The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is the latest book I have finished reading. It is marvelous.

Imagine you are in a crowd, maybe at a train station or a street in a big city, and people are rushing to and fro all around you, nonstop, bunches and bunches of them. You try to hear and look at everything that's around you - the people, signs, sounds, cars, colors. You try to get a mental picture of all of this, and everything else, but it is too much for you. You can't process all that is happening; there's too much noise, too many things to look at, too much to remember...

This probably doesn't ever happen to you, and it doesn't for most of us, at least not like it does to the book's narrator, Christopher John Francis Boone. That's because Christopher has Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism. Imagine Dustin Hoffman in Rain Main, only he's fifteen years old. That's what Christopher is like. He hates being touched, always tells the truth, and is excellent at math. He remembers every experience he ever has, keeps his promises, and sometimes has difficulty understanding what people do and say. Christopher likes to feel safe too. He has never traveled on his own farther than the store down the street, and whenever he gets upset he finds a place to hide and curls up and groans or does maths in his head and stops eating.

Haddon weaves a touching tale through this character. It revolves around Christopher's finding his neighbor's dog, Wellington, dead with a garden fork sticking in him. He decides to be a detective and investigate this incident, much like Sherlock Holmes, whom he loves to read and whom uttered the quote from which the novel's title is derived. He decides to write a book, a murder mystery, about finding Wellington's killer, which turns out to be The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. His father disapproves of this and hides the book. Christopher finds it though, but also makes a new discovery, one that takes him to London and almost destroys his relationship with his father. But along the way, Christopher finds confidence, triumphs, and realizes that anything is possible, including his dream of becoming an astronaut.

It is fascinating to get inside the head of a narrator with Asperger's syndrome, like Being John Malkovich but written words instead. By detailing Christopher's ways of thinking and how he responds to the world around him, Haddon easily gives us a new set of eyes, one where things are confusing, information is incomplete, and a lot is not what it seems. We feel helpless and sad and scared too when Christopher does, and just as joyous and anxious and victorious as well. All the while we know that this is not how we're suppose to see things, but Haddon doesn't allow us to stray too far away from Christopher so we can feel normal again. So long as you are reading, he keeps us inside Christopher's autistic mind, and that makes the book more powerful.

I could particularly relate, I think, because I taught a student this year with Asperger's syndrome. I think I could somewhat relate Christopher to this student, which made it more interesting for me.

The book is also funny. When Christopher wants to ask a stranger where the train station is, he decides it would be best to ask a lady. His reason is they told him in Stranger Danger in school (he goes to a school for students with special needs) "that if a man comes up to you and talks to you and you feel frightened you should call out and find a lady to run to because ladies are safer." There's also a classmate that eats everything, no matter what it is, and when he does a "poo" on the bathroom floor, the teachers have to stop him from eating it.

What's also compelling is how touching the story is. You find yourself empathizing with Christopher. You want him to succeed. You want him to find Wellington's killer and resolve things with his family. Haddon is remarkable, however, in putting you in Christopher's mind, for which you feel this sympathy for a narrator that has Asperger's, without the novel being overly sympathetic. Things are what they are. The only complaint is that the last few pages are too hurried, but this pales versus Haddon's not inundating you with pity, but creating a story that is emotional but also entertaining and funny and imaginative and provocative too.

David Maraniss - Clemente

Each year I try to read 1 or 2 baseball books in the spring. Of all the different sports and therefore the different types of sports books, baseball is the best.

Baseball was the sport of my youth. Summer was for baseball when I was growing up. The Golden Era for baseball was the 50's and 60's.

Roberto Clemente played for the Pirates from 1955 through 1972. He was killed in a tragic plane crash New Year's Eve 1972 as he was flying to earthquake-plagued Nicarauga, which had been hit by a masive quake December 24. Clemente was taking needed supplies to that poor country. He was on a journey of mercy. Unknown to him, the plane he was on was defective. The plane was not fit to fly, but Clemente didn't know it.

I saw Clemente play an exhibition in Birmingham. It must have about 1968. I'm not sure of the exact year.

He was a great, graceful, underrated player.

He ended his career with exactly 3,000 hits and two Pirate World Championships. He was immediately named to the Hall of Fame after his untimely death.

This will be the definitive biography of Roberto Clemente for all-time.

A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby

Four people meet on the roof of Toppers' House on New Year's Eve in London, England, with the intention of throwing themselves off. Each is surprised to find other suicidal people there too. What happens next are the adventures and truths learned of four people who choose life, by banding together and taking the long way down the stairs.

Jess, eighteen, is always at odds with her parents. Although from a prominent family, she is foul-mouthed, rebellious, and spontaneous. She stirs up trouble at every chance, often seeming quite deranged and disrespectful. Her sister Jen ran away years ago, without any explanation or trace of where she is now. Jess also just ended a short relationship with Chas and is troubled that he gave her no reason for no longer being with her.

Martin was a famous morning talk show host. He describes himself as the Regis of England. He lost his family, children, career, and self-respect, however, when he slept with a fifteen year old, landing him in prison. He is intelligent and keen, but he drinks a lot and ruins all the chances he gets at regaining a normal life.

JJ is American, in his early twenties, and reads a lot. He is in London because of his ex-girlfriend, who doesn't want to be with him anymore. His band had modest success for a while, but has also broken up. He misses both, and his dream of being a rock star and being with Lizzie are forever lost. He doesn't know who he is anymore, and cannot imagine much of a future besides flipping burgers.

Maureen, fifty-one, is a single mom whose son, Matty, is disabled. He is a vegetable, confined to a wheelchair. She spends all her time at home, caring for him: no friends, no social life, nothing beyond Matty, who cannot talk, move, or communicate. His father left years ago, and every day is drudgingly the same for Maureen, who is conflicted by her Catholic faith.

This is a unique plot that interested me from the beginning. I read this book in less than a week, so riveting and fast-paced was the story. I couldn't wait to finish it and see what happens to these characters.

Hornby's style is fresh and engaging. Although the subject's core, suicide, is grim, there is much humor in the novel. For example, Jess cannot understand the expression "have your cake and eat it too." She wonders how can you eat a cake that you don't have, then later asks what is the point of the cake if you're not going to eat it. Or, when Maureen arrives on the roof, she discovers Martin sitting on the edge, with a stepladder he used to get over the wire that is set up around the roof. She kindly asks him if she could use it when he's finished, a polite question considering why Martin is dangling his feet off a roof.

In addition, there aren't any epiphanies or redemptive moments. This is not a book about people who discover how wonderful life is and how foolish they were to think it's worth dying for. They don't learn there are plenty of things to live for; they don't discover some great happiness. It's not that kind of story. And I applaud Hornby for not writing such a story. For much of it, the characters remain suicidal even after coming down from the roof. They continually argue with each other, fight, disagree, and even don't really like each other very much. But they have something in common, and they learn they need each other. Changes do occur. Realizations are made. But these things are more subtle and gradual. Their lives and problems are still there, until the end, but things are nonetheless different.

The story is absolutely entertaining. It is fun to be part of the ride along with the characters, such as when Jess decides they should use their noteriety to make some money. The newspapers got wind of their being at Toppers' House, which was a story because Martin was one of them. They do some interviews, claiming that an angel looking like Matt Damon had persuaded them to come down. Hornby is indeed known for putting pop culture in his writing, which there's plenty of here. Things like Seinfeld, Revolutionary Road, Burger King, Kylie Minogue, Mary Tyler Moore, Pop Idol, and R.E.M., to name a few, add to the fun.

The story is also told from the points of view of all four people, with Hornby jumping from character to character throughout the book. It is masterful that he can tell the same story with four distinct voices, each with different personalities and ways of thinking. Even though the story moves swiftly among the characters, the book never loses focus and each character is depicted with detail.

A quick, fun, intriguing read, this story about suicide has a lot of depth. I recommend everyone read A Long Way Down.

What Marcel Proust Says

Every reader is, when he reads, reading only about himself.

From Groucho Marx

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it is too dark to read.

Larry Brown's A Miracle of Catfish

Larry Brown knows his territory. If ever there's been an author who wrote of what he knows, and who he knows, it's Larry Brown.
He's at his best when he's giving the reader the thought processes of the characters. If you're a child of The South yourself, you know it's real.
I started with Larry Brown in 1994. There was mention of him in an article in Time or Newsweek about a new crop of Southern writers, and the name stuck with me. Then I saw his short story collection called Big, Bad, Love at the Hoover Library. I've been a Larry Brown fan ever since.
I met him twice at book signings. The first time was in 1994 at the Barnes & Noble in Hoover. He was sigining the paperback printing of On Fire.
The second time was in September of 2003, the last time I saw him, when he was signing Rabbit Factory at Books-A-Million at Brookwood Mall.
At the latter signing, he said there would be a sequel to Fay. Well, I guess we'll never see that! I asked him if he still kept in touch with Harry Crews, his inspiration, and he said no, he had not talked to Crews in a long time. That's what I remember about my last encounter with Larry.
A Miracle of Catfish is as good as it gets. This is Southern writing at its best by a writer who is control of his element.
In Larry Brown's South, it seems like everyone smokes cigarettes, drinks beer, and lives in a trailer. If you grew up in the South, even if none of these things fits you, you understand what he's talking about as these people struggle to maintain a decent existence.
There is a Southern Gothic element in this particular novel when Cortez Sharp wonders what to do with his dead wife and waits until the next morning to make the necessary calls. I don't remember Brown employing Gothic before. And did Cortez really poison Queen and bury her in the woods so that daughter Lucinda wonders what happened to her? In the rural South, do we always know where all of the bodies are buried?
I wonder about the inclusion of Tourettes Syndrome. Albert is delightful, but what is the point of him having Tourettes Syndrome?
You laugh at Brown's characters. You feel sorry for them. Most of all, even though you feel like you know these people, you are glad you are NOT like them. How awful to live the life of a Larry Brown character!
This is vintage Larry Brown. I liked the book all the way through except that I was let down at the end. It's not that it's unfinished; it's that I was let down by his notes for how he would have ended it.
The problems is that he so many characters and things going on in this novel. How could he have neatly wrapped it all up with every character? I don't think he could have and based on the page of notes, he wouldn't have wrapped it up well.
What happened to Lacey?
Would Lacey have forced him to face his paternity? Surely she would have.
Why would Albert have died?
The big fish?
The fish man in the red truck?
Too many details. Maybe too many story lines. Too ambitious a novel?
But still because it's Larry Brown I loved it.
I wish he could have finished it.

What Gustave Flaubert Says

Read in order to live.

Quote from J.D.Salinger

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.

A Thought on Writing and Reading

Writing and reading are a sojourn into the unknown and unexplored, that emits pleasure and surprise and satisifaction. It changes you: it imprints upon one's self a new sense of being, a sense that something is different about yourself, because you have written or read something that took you somewhere new. You cannot plan this. You cannot expect it or anticipate it or know what the final destination will be. Once the writing or reading has begun, It takes you and doesn't let you go until It decides to.

Or, at least that's what writing and reading should be. Anything that's written or read that's worthwhile is.

As my poetry professor, Dr. Forhan, said about poetry: "In my experience, one sure way to strangle a poem in the cradle is to decide too early what it's about - what idea it is expressing. One needs to repress the temptation to make a grand statement and instead let the words come... one needs to let the poem decide what it is going to be about. (I've learned that the poem is invariably smarter than I am.)"

In being swept up by the language itself, so many times the words have taken me places I didn't imagine beforehand. I inevitably learn something whenever I write or read. It may be a realization about myself or it could be about the world itself. Writing and reading also is a process of discovery, of having an experience or feeling or being in a place that may be familiar, but which is also different from anything before or will come after.

This is how William Stafford puts it: "A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them."

When this process is over, I think it sticks with you. You are new person, whether you know so.

An example that I hope illustrates these thoughts is one of my favorite poems, by James Wright called "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota."

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

The speaker comes to the epiphany, in the midst of these serene and unfiltered observations of nature, while lying in a hammock, that his is a life wasted. This is a surprise, both for the speaker and as a reader. Did you expect such a last line? We are taken somewhere new here, a realization is made, and that is what language, writing and reading, does and should do.

What Joan Didion Says

I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenitrable polish.
– from The Year Of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Literary Blogs

It seems that literary blogs are all over the place. Here is an article from the NY TiMES regarding literary blogs.



ON THE DISAPPEARANCE OF NEWSPAPER BOOK REVIEWS AND THE PROLIFERATION OF LITERARY BLOGS

By MOTOKO RICH
Published: May 2, 2007
Last year Dan Wickett, a former quality-control manager for a car-parts maker, wrote 95 book reviews on his blog, Emerging Writers Network (emergingwriters.typepad.com/), singlehandedly compiling almost half as many reviews as appeared in all of the book pages of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The Los Angeles Times recently merged its book review into a new section combining the review with the Sunday opinion pages.
Mr. Wickett has now quit the automotive industry and started a nonprofit organization that supports literary journals and writers-in-residence programs, giving him more time to devote to his literary blog. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, meanwhile, has recently eliminated the job of its book editor, leading many fans to worry that book coverage will soon be provided mostly by wire services and reprints from national papers.
The decision in Atlanta — in which book reviews will now be overseen by one editor responsible for virtually all arts coverage — comes after a string of changes at book reviews across the country. The Los Angeles Times recently merged its once stand-alone book review into a new section combining the review with the paper’s Sunday opinion pages, effectively cutting the number of pages devoted to books to 10 from 12. Last year The San Francisco Chronicle’s book review went from six pages to four. All across the country, newspapers are cutting book sections or running more reprints of reviews from wire services or larger papers.
To some authors and critics, these moves amount to yet one more nail in the coffin of literary culture. But some publishers and literary bloggers — not surprisingly — see it as an inevitable transition toward a new, more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books. In recent years, dozens of sites, including Bookslut.com, The Elegant Variation (marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/), maudnewton .com, Beatrice.com and the Syntax of Things (syntaxofthings.typepad.com), have been offering a mix of book news, debates, interviews and reviews, often on subjects not generally covered by newspaper book sections.
For those who are used to the old way, it’s a tough evolution. “Like anything new, it’s difficult for authors and agents to understand when we say, ‘I’m sorry, you’re not going to be in The New York Times or The Chicago Tribune, but you are going to be at curledup.com,’ ” said Trish Todd, publisher of Touchstone Fireside, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. “But we think that’s the wave of the future.”
Obviously, the changes at newspaper book reviews reflect the broader challenges faced by newspapers in general, as advertisement revenues decline, and readers decamp to the Internet. But some writers (and readers) question whether economics should be the only driving factor. Newspapers like The Atlanta Journal-Constitution could run book reviews “as a public service, and the fact of the matter is that they are unwilling to,” said Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.
“I think the reviewing function as it is thoroughly taken up by newspapers is vital,” he continued, “in the same way that literature itself is vital.”
Mr. Ford is one of more than 120 writers who have signed a petition to save the job of Teresa Weaver, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s book editor. The petition, sponsored by the National Book Critics Circle, comes as part of the organization’s effort to save imperiled book coverage generally. “We will continue to use freelancers, established news services and our staff to provide stories about books of interest to our readers and the local literary community,” said Mary Dugenske, a spokeswoman for the newspaper, in an e-mail message.
Coming as it does at a time when newspaper book reviews are endangered, many writers, publishers and critics worry that the spread of literary blogs will be seen as compensation for more traditional coverage. “We have a lot of opinions in our world,” said John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle. “What we need is more mediation and reflection, which is why newspapers and literary journals are so important.”
Edward Champion, who writes about books on his blog, Return of the Reluctant (edrants.com), said that literary blogs responded to the “often stodgy and pretentious tone” of traditional reviews.
The brute fact is that while authors and publishers may want long and considered responses to their work, sometimes what they most need is attention. Last year, when Random House published “This Is Not Chick Lit,” a story collection with contributions from authors like Jennifer Egan and Curtis Sittenfeld, it generated a lot of online chatter as various bloggers debated whether the book was pretentious or a welcome correction to an oversubscribed genre. “All the slow but steady online exposure helped build a grass-roots thing,” said Julia Cheiffetz, the book’s editor at Random House, who noted that “This Is Not Chick Lit” is now in its sixth printing with 45,000 copies in print.
But while online buzz can help some books, newspapers can pique the interest of a general reader, said Oscar Villalon, books editor at The San Francisco Chronicle. Blogs, he said, are “not mass media.” The Chronicle, for example, he said, has a circulation of nearly 500,000, a number not many blogs can achieve.
On the other hand, committed readers who take the time to find a literary blog may be more likely than a casual reader of the Sunday newspaper to buy a book. “I know that everyone who comes to my site is interested in books,” said Mark Sarvas, editor of The Elegant Variation, a literary blog that publishes lengthy reviews.

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And newspaper book reviews, which are often accused of hewing too closely to “safe choices,” could learn something from the more freewheeling approach of some of the book blogs, said David L. Ulin, who edits the book review at The Los Angeles Times.
“One of the troubles with mainstream print criticism is that people can be too polite,” Mr. Ulin said. “I feel like an aspect of the gloves-off nature of blogs is something that we could all learn from, not in an irresponsible way, but in a wear-your-likes-and-dislikes-on-your-sleeves kind of way.”
Maud Newton, who has been writing a literary blog since 2002, said she has the freedom to follow obsessions like, say, Mark Twain in a way that a newspaper book review could not, unless there was a current book on the subject. But she would never consider what she does a replacement for more traditional book reviews.
“I find it kind of naïve and misguided to be a triumphalist blogger,” Ms. Newton said. “But I also find it kind of silly when people in the print media bash blogs as a general category, because I think the people are doing very, very different things.”
One thing that regional newspapers in particular can do is highlight local authors. “While I’m all for the literary bloggers, and I think the more people that write about books the better, they’re not necessarily as regionally focused as knowledgeable, experienced long-term editors in the South or Midwest or anywhere where the most important writers come from,” said Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of The New York Times Book Review.
Many local authors view the decision at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a betrayal of important local coverage.
“With the removal of its cultural critics, Atlanta is surrendering again,” wrote Melissa Fay Greene, author of “Praying for Sheetrock” in an e-mail message. “We all lose, you know, not just Atlantans, with the disappearance from the scene of a literate intelligence.”
Of course literary bloggers argue that they do provide a multiplicity of voices. But some authors distrust those voices. Mr. Ford, who has never looked at a literary blog, said he wanted the judgment and filter that he believed a newspaper book editor could provide. “Newspapers, by having institutional backing, have a responsible relationship not only to their publisher but to their readership,” Mr. Ford said, “in a way that some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute maybe doesn’t.”