Washington Post // 3 books about basketball

The review ran in the 1/20/10 edition of the Post.

Unlike baseball, America's purported national pastime, basketball is most definitely homegrown. It originated in Springfield, Mass., thanks to a Canadian immigrant who had forsaken the ministry for a life in physical education -- a tough decision for a man who grew up believing that athletics were "a tool of the devil." In James Naismith: The Man Who Invented Basketball (Temple Univ., $27.50), sportswriter Rob Rains teamed up with the legendary coach's granddaughter Hellen Carpenter and gained access to a cache of Naismith's personal papers, making this biography a hugely valuable addition to our understanding of the sport's earliest days.

It started in 1891 as a way to keep some bored young men busy indoors during a nasty New England winter. Naismith rounded up a couple of peach baskets, codified the game with 13 rules thumbtacked to a gymnasium bulletin board and became responsible for what may have been the fastest-growing sport in history. (He's also credited with making the first football helmet.) He soon took his new game with him to the University of Kansas, where he established the iconic college team. Carpenter's introduction in particular demonstrates just how much the sport has changed since: "My grandfather never profited from inventing the game. . . . He turned down endorsement offers, and he never sought a patent on the game, which would have earned him millions of dollars in royalties." What would he make of today's NBA?

Outside the Limelight: Basketball in the Ivy League (Rutgers Univ., $24.95), by Washington Post sportswriter Kathy Orton, provides a welcome look at a frequently underappreciated side of college hoops, one that Naismith would have been proud of. The Ivy League is unique, Orton writes, in that it doesn't use a tournament to decide the championship. The eight schools don't offer athletic scholarships, they still travel by bus to their away games, and they play a style of basketball that harks back in many ways to a simpler game. Understandably, perhaps, it's not every season that an Ivy League team participates in the hysteria surrounding the annual March Madness tournament, yet the teams share a long and exciting history of extremely competitive basketball.

Orton spent the 2005-06 season closely following Cornell, Penn, Princeton and Harvard, the last of which went into the year with hopes of its first title. "Harvard is believed," she writes, "to be the only Division I program never to have won a conference championship." Alas for the Crimson -- and for Orton, who might have had a bestseller on her hands -- it was not to be. Come the end of the season, "only two of the eight teams still had a shot at the Ivy League championship, and given the history of the league, most outsiders were not surprised those two were Penn and Princeton." Orton's talents shine most brightly in her ability to make us care deeply about these players, like Harvard's Matt Stehle and Penn's Ibrahim Jaaber, both on and off the court. She reminds us that, contrary to public perception, "student athlete"isn't a contradiction in terms.

Unfortunately, the terrible writing in The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy (Ballantine, $30), by ESPN contributor Bill Simmons, undermines what should have been an exciting and engaging project about Naismith's legacy. But Simmons rarely passes up the opportunity for a crude, R-rated joke, which makes the book inappropriate for the young fans who would most benefit from his vast knowledge of the game. The similes and metaphors here are horrendous, such as when he writes of future Hall of Famer Jason Kidd, "If shooting ability were a bra size, he would have been wearing a 32A for his entire career." And is comparing players to specific porn stars really the best analysis he could come up with? That kind of thing wouldn't bother me so much if I didn't think Simmons was smarter than this.

That's not to say the book is a total disaster. Simmons knows his history and provides an interesting look at how the NBA evolved, beginning right after World War II. The most interesting section combines detailed statistical analyses and close observations to create an ordered list of the greatest players of all time in a proposed restructuring of the Hall of Fame. The section on Allen Iverson alone makes it clear that Simmons could be a great writer if he hadn't sold his soul to the devil's earthly incarnation, ESPN, and chosen the authorial persona of a lifelong frat boy. He has clearly put in his time watching and rewatching countless games, but his juvenile approach is neither funny nor shocking, and it doesn't do justice to his immense knowledge and passion for the game.

1/22/10: I found a funny critique of this review on some guy's blog:

If you are going to write a review about three books on basketball, as Andrew Ervin did for yesterday's Washington Post, you simply cannot write a sentence such as this one about a book on Ivy League basketball:

Understandably, perhaps, it's not every season that an Ivy League team participates in the hysteria surrounding the annual March Madness tournament, yet the teams share a long and exciting history of extremely competitive basketball.

. . . and then complain about "the terrible writing in The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy."

Read the excerpted sentence. I have no idea what it means. For one thing, what is its subject? And since the regular season Ivy League champion receives an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament every year, the sentence seems factually wrong if it says what I think it is trying to say. I know it's sort of unfair to cherry pick one sentence from a review like this. It's a bit like criticizing someone for grammar or a spelling error or a typo in a blog comment. But when you lead off your discussion of a book by saying it is terribly written, you really cannot afford a shit-storm of a sentence like that in your 800 words.

In retrospect, that is a shitstorm of a sentence! Oh well. (It is not factually wrong, however.)

Philadelphia Inquirer // The Humbling by Philip Roth

My review of Philip Roth's The Humbling ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Dec. 6.

What is left to say about Philip Roth? Along with Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, maybe Cormac McCarthy, he's among the legends of American letters - the kind of artist capable of both describing his own era with a remarkable clarity of vision and setting the agenda for writers with the misfortune to come along after him. His vast oeuvre includes some of the greatest books produced on this landmass. American Pastoral, Portnoy's Complaint, and Sabbath's Theater, my personal favorite, come to mind. We're extremely fortunate to live in his age, to see how Roth's talents continue to reveal themselves in new and unexpected ways. He has won every prize you can think of except, so far, the Nobel. One day - not too soon, I hope - there will be prizes named afterhim.

The Humbling, Roth's 30th book to date, is not the best Roth ever, but being Roth, it's pretty good. Simon Axler is a 65-year-old actor of tremendous acclaim whose talent has dried up. After disastrous runs as Macbeth and Prospero, he loses his ability to perform on stage and retires to his home outside New York City. His despair and the mental breakdown that follows combine to motor this deeply engaging story. Wackiness and, this being a Philip Roth book, anxiety ensue: "When you''re playing the role of somebody coming apart, it has organization and order; when you're observing yourself coming apart, playing the role of your own demise, that's something else, something awash with terror and fear."

Axler's moping causes his wife, Victoria Powers, to leave him, and thoughts of suicide persuade him to check himself into an asylum. (Many of the names here feel a bit forced. His powers have left him! Get it?) Upon his release, he takes up with a much younger woman, Pegeen, who is the daughter of longtime friends. They first met when she was a baby; now she's a (possibly former) lesbian whose obsessed previous lover finds new and inventive ways to intrude on their relationship. Her parents also disapprove, but Axler and Pegeen soldier on with the help of a big bag of sex toys and the assistance of a local beauty, Tracy, who joins them in the sack. The reader finds none of this quite as transgressive as it feels it's supposed to be. Nothing is shocking anymore, at least nothing inThe Humbling.

As in many of Roth's novels, angst threatens to overwhelm the protagonist at every turn. Roth has all but patented his own proprietary variety of angst. It comes steeped in the big-E Existential woe of Sartre and Camus (you'll-get-nothingness-and-like-it angst) and the bleak, paralyzing horror of Ingmar Bergman's greatest films (nothing-we-do-matters angst), but Roth's version involves despair and the disappointment of ideals (is-that-all-there-is? angst):

The worst of it was that he saw through his breakdown the same way he could see through acting. The suffering was excruciating and yet he doubted that it was genuine, which made it even worse. He did not know how he was going to get from one minute to the next, his mind felt as though it were melting, he was terrified to be alone, he could not sleep more than two or three hours a night, he scarcely ate, he thought every day of killing himself with the gun in the attic.

It's tempting to play armchair therapist and assume that Axler's anxiety mirrors the fears of his creator, who is very nearly the same age. Is Roth worried about losing his talent after all these years? After all, he does have a history of imaging literary super-egos - oops, I mean alter egos - in his fiction. Or perhaps Axler's inability to perform could also signal the sexual anxiety that seems to have so much of the Viagra Generation feeling blue.

But we're dealing with a far better writer than these simplistic explanations would allow - and, frankly, a better writer than you would think from reading just The Humbling. It feels a bit like an excerpt or like the aborted draft of a larger project. Still, it's a vitally important addition to Philip Roth's already amazing body of work.

Philadelphia Inquirer // The Humbling by Philip Roth

My review of Philip Roth's The Humbling appears in today's Philly Inquirer.

What is left to say about Philip Roth? Along with Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, maybe Cormac McCarthy, he's among the legends of American letters - the kind of artist capable of both describing his own era with a remarkable clarity of vision and setting the agenda for writers with the misfortune to come along after him. His vast oeuvre includes some of the greatest books produced on this landmass. American Pastoral, Portnoy's Complaint, and Sabbath's Theater, my personal favorite, come to mind. We're extremely fortunate to live in his age, to see how Roth's talents continue to reveal themselves in new and unexpected ways. He has won every prize you can think of except, so far, the Nobel. One day - not too soon, I hope - there will be prizes named after him.

The Humbling, Roth's 30th book to date, is not the best Roth ever, but being Roth, it's pretty good. Simon Axler is a 65-year-old actor of tremendous acclaim whose talent has dried up. After disastrous runs as Macbeth and Prospero, he loses his ability to perform on stage and retires to his home outside New York City. His despair and the mental breakdown that follows combine to motor this deeply engaging story. Wackiness and, this being a Philip Roth book, anxiety ensue: "When you''re playing the role of somebody coming apart, it has organization and order; when you're observing yourself coming apart, playing the role of your own demise, that's something else, something awash with terror and fear."

Axler's moping causes his wife, Victoria Powers, to leave him, and thoughts of suicide persuade him to check himself into an asylum. (Many of the names here feel a bit forced. His powers have left him! Get it?) Upon his release, he takes up with a much younger woman, Pegeen, who is the daughter of longtime friends. They first met when she was a baby; now she's a (possibly former) lesbian whose obsessed previous lover finds new and inventive ways to intrude on their relationship. Her parents also disapprove, but Axler and Pegeen soldier on with the help of a big bag of sex toys and the assistance of a local beauty, Tracy, who joins them in the sack. The reader finds none of this quite as transgressive as it feels it's supposed to be. Nothing is shocking anymore, at least nothing in The Humbling.

As in many of Roth's novels, angst threatens to overwhelm the protagonist at every turn. Roth has all but patented his own proprietary variety of angst. It comes steeped in the big-E Existential woe of Sartre and Camus (you'll-get-nothingness-and-like-it angst) and the bleak, paralyzing horror of Ingmar Bergman's greatest films (nothing-we-do-matters angst), but Roth's version involves despair and the disappointment of ideals (is-that-all-there-is? angst):

"The worst of it was that he saw through his breakdown the same way he could see through acting. The suffering was excruciating and yet he doubted that it was genuine, which made it even worse. He did not know how he was going to get from one minute to the next, his mind felt as though it were melting, he was terrified to be alone, he could not sleep more than two or three hours a night, he scarcely ate, he thought every day of killing himself with the gun in the attic."

It's tempting to play armchair therapist and assume that Axler's anxiety mirrors the fears of his creator, who is very nearly the same age. Is Roth worried about losing his talent after all these years? After all, he does have a history of imaging literary super-egos - oops, I mean alter egos - in his fiction. Or perhaps Axler's inability to perform could also signal the sexual anxiety that seems to have so much of the Viagra Generation feeling blue.

But we're dealing with a far better writer than these simplistic explanations would allow - and, frankly, a better writer than you would think from reading just The Humbling. It feels a bit like an excerpt or like the aborted draft of a larger project. Still, it's a vitally important addition to Philip Roth's already amazing body of work.

"The Light of Two Million Stars" in Conjunctions

I'm absolutely thrilled to see my story "The Light of Two Million Stars" in the new issue of Conjunctions. I've been reading that magazine for a long time and have seen most of my favorite writers in its pages, so this comes as a true honor.

"The Light of Two Millions Stars" is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Extraordinary Renditions: 3 Novellas.

It's an incredible issue, also containing some previously unpublished letters by Samuel Beckett, a long poem by Thomas Bernhard, and a slice of the next Bolaño translation. Other contributors include Francine Prose, William H. Gass, Peter Orner, Stephen Marche, Peter Gizzi, Matt Bell, Robert Coover, Rachel Blau DePlessis, Can Xue, and Paul West among many others.

11/16: Dan Wickett at the Emerging Writer's Network was kind enough to write:

Andrew Ervin's short story, "The Light of Two Million Stars." It's pretty rare these days for somebody to write a story about the Holocaust and have it still feel fresh or new. Ervin accomplishes this in spades. A really excellent story reminding me to keep on the lookout for news of his trio of novellas being published by Coffee House Press in 2010.

Monkeybicycle 7 Available for Pre-Order

My short story "My Brother's Keeper" will be in the next issue of Monkeybicycle, which is now available for pre-order. Please go ahead and pick up a copy--it's a great magazine and lit mags need all the support they can get these days. And there will be so many great writers in this issue. Thanks.

Leopold

I'm pleased to announce the creation of a new literary magazine, Leopold. Details will be distributed in a timely fashion.

New York Times Book Review // White is For Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

My review of White is For Witching ran in the New York Times Book Review on 9/13/09. It's an interesting and ambitious (in the good way) novel, reminiscent in some ways of Beloved and Song for Night--two of my favorite books. I'd like to read more by Oyeyemi.

Helen Oyeyemi’s eerie third novel features a young woman who has a strange eating disorder and lives with her twin brother and widowed father in a haunted house across the street from a cemetery full of unmarked graves. On the surface, this setup might appear best suited to the young adult fiction market, but Oyeyemi (who was born in Nigeria and educated in England) knows that ghost stories aren’t just for kids. And “White Is for Witching” turns out to be a delightfully unconventional coming-of-age story.

Miranda — or Miri, as she’s called — suffers from pica, a disorder that compels her to eat foreign objects. “She crammed chalk into her mouth,” her brother explains. “She hid the packaging at the bottom of her bag and threw it away when we got to school. But then there’d be cramps that twisted her body, pushed her off her seat and lay her on the floor, helplessly pedaling her legs.” The novel was published in Britain as “Pie-kah” (the pronunciation of Miri’s affliction), a less sensational title that grounds the narrative in the girl’s sad psychic state rather than in its supernatural elements.

After his wife, who works as a photo journalist, is killed on assignment in Haiti, Miri’s father takes sole control of the family’s ancestral home in the southeastern coastal town of Dover, which the couple have converted into a bed-and-breakfast. But the house — which has its own spirited personality — has other ideas. It frightens off the hired help and even insists on narrating some of the story. (“One evening she pattered around inside me . . . and she dragged all my windows open, putting her glass down to struggle with the stiffer latches. I cried and cried for an hour or so.”) Another spectral presence, known as Goodlady, may be a figment of Miri’s active imagination.

Everything changes when a new housekeeper, a Yoruba woman named Sade who has “tribal marks” scarred on her face and practices juju in the kitchen, isn’t scared off. In fact, she stays even when Miri goes away to college and her brother takes up an internship in South Africa. At Cambridge, Miri befriends an African adoptee named Ore, and at that point the novel begins to lose focus.

For a while, Ore’s story takes center stage. Subplots abound (including attacks against Kosovan refugees and violent happenings at an Immigration Removal Center), but they rarely advance the main plot or refer back to Miri’s life in any meaningful way. Throughout, however, the theme of displacement, both cultural and personal, recurs. Miri’s illness — the “pie-kah” of the British title — provides a clue as to how the apparently disparate story elements relate. Could it be that England, as a body, is systematically rejecting its foreign population? Perhaps a statement is being made about English xenophobia. What’s more likely is that Oyeyemi’s story is suffering ever so slightly under the weight of a political agenda.

As in Toni Morrison's “Beloved” or Chris Abani’s “Song for Night,” the super natural elements of “White Is for Witching” serve to remind the characters — and Oyeyemi’s readers — of horrifying historical circumstances. Although she may rely on some too familiar narrative ploys, Oyeyemi clearly appreciates that some crimes (like slavery or genocide or, in this case, institutional racism) are so heinous that the conventions of realist fiction seem woefully inadequate to describe them. She makes us glad to suspend disbelief.

Washington Post // Shake the Devil Off by Ethan Brown

My review of this disturbing book ran in the Washington Post on Sunday 9/13/09. I've only been in Louisiana for a year and didn't live through the horrors of Katrina, but the aftermath (physical & psychological) are still apparent. This is a valuable, albeit incomplete, true crime book.

Even though the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall has passed, much of New Orleans remains obliterated. Entire neighborhoods -- homes and schools, corner stores, churches and barbershops -- got washed away and have not been rebuilt. Outside the relatively higher ground of the French Quarter, and off the beaten path, it's impossible to escape the lingering trauma of the flood.

Given the bleak conditions, it's no surprise that the murder rate in New Orleans has skyrocketed. In one sense we will never get an accurate toll of the victims of Hurricane Katrina and the criminal (in my opinion) governmental mismanagement that followed it. In "Shake the Devil Off," journalist Ethan Brown takes a close look at two lives tragically lost in Katrina's wake.

Zack Bowen was a personable and popular 28-year-old Iraq War veteran and a fixture of the city's quasi-bohemian world. By all accounts, he was a charming, stand-up guy and a good friend well loved by his neighbors and former army buddies. He lived with his volatile girlfriend, Addie, whose "dark humor, wild creativity, and eagerness to fashion an existence away from some presumably more ordinary or otherwise undesirable past made her an ideal fit for the French Quarter bar and club scene."

During Katrina, the two of them remained in New Orleans in defiance of Mayor Nagin's forced-evacuation order and survived the storm, in part, by looting. In fact, they turned the almost-empty city into a private playground. "The immediate aftermath of the levee breaks -- mass power outages, eerily abandoned streets, and a silence that descended over the entire city even during the daytime hours -- had a cleansing effect on Zack and Addie," Brown writes. "The disaster seemed to have washed away their pasts -- his tour in Iraq, her sexual abuse -- and created a world of their own in which they could fall in love."

Fourteen months later, however, Bowen leapt to his death from the top of a hotel at the heart of the French Quarter, but not before he brutally strangled Hall; then, according to a suicide note, "after sexually defiling the body a few times," he chopped her body to pieces over the span of a few days, cooked some of the pieces in the oven of her apartment and then spent a week partying with friends in the Quarter.

The intrepid Brown, a recent transplant to New Orleans, attempted to figure out why Bowen did it. Very much to his credit, Brown mostly avoids the usual pop psychology and pat causality. The 15 pages of "source notes" at the end of the book attest to his thoroughness as a reporter and researcher. We never learn exactly why this particular murder motivated him to move to New Orleans, but upon his arrival he began to interview Bowen's friends, neighbors, co-workers, army buddies and even his estranged wife in an attempt to make sense of what happened. Bowen emerges as a complex and contradictory figure suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder exacerbated by governmental indifference. Brown devotes significantly fewer pages to Hall, acknowledging that "my wife had occasionally angrily accused me of being too sympathetic to Zack," and many readers will feel the same way. Perhaps it's unfair to judge a book on what it's not about, but I find it a pity that the young women so savagely murdered didn't receive equal attention.

"Shake the Devil Off," which stems from an article Brown wrote for Penthouse magazine, is a powerful indictment of our ineffective political establishment and seemingly unfeeling military bureaucracy. Brown cites a published report that shows more than 100 veterans had committed homicide after tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan but "neither the Pentagon nor the Justice Department tracks murders specifically by Iraq and Afghanistan vets." He also notes that "a National Institute of Mental Health official said that postwar suicides among Iraq and Afghanistan vets may exceed the number of combat deaths because of inadequate mental health care." Like Dave Eggers's recent "Zeitoun," "Shake the Devil Off" is essential reading for those willing to face the awful truths about New Orleans -- our nation's most misunderstood city -- and the trials its residents still face every day.

Low-Budget Book Trailer #2

Hobart // Interview with J. Robert Lennon

Lennon is one of my favorite contemporary authors & it was a joy to pick his brain a little bit. If you haven't read his new Castle, I recommend it.

For the record, he did OK the publication of the final Q/A:

ACE: What's your favorite AC/DC album?

JRL: I'm afraid I don't have any AC/DC records, please don't print that, it's very embarrassing...

Pete Lit on Extraordinary Renditions

My buddy Pete Anderson over at PeteLit had some nice things to say about my forthcoming book:

I'm very pleased to see the formal announcement of my friend Andrew Ervin's fiction debut Extraordinary Renditions: 3 Novellas, which is coming out on Coffee House Press sometime next year. I've really enjoyed Drew's stories as well as our often lengthy email conversations during the past several years, and am greatly anticipating his book. Seeing such glowing praise from the likes of Chris Abani and J. Robert Lennon whets my appetite even further.

Pete's a great guy, and one of the few who has ever read my first published story in a cool but now-defunct little journal back in 2001.

Extraordinary Renditions: 3 Novellas forthcoming from Coffee House Press

I'm pleased to announce that the great Coffee House Press will publish my first book next year.

Please see my new web site: www.er3n.com.

The site was made by my close friend Troy Hendricks. He is an amazing web developer--among many other talents--and I wholeheartedly recommend his services. You can learn more about him and his work here.

New story up on Significant Objects

I have a story up this week on Significant Objects. Please see the story here and bid early and often. Thank you.

Nice shout-out on HTMLGiant

Blake Butler over at <HTMLGiant> (and elsewhere) was nice enough to plug my forthcoming book:

Really excited about this one: Extraordinary Renditions: 3 Novellas by Andrew Ervin, coming in 2010 from Coffee House Press. Andrew is a badass, and 3 novellas in the same book is about exactly what I need right now. Mark it.

Philadelphia Inquirer // Imperial by William T. Vollmann

My review is in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

Imperial

By William T. Vollmann

Viking. 1,366 pp. $55

Imperial: Photographs
By William T. Vollmann

powerHouse. 200 pp. $55

William T. Vollmann is without question the most ambitious, indulgent American writer of his generation or, very likely, any other. Fortunately for him, he has all the talent, singularity of voice, and, clearly, dedication required to live up to that ambition. He has written 12 books of fiction, including the National Book Award-winning Europe Central, and, now, seven of nonfiction. One of those seven was Rising Up and Rising Down, a seven-volume, 3,299-page treatise on the history of violence.

The thing is, despite the prodigious output, he hasn't written a bad book. In fact, they're all remarkable.

Vollmann's latest book, Imperial, along with its beautiful companion volume, Imperial: Photographs, of Vollmann's own photos of the region, is an exhaustively researched macrohistory of California's Imperial Valley, in the far southeast of the state, a desert region that became an agricultural powerhouse after canals brought irrigation water in 1901. It's now a major source of fruits, vegetables, cotton, grain, and - because it abuts Mexico - immigration tensions.

But Vollmann doesn't limit his survey to that physical location. "Imperial County's attributes overwash its borders on every side," he writes, "as if they were squint-wrinkles extending like sun-rays from its inhabitants' eyes." His subjects are the borders - physical, psychic, economic, even sexual - that separate the United States from Mexico, and Imperial provides an amazing and unparalleled contribution to our understanding of who and what we are as a nation.

The Imperial Valley serves as a kind of microcosm for all of North America: "When I began to study the history of the period, my mind remained unbiased by knowledge. All I knew was that somehow Imperial County had altered from being one of the richest bits of farmland in the United States to the poorest county in California, and I couldn't fathom how."

What we learn is not always pretty. That's a large part of what makes Imperial so impressive. It's an astounding book that raises the level of the rhetorical tools available to historians - and, therefore, our expectations of them.

Vollmann is no armchair reporter content to smoke his pipe (or even a crack pipe, as he is rumored to have done in reporting past projects) among leather-bound books in a study smelling of rich mahogany. No, he's a throwback adventurer/author willing to put his own neck in jeopardy to get at vital truths of our society. The sections of Imperial that are lived rather than reported are particularly profound.

Among the most interesting concerns Vollmann's fascination with a series of tunnels rumored to have been built in the Mexican town of Mexicali by Chinese immigrants to the valley. The tunnels, originally for hiding, came to include bars, eateries and brothels, almost an underground town. The tensions between the Mexican population and the remaining Chinese make his efforts to see a tunnel for himself all the more challenging. It's difficult to determine, at first, if they even really exist. And if they do, there's no telling what sort of illegal activities might be happening in them. It's all very exciting.

The biggest payoff, however, comes near the end, in a chapter titled "The Maquiladoras." Here, Vollmann narrates his clandestine efforts to film working conditions inside factories known for their appalling mistreatment of employees. It turns out that many of the workers - people who don't have many options - are grateful for the jobs those factories provide. Here, Vollmann is at his best: He's willing to lay aside values and prejudices out of respect for other points of view. He comes to appreciate that there's no consensus among the workers about their own conditions.

That approach characterizes Vollmann's balanced research, and the organization of all this material into a cohesive, compelling narrative is a marvel in itself. Imperial closes with 179 pages of appendixes with titles like "Concerning the Maps" and "Sources" and "Persons Interviewed," all intended to gain the trust of readers.

That said, the obsessive detail of Imperial will test the patience of even Vollmann's most ardent admirers. You can trust me on that because I'm one of them. Sticker shock alone - $55 is a lot to spend on a book - might scare off some potential readers, even if the hand-cramping girth doesn't.

There's a ton to admire about this book (and maybe a ton for some readers to skim past), and it's required reading for anyone interested in notions of identity played out every day on the U.S.-Mexican border. But I couldn't help wondering who the intended audience might be for Imperial. It clearly isn't the maquiladora workers he describes, nor the coyotes or narco-capitalists or prostitutes.

It's entirely possible that Vollmann's ideal audience hasn't been born yet. In the many, many hours it took me to read and review it, I came to believe that this book is ultimately a meticulously constructed time capsule. When future generations look back at our era to figure out what went wrong, Imperial will be waiting. Historians will one day look at Vollmann the way we look at Tacitus - as one of the greatest chroniclers of his fledgling nation-state. He has written Imperial to last, perhaps even to outlive the empire it so brilliantly chronicles.

* * *

Update 8/9/09: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has reprinted this review. I just sent the editor there, Bob Hoover, an email to thank him. He runs a great section. Then I looked more closely at the review. Apparently, someone at the Post-Gazette decided to change a few things. In my original review, above, I wrote:

"The thing is, despite the prodigious output, he hasn't written a bad book. In fact, they're all remarkable."

The Post-Gazette changed that to:

"The thing is, despite the prodigious output, Vollman has written few bad books."

That's a big difference, and despite the fact that my name is on this article I don't agree with this assertion one bit. Vollmann has not written any bad books. None. I've read them all. And his name has two n's: Vollmann.

While I remain grateful to see this review in another excellent newspaper, I can't help but feel like Imperial and I are both being slightly misrepresented. Not a huge deal, mind you, but still.

Miami Herald // Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

Zeitoun. Dave Eggers. McSweeney's. 342 pages. $24.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun is a Syrian immigrant who was living in New Orleans in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina devastated that city. With his wife, Kathy, he had built a widely respected painting and contracting business and owned several rental properties. Sadly, the destruction of his home and livelihood was just the beginning of what would be a grotesque and awful ordeal. In Zeitoun, based on hours of interviews and other research, Dave Eggers tells the man's tragic story and puts a human face on what may be the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Zeitoun spent the days leading up to Katrina in denial. He didn't anticipate the storm's direct impact on New Orleans or even the failure of the levee system to control the water rushing in. ''This had happened before, Zeitoun noted, so many times. The storms always raged across Florida, wreaking havoc, and then died somewhere overland or in the Gulf.'' Kathy didn't share her husband's optimism, and so she took the children out of town while Zeitoun stayed behind to look after his company's job sites and his tenants. When the storm hit and the levees broke, he slept in a tent on his roof and spent his days paddling through the city in a canoe. Eggers' description of the washed-out city will call to mind the scorched-earth wasteland of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The difference is that Eggers' New Orleans is real.

Still Zeitoun stayed. He helped some old folks escape from their homes and even delivered food every day to some neighborhood dogs whose owners had gone. He took tremendous pleasure in helping others, and he stayed even after the mayor called for a forced evacuation. ``He had never felt such urgency and purpose. In his first day in his flooded city, he had already assisted in the rescue of five elderly residents. There was a reason, he now knew, that he had remained in the city. He had felt compelled to stay by a power beyond his own reckoning. He was needed.''

The telephone still worked in one of his buildings. He returned every day to call Kathy until he got arrested, wrongly, for looting his own property. The police and National Guard imprisoned Zeitoun at a makeshift jail and accused him of being in al Qaeda. ``Zeitoun was in disbelief. It had been a dizzying series of events -- arrested at gunpoint in a home he owned, brought to an impromptu military base built inside a bus station, accused of terrorism, and locked in an outdoor cage. It surpassed the most surreal accounts he'd heard of third-world law enforcement.''

Eggers leads the reader deftly back and forth to between equally tense storylines. Unable to contact her husband for weeks, Kathy feared that he was dead. Zeitoun soon got transferred to a maximum-security prison, where his treatment at the hands of xenophobic guards didn't exactly improve. He was not allowed a phone call or medical treatment.

The fact that this sort of crime could happen is nothing short of disgusting. The government's mishandling of Katrina remains a national embarrassment. Large sections of the city remain devastated, but other issues have distracted us from the plights of Americans still living in atrocious conditions. That's why we're fortunate to have journalists like Eggers who are willing to do the muckraking necessary to keep the story in the news.

To his credit, Eggers appreciates that writers of privilege have the responsibility to speak for those whose voices might not otherwise be heard. In Zeitoun, he tells a story made more upsetting by the fact that although it surpasses our worst nightmares, it is absolutely true. It is a major achievement and his best book yet.

My Low Budget Book Trailer

Washington Post // In Hanuman's Hands by Cheeni Rao

IN HANUMAN'S HANDS

By Cheeni Rao

Harper. 399 pp. $25.99

A descendant of generations of Brahmin priests, Cheeni Rao chose a tragic path to enlightenment. "Drugs gave me the power to hear the divine in the way my ancestors had," he writes. His powerful memoir, "In Hanuman's Hands," describes in harrowing detail Rao's troubles with crack addiction and the spiritual awakening that led to his recovery.

As a university student in Chicago, Rao embraced drugs, sex and crime. In one heartbreaking scene, his grandmother catches him doing cocaine in her bathroom: "It's a new kind of snuff," he tells her, "just like what Grandfather used." His family eventually abandons him. At the depths of his despair, while high on crack in an alley, Rao is visited by the spirit of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman, who shows him the way toward a cure. "After my family disowned me over the phone, tears and pleading replaced by the tough-love click," Rao recalls, "it was Hanuman who held me in the alley and told me I wasn't alone." Rao's encounter with the divine elicits a new respect for the Indian stories of his youth; the tales held dear by his ancestors and immediate family inspire him to reexamine his poor choices. It's little wonder Rao, who eventually graduated from the University of Chicago and the venerable Iowa Writers' Workshop, has become such a great storyteller in his own right.

Miami Herald // The Show that Smells by Derek McCormack

Dreams of a vampire carnival with freaky fashions in 'The Show that Smells'

The Show that Smells. Derek McCormack. Akashic. 110 pages. $15.95 in paper.

This thoroughly hilarious, strange and altogether ghoulish little freak show of a book is a campy vampire story with more in common, aesthetically speaking, with William Gay'sTwilight than with Stephenie Meyer's. Even the author's note in the beginning provides a good, dark-humor laugh in setting the record straight about a famous perfume called Shocking! created by the surrealism-inspired fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli in 1937. ''This book is a work of fiction,'' McCormack warns us. ``It is a parody. It is a phantasmagoria. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Elsa Schiaparelli was never a vampire. Shocking! by Schiaparelli never contained blood.''

Shocking! indeed. There's not much of a plot, but isn't linear narrative overrated anyway? Instead, we get something that reads more like a combination of prose poetry and avant-garde drama in which people stand around in a hall of mirrors having witty conversations, most of them riotously funny. The cast of characters includes someone named Derek McCormack, as well as the yodeling singer Jimmie Rogers, Joan Crawford, Lon Chaney and Coco Chanel. Schiaparelli plays the villain. ''Couturiers whispered her name in terrified tones,'' says Coco Chanel of her. ''She was a legend, a figure feared but seldom seen -- a Satanic seamstress who catered to vampires.'' And: ``She started creating clothes for human clients. Even the names of her collections curdled my Christian soul.''

Schiaparelli is apparently designing a ''Carnival Collection'' of haute couture -- or ''Haute horreur!'' -- for the discerning sideshow freak. Among her minions are Larry the Lobster Boy, Pinny the Human Pincushion and a trusty embroiderer named Otto the Octopus Man.

Chanel's most famous perfume is one of the many smells of the title. Lon Chaney in particular, however, has a serious aversion to it. ''Worse than wolfsbane. Gruesomer than garlic. Chaney clutches his throat like he's strangling himself. All vampires act like silent stars.'' When someone spills some on him, it ``burns like battery acid. Blended with bleach. Skin smokes. Seared hair. Seared skin. Seared seersucker. Stinks. Chaney No. 5.''

Be warned: The book is not only hilarious but grotesque. Schiaparelli dreams of a vampire carnival where she will ''pinken popcorn with baby blood'' and ``prizes will be dolls -- dead babies stuffed with sawdust.''

The Show that Smells is the 10th book in the Little House on the Bowery series edited by the great Dennis Cooper, an author and editor whose impact on American letters has not yet been fully felt in the mainstream. Most of the books he has chosen so far for this series, like Trinie Dalton's Wide-Eyed and Travis Jeppesen's Victims, will rock your world in unexpected ways.

A book like The Show that Smells -- not that there are many books like it -- reminds us that much of our most eviscerating contemporary literature is coming courtesy of the small, indie and university presses. It demonstrates that innovative literature, if such a thing still exists, can be accessible and even fun, especially for those of us with a dark sense of humor.

Washington Post // Larry's Kidney by Daniel Asa Rose

Who Needs One?

Sunday, May 31, 2009 

Larry's Kidney

By Daniel Asa Rose. 305 pp. $25.99

"Larry's Kidney," a stranger-than-fiction memoir by Daniel Asa Rose, serves as an enjoyable testament to the lengths to which we sometimes go to help family, even when doing so is a terrible, terrible idea. The absurdly long subtitle -- "Being the Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant -- and Save His Life" -- should come with a spoiler alert. It's not giving too much away to reveal that the plot involves a guy named Larry, who somehow persuaded his long-lost cousin, Daniel Rose, editor of the literary magazine the Reading Room, to leave his wife and kids behind and accompany him to China. There Larry hoped to get an illegal kidney transplant and meet his bride-to-be.

The ensuing adventure is the stuff of slapstick comedy, as Rose and Larry navigate the Chinese black market, the dodgy medical establishment and their own relationship. It's curious and occasionally tense, especially when after all that trouble Larry threatens to call off the operation if it's going to be too expensive. Though their odyssey was a success in the end, Rose makes the moral of the story clear: "Don't try to go to China for a kidney. We got the last one."

6/17/09: A blog about bioethics called this "another favorable--and utterly amoral--book review."

Washington Post // The Dangerous World of Butterflies by Peter Laufer

A Delicate Subject

Sunday, May 24, 2009 

THE DANGEROUS WORLD OF BUTTERFLIES

The Startling Subculture of Criminals, Collectors, and Conservationists

By Peter Laufer

Lyons Press. 271 pp. $24.95

"To me," Peter Laufer writes early in "The Dangerous World of Butterflies," "journalism is an all-or-nothing calling. A real journalist is a journalist to the grave." But even the toughest reporters can get worn out. Laufer, the author of many hard-edged books -- about the rise of neo-Nazism, vigilantes on the Mexican-American border and, more recently, the suffering of soldiers returning from Iraq -- has decided to take on a more lighthearted subject: butterflies. He begins his sally in Nicaragua, where he learns of a conflict between the "butterfly huggers" of the North American Butterfly Association and the International Butterfly Breeders Association over the staged release of butterflies at public events. His investigation reveals a sordid underworld of butterfly hobbyists in which "nefarious collectors fuel criminal butterfly poachers worldwide."

Laufer writes with humor, as if to concede that he's trying too hard to find an exciting story where one doesn't exist. Nevertheless, his book is charming and his attention to detail, combined with a real gift for describing these fascinating characters -- like calling entomologist Arthur Shapiro "an endless litany of intriguing butterfly stories" -- made me want to read everything else he has written. And I'm certain to look differently at the butterflies in my own backyard, knowing now how far they may have traveled to get there.

6/28/09: Republished in the Miami Herald.

Miami Herald // Nobody Move by Denis Johnson

Well I've fallen a little behind in posting my book reviews.

NOBODY MOVE. Denis Johnson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 192 pages. $22.

Denis Johnson had no easy task in following up his sprawling, National Book Award-winning Vietnam epicTree of Smoke. But the same could have been said about his story collection Jesus' Son, a bona fide American classic that has inspired more young fictioneers than any other book since On the Road.He has, to date, written 10 works of fiction, several poetry collections, and even a play.

Nobody Move appears to take its title from the reggae song Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt by Yellowman. That's an unlikely soundtrack to a story about a barbershop harmony singer named Jimmy Luntz who has run up too many gambling debts and gets taken for a ride through south-central California by a thug named Gambol. Instead of accepting the beating he deserves, Luntz shoots Gambol in the leg and spends the rest of the book on the run. Along the way, he meets a beautiful woman named Anita, who has her own share of problems. She's a hard drinker involved in a scheme to steal several million dollars. She and Luntz make a good team.

Gambol recovers from his gunshot with the help of Mary, the ex-wife of his boss, Juarez. Mary is an Army vet with a habit of stealing medical supplies. Her care for Gambol involves all of the therapeutic exercises you might expect from a story that originally appeared in Playboy magazine. In many ways, these are all classic Denis Johnson characters.

Many of Johnson's books appear to inhabit the same universe, as if each title is another piece in an enormous jigsaw puzzle, the subject of which -- maybe the effects of war on the home front? -- is still taking shape. Longtime admirers of Johnson's work, who tend to be somewhat obsessive, will spot a few themes that placeNobody Moves squarely in that context. It is set after 9/11, and the Gulf Wars exist in the story's subtext. Gambol, who is of the mind to nuke ''that whole Muslim desert to glass,'' becomes distraught when he learns that Juarez might be of Middle Eastern descent.

Little of the snappy dialogue can be quoted at length in a family newspaper. And given the spare, made-for-glossy-serialization tone of the book, Johnson's poetic range doesn't find its fullest expression, but there are the occasional passages of utterly perfect prose. ``Luntz's vision turned a brilliant brown, then a mellow purple, then a beautiful color he'd never seen before in which he had everything he needed and all the time in the world to decide what came next. He gripped the wrists of the hands that were choking him and removed the hands as easily as if he were taking off a sports jacket.''

Even if Nobody Moves lacks the obvious gravitas and emotional resonance of Johnson's best books, its hardboiled, tough-as-railroad-spikes tone is likely to find an enormous audience. It reads like a Coen Brothers movie waiting to happen, a cross between Blood Simple and No Country for Old Men. There's certainly enough going on here to feed the jones of Johnson's legion devotees.

Philadelphia Inquirer // New Collected Poems by George Oppen

My review ran in today's Philly Inquirer.I'm guessing it's the first review of George Oppen to cite Ol' Dirty Bastard.  The book comes with a CD of Oppen reading his own work. 

And the recordings of Oppen reading his own poems are exhilarating. You'll want to follow along in the book. His voice sounds like a combination of Woody Allen and James Mason, and he swings a little bit, placing the accents and stresses in places we never expect. I'd recommend loading this CD into your iPod - somewhere between Ol' Dirty Bastard and Otis Redding - and allowing Oppen to shuffle in the background the next time you're hosting a dinner party or planning a socialist uprising.

Tayari Jones has chosen me as one of her "Amazing Eight"

I'm extremely honored & flattered & humbled to be included among the "Amazing Eight," part of a series about debut books that Tayari Jones is doing on her blog. That's just so cool.

In addition to being incredibly good-looking, what do these eight writers have in common? Well, for one thing, they are all members of this blog community. But the real thing, the news, the thing that calls for champagne is that all of them are publishing their first books! (You may notice that one of the Amazing Eight is pictured twice. That's because Dwayne Betts is publishing TWO first books this year, with his bad self.)

Over the next few weeks, each of these amazing first-timers will be featured on the blog. I'll post a little about their books and they will each share something about writing and the writing life.

Ninth Letter // Podcast of "The Snotgreen Sea"

It turns out that Jodee Stanley and my pals over at Ninth Letter have made a podcast of an essay I published there. "The Snotgreen Sea" is about St. Patrick's Day in Chicago. You can hear it here.