goodbye invisible

I’m finally done with Invisible, thank goodness. Not a fan. It was simultaneously better and worse than The New York Trilogy, but mostly it was more of the same, just less exciting (not that The New York Trilogy is very exciting). I’ve already talked a lot about it (here and here and here), so I won’t bother to repeat myself. Normally I would have put the book down, but I wanted to get to the end — I knew he was going to throw something in there, some twist that would (in his eyes at least) tie everything up in one way or another. And, it was definitely there, like a bad M. Night Shyamalan movie. Overall the book felt like a collection of scraps that didn’t really work on their own  forced into a semblance of a novel. On the surface everything a reader of serious fiction would want was there — everything except depth.

I’m also very close to finishing the Zadie Smith book, which I recommend. At times her thinking can be a little inchoate and scattered, but not ever to the extent where you doubt her in what she’s saying. The last chapter on David Foster Wallace is extremely engaging.

mean monday

I saw Jonathan Franzen on Friday and got a copy of the book signed. For anyone who didn’t make it out, here’s a video of him talking:

It’s probably going to be a little while until I get to read the thing, though. I’m still trudging along through The New York Trilogy, and after that I’m going to read a few Graham Greene novels. I’ve come across mentions of Greene many times, but I have to admit I don’t know much about him, and I don’t know many people who are very familiar with his work. It’s going to be great fun.

In other news, Joshua Ferris will be coming to Bookpeople next Tuesday in promotion of his book The Unnamed. I read his debut, Then We Came To The End, and really enjoyed it, and I’m curious to see what he has to say about his latest novel. If I remember correctly, the reviews were overall mostly positive, so maybe one of these days when I have less on my plate I’ll check it out.

some reviews

I hope Labor Day festivities were as pleasant for everyone as they were for me.  I’ve almost finished Olive Kitteridge, which is a good thing because it’s completely hijacked the rest of my reading. On the plus side, having a little distance between myself and The New York Trilogy has given my mind the freedom to think about it in ways I otherwise wouldn’t have had — and not necessarily in Paul Auster’s favor. Right now color me mildly impressed. I’ve had a friend recommend his latest, Invisible, however, and after reading a few things about it I’m definitely going to give it a go here in the next few months.

Since I’ve been talking about Franzen and book reviews lately, I thought it would be fun to go back and read some reviews he’s read. Here’s a selection from his review of Alice Munro’s Runaway:

“But who is Alice Munro? She is the remote provider of intensely pleasurable private experiences. And since I’m not interested in reviewing her new book’s marketing campaign or in being entertainingly snarky at her expense, and since I’m reluctant to talk about the concrete meaning of her new work, because this is difficult to do without revealing too much plot, I’m probably better off just serving up a nice quote for Alfred A. Knopf to pull — ”Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America. ‘Runaway’ is a marvel” — and suggesting to the Book Review’s editors that they run the biggest possible photograph of Munro in the most prominent of places, plus a few smaller photos of mildly prurient interest (her kitchen? her children?) and maybe a quote from one of her rare interviews — ”Because there is this kind of exhaustion and bewilderment when you look at your work. . . . All you really have left is the thing you’re working on now. And so you’re much more thinly clothed. You’re like somebody out in a little shirt or something, which is just the work you’re doing now and the strange identification with everything you’ve done before. And this probably is why I don’t take any public role as a writer. Because I can’t see myself doing that except as a gigantic fraud” — and just leave it at that.”

The whole review is very interesting and overall Franzen does a great job contextualizing his opinion of Runaway in who he is and what he likes and why he likes it. Plus, he doesn’t give anything away. I’ve tried reading reviews of Freedom as they continue to come out, but I find myself either skipping over paragraphs at a time in an attempt to avoid plot details, or wading through pretentious paragraph after pretentious paragraph of head-in-ass snobbery. Ah, yes. Now I remember why I don’t read book reviews. Still, here and here and here are a couple of the more engaging ones I’ve stumbled upon.