NYTBR Picks Best Books

So, not that any of the fiction titles on the list should surprise anyone, they all had great reviews and were all generally well received. What makes the list remarkable is that it doesn't include any of the big-hitters who had books out this year. No Philip Roth, no Don DeLillo, no Richard Russo, not even Alice Munro or Michael Chabon. The only real surprise here might be the Michael Thomas title. As far as the non-fiction goes, this should just reinforce that Emerald City and The Nine are both worth reading. Anyway, more titles to add to my wish list.

Fiction
MAN GONE DOWN By Michael Thomas.
OUT STEALING HORSES By Per Petterson.
THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES By Roberto Bolaño.
THEN WE CAME TO THE END By Joshua Ferris.
TREE OF SMOKE By Denis Johnson.

Nonfiction
IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY: Inside Iraq's Green Zone By Rajiv Chandrasekaran.
LITTLE HEATHENS: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression. By Mildred Armstrong Kalish.
THE NINE: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court By Jeffrey Toobin.
THE ORDEAL OF ELIZABETH MARSH: A Woman in World History By Linda Colley.
THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth Century By Alex Ross.

Book Review: A Stranger on Earth

A Stranger on Earth: The Life and Work of Anna Kavan by Jeremy Reed

Let me say first that Jeremy Reed annoys me. Every time I turn around it seems he's written another book on a subject in which I am interested. From my desk I see two of his books on my shelves (Chasing Black Rainbows about Antonin Artaud and Delirium about Rimbaud), so I'm familiar with his work. But when I saw that he'd put out a book about Anna Kavan, someone hose work is relatively obscure, about whom there hadn't been a single book written when I first discovered her, I was annoyed. I've read David Callard's biography The Case of Anna Kavan, and she remained a mystery. I'd always imagined myself going down to the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa and pouring over her papers and fashioning my own biography of Anna Kavan. But then there's Jeremy Reed.

Reed is not an objective biographer, and that's okay with me. He clearly is impressed with Kavan's work and for someone who praises her work ever chance I get, I was happy to see someone else fawn over her phrases and to be enamoured with her character. He doesn't show her, though, from only one side. Reed, in fact, spends a fair amount of time on her problems with social interaction. She clearly had difficulty with people, though at times her circle of friends was quite large. Reed also charts the course that her writing took over the years, from writing, as Helen Ferguson, plain and not altogether really imaginative books, to the split with her former self, renaming herself Anna Kavan after one of her characters, and writing extremely imaginative, sometimes nightmarish, sometimes fantastical, always fantastic fiction. And he places it all within her biography, even getting into the difficulties she had at times with publishers and editors.

It is impossible to talk very long about Kavan without mentioning her life-long heroin habit. I'll call it habit over addiction because by all accounts she was in control over her use. Reed reasons her drug use as a mechanism for facing the world, for moderating her emotion. This is understandable. Self-medication is a method of coping for many creative types. It is this drug use that leads to her cult attraction. And one can easily wonder whether the drug is responsible for what is other worldly in her writing. I see her drug use as more than a tool for controlling her emotions, for keeping herself and the world in check. It was a method of escape. Just like the fast cars in her stories "Out and Away" and "Fog," it was a way of getting away, of escaping the real world. And so I think some of her writing came directly out of heroin use, which of course comes from an infinitely perceptive and creative personality.

Jeremy Reed seems extremely proud of himself. He spends time expounding on the drugs, clothes and music of sixties London with a time that says "I know all of this and more. And you don't." And much of these sorts of details are irrelevant to Kavan, being as she was cut off from the world outside her door. Reed also spends too much time focused on the fact that most of the men who Kavan kept as friends were homosexuals. While it is understandable that she might be drawn to these sorts of friendships out of safety, to avoid the men of the past, as a reader I'm not much interested in the sexuality, nor the style of dress, of her companions.

A cause for greater concern in this text, greater than my own dislike for Reed's focus at times, is his lifting from the work of others. As noted by Jennifer Sturm, credited in the acknowledgments of this biography and author of the introduction to Kavan's Guilty, in the comments of this blog, Reed appears to have pulled some things nearly verbatim from Sturm's work. In her essay, Anna Kavan Meets a New Zealand Writer on his Special Day, published in Kōtare, Sturm writes:

The couple forged a relationship in England in 1939, when Hamilton’s sister Margery began an affair with Kavan’s husband, Stuart Edmonds.

Reed writes:

In 1939 Anna met Ian Hamilton, with whom she was to travel extensively in the early war years, when Hamilton's sister Margery began an affair with Stuart Edmonds.

Sturm writes:

Hamilton was an expatriate Englishman who had travelled back to his homeland hoping to achieve some success with his anti-war three-act play Falls The Shadow , prophetically written in 1936....

Reed writes:

The conscientious objector Hamilton was an English expatriate who had returned to his birthplace from New Zealand hoping to score a hit with his anti-war three-act play Falls The Shadow, a work he had written in 1936....

Bothersome. I have to wonder if Reed didn't approach other sources in the same fashion.

As bothersome and annoying this biography was at times, I found it both illuminating and inspiring. I learned much that was not previously available about Kavan and her life, including details of her writing process, and it makes me want to re-read all of her work. Maybe next year.

What I'm Thankful For

National Book Award winners on NPR

NPR has a nice podcast of readings from the winners of the National Book Award. Damn that Denis Johnson book sounds good.

Also on NPR, Remembering the Turbulent Life of a 'Gonzo' Writer, interviews about Hunter S. Thompson.

Denis Johnson wins National Book Award - Yahoo! News

Congrats to Denis Johnson and his new novel Tree of Smoke for winning the National Book Award. This one is on my wish list, despite how difficult the NY Review of Books made it sound. I know it's no Jesus' Son, but obviously there are some things to like about it.

'Tree of Smoke' wins National Book Award - Yahoo! News

R.I.P. Ira Levin

The world would be a different place without Rosemary's Baby. Of course some credit goes to Roman Polansky.

Novelist, playwright Ira Levin dead at 78: Yahoo! News

R.I.P. Norman Mailer

I swear I'll get around to The Naked and the Dead at some point.

Author Norman Mailer dies at 84: Guardian Unlimited

Book Review: Guilty

Guilty by Anna Kavan

The full manuscript of this novel was found among her papers in Tulsa, the library I'd been itching to get to from the moment I learned they were there. It is, though, not the best novel. I've read some of her work that didn't move me, but others are among the best books I've ever read. This one, though, is worse than unmoving. It is not fleshed out. It reads like a quick first draft. The first-person narration is distant, as if told from some far-off, removed location, long after the issues raised have been settled. While scenes are described in this way, we are never given that feeling of being there.

Maybe this impression comes from a bias. It is easy to believe that the pages put together to form this new "found" novel are not pages that Kavan ever intended to be published. It is easy to assume that these were not finished pages, the manuscript not a completed whole. The novel's introduction, by Jennifer Sturm (whose has commented here previously) , does an excellent job as serving as a Kavan primer and properly placing this novel among her others. What I want to hear is a little history, though. Had this manuscript ever passed before the eyes of any editors? Anyone at all? Peter Owen, her publisher, was also a good friend. Do we really think she would have had trouble getting anything of which she was proud published? My suspicion was that this book was one of those bottom-drawer manuscripts, ones we think we'll get back to, edit, and revise into the masterpiece we intended it to be.

The novel does redeem itself, though. Despite, the fact that Kavan relies here on a fever for the narrator's mind to loosen, for things to become surreal and ominous, the effect at times is in full force, the images precise and moving. The ending is saved from the downward spiral we see in much of Kavan's work, and realizations reached are realistic and believable. Some might say that a sort of tacked-on revelation happens here, but what I read was heart-felt.

I would hate, despite what I've said here, for this review to turn readers away from Anna Kavan. Her work is mostly brilliant. Even her earlier "county novels" display enough insight and terror to make them worthwhile. Her collections Asylum Piece and Julia and the Bazooka are indispensable.

Movie Review: Into The Wild

Into The Wild

I had been holding off writing a review of this movie to give people enough time to see the limited release film before I colored anyone's view of the thing.

I usually like movies where the central character rejects society and ends up paying for it in some way with his life. But usually these people are artists, writers, musicians. I expected to like the movie despite the flaws in Krakauer's book. I was looking forward to seeing McCandless's story brought to life, McCandless given real and convincing characterization, but like the New Yorker explains, "Penn shoots the movie, however, in a facile, commercially lyrical style—he can’t stop swirling around mountaintops, as if he were selling S.U.V.s."

And these sorts of movies tend to be pretty melodramatic (think The Doors) and maybe incidentally campy. When I was younger and self destructive myself, I probably would have liked Into The Wild never the less. Director Sean Penn fails to see what was tragic in this story, emphasizing instead the beautiful and scenic. It is the innocence and naivete that makes McCandless's story compelling. But as the New Yorker said, "McCandless didn’t experience enough of life for his rejection of it to carry much weight, and Penn can’t see the egocentricity in a revolt that was as naïve as it was grandly self-destructive."

Into The Wild is worth seeing, and it makes you want to get out of doors, but as Krakauer's book failed, Penn's moving leaves us feeling a little silly for even caring.