I Know I'm Unloveable, You Don't Have To Tell Me

I haven't written about books in a while, because I have decided not to discuss (here) books that I haven't finished reading, and I've been abandoning books lately. But here are some thoughts on two books I read over the holidays:

Jonathan Lethem is on the verge of becoming an actual disappointment artist. I skipped his last novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, despite it having a title borrowed from a pretty awesome Roky Erikson song, because it was a book about a band and books about fictional rock musicians are never good. Chronic City, a book I'd really been looking forward to since reading a excerpt masquerading as a short story in the New Yorker last year (and, really, enough with that, New Yorker), is also -- I'm terribly sad to say -- not good.

Generally, I'm an easy reader. I like almost everything. so long as it is free of vampires or hypocritical internal ethics and icky perspectives on transracial adoption. I really loved, and continue to love, Lethem's Fortress of Solitude. For all its messiness, it captures something about friendship, about urban life, about being a teenager, about the sound a pink Spalding ball made when it twokked off the front stoop, about alienation, about "Play That Funky Music, White Boy," about the ways in which pop culture both fires and limits the imagination. I'm not sure, at this vantage point, what Chronic City captures. There's a chapter in which four characters wait for photos to load on eBay through a dial-up connection.

As Janet Burroway said, only trouble is interesting. Chronic City's central character, Chase Insteadman, is an attractive and well-funded former child actor who attends swanky Manhattan parties. Not much trouble, there. A sub-plot involving Chase's astronaut girlfriend, does present some trouble -- there are Chinese mines separating her from earth, she's running out of oxygen, and is diagnosed with cancer -- but this whole matter is pretty well erased by Lethem by the novel's end. Other troubles -- some of them kind of neatly magical, including a gray fog that has encased lower Manhattan and a giant tiger that is destroying buildings along Second Avenue -- are dealt with in similar fashion. In fact, almost at every turn, Lethem lowers the stakes for the narrative, including a pretty winkingly metafictional suggestion that, hey, none of this real anyway.

Kind of sad.

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Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind kind of rescued me from post-Chronic City malaise; I picked it up almost immediately after finishing the last sentence in Lethem. Smith is wicked smart, as the Bostonians say, but the essays are mostly accessible. There's one on Italian opera that I had to skip, and another one on Nabokov vis a vis Roland Barthe that I had just enough grad school theory courses to absorb. She also managed to sell me on E.M. Forester, whom I was previously sure I was never going to read.

She also draws a pretty fantastic connection between Eliza Doolittle and Barack Obama, and reviews the summer movies of 2006. A short essay on the 2006 Oscars falls short for me -- Smith attempts to write her piece without naming any celebrities, but this seems to reinforce the unearned exclusivity and privilege enjoyed by celebrities rather than subvert it. That is, Smith seems more star-smitten in her attempt to work around the sort of gossip magazine fascination we have with stars, as if her press pass into Fight Club has convinced her not to talk about Fight Club.

An essay on "realism" in the novel serves as an late, measured response to James Wood's charge of "hysterical realism" in reviewing Smith's novel White Teeth. (For the early, measured response see here.)

The last part of the book consists of a 40+ page close reading of David Foster Wallace's "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," and the resulting essay is probably the best elegy for Wallace I've seen. Smith's explications of DFW's stories demonstrate his humanity and brilliance, while not ignoring how at-times-insufferable DFW's work can be.