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Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem

(#3 of 2010) I just finished Lethem's latest novel, which is particularly interesting given Apple's release of the iPad. Before I get to that however, can I just remark what a beautifiully written novel it is? It's almost irrelevant, what it's about, thanks to the freshness of the prose. Just read the frickin' thing. Do it. Go out there and get it. The story involves Chase Insteadman, a New Yorker adrift thanks to an event that's happened  to the girl he loves. The change-up prompts him to develop a friendship with an eccentric former rock critic, Perkus Tooth, and the novel chronicles developments in Insteadman's life as he immerses himself in Tooth's strange world.

I was struck by the similarity to Joseph O'Neil's Netherland, another novel about a man in New York, adrift. But Lethem's work is crammed with more ideas than Netherland. The reality of Chronic City is slightly nudged from our own; lower Manhattan is covered in a permanent fog; a tiger roams the island, and in the last 100 pages or so there's some indication the World Trade Center still stands. As an idea-packed satire of contemporary society, Lethem's novel has a forebear in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which gets a backhanded nod in Chronic City. Except while Jest's thousand-page point was an exercise in  experimental storytelling, an investigation into the length a book could proceed without the catharsis of an ending, Chronic City feels more satisfying because things happen within its pages. Chase changes. He grows. There are epiphanies and transformations and deaths.

So it's quirkier than Netherland and less ambitious but more satisfying than Infinite Jest. Another forebear is Money, by a Martin Amis at the height of his powers. If Amis was examining Western society amid all the greed of the '80s, and concluding that we were losing ourselves in our all-consuming desire, then Lethem seems to be making a similar conclusion about how we're living today--but now, a different cause has loosened our mooring. Today, Lethem observes, money is almost beside the point. With access to any entertainment, anytime we like, as much as we like, what obsesses us today is a task that's much different from acquiring money. Rather, it's staying centred, staying real, staying in touch with some level of tactile truth, with reality, amid all the various ways we have to access story. 

Chronic City is particularly interesting in light of the iPad. Books are the artifacts I feel closest to. I didn't mind when music was digitized, because I didn't have any emotional ties to CDs. Nor did I miss DVDs when I quit buying those over-designed rectangular boxes, preferring instead to just download movies onto my hard-drive. Now that books are getting digitized, now that books seem likely to evaporate from real-world objects into strings of ones and zeroes, I'm ready to say, hold on a second. I'm not ready to give up books so easily. Stacked bookshelves in my family room and in the walls of my bedroom mean I'm surrounded by things, things that remind me of stories I've loved, things that inspire me to do my best writing, things, the mere sight of which can suggest new ideas. The bookshelves in my house have started some great conversations. Guests can browse them. They can remark about books the shelves contain, and next thing we're talking about our shared love, say, of Elmore Leonard or Kingsley Amis.

As more and more of our culture dissolves from actual stuff to digital bits, I'm starting to feel nostalgic for these artifacts of the real, what Lethem refers to as "harmless signifiers of our past selves." Later, Lethem writes of a character who "could imagine spadefuls of earth dropping onto a casket where everything that had ever been relevant to him was being quietly buried." I've been feeling like that, lately. There's a great bit in Chronic City when Insteadman and Tooth and their friends get obsessed with mysterious objets d'art called chaldrons, which are valuable partly because they possess what Lethem calls "thingliness" -- that is, they suggest adherence to a reality somehow more real than the reality that surrounds us. The iPad, and the sense that these books I've been accumulating for years will soon be obsolete, has me sympathizing with the book's chaldron-seekers. Thingliness is a thing I crave, too.

Oh, one last thing—actually an idea that occurred to me because I spied a book on my shelf.  I just got around to reading the essay by Katie Roiphe published Jan. 3 in the New York Times Book Review, about the different approaches to writing about sex used by great American male writers from two different eras. She mentions Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updike and Norman Mailer in the one group. On the younger side, she groups together Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers and Benjamin Kunkel. The gist of the essay is that today's brawny storytellers  are nearly neutered when it comes to writing about sex, an argument that's difficult to contradict. What does trouble me is her list of "great" American novelists from the more recent era. Franzen, Foster Wallace: Fine. Michael Chabon? Maybe. But Dave Eggers? I don't think he's yet written a truly great novel. And the jury's still out on Kunkel—I liked Indecision but didn't think it was oh-my-god-amazing. Roiphe didn't include Jonathan Lethem in her group. In light of the remarkable work that is Chronic City, on top of Motherless Brooklyn? He should have been in there. Also missed, I think, was Jeffrey Eugenides, the Detroit-born writer whose two novels (Virgin Suicides and Middlesex) rank with anything done by Eggers, Chabon and Kunkel. (What brought this up? The book review in my hand, I passed my bookshelf and happened to spy Middlesex. Would that have happened had I stored all my books on an iPad? I wonder.)

Booklist 2010

A long time ago someone told me you had to read 20 books a year to qualify as an avid reader. As arbitrary waymarks go, this one has stuck with me, and so I was a little troubled late last year when I realized I would only get to 18 books in 2009. I have some excuses. The number includes two Dickens tomes, David Copperfield and Great Expectations. And it doesn't include the two long-ass graphic novel series I ploughed through as well -- the five-volume Scott Pilgrim series and seven of the nine-volume Bone series by Jeff Smith. Plus there are those two young whippersnappers occupying much of my attention.

But Shulgan, come on. The fact is, now that you're straight edge it's not like you have a social life to keep you from your reading. You've been spending too much time watching television shows like The Wire and Curb Your Enthusiasm. You've been watching too many movies, too. As a writer you have to make books your priority. Alright, enough with the oblique form of address. One of my major resolutions this year is to read more. I hereby resolve to demolish the 20-book waymark and to achieve 30 books this year. At least 30. Do I hear 40? Come on Shulgan, you can do it!

Over the last couple of years I've tracked my reading over at my community page at the Chapters/Indigo web site. I'm going to stop that because too often what I read is out-of-print. Plus, does anyone actually read those community pages? From now on I'll just provide quick reviews on the books I've read at this blog.

Here, then, are capsule reviews of the two books I've read thus far in 2010. 

1. Lit by Mary Karr

I didn't know much about Karr before I saw her memoir listed on the New York Times' list of the 10 best books of 2009. "A master-class in memoir writing," they called it, and as someone in the final stages of revising my own memoir (due out October 2010), and as someone also who tends to poach the NY Times 10-best list anyway, I thought, well, why not. I would say I was a little disappointed. The book feels very insidery. It seems as though it was written for those who had read Karr's two earlier memoirs and then wondered how things ended. And because I hadn't read her two earlier memoirs, a lot of the stuff failed to resonate with me. That said, I enjoyed reading about Karr's trip toward sobriety. I quit drinking a while back and I soaked up how important her sobriety group was to her continued, uh, sobriety.

2. Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line by Ben Hamper

This is one of the best-written books I've read in a while. I loved it. Essentially it's just a straight recounting of the decade or so that Hamper spent as a line worker at a GM plant in Flint, Michigan. I read it as research for a project I'm working on about Detroit. What distinguishes this book is Hamper's voice. He uses hyperbole as adroitly as Twain or, more recently, Hunter S. Thompson. And how frequently do you encounter literary merit combined with authenticity? Interestingly, Hamper got his start at Michael Moore's indy paper, the Flint Voice. And Hamper's quest to go bowling with former GM chair Roger Smith predates Moore's own stalking of Smith as chronicled in Moore's first film, Roger and Me. The book was written in 1991; Hamper maintains a web presence here but it's a shame he hasn't produced more verbiage in book form. This decade could use the Rivethead.

While Natalie's Been At School

Since the start of September, Natalie's been wickedly busy getting through the intense first semester of a two-year program for former labour and delivery nurses who want to become midwives. The good thing about this is that in a year and a half she'll be a midwife. And the bad thing, or what I at first thought was a bad thing, is that it left most of the childcare responsibilities with me.

Most days, it was me getting them ready for school and it was me picking them up after school and it was me figuring out what to do until dinner and getting everybody ready for bed and reading the bedtime story and, usually, falling asleep next to them, and when Natalie returned from her night class or her anatomy lab in Hamilton or her late-night study sessions that's how she'd find us, her husband and her two kids flaked out on the king-size bed.

Natalie is a gifted multi-tasker. I am not. I have to focus on one thing in order to get it done and the thing about childcare is that you have to be able to multi-task, you're in the middle of getting on the mittens when the other one spills the apple juice and then there's a tantrum about boots-wearing and meanwhile if you're getting them to school on time it means you forgot the mittens or some other article of winter wear.

The family collectively got a little crazy through September and into October. 

And then those mornings started getting routine. The three of us, my two kids and I, we fell into our roles and got to know each other and how to live together as a trio. For example, going home after school for snack often meant we didn't leave the house again which meant bedtime was a disaster and so I learned I had to bring the snack with me for the pick-up and then start the afternoon activity pretty much immediately. 

We spent a lot of time in Trinity-Bellwoods Park, or in Kensington Market trying on the sunglasses and ordering the usual at Big Fat Burrito, or at Mountain Equipment Co-op with our shoes off playing in the second-floor tent section.

I went on a school field trip with them, apple-picking a long bus ride north of Toronto.

The apples were pretty' good.

It happens slowly, coming into your own as a dad. You spend a couple of years feeling like you're barely keeping it together and then if you're lucky, something happens.

Like your wife goes back to school.

As I'm typing this Natalie is writing her final exam of the semester. She's in Hamilton. She'll get on a Go Train and come back into Toronto and next semester is supposed to be a hell of a lot easier and so when she gets home we have her back, it'll be the four of us again.

Turns out I really enjoyed my semester as a single parent. Recently my daughter woke up in the night, wailing, and I raced upstairs and scooped her up and instead of looking around for mom or looking into my eyes to ask where's mom, she wriggled her hips into my arms and calmed down. I calmed her down. Me.

Thanks Nater.

Indy Coffee Shops, Starbucks and One Final Raymi

Getting Killed By Raymi the Minx

Earlier this week someone threatened to put a flaming bag of shit on my door stoop. It's been a while since that happened. It all started on Wednesday when I called Lauren White, the 26-year-old blogger better known as Raymi the Minx. I wanted to interview her. She said yes, and we made arrangements to meet up the next day for lunch. What seemed like seconds later, my editor e-mailed me. "You've already been blogged, my friend," he wrote. Lauren had posted it on her site: "the globe and mail is coming by tomorrow... i better watch my mouth."

I love that image—as though the whole of the Globe and Mail was going to Burlington to do the interview. Which may be what she expected to happen.

As it was, Stackhouse stayed on Front Street. What interested me about Lauren was ancillary to a major development in her life. It was clear that she had broken up with her fiancé. What was surprising was that this woman who blogged about the most banal details of her life, including photographing her meals, had opted not to mention this enormous life change. If you maintain a much-followed blog that purports to record the details of your life, don't you have a duty to at least include a line or two? "Hey guys, I broke up with my fiancé, I don't want to talk about it." 

But during our interview, I discovered that Ms. White didn't feel she had to. She conceived of Raymi the Minx as a character, she explained. As a more extreme version of Lauren White. And I quoted her saying as much in the Globe and Mail story I wrote.

Lauren reacted poorly to the article. She didn't like it. For example, she didn't like that I quoted Hal Niedzviecki saying that she didn't have any talent. I disagree with that, by the way; I think she's an enormously disciplined and talented blogger. Her followers liked it even less; for my apparent misdeed, one of them vowed to place the aforementioned offal on my doorstep. (In her comments section. To which I reply: Please don't.) Oh, and then there's the message Tyler Stewart of the Barenaked Ladies sent to Ms. White, dissing the article as well as the Globe and Mail. Geez. I think it means something when the Barenaked Ladies diss you. What, I'm not sure. But something. It means something.

Anyway, what I wasn't able to fit into the article, was my opinion on the whole mess. Which is this: I think Lauren is being hypocritical. And I think she knows it. I think she knows that not telling her readers about her break-up was weak and spineless. People don't interpret her blog as being about a character. People interpret her blog as being about her—as an honest and relatively unfiltered account of her life. That's why it's so captivating.

Lauren, if Raymi the Minx is about a character, then why would I read it? No one reads blogs about fictional characters. Because there are thousands of blogs out there that are about real people—real people who allow their readers into all the fucked-up, confusing events in their lives. Lauren, not blogging about your break-up was beneath you. Your blog is a remarkable account of a young woman's life in post-millennial Canada. One of these days, anthropologists may study it.

Raymi the Minx has been boring the past little while, perhaps because you've begun to conceive of Raymi as this character separate from yourself. Knock yourself upside the head and go back to thinking of Raymi as the honest online version of your life. Make it as raw as it used to be, before you met Phil. And admit that it's not about a character. It's about you. You messed up when you didn't blog about your break-up, you should tell your readers. You do have a duty to be honest. And in the future, you're going to do better.

And remember: Please no flaming bags.

Note on the above photo: Lauren posted it on her site, which is fine, because the shot was taken on her camera. But I'm the one who actually shot that photo, so I figure I have as much a right to post it as she does.