wine at Barnes and Nobles and I decided to see if I liked the inside as much as the cover. I won’t tell you it was as bad as I expected it to be, but it’s certainly no Perks.

On the back, a Jennifer Bell (who wrote a book I’ve never read) was quoted saying “Nersesian’s writing… is beautiful, especially when it is about women and love.” I’m pretty sure that I was misled by this, because while there was plenty about women and men and sex, there wasn’t a damn thing about love in this novel anywhere.

Our main character, Mary, is a 29 year old fuck-up that has been drifting from one temp job to the next without any real sense of purpose or direction. She’s got a book she’s been writing about shitty minimum wage franchises called The Book of Jobs and until maybe the third page, a live in boyfriend named Primo who she comes home at the opening to discover dead on her couch. Through a strange turn of events she finds out that everything she knows about the dead beau has been a lie and finds him infinitely more interesting dead than she did while he was alive. To put all of Primo’s puzzle pieces together, she hunts down (and sometimes stalks) all of his former lovers. Her detective work takes her to seedy strip clubs, art galleries, and a band audition where she ends up accidentally becoming the bassist for Crazy and Beautiful, whose singer is Primo’s ex wife and baby mama Sue Wotts. Sue has a reputation for being “that crazy Cambodian bitch” and even without Sue knowing what Mary’s connection to her is or her agenda, Mary still manages to rile Sue up incessantly throughout the novel.

I think most people have SOME degree of morbid curiosity about their partner’s former significant others, so it was interesting to see someone act out on that in ways that no one in my actual life (I hope) ever would. As long as it’s fictional, I enjoy a good train wreck.

While Mary tries to come to terms with Primo’s life and death, she also has to deal with recurring bouts of unemployment, manage a friendship with a histrionic husband-hunter that’s trying to find any decent remaining unattached Jewish men in New York after sleeping with the rest of the city of New York in its entirety, a string of dates with bizarre men, not pissing off Crazy and Beautiful, and being a decent dog mama to Primo’s overly needy canine Numb. Her relationship with the dog leads to a relationship with the local dog run (hence the book title), where she meets her new love interest, scatters Primo’s ashes, and bludgeons someone in the head and almost gets arrested. I found most of the subplots to be more interesting than the Primo fascination, which became tedious to read about a lot faster than I thought it would. The only subplot I could have done without involves Mary doing write ups on novel manuscripts sent into a publisher for a literary contest. The novels that she has to read all leave a lot to be desired, and Nersesian beats us over the head with that by making us endure three page stretches that describe their crummy plots, involving things like strange sex machines and self flagellating priests. I guess he’s trying to get us to feel sympathetic for Mary but I quickly became impatient with him, instead.

The book was entertaining enough over all, but there were quite a few boring stretches and bad sex scenes to work through before getting to the end, which was a landmine of back to back plot twists I never would have seen coming. I devoured the last quarter of the book right up until the last page, where Nersesian seemed to have forgotten that he made his main character neurotic and self involved and tied things up a little too nicely for them to be believable. The last page is not the right place for warm and fuzzy epiphanies.

I feel like I should follow this up with something more respectable and literary for my next review, but I probably won’t.