I was playing with a new iphone app, redlaser, that reads bar codes and can give you comparison prices…tried it out on Faith. Was I ever surprised to find Faith listed at twice my listing cost at some not-quite-respectable website. When I checked out the site, I saw you could buy-it-now for only $72 and change. What a deal! Another place said they had less than 100 in stock. In fact, I’m pretty sure they have less than one.
For your $72-copy of a $11.99-book, click here:
> http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?binding=&mtype=&keyword=joann+welsh&hs.x=0&hs.y=0&hs=Submit

So the other relatively new classic is George Saunders’s The Braindead Megaphone. If I were suddenly in possession of the White House and had a supermajority in the Senate, I’d make it required reading for everyone in America — even if it took me a year to do it.

The frustration and feelings of powerlessness that came over me once GWB got elected, continued with the invasion of Iraq and grew alongside my own recognition of the expanding class inequality in this country — let’s just say the powerless came more from the sense that none of the smart people in this country were standing up and saying what needed to be said. It was as if all our intelligent, passionate people had decided (along with me, I have to admit) that the system was just so screwed up that it was better to spend our intelligence and passion on our own projects, rather than trying to compete with the drama-hungry mass media in providing a comprehensible, resonating response to the nuttiness.

Who didn’t give up? Humorists! Comedians! Not only did they not give up, the nuttiness gave them just what they wanted. Jon Stewart, and later Stephen Colbert, took the ball o’ nuttiness and ran with it, then spiked it in the endzone and performed a celebration worth many penalty yards.

In The Braindead Megaphone, George Saunders combines the absurdist humor of our current position with the frustration, and it says it all loud and clear. Maybe a book of essays can’t compete in volume on the scale of the news media megaphone, but he blows them away in quality. I’ll post a few quotes later — he says it all better than I ever could.

While on the topic of people saying what needs to be said, I’d like to nominate Paul Krugman for some kind of award. Yes, I know he already won that other award, but it’s just so rare to find someone who can clearly articulate such complicated issues, while also communicating his deep caring about them — and his own well-tuned sense of humor.

While I wouldn’t quite put it in with my list of classics, Lorrie Moore’s The Gate at the Stairs is equal to all the compliments it received in the reviews. I’ve long been a fan of her short stories (“You’re Ugly, Too” is an official classic, in all the anthologies), but her first novel, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, didn’t quite reach me in the same way. Gate, however, was quintessential Moore, with her unique humor and characterization. It read a little like several short stories woven together (which, my husband tells me, she copped to in an interview), but that doesn’t really take away from the book as a whole.

There is a scene that is hinted at throughout the book but only revealed nearer the end — a scene that is horrific, but all the more so because you can see it coming at each step. If it were just a comic-villain dirty deed, it wouldn’t be that affecting. And if the point of view character was more of a superior, judgmental type, then the reader’s reaction to the scene would be blunted in the sense that you’d be told how to react. The main character is horrified, but she’s young — her experience to such things is so limited that she can be horrified and yet not go farther than that. She doesn’t really formulate any response. She starts to, in a later scene that is equally horrifying, and so this novel is something of a coming-of-age novel. But it’s much more than that — this story will stay with me for a very long time.

I guess I should have titled this and the last post “What I Had Been Reading.” What I’m currently reading is Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask and Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. Both got glowing reviews. So far, Lipsyte’s book is a little heavy with the coolness factor. I haven’t yet started Batuman’s, but since I was a doctoral student in a Slavic department, I can’t wait for that one — I may have to put Lipsyte aside for a bit.

Very rarely do I come across books that instantly enter my new personal classics list – books that are the literary equivalent of getting slapped upside the head. The wake-up call need not include sly, stylistic wizardry; it’s the effect that gets me more than the showmanship. What’s surprising is that I’ve found two such books relatively recently, with a third in close standing.

The most recent read was The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris. I almost didn’t read this book. It was the recipient of many glowing reviews, but the set-up – man struck by disorder that compels him to drop whatever he’s doing to walk until he exhausts himself – sounded like the novel would be too gimmicky. What I found was a marvel, a complicated mess of human behavior from a group of not terribly complicated people. I’m in awe of his Ferris’s ability to write scenes that can seem so obviously allegorical, and yet when you try to put the allegory into words – good luck! Nothing is quite as simple as it appears. I love writers who are able to take characters (especially main characters) who are so screwed up and self-centered that you want to dislike them (at the very least), and yet you feel for them. I don’t really “like” the two main characters here, but somehow I connect. How?

I think it has to do with the relationship between our actions and our reasons for our actions. My favorite authors are the ones who flip through all the layers of the human onion. The outer layers are the reasons we give publicly. Next are the layers we admit to our family or close friends. Underneath that are the reasons we admit to ourselves. Underneath that are the layers that we acknowledge are the real reasons, which we secretly cloak with the above layers that we usually admit to ourselves. Underneath that are the really, really secret reasons that we are just barely conscious of, ones we glimpse at only for brief moments that scare us with their unknowableness. Then underneath that are various layers that we just aren’t conscious of.

Death and the Dervish tops the list of my all-time classics, because it’s the best and most beautiful example of this. The main character gets less and less “likeable” by the end of the story, but the novel is an impressive interplay of all the layers. Written in the first person, the narrator examines his motives constantly due to the situation he’s in, and he appears to be very contemplative and aware of ethical complications at each path as he chooses his actions. Yet even his deepest revelations are later shown to be window-dressing for something else, and by the end of the book this man who so carefully examined his motives at each step turns out doing some rather bad things. The book, however, is beautiful, even poetic. The language matches the inherent beauty and wonder of the human experience. Most authors can exploit the fact that our inner reasons often don’t match the public explanations; most can show off a character’s subconscious motivations. But playing with the mix of the two, when we are half-aware of the many layers of deception that we practice on ourselves, even we think we want to be honest in our own minds – that’s another beast altogether. Usually self-deception is portrayed in fiction as something slimy, but yet we are fascinatingly good at it. We don’t just stick to happy-happy deceits – that would be amateurish. From D&theD: “You are a deception that gives rise to discontent, a deception that I cannot and do not wish to drive away, because it protects me from suffering with a quiet grief.” For me, the dance we do with around these deceptions are part of what make us who we are.

Ugh, trying to explain this in prose is frustrating and unsatisfying. This is probably why I’m a reader and writer – looking at these layers directly and consciously only takes you so far (as it did with Nuruddin in D&the D). It’s being startled into seeing them when you weren’t expecting it that really reaches people… Next blog I’ll get to the other books I referred to.