So Many Books, So Little Time

by Sara Nelson

  So maybe my abandonment speaks well for McBride. Odds are Miracle at St. Anna will be a hit, now that it is in paperback. And maybe I’ll pick it up again. But I doubt it.

  March 8

  Hype

  Like every other business, publishing is susceptible to—no, make that dependent on—what they call buzz, the slow, humming interest that might someday grow to a dull roar and tip a book over into big-shot bestseller land. And like most people, even or especially those of us in the media business who should know better, I’m as susceptible to it as anyone.

  So this week I read Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. This is the novel whose author was wet-kissed by New York magazine, the debut that got a front-page rave in the venerable New York Times Book Review, the book that as of this writing—a few months after publication—has sold an impressive 95,000 copies in hardcover and has been bought by a paperback publisher for just shy of $1 million. It’s about a young American, conveniently also named Jonathan Safran Foer (get it? a shadow narrator), who travels to Eastern Europe to discover his heritage. His guide on this trip is a Ukrainian translator known as Alex, who provides comic relief along with topographical know-how; Alex writes in the kind of butchered Russo-English that will remind you of Saturday Night Live’s wild and crazy guys. He’s sycophantic and hypercorrect and clearly sleeps with a (probably very old) thesaurus under his pillow. The two of them are the first post-millennial Odd Couple.

  In a jacket blurb, Joyce Carol Oates said, “[Foer] will win your admiration and he will break your heart.” The Los Angeles Times hailed the book as “powerful.” Even the generally skeptical Kirkus Reviews called Foer’s skill “extraordinary” and his debut “haunting.” Amazon.com has picked up the buzz and packaged it with the very much better book-of-the-moment, Atonement, in a special-purchase deal.

  Here’s what my friend Rita said about it: “Shtetl, schmetl.”

  You know me well enough by now to presume I’m probably closer to Rita’s camp than the TBR’s, and I am—but that doesn’t mean I think the book’s unworthy. I agree that it’s impressive and unusual and very, very inventive. And while I’m generally opposed to obvious gimmicks—like a character who sounds like Steve Martin—I find myself liking Alex’s sections best. Still, after the initial novelty wore off, I began suffering from eyes-glassing-over syndrome, especially in some of the old-country scenes. I was also underwhelmed by the denouement, billed as “a heart-stopping scene of extraordinary power.” More than a few times as I slogged through this not-overlong novel, I started to sound like a Yiddishe grandmother straight out of Foer: What’s with all the fancy tchotchkes? I like a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

  So why is Foer the media darling of the moment? Well, let’s see, according to all the articles that have been written about him: he went to Princeton, and the book was represented and sold by a very charismatic New York agent called Nicole Aragi and, oh, yeah, Jonathan Safran Foer is all of twenty-five years old.

  When I was twenty-five, I was toiling as an editorial assistant at a second-tier women’s magazine, dreaming that someday I might get to write some trenchant captions about running shoes. So it’s possible that a teeny tiny portion of my pique with Foer’s success has to do with simple jealousy. I’m clearly not alone in this: just the other day, I was riding the elevator to my office at the magazine, and two youngish guys behind me were talking about the book: “God,” said one, “have you read all this stuff about the twenty-five-year-old with the novel?” “Yeah,” said the other one mournfully. “It can’t really be any good, can it?” I listened in silence as they complained for fifteen floors and then finally I thought I’d try to put them out of their misery. “Forgive me for overhearing,” I said, “but I’ve read it and didn’t think it was the Second Coming.” To which they responded as if I’d just handed them the Hope Diamond. “Oh, thanks!” the more dejected one said. “I feel much better now.”

  There’s nothing wrong with being twenty-five years old and writing a book, of course—even if I, and, clearly, those guys in the elevator, didn’t do it—and the world is full of people that age who found great success and continued to find more of it for many years afterward. Norman Mailer, for example, turned twenty-four as he wrote The Naked and the Dead, which many still consider the best of his many books. Philip Roth wasn’t thirty when Goodbye, Columbus was published, and we all know what has happened to him. But there’s something about the hype surrounding Foer—like that generated for another overrated book I already admitted to not finishing, White Teeth, by twenty-something wunderkind Zadie Smith—that reminds me of the old adage about the dancing bear. The point isn’t that the bear is a great dancer. The point is that she dances at all.

  But book publishers and their marketing departments need to seize on whatever they can to make noise for their books, and age (or its lack) is a good selling point. Look, for example, at the fanfare surrounding Twelve, the recent novel written by eighteen-year-old Nick McDonell. It was McDonell’s age—even more than his extremely well-connected publishing family—that the publisher exploited in its publicity campaign. The book, about an Upper East Side Manhattan white kid not unlike McDonell himself, has reportedly sold 60,000 copies in its first months, been optioned for the movies, and made its young author at least twice as famous as more seasoned authors four times his age.

  The idea, I guess, is to turn a book into a media event, but this is a strategy that has major backfire potential. For me—as, I believe, for a lot of readers—when a book gets overhyped, we get mad. We’re a funny, cliquish group, we book people, and sometimes we resist liking—or even resist opening—the very thing everybody tells us we’re supposed to like.

  I remember visiting my mother in Key West a long time ago and running into one of her retiree friends at the pool. This woman was reading The Firm—in paperback, but still, that’s how long ago this was!—and knowing I was a “book person,” she began asking me what I thought of it. “I haven’t read it,” I said. She was shocked: “You haven’t read The Firm? I would have thought somebody like you would have read this years ago!”

  Never mind that legal thrillers are rarely in my must-read pile; the truth is, eventually, of course, I did read The Firm, in the same way that I eventually read Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary: which is to say well after the reviews had become birdcage lining and the store displays had been mulched. Likewise, if I hadn’t read The Corrections before it became a bestseller and a cause célèbre, thanks to the Jonathan Franzen-Oprah Winfrey flap, I probably never would have gotten to it, so overwhelmed did I feel by all the publicity. Even more important, with a book that has been discussed, reviewed, and parsed by everybody from Adam on down, you lose more than just your ability to shut off the noise and come to your own conclusions. You also forfeit the joy of discovery.

  As a reader, I am always looking to be surprised, to be wowed, to fall in love as I did with Whitegirl. But if the first three rules of reading are location, location, location, the second three are surely timing, timing, timing. If you’re reading way before, or way after (and I mean years after, in some cases), the hype, you’ve got a better chance to find satisfaction. That was what I liked best about being a reviewer: because I got books in the galley stage or even, sometimes, the manuscript stage, I came with few preconceived notions. A lot of times, I never even saw a cover. So when, a few years ago, I picked up a plain red proof of a novel called Child Out of Alcatraz, because it was a provocative title, I was thrilled by more than author Tara Ison’s charming story of a girl with a prison guard for a father, a girl who grew up in the “shadow of the rock.” I was excited that I had somehow picked it out from across a crowded room.

  That said, hype surely has its place, even if all it does is make you skeptical. (Would any of us even know to create a backlash against Everything Is Illuminated—and even, in some cases, to read it—if it hadn’t been shoved down our throats?) I met Leo a scant fourteen years ago, but he
arrived with plenty of pre-publicity. The older brother of one of my dear college friends, Leo was known to a group of us as “the coolest man in the world,” because of his work, even then, with Saturday Night Live. We’d never met him, we weren’t even sure what he did (I remember thinking he was a gaffer or something), but we were impressed.

  Cut to: Ten years after graduation. I’m meeting a group of old friends in a bar. My friend Jim arrives—with another man in tow. “This is my brother Leo,” Jim tells me. I spin around on my stool.

  “You’re the coolest man in the world?” I say, the sarcasm leavened, I hope, with a bit of brash charm. “You don’t look that cool to me.”

  Now, I never would have even thought to say this if Leo hadn’t been just a tad overhyped all these years. But it was precisely because of all Jim’s advance work that I was intrigued: What, I wanted to know, is all the fuss about?

  It didn’t take long to understand what all the fuss was about when it comes to Everything Is Illuminated. As for Leo . . . well, the process is a little more complicated and is taking far longer. It’s called “marriage.”

  March 15

  Eating Crow

  There comes a moment of truth in every new friendship, a moment after the initial bonding and sharing of life experience, hopes, and fears, a moment when one or the other friend does something that could threaten the fragile bond that has been put in place between two imperfect but well-meaning souls.

  I had one of those moments this week.

  My new office friend, Mary, gave me a book.

  Looking back over the three months since Mary and I met, I see that this moment was inevitable. A temporary employee, Mary had come to the magazine to fill in for another staffer out on maternity leave. Because we had known of each other for years, and because we had many acquaintances in common, we initially sought each other out. It wasn’t long before we were showing up in each other’s cubicles every morning, stepping out for lunch or coffee in the afternoon, and stopping in for conversations about our kids, about the job, about stuff in general, throughout the day. Mary knew I was working on my book-a-week project—at this point, even the guy in the deli where I buy my breakfast every morning knew about it—and we’d often talk about what I’d read the previous week, or what I was thinking about writing. Mary was always interested and excited: “I can’t wait to read it!” she’d say. “It sounds so great.”

  Then, about a week before she was due to leave, Mary reached into her tote bag and somewhat nervously, it seemed to me, handed me a novel by the name of Crow Lake. “I think it might be good,” she said. “Anyway, I enjoyed it.”

  I guess I should take it as a compliment that Mary had enough faith in me, and in our friendship—not to mention in herself—to take the risk she did. As I was accepting the book that day, my mind wandered back to a story she’d told me a couple of weeks earlier, about a woman we both knew and didn’t particularly like. (As I said, we were bonding, and there’s no quicker way for two women to do that than to commiserate about a third.) In fact, Mary said, she had liked this woman—who we’ll call, let’s see, Madame X—or at least had thought there was a possibility that she would like her should their relationship continue. But then Madame came into the office all aflutter one day and said that Mary simply must, must, read this new book that was the best thing she’d ever read. The book: The Bridges of Madison County. “This was before the novel was well known,” Mary explained. (And obviously, long before the movie, which even Mary admits was far more tolerable than the Robert James Waller book.) “I didn’t know what I was getting into, so I went home and started reading. By nine that night, I had thrown the book across the room I hated it so much. And by morning, I’d become incapable of even looking X in the eye. How could somebody I like have liked that book?” Needless to say, their friendship sputtered out faster than the plot of a Luanne Rice novel.

  My guess is that Mary had thought long and hard about giving me Crow Lake. Clearly she knew that between book lovers, a novel is not a novel is not a novel. It’s a symbol, an offering—and sometimes a test.

  I used to work with a guy who regularly stopped by my desk for reading recommendations, and so I devised a quick checklist of questions: Fiction or nonfiction? Historical or contemporary? Male or female? Once I locked in on his general criteria, I could usually choose for him (Nick Hornby’s About a Boy was a bull’s-eye; so, amazingly, was James Kaplan’s Two Guys from Verona), probably precisely because I didn’t know much more about him than his answers to those questions and I didn’t have much at stake. We weren’t friends, really, and the worst that could happen was our tastes would diverge, he’d stop asking me, and both of us would get more work done.

  When real friendship is involved, though, the stakes get higher and the game gets harder. My friend Jessie, for example, has long been my reading twin. She always likes what I like and hates what I hate. When I put her onto How Boys See Girls, for example, she fell into a rapture over the book, became its author’s disciple, and gave copies out as Christmas gifts. Ditto, because Jessie spoke so highly of an oddball novel, Oswald Wynd’s The Ginger Tree, I waded through a slow opening until I, too, came to love the mid-twentieth-century novel about a white woman, a gaijin, living in Japan.

  But with a history of success like that, the failures are catastrophic. “Don’t read the new Anita Shreve,” I told Jessie last year, but she did—and she loved it. Which made me question her judgment and then my own. Worse, she lent me her prized collection of novels by British octogenarian Mary Wesley, who recently enjoyed a brief vogue (in Vogue magazine, in fact). They were too Queen Mum for me, the kind of genial comedies of manners that are the book equivalent of a floral tea dress and a broad-brimmed hat. I couldn’t get past the first chapter in any of them. Was that my problem or Jessie’s? Can you declare a book accident no-fault?

  An occasional disagreement over a book’s merit should not be a big deal to normal people, but the people I love—and the person I am—are not normal: we’re book people. To us, disagreeing about something we read is as shocking and disruptive as, say, deciding that we hate each other’s husbands. (Jessie only half-jokes that when she and her husband disagree passionately about a book, she contemplates divorce.) I should let it go, or reconsider my feelings about the book in question. But I end up reconsidering the friendship instead.

  Luckily, the situation with Mary Lawson’s Crow Lake did not become so dire, though I admit I had a second surge of anxiety when I mentioned to another book friend, Laurie, that Mary had passed it along to me. “Oh! It’s so bad,” she blurted. Uh-oh, I thought, friendships at risk everywhere I look.

  Crow Lake is a quiet, contemplative first novel about Kate, a girl raised by her two older brothers in rural Canada after their parents are killed in a car accident. Kate is now a twenty-seven-year-old professor of zoology, more at ease with sea life than with real life; on a trip back to Crow Lake, she and her much more cosmopolitan boyfriend are forced to confront the secrets of the family she’s been trying so hard to leave behind. Like a lot of first novels, it’s a bit overwritten and, like so many recent books, way too full of easy psychobabble. “I did not analyze my feelings too deeply,” Kate says about her budding relationship, “. . . maybe because I was afraid that if I found I loved and needed him too much, he would be bound to disappear. People I love and need have a habit of disappearing from my life.” Still, the story of the Morrison family, and particularly the portrait of the older brother Kate so loves, is compelling. By the time I’d finished, I’d written “Oy!” beside a dozen passages like the one above, but I’d also avidly turned pages, in a happily desperate desire to decipher the family’s secrets.

  I have yet to see any reviews of the novel, and I suspect that it will be ignored, or even trashed.2 But I don’t care that it wasn’t good in a line-by-line way or even that the story overshoots universal and lands pretty close to cliché. I enjoyed Crow Lake the way one enjoys any dramatic tale about a complicated family and t
heir complicated—though ultimately, basic—problems finding connection and love.

  But the real reason I liked it was that Mary had given it to me, not so much as a literary recommendation as a personal clue. Like the Morrisons, Mary’s family comes from a rural area—one in South Dakota—and like Kate, Mary is fascinated by science and the natural world. (She’s a hard-core, or as she would say, “nerdy,” science writer by trade.) And while I don’t know the specifics of her family life, I do know that she is at the moment caught up with her siblings in dealing with a dying parent. What had appealed to Mary, I now suspect, was not Crow Lake’s qualities as a piece of writing so much as its situational resonance to her own life. Mary was taken with Crow Lake because it reminded her in some ways of herself.

  Mary no longer works with me and we haven’t been in touch in several weeks, but because I’ve read Crow Lake, I feel like the bond between us is even greater. By giving it to me, she was telling me she trusted me to know her a little bit better, as a person whose interests and background were well illustrated within it. She wasn’t making a literary judgment when she handed me the book that day, she was making an open gesture of friendship. So, phew: I can agree with Laurie, more or less, that Crow Lake is not a great piece of literature and retain that relationship, and I can go on liking and respecting my new pal, Mary. After all, what she’d said to me that day wasn’t, “This is the greatest book I ever read.” She’d said, and I italicize: “I enjoyed this. And I think it might be good.”

  March 22

  Sharing Books Gives Me Heartburn

  Mary left the magazine before I finished Crow Lake, so one of the biggest topics in BookLand was at least temporarily tabled. When someone hands you a book, is it a gift or a loan? That is the question. Is it nobler to assume the latter and live by the principle that all books are to be returned, or is it tacky and ungrateful to give them back? No one I know would consciously borrow a book from a library and never return it (even though you can buy a lot of old library books at used-book stores and on Alibris.com). But a lot of those same people think borrowing is different with friends. There’s no return date. No computer system. No librarian. No fines.