So. Let’s review: Jonathan Franzen writes a new novel called Freedom. Everyone freaks out. Time Magazine puts Franzen on the cover and talks about how writing is dying in the accompanying article. Then the NYTimes gives Freedom a good first review. Then some well-known women writers complain that the NYTimes is sexist and only likes books by white male writers like Franzen. (There is plenty of evidence that this is true, but that’s beside the point.) The NYTimes retaliates by writing another huge review of Franzen’s book, authored by the editor of the book review itself. The first line calls Freedom a “masterpiece of American fiction,” and goes on to compare Franzen to Dickens, Tolstoy, Mann, Bellow, and Roth.

Now, Washington Post’s fiction editor Ron Charles has reviewed the book on video, and I declare it the winner! The review is even-handed, and also, I like him, so here you go:

Honestly, what is it about Jonathan Franzen that inspires such controversy? He is a good writer. I think The Corrections is a very enjoyable novel and clearly, Freedom is also good. What is this urge to build the man up to such ridiculous levels in some quarters, and then to tear him down in other quarters? I don’t get it.

Anyway, I am always slow to jump on literary bandwagons. I bought The Corrections for ten cents at a thrift store long after all the hype was over and read it. I was surprised that I liked it. In a similar vein, I am sure I will get around to Freedom, eventually.

I am jealous of John Green’s bookshelves.

Someday, we will build my bookshelves, and I will organize this huge pile of books behind me.

I wish other writers would take us through a tour of their books.

Also, this video made me want to read.

A lot of writers over think everything.

Sometimes it seems as though they are paralyzed to use a word, as if in order to use a word they have to look it up in the dictionary first and examine all its meanings, then run the closest meaning against the meanings of all the other words in the sentence, and then finally use the word, but then they have to add a disclaimer explaining how the word didn’t exactly, perfectly, precisely convey what they meant (as if words do that all that often, anyway) before finally moving on to the next word, which is put through the same anxiety-laced system. It’s like a neurotic computer program that has been designed to second guess itself.

This is why I am not a poet.

The short story I read last week is now up on Bang Out’s site, so now you can read it too. It is called “Five People Describe Burning Up,” in keeping with the “heat” theme.

Read it here.

This Saturday, I am going to be reading a short story for the BANG OUT Reading Series in San Francisco. The theme is HEAT. I will be reading with 6 other people, and I believe it is free. Bargain!

The reading will be at Amnesia Bar, 853 Valencia Street, from 7-9 p.m. I hope you can come.

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I think it is so cool that Moscow has created a Dostoevsky-themed subway station. According to NPR:

The walls are gray and bare, except for murals capturing scenes from Dostoevsky’s famous novels: Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and of course, Crime and Punishment, the book where Dostoevsky digs into the mind of his lead character, Raskolnikov, exploring a young man’s path to murder.

In one famous passage, Raskolnikov cries out, “Good God! Can it be, can it be, that I shall really take an ax, that I shall strike her on the head, split her skull open … that I shall tread in the sticky warm blood, break the lock, steal and tremble; hide, all spattered in the blood … with the ax … Good God, can it be?”

The fictional character — poor, desperate for money to help his family and mentally tortured — ends up killing two women. And it’s all depicted in a mural right on the subway platform in which Raskolnikov holds an ax over a woman’s head, while a corpse lies on the ground.

The mural of this scene is causing controversy. Many mental health experts think it will cause suicide and violence. Here is a picture of the image that is causing all the ruckus:

Sometimes people boggle my mind with the dumb things they worry about. That is not a shocking image. And really, the fear of what the mural might do to someone else’s mind is precisely the kind of thinking that leads to banning books or preventing art from being put on display. The subway station might just as easily inspire pride among Russians for one of their great writers. It might even make them want to read more.

Or they might just want to pretend to be a cool guy in a cape:

And yeah, okay, maybe some people don’t want to think about dark topics on their morning commute, and maybe the gray walls might depress someone, but hey, it’s Russia. Isn’t everyone already depressed?

I’m writing a book about cocktails! The working title is DIY Cocktails, so it will be a very hands-on book about how to create your own cocktails using fresh and homemade ingredients. Adams Media is the publisher. Look for it in stores and through online booksellers in May! In the mean time, I still have a little bit of drinking and writing to do. I see a Word Pirates cocktail party in our future.

Photo by wickenden

I love Jennifer Egan, so of course I have already purchased her newest book A Visit from the Goon Squad. From what I read, saying that Egan plays with narrative structure in this book is a bit of an understatement. As the New York Times review puts it:

What’s actually kind of fun for once, however, is attempting to summarize the action of a narrative that feels as freely flung as a bag of trash down a country gully. That’s because to do so captures Egan’s essential challenge to herself: How wide a circumference can she achieve in “A Visit From the Goon Squad” while still maintaining any sort of coherence and momentum? How loosely can she braid the skein of connections and still have something that hangs together? There is a madness to her method. She hands off the narrative from one protagonist to another in a wild relay race that will end with the same characters with which it begins while dispensing with them for years at a time.

In this interview with NPR, Egan talks about the book, which she says she doesn’t think of as experimental because “when I hear that something is experimental, I tend to think that means the experiment will drown out the story.” She goes on to say, “If you don’t have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you’ve got nothing.”

That is why I was crazy about The Keep, Egan’s last novel. When you summarize the plot for people–a prison inmate tells a story set in a gothic castle–it sounds like it wouldn’t work, but it does.

At the last Word Pirates meeting, we were complaining that some experimental novels come off as self-indulgent or boring because storytelling and characters get lost. When a book is experimental AND has a story, I tend to find it really exciting. But when there is experiment with no purpose behind it other than to “do something new” or to show off how clever the writer is, it usually leaves me cold. The best way to experiment is to pick a structure that best serves the story you are trying to tell, not the other way around. Which, as Egan points out, is nothing new.

“If you read novels of the 19th century, they’re pretty experimental,” Egan says. “They take lots of chances; they seem to break a lot of rules. You’ve got omniscient narrators lecturing at times to the reader in first person. If you go back to the earliest novels, this is happening to a wild extent, like Tristram Shandy or Don Quixote — these are crazy books.”

NPR has a list of funny books to read this summer. I can’t remember the last time I read a book that made me laugh–unless you count my recent perusal of The Anti-Christ by Nietzsche–so this has caught my interest.

I am particularly interested in Dead End Gene Pool: A Memoir by Wendy Burden. “The Vanderbilt dynasty may not strike you as the stuff of great comedy, but Wendy Burden, a four-times-great-granddaughter of old Cornelius, captures the extravagant decline of her wealthy family with the bite of a standup comic, reminding you that your life and material are what you make of them.” Great title.