An important day in history

Today, following a presentation at my local bookstore, I got to meet Jennifer Egan. I told her how much Look at Me (http://thebestbookever.blogspot.com/2011/11/look-at-me-by-jennifer-egan.html) meant to me, and how I could relate so much to both Charlotte, the main character, and to Irene, a sort of frumpy writer/academic type who writes about her. And she said it's her favorite of her books, and that it means the most to her of everything she's written.

...

too starstruck to yell eek or anything. I was so nervous I almost didn't get in the autograph line, but I'm glad I did.

The Intimates, by Ralph Sassone

Lately it often seems like all I do is work and commute, and when I get up before 6 and ride the subway for over an hour, sometimes all I have the energy to do is listen to podcasts, or sometimes not even that, just endless Neutral Milk Hotel and Magnetic Fields (who I'm going to see tomorrow!). But I did read another Jhumpa Lahiri collection (Unaccustomed Earth, which, like Interpreter of Maladies, saves the best for last), and now I'm almost done with The Intimates, a novel about teenage and early 20-something best friends.

The weirdest thing about The Intimates, which took me forever to diagnose, is that it's supposed to be set in the present, but feels like it's set in the past. It goes along feeling like I'm not sure when, mid 90s or so, then all of a sudden it'll be like "Robbie wanted to send Maize a *text message*" like see, we're all modern now, I used the term "text message." Every now and then someone pulls a cell phone out of a bag, which isn't even the right way to say it. Say she pulled her phone out. If it's in her purse, it's not a land line phone. Compounding this, the main characters live in Chelsea when they're broke recent Brown grads. This is quickly explained away with oh they were excited to find a cheap place there and not in Bushwick or Inwood but they should have been in Bushwick or Inwood. Crappy tenement housing in Chelsea for 22 year olds? 90s, at least.

Also Brown University is never identified, either. Robbie just goes to college in "Rhode Island" and Maize studies semiotics. What is gained by not just saying they're at Brown? Semiotics is 100 percent identified with Brown University. The alumni of that program include Jeffrey Eugenides, Rick Moody, and most famously to my mind, Ira Glass. I don't know what number of people read non-best-selling novels, but I'm going to guess that the Venn diagram with "people who picked up The Intimates at their local independent bookseller" and "people who know they're at Brown once the word 'semiotics' is bandied about" has a whole lot of overlap. What could be the point of the omission? Either say that's where they are or go to the trouble of making up a fictional place.

All this adds up to, the events in this book don't belong anywhere in time or place.

Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri

My all-time favorite subway read. So absorbing that I forgot the chaos and congestion around me -- although my headphones help with that too. The last paragraph is so beautiful that I almost cried on the A train.

It's been a while

I started a new job relatively recently, and my workdays are longer than they were. Also have been running around with visitors, getting ready for the holidays, traveling and so forth.

I recently read Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead, which is a perfectly fine book, but not what I wanted it to be. Too much teenage boy stuff. Way too much. Not nearly enough about everyone else in the book, whose characters seemed way more interesting. Probably if I'm going to read coming-of-age novels I should either stick to ones about women or expect this sort of thing.

Now I just started Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. It's a short story collection, which is normally not my thing at all, but I love her work and it should be good for the train. The first story was excellent.

Other work other places

I recently wrote this piece for my friends' website, Bully Pulp:

http://www.bullypulp.com/articles/2011/11/29/the-culture-of-white-people.html

It's a little ... strident. People who understood what I was trying to say saw what I was getting at, but I'm thinking I could have said it better.

I also just wrote this, which was published today, on my two-year anniversary of moving to New York City:

http://rustwire.com/2011/12/05/rust-belt-expat-story-2-finding-career-that-buffalo-couldnt-offer/

I hope a lot of people read the second piece. The editor called it "relatable." I like that. I think it's the most personal piece I've published anywhere besides my own website since I was writing opinion columns for The Bona Venture back in, gasp, the 90s.

The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides

To me, this is a classic highly readable modern novel, a la Freedom. It's about people who seem real, and takes place in a real place and time -- New England and New York in the early 1980s. There's no complicated chronology, no scenes set in the future, no characters who reappear under different names, none of that. There's not much in the way of literary device (that I noticed anyway) except the plot itself, a re-imagining of the classic choice between the difficult maverick genius and the "nice guy." My roommate was just telling me about the latest Twilight movie and it sounds exactly like this book, if this book were terrible instead of being awesome, and also included vampire babies (?).

Adding to my enjoyment of it was that it begins in Providence, RI, one of my all-time favorite places. Eugenides' depiction of the mixture of college-town bohemia and uber-WASPiness (I have such a soft spot for WASPiness, croquet and summer homes and martinis at five and not talking about feelings ...) that characterizes Providence's east side was spot on. Just writing that makes me wish I was there right now, taking in the perfect Revolutionary War-era colonials, cobblestone streets and sidewalk cafes.

Bottom line is: definitely read The Marriage Plot if, like me, you real novels instead of watching television. And no matter what you read, visit Providence if you ever have the chance.

Look At Me, by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit From the Goon Squad, my number-one recommended book of the past year or so, is fast becoming one of my favorite authors. While I think anyone who enjoys literary fiction would enjoy Goon Squad, Look At Me is a different kind of novel. I've read so many books about which I thought, "that was good enough, but it was by, about and for men." Look At Me is the rare novel a man might not "get" at all.

The themes are gender, beauty, identity and power, what it means to have control, and what it means to be an object. It's dark and searing, not dark in say an Oryx and Crake kind of way -- that one I had to put down -- but dark in a "this is forcing me to face up to a lot of things I thought I was good at ignoring" kind of way. One of the themes Egan explores that I don't think I've read about before, ever, is the contempt beautiful women have for women who are not attractive, and vice versa. I spent a lot of my life pretending that didn't exist, but it does, and she nails it. She also takes a deep dark look into the advantages beautiful women have in life, and the ones they really do not. There's a great scene where one of the main characters, a 35-year-old former model, sees a young model walking down the street in Manhattan, watches the power the young woman thinks she has in her ability to attract so many male gazes everywhere she goes. And she remembers how she, too, once thought that's what power was, having other people own and control you because of this fleeting quality, and how now she knows real power comes from what you say and do, from autonomy, not from who owns you and how much money they have.

There are a lot of flat and unrealistic elements to this novel, but I really don't care. It's incredibly engrossing, and it has really made me think.