Book Review: “Wake Up, Sir!”

Wake Up Sir!, a novel by Jonathan Ames
reviewed by Aspry Jones

Lurking deep within the claustrophobic, meticulously alphabetic shelving of libraries the world over, are the answers to universal secrets. Divine gifts from Amazon.com, Borders, Barnes & Noble, and the Mom-and-Pop-labors-of-love corner shop — gifts that provide us with the most startling wealth of knowledge, entertainment, and sidenotes of fulfilling satisfaction. Most people go their whole lives reading the creative writings of others, yet never finding that one piece of literary art that changes their lives. Don’t let this happen to you.

Jonathon Ames’ Wake Up, Sir! tells the story of a modern-day loser. Meet Alan Blair, a neurotic with a sexual affinity for noses; a Jewish, germophobic writer who has only managed to put together one novel seven years before we meet him. Alan speaks at length, Cliff Klavin-style, about a myriad of topics, many of which he knows nothing about. A raging alcoholic, he begrudgingly lives with his aunt and uncle in Montclair, NJ, because he was recently kicked out of his New York City apartment. He doesn’t have a girlfriend, a job, or self-respect. Yes, Alan is a first-class idiot who thinks he is very smart. But the only smart thing he’d probably ever done in his entire life was use his hefty reward money from a timely lawsuit to procure the services of his detached, yet heavily useful valet, a man preposterously named Jeeves.

Alan and Jeeves decide on a hasty exit from Montclair right before his “guardians” decide to ship him off to rehab. Indecisive about where to go for a few chapters, Alan and Jeeves set up temporary shop at a Motel in Saratoga Springs. Breaking a promise made to his aunt about not drinking, Alan goes out to the local bar one night, gets wasted, and ends up getting pummeled by a giant. He is later accepted by a prestigious artists colony in upstate New York, and — black and blue for the rest of the story — off he goes with Jeeves to begin adventures with the eclectic personalities of the Rose Colony.

Smartly written and witty, Ames manages to display just about every mistake, desire, fetish, and thought celebrated and forgotten by “normal” humans through his variety of characters at the colony. The heroic, yet flawed leader Mangrove; the quirky and ludicrously gorgeous Ava; the sexually depraved Tinkle; and the mammoth visionary Hibben show us a tour-de-force in character creation and development. Backed by the drunken and hysterical stupidity of our main character, no effort was spared in the telling of many well thought out stories about the frailty of the human condition. And Jeeves — amazing Jeeves, purposefully inspired from the English comic writings, Carry On, Jeeves and Much Obliged, Jeeves — he is Ames’ Johnny-on-the-spot. With respect to Wodehouse, Ames manages to make Jeeves his own creation.

Perhaps calling Wake Up, Sir! a “life-changing experience” is be a bit of a stretch: true, it’s not the type of novel that tries to change the world, but it’s fun, courageous, symbolic, and it’s got everything you need for a nice, funny, summer read — and beyond. Ames isn’t out to exploit the weaknesses of or point fingers at the reader (see also: Lowry’s Under The Volcano). What Ames does is create an appealing screw-up who you cannot help but root for — then torture the guy until even a priest could identify with him and wrap up the story with a slam-bang ending that makes you laugh and cry at the same time. It’s got everything the modern reader could ever want.

And if getting what you want doesn’t change your life, then how very preferred you must already be.

Essay: “Two Teachers”

by Ed Minus

In the preface to his engaging book The Art of Teaching, Jay Parini predicts that “older teachers . . . will find much to disagree with” in the pages that follow. I am one of those older teachers, ten years older than Parini and recently retired after forty years of teaching, and I found almost nothing to disagree with, even though our circumstances, personal and professional, differed dramatically.

I have long shared Parini’s view that “it is hard not to like having a job where you can start over every September . . .” You convince yourself that you’ve learned from your mistakes and will get it right this time, with the help of a whole new bunch of fresh faces and fresh minds who don’t know your jokes just as you don’t know theirs. Sometimes there is even a new course, or just a new text, and getting ready is half the fun. Maybe more. Then,too, there is always the possibility that one of those new students will be the one you’ve been waiting for and who has been waiting for you. And lo the past is truly redeemed. Consequently, for me the beginning of every semester was exhilarating; the ending, often melancholy; the part in the middle, sometimes onerous. Parini, I think, was better at sustaining an essential enthusiasm. On the other hand, we were both well served by a good sense of humor, often self-deprecating but, in my case, probably too often tinged with sarcastic student-deprecation.

Surely the most valuable parts of The Art of Teaching are Parini’s memories of the gifted teachers he learned from both in and out of the classroom, some of them famous, others relatively unknown. His (second-hand) account of Robert Frost as a teacher is especially vivid, as is his admiration of Bertrand Russell. From Professor W. Edward Brown at Lafayette he learned that “content matters more than anything else,” whereas “Frost understood what I suspect all great teachers know instinctively, that tone is everything in the classroom: the attitude of the teacher toward the material. This tone is the unique gift of the teacher to the student, and it is what students recall long after the specific subject matter has faded from memory.” And at another point: “Style is everything in writing and in teaching . . .” As a teacher of composition, I would of course like to think that students remember my attitude toward language, toward “the limits and possibilities of words and the respect due them” (in Flannery O’Connor’s phrase), toward the strengths and pleasures of the soundly constructed sentence, paragraph, essay.

The least effective part of Parini’s book is his digression (indeed, it seems almost like padding) on “academic dress”: “Long after we’ve forgotten what our professors told us in college, we remember their clothes.” Not true for me — and since I doubt that Parini was more clothes conscious than I, I must assume he has a better memory. Although I was never as preoccupied with masks, Yeatsian and otherwise, as Parini seems to have been, I certainly agree with the point he makes more than once about the element of theatre in teaching, teaching as performance art. I tended to think of what I wore to class in that context: yet another small way of warding off boredom – students’ and my own. But I also dressed quite consciously in ways that endorsed nonconformity. A not altogether atypical outfit might have been cowboy boots, jeans, a button-down shirt, a tweed jacket, and a pink web belt with a military buckle.

The final section of the book, “Letter to a Young Teacher,” offers practical advice on lecturing; on conducting seminars, workshops, and tutorials; on preparing a syllabus; on dealing with chronic absenteeism; on grading; on getting tenure. “The main thing is that you must take your work — as teacher and scholar – seriously. Hard work is the name of the game, in academic life as elsewhere.” “Remember that your job is to demonstrate before students the process of thinking. . . . you are trying to provide students with the sensation of thinking as well as the thoughts themselves.” Amen.

I also strongly subscribe to any number of Parini’s other key beliefs: The teacher should be “a perpetual student,” open and attentive to what students have to say but also willing to risk his own point of view. Striving for an apolitical classroom in the twenty-first century seems foolish and futile. “Teaching, at its best, is personal.” What’s missing here — what I would surely have found invaluable at the beginning of my teaching career and all along the way — is some basic advice on how to cope with, how to tolerate, how to educate incompetent administrators, whose numbers are, in my experience, legion. I’ve had opportunities to observe six college presidents at close range. Two of the six were exemplary educators, men of imagination, vision, and compassion who had also mastered the day to day nuts and bolts business of running a school. They were also far too bright, progressive, and independent for the Boards of Trust they were answerable to. The other four, much more popular with their masters, were embarrassing dullards at best and harmful toadies at worst. And as one descended the multiple and ever-increasing ranks of administration, the ratio got grimmer and grimmer.

Midway through my life as a teacher I was plunged into a long and painful — although rarely completely debilitating – depression by the suicides of two students I knew well and was fond of. And two self-righteous and officious deans were at least indirectly implicated in those deaths. Extreme examples to be sure, but I could cite dozens of lesser — indeed, by contrast, trivial — instances of aggravation, insult, harassment, interference, and betrayal suffered by many of my colleagues.

As far as one can tell from his book, Parini was spared those kinds of occupational horrors and distractions. Acknowledging his privileges as such could have palliated a slight impression of complacency that may be a bit off-putting for teachers not so fortunate. (“Tone is everything.”) Even so, I would happily recommend The Art of Teaching to anyone contemplating a career in the classroom and to anyone who loves teaching and wants to get better at it. I have often been shocked and saddened by the number of teachers who say they hate teaching and whose teaching reflects that hatred. Parini and I loved teaching from the start and never stopped loving it.

Book Review: “The Wapshot Scandal”

Traveling Music
John Cheever’s The Wapshot Scandal
by Ed Minus

Though unlikely to be dubbed “experimental,” John Cheever’s novel The Wapshot Scandal is not altogether traditional either. “Free-wheeling” is the word that comes to mind. For in the course of its two-hundred page year, six of the seven main characters are pretty constantly on the move: the scene shifts several dozen times, and no more than three chapters in succession (scarcely more than ten pages at a stretch) have the same setting. Within the first five chapters we are introduced to the three main (fictional) settings; St. Botolphs, a village not far from Boston; Talifer, a Mid-Western site for Missile Research & Development; and Proxmire Manor, a Westchester-like suburb (and, on the wrong side of the tracks from Proxmire Manor: Parthenia). As the story picks up steam, we not only bounce back and forth among those three places but also find ourselves in (among other locations) New York, Nantucket, Rome, a Colorado ski resort, Atlantic City, the Vatican, Washington, Boston, Toledo, Naples, and Ladros And, inevitably, we are often in transit: waiting at train stations, dockside in New York harbor, stranded at various international terminals.

The novel does not, I think, feel as frenetic as these lists may suggest – and to Cheever’s credit it never takes on the tone of a travelogue. It is, however, undeniably restive. Not even Besey Wapshot, the one major character who stays put for most of the book, is happy where she is. Honora Wapshot is happy in the village she has lived in for seven decades, but she is forced to flee not only St. Botolphs but, indeed, her native land. We assume that her cousins Moses and Coverly first left St. Botolphs when they went away to school, after which their careers deposited them in places somewhat similar to each other but distressingly different from their New England hometown. Moses’ wife, Melissa, is probably a native Northeasterner; but Coverly’s wife, Betsey, came from “the Georgia badlands.” Dr. Cameron, director of the missile site where Coverly works, is driven hither and yon by a consuming lust for power, flesh, and forgetfulness. Nineteen-year-old Emile, who has seldom been beyond the confines of Parthenia at the beginning of the novel, ends up traveling halfway around the world and living (in sin) in Rome with Melissa. And at the very end of the book the narrator himself, presumably another native of St. Boltophs, tells us that he will never come back.

What then are we to make of all this? All this motion. All this harried globe-trotting. What Cheever makes of it, I would contend, is an extraordinarily entertaining, multi-faceted story, whose highly episodic structure intensifies its central themes. Structurally speaking, the novel is fragmented – just like the Wapshot family, just like the lives of most of the main characters. (A relevant irony is that many of the minor characters whose lives may seem to be more of a piece are crude and shallow.) “Most of us,” the narrator reminds us midway through the book, “travel to improve on the knowledge we have of ourselves.” Undeniably, there is an element of quest about some of the journeys in The Wapshot Scandal; but there is just as often an element of flight. (There is the recurrent suggestion throughout the novel that what most of us are fleeing from all too heedlessly is the past.) And so it’s hard to feel, on balance, that more has been gained than lost by Cheever’s wanderers. Indeed, a sense of loss pervades the novel. But so does an unmistakable hopefulness. And if the novel’s structure contributes, with considerable effect, to our impression of confused and shattered lives, it is Cheever’s sensibility, manifested in his style, which serves as a constant reminder that the world is still worth savoring and celebrating.

Cheever’s distinctive voice is more easily admired than analyzed, but there are recognizable patterns in the style, just as there are in other aspects of the book. Though his point of view may seem to be handled somewhat casually, that casualness is almost certainly calculated. Most of the novel is told by an invisible and omniscient narrator; but at the beginning and the end an old schoolmate of Coverly and Moses speaks to us in first person; and there are a couple of wonderful passages where it would seem to be the author himself who addresses us directly, imperatively, and engagingly:

“Spread them out on some ungiven summer evening on the lawn between their house and the banks of the West River in the fine hour before dinner.

“…regard this lovely woman then, getting off the train in Proxmire Manor. See what she does. See what happens to her.”

As those sentences suggest, Cheever’s attention to the ordinary is remarkably careful. By the same token, even as the ordinary is valued, the banal is exposed and dismissed: underpants printed with poker hands and dice, machines for vending sacred medals, Cimarron: Rose of the South West. And it happens on occasion that even the most inconsequential items take on unexpected power and significance: the burnt match in Norman Johnson’s greasy soup, the crimson feathers on the arrow that almost kills Coverly, the scar in the hair on Emile’s belly, Honora’s curling iron. Nor is it, with Cheever, simply a matter of an eye for the telling details; it is a question of intelligence, of insight and understanding:

“…the extraordinary density of a family gathered at a kitchen table on a dark winter morning.”

“…here was a lonely man, familiar with blisters and indigestion, whose humble motives in inventing a detonative force that could despoil the world were the same as the child actress, the eccentric inventor, the small-town politician.”

Just a the novel’s shifting structure allows for various contrasts, Cheever’s most typical stylistic design juxtaposes disparate elements: the abstract and the concrete, the cosmic and the domestic, the scientific and the secular, spirit and flesh:

“There was a deep octave of thunder, magnificent and homely, as if someone in heaven had moved a chest of drawers. Then there was some lightning, distant and discolored, and a moment later a shower of rain dressed the earth.”

It would be possible, of course, to keep strolling through this antic novel, pointing out its pleasures, for quite some time – but those pleasures are much more splendid in vivo. As in the best of Cheever’s short stories (and there are many), the characters here are fully alive – and more complex than they may seem at first. The situations range from the tranquil to the farcical, from the erotic to the repellent. There are frequent, surprising, breathtakingly skillful modulations of tone. The style is lucid, passionate, eloquent, full-bodied. And in this novel – more impressively than in any of the stories of other novels – structure and style combine to give us a vivid sense of the texture of lived experience. A sense unmatched by the work of most of Cheever’s contemporaries.

Book Review: “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit”

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a novel by Sloan Wilson
reviewed by Greg Vuono

Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit just passed the fifty-year-old mark, but he is still as prevalent as ever. First published in 1955, Sloan Wilson’s novel of disenchantment and corporate prevarication tells the story of Tom Rath, an ex-World War II paratrooper who has settled into a life of apparent suburban coziness with a pretty wife ready to mix martinis at a moment’s notice and three gosh-golly-gee children straight from the black-and-white world of sitcom civility. But just below the surface of Tom’s forced politeness and good nature lies a man so seething with disillusionment and disappointment that Wilson’s choice of the last name Rath seems painfully obvious. Tom has obtained all that he was supposed to, according to the capitalist sentiment of post-war America, and yet he feels profoundly unfulfilled.

Wilson’s prose is light and prompt; it reads swiftly. When Tom Rath concludes-or rather when it is concluded for him-that more money will solve his problems, he dives headfirst into the corporate feeding tank by taking an unusual and extremely fragile position for the sake of a bigger paycheck. It is during these scenes that the text suffers most from the fifty year generational gap; contemporary readers are left baffled by aspects of the ’50s culture such as the hokey dialogue, painfully contrived politeness, and the monolithic amount of alcohol and nicotine consumed by Wilson’s characters. It is difficult to determine whether it was really customary for men to guzzle scotch during business meetings, or if Wilson is merely attempting to portray a climate in which no one feels comfortable with their sober selves.

It must be the latter, for the war flashback segments crackle with urgency and verity. When Tom knifes a young German in the throat and accidentally grenades a hole through a fellow soldier, Wilson tosses aside the pretense and takes on an unapologetically gritty style. The gruesome imagery offsets the artificiality of Tom’s corporate existence, and this dynamic is played upon rather beautifully as Tom struggles with his past, present, and future in order to battle his disillusion.

Although some of the details of this now 50-year-old novel – including an excessively sentimental ending – may seem a bit dated to a 21st century audience, Wilson’s themes – capitalistic disillusionment, corporate mistrust, and the heedless disregard for life in war – resonate as loudly now as they ever have. For those confounded by contemporary culture, Wilson provides a relevant and powerful comparison; for The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, life begins at fifty.

Book Review: “The Loch”

The Loch, a novel by Steve Alten
reviewed by Missye E. Clarke

The new fiction buzz in the publishing world is fact woven eloquently with storytelling fiction. Like Michael Crichton before him (Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain), Steve Alten’s The Loch does this brilliantly. More than a beach read, Alten’s most recent novel is substantive, and you may even find yourself passing up some summertime TV in favor of this brilliantly written thriller.

Taking place on the famous Loch Ness in the Scotland Highlands, marine biologist Dr. Zachary Wallace returns to his native homeland after a boating accident that leaves his scientific reputation in near tatters, to beat his night demons and face his estranged father who is on trial for the murder of a business partner. Papa Angus Wallace – throughout the story claiming to be the descendant to Sir William Wallace – uses the “Nessie card” as his alibi (and possible ruse) to get his son Zack to chase down answers why the most famous European rose to such notoriety. Adding a twist from the very beginning that has the Loch Ness Monster reveal itself, Zachary also discovers a well-guarded secret legacy as murky as the waters of the Loch itself. Most writers try to show their protagonists as strong, daring, and capably fearless, not allowing their readers the simple joys of the dark, dingy, and barnacle-encrusted underside of their characters. It was a joy to find manly Zachary Wallace wearing his vulnerability on his dirty sleeves.

Michael Crichton fans will appreciate the way Alten crafts a fact-based story. Between spun stories and the I-saw-Nessie lies of tourists, Alten inserts selected Darwinian texts explaining natural selection of such proportions and text of Dr. Alfred Wallace (possibly Angus and Zack Wallace’s kinfolk Alten explains) that will have even the tightest skeptic exploring the mysteries hidden in the black depths of Europe’s largest body of water.

The only flaw with this read (aside from the slightly lackluster ending and the canned, corny, Brady-Bunchy way Doc Wallace confronts his demons) is Alten’s ongoing maturation as a writer. Regardless, The Loch’s technical structure, snappy dialogue, and imagery alone are worth the hefty hardcover price tag.

The Loch and what lies beneath Ness’s icy darkness isn’t just an Art Bell “Coast to Coast AM” late night talk topic anymore. I highly recommend this book, especially if you’ve ever wondered what lies in Loch Ness. Wade in Nessie’s cold waters unawares (imaginatively speaking), and you may invite something to slither its way into your dreams.

Book Review: “The City of Falling Angels”

The City of Falling Angels, by John Berendt
reviewed by Grady Harp

When Venice’s historic Fenice Opera House burned in 1996, then-mayor Massimo Cacciari promised that the historic landmark would be built com’era dov’era, meaning “as it was, where it was.” John Berendt, author of the best-selling book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, arrives just days after the burning of La Fenice and, while gradually exposing the truth behind the fire, reveals a greater truth about the many plots and characters that make up the floating (or sinking!) city of Venice. Reporting on the fire with his trademark novelistic prose, Berendt reveals a city in dissent over the reconstruction efforts, and creates an insider’s look at what has, for centuries, made Venice the city of lovers and dreamers.

Berendt’s prompt relocation to Venice in 1996 afforded him the proximity and objectivity necessary to report on the incident and the subsequent investigation. It also allowed him to delve into the lives of the Venetian neighbors who watched the fire as well as those involved in the aborted reconstruction attempts and the final restoration of the opera house. Most interestingly, he investigates all of the subterfuge and scandal involved in the seven-year process that led to the eventual reopening of Le Fenice in 2003.

But Berendt doesn’t stop there. Along his journalistic route he reports on the museum that Peggy Guggenheim built, the people who took over the museum upon her death, the clash of classes, the lives of Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge, and the Ezra Pound Foundation enigma. He also delves into the fascinating life of controversial poet, Mario Stefani, whose “suicide” by hanging initiated yet another investigation of occult mysteries, the type that make Venice the fascinating city it is. In Stefani’s last days he painted the message, “Loneliness is not being alone; it’s loving others to no avail” – an idea that Berendt uses to uncover truths to the many wills left by Stefani (in them, the poet assigned his worldly goods to street hustlers, to a small child whose parents owned a greengrocer he frequented, and to churches and preservation societies). Once again, Berendt proves himself a thorough journalist and brilliant writer.

But where Berendt really shines is in his poetic capturing of the sights and smells of Venice, the attitudes and demeanor of Venetians, the glory of the monuments and palaces, the gossip about the history of “Save Venice” and those who wrought havoc in attempting to disguise restoration attempts for personal gains. “Everyone in Venice is acting,” the author recalls being told by Count Girolamo Marcello. “Everyone plays a role, and the role changes. The key to understanding Venetians is rhythm – the rhythm of the lagoon, the rhythm of the water, the tides, the waves.” The City of Falling Angels is a book to treasure with a patient read, allowing the mysteries and ambiguities of this wondrous and strange city to filter in through the heart.

Book Review: “Survivor”

Survivor, by Chuch Pahluinik
reviewed by Anthony Costanzo

Testing, testing. One, two, three. Maybe this is working, I don’t know. If you can even hear me, I don’t know. But if you can hear me, listen. And if you’re listening, then what you’ve found is the story of everything that went wrong. This is what you’d call the flight recorder of Flight 2039.

This is the voice of Tender Branson, lone surviving member of the so-called Creedish death cult. Alone in the cockpit of the plane he just hijacked, Tender is narrating his life story into the plane’s black-box in the few hours he has left before the fuel runs out and the plane crashes into the Australian outback. This is the premise of Chuck Palahniuk’s sophomore novel, Survivor.

The author of Fight Club, the novel that inspired the well-attended and well-received (a rare combination) movie staring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, offers this satirical look at fame and fortune, and more importantly, at the potential impact of an individual’s educational system. As the pages, numbered in descending order, count down to final impact, Tender runs through the multitude of things that went wrong in his life to lead him to this point. And he starts at the beginning, at the Creedish compound in Nebraska.

Unfortunately for Tender, the Creedish do not recognize twins, so when he was born just three minutes after his brother Adam, his life was already decided on – all children born after the first child in each family receive job placements in the “Outside World,” where they work long hours, only to send their earnings back to the Nebraska compound. Tender, 33, has been cleaning the house of a rich couple he’s never met since he left the compound at the age of 17. His only social contact is his case-worker from the government-sponsored Survivor Retention Program. His only source of enjoyment is his suicide-“help” hotline, which he uses to encourage desperate people to kill themselves on a nightly basis. After the Creedish “Deliverance” (a.k.a. mass-suicide), the number of Creedish in the outside world dwindles, with more and more committing suicide as per Church doctrine (hence the need for the government agency). When the only other living Creedish eventually kills himself, Tender Branson becomes the sole Survivor, and an overnight sensation.

Here is where the book takes a dramatic turn as Palahniuk presents a dark and critical look into the world of celebrity. Palahniuk creates a caricature of fame, pointing out the pressures and superficiality of life in the public eye. Following the advice of a nameless agent, Tender is thrown into the spotlight. A few tanning sessions, Botox treatments, and steroid-cycles later, and Tender quickly becomes the world’s most famous televangelist, complete with his own line of autographed bibles, a prayer book (The Book of Very Common Prayer which includes such sacred verses as “The Prayer to Find a Parking Space”), and television specials in which he predicts disasters – thanks to the help of his friend Fertility Hollis, the barren surrogate mother with an ability to see the future.

The plot-line, with its share of twists and turns, is entertaining enough, but what’s more intriguing are the thoughts within the head of Tender Branson, and the way they’re expressed. Infused with a dark humor that will have you laughing aloud at times, Palahniuk’s minimalist style, with its looping phrases and short, impactful sentences, creates a narrative voice eerily reminiscent of Fight Club-at times you can actually hear Ed Norton narrating the story in your head. Survivor is worth the time, as Palahniuk invites you inside the afflicted mind of a man hurtling toward his end.

Read this book, and after you do (and only after you do) read this info from the official Chuck Palahniuk website.

Book Review: “Men”

Men, a novel by Margaret Diehl
reviewed by Lisa Schmidt Winsor

Margaret Diehl’s remarkable debut novel, Men, probably has about as many sexual sequences as a special edition Best of Penthouse Letters, only far better written. If that doesn’t send you rummaging through your local secondhand bookstore for a copy, I should add that the tale of its principal character, Stella James, embodies one of the most convincing struggles between autonomy and dependence committed to ink.

Published in 1988, Diehl’s novel escorts readers in and out of the different eras of Stella’s life non-sequentially, from teenage and university years marinated in spirits and tepid sex, to early days living with her eccentric grandmother in the New England countryside, through to the uninhibited one-night stands of her early 20s. All this culminates in Stella’s move to Berkeley where she meets Frank, a local photographer, while working as a cook in a bistro, and Stella’s attempts to find a way to both deepen and honor her bond with Frank, while being free to fornicate with her boss — and anyone else she fancies — at the drop of a skirt.

What is most engaging about the book is Diehl’s silky use of language and her adept insight about what to state bluntly and what to couch in metaphor. The book seduces with rich detail and keeps your literary arousal going more or less right through to the last page. The ending, sadly, is a bit disappointing, but the highs and lows that get you there are well worth the hours in bed, reading.

Feature: McNally Jackson (nee Robinson) Staff Picks

The good folks of McNally Jackson (circa April 4, 2007) flexed their professional muscles with these Two-Cent Reviews.

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AUSTERLITZ
by W. G. Sebald
picked by Dustin Kurtz

Austerlitz is very simply a masterful novel. The past suffuses the work, embodied in architecture and landscape, gesture and speech. The book is heavy with the dust and ashes of an accumulated Europe. Somehow, though, perhaps exactly because the insistent – almost compulsive – historical contextualizations driven by author and characters both, the work manages to feel decidedly modern without being flippant, simple without being forgetful. It has easily become one of my new favorites.

BAMBI VS. GODZILLA
by David Mamet
picked by Sarah McNally

This is a very funny, very informative book, and Mamet’s love of movies is infectious. I picked it up because I’ve long wondered why our movies are so often so terrible. Now I know.

BETTER
by Atul Gawande
picked by Sohaila Abdulali

Gawande, a surgeon in Boston who is also a writer for the New Yorker, talks about performance and excellence in medicine in this book. It’s fascinating and inspiring even if, like me, you’re not particularly interested in medicine, because he seriously explores human effort, how we try, succeed or fail to make systems work, how we think, and what inspires us to grow in whatever we undertake. Plus you’ll learn all kinds of amazing facts about things from handwashing to the ethics of lethal injections. He’s a terrific writer, and it’s an unlikely literary page-turner.

BRIGHT EARTH: ART AND THE INVENTION OF COLOR
by Philip Ball
picked by Adjua Greaves

Oh, sweet micro history! Take me behind the scenes of my very life and show me how it all came to be.With Bright Earth, Philip Ball adds his engaging investigation of color’s role in art to the genre that brought us Salt, Birth, Cod and many others. Travel with Ball through the studios, laboratories, factories and mines that brought us our current rainbow and thrill at all you didn’t know you didn’t know.

BURY ME STANDING
by Isabel Fonseca
picked by Stewart Dawes

They are the most downtrodden people in the western world. They are romanticized, loathed, and misunderstood to the highest of degrees. They have no political voice, academics, or Holocaust Museum. They are the Roma, more commonly referred to as the Gypsies. There’s not too much written about them due to the seclusion and their lack of literacy. Fonseca went head-first into Gypsy culture and came out with this beautiful, historical narrative of their journey.

N+1 (No. 5)
picked by Douglas Singleton

The fifth edition of this heady collection of essays and literary musings is titled “Decivilizing Process,” and begins with a collection of short essays on the peculiarities of modern communication—inboxes, Bluetooth, blogs, headphones, and the social repercussions of voice recognition software. Nancy Bauer’s lucid essay on pornography, “Pornutopia,” reads like a contemporary updating of Sontag’s essay on the subject thirty years ago. And you simply must read Keith Gessen’s piece on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the “known/unknowns” of torture. Don’t sleep; this is thought-provoking stuff.

CAPITAL
by Karl Marx
picked by Stewart Dawes

I know, some of you are rolling your eyes as you see this on the staff picks, but you know what? You should read it! Why? Because the major social relation that you function with/by/for/under is capitalism. Marx deconstructed this relation like no one else who ever lived. It is a piece of scholastic investigation to the highest of degrees, and is on par with Darwin’s Origin of Species as the most important piece of 19thCentury nonfiction. One should not judge this in the context of the Communist Manifesto as it is not a diatribe, but it should be judged as being the earth-shattering project that it is. Warning though: your life will never be the same after reading this.

A CHANGE OF CLIMATE
by Hilary Mantel
picked by Yvette Grant

A newly married English couple travel to Apartheid-era South Africa to find the terrorized residents so deeply traumatized by their circumstances that a verbal insult can provoke a horrific crime. This act deforms the couple’s perception of humanity for the rest of their lives, consequently spreading to corrupt their relationships with friends and family forever. Mantel’s prose is simultaneously streamlined and elegant, allowing the reader to experience the character’s traumas as his or her own; you will be wholly absorbed by this novel.

THIS SIDE OF GLORY
by David Hilliard with Lewis Cole
picked by Douglas Singleton

David Hilliard was one of the central members of the Black Panther Party during the seminal years of 1967-1971, right beside Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver. While not the best written memoir, this book captures the idealism, promise, and yes, criminality, of the party during those most turbulent of times. A cast of characters as wide ranging as Marlon Brando, Geronimo Pratt, Tom Hayden, and Angela Davis cross its pages. Hardly televised, the revolution will be written about endlessly.

I WILL FLY! and MY FRIEND IS SAD!
by Mo Willems
picked by Adjua Greaves

The hilarious and honest Mo Willems is also a masterful illustrator whose work will set you giggling uncontrollably just as it touches your heart. The simplicity and charm of these books belies their emotional wallop. As your giggles subside, you’ll walk away remembering that believing in yourself inspires others to do the same and that the loyalty of a good friend takes many, many forms. Enjoy.

THE VISIBLE WORLD
by Mark Slouka
picked by Sarah McNally

A finely wrought, heartbreaking universe is contained between these covers. Elegant and limpid, this is a beautiful novel about the burden of memory passing from parent to child. The narrator tries to unearth the past that slowly devoured his mother after she escaped Czechoslovakia in World War II and immigrated to America with his father, but he is forced to quilt a story from scraps of history. The one time he asks her pointblank about the specter that had always hung over their small family, she replies that she doesn’t feel like talking about it just then.

Review: “Everyone Poops”

Fecal Matter
“Everyone Poops,” reviewed by Patrick John Walsh

We live in a nation where taking a crap is always accompanied by cover-ups ranging from simple running water to elaborate lies. It seems the country has never quite considered going number-two to be an acceptable practice. Any discussion of it is greeted with upturned noses and disgusted faces. Why is there this huge stigma attached to pooping? You could be dining with the Queen of Frenchtown and get away with excusing yourself to take a pee. But crap is a different matter altogether (quite literally).

The ever-popular children’s book Everyone Poops (or Todos Hacemos Caca, for Spanish-speaking poopers), published in 1993, has become something of a cult favorite. Written by Taro Gomi, it comes to us from Japan, where people are apparently much freer about bodily functions (they reportedly have poop-themed subway cars). The book’s purpose is a simple one: it teaches children the exquisite beauty of taking a dump. It lets them know it is perfectly natural, and that every living creature — be it chickadee or wooly mammoth — must indeed poop. “An elephant makes a big poop,” the reader is informed. The insight continues: “A mouse makes a tiny poop.” The book may seem pedestrian, but it touches on something quite profound. Much like sex, (although the two should probably not be combined), poop is something we all do, but for whatever reason it is considered off limits to actually (gasp!) talk about. Everyone Poops does the talking for us; in this overly prudish world, most adults could certainly use another reading of this important document to become more comfortable with that previously unspeakable topic.

Example: Your girlfriend gets wasted at a party and laughs so hard she actually wets her pants. You’d still go out with her, right? You guys would have a funny (albeit uncomfortable) story to tell your grandchildren. Now let’s say this same girlfriend gets sloshed at a party and poos her pants. Next stop Dumpsville! (By this I meant “dump” in the “taking a dump” sense and also the “breaking up with her” sense. Really pretty clever. You should go back and reread it and marvel at my verbal acrobatics). Both incidents involve a loss of control, but poop is obviously the harsher offense.

Another Example: One morning I arrived at work needing to move the bowels, and painstakingly selected a periodical to compliment said movement. (I work in publishing, so there are literally huge piles of magazines lying around.) I have done this several mornings before, but the difference is that I always stuff the magazine under my shirt or in my pocket. But I thought: why should I? Is it weird if I walk proudly down the hall and into the restroom, People Weekly in hand? It is, isn’t it? But why is that?

Well that day I decided to defy convention and walk to the restroom, mag in plain view. (I should point out it did not have a provocative cover.) The looks I got, you would have thought I had beaten a small girl to death with a brick, then dropped to my knees and sucked the blood from her tiny head.

What, like you’ve never read a magazine on the toilet? Does waste fall from you quickly, silently, and without a trace? Stop eye-judging me!

Women have it much, much worse than men, as most guys go about their whole lives convincing themselves that women neither fart nor poop. There’s a true double standard when it comes to matters of the ass. Whenever a girl discusses pooping, I immediately stop thinking of her in a sexual way. I can’t help but picture her seated on a toilet with a twisted grimace on her face, fists clenched, brow sweaty. Decidedly not hot. The guy who farts aloud in mixed company is generally considered something of a comedy hero. A gal farting aloud is subject to nothing but shame.

If you go to a public restroom, and you’re in there more than a few moments, people know your secret, champ. You come walking out of there, avoiding eye contact, fumbling, nervous. You might as well have a scarlet “A” on your chest. Or, for the sake of this discussion, a brown “P.”

Have you ever been on a date at the movies, and the date is in the bathroom for about 10 minutes, and you know full well he/she is dropping kids off at the pool? Why should that be so embarrassing? But Lord knows, if I’m the one in the restroom, when I come out, I’m always like “God, there was a huge line in there!” Why do I feel the need to make excuses? She knows no one has gone in or out. There was no line.

Admit it: there was no line!

I should come out, grab her by the shoulders, yell, “I was pooping, dammit!” and kiss her fully on the mouth (perhaps after explaining that I washed my hands). Maybe she would be so turned on by my honesty, she would consent to in-theater, Alanis Morissette-style relations.

Read Everyone Poops, my friends, and stop living in fear. Its lessons are clear, and even more relevant in this post-9/11 world. Everyone poops. So why does everyone get so freaked out about it?

Really, who gives a shit?

a version of this essay was originally published on http://www.patrickwalsh.blog-city.com