Eschewing TV, month five, part one

I figure I'll last until Lost starts up again, anyway.

The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
I found some of the neologisms and original-description-at-any-cost-isms jarring and precious. I don't remember the particular examples, but things along the lines of "She had an expression in her eyes like parboiled potatoes" -- I just remember thinking "nope, don't have a clue what to imagine, here." But damned if other passages in the book don't linger in my mind more vividly than most other things I've read recently. Not the characters so much, though I appreciated them -- and all the more so for being able to appreciate them without liking them; that's a sign of a well-drawn character -- but of places, and moods in places. I've never really "gotten" what I tend to think of as "land-based novelists," even after escorting one (a very difficult one) through Gujarat. But I might try another one, after this experience. Er, reading them, that is.

The White Masai, Corinne Hofmann
True story: I thumbed through this book in a store in Munich, thought it looked interesting, but not interesting enough in a how-many-dollars-to-the-Euro? way. Recently, I wanted to find it in the library, but couldn't remember the author, the title, or any part of the title, other than that it was about a German woman who married a tribesman while on holiday in Kenya. So I picked up a "story of food"-type book that's popular these days, and which K inexplicably likes, and opened it right to someone else's old checkout slip for "The White Masai." Cool! (I also borrowed the food book, on the premise that the last person to take it out had also sought out something else I was interested in, but found it intolerably boring. K liked it well enough.) I won't say much about TWM right now, other than that it's the tale of someone who went to a difficult and very foreign place, and, George-Costanza-like, did every little thing exactly opposite to what I did and would have done, and still met with howls of racism. Interesting, huh? This will be the topic of a future post...

The Last of Her Kind, Sigrid Nunez
Really didn't understand all the fuss. I picked it up because it appeared in some NYT article about what all the trendy young authors are reading right now; can't remember who endorsed this one. It's a well-well-WELL-worn tale of sixties radicalism in which one character escapes her blue-collar roots, and the other never quite escapes being a caricature. Next.

No Excuses, Robert Shrum
I'm not big on non-fiction. It's K who settles in with these massive, dense tomes on history and actually charts a course through them; I watch with awe and envy. I have no attention span. If it doesn't do something fanciful on the first page, it never makes it off the bedside table. I forced my slow, painful way through this book because I thought it would be good for me, and I probably ended up turning half the pages while vacantly daydreaming (the expression in my eyes, no doubt, like parboiled potatoes), and the whole experience was rather unpleasantly medicinal. For a guy who made/makes his living with words, Shrum seems to have a strange aversion to employing, say, a style. The writing had a weirdly flat-but-chipper tone that narrated events and even emotions and reactions in a solidly matter-of-fact way that kept everything at arm's length. I felt as though I were walking through the snake house at the zoo, with everything behind thick glass, reading the blurbs on the wall. I'm not a fan of rule-based criticism, but I suppose I can generally endorse the dictum that a good story should teach you something, even if that something is along the lines of "what it's like to be a Bangladeshi immigrant" (actually, those are some of my favorite stories). What did I learn from this book? Certainly not "what it's like to be Bob Shrum." That John Edwards doesn't like gays, perhaps, and is like a Bill Clinton who never did the required reading. That's useful, but not useful enough to justify the time I spent with this.

A further disturbing thought: I've often shorthanded the sorts of people who excel in my line of work as "Labradors" -- you know, doggily enthusiastic and respectful of authority and loyal, at least in their public persona, and smart but pretty well determined not to use their brains. And I've clung to the notion that Labradors are born, not made, and self-select to my career. But while, I think, Shrum can't possibly be a Labrador, his writing has pawprints all over it; in fact, it is canine verbiage par excellence. I'm not sure that kind of command of the niche's nuances could be faked; it suggests a man who has had doghood thrust upon him. This leaves me with yet another worry about my current career path. In my undergraduate days, there was a bumper crop of actual Labradors, vaguely owned, lolling about the lawns. One wag (so to speak) pointed out in the student newspaper the positive linear correlation among duration of student residency, student (male and female) hirsuteness, and number of dogs. The next day, the following graffito, artistically inked, appeared above the doors to the student union: "Leave now, or leave on all fours."

Indeed.