Category: fiction

How ‘Jaws’ ate me alive

~ Chris ~ 4 Comments

Today was a two-errand day. I was picking up a modern classic potboiler at the library — the one about a ginormous great white shark that terrorizes the bejesus out of a New England beach town — and I was getting my periodic pedicure at the salon. I dubbed the day “ ‘Jaws’ and claws” to amuse myself. (Mission accomplished.)

The book I got really is “Jaws,” Peter Benchley’s 1974 blockbuster that spawned Spielberg’s famous film and a million petrified beachgoers around the world. As a kid, I lived in beachy Santa Barbara when both were released, and I fantasized about flesh-shredding teeth and ominous dorsal fins to unhealthy degrees. It terrified me, and I loved it. 

First I worshipped the movie, which I saw at age 7, then I snatched my parents’ mass market paperback of Benchley’s novel and gobbled it up at age 8. I savored those pages, slashing with vivid, violent writing that helped turn me onto reading for a lifetime. 

I still own that cracked, yellowed paperback, but it’s packed away with other mementos. So, on a whim, I hit the library up for its copy. I quickly located some of my favorite passages, ones that haunted — and excited — me as a young reader.

Just like my own copy

Can you handle it? This horrifying scene is from the opening of the book, when a young woman — recall her from the movie — takes a skinny-dip in the moon-dappled ocean. 

“The fish smelled her now, and the vibrations — erratic and sharp — signaled distress. The fish began to circle close to the surface. Its dorsal fin broke water, and its tail, thrashing back and forth, cut the glassy surface with a hiss. …

“At first, the woman thought she had snagged her leg on a rock or a piece of floating wood. There was no initial pain, only one violent tug on her right leg. She reached down to touch her foot, treading water with her left leg to keep her head up, feeling in the blackness with her left hand.  

“She could not find her foot. She reached higher on her leg. Her groping fingers found a nub of bone and tattered flesh. She knew that the warm, pulsing flow over her fingers in the chill water was her own blood. Pain and panic struck together. The woman threw her head back and screamed a guttural cry of terror.

“This time the fish attacked from below. It hurtled up under the woman, jaws agape. The great conical head struck her like a locomotive, knocking her up out of the water. The jaws snapped shut around her torso, crushing bones and flesh and organs into a jelly.” 

Now, as a young boy, this was about as stupendously visceral as prose could get. (And I omitted the rest of the violence for reasons of taste and space.) “A nub of bone and tattered flesh” — I reread that line over and over, shocked, thrilled, gobsmacked. 

Even today, these opening pages stun. Getting the book at the library, I was hoping Benchley’s eloquence would strike me again, and it did. That’s why I shared some here. 

Call him a hack or a mercenary, but you’d be wrong. Benchley’s a savvy craftsman, expert at tension and thrills, not to mention a vibrant stylist with a painterly (think Francis Bacon) flair. His humans, from Quint to Brody, pop off the page even if the world he confects for them occasionally brushes pulp.

I’m not going to reread the entire novel, which is remarkably short at 278 pages, but it was fun revisiting a book that so influenced my cultural life.

Why “Jaws,” why now? Well, I’m reading an excellent new book about the history of Hollywood and the Academy Awards called “Oscar Wars,” and I’m deep in the chapter focusing on the making of “Jaws” (as well as “Barry Lyndon,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Nashville” — 1975 was a hell of a year in American film.)

The lore is notorious: Making the movie “Jaws” was a prolonged ordeal and near-disaster for all involved, including a 26-year-old Steven Spielberg, who was sure his nascent career was finished. We know how that turned out.

If the movie “Jaws” remains one of my all-time favorites — in a crowded field that includes “Heat,” “All About Eve,” “Sweet Smell of Success,” “Manhattan,” “City Lights,” “Seven Samurai,” “Duck Soup” and on and on — the novel “Jaws” is more of a sentimental gem. It’s dear to my heart for reasons that go beyond art. On a nostalgic level, it has — yes, I’ll say it — sunk its teeth in me. And it won’t let go.

Farewell, Fido

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

“I don’t want to be buried in a pet sematary/I don’t want to live my life again!”

— “Pet Sematary,” the Ramones 

I once had a pet rat named Becky. After two and a half years of feisty play and impish scampering, tug of wars and belly tickles, she got terminal cancer and I had to put her down. I placed her remains in a decorated wooden box, dug a hole in the hard Texas dirt, and buried her in my backyard.

I repeated this ritual with three other pet rats — Phoebe, Tammy, LaShonda — and it shattered me every time. My yard became a veritable pet cemetery, a rodent resting place, and each grave should have cautioned me: Never again. I didn’t learn.

I also buried a blue betta fish named Alvy in the ad hoc graveyard. He thrived for four swishing years in a big sparkling bowl. I nestled the old man in a matchbox and set him in the ground, saluting him for his gratifying longevity. I miss the fish.

If you care one lick, laying your pet to rest is undiluted trauma. The platitude holds: pets are family, loving and adored, like hairy children who only live to their teens, if that. So integral are they to our lives, you swear they speak English and read minds. (I’m convinced Cubby the dog is really a tiny man in a dog suit. I keep looking for a zipper.) 

And so we honor them in death as in life, with a sentimental flourish and teary respect. Or at least we do in the modern age. There was a time when “people disposed of their dead pets in the river, or might have sold their bodies for meat and skin,” notes a CNN essayist. I know of modern folks subjecting their late Spots and Trixies to taxidermy, which is not only creepy, it’s selfish and disrespectful and twisted. 

Burial and cremation are popular send-offs. Barcelona, Spain, is set to open its first pet cemetery next year, with plans to carry out 7,000 animal cremations a year. Why? “Constant public demand,” they say. Barcelona is home to 180,000 dogs alone. Surely there’s just as many cats. (Rats? I bet.)

In 1983, Stephen King published the popular horror novel “Pet Sematary” about some macabre happenings surrounding a buried cat that is resurrected, or some such nonsense. The book spawned a 1989 movie (with “cemetery” also intentionally misspelled for plot purposes), which featured a cat-chy theme song by the Ramones.

The book and film helped spread the idea of the pet cemetery. And yet pet cemeteries are not some freaky esoteric brainchild of ghoul-meister King. There’s one in London’s Hyde Park, founded in 1881. New York’s legendary Hartsdale pet cemetery was founded in 1896, followed by Paris’ Cimetière des Chiens in 1899. 

About a hundred years later, I founded my own pet cemetery, at age 6, in my family’s pretty and serene Japanese-style garden in Santa Barbara. (This preceded the rat resting place by decades.) Surrounded by bamboo, moss and a statuary fountain, the graveyard contained goldfish, salamanders and other mostly water-bound critters. I’ve been at this a while.

On film, celebrated director Errol Morris made his debut with the acclaimed 1978 documentary “Gates of Heaven,” about the pet cemetery business and the souls who rely on it. It’s alive with vivid characters who are wrenchingly emotional about their dearly departed four-leggers.

Critic Roger Ebert, who named the film one of his 10 all-time favorites, wrote about “the woman who speaks of her dead pet and says, ‘There’s your dog, and your dog’s dead. But there has to be something that made it move. Isn’t there?’ 

“In those words,” Ebert writes, “is the central question of every religion.”

That pretty much says it all.

Becky the rat, at play.
Becky at rest.

Raging with Roth

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Last weekend, we hit a panel discussion at the Philip Roth festival in the late novelist’s hometown of Newark, New Jersey. We left it walking on intellectual air. Not smugly, but smilingly. It was heady and engrossing. Fun, funny and fascinating.

Called Philip Roth Unbound, the festival was a three-day celebration of all things Roth, from bus tours around his old Newark haunts to numerous panels parsing the formidable genius that gifted us “Portnoy’s Complaint,” “American Pastoral” and “Sabbath’s Theater,” to name some obvious masterpieces. (Need more? How about “The Human Stain” and “Everyman.”)

Our panel was irresistibly titled “Letting the Repellent In: Philip Roth and the Art of Outrage” — right up my twisted alley. A short description from the festival: 

“[A] panel on the cathartic power of discomfort. With each new novel, Roth predictably delighted and shocked readers with his frank depictions of human frailty and immorality. No aspect of behavior was spared his withering critical eye — sex, gender, race and religion were all fair game.”

I love it.

The panelists, all novelists, were a youngish quartet of publishing stars, award winners and best-sellers: Ayad Akhtar, Susan Choi, Gary Shteyngart and my personal favorite, Ottessa Moshfegh. They comprised a supergroup of sizzling hot writers, gathered to chat up Roth, his transgressive themes, techniques, cultural impact, and personal influence on each writer. 

I won’t recap the 90-minute discussion, but I will say that Choi was supremely poised and verbally chiseled; Akhtar, as moderator, navigated the discussion with shrewd erudition; Shteyngart labored to entertain with cussing and comic schtick, including some mugging (he was often very funny); and Moshfegh, coming across as a cerebral introvert and a smidge neurotic, was refreshing in her sometimes spacey reflections. 

To be surrounded by diehard Roth fans was heartening. Too often I feel that Roth is marginalized. He’s either too dirty, too angry, too offensive or too smart. His books aren’t easy; they are verbally dense, lashed in skeins of urgent ideas about life, marriage, love, sex, Jewishness, morality, death, politics, art. They are mean, unsparing, philosophically violent, crude, passionate and hilarious.

Few writers — Saul Bellow is one — could graze such dazzling complexity, that Rothian exuberance, that volcanic, (sometimes literally) orgasmic prose. “American Pastoral” (1997) is one of my top two favorite novels. It sucked my breath away with its relentless moral and artistic propulsion. It should be banned by sheer dint of how good it is.

“Sabbath’s Theater” — described by one critic as “Roth’s coarsest, frankest, and most exhilarating novel, showing off Roth’s linguistic verve, and his unparalleled ability to stare unblinkingly into the psyche of a depraved scoundrel” — is mandatory reading, a master text of style, for anyone pursuing the art of fiction. (I’m about to read it again.)

Roth died at 85, in 2018, without winning the Nobel Prize (though he received many awards, including the Pulitzer). In later years, he was regularly shortlisted, but was likely too incendiary for the milquetoast committee. Every October I would check the paper to see if it was his turn, then throw it down, crushed, livid. Bellow won it in 1976. Faulkner in 1948. Toni Morrison in 1993. Roth would fit right in that company of trailblazing masters. 

Maybe he was just too much much. Roth fans are zealous and jealous, and to see the capacity crowds at the festival, chatty and excited, reminded me the great one lives on. Or at least his challenging ideas and coruscating wit live on. We at least have that. 

Philip Roth. Such a dirty, furious, brilliant mind.

Quote of the day: Exactly how I feel about it

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

“Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.” — Teen philosopher Holden Caulfield

One of the hottest books of the year is cool to the touch

~ Chris ~ 1 Comment

Funny how you can admire a book without fully liking it. That’s the case with the lavishly overpraised memoir “Stay True” by New Yorker writer Hua Hsu, which was named one of the 10 best books of the year by The New York Times and made book reviewers get all moist.  

It’s a baffling response to a book whose prose contains no electricity, no buzz. A book that rather lies there, dry, ho-hum and humorless. 

And yet Hsu reveals authorial gifts by showing what even a mildly engaging story can do: carry you along with raw pathos, stripped of punch and pyros. Though the book sputters at the half-way point — Hsu’s early years at UC Berkeley in the ‘90s aren’t as novel or riveting as he thinks they are — it occasionally grazes the profound with ranging reflection that delivers a spurt of substance. 

Still, missteps abound. Women, for instance, are almost totally absent for most of the book, noted in passing by first names only, granted the vaporous texture of ciphers. I don’t recall one speaking, even when Hsu at last finds a dimly sketched girlfriend.

Not even his Asian identity issues (he’s Taiwanese American), his mania for alt-music, or especially the zines he publishes pop off the page. These are exciting topics, but we’re left thirsting. While a huge fan, I find most New Yorker writing to be self-consciously restrained and prim. Staff writer Hsu suffers from a chronic case of New Yorker-itis.

But at least it feels real, which memoirs like Mary Karr’s aptly titled “The Liars’ Club” definitely do not. Which makes “Stay True” also aptly titled. (I find pretty much all memoirs to be 15-20% made up — there’s simply no way such decades-spanning reportage can be true — but that’s pulp for another blog.)

This book is about friendship and the violent loss of it and the hole it leaves. Hsu meets his friend Ken —  who’s mostly depicted as a one-dimensional cut-out — at college and they become best bros (Ken is in a frat, something initially anathema to the “outsider” Hsu). Ken is soon ripped from the narrative and we’re supposed to be crushed. 

But the loss of a character we barely knew is treated with a remove that makes it hard to share an emotional wallop. Believing otherwise, Hsu writes: “I was a storyteller with a plot twist guaranteed to astound and destroy.”

Not quite. “Stay True” misses its mark, but by feet, not yards. A few sentences jiggle with magic — “Their beats sounded like death rearranging furniture in the underworld,” Hsu notes about a rap group — and the closing passages of this slim volume emanate a cathartic warmth that’s AWOL in the gangly prose of the first 100-plus pages.

In the end, Hsu wants the truth to pierce. Here, it merely pinches. 

***

Ten books I really liked this year:

“Asymmetry” (Lisa Halliday); “Eleven Kinds of Loneliness” (Richard Yates); “The Copenhagen Trilogy” (Tove Ditlevsen); “Heat 2” (Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner); “Either/Or” (Elif Batuman); “How Should a Person Be?” (Sheila Heti); “Weather” (Jenny Offill); “Wildlife” (Richard Ford); “A Manual for Cleaning Women” (Lucia Berlin); “The Idiot” (Elif Batuman).  

Life, in no particular order

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

1. I don’t do dragons. I think they’re silly. For all their fiery tantrums and wing-flapping fury, I can’t take them seriously. Humans ride on their scaly backs like they’re horsies and fly through the sky. I crack up whenever I see that. 

So needless to say I’m not watching HBO’s “House of the Dragon” or Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” big ticket fantasy orgies that by turns bore and baffle me. I don’t even know if “Rings of Power” features dragons — halitosis-impaired Smaug looms large in Tolkien’s Hobbit-verse — but I also don’t do elves or wizards, Orcs or even swords, so I’m pretty much locked out of those good times. 

But I’m not a complete dragon-phobe. My favorite dragon movie is easily “Reign of Fire,” starring Christian Bale and a bald Matthew McConaughey as gnarly post-apocalyptic dragon slayers. If you haven’t seen it, do. It’s a blast. McConaughey chews on a big fat cigar throughout. There’s fire and volcanic sludge and dragons all over the place. It’s also pretty grim. And nobody rides a dragon.

2. My brother and his wife just got back from Madrid — precisely where I am headed 20 days from now. No conspiracies, no subtext, we just happened to agree that Spain’s capital is the place to be this month, this year, right now.

What’s great is that I sent the lovely couple on a sort of expedition to scope the city, suss out all the hot tapas bars and cocktail bars, the most electric neighborhoods, what sights to see and what to skip. 

And they delivered resoundingly, finding me a better hotel in a livelier area, several hip restaurants and bars, a shrine to Goya, and a slew of invaluable practicalities. Teamwork! High five! Madrid is famous for its blaring all-night carousing. You still hear people banging bongos in the street at five in the morning. I land on Halloween. I hope it’s batshit. 

3. The ongoing saga of my misadventures in sneaker shopping — the subject of a prior post — is finally winding down. I spent the summer agonizing over what shoes to get to replace my moldered, moth-eaten collection of casual kicks. 

Halt. Mere minutes ago, after I wrote that paragraph, I ordered the final pair of sneakers I will order this year. (I hope.) Just as I was getting comfortable with some slick new Cole Haans, I stumbled on a pair of rare New Balance sneaks that I fell for instantly. Now what? I put the Cole Haans back in their box (for the moment) and clicked “Place My Order” on the New Balance. 

Which means I’ve now, since July, bought seven pairs of sneakers, an unholy sum that has me and my Visa doing barfy loop-the-loops. What else: I got another pair of New Balance, two pairs of Italian-made Oliver Cabells, a cheap pair of white Adidas Stan Smiths, and some Asics that I promptly returned. Incidentally, one pair of the Oliver Cabell shoes are all but unwearable, causing oozing blisters at each step. And it’s too late to return them. My Visa is writhing.

The indulgence is appalling. I’m no sneaker-head. I don’t collect footwear. I am not Imelda Marcos. I just need a fresh fleet of shoes to replenish the worn and rejected. If the latest New Balance are good, I will return the Cole Haans. That will mean I will own only five new pairs of sneakers. One of those causes blisters. So that means four new pairs. Not so dramatic after all. But still: really?

4. Next to Michael Mann’s cop thriller “Heat 2,” a brilliant, blistering, book-form sequel to his 1995 crime movie masterpiece “Heat,” with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino among other badasses, the best book I read this summer was Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?” — sticky auto-fiction that giddily pinballs through its meandering idiosyncrasies. This jagged, brainy book functions with the itchy buzz of life. It’s hilarious. Awkward. Wincing. Wonderful. Yeah, life.

Narrated by a 30-ish Heti, it’s aptly described as “part literary novel, part self-help manual, and part vivid exploration of the artistic and sexual impulse.” It happily recalls the sui generis first-person fictions of Rachel Cusk, Jenny Offill and Elif Batuman, currently my favorite writers. They kind of drop you mid-thought into their lives, then roll on from there with chatty, funny, unembarrassed realism. The works revel in their mundanity, which becomes a kind of magnificence.

Heti’s 2012 novel was named one of 15 “remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write in the 21st century” by The New York Times. A bold but clear choice I wholly endorse. Heti has a new novel, “Pure Colour,” that I wasn’t bonkers about, but you might find worth a peek. For now, “How Should a Person Be?” is what I’m bellowing about from the mountaintop. (Me. Megaphone. A towering crag.)  

5. If you want to know something about me, read this tart and telling passage from Elizabeth McCracken’s new novel “The Hero of This Book”:

“Myself, I loathe having my picture taken. I have for as long as I can remember, even in the old days when you could go weeks without somebody trying. In all group shots I am not pictured. It’s beyond vanity and in the realm of superstition. I don’t like people looking at me. I don’t like being the center of attention except under very specific conditions. … I will not stop for a photo. I will not look at myself in a mirror for you. I will not watch myself pass in a plane-glass window.”

There. Now you know a bit more about me. Also, I’m not big on dragons. 

My current cultural playlist

~ Chris ~ 4 Comments

1. Way behind on the cult British crime saga, I’m discovering the gritty and gruesome pleasures of “Peaky Blinders,” an uncompromising gangster epic bristling with politics, razor blades, gamblers, guns, and unvarnished thuggery. 

Set in Birmingham, England, just after World War I, the Netflix series is a fearsomely atmospheric blood opera starring a rogue’s gallery of dapper gangsters with deep family roots and a hunger to stay in power. It openly, inevitably recalls “The Godfather,” “The Sopranos” and, on a knife and knuckle street level, “Gangs of New York,” with perhaps more thematic tentacles.

The show is fronted by Cillian Murphy as crime boss Thomas Shelby, whose smoldering menace can burn a hole like a bullet. One website has voted him the Greatest TV Character of All Time, a testament to Murphy’s pit bull commitment and conviction. He unnerves every time he’s onscreen, makes you shift in your seat. Pepper the grimy period setting with tunes by Nick Cave, PJ Harvey and White Stripes and you get more than anachronistic friction; you get gang-banging with a boogie beat. 

2. Listening to Nirvana’s short, punchy songs, it struck me again why the band is so good and lasting: Almost lick for lick, Nirvana is as infectiously hooky as the Beatles.

And on the Beatles — my favorite band, and I’m not a hundred years old — I liked this line from “The Idiot,” Elif Batuman’s riotous novel of the head and heart: “The Beatles turned out to be one of the things you couldn’t avoid, like alcohol, or death.”

3. You also can’t avoid Marvel and its muddleheaded mayhem in the current cinema, a soul-battering bummer. But there do exist little oases floating past the aesthetic carnage, attractive indie films like the raunchy, uproarious “Zola” and my latest favorite, “The Worst Person in the World.” 

The grabby title is slyly misleading in this dark rom-com drama about a young woman who skitters between jobs and lovers while surfing life’s foibles. Joachim Trier’s prickly Norwegian charmer, ablaze with insinuating characters and sexy anecdote, is told in 12 fluid chapters, led by endearing star Renate Reinsve, who won best actress at Cannes for her intricate portrayal of a woman in flux. Hardly the worst person in the world, she’s a millennial supernova.

4. Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel “Lapvona” is grossing out reviewers with its blithe violence and panoramic depravity. (Is Moshfegh the worst person in the world?) The medieval fable, set in a village rife with plague and other misfortunes, is earning wildly mixed reviews, many of them lashing in their displeasure, even from fans of Moshfegh’s previous dark fictions (“Eileen,” “Homesick for Another World”). 

I’m a fan as well, and I’m steeling for a rough ride. I’m only on page nine, and here’s a verbal taste: “disemboweled” “heads of the dead,” “a bone sticking out through the flesh,” “animal excrement.” (Page nine.) The book, in all its gloppy mucus and viscera, came out this week — which makes it the perfect summer beach read. You heard it here first.

In praise of small pleasures

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

Stay away. We’re contagious. First my nephew caught Covid, then I did. Now my brother has it. Next up: the dog. 

This too shall pass, this rottenness, and I’m happy that the virus, for now, is behind me. It’s just one small blessing in muddled times, a jagged slab of flotsam to hug while the ship sinks.

There are other things. Like Elif Batuman’s new novel, “Either/Or,” which I’ve plugged here before briefly. It’s one of few passing pleasures right now, be it a startling observation about love or a suave turn of phrase that knocks me dizzy. 

Or a jab of insight glinting with wry misanthropy: 

“Of course, you couldn’t have a party without alcohol; I understood this now. I understood the reason. The reason was that people were intolerable.” 

Or any number of absurdist gems: 

“I hadn’t a clear mental picture of his new girlfriend, Lara, and realized that I had almost expected her to look blurry.”

But what’s a small delight to me may be imperceptible to you. 

Unless you’re traveling abroad and you’ve just learned that the U.S. has lifted its Covid testing requirements to return to the States — a major hassle deleted from an already stressful travel climate. I recently had to take the test in Portugal and Italy to get back home and the logistics were near-traumatic. 

So rejoice for that minor miracle. And why not the same for Monkey 47, a richly aromatic, botanically fierce, impishly named gin that I’ve rediscovered and is well worth the price. Even the gin-averse extol its ample virtues. It may be the best gin on the shelf, a smooth bracer for rough days.

What else is keeping me warm, now, when the skies are dark? The crack and screech of Brandi Carlile’s voice on her song “Broken Horses.” The zesty mazeman noodles at Ani Ramen House. Penélope Cruz’s febrile, heartrending performance in Pedro Almodóvar’s stirring melodrama “Parallel Mothers.” My unquenchable wanderlust. Bongos. That woman at the cafe. Books, mountains of them.

The dog. 

The dog. 

The dog.

Culture in the time of Covid

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

My Covid’s gone and I feel strong as an ox, even though I barely know what an ox is. A big cow? Paul Bunyan’s interspecies BFF? Actually, I just looked it up. An ox is a “castrated bull used as a draft animal.” So let’s scratch the whole ox analogy entirely. 

Point is, I’m back — non-contagious, symptom-free, fit as a fiddle. (I don’t know what that means either. Skip it.) It took about five days to vanquish the virus, and it wasn’t as bad as I imagined. It was like a mild cold, but without mucus violently erupting from my lungs. This was a dry cough, little hacks, as if an infant was smoking a cigarillo.

As hoped, I got a lot of reading done during my convalescence. I wrapped up “The Sportswriter,” Richard Ford’s extraordinary, bittersweet novel about life, love and letdowns, and started three more books, all highly acclaimed and released in the past few weeks.

Alas, two of them tanked. Those would be Ali Smith’s “Companion Piece” and Mieko Kawakami’s “All the Lovers in the Night.” 

I’m not sure what critics are going on about with Smith. They go bananas for her Seasonal Quartet novels — I failed miserably to warm up to two of them — and seem to regard the new book as the prosaic sublime. I read 175 pages of “Companion Piece” and surrendered with a mere 50 left. She’s a slog, oblique, flirting willfully with incoherence. I wasn’t having fun. I was having a migraine.

I enjoyed Japanese super-author Kawakami’s earlier novels, the shrewd and touching “Heaven” and “Breasts and Eggs,” which sounds like a particularly provocative breakfast dish. But her latest, though not totally displeasing, never takes off. It’s slow going … going nowhere.

But I hit pay dirt with “Either/Or,” Elif Batuman’s sequel to “The Idiot,” tracing the turbulent interior life of a female college student who’s trying to figure it all out. It’s at once wildly funny and erudite, catchy and sparkling, and that’s about all I can ask for in a book. Bonus: the author’s name is Elif.

For someone isolating with time to burn, I watched very little in the way of shows and movies. I did stay abreast of the series “Hacks” (hilarious), “Top Chef” (harrowing) and “Barry” (hilarious and harrowing). And I’m looking forward to sinking my teeth into “Irma Vep,” the great Olivier Assayas’ dramedy about a vamp, vampires and the insanity of making movies.

Meanwhile, everybody and their easily-scared tweens are bingeing Netflix’s gimmicky genre mash “Stranger Things.” I preferred the show when it was called “Scooby-Doo.”

I also got to anticipate my July journey to Buenos Aires as I was spread out, aching and sniffling with dramatic moans of self-pity. It’s something to look forward to, and, from a piece I read recently, that’s not only a good thing, it’s a healthy thing: “Having something to look forward to boosts your mood and lowers your stress. It can increase motivation, optimism and patience and decrease irritability.” Huh.

Not quite a Covid cure, but it can’t hurt. So much so that I started looking forward to my annual October trip, leap-frogging the July trip I haven’t even taken yet.

I’m thinking Budapest, a European joint I have yet to visit. Or perhaps a return to Krakow. Or Berlin. I’ll have to see what Covid is up to in those places. I might be cured, but the tenacious bug, mean and mercurial, still has the world in its gooey grip. 

Is reading for sissies?

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

As a kid, from ages seven to 17, I had subscriptions to sheaves of magazines I eagerly awaited to hit my mailbox — Dynamite, Ranger Rick, Hit Parade, Modern Drummer, BMX Action, Omni, Heavy Metal, Movie Monsters and more.

Each title represented a discrete passion — showbiz, animals, rock, drums, science, bikes — and the glossy journals were bibles of my interests. I read them rapt, lapping up interviews, gossip, photos, front-of-the-book ephemera, often scissoring them to bits for bedroom wallpaper and school-locker decor. (Try that with an online subscription.)  

At about 17, I started reading the local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, with a new seriousness that went beyond comics “Bloom County” and “The Far Side.” I loved the stylish writing, current events, cranky columnists and clever critics. It was a daily feast, and each week I’d spend up to three hours poring over the overstuffed Sunday edition, an inky ritual I savored.   

I also read lots of books — “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” to freak show biographies; “Slaughterhouse-Five” to Jim Morrison’s (dreadful) poetry — but that’s a given. When I was eight I read the fat paperback of Peter Benchley’s “Jaws,” and I’m still proud of it.

But is it normal, for a boy at least, to spend so much time with the written word, reading? Shouldn’t he be outside, say, throwing balls, or blowing things up?

While I hated most sports — except soccer, skiing and BMX — I was your average knee-scraping, war-playing, B.B.-gun-shooting, lizard-catching, fire-setting, doorbell-ditching, girl-crazy, grungy little scamp. 

Still, I adored words and what they imparted — ideas, information, whole worlds. I used to wade through our World Book encyclopedias and ginormous Mirriam-Webster dictionary just for fun. My best friend Gene and I wrote little books about devils, murder and other unspeakable mischiefs. We had a thing for horror.   

But did all that bibliophilia and word-love mean I was a giant wuss?

This week teacher and novelist Joanne Harris — bestselling author of “Chocolat” — said that reading is far more rare in boys than girls, for rather macho reasons:

“When I was teaching boys particularly, I found that not only boys did not read as much as girls but they were put under much more pressure by parents, largely fathers, to do something else as if reading was girly,” she said via LitHub. Boys, apparently, “ought to be out playing rugby and doing healthy boy things.”

And I reply: Can’t boys do both — reading and “healthy boy things” — like I did (and what’s a healthy boy thing, anyway)? 

Forbes reports that boys are way behind girls in reading comprehension and writing skills, because “reading and writing are stereotypically feminine endeavors, and boys tend to avoid anything that’s remotely feminine. In other words, it’s just not cool to read, because reading is for girls.”

This is clumsy and reductive (and offensive) reasoning, more fitting for the playground than a hard, rational study. Reading is for girls? You don’t say.

What then to make of all the wildly famous male writers overpopulating the literary canon who have (unjustly) eclipsed their female counterparts? Call Hemingway or Mailer a wuss and see where that lands you. 

I don’t doubt that girls read more than boys; I’ve seen it borne out. If it’s because boys are discouraged and intellectualism is deemed unmanly, then we have a real societal problem. I don’t have the answers — just my umbrage — but if you have any thoughts, please comment.  

I know many bibliophobes, people, almost all male, who would never think of strolling the living, fragrant stacks of a bookstore, or simply pick up a book for that matter. To me, they’re the wussies, un-evolved, willfully ignorant, with the vocabulary of third graders and the critical thinking skills of a hubcap. I don’t trust adults who don’t read. Philistinism is a cultural crime.  

World travel has largely usurped my juvenile need to start fires and catch lizards, but I still read at a mad clip and write as much as I can. Call me a sissy. I’m having a ball.