I must insist on a cliche here. So often we hear that a new non-fiction book "reads like a novel," but in the case of Tracy Kidder's Strength in What Remains it is really true.  Early in his account of Deogratias' flight from Burundi to the United States, Kidder writes, "A memory from world history class surfaced [in Deo's mind].  Maybe he was like that man who got lost and discovered America."

Deo is a latter-day Columbus, navigating his way through the perils, mysteries, and wonders of America life, without legend or language.  I'm reminded of the closing of a great American novel, The Adventures of Augie March, when our hero-narrator Augie remarks, "Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand, and believe you can come to them in this immediate unknown land that spreads out in ever gaze."

Deo's encounters with those near-at-hand in New York are sometimes uncomfortable, often trying, but his response is frequently heroic.

I'm glad to report that the epic sweep of Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone includes a character from our own fair city, though he shows up in Addis Ababa. Mr. Eli Harris, a Baptist from Houston, is a friend and somewhat muddled supporter of Missing (Mission) Hospital, the essential scene of the early parts of the novel. He's a sympathetic character, "the sort of man who, even when he had the upper hand, didn't know how to press for his rights."

In other news, our friends over at the Brazos are hosting a major European writer this evening: Arthur Japin is one of Holland's leading novelists, and he'll be reading from his latest book to be translated into English: Director's Cut, set in the world of Italian cinema. The event starts at 7pm. For more details, please follow this link: http://www.brazosbookstore.com/event/arthur-japin

Pamuk's chapter (in Istanbul) on "The Turkification of Constantinople" brought to mind an issue much closer to (my old) home. "When I was a child," he writes, "the view among the city's more vocal nationalists was that anyone who so much as used the name Constantinople was an undesirable alien with irredentist dreams [of a Greek reconquest]." This example of the provocative power of a place-name reminded me of the long-running and highly contentious Derry vs. Londonderry debate in ... (here's another verbal battleground) Northern Ireland/the North of Ireland. Derry is the original name of the city--or, more precisely, it is the English version of the original Irish place-name, Doire, which, as Seamus Heaney, the town's most famous son, told us at an Inprint reading some years ago, means an oak wood. Derry is what the Nationalist majority of the city's population call their home. But the Unionist minority (or the Unionist majority across NI) insist on calling it Londonderry, in remembrance of the British ships that lifted the Seige of Derry in the 17th century--an event that is central to their identity. Gerry Anderson, a popular broadcaster with the local BBC station (called, with canny neutrality, Radio Foyle, after the river that flows through the city ... and divides the Catholic- and Protestant-dominated areas), came up a number of years ago with the ingenious way of referencing his hometown: "Stroke City," short for his all inclusive method of naming it on the air: "Derry/Londonderry." Perhaps this Stroke City could be twinned with other linguistically contested places around the world.

Updated my New Yorker fiction podcast this morning (newyorker.com/ online/podcasts/fiction) and lo and behold the recording features Orhan Pamuk. He reads the Nabokov short story/memoir "My Russian Education" and then discusses it with New Yorker Fiction Editor Deborah Treisman. An observation Pamuk makes about Nabokov's technique in this piece--how a writer takes his "secret wounds" and connects "them with the whole culture" gives us, I reckon, an useful insight into Pamuk's own approach to both his own fiction and non-fiction (in the interview, he maintains that writers aren't as interested in such a rigid distinction between the two as, say, publishers are). Treisman connects Pamuk's new novel, The Museum of Innocence (which he'll be reading from at the Inprint and Brazos event, November 16) with Nabokov's Lolita. Pamuk modestly admits that, in the case of the Russian master, he'll probably always have "anxiety of influence." Even Nobel Laureates have writers they look up to.

RAGTIME (1975) shines a critical light not only back to American culture of the early 20th century but also forward to our own time.  There's an intriguing analysis on p. 84 (Random House paperback) of the birth of the manufactured celebrity.  The "business community" is taken with the phenomenon of Evelyn Nesbit, famous for being infamous as well as beautiful: "They realized that there was a process of magnification by which news events established certain individuals in the public consciousness as larger than life."  My goodness, they must be cheering in their graves at this era of the viral video, TMZ, and 24-hour cable news.  "The businessmen wondered if they could create such individuals not from the accidents of news events but from the deliberate manufacturers of their own medium."  Yes they could.  As Doctorow notes, they parlayed this public bedazzlement into the Hollywood star system, with its production line of manufactured stars (with made-up, brand-worthy names).  These days, of course, they'd get the starlets their own reality TV shows.  You can well imagine Evelyn having her own show (THE TRIALS OF EVELYN NESBIT?), with a hand-held camera following her into the Lower East Side on her mercy missions.

I'm fifty+ pages into RAGTIME, the 1975 Doctorow novel that was included in that 100 best of the 20th century a few years back.  And what a bracing read it is, having all the energy and complexity of its namesake musical form.  I've reached the point where Evelyn Nesbit attends the Emma Goldman lecture.  Goldman's subject is Ibsen.  I think we forget what an enormous impact that Scandinavian playwright had around the turn of the century--around the world. Shaw wrote a book about him.  In Dublin, a young James Joyce learned Norwegian to be able to read him in his original language.  When Joyce, just an undergraduate at the time, received a letter from the old man thanking him for a review/essay of WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN (I think) in a British journal, he took it, quite rightly, as a kind of annointing of his literary career.  The medical terminology that Doctorow's Emma uses when speaking of Ibsen--"in whose work, she said, lay all the instruments for the radical dissection of society"--is spot on.  At least one of the plays, AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, where the doctor tells the citizens something they don't want to hear, involves medical determination.  In others, Ibsen is the "doctor," dissecting society or making his diagnosis of social ills.  It's something that the young Joyce, a former medical student, picked up on.  One of the key words in DUBLINERS is "paralysis"--Joyce's diagnosis of the malaise afflicting his city.  DUBLINERS was written in the very early 20th century; RAGTIME is set in the very early 20th century (an alternative title could be NEW YORKERS, given the vast cast of characters).  I wonder what diagnosis of THIS city Doctorow is indicating?  Suggestions?

Beware of plot spoiler ahead if you haven't finished THE BOOK OF DANIEL:

What you could call the novel's denouement occurs when Daniel goes to Disneyland to confront (sort of) Mindish.  The passage is a tour de force, something that you could imagine standing alone in an anthology (perhaps this has happened already).  This shift, so late in the story, from east to west coast, from a monochromatic atmosphere to gaudy color, is wholly unexpected, and devastatingly effective.  Question is, Why?

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on this.  A couple of suggestions to get things started:

There are resonances of the larger story all through the scene.  Daniel/Doctorow's definition, for instance, of HUCKLEBERRY FINN, could describe the entire novel: "a nightmare of childhood in confrontation with American social reality."

And, as the narrator says later, "there are political implications" in his analysis of the Disneyland phenomenon.

I'm struck by how prophetic several sentences in the same paragraph (published in 1971) are: "In a forthcoming time of highly governed masses in an overpopulated world, this technique ["abbreviated shorthand culture for the masses"] may be extremely useful both asa a substitute for education and, eventually, a substitute for experience."

A "substitute for experience" ... hmm.  I get the sense that Daniel would not be so comfortable in the 2009 world of youtube and Second Life.

One point of connection to note between this powerful scene and Doctorow's reading on Oct 19.  After reading from his new novel, HOMER & LANGLEY, E.L. Doctorow will be interviewed on stage by Alex Parsons from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.  In the passage we've been talking about Daniel compares Disneyland to a prison camp (a concentration camp, indeed), and in Alex Parsons' first novel, LEAVING DISNEYLAND, "Disneyland" is the nickname for a penitentiary.  Sufficed to say, both novelists deal with "confrontation[s] with American social reality."

E. L. (Edgar Lawrence) Doctorow was named after Edgar Allan Poe, which adds a further twist to a striking, perhaps unsettling passage in The Book of Daniel.  You'll find it on page 177 of the Random House paperback edition.  It's a long paragraph in which Daniel riffs on the theme of traitors in American history.  He mentions Benedict Arnold, and other (debatable) Benedict Arnolds.  Then he introduces his namesake: "the archetype traitor, the master subversive Poe, who wore a hole into the parchment and let the darkness pour through."  What follows reads like a dark Barthelme story (I wonder if there was an influence; ELD was writing this when Don B. was very prominent).  "It's Poe who ruined us," Daniel concludes (that "ruined" appropriately in quote marks), "that scream from the smiling face of America."  What do you make of this passage?  What do you think ELD is implying about the role of the writer in America, the writer with his/her "plots" (to pluck an idea from another Don: Delillo)?  Is "role" to formal a word?  Have things changed since 1971?

Interesting connection between E.L. Doctorow (reads Oct. 19) and John Banville (reads March 1, with Abraham Verghese).  They both have acknowledged the influence of the German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist.  The plot of Doctorow's major 1975 novel Ragtime (which I'll be blogging about after The Book of Daniel) is based on von Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhass, about a man on an obsessive quest for justice.  Banville's new novel, The Infinities, is inspired by the von Kleist play Amphitryon, about the intervention of the gods in human affairs.  In the 1990s, Banville adapted von Kleist's comedy The Broken Jug, which I remember seeing on the Peacock Stage at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Ireland's national theatre.

About half way through The Book of Daniel now.  After reading the arrest scenes, I was reflecting on how wise it was of Doctorow not to write a novel about the Rosenbergs but about the Isaacsons, a couple indicted for conspiracy to commit espionage, reminiscent, to be sure, of the Rosenbergs, but not the Rosenbergs.  How would a novel about the Rosenbergs, written in the early 70s, look now, in the light of the admission last year by Mort Sobell that he and Julius Rosenberg were indeed Soviet agents.  The Rosenbergs two sons, Robert and Michael, have essentially accepted these facts, though they continue to dispute their mother's guilt, the damage done by their father's activities, and, understandably, the severity of the sentence.  My "read" on the novel, so far, is that ambiguity as to Paul and Rochelle's guilt/complicity is a big part of the book's meaning, an ambiguity that, in large measure, as been removed from the historical record. 

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the outpouring of information from Russian sources, which was hardly plausible in the 50s/60s/70s, has also shifted our understanding of the espionage issue.

Does this historical shift, and shifts in our historical understanding, change your reading or experience of the novel?

So I swung by the Brazos yesterday and picked up my copy of THE BOOK OF DANIEL.  About fifty pages in, just finished the chilling scene about the Paul Robeson concert (and aftermath).

Great line about Daniel's father running "up and down history like a pianist playing his scales"; maybe that could describe Doctorow's oeuvre.  

The novel is propelled by the bitter brilliance of Daniel's voice and mind.  Even the most innocuous-seeming paragraphs can whip round and remind you of the darkest concerns of the book, as when D. observes his troubled sister reading a movie magazine: "Does Dick Really Love Liz?  ... I think if they were put on trial for their lives, he might come to love her."

I'm also struck by the novel's emphasis on its own fictionality ("This is Composition Notebook 79C made in U.S.A. by Long Island Paper Products.")  Do you think this enriches the text (called, after all, the BOOK of Daniel) or it is something of a distraction?

I wonder if Doctorow were writing the novel today if it would be as meta-fictional (keeping in mind that "I used to know a lot more about writing, now I just write" comment I mentioned in my last posting).

Next up in the reading series is E.L. Doctorow (reads Oct. 19), and over the next few weeks i'll be reading/rereading some of his key books, starting with his breakthrough 1971 novel THE BOOK OF DANIEL and ending with his latest, HOMER & LANGLEY.  Perhaps you'd like to read along ...

One overarching question to keep in mind: E.L.D. has said in recent times "I used to know a lot more about writing; now i just write."  In the light of these and other novels, what could he mean?

Just back from the sell-out inaugural reading of the new season.  I was particularly struck by that story Joseph O'Neill told about a difficult phase in the writing of NETHERLAND, when he was in someone else's house/cabin in Canada and came across Marilynne Robinson's HOUSEKEEPING.  He said that what he learned from Robinson's novel was "slowness," which moderator Antonya Nelson identified as the quality of "patience" in Robinson's work.  I think they hit upon something important here, a strength in novels that really work and that we can really care about.  Ian McEwan has talked about the pleasure of "the slow unfolding" of narrative in a novel--for both reader and writer, I suppose.  Perhaps the purpose of a short story is to crystalize and the purpose of a novel is to develop (with "perhaps" being the crucial word in any discussion/definition of literary genres).  We certainly heard tonight, in O'Neill's and Robinson's wonderful readings, the pleasures of prose that lets character, narrative, incident, and language breathe.

It sounded barmy to his friends while he was writing it, but now a novel about cricket in New York (NETHERLAND, by Joseph O'Neill) has been acclaimed as a brilliantly original subject, and canny way of looking at the state of the American Dream in the early 21st century.  I'm intrigued to find out what American readers with little or no exposure to the game (ie, about 94% of you) make of all this.

Personally, talk of LBW, googlies, and gullies is not puzzling.  I played a bit of cricket as a kid back home, but here's the rub: it was very much a minority sport in Ireland (with a bigger following up North).  In certain parts of the former British Empire, such as Trinidad (where Chuck in the novel hails from), cricket is HUGE: Trinidad forms part of the West Indies, which is one of the great cricket sides (playing at Test Cricket level, and often beating auld England); in other former, eh, dominions, such as Canada, Ireland, the US, it's almost below the radar (one of the points of O'Neill's book).  I went to one of the few cricket-playing schools in (the Republic of) Ireland.  Because of the resurgence of our "native" Gaelic sports in the late 19th century, an antipathy developed, in certain quarters, to "foreign" games.

By the time I was growing up in the 1970s, football (soccer to y'all) was ubiquitous, rugby had its (middle-class) strongholds, but cricket ... we might as well have raised a Union Jack over the school grounds as far as some people were concerned.  Irish-born O'Neill wouldn't have experienced this, since his was a cosmopolitan childhood spent outside Ireland, with the family eventually settling in Holland, where he played for the Dutch under-19 cricket side.  I'm really taken with one of the founding ideas of NETHERLAND, that cricket in New York was being played but simply invisible to most people.

Irish cricket, by the way, is enjoying a higher profile these days.  In 2007, in the World Cup, the team shocked everyone, including the Irish, by beating Pakistan, another of the great Test Cricket nations.  Former IRA member and present Deputy First Minister of North Ireland Martin McGuinness surprised a lot of folks by revealing that he's fond of the sport.  Both he and First Minister Ian Paisley sent their congratulations to the team (unlike soccer, North and South play together on one national side).  Now, who else is for cricket?

In the interview with Times of London--Wednesday's blog post, though the link is now giving me a 404, even when I google the article; sigh--Joseph O'Neill is most gracious when he's asked about the Gatsby influence.  I've seen writers bristle at these influence questions during Q&As at readings, signings, etc., but O'Neill embraces it, saying, basically, (and I paraphrase) Hey, though I didn't realize my plot was drawn from that template till deep into the writing, I am rolling down Fitzgerald Blvd (green lights all the way?).

And then he adds a most intriguing qualification.  O'Neill says that the novel is his "farewell to Gatsby"; that it also stands in contrast to the Jazz Age classic, because then a tale of the American Dream was predicated on the idea of limitless economic opportunity, an idea that has had its wings severely clipped.

I would share O'Neill's pessimism, or realism, but then again I am, like him, a European writer resident in the States, so I'm much more interested in YOUR take on O'Neill's vision.

I would add just this:  Yes, in the novel Chuck has a grand plan--converting the American people to cricket!--but that's hardly hooch-pipeline-from-Canada lucrative ... or is it?  Cricket is huge business in India, where it has been injected with the showbiz spirit (as O'Neill has pointed out, teams in white, the classic image of cricket, are becoming an anachronism).

The news keeps getting better and better for Joseph O'Neill:

http://vintage-anchor.knopfdoubleday.com/2009/08/24/netherland-movie-new/

Of course, it'll be ages yet before you'll be able to see the movie in theaters, so come on down to Zilkha Hall on Sept. 21 to see the author read with the equally excellent Marilynne Robinson.

In some ways, Joseph O'Neill and Marilynne Robinson, our authors for the opening reading of the season (Sept. 21), are very different novelists, but they do have a common approach to the creative process: they are very patient.  Robinson has commented in several interviews that she must hear the voice of the central character in her head before commencing a novel (one explanation, perhaps, as to why she has published so sparingly).  Netherland, O'Neill's breakthrough book, took him seven years to write.  Check out this interview with him from the Times of London:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4025113.ece

Check out this excellent, and extensive, interview with Joseph O'Neill (reads September 21), author of the acclaimed novel Netherland.  He comes across as being unpretentious, wise about writing, and witty.  See for yourself:

http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2009/07/interview-with-joseph-oneill-part-1.html

Amigoland, the debut novel from Oscar Casares (reads September 21), gets a great review from Houston's own Edward Nawotka in the Dallas Morning News.  Check it out:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/stories/DN-bk_amigoland_0816gd.ART.State.Edition1.4baedec.html

It's hard, after reading this article, not to rush out immediately to your local library or favorite bookstore (the Brazos, undoubtedly):

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4774827.ece

It's not surprising that Joseph O'Neill (reads September 21st) knows New York so well (as evidenced by his acclaimed novelNetherland), given where he lives:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/16/familyandrelationships1

I note with interest that one of our Inprint MRB Reading Series authors, Marilynne Robinson (reads September 21, with Joseph O'Neill) sings the praises of another reader: Oscar Casares, (May 3, with Gwen Zepeda).

Of Casares, Robinson says, his fiction is "clear-eyed and fresh, full of sweet gravity and pensive humor."

The quote is featured on Casares' nicely desgined web site: 

http://www.oscarcasares.com/

The Paris Review, famous for its "Art of Fiction" interviews, has some great resources on its web site.  Here's an audio clip from 2000 with novelist E.L. Doctorow, who reads in the Brown Root Reading Series on October 19.

The witty, patrician voice you'll hear asking the questions is the late George Plimpton, a Paris Review founder.