The Pale King Early Review

Earlier this year I toyed with the idea of re-reading Infinite Jest. Instead, I've already pre-ordered a copy of DFW's new novel,The Pale King.  Lev Grossman at Time has an early review:

"Pietsch spent two years assembling and editing the contents of that duffel bag. The results will be published, appropriately enough, on April 15. If The Pale King isn't a finished work, it is, at the very least, a remarkable document, by no means a stunt or an attempt to cash in on Wallace's posthumous fame. Despite its shattered state and its unpromising subject matter, or possibly because of them, The Pale King represents Wallace's finest work as a novelist."

Time Magazine

The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner

A valiant attempt to use logic, reason and statistical reality to dispel our fears about airplane crashes, road rage and young black men. Pre-9/11, it has a wholesome feeling (should we be more afraid of terrorist attacks? Residents in NYC, London and Madrid might have a strong opinion) of fears that we used to worry about - Internet porn, for example.  The main message remains the same - our real problems are so large and complicated and difficult to fix it's far easier to get worked up by less substantial problems.

F.I.A.S.C.O. - Frank Partnoy

A pale cousin of Liar's Poker, the best part of F.I.A.S.C.O. was the unheeded  warning that the economic collapse in 2008, caused by Wall Street shenanigans, could have been avoided if the people who had the power to stop it had bothered to listen. Which no one, did, because they could hear over the whaps of their money being counted.  F.I.A.S.C.O. focuses on hedge-funds at Morgan Stanley, an area of finance so shady that it didn't even fall apart in 2008. Clunky in parts, it reads like a very long magazine article that 's a bit heavy on the technical jargon. In the end you will either shake your head and sigh or clutch your fist, and move your money out of stocks and into a rusty coffee can in the backyard.

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline - George Saunders

The only problem I had with this book is that it took me so long to discover George Saunders. He had been on my literary radar for a while, a distant blip, and I'm glad to have zeroed in on him. The 400-pound CEO is the best, about an morbidly obese loser who gains control of a raccoon-killing company after giving his boss a lethal bear hug and the novella, Bounty, reads like a movie that should have been made 10 years ago.  The world Saunders creates is 20 minutes into the future of our own, where things have fallen apart a little more than they have now. The endings, especially of the title piece, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline - takes us to unexpected places that are entertaining.

Hemmingway's Yelp

From the good people at McSweeney's:

Sun City Asian Bistro and Café
Category: Asian
TWO STARS

I called Sam and asked him if he wanted to come to dinner but he said he had softball practice and I said that was a damned shame and hung up. When I got to Sun City Bea and Rob were at were at the bar, behind tattooed women and men with guitars. They were sitting in the shade and their beers were half empty. We drank beer and ate pho but Rob was restless and did not talk very much. He said he wanted to go see a band that was playing in a dive bar across town. Bea called him a smug hipster and Rob called her a bitch and I sat and drank my beer and wished I had not come. They left early and I paid for Bea's spring rolls and went home alone.

:

Roscoe - William Kennedy

Kennedy owns Albany like no other writer owns any other city, having constructed a city that surpasses the reality. Roscoe Conway is a lawyer for the Democratic Party Machine that runs Albany, an insider that stands just outside the circles of true wealth and power. Elisha Fitzgibbons, the money behind the party, former lieutenant governor of the state and married to the woman Roscoe really loves, kills himself, setting in motion a mystery that only his right-hand man, Roscoe, can solve.
With other Kennedy novels, the dead are too near us, giving Roscoe hints and faint suggestions. Moving quickly from past to present, Roscoe finds his present and his future tied too deeply to this past, and in the end, sacrifices himself for love, for the party, and for the city.

Fear and Loathing at 40

One of the best books about the 60's, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, turns 40 today.  If anyone wants to understand how the 60's turned into the 70's (and then into the 80's), they should read Fear and Loathing, which explains it better than any history or sociology book.

"There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning….Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

More at The Millions

A Writer's Life and Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories - Raymond Carver

The value of matching the events in a writer's life to his/her work has always been suspect, but interesting, to me. My first year English prof warned us against doing so (and this was well before the reality TV got placed a headlock on pop culture and the public confession became our new art form) - he recognized it was fun but it didn't add much to the discussion, or the understanding, of the work.  He was right - knowing that Carver was a drunk for most of his life doesn't add a dimension to any of his stories - but it is satisfying to connect some dots between fact and fiction.

Two main points stand out in Raymond Carver A Writer's Life Carol Sklenicka: the relationship that Carver had with his editor, Gordon Lish, and Carver's dedication to becoming a writer.  The first has been talked about at some length, but it appears that what a lot of people like about Carver may have been from Lish - the sparse detail, the minimal style that Carver made famous.  Most of the controversy has to do with what we think a writer is versus what we think an editor does, but also that Carver was so eager to achieve literary success (and not to mention some measure of financial success as well) that he may have sold out to Lish in order to be publish. Once he establishes himself, he does push back on Lish - reading through Where I'm Calling From:Selected Stories, you can chart the relationship.


Carver's dedication to be a writer forms early, and his entire life is dedicated to the cause, to the extent that he sacrifices personal relationships. Sklenicka portrays a man that grows resentful at his wife and children for distracting him from writing, who takes the raw material of his life and transforms it into stories. Boxes, which appears in Where I'm Calling From is a good example - the narrator's mother keeps moving apartments, never satisfied and resembles Carver's own mother so much that she "threw the book across the room."


Intentional or not,  Carver becomes a character in one of his own stories. The risk in reading a writer's biography, even one as neutrally written as A Writer's Life, is that it can reveal the writer's true nature, forming a stain on the writer's work.  If the writer is a terrible human being, does it mean the work is viewed differently?