Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Friday August 13, 2010
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SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY
Gary Shteyngart
Random House
ISBN 978 1 4000 6640 7
334 pages
$26
Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post Book World. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/roncharles. His e-mail address is charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
Gary Shteyngart has seen the future, and it has no room for him -- or any of us. His new novel, a slit-your-wrist satire illuminated by the author's absurd wit, follows today's most ominous trend lines past Twitter and Facebook addiction to a post-literate, consumption-crazed America that abhors books, newspapers and even conversation. "In other words," Shteyngart notes, "next Tuesday." This zany Russian immigrant loops the comedy of Woody Allen's "Sleeper" through the grim insights of George Orwell's "1984" to produce a "Super Sad True Love Story" that exposes the moral bankruptcy of our techno-lust. I hope the e-book version contains a virus that melts your iPad.
A funny excerpt of it appeared last month in the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" issue, and it's the sort of riff-based novel that does particularly well in bite-size pieces. Indeed, some of the funnier parts read like the magazine's "Shouts & Murmurs" column -- perfect for our Internet-shrunk attention spans.
We meet the main character, Lenny Abramov, through his diary entries. He's a death-obsessed, 39-year-old Jew with "a so-so body in a world where only an incredible one will do." Raised and educated in the obsolete literate society, he now works as a Life Lovers Outreach Coordinator for a multinational corporation that sells immortality to High Net Worth Individuals. His 70-year-old boss, a rabid advocate of dechronification and fish oil, gets younger every week, and everyone's neurotic preoccupation with physical health, in a society that's spiritually dead, is only one of the novel's clever themes.
But what pulls on our affections and keeps the satire from growing too brittle is Lenny's earnest voice as he struggles to fit into a world that clearly has no more use for him. (Raise your Wii if you know what I mean.) He opens his diary with the declaration that he's fallen madly in love with a grim, anorexic Korean woman named Eunice Park. Much younger, infinitely more hip and completely in sync with the glittery e-culture, Eunice is a well-educated woman with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness. She's a sad, anxious poster child for "The Shallows," Nicholas Carr's new book about what the Internet does to our brains. Lenny's diary entries are interspersed with her e-mails written in a futuristic Internet patois, which allows us to follow the super sad trajectory of their love story as the United States collapses.
Like "Chronic City," Jonathan Lethem's dystopic vision of a near-future New York, Shteyngart's novel is light on plot but studded with hilarious and sometimes depressing details of our culture's decay. He's blended the competing nightmares of Sarah Palin and Nancy Pelosi to imagine the worst of both worlds, ruled by a bureaucratic monster called the Bipartisan Party. It hardly feels like any distance into the future at all when Eunice cries, "Oh, what has happened to us, Lenny?"
Mega-corporations like UnitedContinentalDeltamerican and ColgatePalmoliveYum!BrandViacomCredit dwarf the government's power; health care, education and transportation have been privatized with disastrous effects; citizens live at the mercy of gyrating currency and credit markets; the poor and the old are deported to make room for exclusive Lifestyle Hubs. The United States is a crumbling police state, buried in debt to the Chinese (as if) and stuck in a crippling war with Venezuela (get ready, Hugo!). Our last futile hope is a rousing new marketing campaign: "Together We'll Surprise the World!"
But Shteyngart's most trenchant satire depicts the inane, hyper-sexualized culture that connects everybody even while destroying any actual community or intimacy. This may be the only time I've wanted to stand up on the subway and read passages of a book out loud. In these pages BlackBerrys have evolved into something called an apparat, an irresistible multipurpose device for shopping, scanning and "verballing" our pornographic lives in real time over the "GlobalTeens" network. Only the youngest children actually speak before "retreating into the dense clickety-clack apparat world of their absorbed mothers and missing fathers." Privacy, of course, is as quaint as a Victrola -- sexual preferences, credit ratings and cholesterol levels are broadcast nonstop -- and everyone continually rates everyone else on an 800-point scale for personality and sexiness in the most salacious terms imaginable. I'm tempted to "friend" Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and "message" him these scenes one by one.
Most of the story swings on gallows humor aimed at anyone fusty enough to still be reading novels -- or, worse, reviews of novels. Eunice is horrified by Lenny's devotion to his smelly old books: "I was so embarrassed I just stood there and watched him read which lasted for like HALF AN HOUR." Her friend texts back: "Maybe you guys can read to each other in bed or something. And then you can sew your own clothes. HA HA HA." Of course, the rest of what we might call literary culture is a shambles, too. In the New York Lifestyle Times, bits of political analysis are sometimes dropped into the stories about new products, and the nightly news is delivered by a naked muscleman being sodomized.
Perhaps the saddest aspect of this "Super Sad True Love Story" is that you can smell Shteyngart sweating to stay one step ahead of the decaying world he's trying to satirize. It's an almost impossible race now that the exhibitionism of ordinary people has lost its ability to shock us. Just try coming up with something creepier than middle school girls wearing shorts with the word "Juicy" across their bottoms, or imagine a fashion line cruder than FCUK (Shteyngart comes close). His description of friends getting together after work to text other friends is taking place today in every D.C. restaurant. And how can you parody the TV news coverage when George Stephanopoulos has already presented a straight-faced report on Lindsay Lohan's obscene fingernail stencil?
The only bulwark against despair, Shteyngart suggests with a nod to Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," is our fidelity to those we love, the persistence of affection on a darkling plain lit only by giddy advertisements. What a tender, haunting moment, late in the story, when Lenny finds an old copy of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and actually tries reading it to Eunice in bed, as her friend once joked he would. It's a brilliantly apropos novel to pull down from his antique Wall of Books, but is it still possible to comprehend Milan Kundera's rich, existential story about the search for meaning during the Prague Spring? Maybe. The best satire is always grounded in optimism: faith in the writer's power to gibe and cajole a dormant conscience to reform. And if that doesn't work, well, the future really isn't very far away after all, and we should listen to Lenny's ever-younger boss: "Brush up on your Norwegian and Mandarin."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THINK OF A NUMBER
John Verdon
Crown
ISBN 978 0 507 58892 0
418 pages
$22
Reviewed by Daniel Stashower, whose most recent book is "The Beautiful Cigar Girl"
In "The Simple Art of Murder," his cornerstone essay on detective fiction, Raymond Chandler famously drew a line in the sand between the American "hard-boiled" school of Dashiell Hammett and the more genteel traditions of writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. Hammett and his followers, Chandler wrote, "gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish."
John Verdon manages to have it both ways in "Think of a Number," his inventive and entertaining first thriller. The hard-edged characters and gritty plot recall Chandler's "mean streets," but the ornate puzzles laid before Verdon's detective might have challenged the "little grey cells" of Hercule Poirot. Verdon appears to take a certain fiendish glee in his brainteasers. At one stage he gives us a trail of footprints that comes to an inexplicable stop in the middle of nowhere: "It was as if the killer had walked purposefully to this spot, stood about shifting from foot to foot for a few minutes, perhaps waiting for someone or something, and then ... evaporated." There are also secret messages written in skin oil, cunningly concealed gunshot wounds, and a killer who delivers his threats in enigmatic verse.
Verdon uses his best trick to get the plot rolling. When a "spiritual renewal" counselor named Mark Mellery finds himself at the center of a "weird puzzle," he seeks help from his old college friend Dave Gurney, a retired homicide detective living nearby in the rural Catskills. Mellery has received a disturbing letter filled with oblique references to a potentially ruinous episode from his drunken past. The anonymous correspondent warns that Mellery's day of reckoning is at hand, and goes on to prove his bona fides with a startling mind game. He tells Mellery to think of a three-digit number -- "the first number that comes to your mind" -- before opening a small sealed envelope that was included with the letter. Inside is the number Mellery selected. "Now," boasts the mysterious tormentor, "see how well I know your secrets."
Gurney, a "detective of legend," agrees to investigate the problem as a favor to his friend. More threats bubble to the surface, followed in turn by a series of grotesque and baffling murders. Gurney soon finds himself at the center of a full-blown manhunt, tracking a serial killer who is apparently able to read the minds of his victims.
Verdon provides plenty of the flashy forensics that readers have come to expect in a modern thriller, but he also does a good job of fleshing out the human side of police work, highlighting Gurney's prickly relationship with a local cop who resents the intrusion of the "most revered homicide detective in the history of the NYPD." The author also takes an unsparing look at tensions that arise in Gurney's marriage, already frayed by the pressures of his long career on the force. "David, what is the matter with you?" his wife asks as he plunges headlong into the investigation. "Do you just keep running at the bullets? Running at the bullets? Until one goes through your head? Is that it? Is that the pathetic plan for the rest of our lives together?"
Verdon stumbles now and then in his efforts to fuse the lightning pace of a thriller with the more stately charms of an old-fashioned mystery. The action is parsed into short, fast-moving chapters, but the events at hand don't always fit. A lengthy scene at police headquarters gets chopped into four segments, more or less indiscriminately, like sausage links. At the same time, Verdon spends too long remarking on the weather, especially during the book's leisurely opening pages, and some readers may find their patience wearing thin.
If the book starts slowly, however, it finishes strong. As soon as Gurney arrives at the first crime scene, a gripping game of cat-and-mouse begins. Verdon plays fair with the reader, crafting the puzzles with elaborate care and dangling the clues in plain sight. When he finally springs the solution to the "think of a number" conundrum, you'll never see it coming -- but all the numbers add up.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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AMERICAN INSURGENTS, AMERICAN PATRIOTS: The Revolution of the People
AMERICAN INSURGENTS, AMERICAN PATRIOTS: The Revolution of the PeopleT. H. Breen
Hill and Wang
ISBN 978-0-8090-7588-1
337 pages
$27
REVOLUTIONARIES: A New History of the Invention of AmericaJack Rakove
Houghton Mifflin
ISBN 978-0618267460
487 pages
$30
Reviewed by Jan Ellen Lewis
So tied up is American identity in the American Revolution that popular histories of it are inescapably children's books, bedtime stories that tell us how we came to be: "Mommy, Daddy, tell me about when I was born." The newest additions to this literature are by two distinguished historians, T.H. Breen of Northwestern and Jack Rakove of Stanford. Each will appeal to a different segment of the history-reading public.
Although this is surely not Breen's intent, modern-day Tea Partiers who look in his book may see their own flattering reflections: an essentially all-white group of angry men and women, guided more by the Bible than political philosophy, convinced that a distant government is out to enslave them, eager to suppress dissent, ready to pick up arms at the first rumor -- and described as a brave insurgency that had "spoken truth to power." Breen wants to evoke comparisons to other world-wide anti-imperialist insurgencies, but his focus on the "raw anger" of a people who "surged forward in the name of rights and liberty" can't help calling to mind today's Tea Party movement as well.
Focusing on the two years after the Boston Tea Party of 1773, Breen argues that the driving force behind the revolution was an American populace enraged by the punishment meted out by Parliament, which shut the port of Boston and took the right of self-government away from Massachusetts. "Without bothering to consult with a single Founding Father," he writes, "the people took up arms en masse against the empire." He goes on to describe the popular mobilization that drew thousands of colonists, especially in New England, into the patriot ranks by collecting donations of money and supplies for Boston but also by censoring the press, burning offensive publications, staging "show trials" and creating "extralegal bodies fully prepared to intimidate, even terrorize those who dared to criticize the American cause." Although contemporary Americans might be chilled by this piece of their history, Breen makes excuses for it. "Considering the atrocities that have occurred in other revolutions over the last two centuries," he says, "we might wonder at such restraint."
Breen writes with the zeal of a partisan, and it is hard to distinguish his thoughts and feelings from those of his subjects. He quotes uncritically the many colonists who were convinced that they faced a choice between "LIFE & DEATH, or what is more, FREEDOM & SLAVERY," as if so emotional a response to the Coercive Acts were perfectly understandable. Yet the pervasiveness of such paranoid rhetoric, from the outset of the imperial crisis more than a decade earlier, has led some historians to look for explanations of the Revolution not so much in the series of events that led up to it as in the theories used by the colonists to make sense of those events: the "ideological origins" of the American Revolution. Breen's insurgents are motivated, however, not by "political theory" but by "spontaneous rage against the imperial state."
Like the insurgents who took up arms and rushed off to Boston on the rumor that the British had fired on the city, Breen is sometimes a little quick on the draw. He warns against exaggerating John Locke's influence on Revolutionary thought: "Many Americans had never read Locke's work; quite a few would not have even recognized his name." Three pages later, however, he explains the source of the motto on a popular flag: "Ordinary Americans had encountered the phrase in the pages of John Locke's 'Second Treatise.'" In one chapter, Breen excuses the insurgents' censorship of the press, but in another the Parliament that considers censorship has "mistaken a tough response for political wisdom."
Confining himself to the two years of popular mobilization after 1773, Breen effectively dismisses the decade of organizing by radicals that led to the Tea Party and the subsequent decades of unbelievably hard work, often by moderates, that transformed rebellion against the British into the foundation for an independent nation. This hard work is Rakove's chief interest. He structures his narrative of the revolutionary era as a series of portraits of the Founding Fathers, some better known than others, but each making his mark. Each chapter has its heroes who push their sometimes-reluctant colleagues forward: John Dickinson denouncing British taxes in 1767; Sam and John Adams pushing the Continental Congress toward independence; George Mason writing Virginia's Declaration of Rights; George Washington holding an underfed, underfunded and outnumbered army together; James Madison pulling off the feat of getting the Constitution written and ratified; and Alexander Hamilton putting the nation's economy on a sound footing.
But one chapter's hero is the next chapter's pain in the posterior. Dickinson refused to sign the Declaration of Independence, and Mason, the Constitution. In Paris, the three men sent to negotiate the treaty to end the war seemed to spend more time complaining about each other than actually working on a treaty. John Adams griped about Benjamin Franklin's "Sordid Envy" and warned John Jay about those, like Franklin, "who will use all the Arts of the Devil to breed Misunderstandings between us," while Franklin said that Adams "sometimes, and in some things, is absolutely out of his senses." Madison worked closely with Hamilton to get the Constitution ratified -- and then even more closely with Jefferson to undermine Hamilton in Washington's cabinet.
Rakove's attentiveness to the Founders' foibles humanizes them at the same time that it underscores their collective achievement. No one revolutionary got everything right, but together "they carried the American colonies from resistance to revolution, held their own against the premier imperial power of the day, and then capped their visionary experiment by framing a Constitution whose origins and interpretation still preoccupy us over two centuries later."
Although scholars will find little new in Rakove's book, he tells his story well, with a Madisonian appreciation for human frailty. And if Breen's book may please the Tea Party crowd, Rakove's offers a consolation to modern liberals: that no matter how serious the crises, we will somehow find what we need to make it through. His is a bedtime story for grown-ups.
Jan Ellen Lewis is a professor of history at Rutgers University, Newark.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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COMPOSED: A Memoir
Rosanne Cash
Viking
ISBN 978 0 670 02196 3
245 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
"F or the first fifteen years of my own career," Rosanne Cash writes in this wise, honest and utterly engaging memoir, she "struggled ... mightily" with the impulse to break away from the musical bonds of her family. Small wonder. By the late 1970s, when she was in her early 20s and embarking on that career, her father, Johnny Cash, had become one of the most celebrated musicians in the country, and her stepmother, June Carter Cash, was right on stage beside him. Making the burden even heavier, June's forebears, known professionally as the Carter Family, were among the founding royalty of country music, right up there with Jimmie Rodgers and, in the second generation, Hank Williams.
For any child of any famous star in any art form, remaining true to one's roots while at the same time establishing a presence of one's own can be a formidable challenge, all the more so when, as in Rosanne Cash's case, one's love for that famous parent is deep and unconditional. On the one hand, she wanted to be known as Rosanne Cash, not just as Johnny Cash's daughter, but that's just what she was and is, and she's obviously as proud of it as she could be. "He cast an obviously large shadow," she writes, "and it was hard for me to find my own place outside of it, or to be comfortable when the shadow was the first thing people noticed about my life or my work." What's remarkable is that she's somehow managed to combine the two, to be at once herself and her father's daughter. The wonderful music she writes and performs has country at its heart, as of course his did, but it also draws upon rock, folk, the blues and even the faintest hint of jazz.
Johnny Cash had his share of the world's problems, chief among them an addiction to drugs against which he struggled for much of his life, but he seems to have been a loving, attentive, concerned father to the four daughters he had with his first wife, Vivian, and the son he had with June. "When I was a day out of high school," Rosanne writes, "my father took me on the road. It was something of a graduation gift, and a chance to catch up on some of the time we had lost." Her account of that journey should be quoted at length:
"Traveling the world, watching him perform, and singing on the bus were also the basis for a serious education. Early on he made a list of a hundred essential country songs, which he instructed me to learn, a wide-ranging selection that ran from old history-lesson songs like 'The Battle of New Orleans' through classics like Hank Williams' 'I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry.' As I was ushered into this treasury of song, it was thrilling to learn more about my father through his great love for the music. I learned to play guitar from my stepmother's sister Helen, from Mother Maybelle Carter, and from Carl Perkins, all of whom were on the road with dad at the time. Each day I spent many hours in dressing rooms, practicing chords and the old songs they taught me. I discovered a passion for songwriting that remains undiminished to this day and that led me into my life as a writer and singer -- into my family's vocation."
Last year, three-and-a-half decades later, Rosanne -- by then herself a star of considerable brilliance -- recorded a dozen of those songs on an album called "The List," a surpassingly beautiful piece of work that "represents a kind of resolution, of so many seemingly disparate but intimately related themes and struggles in my life, both musical and personal." It is her way "to say yes" to his legacy, and: "I wish he had been alive to hear The List, and to see me say yes to all of it, and more than that, to revel in it as if it were a secret passed from parent to child, and a key to a particular familial mystery."
As by now you doubtless have figured out, from the passages quoted above, Rosanne Cash isn't just a writer and performer of songs, she's a (BEG ITAL)writer(END ITAL), period. By the time she was a seventh-grader at a Catholic school in California, an assignment she wrote "on metaphors and similes" turned the corner for her. Reading it years later, "I could feel the thrill of my twelve-year-old self coming off the page, a nascent writer in love with language as if language were a potential lover." Indeed, a metaphor she created for that paper found its way, years later, "into a song I was writing, 'Sleeping in Paris.'" This is how she describes her evolution as a writer and performer:
"I have been lucky. I have also been driven by a deep love and obsession with language, poetry, and melody. I had first wanted to be a writer, in a quiet room, setting depth charges of emotion in the outside world, where my readers would know me only by my language. Then I decided I wanted to be a songwriter, writing not for myself but for other voices who would be the vehicles for the songs I created. Then, despite myself, I began performing my own songs, which rattled me to the core. It took me a long time to grow into an ambition for what I had already committed myself to doing, but I knew I could be good at it if I put my mind to it. So I put my mind to it."
Her resistance to performing was real and deep. The "draining, peripatetic life my dad was leading" did not appeal to her, and the "bone-crushing exhaustion, the constant vulnerability to media misinterpretation or even slander, and the complete obliteration of any semblance of a private life were not things I wanted for myself," but "I just kept doing it until it felt like home. I worked out a lifetime of self-doubt and musical and emotional vulnerabilities under the spotlight." In time she realized that "the arena I thought was a circus of humiliation actually held half the available light of what was intended for me, for my whole life."
It hasn't always been a smooth ride. As a girl she had to cope with "my father's drug addiction and the collapse of my nuclear family, the two central catastrophic events of my childhood, which have cast their long shadows over my life since." Her first marriage, to the gifted songwriter and singer Rodney Crowell, produced three daughters to whom she is devoted, but it ended in divorce; "ultimately, we both had to belatedly grow up, and we recognized that we couldn't do it together." Subsequently, she married John Leventhal, a producer, with whom she has one son. The serenity of her happy new marriage was interrupted three years ago when she underwent complicated and risky brain surgery; recovery was long and difficult though ultimately successful, "but I don't recommend it as an elective adventure."
Now in her mid-50s, Cash has learned life's lessons well. "We all need art and music like we need blood and oxygen," she writes. "The more exploitative, numbing, and assaulting popular culture becomes, the more we need the truth of a beautifully phrased song, dredged from a real person's depth of experience, delivered in an honest voice; the more we need the simplicity of paint on canvas, or the arc of a lonely body in the air, or the photographer's unflinching eye." Amen to that, and amen as well to this beautiful and stirring book, of which one thing can be said for sure: Dad would have been proud of it, and her.
Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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