Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013)

This is Book #2 after White Teeth on my reading list to counteract the overwhelming base of white male authors that comprise the Flying Houses review archive.  Actually, if you look back at the past 3 years, it's not so bad, but no further excuses.  A lot of people consider me "well-read," but I think that term is misleading.  I've read a fair number of books, but really not that many (I'm sure many critics that review books as their job have tackled 5-6 times my number), and really not that many from different cultural backgrounds.  Americanah was time well spent.

Have I read anything close to Americanah?  A long time ago, before I started Flying Houses, I picked up What is the What by Dave Eggers and got maybe halfway through it before finding it too tedious and painful.  It's a bit of a different book, because it's specifically about one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, his struggles in Africa, and his struggles as an immigrant in the U.S.  Eggers interviewed him extensively and transmuted the experience into literature.  Still technically a white male author though!

Americanah is quite different, and does not concern itself as greatly with human rights atrocities.  Rather, this is a book about being an African in America, and then being an American in Africa.  There are so many people that would be able to identify with this book, it's not even funny.  Because Adichie does not restrict herself to the female perspective.  True, it is a female perspective in America (and only a male perspective in England), but the alternating "Parts" are both a strength and a weakness of the novel.  Let me be clear: I am trying to be more picky about what I call the Best Books reviewed on Flying Houses, and many times, I felt this belonged there.  Maybe after I finish this review, I'll put it there.  But on my "scale," I would say it's better than White Teeth, definitely, and on par with The Goldfinch (which did not quite make the list).

The plot concerns Ifemulu.  Every single time I read her name, I wondered if the voice in my head was mispronouncing it.  Here is the way I heard it in my head: Eef-ay-moo-loo.  Ifemulu is a young girl growing up in Nigeria, who meets a young man, Obinze, at school, high school I guess.  They go to college together for a while, but then separate, as she decides to move to the U.S., as her aunt has done to become a doctor.  Ifemulu and Obinze are definitely an "item," and all of their friends pretty much presume that they will get married and be together forever, but this emigration effectively destroys their romance.

Though it is certainly about a different era, this book does have more than its share of similarities to Brooklyn.  I just realized that now.  I prefer Americanah because it's about our present age.  Actually, on the morning of the election last week, I was reading the section about the 2008 Presidential Election, and how Ifemulu liked Hillary Clinton a lot, but just had to support Obama.  Obama is a major figure in this book.  This book contains a recommendation for Dreams from my Father, which I'm sorry to say I haven't read.  Let me briefly give a shout-out to President Obama as one of the finest we have had.  My only complaint is the Affordable Care Act.  His heart was definitely in the right place with it, but these 2017 premiums off the Exchange are off-the-charts high.  Also the interest rates on my student loans are way too high.  Back to the book...

After Ifemulu arrives in America and enrolls at a college in Philadelphia, she has serious struggles with money.  She finds her footing after being hired as a nanny to an affluent family.  Through them she meets Curt, a cousin of the family, who falls in love with her and asks her to move to Baltimore with him, where he pulls some strings and helps her get a job in public relations.  Then one night she randomly hooks up with another dude in their apartment building, and Curt dumps her.  Shortly after this, she starts her own blog, Raceteenth or Curious Observations by a Non-American Black on the Subject of Blackness in America.

I think it is fair to say that we are in the midst of a civil rights renaissance, an acknowledgement that a guarantee of equal rights (i.e. equal treatment and equal opportunity) is little more than a rhetorical facade.  And so Americanah is a book that came at the perfect time.  Many of the chapters in this book end with a post from the blog.  (I am also having a sort of wonderful feeling of irony by reviewing a book about a blogger.) Almost all of the posts are highly-quotable, and written in a very different tone from that of the novel.  The most epic one is not at the end of a chapter, but read aloud by a friend at a dinner party, over pages 403 to 406.  I'll excerpt the end of it:

"Finally, don't put on a Let's Be Fair tone and say 'But black people are racist too.' Because of course we're all prejudiced (I can't even stand some of my blood relatives, grasping, selfish folks), but racism is about the power of a group and in America it's white folks who have that power.  How?  Well, white folks don't get treated like shit in upper-class African-American communities and white folks don't get denied bank loans or mortgages precisely because they are white and black juries don't give white criminals worse sentences than black criminals for the same crime and black police officers don't stop white folk for driving while white and black companies don't choose not to hire somebody because their name sounds white and black teachers don't tell white kids they're not smart enough to be doctors and black politicians don't try some tricks to reduce the voting power of white folks through gerrymandering and advertising agencies don't say they can't use white models to advertise glamorous products because they are not considered 'aspirational' by the 'mainstream.'
So after this listing of don'ts, what's the do?  I'm not sure.  Try listening, maybe.  Hear what is being said.  And remember that it's not about you.  American Blacks are not telling you that you are to blame.  They are just telling you what is.  If you don't understand, ask questions.  If you're uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway.  It's easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place.  Then listen some more.  Sometimes people just want to feel heard.  Here's to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding." (405-406)

While this is definitely Ifemulu's book, Obinze is the other main character.  I would say 66% of this is Ifemulu and 33% is Obinze.  At first I thought the alternating book-by-book perspective was a weakness, but I grew to appreciate Adichie's ability to develop a male counterpart.  His experience in London, detailed in Part 3 of the novel, is one of its highlights.

And generally, the romance between Ifemulu and Obinze is the true highlight.  It exemplifies the cliche phrase "achingly beautiful."  There have been few other novels where I have rooted more for its characters to end up together.

I don't mean to get all gushy here, but I hope you've experienced the phenomenon of reading a book that seems eerily connected to your present situation, which then provides an extra layer of appreciation and meaning.  It happened for me with Americanah, dealing with a frayed, broken and resuscitated relationship, and an election that inspired more dialogue (or monologues) on racism than any other I've seen in my lifetime.

Did this book change the way I thought?  Not really.  Did it open up my mind to the experiences of others in a different position than me?  Sure.  Most importantly, was it entertaining?  Yes.

And that is why I think it is better than White Teeth.  White Teeth almost seemed to be going out of its way to be clever or comic in sometimes absurd situations.  Americanah simply rolls through a story with incredibly well-developed characters whose adventures are amusing, more often than not.  Of course when the "adventures" are more like "travails," the book remains gripping.

I feel like this is a hard book to know where to start and stop to avoid spoilers.  I will note that its structure is quite unique, and vaguely similar to what I did in my third book in that it uses a hair cut (really a hair-braiding) as a framing mechanism.  Ifemulu is getting her hair braided in New Jersey, having recently decided to quit blogging, to leave Princeton and to return to Lagos in Nigeria.  I don't really remember why she does this, but I guess underneath it all, she still subconsciously wants to be with Obinze.  In any case, the novel primarily occurs in a series of flashbacks and returns to the present in the hair salon, before a traumatic event involving Ifemulu's younger cousin, Dike, temporarily disrupts her plans (the NY Times review remarks that, "Early on, a horrific event leaves Ifemulu reeling, and years later, when she returns to Nigeria, she's still haunted by it."  I don't think this is the same traumatic event and I can only assume this is a reference to the soccer coach episode, but maybe my memory is hazy.  Was it something else?  Is that really as horrific as what happens with Dike?).

That is something I will not spoil, but I would like to say it was validating to find that Dike is an actual name, when I was given much grief over using "Dike96" as a screen-name for AOL back in 1996, probably because my youngest sister called me something like that as a baby (before she could pronounce my first name).  Moving on...

I wish Flying Houses were as popular as Raceteenth.  I find the notion that Ifemulu would become quasi-rich-and-famous from a vociferous blog on race a bit far-fetched, but then again the blog is portrayed as a "safe space" where millions of disenfranchised people of color come to share their grievances and make one another stronger.  As a white male who is responsible for his own lack of opportunities in life, I can't really fathom "starting a blog" about anything except books, and the entertainment industry in general, and I've written before about how unpopular Flying Houses is and I don't have any illusions that one day people are going to wake up and realize that it carries some of the best reviews on the internet.  Absolutely not; this is not the New York Times and I am the only editor.  I'm still only at $33 earned after 8.5 years of this, payment threshold at $100.  Hopefully one day somebody will give me a MacArthur Genius Grant because they feel bad for me and realize that I've made a valuable contribution to the field of literary criticism.  More likely is that I will just die and be forgotten and my legacy will be a bunch of crappy status postings on Facebook that people will only notice for a few days or weeks after my death.  It's depressing as hell but I guess that is why I am starting to believe in reincarnation, as the only "fair" result of existence.

Wow that paragraph went dark places!  But the blog is an important element of this book because it speaks to the issue of "how to make a living." Ifemulu is invited to give "diversity talks" after her blog gains traction; she doesn't make all of her money off AdSense.  She also receives large donations from an anonymous supporter, so maybe I should set up some kind of funding portal...

It's quite difficult for me to think of anything else to say about Americanah.  It's pretty much everything you could ask for in a novel, but it's quite sad to read about the 2008 election:

"On television, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama and their two young daughters were walking onto a stage.  They were carried by the wind, bathed in incandescent light, victorious an smiling.
'Young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled, Americans have sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of red states and blue states.  We have been and always will be the United States of America.'
Barack Obama's voice rose and fell, his face solemn, and around him the large and resplendent crowd of the hopeful.  Ifemulu watched, mesmerized.  And there was, at that moment, nothing that was more beautiful to her than America," (447-448)

Contrast that with the way many of us have felt over the past 12 days.  I suppose the lesson that we should keep in mind is that, though it feels like we have taken a step backwards, we haven't undone all of the progress we've made. Books like Americanah should remind us that our country, and the literature we produce, is enriched by an inclusive ideology.  They can teach us how to be better to one another, and to open up our minds beyond ourselves.

Why We Write About Ourselves - Ed. Meredith Maran (2016)

For NaNoWriMo 2015, I wrote a 60,000 word shitty first draft of a memoir, to be published when I was 33, to document these first 33 years, with the thought that I might do it again at 66, if I live that long.  This, apparently, would be a horrible memoir, because no one wants to read about every meaningful event of some random person's existence.  No, they want to read about more specific events in your life, things that happened which were extraordinary--pain you suffered--which you can relate on a universal level.

This is the lesson I learned from Why We Write About Ourselves, another rare book that was sent to me by a publicist.  It's ironic to mention two gifts that two of my sisters received on Christmas morning.  My younger sister received a copy of Tales of Two Cities and my youngest sister received a book by Cheryl Strayed, which I think was The Beautiful Things.  My sister hadn't read my review, but she specifically requested the book, and I guess neither had my mother.  It's the only time I was "ahead of the curve" with this blog, and I hope that's the case here again: certainly my youngest sister would be interested in this one, as a fan of Strayed.  And frankly, between this and Tales, this was the better read.

Unfortunately, it won't be named to the Best Books of Flying Houses list, to make for a perfect trifecta with Raymond Carver and Patti Smith, but that is only because the form this book takes.  It is a different sort of book than I have ever read, and it reads more like a very long magazine article.  It's a very good article, but it's written to be read in little candy-sized nuggets.  I think that makes it especially appealing in today's socio-cultural climate of social media saturation and ADHD.  Basically, it is not aiming for canonical status.  Instead, this book is perfect for one of two things: checking out from the library, or gift-giving.  One could certainly purchase this book for themselves if they have made up their mind to write a memoir, but it's more of a book to expose yourself to once and learn from, rather than to pore over and savor for the richness of its language.

Still, I am very happy I read this book, if only because of its ulterior motive: publicity.  There are 20 chapters in this book.  Here are the writers that I knew going in: Anne Lamott, Cheryl Strayed, Meghan Daum and Edmund White.  There were some writers I didn't know, but knew of vaguely: Pat Conroy, David Sheff and Sue Monk Kidd.  For the 13 other writers for which I had no direct reference point, I was forced to be exposed to their minds: what they wrote about, why they wrote about it, and how.  And I will definitely be putting a few of their books on my reading list.

As previously mentioned with these anthologies, they make for difficult reviews.  I don't want to give short shrift to any of the contributors, but I don't want the review to go on endlessly.  I suppose the best thing to do is hit the highlights--for me, personally.

The first section that struck me as quotable came from Anne Lamott.  Now I have mentioned Bird by Bird before on this blog, somewhere, and upon reflection I had to read it for a creative writing class my senior year in high school, and I think it did inspire me at an impressionable age to throw my whole self into the writing thing, which was a huge mistake (however, it was not nearly as big a mistake as throwing myself into the whole lawyer thing--while the law may ultimately provide me with an avenue for an outwardly respectable career, it has impoverished me, robbed me of the last vestige of youth and destroyed my self-esteem and self-respect).  At least a couple times in this book, Bird by Bird is referred to as something of a "bible" of creative writing.  I'll have to check it out again.  Lamott's section in this book is a definite highlight:

"I wrote a piece about my mom in Traveling Mercies, and it really hurt her feelings.  I thought it would be such a great thing to tell the truth about my mom, because my whole life had been about about this made-up relationship, pretending I wasn't mad about the damage she'd done to me.
I wrote this very tender piece about her in her last days, when she had Alzheimer's.  It wasn't even a critical piece.  It just said that she could drive me crazy.  Sadly she didn't have bad enough Alzheimer's.  She read it and went bonkers.  My mom's twin sister called me up and said, 'You will never be forgiven for this, Annie.'
The crisis passed.  Then it turned out it was great to have told the truth about deeply crazily I loved her and that she'd been a handful."  (136)

These sort of themes emerge over and over throughout this book.  What will my friends and family think of the memoir?  How much personal information can I reveal about other people?  Do I have to reveal everything about myself?

Most seem to agree that, you should always make yourself look as bad as possible.  As a person that has often followed this rule without hearing anyone else say it, this felt comforting.  Moreover it feels refreshing in 2016, where our public image has to be so squeaky clean on social media and anything the slightest bit non-PC can end up leading towards ostracization from the in-crowd.

Most seem to follow the rule that, if they write about one of their friends, they send it to them and make sure they are okay with it being published.  I've never really had to do this because I've never been published in any meaningful way.  However my younger brother became very upset when I made a reference to "wanting to kill my parents" in an unfortunate section of Think and Grow Poor, and upon reflection I should have deleted that (note: I later did after this throwaway line inspired by Tao Lin remained unforgettable after 15 years--though he only wrote he "wanted to go on a killing spree.").  You can't say I don't know anything about memoir writing.  I guess I just subscribed to the view that Edmund White expresses near the very end.  Actually, the last sentence:

"In general, I try to be very honest in my memoirs.  If I lose the friendship, so what?  I believe Milosz, the Nobel-winning Polish poet, who said, 'Whenever a writer is born into a family, that family is destroyed.'
On the other hand I sometimes say the best way to keep a secret is to publish it, since no one reads.  My books aren't indexed.  So anyone who wants to know what I wrote about him has to read the whole thing." (254)

Speaking of White, he is the only author to appear in both this volume and Tales of Two Cities.  He also makes this ridiculous, Wilt Chamberlain-esque claim:

"My protagonist in A Boy's Own Story was much less precocious intellectually and sexually than I was.  He was shyer.  If I'd written about myself as the freaky boy I really was, very few people could have identified with that novel.  That book came out in '82.  I don't think that was quite the period yet for my own true story.  In real life, I had had sex with five hundred men, most of them older than I was, by the time I was sixteen.  The boy in the book has one or two experiences, with boys his own age." (250)

My only response to that is, what the fuck dude!
But yeah, I'll probably check out some of his books.

***

There are a few glaring omissions from this volume.  It would have been remarkable to read a section by James Frey, but instead he is just referenced by another writer (again, White):

"There have been so many scandals about memoirs that weren't true.  The author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil confessed that he'd taken two phone conversations that were crucial to the story and collapsed them into one.  People were very disturbed when the author of A Million Little Pieces, which purported to be a memoir and was directed to a very vulnerable population of recovering addicts, admitted that his girlfriend hadn't really committed suicide.  There were some other events that he falsified, which led to his denunciation on Oprah.
That's a good example to keep in mind.  People do feel cheated when you lie in a memoir because you've broken your contract with your readers." (252)

I've never read A Million Little Pieces and I think most people nowadays would say it's not especially necessary to do so, but one cannot forget the cultural import that the book briefly possessed.  The other writer that should be here is Dave Eggers.  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius has not been discredited and seems to defy most of the "rules" that these writers pronounce.  Eggers hasn't written anything like it since, but I still believe it's his strongest work and a true high watermark of the medium.  It's far from perfect, but I still think if I read it again 14 years later, it would make the Best Books list (The Real World interview chapter alone should qualify it).  Then again, this is an unfair criticism to make.  It's not clear if Maran reached out to these authors or if perhaps they could not write outside of their contracts with their current publishers.

I want to mention Meghan Daum.  I first became aware of her in 2008, when I was offered a limited free subscription to the Los Angeles Times.  I read her column every week and looked at her picture and thought she was cute and prayed that she would be my girlfriend.  She was cute and I liked what she wrote and she had a regular newspaper gig--did anything else really matter?  Subsequently I left L.A. and forgot about her.  Then, about a year ago, I came across her name in relation to her new book about making the conscious decision not to have children (Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decisions Not to Have Kids) and my crush was briefly renewed at an even more intense level, until I found out she was married.  Also, she was 13 years older than me.  Not that that's a deal-breaker or anything--she looked good for her age.  I mean, she wrote an essay and then a book about being deeply indebted in her 20's called My Misspent Youth.  She also made me feel better about my newest NaNoWriMo project:

"That thing I said earlier about weighing each detail to determine whether it's worthy of inclusion?  That's for the third, fourth, or fifth draft.  Not the first draft.
The 'morality' of any given project has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.  If you're writing about yourself just for the sake of writing about yourself, and other people are going to get dragged along for the hellish ride, it might it might be wise to examine the worthiness of the venture.  If you have something important to say that can only--or at least most effectively--be said through the lens of your own story, then go for it." (86)

***

Randomly, in here, I'd like to excerpt a brief snippet from Darin Strauss's section, as Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish are still fresh in our memories on this blog:

"Amy Hempel tells a good story about when she was in a beginning workshop with Gordon Lish.  He had the class write about the one thing that most embarrassed them.  The only restriction was that you had to write it as honestly as possible.  She said that out of that class of fifteen people, seven or eight published pieces they wrote in that class.  If you write something honestly, it'll be worth reading.  If you don't, it doesn't matter how good a writer you are.  The reader will feel it." (200-201)

***

I could mention Ayelet Waldman's contribution as another highlight, or the weird celebrity spouse connections (she is married to Michael Chabon, while contributor Nick Flynn is married to Lili Taylor (ironically another unusual crush of mine)), but the last thing I want to mention is the one bit of advice on which I do not agree.  Waldman mentions it as a piece of advice given by Chabon, but like other tips in this book, it shows up in various forms:

"When I first started writing, Michael told me that if you're not uncomfortable, you're not writing what you need to write.  If your work feels really safe and pleasant, there's a problem." (222)
"If you're not uncomfortable and scared while you're writing, you're not writing close enough to the bone." (230)

David Sheff also adds, "If what you're writing about wasn't intense, you wouldn't be writing about it.  Writing a memoir can dredge up every awful feeling all over again.  Make sure you have the support you need to make it through." (192)

Now of course, a memoir about how your life has been so happy and perfect will make people want to throw up, but there are brighter sides to life as well, and we should know because we've seen them, if not very often.  You know I have always wanted to read Morrissey's Autobiography.  Maybe that's not a memoir, though.

Sorry for that.  Anyways, sometimes when I'm writing a piece of creative non-fiction, there are some wonderful moments back in there that you want to share with a reader, you want to put them there with you, you want them to feel the happiness you felt.  Is that so wrong?

That's really my only criticism of the "wisdom" of this book.  I think it's okay to write about the times when life was good.  It's not a useless nostalgia trip.  It's a document that you were alive, and that it wasn't all pain and misery, even though much of the time it felt that way.

In short: read this book if you have any designs whatsoever on writing a memoir.  It's a quick read (less than a week), it's entertaining, and it should help put you in the right frame of mind to accomplish your task.  Also it lists all of these writers' Twitter accounts so I'm going to start following them right about now.

Tales of Two Cities: The Best & Worst of Times in Today's New York - Ed. John Freeman (2015)

It's not every day a publisher or publicist reaches out to me and asks if I want to review their book.  In the past, I asked Tao Lin myself if I could get free copies of his first novel, novella, and second novel.  Once, someone from a bigger publishing house sent me a random book and I reviewed it.   A couple times, publicists sent me e-mails teasing a new book, asking if I wanted a review copy.  This is the first one where I expressed interest, and they actually followed through.  So, I'd like to say, thank you, Shannon Twomey, for reminding me that I am not yet totally irrelevant.

Tales of Two Cities is an anthology, and these pose particular challenges for the critic.  Of course, Userlands is partly responsible for the existence of Flying Houses in the first place, and no other reviews of anthologies have appeared since then.  Certain books of short stories, or essays, by Thomas Mann, James Franco, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Chuck Klosterman, Wells Tower, Jonathan Franzen, and others have spurred lengthy reviews that potentially lacked focus.  Like Userlands, there are many writers in Tales of Two Cities, and most of them will not be familiar to the casual reader.

Certainly, Zadie Smith, Junot Diaz, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers and David Byrne are pretty famous, but their work is probably not the strongest in this volume.  I suppose we can start there, keeping in mind that people's attention spans on the internet are less than ideal.

We'll start with Smith because her story appears closest to the beginning.  I've never read White Teeth or On Beauty or NW but she's certainly one of the literary stars of our time.  For better or worse, "Miss Adele Amongst the Corsets," will forever remain my introduction to her.  It definitely took me  a minute to figure out what was happening in this story.  I feel weird not wanting to give away spoilers for short stories, but it feels necessary here.  Basically, this is the story of a drag queen going to buy a corset from a store run by Eastern European immigrants that may or may not be fundamental Christians.  It is about Miss Adele's mentality as she veers toward her late forties and reflects upon her situation.  It is about paranoia, insecurity, and the expectations we all have of common decency.

Parts of this story are engaging, and other parts drag a bit.  It's only 17 pages long, but it's one of the more memorable moments in the anthology.  I like in particular how Smith weaves in memories from Miss Adele's childhood, when her name was Darren and he was the twin of Devin (who is now successful/married) and their parents fought, all while she changes in a dressing room.  It also reminded me of my own work from 2003, "Autointoxication," with the insecurity, paranoia and egotistical impression that everyone is really talking about you.  While this is far from a great short story, it should serve Smith well.  It makes me want to check out White Teeth.

***

Before we move on, the theme of this anthology merits attention.  Of course, this book harps on the same themes over and over again!  Bill de Blasio and his infamous description of New York as two cities, for the haves and have-nots.  The rent is too damn high!  Those darn 1%-ers!

Income inequality is a hot topic (see the Democratic Debate on 10/13/15, see also the rapid rise of the minimum wage) and as a person that enjoys reviewing books by modern day heroes and doctoral journalists that attack the issue head on, as well as spearheading one's own faulty program to assess how much "fun" poor people are allowed to have, to say nothing of the 6+ years I lived in New York on my parent's/the government's dime, reviewing this book is a no-brainer.

Why the fuck do you need to live in New York?  Is it really that nice?  Oh, you've got Central Park---great!  An urban oasis.  You feel like you're not really in the city!  Oh, and the pizza--the pizza is just the best.  The museums, the culture!  Greenwich Village!  Brooklyn!  All the greatest artists come out of the village scene, don't you know?  The best public transportation system in the country, hands down.  Those wonderful 24 hour delis on every corner, or at least many corners.  The people, who are all in this struggle with you!  The energy--the city never sleeps!  It is the #1 biggest city in the country, and so much better than L.A.  God, who can stand to sit in all that traffic!  Oh, the food, such wonderful restaurants.  It is the epicenter of the legal industry!  All your friends live there, too.

Perhaps you can tell that I have conflicted feelings about New York.  Certainly, the years I spent there from 2001 through 2004 were some of the very best of my life and I will forever cherish such memories.  But, the years I spent there from 2010 through 2013 were different.  I was older.  I wasn't in college.  The Great Depression Part 2 happened in between.  I had to take out student loans this time.  I was in Brooklyn Heights rather than Greenwich Village.

When I was 22, I moved back to Chicago because my dad offered me a job there, and I had no job offers in New York (I hadn't really started looking for one, and had always lived in the NYU dorms, never my own apartment).  When I was 30, I moved back to Chicago because I had no legal job offers in New York, and again, lived in the same "apartment-style" dorm at Brooklyn Law School for 3 years, the rent approximately $1,000 per month for a 2 bedroom.  My room was small, but my roommate's (there were 3 different ones of varying quality, one of whom was the best roommate I have ever had, and there have been many) was only about $60 per month more than mine, and I think this place was a steal for the neighborhood.  Sometimes I see friends on Facebook moving out and posting their craigslist ad when they want someone to take over their lease, and it's usually almost $1000 per month to live in one room in a 3BR in a vaguely desirable neighborhood in a wave of gentrification.

Compare that to the $580 (up from $540 as of 9/1/15) for my room in Logan Square (say nothing of sharing that room and cutting the cost to $290), a neighborhood in Chicago that has been in a steady state of gentrification over the past 10 years.

Now granted if I could have lived in New York with a rental at $500 or $600 per month, I would have stayed.  But I would have probably needed to split a room to get that.  And it would most likely be in Crown Heights.

***

There are two stories in this collection that are focused laser-like on housing: "Partially Vacated" by D.W. Gibson, and "A Block Divided Against Itself" by Sarah Jaffe.  The latter features Crown Heights as the epicenter of the current gentrification fight in NYC and the former features South Brooklyn Legal Services and Housing Court on Livingston St.  Guess which one I liked better.

It's not that Jaffe's story is more boring.  Actually, I kept flashing back to Show Me a Hero while reading it.  It's quite compelling, but also one-sided, like many accounts of housing issues.  I am not a Pollyanna for landlords.  I used to prosecute them for bad behavior, and I currently live under one that I'd like to report.  The Residential Landlord Tenant Ordinance in Chicago is quite tenant-friendly, and I'd presume a similar situation exists in New York.  Yet all we hear are stories about the bad landlords.  What about the bad tenants?  One day I will write a story about bad tenants.

Apart from the Show Me a Hero comparison, I don't really know what to say about the Crown Heights story.  It was basically average for the collection, and maybe it gets a bonus point for being so perfectly on topic.

However, "Partially Vacated" is one of the finest moments in the anthology.  Of course, I may be biased, because one does not often get to read books about things one knows semi-intimately:

"The civil courthouse in Downtown Brooklyn sits amid a cluster of bureaucratic towers, adjacent to a mix of 99-cent stores and restaurants where bartenders prefer to be called mixologists.  The Quaker-affiliated Brooklyn Friends School, $28,000 a year for pre-school, is just up the block.
Inside the rectangular building of steel and glass leased by the civil courthouse, the elevators break down year-round, the air-conditioner only in summer.  Before he was mayor, Bill de Blasio, acting as Public Advocate, put the building's landlord on his 'Worst Landlord' watch list.  The city's lease for the property expired last week, but, unable to find new housing, housing court--ironically, or perhaps not--will stay in the ailing building.
The line to get in the door--to shuffle through security and wait in a second line for the persnickety elevators--usually runs out the door and all the way down the block well before eight in the morning.
On the tenth floor, the elevator doors open onto a crowded hall, filled with the strident din of heated conversations in every direction.  Clumps of three or four people stand together: always a landlord, always a tenant, usually a landlord's lawyer, occasionally a tenant's lawyer, too.  They're all haggling, trying to reach a settlement; when and if they do, the details are immediately written on a piece of paper and taken into one of the court rooms to receive a judge's approval.  There are dozens of courtrooms--some for hearings, some for trial--and all guarantee long waits."  (63-64)

I didn't do housing in Brooklyn, but I did have a few friends work for South Brooklyn Legal Services, and I'm sure this story would be quite interesting for them.  I did work at that civil courthouse, and I had forgotten about those ridiculous lines!  In short, this story is great because it is true.  And for what it's worth, the landlord in this story has to be one of the all-time worst.

***

More generally, these stories are just about people living in poverty in New York.  The introduction by John Freeman is wonderfully written.  It teases the entry by his brother, Tim Freeman, and provides a little snippet of each story to come in the collection.  I have to say that while reading John's intro, I thought he came off as a total douchebag; after reading Tim's story "Home," much less so:

"I tell this story now because we need to change the way we talk about inequality.  The reasons it exists are as complex as the reasons why my brother wound up in a shelter.  Inequality is not an issue of us and them, the rich and the poor.  You often see these same so-called divisions within one family, like mine.  I have an instinct here to apologize for making this point, to add a caveat that my experience of witnessing my brother's homelessness was not nearly as hard as it was for him to live it, while I'm sure there are people who have suffered far more than both of us.  All this is true, I suppose, but it leads us into a cul-de-sac.  To rank suffering creates a false hierarchy of pain, as if there were a way to compare and weight grief with, say, physical discomfort, or career frustrations, or hopelessness.  It allows us, to some degree, to say that some forms of suffering are OK while others are not." (x)

"I did not want anybody's help when I was homeless.  If a family member had offered to take me in, I most likely would have declined the offer.  When I was trying to stay at Bellevue, my brother John lived less than a mile away on the other side of town.  I only saw him twice during the whole time that I was homeless.  Again, I think this is because of the awkwardness.  I also didn't want to be a burden on anybody.  I know this probably sounds like an old homeless cliche, but it is how I felt." (213)

***

As for the other "famous" writers in the anthology, Junot Diaz has one of the better entries.  It's a very short and sweet essay about an act of larceny.  However, I found it was published in 2001 in The New Yorker, so even though this had to be one of Diaz's breakout pieces, it has little to do with "today's New York."  It's a remembrance from his childhood.  It's only a few pages long, but it's as good as any single part of Oscar Wao.

Jonathan Safran Foer's is also an older piece--from 2004, I believe--and let's just get this out of the way: I don't like him.  People may think it's cruel for me to say that when I've never read him, but I just don't like him.  Once I got my mom Eating Animals from the library, and she seemed to think it was pretty good.  But I have never read anything by him before and I never wanted to, but it would have been irresponsible to skip "The Sixth Borough," which details the secret history of another borough that was once part of New York City.  It is probably the silliest piece in this book and has almost nothing to do with its theme.  I think it was included for "star power."  In any case, this was the one chance for JSF to prove to me that I should give him a chance.  I think putting in previously published work is a bit of a cop-out, but whatever.  I still liked Diaz's piece.  This one, not as much.  Sorry, I guess I am just jealous.

Dave Eggers is his typically good-natured self, and introduces an essay by a fifteen-year-old girl whose family moved into Park Slope.  She wrote the story as part of his 826 program.  While her story is certainly impressive for a 15-year-old and sits comfortably alongside all of these other writers, I still thought Eggers little anecdote about living around a certain area in Brooklyn in the late 90's was more interesting.  Both of these submissions add up to about 7 pages total, so it's not a huge part of the book.

I should briefly mention Colum McCann here, because he's "semi-famous."  At a wedding over three years ago, a younger guest who was just starting college and wanted to be a writer, asked if I had read him, I said no, and he suggested Let the Great World Spin.  Maybe one day I'll read that.  In any case, McCann writes an essay that could be a viewed as a companion piece to the film Dark Days, which is a documentary that came out around 2000 and was about the "mole people" living in tunnels beneath the city.  This is also really short--only about 4 pages--but it's another highlight from the book.

Last but not least, David Byrne's essay is wonderful.  It's quite in your face and filled with quotable moments.  Byrne does not try to pretend that the Talking Heads haven't made him rich, and openly admits that his relationship with New York may be souring:

"Many of the wealthy don't even live here.  In the neighborhood where I live (near the art galleries in Chelsea), I can see three large condos from my window that are pretty much empty all the time.  What the fuck!?  Apparently, rich folks buy the apartments, but might only stay in them a few weeks out of the year.  So why should they have an incentive to maintain or improve the general health of the city?  They're never here.
This real estate situation--a topic New Yorkers love to complain about over dinner--doesn't help the future health of the city.  If young, emerging talent of all types can't find a foothold in this city, then it will be a city closer to Hong Kong or Abu Dhabi than to the rich fertile place it has historically been.  Those places might have museums, but they don't have culture.  Ugh.  If New York goes there--more than it already has--I'm leaving.
But where will I go?  Join the expat hipsters upstate in Hudson?
Can New York change its trajectory a little bit, become more inclusive and financially egalitarian?  Is that possible?  I think it is.  It's still the most stimulating and exciting place in the world to live and work, but it's in danger of walking away from its greatest strengths.  The physical improvements are happening--though much of the crumbing infrastructure still needs fixing.  If the social and economic situation can be addressed, we're halfway there.  It really could be a model of how to make a large, economically sustainable, and creatively energetic city.  I want to live in that city."  (246)

***

Like any anthology, there are bound to be a few disappointments.  Edmund White (whom I would designate as "quasi-famous") submits a very nicely written biographical essay that seems to have almost nothing to do with the "theme" except for the fact that his subject (Lorenzo Da Ponte--a.k.a. the writer of Mozart's librettos) eventually settled in 18th century NYC.  I found it occasionally entertaining and out of place.

"Small Fates 1912" by Teju Cole (the only other writer listed by name on the cover besides Smith and Diaz, though one I would not designate as any kind of famous) starts off great, and quickly grows tiresome.  Some of these "fates" are uproariously funny, but after about two pages of them, I realized they were really all just "tweets" and I fucking hate twitterature.  I know it can be experimental in the same vein as an Oulippo-stunt, but I don't think it can be revelatory when it's trademarked by a publicly-traded company.

"Due North" by Garnette Cadogan is about walking around Manhattan, and it's pretty good.  I like walking around, too.  But it's also about feeling that people are friendlier in certain areas like the South Bronx, and more standoffish or invisible in areas like the Upper East Side.  Unfortunately it made me wonder what Cadogan did in order to have all this leisure time to loaf.

"Options" is probably one of the stronger stories in this book, and perhaps deserves to be placed in the next section (I am saving the best for the last here).  It's about moving to New York to try to get the best possible care for one's autistic child.  It's about seeing a sign for a lost child that is autistic, and reflecting on your own.  It's pretty powerful stuff, but it seems a little over the top, too.  It strikes me as being 100% factual, but ultimately foolhardy.

"The Children Suicides" by Maria Venegas is interesting, but it's not about the NYU suicides in 2003-2004, so I have trouble relating.  Then again as a former 10-year-old that confided suicidal thoughts to a teacher, it's affecting to see it from the other perspective.  Not that they didn't take it way more seriously than they needed to or anything.

I almost want to put "Four More Years" by Jonathan Dee in the next section, too, because it seems like it's the only story that's really about "the 1%" and it's about driving around the neighborhood during a horrible snowfall and navigating the horrible conditions.  This is actually a really memorable story and I don't know, I guess the characters came off as being sort of one-dimensional, and that's why it doesn't go in the next section.

"So Where Are We?" is a poem by Lawrence Joseph.  I rarely review poetry on Flying Houses.  I think I did once before.  Is it a good poem?  I don't know.  Is it a bad poem?  I don't know.  It seems like it's about 9/11.  9/11 is obviously a big topic for New Yorkers but it almost never gets mentioned in this book.  I skimmed this poem and moved on.

"Round Trip" by Akhil Sharma is certainly no failure at all, but it is slight at four pages and feels almost like Diaz's story.  It's about a guy who has money, but is super frugal anyways because he hates spending.  I can relate.  However, he quits his job that pays pretty well to be a writer.  I wish I had the luxury.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and call "Aliens of Extraordinary Ability" by Taiye Selasi a weak spot.  It's stylish and while not exactly pretentious, seems to take itself a bit too seriously as "art."  It's not bad, but it just seems calculated.  I don't remember very much about it.

"One, Maybe Two Minutes from Fire" by Tea Obreht--I am very tempted to move this into the next section, but ultimately I cannot.  It's got a great ending, on top of everything else.  It's about being a victim of a scam.  There needs to be more literature about victimhood.  Not just woe-is-me victimhood, but God, I'm-so-fucking-dumb victimhood.  Great story, and its placement in this review is faulty.

"Service/Non-Service: How Bartenders See New Yorkers" by Rosie Schaap is more like a special newspaper article or essay than an anthology essay, but most of the truisms about the service industry remain relevant.  I still don't know how anybody makes it in the service industry, unless you spend your whole life (i.e. 60 hours a week, not 60 years) at the business in question, or unless it's a ridiculously expensive place.

"Mixed Media, Dimensions Variable" by Michael Salu, I put in the same category as the Selasi story.  It's a little more ambitious than it has any business being.  I think it's actually a bit better than the Selasi story, but I would not put it in the next section.

"Zapata Blvd" by Valeria Luiselli, "Seeking" by Victor Lavalle, and "Walt Whitman on Further Lane" by Mark Doty, can round out the "yawns" for me.  As you can see, these anthology reviews get difficult because I do not want to give anyone short shrift.  Doty's essay on Whitman and Long Island does have some pretty amazing insights, and some great surprises, but overall I found its tone to be off.  Like, when literature/poetry PhDs try to make criticism interesting for the lay reader.  "Zapata" is about being vaguely revolutionary, and there was a nice image or two in it--certainly I would not call it bad, but I found it disjointed.  "Seeking" is actually quite good--though not as good as "One, Maybe Two Minutes from Fire."  It's actually an incredibly deep essay about whether or not God exists.  Worthwhile for anyone that still contemplates philosophical problems.

I'm conflicted about whether to put both "First Avenue & Second Street" by Hannah Tinti and "Traveling to Brooklyn" by Lydia Davis in this section or next.  I guess they belong in the next.

***
Because they barely make this list, the last two stories should be mentioned first.  Both of them fall squarely in the realm of creative non-fiction.  I'm not sure which one is better, but I'm inclined to pick Davis.

Tinti's is very good, but it is pretty much just about one of her co-tenants.  Kind of a character study.  But it's a building near the Library, a good dive bar at 1st & 1st, and a handful of my friends moved out of the dorms after freshman year and got places in the East Village, and the memories of the Towers being there, and then not being there, made me nostalgic for that brief time that I shared in that wonderful area (even though it was only about 10 blocks north of that corner that I almost got mugged in 2002)

Davis's is great, because it reflects upon the nature of her fantasy, and how it has changed as she has aged, and then hits on a specific incident that happened recently on the subway around South Brooklyn.  Basically, it is a personal essay par excellence, a near-perfect prototype of what one should write for a college essay, perhaps.  Okay, the subject matter would not necessarily be great, but the way it's so beautifully written would get an admit from any admissions officer (this is why I think we studied personal essays as a form in high school).

Bill Cheng's entry, "Engine," is one of the best in the collection, though two others are better because they don't end on a kind-of-awkward last sentence.  Basically, this story is a complete well of misery, with some quite graphic descriptions of medical maladies, silly jobs, and lack of self-worth.  It's not very long, but it will punch you in the gut.  For a person such as myself, that can identify quite strongly with the subject matter (even if I haven't worked in a movie theater), it is the sort of thing I need to read to remind myself that life can be just as frustrating for others:

"I don't know how to talk about money.  It's one of those things we can't seem to get shook of.  As much as we pretend it doesn't matter, it sets the stage for all our relationships.  What I have, what you don't--all of it bound up in our identity, our careers, our ambition, our self-worth.
That was the gall of this first job, the improbability of being seen, how a stranger could just look at you and shrink you down into nothing.  I was in college.  I wanted to be a writer.  I considered myself intelligent, ambitious, sensitive, with a full inner life.  But every day wore me down to the nub until I carried in me a reservoir of abiding hate.
One summer at the theater, I spotted someone I knew from high school lining up at my register.  He had gone to college upstate, and now he was back for the break.  He looked good: lean, tan, handsome.
He recognized me.
Hey, Billy, how are you?
And it wasn't embarrassment but rage prickling at my face.
I pressed the bottoms of my hands to the counter.
I glared at him.
Would you like to try our super combo? (163)

The final two stories I loved for similar reasons.  The first is "Every Night a Little Death," by Patrick Ryan.  It concerns the travails of a team of graveyard shift proofreaders at a large law firm.  The story is just hilarious and it made me laugh more than anything else in the collection.  It seems completely over the top.  I know that many of these entries are essays, or pieces of creative non-fiction, and some of them are works of complete fiction.  I really could not decide where to categorize this piece.  Certainly, it reads like creative non-fiction, but it's so extreme that it has to be fiction.

Cue person chiming in that life is often stranger than fiction.

I just don't believe someone who would come into work every night wearing a clown wig would get so upset about office propriety.  It is slightly more believable that a person would bring a stuffed chimpanzee into work with her--slightly--but not that she would use such a toy as a weapon of assault.  Frankly, I wish I worked in an office where such shenanigans were commonplace.

"I'd never had a job in the corporate world before.  I'd been a house-painter, a waiter, a stockroom clerk, an English teacher, a bartender.  The graveyard shift seemed a fitting place for me to land, given that I'd just moved from the 'sleepy' South to the city that never sleeps--an exciting change for me, though most of my friends back home had told me I was being foolish.  'New York?' one of them had asked.  'Really? I hope you have a lot of money, and a lot of tears.'
Another, pulling up beside me at a traffic light, had rolled down his window to shake his head and holler, 'That place is going to chew you up, spit you out, and piss on you.'
'I'll tell you exactly what's going to happen,' an older, chain-smoking neighbor had said as I was helping him sort his recycling.  'You're going to fuck up your life beyond belief, and you're going to be back here in six months--probably addicted to heroin.'
All of which made me more determined than ever to succeed (success meaning only my not having to move back south in six months).  I took the job.  I even decided graveyard shift had an impressive ring to it.  Responsible people worked the graveyard shift.  Guys who wore matching-cap-and-jacket uniforms and carried lunchboxes worked the graveyard shift.  Copyeditors in newsrooms, security guards who shone flashlights into warehouses, EMTs who stanched gunshot wounds--these were the secret heroes who kept the gears of the world turning while everyone else snoozed.
I was thirty-three and living in New York.  I had an illegal sublet on the upper west side that was mine for another two months, and I had employment.  To celebrate, I went to dinner with friends." (19-20)

This story isn't especially deep or dramatic, but it's just very entertaining from start to finish, and pretty original.  I am reminded of a book I've never read called And Then We Came to the End.  I guess that is the closest reference point.  It feels like non-fiction, but again, it's just a tad unbelievable.  It's right near the beginning of the anthology, which is brilliant sequencing.  Maybe it's not actually the second-best story in the collection, but the sequencing made me feel that was so.

The best story in the collection, then, is "Quid Pro Quo, Just as Easy as That" by Jeanne Thornton.

I'm not just saying that because it has a transgender narrator.  I am definitely not playing that game.

This is straight-up creative non-fiction.  Unlike Ryan's story, none of it strikes me as too absurd to be true.

Can I profess some ignorance?  I still get really confused when transgender people identify themselves.  The narrator in this story is a trans woman.  I need to think for a second to make sure I get it right.  They were born male, but transitioned to female.  Whether they have undergone hormone treatment or not is unclear in this story.  To be honest, it doesn't matter.  The transgender issue is almost secondary to the poverty issue.  Just looking at the first two pages of this story, every sentence begs to be excerpted.  Because of my obsession with monthly expenses, I must excerpt the very end of that second page, and the top 1/3 of the third page:

"It was a flush time for me in New York City.  According to invoices I still have, I was making the sweet sum of $12 per hour and working enough to clear about $1600 every month.  The rent at the time was $1100, which I split evenly with a roommate.  My share of the bills was usually about $125 total, and the Metrocard rate $100 per month.  I knew of a cheap grocery store and cooked when I could.  I smoked back then too, a hideously expensive habit at $13 a pack in NYC.  So I'd switched to smoking three of four 'lucies' a day at $0.75 per cigarette, or $2 for three, from the grocery store just down the street from me that kept lookouts.  Sometimes you could run across illicit cig pushers on the streets--especially, for some reason, on Roosevelt Island--who'd let you have a whole fat pack of Delaware-smuggled Newports for seven bucks.  A devotee of The Richest Man in Babylon, I kept back about $100 or $200 from each paycheck to put into a savings fund, though I inevitably ran out of money every three or four months--food, doctor bills, miscellany--and had to raid it back to zero.  But it all worked."  (113-114)

So it seems, finally, here is another person that makes the same sorts of observations I do, and has similar concerns.  Perhaps this is why I feel this is the best story in the collection.

This story is about the narrator herself, her boss at the publishing company where she works, and her friend that sleeps on her couch (her roommate, who paid the other $550, moved to Chicago to work for Groupon, and paid the next couple of months to be nice).  There is a footnote about "All My Friends" by LCD Soundsystem.  The story is about everything and nothing.  It's a story whose style, tone, structure and plot I'd like to emulate.  The only thing that slightly annoyed me about it was that the narrator would not reveal what her friend wrote on Facebook:

"Friends--without exception, female friends--began to tell me explicitly that they would not come over to see me when my friend was at the apartment.  After the Facebook message incident, my friend was not a big fan of women, and he liked to discuss this with other women whom I was friends with.  He would discuss it with me, too.  In part this was because I hesitated to defend myself as a woman to him, and because I don't think he particularly thought of me as one anyway.  (As evidence of this, the time he laughed at me and said you're a dude.)" (117)

Ultimately I think this is one of the most entertaining stories in the anthology, and while the ending may be one of failure, it feels happier than that, like the narrator will be going on to better things.

So we come to the end of this lengthy review.  I think this book makes an excellent gift for any person moving to New York for the first time.  The only question is whether it will be eternally relevant, or if NYC will completely transform itself in 20 years.  This may be sold for a buck on tables arrayed on various streets in Greenwich Village in five years, but it is a worthwhile project for capturing the city at a crucial time in history.

The Circle - Dave Eggers (2013)

Oeuvre rule: I started paying attention to Dave Eggers right around the time most people did.  That is, the early 2000s, when he published his debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a book some may describe as indulgent, but justly lauded for it originality.  I took it with me when I left for my freshman year at NYU, and read it concurrent with the beginning of my classes.  I had already wanted to be a writer, but AHWOSG definitely influenced me in a way that few other modern day authors ever did.  It helped that Eggers was from Lake Forest, IL, the town in which my family was presently residing, and where a fair part of that book took place.  Later came You Shall Know Our Velocity!, his first novel, which I read in Paris and also liked very much.  I felt it was "better edited" than his previous volume, but not quite as unpredictable and compelling.  I got a copy for my older brother, because he had said something like, "Dave Eggers said he was never going to release another book," and I wanted to show him he was wrong.  I picked up a copy of How We Are Hungry, a book of short stories I still have not read, and got both signed by Eggers at the Printer's Row Book Fair in Chicago one year.  He wrote, "Hummus is not good," in my copy, and some other comment critical of hummus in my brother's.  Later I picked up What is the What and got about 1/2 or 3/4 of the way through, but never finished.  It's not that I didn't think it was good--I just remember thinking it was repetitive and gruesome and depressing, though vivid and well done, and liking the present-day scenes more.

I guess I forgot about Eggers in between 2006 and 2013, though he published Zeitoun in 2009, which is apparently a non-fiction book about a Syrian-American's plight after Hurricane Katrina, and the 2012 novel A Hologram for the King, which takes place in Saudi Arabia and is apparently being made into a film starring Tom Hanks.  But when I read about The Circle towards the end of last year as a notable new book, it seemed like a departure for him, and I guess I was interested.

The Circle is not a perfect novel by any stretch, but I do think it has a near perfect opening--maybe the first 100 pages are very excellent.  Then, I think, the mystery and intrigue of what is going on begins to fade, and the action that is supposed to mark the turning point of the plot ends up feeling anticlimactic.  Still, for its great opening, for its inventiveness, and for the interesting philosophical questions it poses, it is definitely worth checking out.

The story opens with Mae Holland walking onto the campus of the the Circle, which is somewhere in Silicon Valley, and seems like a hyper-driven version of the stories one hears about Google's or Facebook's headquarters.  Yes, there are great perks to working there, but then it appears to take over its employees lives completely.  Mae is 24 and had been working at a utility company as an administrative assistant or something or other until she gets up the guts to ask her college roommate, Annie, who has a high-ranking job at the Circle, if she can hook her up.  She does, and is overjoyed by the prospect of working there.  This makes the opening of the book very exciting.  And it is when Eggers is stretching his imagination to guess at what could be the next big internet thing that the book is at its best.  The Circle is essentially a social media network, but taken to a new extreme.  It is laid out during the tour by Annie, particularly when she is talking about a corny painting of the three Wise Men, who run the company:

"Ty had devised the initial system, the Unified Operating System, which combined everything online that had heretofore been separate and sloppy--users' social media profiles, their payment system, their various passwords, their e-mail accounts, user names, preferences, every last tool and manifestation of their interests.  The old way--a new transaction, a new system, for every site, for every purchase--it was like getting into a different car to run any one kind of errand.  'You shouldn't have to have eighty-seven different cars,' he'd said, later, after his system had overtaken the web and the world.
Instead, he put all of it, all of every user's needs and tools, into one pot and invented TruYou--one account, one identity, one password, one payment system, per person.  There were no more passwords, no more multiple identities.  Your devices knew who you were, and your one identity--the TruYou, unbendable and unmaskable--was the person paying, signing up, responding, viewing and reviewing, seeing and being seen.  You had to use your real name, and this was tied to your credit cards, your bank, and thus paying for anything was simple.  One button for the rest of your life online.
To use any of the Circle's tools, and they were the best tools, the most dominant and ubiquitous and free, you had to do so as yourself, as your actual self, as your TruYou.  The era of false identities, identity theft, multiple user names, complicated passwords and payment systems was over.  Anytime you wanted to see anything, use anything, comment on anything or buy anything, it was one button, one account, everything tied together and trackable and simple, all of it operable via mobile or laptop, tablet or retinal.  Once you had a single account, it carried you through every corner of the web, every portal, every pay site, everything you wanted to do.
TruYou changed the internet, in toto, within a year.  Though some sites were resistant at first, and free-internet advocates shouted about the right to be anonymous online, the TruYou wave was tidal and crushed all meaningful opposition.  It started with the commerce sites.  Why would any non-porn site want anonymous users when they could know exactly had come through the door?  Overnight, all comment boards became civil, all posters held accountable.  The trolls, who had more or less overtaken the internet, were driven back into the darkness."  (21-22)

***

It seems clear that Eggers is presenting a modern update on Orwell's 1984.  Of course, The Circle cannot touch 1984, but in one respect it prevails: the potential for our world to mirror that of the Circle's is maybe two steps away.  The societies depicted in both can also be readily defined as "surveillance states," and Mae even creates her own slogan redolent of War is Peace/Freedom is Slavery/Ignorance is Strength: Secrets are Lies/Sharing is Caring/Privacy is Theft.

What makes The Circle more than just your typical dystopian thriller is its ambiguity.  For almost the entire book, while there is certainly a dark edge to the technological innovations introduced, the reader will need to check themselves and think about whether the world imagined might actually be improved by a similar system.  This is probably why I liked the first 100 pages so much.  It functions as a fantasy, and you can really feel the excitement of obtaining a dream job.  This mood carries over into the first "Dream Friday" presentation by Eamon Bailey, one of the Wise Men.  This is for the product SeeChange, which is essentially a very small camera that runs on a battery for two years and will transmit high-quality streaming video via satellite to the Circle, which allows them to see any location in the world in real time.

"Bailey continued.  'Instead of searching the web, only to find some edited video with terrible quality, now you go to SeeChange, you type in Myanmar.  Or you type in your high school boyfriend's name.  Chances are there's someone who's set up a camera nearby, right?  Why shouldn't your curiosity about the world be rewarded?  You want to see Fiji but can't get there?  SeeChange.  You want to check on your kid at school?  SeeChange.  This is ultimate transparency.  No filter.  See everything.  Always.'" (69)

SeeChange brings the promise of instant accountability, and soon politicians opt to start wearing cameras so that anyone may watch their "backroom dealings."  There are no chapters in this book--it is separated around page 300 as "book one" and "book two."  I'm wary of spoiling the plot, but I don't think there's really much you can spoil except for a couple of events and a revelation in the last fifty pages.  These moments also feel underwhelming for some reason.  I will just say that Mae is a "newbie" at the beginning of the novel and eventually becomes one of the most important members of the company.

Along the way, The Circle does tend to run over the same ground more than a few times: what value do we attach to our privacy?  What is the endgame of true transparency?  There is also plenty of human drama: Mae's pseudo-relationship with her co-worker Francis, her mysterious lover Kalden, her parents dealing with her father's debilitating MS, her ex-boyfriend Mercer who recognizes the sinister elements in the Circle, and kayaking.  At one point Mae commits a very minor crime, and the effect it has on her professional life is not difficult to believe, but does not ring true.  Finally, one other annoying aspect of this book: the people on the internet have just become a bunch of nerdy losers who have exhaustively positive outlooks.  There isn't debate on any topic.  There is little counterpoint, except for Mae before she becomes a "convert," and Mercer, who cannot be considered a major character--though he is quite important in the plot of the novel, he only appears a handful of times.

The novel seems to hit its climax when Mae comes up with the idea of DeMoxie, which would automatically register users to vote, and result in approximately two hundred billion dollars savings in government spending:

"The night was cold and the winds were lacerating but Mae didn't notice.  Everything felt good, clean and right.  To have the validation of the Wise Men, to have perhaps pivoted the entire company in a new direction, to have, perhaps, perhaps, ensured a new level of participatory democracy--could it be that the Circle, with her new idea, might really perfect democracy?  Could she have conceived of the solution to a thousand-year-old problem?
There had been some concern, just after the meeting, about a private company taking over a very public act like voting.  But the logic of it, the savings inherent, was winning the day.  What if the schools had two hundred billion?  What if the health care system had two hundred billion?  Any number of the country's ills would be addressed or solved with that kind of savings--savings not just every four years, but some semblance of them every year.  To eliminate all costly elections, replaced by instantaneous ones, all of them nearly cost-free?" (392)

***

My third time sitting down to write this review, and I've felt strangely unsure of what to say about it.  I guess that this has been a hard review to write, because I think this book consists of genuinely interesting subject matter, but have found it difficult to highlight passages from the text, or portions of the novel I found particularly compelling.  I've written about the first 100 pages of course, but my interest began to wane and occasionally rise around page 200.  I read on for two reasons: (1) keeping my blog the way I do, I strongly dislike leaving books reviewed as "(incomplete)" and would not have put down What is the What after April 2008; (2) I wanted to know how it would end.  As I've mentioned, the ending feels a bit underwhelming.  But I'm not sure what would have been more satisfying.  Maybe the aftermath of what happens?  Like, if Mercer's imagined society, with Circlers on the one hand and rebels on the other, actually manifested themselves?  I feel the book could have been shortened and maybe added to its ending, but maybe that ending could be tough to write:

"I will always wish all good things for you, Mae.  I also hope, though I realize how unlikely it is, that somewhere down the line, when the triumphalism of you and your peers--the unrestrained Manifest Destiny of it all--goes too far and collapses into itself, that you'll regain your sense of perspective, and your humanity.  Hell, what am I saying?  It's already gone too far.  What I should say is that I await the day when some vocal minority finally rises up to say it's gone too far, and that this tool, which is far more insidious than any human invention that's come before it, must be checked, regulated, turned back, and that, most of all, we need options for opting out.  We are living in a tyrannical state now, where we are not allowed to--"(368)

That's not even the passage I was thinking about.  I guess maybe part of my problem with the book was the lack of chapters.  Basically, because The Social Network was popular, The Circle should also be made into a movie.  I think it's the type of thing that is meant to translate to film, and could lend itself to interesting interpretations (it would certainly come with visual challenges--but that's also what can make for more interesting films) that might possibly outdo the book.  I also think this isn't really the type of movie to make a lot of money, but perhaps could be marketed pretty easily to do well.

Now I want to go read AHWOSG again.

Taipei - Tao Lin (2013)

Taipei is Tao Lin's third novel, and his fourth book to be reviewed on Flying Houses.  There is a lot I could potentially write about here, but I think once I hit a certain number of books by one author on this site, I need to rank them:

#1: Taipei
#2: Shoplifting from American Apparel
#3: Eeeee Eee Eeee
#4: Richard Yates

Reading all of these past reviews, I am embarrassed.  This is actually a pretty significant milestone because the last one I reviewed was Richard Yates, and I wrote that almost exactly when I started law school.  Now I am done (and have been done for almost 11 months now) and I often say that law school did very little for me except gave me two more letters to put after my name and improved my writing.  So this will be the test.

I have corresponded with Tao a number of times over the past six years, but for some reason, I don't feel like going through the motions and asking him if he would agree to answer a few interview questions.  This is mainly because Taipei doesn't perplex me in the same manner of some his earlier material.  Taipei is, as I'm sure has already been noted, Tao Lin at his most "accessible."  To be sure, it is still "weird" in that it doesn't really concern itself with the trope of a "plot," but it is consistently his most entertaining work to date, and arguably the one most likely to inspire a film adaptation.  However, I don't think that movie would make a ton of money.  So too with this book.  While it is Lin's "major publishing house debut" (I wanted to write "major label debut" but it seemed like something I would do 4 years ago) and while I hope it earns him a greater following and more sales, it's not exactly going to be his big splash that puts him on Oprah's Book Club (I am assuming that still exists).  But it is a step towards that level of fame.

***

These asterisks signify that I have broken up this review into multiple sittings.  Crucially, this is my 3rd time sitting down to write on it over the past couple of weeks.  My 2nd time, I wrote a lot--perhaps 1,000 words--and for some reason it was not saved, even in this post-security world.  I will whine a fair amount about everything I lost, but I will construct a new rule out of this disaster: from now on, every review that I write in multiple spurts will be marked by asterisks.  It is unfair to pretend that I am as disciplined as it may appear from each post.

But I know I made a few points I want to repeat as I try to unearth the past.  I recounted the plot of Taipei:  Paul is a 26-year-old novelist in November 2009, who goes to parties in Brooklyn and then goes to visit his parents in Taipei, Taiwan.  He then returns to the U.S. and decides that the period between April and September 2010 will be an "interim" period which he has to get through until the book tour for his second novel begins.  He breaks up with his girlfriend, Michelle, during the beginning of the novel; then, he goes out with a girl named Laura for a little while; finally, he reconnects with a girl named Erin, and the story of their relationship is probably the whole point of the book being written.

It should also be fairly obvious to anyone with more than a passing interest in Tao that this book is very autobiographical, and I would say his most "personal" book yet.  I say this even though he told me that Shoplifting from American Apparel was "100% autobiographical."  I say Taipei is more personal because, while it still trades in some of the minimalist language of Tao's earlier books, it represents a leap forward stylistically along with a willingness to examine psychological interiority.  Some of the sentences are so long you could mistake this for any number of more "mainstream" authors.

As a corollary to this last point, if Tao's books are drawn from his life, then his friends are the supporting characters.  And there are a ton of supporting characters.  Here let me try to list them, excluding the three girlfriends already mentioned: Jeremy, Kyle, Gabby, Traci,  Anton, Juan, Mitch, Lucie, Amy, Daniel, Matt, Lindsay, Fran, Walter, Taryn, Caroline, Shawn Olive, Harry, Charles, Jeannie, Calvin, Maggie, Cristine, Sally, Mia, Beau, Gary, Alethia, Rodrigo, and Peanut.  From this list perhaps you can tell that this book is primarily a collection of social encounters, which act as a framing device for the three relationships.  None of the relationships is probed very deeply either, except for the one with Erin.

Thus, many of Tao's friends appear here, though I do not.  To be fair, Tao and I have only met twice.  The first time I met him is briefly referenced:

"Paul's book tour's fourth reading--after another in Brooklyn and one at a Barnes & Noble in the financial district--was in Ohio, on September 11.  Calvin, 18, and Maggie, 17, seniors in high school who'd been friends since middle school and were currently in a relationship, had invited Paul and Erin and other 'internet friends' to read at a music festival and stay two nights in Calvin's parents' 'mansion,' as Paul called it." (94)

That reading, I am reasonably sure, took place around September 9 at Book Court on Court St. in Brooklyn.  I had moved there a few weeks earlier, and one of the first pieces of mail I received was a copy of Richard Yates, which I reviewed.  I also received Think Tank for Human Beings in General  by Jordan Castro.  Many people have said that Erin is clearly Megan Boyle, but I have not seen anyone postulate that Calvin is Jordan Castro.  But those are the only two "beat" connections I can make.

Tao would not write about me because I said basically nothing to him at that reading.  He seemed to offer a glimmer of recognition when I mentioned that I ran this blog.  He was friendly, but seemed a bit distant, perhaps because he may have been on drugs.

Tao notably took magic mushrooms before a reading in San Francisco and asked readers of his blog to guess which drug he was on after posting a video of the proceedings.  This is also detailed in Taipei:

"Around two weeks later, in early October, he stayed for eights days in San Francisco in his own room, on the second floor of a house, which Daniel's ex-girlfriend and ex-girlfriend's sister shared.  An employee at Twitter invited him to its headquarters, where he ate from two different buffets.  Daniel's ex-girlfriend'sister's boyfriend sold him MDMA and mushrooms, which he ate a medium-large dose of before his reading at the Booksmith, which was livestreamed on the internet.  His publisher left him a voice mail the next afternoon, asking him to call them to discuss 'some problems.'  He emailed them late that night apologizing for missing their call and said he was available by email.  He met someone from Facebook and ingested LSD, which she declined, before watching Dave Eggers interview Judd Apatow for almost two hours in an auditorium.  On her full-size mattress, three hours after the interview, they watched a forty-minute DVD of a Rube Goldberg machine and kissed a few minutes, then Paul 'fingered' her and, after seeming to orgasm, she rolled over and slept." (110)

There are a lot of drugs in this book (primarily a lot of Adderall and Klonopin) and I noticed Tao writing more about drugs on his blog during this period.

Thus, October 1, 2011, perhaps 4 months after the date where Taipei ends, in the vestibule of the Whole Foods at Union Square, with Slutwalk and a rainstorm going on outside, I met Tao for the first time since the reading, more than a year earlier.  I asked him if he remembered me, and he said yes.  I asked him if he had really done heroin.  He said yes.  I asked him what it was like.  He said it was like a really strong painkiller.  An older woman walked by and said, "Excuse me!" I replied, "Do you know who this is?  This is the greatest writer of our generation!"  Tao said, "Don't say that."

So I am hoping that Tao will write another book (though I read an interview where he said he just wanted to write shorter books from now on) and that he will include this anecdote.  If he doesn't, then I will.

But back to this book and away from my egomania: at one point Tao mentions going to see the movie Somewhere with Erin.  For some reason, I feel this book is a lot like that movie.  It conveys a mood, a feeling, but doesn't really have much of a story.  The relationship with Erin is the main point of the book, but she doesn't appear until page 90 (out of 248).  There is a great short reference to what must be Center on Halsted, too:

"Paul sensed she was busy with college and maybe one or more vague relationships, but allowed himself to become 'obsessed,' to some degree, with her, anyways, reading all four years of her Facebook wall and, in one of Chicago's Whole Foods, one night looking at probably fifteen hundred of her friends' photos to find any she might've untagged."  (109)

There are moments of this book that seem plucked from a work of "award-winning literature," like Paul and Erin's pseudo-breakdown in Taipei, and pages 35 through 43, which recount Paul's childhood in a way that is both charming and heartbreaking.  Also, the friendship between Paul and Daniel, who seems almost like a precursor to Erin, is very nicely sketched.  Overall, this is not a perfect book, but it is definitely Tao's best.  There are six chapters, and it reads pretty quickly.  It's a good place for newcomers, but fans that have been reading from the beginning will recognize it as his strongest work, too.

Taipei may not be "about" much, but it is a pleasant story about relatively carefree days and the daily life of a quasi-famous artist.  I don't know if Tao's prose represents "the future of literature" anymore, but I still think he is at the forefront of 30 or 31-year-old authors and still writes more intellectually honest material than younger writers looking to cash in on a cinematic trilogy adaptation.  I'm sorry I didn't receive this book in the mail and review it about a year earlier, but I enjoyed reading it, and I'll look forward to whatever Tao does next.  The only question I have is why his website has been stripped back to almost nothing.

Palo Alto - James Franco

I sat on his couch and he went over to his writing desk.  He opened a drawer and pulled out a few pieces of paper. 

                “This is the first story I want to publish,” he said to me, “Think it will be easy?”

                “Because you’re already famous?”

                “Read it.  Give me your honest opinion.”

                I read it, and I liked it.  It reminded me of a few stories I had read by Richard Lange.  The protagonist was suicidal, so that was one point in its favor.  There were hints of aberrant sexuality, so that was two points.  There was a fair amount of drug use in it, so three points.  I finished it, and looked over at him, who was hunched over his coffee table, breaking up weed to put into a bong. 

                “What’s your diagnosis?”

                “I think you’ll be able to publish it.  Everyone is going to think you’re a doofus, but if they read the story it will shut them up.  I think you have the potential to be one of the most singular artists of our generation.”

                “I’m not trying to monopolize all of the entertainment mediums; I just want to improve my writing skills.  I also want more people to read literary fiction.  I think my fans already are readers—but if I can get just a few more people reading—maybe my books could snowball into others—and I could help to end this massive ignorance threatening to destroy our world.”   

                “I just want to write because it’s fun,” I said.  “I don’t expect to change the world.”

                “Bono wants to change the world,” he said.

                “Are you like Bono?”

                “I’m not bigger than Bono, but I do aspire to raise my cultural cache to his level.”

                “And that involves ending hunger, war, poverty, environmental destruction?”

                “If you have the ability to make good things like that happen, why wouldn’t you?”

                “He doesn’t have the ability,” I said, “And neither will you, and neither will I.  Obama doesn’t even have it.  Nobody can save the world now.  Apple owns the world.  Digital cable companies own the world.  Maybe Verizon owns part of the world.  The only way the world could be saved would be the disappearance of these products.”

                “I think you’re going a little overboard,” he said as he handed me the bong.  I hit it.  He did the same and then he asked me:

                “What was your favorite part of the story?”

                Random question.

                “When the guy says, ‘don’t you ever get jealous of those girls in pornos in the middle of all those dicks?’  So hilarious.” 

                He laughed, and after a beat promulgated, “That was kind of when I realized how much more freedom there is in literature.  I mean, this could be adapted into a short film, it could, but most movies don’t have dialogue like that.  I don’t like how movies make everything seem cooler and easier—I want to represent reality in its fullness.”

                “You know, I have the exact same goal.”

                “Can we stop talking about work for a second?  It’s making me nervous.” 

-"Storyteller," Part II, Chapter 5 

This is an excerpt from my third novel, which I could not complete before starting law school.  I am looking forward to returning to it in about 9 months but I am afraid it will no longer be so topical.  I felt it was useful to include this in my review of Palo Alto because it pretty much sums up the way I felt about it--that is, the way I thought I would feel about it back in April of 2010, and it was published in October 2010.

The story referenced above is "Jack-O,'" which is the final story in the collection.  This was published in Esquire in March of 2010 and it was titled "Just Before the Black" back then.  It may serve as a barometer of the general quality of all of the stories in Palo Alto: it is "pretty good."  

I stop short of calling it "excellent" for several reasons.  My primary complaint with the collection is that the narrator in (almost) every single story is affirmatively dumb.  Or, if not dumb, at least stupid or irrational in some really obvious way.  Now this is to be expected, as Franco's subject matter is, generally, adolescence. Perhaps the narrator in "Lockheed," a girl who does not like math but who is very good at math because her father tells her to be, is the most intelligent.  She works at Lockheed Martin for a summer internship and her job sounds exactly like the type of thing that high school interns would do:

"My job was to watch old film reels of the moon.  There were hundreds.  I worked in a cold, windowless basement.  The reels would run from one spool to another on this old machine that looked like a tank.  I was supposed to record blemishes and splices in the film.  Sometimes the moon was full; sometimes it would get a little more full as I watched.  Sometimes the film was scratched so badly it skipped, or it broke.  I was in the basement forty hours a week.  I watched so many moons."  (15)

She starts to get bored and starts drawing while she does her moon studies at Lockheed.  She works for a man named Jan, and he notices that she has been making some drawings, but does not seem to care.  Later, he offers her an anecdote that is probably one of the better pieces of "advice" in the book:

"'I did these when I was at school,' he said.  'I wanted to be artist.  But it was no good.  It is no good to be artist.  I practiced every day, eight hours a day.  Then I could draw like Michelangelo.  Then what?  There is already Michelangelo.  I realized there was nothing more to do.  In science, there is always more to learn.  Always more.'

I didn't look at him; I looked at his pictures.  I felt very lonely.  I pictured him and his wife, alone at a long table, eating some bland Swedish food, not talking.  The only sounds were from the utensils hitting the plates, and the squish of their gentle chewing.

'So, he said, 'You see.'  He reached over and shut the portfolio to punctuate the 'You see,' but I didn't know what to see.  Then I looked at him.  He stood there and looked at me.  We were so awkward."  (16-17)

Later she witnesses some kind of fight at a party at a kid's house in Menlo Park.  The fight is the "climax" of the story, and is fairly well-done.  "Lockheed" is thus one of the better stories in the collection.

But if forced to pick the absolute best, I would have to say that "April" a 3-part story that is 33 pages long, is the best in the collection.  "I Could Kill Someone," while suffering from perhaps the worst title in the book, comes next in terms of quality (I know it can be hard to give good titles to things and so I am forgiving when it comes to that aspect of creative writing).  Finally, "Chinatown," another 3-part story, though only 16 pages long, fills out the top three in the collection (a mon avis, bien sur).

If you add up the content of those stories (and include "Lockheed") then it is about 85 pages and the book is 195 pages long.  So that is another reason I say the book is "pretty good" (if 170 pages were of this quality it would be "excellent").  But it is very important to point out that I read this entire book in one day.  And it is also striking that I took it out from the Brooklyn Public Library (the day I got my card) along with The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis, another book I similarly read quickly on an airplane trip (that one from NYC to Paris; this one from NYC to Denver).  

There is a very strong connection between these two books, and it is almost as if Franco's characters are the same as in The Rules of Attraction--just a few years younger, a little bit dumber, and generally from poorer families (Palo Alto does not equal Beverly Hills, or the other rich suburban L.A. upbringings of Easton's characters).  

In fact, one of the "praise" quotes on the back spells this out further--Ben Marcus wrote, "Think Bret Easton Ellis, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker.  Or better yet, just think James Franco."

I will admit that I once purchased Ash Wednesday by Ethan Hawke (at the Printer's Row Book Fair in Chicago at a discount) and would like to use a line that my younger brother suggested, but I cannot.  Without having read that book, though I would say Ethan Hawke is, myyyyyyyyyyyyyyy second favorite fiction writer-cum-actor.

A couple quotes before ending this review seem fitting, or else people may still continue to write off this "second career" as an exercise in pure dilettantism.  It is important to note at this time, when the debate on "school violence" is peaking, that Franco seems to hit at the very core of the problem in more than one story.  While I have previously suggested that the Internet is to blame for every ill that has felled our society over the past dozen or so years, Franco's story takes place in the pre-Internet era.  And while I certainly appreciate the references to Street Fighter II, The Legend of Zelda, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, "gangster rap," Menace 2 Society and Boys in the Hood, and other influential artifacts of the 80s-90s, Franco shows that my explanation is far too simple-minded to be taken seriously:

"This is Brent's joke: 'What's the difference between a faggot and shit?' I didn't know the answer.  'Nothing, you fucking faggot.'  He told that joke one time, and then kicked my foot to trip me into dog shit on the quad lawn.  I didn't fall, but everyone thought it was funny.  

Brent says I'm a faggot because I quit the football team freshman year.  I asked him about it and that's when we had our first little scene.  

'You think I'm a fag because I quit the team?' I said.

He stopped.  He had his usual black San Diego Chargers hat on backward.  His long face looked suprised, and the one stoned-looking eye opened a little bit more.

'You are a fucking fag,' he said.  He looked like he was getting a little emotional about it.  I could see it in his retarded eyes.

'Why do you think that?' I said, and my voice trembled.

'I don't think it, you are!'  Then he walked off.  It's weird, but I think it's because he was going to cry.  After that he always called me a faggot."

"After the locker room I decided that Brent needed to die.  He was never going to get smarter, and he was a bigot.  And I couldn't stop thinking about his acne-corroded flesh being opened, and his thin racist blood matting the hair of his beastly body.

I was standing over near the underpass next to the school where people smoked.  Some people called it the Bat Cave.  

'You really want one?' said Barry.  Barry was my friend.  He was chubby and lovable, and Mormon, and smoked pot and loved John Bonham.

'Yes,' I said.  'I want one.'

I wanted a gun.

Barry couldn't get me one, but he knew a guy who could." (170-171)

The story does not have a happy ending or a sad one, and fails to provide any easy answers.  But it is clear that the stupidity of teenagers--going both ways in terms of typical bigotry and the other in terms of intellectual snobbery--is a serious problem that is not easily solved, though the increased awareness of the devastating effects of bullying and the passage of criminal laws on the matter have been steps in the right direction.  

There is still, however, the problem of simply "giving up" and taking others down with you:

"'What do you think about that suicide?' I said.

'I think the parents made him do it,' said Teddy.

'He was Asian,' said Ivan.  He was on the other side of Teddy and I couldn't see him.

'What does that mean?' I said.

'That they worked his ass like crazy and pressured the shit out of him.'

'Do you think it hurt?' I said.

'For a second,' said Teddy.  'But if it's all going to be over anyway, then why does it matter?  Pain only matters if it's prolonged.'  Ivan was sucking long on the joint, then he said, 'If I was going to kill myself, I wouldn't waste it.  I would do a bunch of crazy shit first.  Maybe kill some people I didn't like and take 'em with me.' 

We all thought about that.  Then I said, 'Wouldn't it be better to do a bunch of crazy good things before you died instead of killing people?'

'Like what?' said Teddy.

'I don't know.  Give your life to save a bunch of kids or something.'

'But that's what you're supposed to do every day, not if you're suicidal,' he said.  'If you're suicidal you're probably only thinking of yourself.'

I drank the syrupy alcohol.  

'I try to be good,' I said.

'Me too,' said Teddy.

'Fuck good people,' said Ivan, and we laughed.  

We finished the joint and I gave them both cigarettes.  The stars were dots between the branches.  On the other side of Teddy, Ivan started carving in the tree with a knife.  He carved SUICIDE RULZ.  Teddy was next and wrote FUCK GUNN.  They told me I had to write something.  

'I feel bad, the tree is so old.'

'Fuck you, said Ivan. 'Do it.'

I drew a heart.  It was hard to make it round because of the bark, so it was jagged on one side." (137-138)

In summary, I have to say that this book is "pretty good"--but maybe even a little better than that.  Though it was not "excellent" and I am not going to run around telling everybody that Franco is the greatest living American artist in his prime, I do have to say that he is certainly one of the most interesting.  And I am very happy that our works seems to coalesce.  The quotation above from my incomplete third novel, and the tangent that the novel goes on, were not made without considered judgment.  Palo Alto is a collection of "linked" short stories that could be a novel if it wanted to be--not unlike my first novel.  It has taught me that my first novel is not a total failure, but could be much more "digestible" if converted into something of a similar product.  My second novel basically deals with the same themes as Palo Alto and attempts to portray the same "period" of psychological development.  Moreover this book is a paean to the community in which he was raised, as is S/M.  And the third novel posits the life I might have led if I had gotten into the MFA program at Columbia and entered in the Fall of 2007, when it was certainly possible that Franco could have been my classmate (or friend).  

I hope that he continues to write because it is important for people to realize that subjective human experiences are not always best told through the objective lens of a camera.  It is also clear that Franco has a  very good sense of humor about himself, which is important in an undertaking such as this:

"'Picasso started off painting in a classical style, but it was only after he had mastered the masters that he broke tradition and became Picasso.  He knew he had all the skill of Raphael at age sixteen, but that wasn't enough.  Technical skill is never enough.  He needed to find his voice.  We all have a voice or a style, but it takes practice, practice to find it.  The technical stuff needs to become second nature.'  Everyone agreed with this part too.  Wilson said quietly to me, 'You remind me of Sylvester Stallone.'  I stopped drawing.  Wilson went on: 'I used to go to art classes with him.  He was always trying to break away from classical form.' 

One of the ladies spoke up.  'Sylvester Stallone, the actor?'

'That's right.  He's a huge art enthusiast and not a bad artist either.'  Everyone was surprised and talked about it for a bit.  Someone said that underneath all that muscle he was actually a really intelligent guy.  'He did write Rocky, after all.'" (122-123)

Stallone did receive his BFA from the University of Miami in 1999, but this excerpt may be apocryphal.  Regardless, Franco's enthusiasm for literature is not likely to be questioned by anyone.  Though I would not be surprised if I am in the minority in my praise of this work.  I judge it according to the standards of my former classmates in creative writing classes.  If one of them had submitted such materials, I would have put them in the class of the top three or four (among the 70 or 80 total) that deserved to have their work published.  Unfortunately, not all of us have the advantage of taking classes taught by Amy Hempel, Michael Cunningham, Gary Shteyngart, Jonathan Lethem, or Dave Eggers.  Or Joyce Carol Oates for that matter....