Unfinished: Book of Numbers and The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.

I’m usually pretty good at selecting books I’d enjoy, so it was with a frustrated sigh that I put down two in a row. 

Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen

Fictional author-insert Joshua Cohen, a failed novelist, is tasked with ghostwriting the autobiography of a tech entrepreneur also named Joshua Cohen, founder of this universe’s Google.

Cohen’s prose is snappy and sharp, his vocabulary impressive in its range. It’s the type of language that is both entertaining and invigorating to experience. This book could be great, it should be great. Instead, it wallows in its miserable characters’ self pity whilst attempting to make points about modern life that largely fall flat.

I quit about two hundred and fifty pages in. The closing subplot went as such: Cohen is in Dubai, where after plenty of inner monologuing about how poorly Arabs treat women, he encounters a woman being beaten by her husband. He then heroically steps in and beats him up! Shortly afterward, he engages in a sexual obsession over this woman, who he saw for like 3 seconds crawling around on the floor, bloodied. He stalks her around the hotel for a while until miraculously, implausibly, she seeks him out in his hotel room for some immediate sex.

Maybe several hundred pages later (the book immediately pivots in form after this to a draft of the ghostwritten biography so it wasn’t happening any time soon), this exploitative and baffling scene somehow has a point, somehow makes sense, or is proven unreliable. I don’t give a shit. It’s virtually impossible to redeem this crap and nothing else about the novel gave me any confidence in Cohen’s thematic virtues.

Of the endless critical praise for this book (hilarious put aside the miserable Goodreads reviews), Cohen’s inevitably compared to David Foster Wallace, one reviewer going so far as to say The Book of Numbers is to the internet what Infinite Jest was to TV. This too is nonsense. For all his lingual skill and wit, Cohen’s insights are banal, things everyone knows already: tech people have too much money, the internet draws us closer while simultaneously making us more alone. It’s fertile literary ground expressed without depth. Falling to cheap jokes instead, ha ha, the rich-person restaurants in Palo Alto have gluten free and vegan menus, what a laugh.

This book is a waste.

 

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O by Nicole Galland and Neal Stephenson

An overworked, underappreciated Harvard lecturer and linguist stumbles into contact with a shadowy government agency that has been collecting info about the Big Disappearance of Magic, circa 1850 or so. The first chapter reveals our heroine is now stuck sometime in that very same 19th century, so time travel is sure to be afoot.

Here we have almost the opposite reaction — nothing about this book elicited much from me at all. The language here is very basic, without the verve required to pull that off. The plot unfurls through a series of conversations between the main characters, who hypothesize solutions to the origins and mechanics of magic, which then are apparently de facto truth, begging the question of why no one figured this all out beforehand if all it takes is a few 1:1 brainstorming sessions. 

I could also see the book was setting up a romance, but only because the book was sending signals at me, the reader, that hey! here’s a romance, not because I felt any chemistry between the protagonists. Tristan was blunt to the point of dullness, not charm. 

Only about 50 pages into this one and obviously it didn’t trigger the same emotional response as The Book of Numbers, just not for me.

I’m on to reading Borges now to guarantee something I’ll enjoy.

The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer

It’s true. There really is nothing like it.

Eleven hundred pages of narrative journalism. Gary Gilmore is released from prison, tries to re-integrate while being a nuisance to friends and families, falls in love with Nicole Barrett, murders two innocent people for no reason, is put on trial and convicted, given the death penalty, refuses to appeal, is executed. In detail both scintillating and banal.

Unlike In Cold Blood, this is not a book trying to understand why Gilmore did the things he did. He spent half his life in prison and was trouble since he was a child. Truth be told, he was a huge asshole. Selfish and racist and manipulative, often under the guise of eloquent and grandiose language. Indeed, his spiel about why he never appealed his death sentence — because he was responsibly accepting his punishment as determined by the people — was a complete farce. He just didn’t want to live out the rest of his life in prison.

Generally the defenses of capital punishment — punishment, deterrence, removing a future threat — are kind of bullshit. But the last might have actually applied to Gary. If he got out, no one would be surprised if he hurt anyone again. Also, the typical criticism of capital punishment: that the state does not have the right to kill anyone, while still true and certainly disturbing when reading of the attorney general and co. scrambling into a rickety plane in the middle of the night to sprint through the Denver circuit court to avoid a stay of execution, does lose a bit of steam when the defendant actually does not want to die.

Yet, willing or no, sociopathic asshole or no, it’s hard to describe the execution as anything other than utterly wrong. On something almost like a primordial level, before you even get to moral. Killing another human, regardless of justification, is just psychologically damaging. The body rebels. Even the people who fought for the execution, or the men who voluntarily carried it out, either felt it was wrong afterwards or had to continously convince themselves they did the right thing. It was only the conservative Utah public, far from the body and blood and gunshots, that could approve with great moral righteousness and zero qualms. Despite a cynical and hobbesian notion of human nature that many subscribe to, we are simply not well-equipped for close-quarters human-to-human violence. It only becomes easy through distance and dissonance.

Don’t get me wrong though. This is not an opinion actively espoused by Mailer. The narrative is trying very hard (successfully) to be as impartial as possible. It’s a major strength of the book. No where is this more clear than in characterization of Nicole Baker. Teen mother neglecting her children, sleeping with pretty much anybody, messed up priorities, and firmly entrenched in the web of Gary Gilmore. There’s many ways this could go wrong. But Mailer’s clinical prose, striving to make the voice as close as possible to the real Nicole, slots the reader firmly into her state of mind. Makes it possible to understand how she was sucked into Gary’s web.

The book does have one clear weakness. After Gary is convicted, several TV producers fall on the scene trying to buy up the rights to all the prominent character’s stories. Chief among them is Larry Schiller. While it’s interesting, both the parasitic nature of the media and internal conflicts between money and morality layered therein, there is way, way too much Larry. One hundred pages too many. At least. The only point I would say The Executioner’s Song bored me was when it strayed too far from Gary and Nicole and the rest.

Great stuff.

I have returned

I was on a road trip through Oregon for the past ten days, hence the lack of updates. I read many books! I bought even more. Details to come…

(pictured above: Deschutes River in Bend, OR)

The Familiar Volume 3: Honeysuckle and Pain by Mark Z. Danielewski

Here we are with Volume 3 of my favorite series prominently featuring a scrying orb.

My review of Volume 3 could almost be a copy-paste of Volume 2.

Xanther’s bond with the sinister Familiar deepens. Anwar worries about code and money. Astair worries about sex and money. Luther chews metal. Jingjing smokes. Isandorno unemotionally observes great violence. Cas is on the run. Shnorrk drives his cab around and ponders being the most irrelevant character. Ozgur collects even more scintillating clues that will surely come together, some day.

In Volume 3, there’s actually conjecture that the characters might all start converging in LA. And one character even, ever so briefly, sees another one. Granted, it’s a 2 second long accidental non-meeting, but it’s there!

In other words, the series remains a very slow burn. But it also remains a pleasure to read. The swirling text and tension-via-page flipping and word arrangement remains enchanting. I just like holding and reading the damn thing. The characters were already easily identified by their fonts, but now I can just glance at the color coding on the top right and think “Oh, pink, I’ll have a long Xanther chapter next”. It has become… familiar.

The Familiar is extremely tight on both technology and current events. The nerdy characters discuss modern video games. The characters react to say, the Isla Vista Killings or ISIS executions. But even now, we’re starting to outpace, in real time, the story. It’s still Summer 2014 there. Anwar attends E3 and beholds games that have already been released. Should this series reach its end, at 26 or 27 or whatever volumes, we’re going to be many years ahead (barring major time skips). It’s set to produce the heretofore unseen trick of going from fully up-to-date to capturing a past moment in history in the same series.

Happy Birthday, Scrying Orb

No grandiose goal setting this year, just a happy year number 3. Hooray, books! Hooray, book reviews!

And a few housekeeping activities:

– I updated the about page again; it was a little stuffy.

– I replaced my profile picture with a photo from when I officiated my sister’s wedding. The former one was a few years and a city away and distractingly beardless.

The Spooking Orb #4: A Pumpkin

No time to wrote a real post today, so instead, here’s the Wario pumpkin I just carved. Review: Perfect; Flawless; Must watch; 10/10

Lost amidst the Atlantic

No update this week. Er, it’s Sunday. Belated: No update last week. It’s my wife’s birthday and I’m officiating my sister’s wedding. So here’s a picture of Cape Breton, on the eastern most tip of Nova Scotia, where I spent much of the last week. On sea and land, by boat and car and foot.

Reviews to continue next (this) week, as I’ve got a backlog to start writing from.

A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava

I just finished this novel a few minutes ago. Damn. It’s been awhile since I read a book so completely absorbing.

Casi is a young, all-star defense attorney in New York City. The plot, insofar as there is one, is Casi’s detachment with the system and seduction by the perfect crime, which he plans with some characters who begin to trigger suspicions of a very Fight Club-type twist. But the plot is totally secondary to the thematic weight of this dense novel. It’s a book of musings, of internal investigation of self. Primarily, this is a book of conversations. People talking to each other. The author talking to the reader. Casi talking to judge and jury.

They’re not the types of conversations that real people have, but the kind of big picture what-is-life type discussions that use vocabulary that even the most over-educated real people don’t regularly use. Characters jabber back and forth in 1-5 word phrases, in almost slapstick comedy fashion of mispronounced words and misunderstandings, and then launch into a several page soliloquy on the meaning of life, law, justice, existence, life after death, the universe. I’m not positive what makes this work, but I’d hazard it takes a specific kind of immensely witty & intelligent writer who understands deeply the way human conversations function and flow.  

A Naked Singularity owes an extremely heavy debt to David Foster Wallace. Most remarkably is not just how unbelievably in love with Infinite Jest this book is, but how often De La Pava succeeds at what DFW succeeded at. Many writers have tried and almost all have failed. It’s actually uncanny how similar they seem at times. There’s a sequence where Casi overhears two men having a conversation at a diner about how shitty they are to women that is the exact set-up as the stories in Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Wallace isn’t the only major influence, Delillo is as well. And it wouldn’t be a good law-room novel if it did not hearken to Kafka’s The Trial.

Indeed, A Naked Singularity is at its best when it’s in the courtroom or its environs (prisons, law offices, etc). There’s a real moral force behind Casi as he tries to represent people society has collectively discarded. A plot line later on delves into the baffling cruelty of the death penalty and it pierces, both Casi and the reader. When the book is focusing on family or media absorption (there’s a cadre of roommates obsessed with Television and philosophizing on entertainment), it’s not quite as good. In fact, I think De La Pava cheats a little bit here: The novel ostensibly takes place in modern day but the technology isn’t quite right — everyone is obsessed with Television and news stations and the internet, etc doesn’t quite exist. Events that would surely occur online or tasks people would fulfill with smartphones (which no one has) just… don’t. Even though the internet is occasionally mentioned. This was written in 2012, (not 1996 like Infinite Jest!). So yeah, De La Pava’s notes on television are cogent and interesting but it’s trodden ground and I wonder why he didn’t take on the same kind of issues with modern tech. 

De La Pava also deploys employs another DFW staple (or I guess to go further back, a Miguel De Cervantes staple): characters telling stories to each other that become as engrossing as the main narrative itself. One of Casi’s clients opts to become a criminal informant and launches into a thirty page long story of how he came into the drug trade. It’s completely absorbing — I experienced an almost physical jolt when he finished the tale and the book returned to the main narrative thread. Similarly, boxing is to A Naked Singularity as tennis is to Infinite Jest. At several points in the book, Casi purposely abandons his conscious thoughts and relates the story of boxer Wilfred Benitez, in scintillating detail. It’s a thread that runs the entire length of this lengthy book and it’s completely absorbing, like just about everything else written here.

Not dead; just in India

Bought some books, ate some good food, dodged some traffic, saw some temples, but mostly worked, work, work. Work.

I planned to write reviews in my spare time, but I barely had time to read, let alone write.

But I am back now. And with no travel for a while, I’ll have plenty of time to read and the blogging will continue.

Closed for vacation.

Haven’t updated in a while. Because I am on vacation.

In Dublin, reading Dubliners.

In literary tourism news, I beheld The Book of the Kells, an ancient & illustrated rendition of the New Testament, which was positively stunning. Modern day has lost the synthesis between content and the shape of text and its accompanying imagery. And it’s a shame. It makes me happy I just picked up the latest Mark Danielski novel.