Book Log - December 2007 -  March, 2008

This is stuff I managed before/during the semester outside of the courseload...I'll tackle that when the semester's over.

Ratking - Michael Dibdin — Read about this series in the Times Book Review at some point and made a mental note to check it out, since it seemed like a series of novels about an Italian police detective butting up against corruption and bureaucracy would make a nice cross-national analogue to my beloved Inspector Ghote series. This is the first book in the series, and I think I'll leave my progress there, though I don't feel like reading this was actually a waste of time. The main problem is Dibdin's somewhat heavy hand in setting up emotional dynamics and a back-story for his hero, Aurelio Zen: "If there had been an unspeakable secret, then one of the two men who had guessed it had died here. And since that moment, day and night, whatever else he might be doing or thinking, Zen had remained uneasily aware that he was the other." Having clumsily dropped this and similarly portentous hints, Dibdin simply lets it go — presumably to haunt his hero in future installments — and gets down to business. Much of what Ratking does is good — there's the laying out of the poisonous inter-police factions, especially in a great press conference scene ("Di Leonardo looked flabbergasted, as though never before in his experience had the media failed to be satisfied by the reading of a prepared statement") that's a minor masterpiece of evasion and stonewalling. There's also Dibdin's curious dialogue, which somehow exactly approximates the patterns of Italian translated into ad-hoc English ("It wasn't a pretty sight, I assure you") — I can't tell if that's a good or bad thing, but it's distinctive. What's missing to make me want to keep going, I guess, is a sense of joy or even pride in navigating bureaucratic pitfalls — the obstacles Inspector Ghote transforms into a sort of screwball comedy (the joy in doing a job well when that seems almost antithetical to the spirit of doing the work in the first place) is played for nearly unrelenting yet kind of numb tragedy. That justice will not be served is pretty much a foregone conclusion from the first pages.
(Dec. 2007)

Hotel: An American History - A.K. Sandoval-Strausz —I'm not much for reading academic prose in my spare time, but I couldn't resist this title, which promised to do for the negative space of corporate hotels what Walter Kirn did for AirWorld in Up In The Air. As it turns out, Sandoval-Strausz's work stops just short of the monolithic, uniform spaces that define American travel (though it glances towards their arrival via E.M. Statler, who created the first uniform layouts with the motto "A bed and a bath for a dollar and a half," claiming "there is nothing wrong with standardization"), let alone motels. Sandoval-Strausz isn't interested in the topography of ubiquitous mediocrity: instead, he offers up a quite comprehensive, generally absorbing history of the hotel up from its incubation during George Washington's presidency through the civil rights movement. Dominique Browning's Times review which pointed me to the book in the first place complains of a surplus of academic jargon, noting (correctly) "It is nowadays to be expected, sadly, that an author familiar with Kant’s work will also feel obliged to use language like 'domestic ideologies,' 'microgeography of labor' and, my personal favorite, 'gendered dynamic.' " Sadly, I appear to be fluent in this tongue (and yes, the requisite Foucault citation is on page 222): I zipped through Hotel with little to no problem. The prose is dull but not unnecessarily dense (sample quote: "While this domestic ideal bore little resemblance to most people's reality, it nonetheless did the ideological work of reinforcing Anglo-American residential preferences by providing another reason to valorize the individual household"), and always livened by choice quotes from critics less forceably restrained, like a Harper's Weekly writer complaining, in 1957, of haughty hotel managers: "Would you ever imagine, on entering the Bunkum House, that the portly, insolent-looking man, smoking his cigar in the public hall with his feet on a chair, and reading the morning paper — would you ever imagine that this immense being, radiant with diamonds and huge chin, was the landlord? He is. Go and ask him for a room, and be instantly withered with a glance of offended dignity. Speak to him at all, if you are a stranger, and you will soon learn better than to address this Jove of Olympian attic rooms on a short acquaintance." There's a generous sprinkling of past euphemisms and general strangeness. The argument, generally advanced, posits hotels as at least as important towards American development as the railroad, the two interlinked in the distribution of resources, capital and settlers. Hotels could act as outposts for future metropolises and provide housing for railway workers; the argument is generally convincing, though less so when Sandoval-Strausz argues that their position as a civil rights integration issue was pivotal (important, sure, but hotels were tied in to a laundry list of problems, not in the pole position). There's a lot of history here, enough to make me wish I bought my own copy instead of getting a library one, but it's kind of a pain in the ass to read; a dash of style here and there wouldn't have hurt any of Sandoval-Strausz's excellent points. Still, if you're interested in the subject, dig in.
(Jan. 2008)

Hindoo Holiday - J.R. Ackerley — Ackerley's travelogue is a faux-diary — I'm guessing on the "faux" part, but it seems too neatly structured to be the real thing. His observations on Indian culture are pretty basic (it's aged badly in that respect); like E.M. Forster, though, he's really good at bashing snotty Anglo-Indian society, recording every poisonous interaction: "At the least opportunity," explains Mrs. Montgomery shortly after his arrival, "you should have produced information about yourself. ... You see, when we asked you one thing about yourself it meant that we wanted to hear all. ... We have to stick together. How do you suppose we'd get on if every one was like you?" Ackerley: "But I think you all knew all about me before I arrived." Mrs. Montgomery: "That's quite true, but it doesn't excuse you." Ackerley is sensitive in his interactions with others, if slightly myopic on context; his conversations are a delight, his general observations on the country not so much.
(Feb. 08)

Love Always - Ann Beattie — Picked this up in an excellent LA bookstore I can't remember the name of for only $3 on the strength of my fondness for the film of Chilly Scenes Of Winter. Sure enough, the first 2/3 of this is warm and witty satire, expertly spoofing dated '80s upper-middle-class social mores without veering into mere caricature. The paperback back-cover blurbs have Margaret Atwood serving up the Austen/Wilde/Waugh trifecta for comparison, which seems about right. It's all part and parcel of the East Coast nexus of literary power I didn't really learn about til I moved to New York: writers whose goal is nothing more than to live the faux-rustic lifestyle in Vermont, 30somethings doing drugs like they're in college, the whole bit. It starts on the first page with one Maureen preparing for a party: "Maureen liked to give parties with motifs, and although Hildon's staff did not deserve such pleasure, she decided on clever parties so that she, at least, would be amused." Dead-on. Beattie keeps expanding the cast of characters casually, broadening the social circle rather than plunking them all down at the start and then sorting them out. Unfortunately, this dead-ends with the introduction of Rita, a mother who shows up to provide gravitas for the big close: the fatal error, as fucking always, is that what goes up must come down. And come down it does, with the kind of prose that obsesses over "small details" as the clue to everything that's come before ("when she went to the hospital, it was the first time that she saw a hospital room that was not painted white. It was painted green." Thanks, I understand mortality and grieving so much better now.) Before that unfortunate shift, what Beattie basically offers is a smarter, older counterpart to Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis. If '80s satire is trivial and obsessed with material status signifiers, at least it's grounded: I didn't get all the references here, but I appreciated that they were there. Seems to me like this era awaits its own trenchant satirist that's not in blog form: Hari Kunzru's Transmission comes closest out of my imperfect sampling.
(Feb. 08)

Generation X - Douglas Coupland — Overwritten and massively dated, of course, but that's what gives it its charm. As earnest and convinced of its own significance as '60s Antonioni, Generation X declares war on sincerity, irony, narrative structure, and lord knows what else: as much the work of a petulant graphic designer as a writer, Generation X insists on facetious marginalia, Lichtenstein-type side panels, etc. Lots of adjectives, needless tangents, descriptions of clothing, overwrought protestations of nuclear-era angst. The charm is in the time-stamped flaws as much as Coupland's obvious talent (the Texlahoma story is a standout: a planet where it's always been 1974 as long as anyone can remember, a perfect way of describing the decaying suburbs), but he's become a better writer since then: his prose is much leaner these days.
(Mar. 08)