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I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, given how steeped my childhood was in Bible stories, that R. Crumb’s graphic rendition of Genesis infiltrated my thoughts the way that it did, but I was. Because his book was the one that affected me the most this year, it’s my pick for Salon. What I say there is partly a retread of some earlier posts, but you should click over anyway to see what titles Geoff Dyer, Laura Lippman, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Junot Díaz, and other writers chose. Salon’s book critic, Laura Miller, who recently considered the trouble with book reviews, also names her favorites: fiction and nonfiction.

For The Millions’ A Year in Reading 2009, I write (big surprise) about continuing to make my way through the complete, and completely out of print, works of Theodora Keogh. The Millions’ roster of contributors is even more extensive this year, with Kate Christensen, Victor LaValle, Jonathan Lethem (whose Chronic City I hope to settle in with over the holidays), Julie Klam, Michelle Huneven, and Diane Williams, to name a few, joining returning writers Mark Sarvas, Stephen Elliott, and Edan Lepucki.
 

In 2009 I reviewed more than twenty new books, the majority of them books I like, and returned to a number of old favorites. (No wonder I haven’t gotten enough of my own writing done.)

I also enjoyed many titles that I couldn’t officially review because they were written by friends or friendly acquaintances: The Book of Night Women, Picking Bones From Ash, Big Machine, The Sixties, Trouble, Shelf Discovery<

My appreciation of The Paris Review Interviews I-IV is up at NPR. An excerpt:

The advice on offer to aspiring writers is vast — and sometimes contradictory. In his introduction, Orhan Pamuk recalls discovering Faulkner’s interview while he was holed up with his first novel after dropping out of architectural school, and finding the answer to the question that seemed most urgent: “What sort of person should I now become?” An artist, in Faulkner’s view, is “completely immoral in that he will rob, beg, borrow or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. … The writer’s only responsibility is to his art.” Toni Morrison would disagree. “Why should I get to steal from you? I don’t like that. What I really love is the process of invention.” These strongly held opposing views, bound between the same covers, give the volumes immense energy.

You can read the rest here. In related news, The Paris Review’s third editor, writer Philip Gourevitch, announced last week that he’ll be stepping down next spring to focus on his own writing.
 

For previous Paris Review interviews-related posts, see On running guided tours through your work; too far down: on writing and the emotions; the voluble Ms. Porter; literary quotes 5 and 7.

In the London Review of Books this week, James Wood adjudged A.S. Byatt “a very ordinary grown-ups’ writer and a very good children’s writer” — a verdict that, notwithstanding her sometimes didactic omniscience, I find ludicrous.

My review of Byatt’s latest novel, The Children’s Book, is at Barnes & Noble Review today. An excerpt:

A.S. Byatt published her first novel in 1964 and, over the ensuing two and a half decades, produced a series of successors that were admired by critics but had little reach beyond intellectual circles. Yet when Possession, her literary romance and thriller, became a bestseller on its publication in 1990, the author evinced no surprise. Quite the contrary: this time, she said, she had written with a larger audience in mind. In tone and scope, the resulting novel proved a gripping and original blend of the Victorian and postmodern, serving up two love stories, some improbably sexy critical theory, and countless deft pastiches of Rossetti and Browning. “I knew people would like it,” Byatt told The New York Times. “It’s the only one I’ve written to be liked, and I did it partly to show off.”

Nearly twenty years later, still mashing up genres, switching historical periods, and unfolding stories with supple and convincing omniscience, the author has continued to challenge and entertain her readers. She has ventured into fairy tales, suggesting that “they form, or until recently formed, the narrative grammar of our minds.” She has excoriated grown-up readers of the Harry Potter books, claiming that J.K. Rowling’s series “speaks to an adult generation that hasn’t known, and doesn’t care about, mystery.” And she has questioned the practice of including real-life people in fiction, arguing that that using an actual person “as the single original in fiction” inhibits creativity by failing to leave room for “the necessary insertion of inventions.”

By her own admission, Byatt peoples her books with composites. Types, she says, tend to recur. Olive Wellwood, the preening, selfish, and blinkered, if basically good-hearted, children’s writer at the center of her latest novel, is one part D.H. Lawrence, one part E. Nesbit, two parts Alison Uttley, a dash of Rebecca West, and, of course, a great deal of the author’s imagination, all steeped in the pot of her moralizing. Writers and other artists who steal too directly from other people for inspiration fare badly in The Children’s Book, another brainy crowd-pleaser — a vast Edwardian-era panorama so spellbinding it invaded my dreams, but also frustrated me, in the end, as characters’ fates bent to Byatt’s ethical agendas.

The rest is here. For more on Byatt and The Children’s Book, see Kera Bolonik’s excellent interview for Bookforum.

Speaking of Nazis in South America, Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s first novel, The Informers, is set in 1990s Bogotá, but looks back to the city’s World War II history as a son tries to unravel the lies and omissions his father built their lives around.

Translator Anne McLean “exchanged 200 e-mails” with the author in the course of translating the novel, and her diligence shows. The prose is taut but expressive, every sentence so precise I’m inspired to try dusting off my rusty kindergarten-level Spanish and comparing the original.

My brief appreciation of the book is up at NPR. An excerpt:

Even the most original writers labor under the shadow of their elders. The critic Harold Bloom has argued that the truly great artist overcomes this anxiety of influence only by “killing the father,” his or her predecessor, through misinterpretation. Whether or not this is true, the relationship between writers who are, literally, parent and child, often takes on a combative quality.

Martin Amis, for instance, attributes his tolerance for criticism to his father Kingsley’s candid disapproval; the older writer announced that he “couldn’t get on” with Amis’ second book, and later threw the much-acclaimed novel Money across the room. Auberon Waugh, meanwhile, was so haunted by the father who called him, at seven, “clumsy and disheveled, sly, without intellectual, aesthetic or spiritual interest,” that he eventually wrote a memoir called Will This Do?

Generational tensions of both the familial and cultural sort form the thematic center of Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s inventive and intricately plotted The Informers. As the novel opens, its narrator, Gabriel Santoro, receives a surprise phone call from his estranged father, a renowned speechwriter, professor and critic, and learns that he will soon undergo risky surgery for an obstructed artery. The two men haven’t spoken for a couple of years, since Santoro, Sr. published a hostile review proclaiming his son’s first book a failure.

For more, see Michael Shaer in Bookforum, Michael Orthofer at The Complete Review, Mark Asch for The L Magazine, Georgina Jiménez in The Latin American Review of Books, Isabel Obiols in El País (Spanish), Richard Lea’s profile in The Guardian, an interview in Miami’s El Nuevo Herald (Spanish), and, at PEN, the author’s own remarks on writing The Informers

My review of Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs is up at the expanded, handsomely redesigned Barnes & Noble Review site.

As an ardent Moore fan — and we are legion — I was entertained, moved, and frustrated by her latest novel. Here’s the start of what I wrote:

In a recent talk, Lorrie Moore suggested that twenty is “the universal age of passion” — the point at which the unique shape and expression of our feelings like love and disgust and fury becomes fixed. It is also, she observed, the perceptual halfway-point of most people’s existence. Our first two decades seem to pass as slowly as the whole of the rest of our lives, according to scientists, so that our early experiences carry vastly more psychic weight than those of adulthood.

It’s interesting to consider the impact of Moore’s own work by this metric, and not only because her ambitious new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, is narrated by a twenty-year-old. Since the publication of her first collection, Self-Help, in 1985, so many readers have identified with Moore’s witty, cynical and yearning failed-relationship stories at a similarly impressionable stage that her writing has become as formative an influence on American fiction as her hero John Updike’s was in an earlier era.

The rest is here. For other perspectives, see Jonathan Lethem’s rave, Michiko Kakutani’s glowing review, Edan Lepucki’s It’s Not You, It’s Me, and Stephanie Zacharek’s People like Lorrie Moore are the only people here.

Narrative has an interview, and you can watch Moore’s Book Expo talk online, in two parts. The first is below.

My appreciation of Cristina Nerhing’s A Vindication of Love is up at NPR.

Nowadays a woman can claim just about anything as a badge of feminism. She can pursue a career, raise a child, or both; maintain a stable of lovers, marry, or both; serve in the military; sit on the Supreme Court; stay home and keep house; or take off her clothes for money. Short of infanticide, it’s difficult to conceive of any act that doesn’t fall within the big tent of women’s liberation.

Yet as Cristina Nehring observes in her sharp new polemic, A Vindication of Love, there is still at least one way to be instantaneously and conclusively stripped of feminist credentials — and that is to act impulsively, irrationally or self-destructively out of passion for a man.

You can read the rest, and an excerpt from the book, at the NPR site. See also Jessa Crispin’s praise, and Katie Roiphe’s reaction.

In honor of the appearance of Love is a Four-Letter Word,* The Week invited me to contribute this week’s “best books” list.

It’s devoted to “doomed love,” and a reader says it’s available now.

Instead of focusing on autobiographical stories, I chose first-person works of fiction** that (mostly) take the form of confessions: Lolita, Les Liaisons dangereuses, The Black Prince, The Book of Night Women, The End of the Affair, and My Name Is Rose, “in which the narrator strives in a frank, unsentimental journal to reconcile her two selves: the dutiful wife and the yearning, philandering creative soul.”
 

My Name is Rose was written by the remarkable Theodora Keogh, who, despite being wildly talented, and the granddaughter and namesake of Theodore Roosevelt, died in obscurity last year — nearly a half-century after (apparently) laying down her pen.

It was difficult to choose between My Name is Rose and The Tattooed Heart (which Brooks Peters aptly describes as a “marvelously atmospheric novel about a young boy and girl living in the Hamptons. Abandoned by their high-flying, distracted parents, they create their own universe amid the sand dunes and privet hedges of the East End”); The Double Door was also a possibility. But the biting, relentlessly frank Rose is my favorite of Keogh’s novels. I’ll have to explain why some other time.
 

The image above is a caricature of the author, by her then-husband Tom Keogh, that appeared with seven more of his drawings in the very first issue of The Paris Review, in 1953. You can see another one bleeding through slightly from the next page.

Many thanks to Paris Review Managing Editor Caitlin Roper, who verified the sketch’s existence and scanned it for me.
 

* There’s more good press for the anthology in Bookpage and Elle.”

**

My appreciation of Samantha Peale’s The American Painter Emma Dial is up at NPR.

Young artists often mistake proximity to the art world for the act of creation itself. Nowhere is this error more common than in New York City, where being able to paint and make rent is a question of finding “the right imbalance” between art and paying work. So says the disarmingly candid narrator of Samantha Peale’s first novel, The American Painter Emma Dial, who is not following her own advice. Emma, in the employ of a critically acclaimed painter, hasn’t visited her studio in a year. Her self-loathing is palpable; the prose vibrates with the heat of her disgust.

You can read the rest, and an excerpt, at the NPR site.

For more, see Deborah Solomon’s generally admiring review for The New York Times, Deborah Vankin’s for The Los Angeles Times, and Ron Slate’s at his own site. Artnet reviewer Walter Robinson is more critical. If you’re curious about the working methods and private life of Peale’s former employer, the controversial artist and former Wall Streeter Jeff Koons, go here and here.

When Bookforum relaunched its website recently, the editors introduced my favorite feature: an idiosyncratic collection of writers’ syllabi on various topics. Mine is devoted to doubt.

The narrator of my novel in progress has a storefront preacher mother and a family legacy of extremism that seem, the more she struggles against them, destined to determine her future. While her life goes in a very different direction from mine, I’ve taken quite a bit of material from my own experiences and neuroses in imagining her story. I’m a doubter by nature — committedly, almost compulsively so — and gravitate toward works by other agnostics. Skepticism is as old as faith, and its manifestations are complex and varied.

Go there for the actual reading list. (And please consider it a plea for someone to republish the collected works of Anne Royall.)

It’s going to be a Jean Rhystravaganza around here for a little while.

Next week Granta online will publish some correspondence between novelist Alexander Chee and me about Rhys’ affair with Ford Madox Ford, and the novels they wrote afterward.

And today at The Second Pass, I review Lilian Pizzichini’s new biography, The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys.

Jean Rhys’ final novel and masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, bestows a life on Jane Eyre’s offstage villain, the Creole madwoman in the attic. Although the book appeared to wide acclaim, Rhys held a grudge against editor Diana Athill for, she believed, publishing it prematurely. “‘It was not finished,’ she said coldly. She then pointed out the existence in the book of two unnecessary words. One was ‘then,’ the other ‘quite.’”

Rhys, who toiled on the book for many years, was always known for her economy. She learned early on to pare down her prose, shaping it until her stories seemed to echo the elusive emotional truths of her own experience. It was Ford Madox Ford, one of her lovers and her very first editor, who encouraged her in this cutting, but she took to the art so immediately and so zealously that he later urged her to emphasize geographical concreteness and include physical detail. Rhys only pruned further. The four slender, deceptively straightforward novels that resulted evoke, like nothing before and very little since, the anguish of pretty young women, living hand to mouth in seedy hotels and boarding houses, who are kept, used and finally abandoned by wealthy older men.

Restraint is as essential to Rhys as the depression and fear she excavates. The intensity of her work is counterbalanced by a steely precision that serves to stave off melodrama.

The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys, a brief biography by Lilian Pizzichini, reads more like a novel than a nonfiction study, and this is no accident. A foreword characterizes the book as “an attempt to recapture her life.” Passages from Rhys’ unfinished autobiography, Smile, Please, are liberally quoted and paraphrased. Conjecture as to her emotional state abounds. At times the clumsy armchair psychoanalysis weighs down the story, giving it the exaggerated sentimentality and cheap pathos of a romance novel, but the material itself is inherently fascinating.

The rest is here.

My appreciation of Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger is up at NPR. Here’s an excerpt:

For a writer so gifted at conjuring up worlds in which unspoken longings seem to manifest themselves as otherworldly phenomena, British novelist Sarah Waters is surprisingly dismissive of her own superstitions, which she sees as symptomatic of her lower-middle-class origins. Her grandparents worked as servants, her parents were the first in the family to attend grammar school, and the Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith author learned early on to touch wood, cherish the Catholic saints, and worry that it would be bad luck to try to move too far beyond the station to which she was born.

Class anxiety is the animating force behind Waters’ fifth book, The Little Stranger, a suspenseful and psychologically layered haunted-house story set in the aftermath of World War II, when the fading gentry collided with the emerging professional class that would once have been the help. The novel opens as its narrator, Dr. Faraday, arrives at Hundreds Hall, the Ayers family manor, to treat the maid. Faraday quickly realizes the girl is fine; her real affliction is not a stomachache but an ignorant and, to a medical man, wholly frustrating terror of ghosts. It’s the condition of the house itself, now a grim structure crumbling in a thicket of weeds, that worries him. His late mother had once been a servant there, and when Faraday was a boy the majesty of the place had filled him with such yearning that he’d sawed away at a decorative acorn with his penknife and slid it into his pocket.

For background on the author and her work, try Robert McCrum’s glowing Guardian profile. Elsewhere, Waters explains that The Little Stranger was inspired by Josephine Tey’s 1948 detective novel, The Franchise Affair, which in turn had its origins in a real-life scandal. (Via and via, respectively.)

See also Laura Miller’s thoughtful review for Salon, Scarlett Thomas’ for the New York Times Book Review, and Ron Charles’ for The Washington Post

For the summer issue of Bookforum, I wrote a joint review of Eileen Luhr’s Witnessing Suburbia, on the development of the Christian youth culture, and Bethany Moreton’s excellent To Serve God and Wal-Mart, on the making of Christian free enterprise. Here’s an excerpt:

Books claiming to decipher evangelical Christianity for the secular reader are nothing new, but the Bush years ushered in the genre’s golden age. Following the 2000 election, scores of pundits sought to explain the rise of the Christian right, and some of their efforts were worthwhile. For The Great Derangement, Matt Taibbi went undercover at a fundamentalist retreat that culminated with a mass exorcism where he was encouraged to vomit up demons, and he walked away understanding how easy it could be to “bury your ‘sinful’ self far under the skin of your outer Christian.” D. Michael Lindsay conducted interviews with evangelicals in business and politics for Faith in the Halls of Power and (perhaps to a fault) allowed them to speak for themselves.

Yet many recent guides to evangelicalism are vastly oversimplified, if not aggressively disingenuous. The worst are the Red America manuals that issue forth from career contrarians like David Brooks, who concocts a thesis about homely red-state virtues and works backward — making a few trips across state lines to churches, auto-body shops, and Red Lobsters — in search of anecdotes to support it. And in the era of family values and untrammeled free enterprise, a host of professional opinion mongers affected to don evangelical-tinted glasses through which they reassessed and cast doubt on progressive ideas that had entered the mainstream in prior decades. Never mind that “evangelical” is a slippery category, prone to many opportunistic manipulations. Do we count the Charismatics? PCA Presbyterians? Tongues-speaking Episcopalians? There are many camps along the spectrum of American Protestantism — camps often hostile to one another — and as a child I was dragged through a number of them.

In the post-Bush era, some of the most reductionist punditry on the evangelical scene has receded, leaving room for serious inquiry into how the past eight years came about. To that end, Eileen Luhr’s Witnessing Suburbia is a diligent and informative, if somewhat muddled, exploration of the ways mainstream evangelicals’ attitudes toward popular culture have evolved in the past forty years.

You can read the rest here.

The Luhr book deals primarily with Christians’ appropriation of popular culture, particularly rock, metal, and punk, and the emergence of the “MTV approach to evangelicalism” as an industry. Recently a friend pointed me to a fascinating 1980s documentary that suggests rock and evangelical revivals were linked from the start. See Rock my Religion: where Shakers & Patti Smith meet?.

My current NPR appreciation is of the late, great Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North,

an engaging and complicated novel, by turns combative and wistful, about two men who leave the Sudan to study in England and afterward belong in neither place.

As Laila Lalami observes in her introduction to the New York Review of Books reissue, the book’s happy life in translation is something of an aberration. Most classics of Arab literature remain unavailable in the States despite the public’s growing appetite for translated fiction. Yet Season of Migration to the North first appeared in English in 1969, only three years after its original publication in the author’s native Arabic. Both because of its accessibility and because of its deep insights into the complexities of life in a colonized place after the colonizers depart, it has taken its place, along with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, at the core of the university postcolonial literature curriculum.

You can read the rest — and, more importantly, an excerpt from the novel — at the NPR site.

My latest NPR appreciation is of Who Is Mark Twain?, a collection of previously unpublished writings by my favorite essayist. Here’s an excerpt:

Best known for crowd-pleasers like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and for his lucrative speaking tours, Mark Twain was a writer whose livelihood depended on maintaining enough down-home affability to appeal to the masses. Yet as we see in Who Is Mark Twain?, a new collection of previously unpublished writings, he fantasized constantly about the freedom death would bring.

Among the writings left behind at Twain’s death in 1910, at age 74 — in his “large box of Posthumous Stuff” — were squibs, rants, unfinished essays and his most heretical and passionate work, Letters From The Earth, a satirical attack on Christianity so scathing that his daughter forbade its publication until the 1960s.

Weekend Edition ran an interview with Robert Hirst, the editor of the collection and head of the University of California Berkeley’s Mark Twain Project.
 

Previously on Twain (a sampling): Twain’s manufactured, curiously theological thoughts on Shakespeare (in which my obsession begins); Send up the clowns; In the beginning, again, with Alter (and Twain); Fear of burning out on a writer; The New Yorker, Mark Twain, and Christians live forever; Whenever Twain was about to publish a book.

My brief appreciation of Frederick Barthelme’s Waveland is up at NPR. The novel, his twelfth work of fiction,

obliquely parallels the fate of the [Mississippi Gulf Coast] town of its title. “Even before Katrina,” he writes, “when Waveland was all there, it wasn’t a high-toned beach town; it was more like 10 miles of down-on-its-luck trailer park. After the storm, it was 10 miles of debris, snapped phone poles, shredded sheets in the trees.”

Recovery has been slow because, basically, there is nothing to recover, especially for Vaughn, whose wife, Gail, kicked him out shortly after the hurricane.

“Why don’t you just move along,” she’d said one day.

Here’s an excerpt. See also Bookforum’s review and praise at Esquire.

My latest contribution to NPR’s Books We Like is an appreciation of Will Elliott’s The Pilo Family Circus:

Fans have waited more than 20 years for another book from the great Katherine Dunn, whose amazing Geek Love centers on a family of circus freaks and sets the standard for the literary Big Top novel. She’s still working and won’t be rushed, but she does have a recommendation. In her glowing introduction to Australian writer Will Elliott’s gripping debut, The Pilo Family Circus, Dunn offers comparisons to Kafka, Chandler, Swift, Orwell, King and The Three Stooges. The blend may be hard to conceptualize, but Elliott’s story of a young man unwillingly inducted into a lethal clown act mixes horror, satire and slapstick into a brutal but timeless parable.

Jamie, a timid everyman with an arts degree who works as a concierge at a Brisbane gentleman’s club and has arranged his bedroom with an eye toward impressing a cocktail waitress he’s never had the nerve to ask out, nearly runs into a psychotic clown with his car after getting off a shift one night. Soon his apartment is trashed, his roommate Steve is vomiting blood, the clown and his buddies are constantly dropping in to make threats, and both Jamie and Steve are told they must pass an audition — by making the clowns laugh — within 48 hours, or die.

See also Brian Evenson’s interview with the author.

Today at The Second Pass I consider C.E. Morgan’s first novel, All the Living, in the context of other fiction that takes up the question of faith — and as an example of what Marilynne Robinson has provisionally called “cosmic realism.”

An excerpt:

Marilynne Robinson is the rare contemporary writer who has dared to devote entire novels largely to the question of faith. Gilead, presented as a dying pastor’s letter to his young son, sustains a subtle but tenacious momentum completely dependent on its narrator’s eloquence, insight, and complexity of thought. Yet fiction that directly engages religion can descend so speedily into sentimentality or sermonizing, or even caricature, that the stories most effective at compelling the agnostic reader to consider the possibility of God generally seem at the outset to be about something else. Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, for example, transforms from an obsessive chronicle of a jilted lover’s efforts to discover who is sleeping with his beloved into an atheist’s unwilling screed against a deity he doesn’t believe in: “I hate you as if you existed.” Peter De Vries’ brilliant The Blood of the Lamb invokes religion from the start, but with the ironic (and hilarious) detachment of someone raised in, but estranged from, the church — until he needs a higher power to lash out at when his little girl is stricken with cancer. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road depicts a father and son trekking through charred forests in a frigid post-apocalyptic world that promises a life of scavenging and likely death at the hands of cannibals, and it is only when the man kills to protect the boy, saying, “I was appointed to do that by God,” that the reader is implicitly called upon to consider what sort of creator would allow humanity to exist in a state so bereft of hope.

Although his setting is singularly dire, McCarthy is of course far from alone in tying religious concerns to nature. Last year Robinson, in a review of Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees, tentatively identified an entire genre, “cosmic realism,” in which the physical world is “primordial, archaic, full of the fact of time past and persisting, unchanging, changing everything.” As Francesca Mari has observed, “Robinson’s labeling is cautious — perhaps because it approaches self-categorization. But the classification is inspired…. [Cosmic realism] encompasses a range of description-driven novels steeped in transience and obsessed with iterations of ephemerality. Their substance is more thought than action, and the thought is almost as much perception as it is reflection.” These works, says Mari, owe a great deal to the Transcendentalists. At their best, the books evoke landscapes and moods to summon questions of being at the core of us all; at worst they are freighted with false solemnity, and objects and moments too trite or insignificant to bear the weight of the symbolism forced upon them.

C. E. Morgan’s contemplative and atmospheric first novel, All The Living, is cosmic realism subtly tinged with the anger of The End of the Affair or The Blood of the Lamb. Like The Road, it edges into spiritual concerns slowly, seeming at first to be a story about a young woman, Aloma, torn between her desire for independence and her passion for a man. Love, or at least lust, is winning as the story begins. Aloma has joined her lover, Orren, at the ragged and desolate Kentucky farmhouse where he grew up and has been living since his family was killed in a tragic accident a few months before.

See also Zoë Slutzky’s review for Bookforum and Beth Kephart’s for The Chicago Tribune.

My current contribution to NPR’s Books We Like is devoted to Kitty Burns Florey’s Script & Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting:

At five, teary-eyed, I announced to my mother that I never wanted to grow up, because adults’ handwriting was ugly. When she asked what I meant, I pointed to her signature — a towering and illegible series of loops that barely fit in the space allotted — on a check she’d just made out. I couldn’t even read cursive then, much less write it, but I was a bit of a hall monitor as a young child, and her penmanship didn’t even seem to be the same species of writing as the flowing, even curves that covered the chalkboards in the second and third grade classrooms.

Nowadays kids are lucky if they learn to write as legibly as their parents did. As Kitty Burns Florey observes in Script & Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting, in our rushed, computer-obsessed society, schoolchildren increasingly are taught printing for a year or two, given a year of slapdash instruction in cursive, and then introduced to the keyboard sometime around grade three. It’s not difficult to imagine a time, maybe a century hence, maybe sooner, when only experts can decipher the dips and curlicues of handwriting styles so prevalent in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The author’s perspective is nuanced and interesting; she doesn’t just spend 200 pages wringing her hands. You can read the rest of my appreciation, including a brief description of Florey’s very practical solution, at the NPR site.

For other perspectives, also positive, see Michael Dirda’s for The Washington Post, Albert Mobilio’s at Bookforum, and Cullen Murphy’s in The Wall Street Journal. The image above, of students practicing the Palmer Method, is taken from the Journal review.

Amara Lakhous’ excellent Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio is this month’s Words Without Borders Book Club pick, and I’m leading the discussion.

If you order the book now, you’ll be at less of a loss for something to do once the ballots have been counted, the colors on the map are filled in, and the liquor bottles are gathering rainwater out by the curb.

Here’s the beginning of my introduction:

“Doesn’t make any difference who we are or what we are,” a cholera germ announces in one of Twain’s stories, “there’s always somebody to look down on!”

No recent novel illustrates the truth of this axiom with more precision, intelligence, and humor than Amara Lakhous’s Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, which is exactly what the title promises, except better. It’s a satirical but not unsympathetic examination of the events leading up to a murder in a modern-day Roman apartment building where immigrants, transplants, and multi-generational locals can’t seem to stop arguing about the elevator. The book was a surprise best-seller, and the winner of the prestigious Flaiano and Racalmare-Leonardo Sciascia awards, when it appeared in Italy two years ago, and has just been translated from the Italian by the formidable Ann Goldstein (who also translated Elena Ferrante’s remarkable Days of Abandonment).

Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio presents a series of conflicting, casually bigoted, and often very funny monologues. These turn out to be witnesses’s statements following the brutal killing of Lorenzo Manfredini, aka the Gladiator, who was stabbed to death in the very elevator where — according to some — he often enjoyed surreptitiously urinating.

Between each of the statements are brief collections of eight or ten journal entry fragments written by prime suspect Amedeo, aka Ahmed Salmi, who, most everyone is amazed to learn, now that he’s disappeared, is not actually Italian. But he’s so gentlemanly and respectful! He can debate the teachings of Jesus and tell you the history of any street in Rome! Every single morning, he orders the “three ‘C’s” that only true Italians know the value of: “cappuccino, cornetto, Corier della Sera“! (”I’ve never in my life,” the proprietor of the establishment where Amedeo breakfasts says, “seen a Chinese, a Moroccan, a Romanian, a Gypsy, or an Egyptian read the Corier della Sera or La Pepubblica! The only thing the immigrants read is Porta Portese, for the want ads.”)

You can read the rest here, and sample an excerpt from the novel here.

Also, in the current issue of Words Without Borders, translator Ann Goldstein discusses the challenges of translating the novel, PEN American Center Translation Committee chair Michael F. Moore looks at the characters’ sweating and swearing, and the author is interviewed by Suzanne Ruta in Scheherazade, C’est Moi?

Finally, if you’re free this Thursday, November 6, Idlewild Books is hosting a conversation between Goldstein and Moore.

Today I close out IFC.com’s List Month with ten works of fiction I’d like to see adapted for film.

The list leans toward the contemporary and is by no means comprehensive; among other things, I intended to mention James Hynes’ “Queen of the Jungle” (from Publish and Perish, with a possible sequel in Kings of Infinite Space), but forgot. Here’s the intro:

Adapting fiction for the screen has always been a tricky endeavor. For every “Apocalypse Now,” “The Big Sleep” or “Rebecca,” there are scores of butchered classics and box office duds, and in recent years, Hollywood has only continued to perfect its reverse-alchemy process, transforming narrative gold into the dullest, heaviest lead, topped off with a giant packet of saccharine.

For details, see Roland Joffe’s “The Scarlet Letter,” featuring a pearl-bedecked, shiny-bodiced, utterly vacuous Hester Prynne, or the soul-sucking “Love in the Time of Cholera,” which drove the Guardian’s John Patterson to call for a ban on the making of all movies based on books. It’s easy to sympathize. We’re talking, after all, about the machine that reduced Zoë Heller’s brilliantly satirical “Notes on a Scandal” — a teacher’s obsessive chronicle of her female colleague’s affair with a young male student — to a cautionary tale with all the subtlety of “Fatal Attraction.”

Still, the best fiction can offer what most industry vehicles don’t: a compelling narrative, vivid characters, surprising but realistic plot twists — and sometimes all three. It’s hard not to imagine how “The Secret History” and “A Confederacy of Dunces” would play out on screen, had they escaped getting sucked into the black hole of pre-production. Some books — like Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men,” so stripped-down novelistically, it tended to read like stage directions — actually work better as films.

Tomorrow Julian Jarrold takes his own cinematic run at Evelyn Waugh’s magnum opus “Brideshead Revisited,” contending with not only the daunting original text but the beloved 1981 miniseries. Amid all the early reviews and speculation, I’ve been thinking about novels and short stories I’d like to see adapted.

Click over for my suggestions. And since Hollywood clearly needs all the help it can get, please feel free to add your own in the comments.

My review of Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project appears in The Boston Globe today. Here’s an excerpt:

The late, great writer and World War II veteran Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was captured by the Germans and confined to a prisoner-of-war camp in Dresden. When an American air raid destroyed the city, he was put to work carrying civilians’ corpses. The apocalypse haunted Vonnegut ever after. “Believe me,” he wrote, “it is not easy to rationalize the stamping out of vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored when gathering up babies in bushel baskets.”

A similar sense of the indefensibility of bloodshed underlies Aleksandar Hemon’s stunning new novel, “The Lazarus Project.” The book opens on March 2, 1908, but the date could be a century later. A “slim, swarthy young man” with cold eyes turns up at the door of Chicago’s police chief, and thrusts an envelope at him. Taking the stranger for an anarchist, the lawman restrains him, summons the missus, and orders her to do a pat-down. A struggle ensues; she thinks she feels a pistol. Soon the man is dead, his blood spattered across the room. The assistant chief pulls down the victim’s pants to verify his ethnicity. ” ‘He’s a Jew all right,’ he announces, leaning over the young man’s crotch. ‘A Jew is what he is.’ ”

The deceased is one Lazarus Averbuch — a fitting name, given that Hemon has resurrected a real man, an immigrant who escaped a brutal Kishinev pogrom only to be gunned down in the Land of Opportunity.

You can read the rest in the Globe. And at the author’s site, peruse a collection of related photos from the Chicago Historical Society, and many more recent ones taken by Hemon’s photographer friend Velibor Bozovic on their trip to Averbuch’s birthplace.

When the venerable literary magazine Granta invited me to contribute to a feature about the Web Habits of Highly Effective People, I agreed. And secretly braced for the punchline.

My comments are up at the site now — although I probably should’ve confessed my iPhone addiction* — alongside revelations and tips from: Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger (who gives a shout-out to the indispensable Talking Points Memo); novelist A.L. Kennedy; journalist and commentator John Kampfner; journalist and editor Isabel Hilton; literary agents Kevin Conroy Scott and David Godwin; writer, filmmaker, and anthropologist John Ryle; writer and journalist Andrew Brown; publisher Philip Gwyn Jones; jornalist and blogger Jonathan Derbyshire; writer and blogger Amanda Gersh; and journalist and author Andrew Hussey.
 

* The only satisfying substitute for cigarettes. I use it so often, the little button doodad is dying.

Round 2 of the 2008 Tournament of Books kicked off yesterday with my friend Mark Sarvas’ judgment. Today I choose between books by two novelists I admire, Joshua Ferris and Jonathan Lethem. Here’s how my decision opens:

Jonathan Lethem is a gifted literary thief. I mean no insult. Last year, after all, he published an essay, “The Anxiety of Influence: A Plagiarism,” in which many ideas and even actual phrases are lifted from other places and amended a little. The reader — this reader, at least — would have been unaware of the borrowing if it weren’t for the source attributions that follow the text. Bob Dylan’s art, Lethem argues in the piece:

…offers a paradox: while it famously urges us not to look back, it also encodes a knowledge of past sources that might otherwise have little home in contemporary culture, like the Civil War poetry of the Confederate bard Henry Timrod, resuscitated in lyrics on Dylan’s newest record, Modern Times. Dylan’s originality and his appropriations are as one.

The same can be said of Lethem’s own best work. Motherless Brooklyn, a novel about a depressed private investigator with Tourette’s, is uniquely Lethem’s story, but unmistakably infused with the sensibility and preoccupations of noir maestro Raymond Chandler. Gun, With Occasional Music, an earlier book, also centers on a bumbling, karma-challenged outcast of a detective and takes a great deal from Chandler, but mixes in gun-packing rabbits and kangaroos straight out of Philip K. Dick’s nightmares.

Literary fiction that takes elements from genre is all the rage now, but too often it careens into the twee or the randomly fantastical or — worst of all — the ponderous. Lethem was a trailblazer in the field of modern genre-borrowing, and his footing in works like Motherless Brooklyn, Gun, and As She Climbed Across the Table is sure and surprising. These are unsettling yarns about men so out of place that their mere presence in an interaction throws the social customs of their worlds into sharp relief, highlighting their absurdity. By steeping his stories in the conventions of genre — the almost comical melancholia of noir, the concrete ominousness of sci-fi — by placing his characters in these harsh, reality-bending environments, Lethem, like the great British writer Rupert Thomson, is able to explore dark realities and emotional terrains at once strange and oddly familiar.

Yes, I know, it’s very long. You’ll have to click over to The Morning News for the rest, and to find out which book goes on to Round 3.

My review of Cate Kennedy’s new short story collection, Dark Roots, appears in the weekend’s New York Times Book Review. Here’s an excerpt:

A writer, Eudora Welty insisted, must know her characters’ “hearts and minds before they ever set visible foot on stage. You must know all, then not tell it all, or not tell too much at once: simply the right thing at the right moment.” When fiction doles out its revelations in this way — when it allows just the right sequence of glimpses through a parted curtain — we misleadingly call it “realistic.” Actual existence is rarely well choreographed.

The stories in “Dark Roots,” the Australian writer Cate Kennedy’s first collection, are melancholy but deliberate and coolly exact. They depict characters in crisis, often so mired in what Walker Percy called the malaise of everydayness that the horror of their condition is invisible to them. Some of the stories culminate in epiphanies; others hinge on a jolt — a violent act or loss.

You can read the excellent “Black Ice” (published in the collection as “Cold Snap”) at The New Yorker. And there’s an interview with the author at The Age.

I've been having so much fun drawing the cute little flowers for my Flower Potions brochure. As long as I could remember I loved to draw little things.