Lest any readers think I've been slacking on my vow to read fifty books in 2005, I'm happy to report that I'm well ahead of schedule, halfway through book 24 and here it's only mid-May. My writing on those books, however, has been sadly remiss. Below the fold, my incoherent maunderings about books six through nine on my list.
China Mieville: The Scar
Jacques Pepin: The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen
David Sedaris: Me Talk Pretty One Day
Kevin Boyle: Arc of Justice; A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
China Mieville - The Scar
I blogged earlier this year about Mieville's second novel Perdido Street Station, and if you'll recall my main beef was with Mieville's ambition as an epic novelist and fabulist outstripping his talents as a writer. Luckily, I read its sequel, The Scar, before the earlier novel so was able to remain sanguine about the eventual blooming of his skills throughout.
Set in the same world as PSS, The Scar concerns the adventures of Bellis Coldwine, an acquaintance of the man who caused all the terrible trouble in Perdido Street Station and has as a consequence been forced to flee the brutal justice of the government of her home city of New Crubozon. She catches the first ship out of town, and through a series of misadventures finds herself a prisoner-citizen of the floating pirate city of Armada. Armada is ruled by The Twins, lovers who are secretly taking the floating city on a quest to what eventually proves to be the edge of the world. In the meantime, mysterious forces try to stop them.
Mieville's tendency toward writing a film script in lieu of a novel has almost completely vanished in The Scar, and his tendency to dramatic overreaching is constrained somewhat by the fact that most of the action takes place at sea. Even though the story certainly concerns (*spooky voice*) forces beyond our control, and therefore is ripe for indulgent over-writing, everything hangs together nonetheless.
Mieville is especially strong when filling out the world he's imagined; the various neighborhoods of Armada, ruled variously by the Twins, by vampires, by half-humans with dangerous blood, and by cactus people; the underwater society of the mermen and the reminisces of a city ruled by the dead; the lost nation of mosquito-men; the internal politics of Armada and the geopolitics of New Crubozon; the strange relationship between people and the rare bit of magic.
Burdened with only a simple plot that can move forward practically of its own volition, Mieville can let his imagination run wild in his world and in the conflicted motivations of his characters. Each one of the major players has a personality, volition, and stake in outcomes, and Mieville deploys them with Dickensian aplomb.
What a great novel. What a great, great novel. It’s been four months since I read it, I’ve read more the twenty books since then, and I still can’t shake the flavor of Mieville’s prose. Outstanding.
Jacques Pepin: The Apprentice: My Life in The Kitchen
Jacques Pepin is one of my favorite celebrity chefs thanks to his unpretentiousness. Together with his former partner in crime, the late and lamented Julia Child, he seems more concerned with showing people how to cook food the good, right way than with any fads of convenience, nutrition, or taste. Not that those fads don't have value, but I'm a conservative guy.
What?!? Yep. Conservative. I strongly believe the best way to learn something is first to learn how it’s been done before. You have to learn how to play scales on the piano, and learn your harmony and fingerings, before you can improvise with any authority. You don’t jump on the double black diamond without first skiing the bunny slopes. You need to learn why things happen before you can go making it up on your own. Not that ignorance and amateur stabs can't be both fun and productive, but if you are serious about something, it behooves you to learn the "right" way before you try to discover what "your" way is.
Pepin is one of the best instructors of basic, essential technique I've ever seen. His various television series are How to handle a knife. How to sweat onions. How to braise a chicken. He makes it all eminently comprehensible and easy, not to mention fun. This same clarity and innate geniality come through in his autobiography. Discussing his life as a cook, he traces his journey from a kitchen boy in France taking out the trash and dumping consommé down the sink (I thought it was garbage!) to the celebrity icon he is today, at least in the food world.
Fans of cooking will enjoy his anecdotes about food and kitchens, and fans of food writing will appreciate Pepin's way with words. His love of life and food come from the same place as the redoubtable doyenne of food writing, M.F.K. Fisher (if you haven't read her, go, please and do so. Nobody can make you appreciate an oyster better.). The title “The Apprentice” refers to Pepin’s commitment to perpetually trying to learn new ways of doing things, and his openness to new experiences. When some people profess to have such a commitment, it proves to be a sign that they are in fact completely over having new experiences. In Pepin’s case, however, it is as advertised and the book is filled accordingly with his enterprising spirit and (oh, let’s just say it!) joie de vivre.
And the stories! Oh, the stories! As a young chef, Pepin was in the French Navy (as a cook), and earned the privilege of cooking for de Gaulle. In France, chefs - no matter how skilled - are technicians, artisans, and their work is not considered deserving of celebrity. So, even though Pepin was the head chef to the leader of France, he was just a schlub in a tall hat. A plumber with a whisk. Consequently, when he was offered the post of head chef in the Kennedy White House (a job that would certainly have brought him everlasting renown, not to mention the people's ovation and fame (...Allez cuisine!!), he thought, "Meh… done that." Instead Pepin took a job working for Howard Johnson, developing versions of chicken cordon bleu and potato-leek soup that could be parcooked and reheated in HoJos around the country. As it turns out, this was a fortunate choice since it forced him to reconsider the rigors of his classical training in light of the needs and tastes of the modern world. (The premade chicken cordon bleu, they say, was delicious).
Fascinating characters move in and out of the narrative; a stream of childhood friends and semi-famous French chefs; Julia Child; Howard Johnson; Charles de Gaulle; food critic Craig Claiborne spiraling toward his final sad dissipation. Friends gather on the beach or at farmhouses and commence to cook fabulous meals of impeccable home cooking. And along the way, Pepin achieves everything he's ever wanted. It seems a contented author makes for a satisfying book. And it made at least one reader long for a farmhouse and a passel of friends to cook in it. Someday, someday…
David Sedaris: Me Talk Pretty One Day
I have broken a little bit with the "rules" of the 50-book challenge with this one. If the Senate can do it, so can I. I actually re-read this one while I was sick earlier this year, but since I was half out of my head when I read it again, it was just like reading it for the first time. Didn’t remember a damn thing. (A tip: if you ever want to read something familiar with fresh eyes, I strongly recommend a debilitating illness. Nothing like it in the world.) Moreover, since I was sick I was not able to make my regular pilgrimages to the local library and had to find something on my home bookshelves to read. Since nearly everything there that remains unread is either dry, dense, heavy or an obligation, I had to choose something I knew I could get through without wanting to cry from the effort. So: Sedaris.
Longtime readers will probably not be surprised to find that I consider David Sedaris a filthy son of a bitch who took my dream job. That NPR gig is rightfully mine. His sensibility and penchant for tawdry self-mythologizing resonate with me, and those same tendencies have crept into my writing (e.g. my piece on [url=http://old.perfidy.org/index.php/weblog/comments/performance_art/the most humilating performance I ever gave[/url]). It would be more accurate to say that I always had those tendencies and Sedaris has only made them more pronounced, but I'm not here to talk about myself.
Although not necessarily as full of laughs-per-minute as Naked, Sedaris works more gut-punch moments into Me Talk Pretty One Day. My favorite is the bit about Sedaris' sister Amy who likes to dress in costume, and decides to wear a face full of makeup bruises to a photo shoot for "New York's Most Successful Bachelorettes." That's just dark, man.
Kevin Boyle: Arc of Justice; A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
In the long hot summer of 1925, Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black physician, moved his family into a new house in a working-class neighborhood of Detroit. Within days, a man lay dead and a city ripped apart. Kevin Boyle, a professor of history at Ohio State (who I knew while he was teaching at UMass-Amherst, and whose adorable resemblance to youthful comic actor Topher Grace is growing less pronounced by the year), writes a gripping and insightful story of one black man's struggle with segregation, racism, and the cruel legacy of slavery.
When Sweet bought his Detroit house in 1925, he deliberately chose to move out of the slums reserved for blacks in the city, and to even avoid the nicer all-black neighborhoods in favor of a location that would underscore his maverick status and equality to all. Unfortunately, when threats were made on his life even before moving in, he chose to call on friends and family to arm themselves in defense of his house. At night outside the Sweet house, a mob would gather. As usually happens, the mob eventually spilled over into violence. The mob threw stones, someone got edgy, and in the ensuing melee, a white man got shot by someone defending the house from inside.
In Ossian Sweet, Boyle has a protagonist who it is impossible to make a hero. Born in a segregated Southern town, childhood witness to a brutal lynching, and hardscrabble aspirer to W.E.B. DuBois’ "talented tenth," Boyle brings Sweet across as a somewhat vain and high-handed, if well intentioned, man determined to make his own choices in life. His decisions all seem to have been made with the intention of stubbornly defying critics who claimed that poor black men could never become important members of society. Freed from any obligation to make a hero of Sweet (after all, Sweet is no George Washington, a godlike paragon of American "virtues," whatever they are, but rather an actual human being), Boyle can concentrate on the story and the players in it without any need to build up protagonists or demonize villains. Besides, how hard would you have to work anyway, to demonize a Klansman running for mayor on a "get the darkies out" ticket?
Through court documents, interviews, memoirs, and copious use of personal papers, Boyle reconstructs Sweet's life, his decisions as a Detroit physician, and the trial that ensued after the shooting with meticulous detail. A strong writer, Boyle is canny enough to get out of the way of his story (although he suffers from a shortage of adjectives - if every event, however horrific, is "searing," eventually the word becomes a little hokey). As the trial of Sweet and his co-conspirators approaches, the scope of the story widens as the NAACP get involved. Eventually Clarence Darrow enters the picture as a defender of Sweet, smelling one last iconic victory to cap his storied career. A Klansman runs for mayor (and nearly wins!). Corruption is unveiled. The national struggle for civil rights gets an early test, thirty years before the big one. Does Ossian Sweet get the death penalty for his complicity in the death of a white man, a fine upstanding member of his neighborhood and community? Or does Sweet finally walk, vindicated by the unavoidable stink of vicious institutional racism that clings to the whole affair? You tell me. I already read the book.
Throughout the book, Boyle masterfully balances an intimate portrait of one man's struggle with his own limitations and those society imposes on him with a larger look at how people in the 1920s lived and experienced questions of race. Although his prose is sometimes a little repetitive, his imagination and facility with primary sources more than make up for whatever linguistic shortcomings may sometimes arise. Moreover, Boyle has completely managed to transcend the limitations of genre and specialization. Although frequently labeled a “labor historian,” Boyle uses the shop floor and working environments as a jumping off point to examine deeper connections between people and communities. His 1997 article, “The Kiss: Racial and Gender Conflict in a 1950s Automobile Factory” (Journal of American History 84:2, p. 496) used an interracial kiss between co-workers at a Chrysler lineworkers’ Christmas party to examine how gender and race relations played into notions of status in the workplace and in Detroit society in general. At the time I considered it a brilliant and even audacious departure from the usual standard of written academic history, and I am gratified to see that he has not only stayed this course but gotten even better.
This week is History Week at Slate, and there is a great deal of debate on that site about whether and how real historians should write history readable by anybody but still academically rigorous. Kevin Boyle shows us how.
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