The Writer Working 2010 was a little like the American economy the last thirty years–no middle class. Some superlatives and some real duds. This is the fifth year of our annual awards. The traditional gift for this time around is wood, so I suppose it would be appropriate to thank the gods for the San Francisco Giants, who, wielding their wooden sticks, brought us a world series championship. And, for more connections, some of those bats had to be Louisville Sluggers, another tribute to my wife’s home town. So much for the sizzle, now for the steak.
FICTION
The normal practice around here is to list the winners without ranking, and we’ll do that for all but one. American Rust is clearly the book of the year, and I thank Phillipp Meyer for writing it.
Phillipp Meyer’s evocation of the rusting Pennsylvania steel industry and its parallel with the deterioration of institutions in a collapsing society, or the collapsing part of a society, is so powerful it shakes your heart. When institutions die, of course, people and families die with them. Such deaths and transformations are the core of American Rust.
Meyer’s novel is a marvel of characterization, one that breaks another of those cardinal writing rules—be careful how many characters you introduce lest you split your reader’s focus. Meyer gives us five people, each of them so powerfully drawn that just when you think the book belongs to one of them, you decide, no, it must belong to this other. Still, each one is so absorbing, all of them held together by the force field surrounding the inciting incident near the novel’s beginning, that the reader not only doesn’t feel unfocused, but is drawn deeper into every emotion and event that leads up to and away from that initial brutal scene that becomes a quicksand for everyone involved and for everyone around them.
As for the rest:
Two Trilogies. A first for Writer Working’s awards. There are only two of the Baker Trilogy here. Look for the third in 2011.
Baker’s narrative starts off like a bullet and seldom lets up. He prefaces Book One with a list of “Dramatis Personae, like a Playbill, and it helps set the historical tone. We hear first from Trick the Dwarf, whose first words are I know a story. And does he ever. We’re transported from uptown to downtown in an instant, from Coney Island’s sand and water to rat-baiting in a Bowery cellar, and to an incident that will haunt every character in the story from then on.
Hot with fervor over Kevin Baker’s Dreamland (see August 30 comments) I moved on to Paradise Alley. Even though much of Dreamland revolves around Coney Island, Baker’s attention is never far from the Lower East Side. And it is on the lower east side that Paradise Alley is located, though we’re moved back in time thirty or forty years for this one–the 1863 New York riots in response to the Civil War draft.
And the wildly popular–so wildly so I almost didn’t pick it up out of literary snobbery–Steig Larsson series about “The Girl Who…” My snootiness would have missed out on some first rate pop lit. Let that be a lesson to me.
As a mentor of mine once put it, character can trump nearly everything else, and the character of Lisbeth Salander is one of the marvels of modern popular literature. I envy Larsson her creation. Salander is a young (25 years old in the Tattoo) semi-functional semi-idiot-savant social outcast.
If you start on this Millennium Trilogy thing, carve out some time. It’s like being tied to a rope and pulled behind a power boat. The boat won’t stop and you can’t let go. I just dived into my iPad (see also the October 25 commentary on “E-Books and Me.”) and didn’t come for air till The Girl Who Played With Fire was done.
Hornet’s Nest is almost not a separate book in the trilogy. Its first chapter could easily be the “next” chapter in its predecessor, The Girl Who Played With Fire. Not a criticism. There’s no sense of incompleteness at the end of Fire. It’s quite whole in itself. Besides, combining the two would have made an 1100 page book, and who wants that? Put down your hand, smartass.
I’ve never been much of a Barbara Kingsolver fan. I forgive myself for forgetting exactly what I objected to because it’s been so long since I read anything of hers and so long since she wrote a new novel. But since she’s now become (unbeknownst to her) family of a sort–her brother recently married a distant relative of my wife’s–I felt compelled to give The Lacuna a try. I can’t say it’s made me a devotee, but I’m certainly an admirer now.
First, the title. A lacuna is a gap in a manuscript or text. It’s also a hole in a submerged rock through which water ebbs and flows and which for the ambitious diver can become a doorway into lost worlds. Or it can be an opening in a life, like a tunnel, which can lead to transformations. Alice’s rabbit hole might be called a Lacuna. I think we all need one of those.
Birdsong’s cover advertises it as a “novel of love and war.” Cliched, but true enough. Faulk’s work has an odd feel about it for a modern (1993) work. With its omniscient narrator, constantly shifting pov, descriptive and narrative side trips, it seems almost Victorian. There is a visionary passage of unity of all creation that might have been pulled straight out of Thomas Hardy. Yet, a more accurate parallel might be with D.H. Lawrence for some of its torrid, protoplasmic sex and violence. Indeed, the war scenes, especially in part two, are among the most brutal I have ever read. I thought after all I had read about WWI over the last couple of years, I knew it all. However, Birdsong opened an entirely new aspect to me–the lives of the miners who tunneled underneath enemy lines planting explosives. Gives a literal meaning to the word “mine,” and I understand where the word comes from now.
Are liberation movements ideological or personal? In Steinhauer’s world, apparently, ideology means little or nothing at all. Not to the Armenians, not the Turks, not to the communists—not to anyone. My last Steinhauer was The Bridge of Sighs (Nov. 30, 2009), which impressed me favorably, if not overwhelmingly. Liberation Movements is even better. This guy is a real writer.
W
hen I first searched the library for The Sealed Letter, a book a friend had recommended, I found it checked out and settled for Slammerkin (May 11, ’09). Quite a good book in itself, but this one is heads and shoulders better.
Judging from these two works, Donoghue specializes in a unique type of historical novel, a sort of ripped from yesteryear’s headlines incidents covered in the popular press but not necessarily connected with any great historical event. In the case of The Sealed Letter, she sets us down in 1864 London amid the scandalous divorce case of Helen and (Admiral) Harry Codrington. Unlike the case of the Slammerkin murderess, however, this divorce connects directly with a number of important social and legal issues that reverberate still.
One Mississippi–great title–fooled me good, I have to say. It starts out as a trivial novel of small-town high school life. Funny and slight, sort of like the old Max Shulman books. I even wondered if I’d latched on to a very early Childress, before he got serious and weird. But no. The copyright date was 2006. So on I read, and Mark rewarded me greatly for my efforts.
Ah, yes you are my true Kate, Kate Atkinson. I trust you, I do, enough that when you spend fifty or so pages wandering around in too much back story (after a smashing opening), I relax knowing you know the way and will take me by the hand and lead me along the right path. That everything that appears disparate and unconnected will become related in your hands. For, as one of your characters remarks, a coincidence is just two separate events awaiting an explanation.
Writer Working has seen Boyle’s several times before, most recently in anent the disappointing Riven Rock (June 30, 2010) the novelized biography of Cyrus McCormack, he of the reaper. The Women is a also a novelized biography, this one of Frank Lloyd Wright, but it is anything but disappointing.
The women in question are the four main women in Wright’s life–his first wife and his three main mistresses (Boyle doesn’t mention more than three, but given what the guy was like … ), the second and third of which later became wives, with Olgivanna, the third, finally becoming the ONE.
But those are just facts, and convey nothing of Boyle’s treatment of the story of this egomaniacal, amoral, gangster of a genius who was as much persona as artist.
So, not counting American Rust which is in it’s own special category, that’s either eight or eleven modern novels for my top-of-the pile list, depending on whether you count the trilogies as single works. I recall when I’ve had fifteen. See what I said about its being a slow year? Here are a couple of separate categories:
BEST TITLE
Irving throws nothing he’s written in the wastebasket, which does great harm to this nicely-conceived, mediocrely-executed novel. But the title is compelling and half the reason I wanted to read it in the first place.
CLASSICS
This is a book you could spend a lifetime studying. The turns of plot and character are intricate, often baffling. Social, political, and artistic history are layered like Appalachian limestone, and the point-counterpoint of religion, philosophy and intellectual concepts would do credit to a Beethoven symphony.
Most of the characters in Crime and Punishment are in agony most of the time, so if you’re looking for laughs, don’t look here. However, if you’re wondering if it’s possible to write a six-hundred page novel with an ax murderer as a protagonist, a character you can both despise and sympathize with, pick it up. I’m not kidding. It’s a literary feat like no other, and my mind returns to it over and over, puzzled, fascinated, enriched.
I struggled through the first four hundred pages of this nearly eight hundred pager. That first half is full of philosophy and religion and back story and not much action-moving conflict.
Even the romantic complications of father and son pursuing the same woman, one who played the two off against the other for her own benefit, didn’t seem particularly exciting. I wondered if I’d get through the whole work. I’m glad I didn’t give up.
The second half of the book was another matter entirely. Today, the idea of putting off the inciting incident until around page four hundred is a recipe for publishing death. For Dostoevsky it’s a recipe for a monumental piece of literature. That inciting incident, of course, is the murder of the Karamazov patriarch and the accusation that his middle son did him in. The subsequent chase, arrest, and parricide trial consume four hundred fast moving pages every bit as rich in philosophy and religion as the first four hundred, but those same pages would constitute not much more than a simple thriller without the backdrop of the first half. Tedious though I found it, the fault is in me, not in Mr. D.
SHORT STORIES
Ship Fever offers up eight stories–the title tale is a novella–whose overall effect Thomas Mallon of the New York Book Review calls “quietly dazzling.” I can’t improve on that phrase. Andrea Barrett has made a career of marrying the worlds of science and of fiction, and all of these stories occur in worlds that at least purport to be scientific and terrestrial, but whose boundaries turn out to be illusory.
In “The Behavior of the Hawkweeds,” for example, it’s Mendel and genetics; in “Birds With No Feet,” it’s the world of the naturalist and of evolutionary theory; in “Ship Fever” it’s typhoid. Every single one of the stories is carefully researched, often connected to an historical event or period. And in every single one, Barrett singles out someone who lives and thinks outside the norm, challenges or ignores or simply can’t live with convention, and who suffers for the debility.
NON-FICTION IS A DIFFERENT STORY, THOUGH, SO GO ON TO THE NEXT AWARDS.
The Writer Working 2010 was a little like the American economy the last thirty years–no middle class. Some superlatives and some real duds. This is the fifth year of our annual awards. The traditional gift for this time around is wood, so I suppose it would be appropriate to thank the gods for the San Francisco Giants, who, wielding their wooden sticks, brought us a world series championship. And, for more connections, some of those bats had to be Louisville Sluggers, another tribute to my wife’s home town. So much for the sizzle, now for the steak.
FICTION
The normal practice around here is to list the winners without ranking, and we’ll do that for all but one. American Rust is clearly the book of the year, and I thank Phillipp Meyer for writing it.
Phillipp Meyer’s evocation of the rusting Pennsylvania steel industry and its parallel with the deterioration of institutions in a collapsing society, or the collapsing part of a society, is so powerful it shakes your heart. When institutions die, of course, people and families die with them. Such deaths and transformations are the core of American Rust.
Meyer’s novel is a marvel of characterization, one that breaks another of those cardinal writing rules—be careful how many characters you introduce lest you split your reader’s focus. Meyer gives us five people, each of them so powerfully drawn that just when you think the book belongs to one of them, you decide, no, it must belong to this other. Still, each one is so absorbing, all of them held together by the force field surrounding the inciting incident near the novel’s beginning, that the reader not only doesn’t feel unfocused, but is drawn deeper into every emotion and event that leads up to and away from that initial brutal scene that becomes a quicksand for everyone involved and for everyone around them.
As for the rest:
Two Trilogies. A first for Writer Working’s awards. There are only two of the Baker Trilogy here. Look for the third in 2011.
Baker’s narrative starts off like a bullet and seldom lets up. He prefaces Book One with a list of “Dramatis Personae, like a Playbill, and it helps set the historical tone. We hear first from Trick the Dwarf, whose first words are I know a story. And does he ever. We’re transported from uptown to downtown in an instant, from Coney Island’s sand and water to rat-baiting in a Bowery cellar, and to an incident that will haunt every character in the story from then on.
Hot with fervor over Kevin Baker’s Dreamland (see August 30 comments) I moved on to Paradise Alley. Even though much of Dreamland revolves around Coney Island, Baker’s attention is never far from the Lower East Side. And it is on the lower east side that Paradise Alley is located, though we’re moved back in time thirty or forty years for this one–the 1863 New York riots in response to the Civil War draft.
And the wildly popular–so wildly so I almost didn’t pick it up out of literary snobbery–Steig Larsson series about “The Girl Who…” My snootiness would have missed out on some first rate pop lit. Let that be a lesson to me.
As a mentor of mine once put it, character can trump nearly everything else, and the character of Lisbeth Salander is one of the marvels of modern popular literature. I envy Larsson her creation. Salander is a young (25 years old in the Tattoo) semi-functional semi-idiot-savant social outcast.
If you start on this Millennium Trilogy thing, carve out some time. It’s like being tied to a rope and pulled behind a power boat. The boat won’t stop and you can’t let go. I just dived into my iPad (see also the October 25 commentary on “E-Books and Me.”) and didn’t come for air till The Girl Who Played With Fire was done.
Hornet’s Nest is almost not a separate book in the trilogy. Its first chapter could easily be the “next” chapter in its predecessor, The Girl Who Played With Fire. Not a criticism. There’s no sense of incompleteness at the end of Fire. It’s quite whole in itself. Besides, combining the two would have made an 1100 page book, and who wants that? Put down your hand, smartass.
I’ve never been much of a Barbara Kingsolver fan. I forgive myself for forgetting exactly what I objected to because it’s been so long since I read anything of hers and so long since she wrote a new novel. But since she’s now become (unbeknownst to her) family of a sort–her brother recently married a distant relative of my wife’s–I felt compelled to give The Lacuna a try. I can’t say it’s made me a devotee, but I’m certainly an admirer now.
First, the title. A lacuna is a gap in a manuscript or text. It’s also a hole in a submerged rock through which water ebbs and flows and which for the ambitious diver can become a doorway into lost worlds. Or it can be an opening in a life, like a tunnel, which can lead to transformations. Alice’s rabbit hole might be called a Lacuna. I think we all need one of those.
Birdsong’s cover advertises it as a “novel of love and war.” Cliched, but true enough. Faulk’s work has an odd feel about it for a modern (1993) work. With its omniscient narrator, constantly shifting pov, descriptive and narrative side trips, it seems almost Victorian. There is a visionary passage of unity of all creation that might have been pulled straight out of Thomas Hardy. Yet, a more accurate parallel might be with D.H. Lawrence for some of its torrid, protoplasmic sex and violence. Indeed, the war scenes, especially in part two, are among the most brutal I have ever read. I thought after all I had read about WWI over the last couple of years, I knew it all. However, Birdsong opened an entirely new aspect to me–the lives of the miners who tunneled underneath enemy lines planting explosives. Gives a literal meaning to the word “mine,” and I understand where the word comes from now.
Are liberation movements ideological or personal? In Steinhauer’s world, apparently, ideology means little or nothing at all. Not to the Armenians, not the Turks, not to the communists—not to anyone. My last Steinhauer was The Bridge of Sighs (Nov. 30, 2009), which impressed me favorably, if not overwhelmingly. Liberation Movements is even better. This guy is a real writer.
W
hen I first searched the library for The Sealed Letter, a book a friend had recommended, I found it checked out and settled for Slammerkin (May 11, ’09). Quite a good book in itself, but this one is heads and shoulders better.
Judging from these two works, Donoghue specializes in a unique type of historical novel, a sort of ripped from yesteryear’s headlines incidents covered in the popular press but not necessarily connected with any great historical event. In the case of The Sealed Letter, she sets us down in 1864 London amid the scandalous divorce case of Helen and (Admiral) Harry Codrington. Unlike the case of the Slammerkin murderess, however, this divorce connects directly with a number of important social and legal issues that reverberate still.
One Mississippi–great title–fooled me good, I have to say. It starts out as a trivial novel of small-town high school life. Funny and slight, sort of like the old Max Shulman books. I even wondered if I’d latched on to a very early Childress, before he got serious and weird. But no. The copyright date was 2006. So on I read, and Mark rewarded me greatly for my efforts.
Ah, yes you are my true Kate, Kate Atkinson. I trust you, I do, enough that when you spend fifty or so pages wandering around in too much back story (after a smashing opening), I relax knowing you know the way and will take me by the hand and lead me along the right path. That everything that appears disparate and unconnected will become related in your hands. For, as one of your characters remarks, a coincidence is just two separate events awaiting an explanation.
Writer Working has seen Boyle’s several times before, most recently in anent the disappointing Riven Rock (June 30, 2010) the novelized biography of Cyrus McCormack, he of the reaper. The Women is a also a novelized biography, this one of Frank Lloyd Wright, but it is anything but disappointing.
The women in question are the four main women in Wright’s life–his first wife and his three main mistresses (Boyle doesn’t mention more than three, but given what the guy was like … ), the second and third of which later became wives, with Olgivanna, the third, finally becoming the ONE.
But those are just facts, and convey nothing of Boyle’s treatment of the story of this egomaniacal, amoral, gangster of a genius who was as much persona as artist.
So, not counting American Rust which is in it’s own special category, that’s either eight or eleven modern novels for my top-of-the pile list, depending on whether you count the trilogies as single works. I recall when I’ve had fifteen. See what I said about its being a slow year? Here are a couple of separate categories:
BEST TITLE
Irving throws nothing he’s written in the wastebasket, which does great harm to this nicely-conceived, mediocrely-executed novel. But the title is compelling and half the reason I wanted to read it in the first place.
CLASSICS
This is a book you could spend a lifetime studying. The turns of plot and character are intricate, often baffling. Social, political, and artistic history are layered like Appalachian limestone, and the point-counterpoint of religion, philosophy and intellectual concepts would do credit to a Beethoven symphony.
Most of the characters in Crime and Punishment are in agony most of the time, so if you’re looking for laughs, don’t look here. However, if you’re wondering if it’s possible to write a six-hundred page novel with an ax murderer as a protagonist, a character you can both despise and sympathize with, pick it up. I’m not kidding. It’s a literary feat like no other, and my mind returns to it over and over, puzzled, fascinated, enriched.
I struggled through the first four hundred pages of this nearly eight hundred pager. That first half is full of philosophy and religion and back story and not much action-moving conflict.
Even the romantic complications of father and son pursuing the same woman, one who played the two off against the other for her own benefit, didn’t seem particularly exciting. I wondered if I’d get through the whole work. I’m glad I didn’t give up.
The second half of the book was another matter entirely. Today, the idea of putting off the inciting incident until around page four hundred is a recipe for publishing death. For Dostoevsky it’s a recipe for a monumental piece of literature. That inciting incident, of course, is the murder of the Karamazov patriarch and the accusation that his middle son did him in. The subsequent chase, arrest, and parricide trial consume four hundred fast moving pages every bit as rich in philosophy and religion as the first four hundred, but those same pages would constitute not much more than a simple thriller without the backdrop of the first half. Tedious though I found it, the fault is in me, not in Mr. D.
SHORT STORIES
Ship Fever offers up eight stories–the title tale is a novella–whose overall effect Thomas Mallon of the New York Book Review calls “quietly dazzling.” I can’t improve on that phrase. Andrea Barrett has made a career of marrying the worlds of science and of fiction, and all of these stories occur in worlds that at least purport to be scientific and terrestrial, but whose boundaries turn out to be illusory.
In “The Behavior of the Hawkweeds,” for example, it’s Mendel and genetics; in “Birds With No Feet,” it’s the world of the naturalist and of evolutionary theory; in “Ship Fever” it’s typhoid. Every single one of the stories is carefully researched, often connected to an historical event or period. And in every single one, Barrett singles out someone who lives and thinks outside the norm, challenges or ignores or simply can’t live with convention, and who suffers for the debility.
NON-FICTION IS A DIFFERENT STORY, THOUGH, SO GO ON TO THE NEXT AWARDS.
THE BALL DROPS ON 2010–NON-FICTION
This was a banner year for non-fiction on Writer Working, in this our fifth year of awards, so let’s unfurl the banner without further delay.
No one did more to shake up tradition than Albert Einstein. Darwin with creation, Freud with the human mind, and Einstein with physics showed the 19t/early 30th century world that all you thought you knew about yourself and your universe was most likely bunkum. Walter Isaacson’s bio is not as readable as his earlier one of Benjamin Franklin, but it’s much more incisive. I don’t know if that’s the result of Isaacson’s writing or of his subject. Physics and math are not so entertaining for me. When you tell me, for example, that a spinning disc will have a variable circumference but a constant radius, or that the universe is finite, but has no borders, my imagination falters. So my imagination did a lot of faltering during the talk about competing theories of math and physics, about why Einstein was averse to quantum theory and about his battles to prove it wrong or at least incomplete.
However, it wasn’t hard to get involved with his struggles to get employed despite his four 1905 papers that revolutionized physics. With his constant battles with anti-semitism. With his battles on the social and political fronts to sell pacifism and disarmament to a world that went through two world wars, the founding of Israel (He was a Zionist, but didn’t want a nation. Nationalism, he thought, plays into the worst aspects of human nature, and he feared that Israel might end up, well, just where it is.), and the fighting of a “police action” in Korea.
Patton–A Genius for War is 820 dense pages that covers every aspect of the man’s life and nature from infancy to death. Good thing he didn’t survive longer than he did (1895-1945), or Carlo D’Este might have kept me reading until Easter. Following close upon the rather difficult Einstein bio, I’m ready for a literary rest.
He was the general the Germans feared most, maybe the only one they really feared. Hitler called him “that crazy cowboy,” which would have pleased him had he lived long enough to hear it. From the beginning of his life, he was all about attack, attack, attack. Yet, he was full of insecurities, born, according to D’Este, of his acute dyslexia (unnamed and undiagnosed in those days), which kept him running to keep up in the world when what he wanted desperately was to be its master. His ancestors were Civil war heroes, and he aspired always to emulate them in battle, believing himself the reincarnation of previous generals (Stonewall Jackson, Hannibal) and destined to be reincarnated as another one after his death.
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is kind of a rough book, and a good one. Peter Godwin’s memoir of life in Zimbabwe is both global and personal, both disheartening and inspirational. Robert Mugabe, tyrant, started out as a rebel leader fighting to free Rhodesia from colonial rule. He’s now one of history’s cruelest and stupidest dictators, destroying the country over which he’s determined to maintain power, even if it’s power over a cataclysm. The title comes from a native legend which ascribes solar eclipses to crocodilian consumption. Mugabe’s’ family comes from the clan of the crocodile. Never a better title if you ask me.
WWII over, the military demobilized, and America set about its civilian business. But, David Halberstam avers, America was now a world power, and it would be impossible to return to anything like the just-leave-us-alone status so many wanted. We had the bomb. Russian communism threatened Europe. Maoist communism threatened Asia. We suddenly had responsibilities, and like it or not, they were about to come seek us out. And so, we found ourselves in a war no one anticipated or wanted. The first of the hot proxy battles, undeclared wars, of the cold war.
Halberstam does a masterful job of taking us around the Korean battlefields.. His deft weaving of individual tales with military overviews keeps his story both personal and comprehensive. You get a wonderful sense of what’s politically and personally at stake for men from top to bottom of the hierarchy.
My Father’s Paradise is perhaps the first book I’ve read that provides a good argument for changing the term “memoir” to the more trendy “narrative non-fiction.” And it’s a strong argument, for this is much more than a nostalgic look at one man’s past. It is an excavation into a corner of civilization itself. Ariel Sabar looks for his own roots by searching for his father’s, and his search takes him back nearly three millennia.
A twelve year old boy is forced out of his village by rebel soldiers. He and six of his friends wander the countryside for months, avoiding the fighting, starving most of the time, depending either on the kindness of strangers or stealing food, until they are finally surrounded by and impressed into the army. They are handed AK-47’s, given minimal training, hopped up on cocaine and pot, indoctrinated with Rambo and Rambo-like video tapes, and sent out to kill rebels. The rebels killed your families, they are told, now it’s your turn. And they, indeed, take their turn.
Again, they wander the countryside, but this time with guns, bayonets, and rpg’s. They burn people out of their villages in the same manner they were burned out of theirs. Filled with industrial strength drugs and hate, they bathe themselves and the equatorial countryside in blood, day after day.
There’s a happy ending, more or less, for Ishmael, who manages to escape his horrid situation. He’s an appealing guy who doesn’t mince words about what he’s done, doesn’t try to spin or excuse it. It’s a short book, so go ahead, see if you have the guts to read it.
When I turned the last page of Shelby Foote’s (You may remember Foote as the gentlemanly, professorial presence in Ken Burns PBS series.) monster “, I felt as if I’d finished a marathon. Close to 3000 pages detailing every military and political battle in those horrendous four-plus years of slaughter that stand as a monument to human obstinacy and idiocy. Why I needed to do this, when I’ve already read so much about all this over the years, I can’t possibly explain. Probably a 12-step program would help, but like I said it’s over now and not worth the further pain recovery would take.
I did learn a lot, and maybe I’ll be able to remember some of it, and what a piece of writing.
In The Monster by Michael W. Hudson we have, despite the fact that it’s a carefully researched piece of nonfiction, a true novel of corporate and political crime, crime that reaches to the highest and lowest levels. The book wins the Writer Working award for the longest and best subtitle of this or any other year [How a gang of predatory lenders and Wall Street bankers fleeced America–and spawned a global crisis.] The add-on was a great idea because the title tells nothing of what the book is really about, and you don’t find out what it means until halfway through. All this is fine with me, because once you know the answer it was worth the wait, and the subtitle sums things up nicely.
This book will angrify you and raise your blood pressure, but I still encourage you to read it. Once you have, you’ll know that it’s not just the naive and greedy people who signed up for loans they could never pay back; not just the thug frauds who designed, misrepresented, and sold the loans; not just Wall Street and the bankers; not just the politicians; not just the president. It was all of them, and we’re paying while they play. Grrr.
3 Among the Wolves argues (though not explicitly or intentionally) that you’re never too old for anything. Picture this: A 58-year-old woman and her 69-year-old husband decide that it would be a good idea to take their wolf-dog, Charley, hike a week into the wilderness of the Northwest Territories, and spy on a wolf pack from April to October. Basically snow to snow. So they do.
That accomplished, still hungering for adventure, they outfit themselves for an expedition to the arctic to study the relationship of polar bears and wolves during the winter dark.
The title of this one is taken from a phrase uttered by Eisenhower, who after 8 years of trying to shape and control the then-new agency called the CIA to the national good felt that he had completely failed and had left his successor a “legacy of ashes” when it came to national intelligence. Things never got any better. I never believed the notion that the CIA would have employed mafia hit men to assassinate Castro. With JFK’s blessing. But it happened just that way, though never, obviously, succeeded.
The ultimate failure, of course, was Iraq, and the worst you’ve read is not the worst that happened. It’s a disgusting and shameful piece of American history that in some ways I wish I’d never read. Combined wit the financial fiasco outlined in The Monster (see Dec 3,2010), it makes you wonder if as a country and culture we haven’t succumbed to our most venal and corrupt selves.
Once again, thanks to my buddy across the street, I dived into a Civil War story. This time, The Fiery Trial, a Lincoln phrase, naturally, exploring Abe’s evolving attitudes and policies toward slavery. For a while, I found no surprises, though of course Foner includes some facts and stories that were new to me. However, it was not news that Lincoln was pretty much always anti-slavery. Nor was it news that he was not much for black-white social or political equality. Most of his life, his notion about what white folks’ obligation toward Negroes was to get them free so they could keep and eat the bread that was the fruit of their labor. Voting, citizenship, or other civil rights–these matters pretty much didn’t enter his mind.
Even the descriptions of the careful political trail he had to blaze among the various factions vying for his presidential favor were part and parcel of a story with which I’d become quite familiar in my reading of the last few years. About midway through Foner’s narrative, though, some new material manifested. I hadn’t realized how little contact Lincoln had had with colored folks in his life.
But Lincoln was a learner. No one can say how the post-war years would have been different had he lived. Lincoln failed to change the views of many around him, but he generally found ways to work with them or to confound them. The man who replaced him was a stubborn, short-sighted alienator who was unwilling and unable to learn or compromise or understand any view but his own. Whatever is uncertain about what direction reconstruction would have taken under Lincoln, it seems certain that the direction it did take, with the lapses into vitriolic vengeance by northerners, black laws, and Jim Crow and all the rest, could not have been worse.
So that’s either eleven or thirteen non-fiction prize-winners. Surely a record, though I don’t feeel moved to look it up. It’s absolutely a record for non-fiction winners to number as high as fiction ones. So it’s on to next year, and could any year with two #1’s in it be bad?
