The Megahearted George Saunders...

On endings, beginnings, megaphones, essays, compassion, disgruntled dogs, immigration, and lonely bookmarks:

Last week's Booking Through Thursday question was:

You’ve just reached the end of a book . . . what do you do now? Savor and muse over the book? Dive right into the next one? Go take the dog for a walk, the kids to the park, before even thinking about the next book you’re going to read? What?

(Obviously, there can be more than one answer, here–a book with a cliff-hanger is going to engender different reactions than a serene, stand-alone, but you get the idea!)

I thought this question would be especially pertinent today since I finished a book last evening: THE BRAINDEAD MEGAPHONE by George Saunders. What did I do after I finished it? Well, a number of things, actually. The first of which was to restrain myself from going back to page 1 and beginning all over again, which usually means I enjoyed myself a great deal. I did. On a very random whim - and I do mean random - I pulled this book from my shelf on Monday. It wasn't as if I didn't have other things to read, nor was it as if I wasn't already in the middle of reading five other books. But as it happens from time to time, this book started calling to me from the shelf and my lack of resistance when it comes to beckoning books is well-documented by now.

For four nights and three days I engrossed myself in Saunders compassion, his empathy, his humorous prose, and his transparent love for and undying faith in humanity. Before I began this book, I already had a full-fledged literary crush on Saunders - now it's unabashed love. Any writer who can go from embodying the voice of a disgruntled dog contemplating biting off the "various hangie-down things" of his master because --

There are times, deep in the night, when you have been "tippling" and/or "imbibing" and/or "getting pershnockered," when, perchance overwhelmed by joy (I hope it is joy, and not something darker), you shed your puzzling overskin and stand in the kitchen, moving hips and all, to that melange of painful-high-pitch and human squawling you call "Purple Rain." ("Woof: A Plea of Sorts")

-- to putting human faces and human hearts on the "illegal alien crisis" --

Tonight, America seems like the for-centuries-dreamed-of rescuer of the Little Guy, the place that takes a guy like Hector and puts some pounds on him, sets him on his feet, puts a spring in his step, and ends, forever, his flinching hustle for two-dollar hot dogs. But first he has to get here. ("The Great Divider")

-- this guy is a guy I can love. Saunders doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve, he wears it in his writing, and it's our luck as readers that his writing is a great as his heart is big.

Which is why as soon as I finished THE BRAINDEAD MEGAPHONE I wanted to read it all over again. But we all know I don't have time for that. Besides, getting back to my original discussion, the second thing I feel after I finish a book is that unquenchable curiosity - the driving force behind my passion for literature. After I've finished one book, I begin to wonder about all those other closed books sitting on my shelves that have yet to reveal their secrets - secrets that have the potential to be as awesome, or if I'm lucky even more awesome, than the one I've just finished.

So I did what I usually do when I suddenly have a bookmark without a home: I went scouting around for another. I didn't go very far at all. It went from Saunder's collection of essays to his collection of short stories: IN PERSUASION NATION. To be fair, I started the stories long before I started the essays which was some time early last year. But I got bogged down, and the book got replaced with something else. But inspired, and on a Saunders high, I decided to give it a go again, and it's going much smoother now. The clear-sighted empathy I saw in his essays is not hard to find in his stories. I anticipate that in another week, I'll have added this to my "retired bookmarks" list as well.

And that's where we are now. To sum: what do I do when I've just finished a book? I turn right around a read another. Or, if I'm really in a good mood, I'll start five.

THE BRAINDEAD MEGAPHONE
by George Saunders
Riverhead Trade / Sept. 2007
272 pgs.; $14.00

Now 'N' Later Coveting...

On prep schools, superstar English teachers, groupies, Michiko Kakutani, David Sedaris, flames, and impatience:

For some reason a few years ago I bought and read Tobias Wolff's short novel OLD SCHOOL. I'd never heard of him - or, more likely, I might have, and simply never paid much attention - nor had I heard of his book. But there was something about the New England prep school scholarship kid which caught my attention, and, as it happens with so many of the books I read, on a whim I picked it up, read it, and absolutely loved it.

OLD SCHOOL is, among other things, a celebration of literature and the potential momentous effect it can have on our lives. In the prep school of Wolff's creation, the English teachers are superstars; according the narrator they were the only ones who knew "exactly what was most worth knowing." And as superstars often do, the English teachers have a core of student groupies, which includes the narrator. In addition to competing for the English teachers' attention, the students compete in annual writing contests for the chance at a private meeting with heavy-weight writers such as Earnest Hemingway and Ayn Rand (the novel is set in the 1960s).

I loved every aspect of this book, from the clear and concise prose, to the narrator's love affair with literature; from the humorous portrait of those famous writers who visit the school, to the growing maturity of the narrator not only as a reader but as a writer. All of this, and the book is only 200 pages.

So naturally after having read this morning's NY Times book section, and in particular Michiko Kakutani's review of Wolff's new collection of stories OUR STORY BEGINS, I'm in full covet mode, wondering if I really want to wait for the paperback.

Then again, I was already in covet mode when, on my way out of the door this morning, I happened to glance at this week's issue of the New Yorker, and read this bit of info on the "Contributors" page:

David Sedaris ("April & Paris," p. 38), has a new book of essays, "When You Are Engulfed in Flames," coming out in June.

What's this? A new book? And I have to wait until June? Sigh, yet another reason summer can't come soon enough. But I greet the news of Sedaris' new book with a little worry because, since he writes regularly for the New Yorker I fear I've already read many of the essays likely to be included in the new collection. Of course, my concern is moot because I'm buying it anyway. I'm just wishing I didn't have to wait so long.

Don't Get Too Comfortable, Final

by David Rakoff
Broadway Books

The subtitle to David Rakoff’s new collection of essays Don’t Get Too Comfortable is a long one: The Indignities of Coach Class, the Torments of Low Thread Count, the Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems. I think, however, it would have been more apt if he’d called it ...and Other First World Absurdities, which is really the over-arching point of these essays: to spot-light how the privileged of the privileged first-world residents spend their time and money when they don’t have to concern themselves with where their next meal is coming from or with the genocidal war next door. Do they spend it on feeding the hungry, on clothing the poor, or on saving rainforests? Ha, ha - get real. They aren’t adopting third-world children (Madonna and Angelina Jolie notwithstanding); they’re not making documentary movies on the dangers of global warming (Al Gore not included).

In Rakoff’s world - in our world, really - if the privileged of the privileged are making movies it’s soft-core porn with hot Latino women. If they’re flying overseas it’s to attend an exhibition of the couture collections in Paris. If they’re having existential considerations on life after death, it’s to work out the logistics of how they’ll survive after having their cryogenically frozen bodies resurrected. But is any of this news really? Even the least informed of us know that our privileged first-world culture has the tendency to drift toward the self-absorbed and the vapid. So what's the point of these essays, which tell us things we already know? In many ways, it’s easy to get the feeling that Rakoff is only preaching to choir.

But part of the pleasure I think in reading Rakoff’s essays is his ability to make the reader seem as if she’s inside the joke, not a part of it. It’s the feeling of feeling superior without really being superior. He invites you laugh at those nutty folk who pay $36 a kilo for sea salt harvested in France and $300 for the formula to a two-week long fast. Ha, ha - oh, you crazy first-worlders, you. But before we get too comfortable (or begin to feel uncomfortable) with our self-satisfied superiority, the thing that keeps this collection from being a nasty behind-the-back snicker at the Richers is that, by the collection’s conclusion, the reader discovers that he hasn’t been laughing at them after all - he’s been laughing at himself. The joke isn’t on them, it’s on you. The clue is on the cover: Don’t get too comfortable.

In a perfect microcosm of the effect of Don’t Get Too Comfortable, Rakoff imagines “an impoverished seamstress, her fingers bloody from hours of painstaking needlework...being dressed down by an outraged couturier" in the beginning of the essay “I Can’t Get it For You Wholesale”:

“I asked for camellias. These are not camellias,” he says, ripping out the stitches. “Do it again.” He flings the garment at her, an errant bugle bead catching her right in the eye. She weeps softly. The designer’s teacup poodle, Salo Meneo, yaps agitatedly throughout.

Later, as Rakoff roams his hotel room in Paris he writes:

I have a sitting room with a tasseled damask sofa, a passageway with walnut-doored closets leading to a bedroom, and beyond that a bathroom with a claw-footed tub. I count no fewer than three vases of roses...Looking out to the central courtyard filled with statues, I realize that I have crossed the Parliament floor. I used to identify with the downtrodden seamstress in that story I told myself, but I have now thoroughly joined the ranks of the imperious monstrocracy.

Rakoff’s witty insight into not only the “culture of excess” but also into his own heart and mind makes this slim volume a funny and informative read. It’s not hard to find a great laugh-out-loud sentence followed by the deepest insight into the human heart. If Rakoff’s collection is the seat of being uncomfortable, I’ll sit in it any day.

My previous post on this book can be found here.

Double David

by David Rakoff
pgs. 1-67

Unfairly or not, reading David Rakoff inevitably engenders comparisons with his namae frater David Sedaris, the superstar memoirist of the hilarious and critically-acclaimed compilations Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. The two Davids are both witty gay men in their late 30s (early 40s?), whose sharp eye, self-deprecating humor, and ease with a pen makes most of their selections both informative and humorous reads. However - and this is where the comparisons really begin - Rakoff, simply put, just isn’t as funny as Sedaris. Nor has he quite yet developed Sedaris’ skill at using his comical set pieces to transcend their often zanny and (sometimes) toilet humor to something that comments on the larger human experience. But here’s what: it seems that with Don’t Get Too Comfortable (subtitled: The Indignities of Coach Class, the Torments of Low Thread Count, the Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems), Rakoff has finally discovered that he doesn’t have to be. With this thus far engaging compilation of both new and previously published essays, Rakoff has eschewed riding the coattails of Me Talk Pretty One Day - a tendency so evident and poorly-executed in Fraud that I couldn’t finish it - and decided that a bit of investigative journalism intersped with occasional bouts of humor and personal, biting commentary is more his style. It’s a fine choice and a perfect fit.

In “Sesion Privada” Rakoff joins a couple of photographers, cameramen, their crew and three Playboy centerfolds on the paradise island Caya Espanto where they will film a Latin American Playboy television program. One would expect that a gay man on a Playboy soft-core shoot would be the perfect recipe for nothing but one-two knock-out punches of humor. But Rakoff seems to have discovered the art of subtle satire. Of the shoot, Rakoff writes:

The crew confers about her moves. The video-camera man demonstrates what they want. Sinking to his knees, he twists his torso and drags his open palms slowly up his chest to his head where they rub slow circles through a hypothetical jungle of tousled hair...Perhaps this is just the nature of soft-core, but the girls’ hands are kept so primly far away from their genitals that all of their crypto-masturbatory back arching and moaning for no apparent reason starts to look a little mentally unbalanced, frankly.

The joke is there; it’s just a whole lot quieter than what you would have found in Fraud. It’s not a knock-out punch to the face so much as it’s an unexpected soft blow to the back of the head. And, like I said, it’s educational too. In “Wildman” Rakoff informs readers:

...flowers were once thought to have no purpose greater than pleasing the human eye. It wasn’t until experiments in pollination during the Renaissance that people realized to their puritanical horror that even the loveliest of blooms were nothing more than sex organs. In Catholic Europe, people burned Carl Linnaeus’s books as corrupting filth. (To give them their due...they kind of had a point: Linneaus was a bit of a sexual obsessive, vaginally fixated, pushing his penchant so far as to name an entire genus of plants Clitoria.)

I don’t know about you, but my first order of business after reading that passage was to immediately drop what I was doing and see if Lenneaus’ genus name stuck. I’ll save you the trouble...It did.