So, like, you can't just hyperbolize the most oft-repeated talking points on cable news and call it a dystopia. "OMG the Chinese are taking over the wSo, like, you can't just hyperbolize the most oft-repeated talking points on cable news and call it a dystopia. "OMG the Chinese are taking over the world! Everyone has iPhone-like devices that they look at instead of reading or talking to each other. It's a wooooorrrrrllllddd gone maaaaaaaad!"
That was bitchy, I know. But still. Come on. M.T. Anderson's "Feed" did this earlier and better and more thoughtfully and that shit was YA.
Also I didn't finish it. Maybe it ended up being good and went somewhere original? I will defer to anyone who makes that point. ...more
Uneven, but frequently clever. The format of the book is ingenious, if a little precious: it switches off between fact and fiction every other chapterUneven, but frequently clever. The format of the book is ingenious, if a little precious: it switches off between fact and fiction every other chapter, and Silverstein labels the chapters because he does not "wish to deceive by passing off fiction as fact, as so many have done." The result is a patchwork novel-memoir chronicling the author's attempt (and spectacular failure) to be a real writer of some stripe, first a journalist and then a poet and then a journalist again. The first three chapters deliver hugely on the promise of the premise. There's the hilariously uneventful account of his search for the bones of Ambrose Bierce in and around Marfa, Texas. There's the tall tale of the very German New Yorker photographer looking for "ze shot" to convey the soul of Midland, Texas in a single picture. (Ze shot ends up pitting the teuton against junkyard dogs.) And there's the horribly true account of Silverstein's sojourn in Reno to compete for $25,000 after receiving a letter from the clearly bogus Famous Poet's Society. (He knows it's bogus, but he needs the money, and he predicts that competition at such an event won't be too stiff. This proves to be hubris. How will he compete with the man who wrote a poem about everyone in the world praying for world peace for a solid week in all the different time zones, complete with a chart illustrating the effectiveness of this scheme? He didn't know you could use visual aids! Or with the man whose poem includes the line "it takes both sunshine and rain to make rainbows"?
So those are funny and awesome and include some smart, incisive stuff about the nature of journalism and poetry and fiction and truth-telling and whatnot. The rest is kind of a whiff. Somehow, the long, long true chapter about the deadliest road race in the world is kind of boring? I'm not sure how that happened. ...more
I blazed through this and raved about it while I was reading it, and I still maintain that it's clever, but it's not as important as it thinks it is, I blazed through this and raved about it while I was reading it, and I still maintain that it's clever, but it's not as important as it thinks it is, and there are few things more annoying than that to me. ...more
Four and not five stars only because the last story truly sucks. But the rest is just disgustingly good. Really fearless investigations into this partFour and not five stars only because the last story truly sucks. But the rest is just disgustingly good. Really fearless investigations into this particular nexus of sex, power, violence, and class that clicked into place for like ten seconds in the 1980s on the Lower East Side. You don't wish you'd been there, but you're glad Gaitskill was around taking notes....more
I finished this book today and I've already forgotten everything but a few well-turned phrases and the creepy twist Moore tosses in at the climax. I finished this book today and I've already forgotten everything but a few well-turned phrases and the creepy twist Moore tosses in at the climax. ...more
I'm sorry if you don't like this narrator, because she is actually me ten years ago.
It was strange and sort of cringe-inducing to read an era I livedI'm sorry if you don't like this narrator, because she is actually me ten years ago.
It was strange and sort of cringe-inducing to read an era I lived through seen through the eyes of a narrator who was my age at the time. (Tassie and I were both 18 and completely clueless and far away from New York when 9/11 happened on our TVs.) Moore really, really deftly captures the disgruntled but still dopily hopeful mind of exactly the kind of late-adolescent sardonic asshole I used to be at Tassie's age. If you're in your late twenties and thinking life is just a "long, slow drip of adult acne and bad OkCupid dates," as this one awesome blogger put it, read Gate at the Stairs and remember how stupid you actually USED to be and maybe feel a little bit better about how far you've come since then.
I always like a book that gives you new ways to think about stuff. A book like this by a wise, gentle old closeted gay English dude who spent his lifeI always like a book that gives you new ways to think about stuff. A book like this by a wise, gentle old closeted gay English dude who spent his life, as Virginia Woolf said, "rowing old ladies about in boats": that's pure fucking gold. The combination of Forster's keen, incisive intellect and his sweet, palpable love for humanity makes for characters that stick to your ribs and honest-to-God life lessons that will help you make sense of your own shit. Seriously. Because of this book, I will for the rest of my life divide people into Wilcoxes and Schlegels, and I find this distinction enormously helpful, especially when I remember that the lesson (for lack of a better word) of the novel is for Wilcoxes and Schegels to stop hating on each other so much, since I'm a Schlegel and have had endless, endless trouble with Wilcoxes. ...more
I finished this forever ago, on the last day of my spring break, actually, and it's still haunting me in lots of weird little ways. DFW's characters hI finished this forever ago, on the last day of my spring break, actually, and it's still haunting me in lots of weird little ways. DFW's characters have one hell of a half life; they take a terribly long time to fade from your memory. Long, long after I've finished the book and forgotten most of the plot and even their names, the levitating rote examiner and the maniacal silver-haired Jesuit accounting professor and the dopey, fatherless Chicago burnout and the devastatingly beautiful but disgustingly narcissistic accountant are still bouncing around in my head, saying stuff about what I'm reading and doing. The twisted fictionalized version DFW created of himself, complete with the disfiguring acne and the blue-collar chip on his shoulder, is particularly tenacious.
It's not like the space they're occupying in my brain is prime real estate, but I kind of wish they'd go away? They're creepy, is all. One of them is a ghost who killed himself after decades of mind-numbing labor in a mirror factory, for God's sake. ...more
God, E.M. Forster, where were you when I was sixteen and didn't know any better than Jane Austen? God, E.M. Forster, where were you when I was sixteen and didn't know any better than Jane Austen? ...more
I guess mostly I wished Cushman would have backed off her own agenda for a little bit and allowed these kids time and space to craft their own ideas aI guess mostly I wished Cushman would have backed off her own agenda for a little bit and allowed these kids time and space to craft their own ideas about good teaching. It sounds like she just sat in a room with them and goaded them to say certain things (including some awful things about former teachers of theirs who were presumably still in the classroom) and then had somebody write it all down word for word. There are some little nuggets of wisdom, and the kids are lovely and candid (but when aren't kids lovely and candid?), but mostly there's nothing in here that most teachers worth their salt don't already know.
I guess I would have found this more useful if I'd read it back before I was worth anything near my salt, in my first two years? ...more
"I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from i"I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it."
This is the ethos of Lewis "Teabag" Miner, an outcast and geek in high school who grew up into a slightly larger, fatter outcast and geek with precisely one friend, no prospects, and an insatiable urge to speak truth to power鈥攐r at least to the powerful alums who run his alumni newsletter.
Lots of reviews invoke Holden Caulfield, but this narrator鈥攁 lonely, lascivious man-child maniacally bent on "updating" his more successful high school classmates on his tawdry wreck of a life鈥攔eminds me much more of a Yankee Ignatius J. Reilly, as unhappily wedded to his native New Jersey as Reilly was to New Orleans.
The Wrathful Anomie of a White Dude Who Cannot Grow Up is hardly new territory, but Lipsyte's vicious, hilarious, and sometimes really, really beautiful prose makes it well worth reading. It's also the first time in a LONG time a novel has succeeded in shocking me, both with its stubbornly unpredictable plot and with some truly disgusting descriptions of bodily matters normally left in the realm of metaphor. (Seriously, if by some strange chance you are an underage student of mine actually reading this review, do not tell anyone I recommended this book to you. Because I didn't. This book is not for you. It would probably stunt your intellectual and emotional growth and most likely scar you for life.)
AND, also much to Lipsyte's credit, this is the first time I've read a novel with a narrator who has problems with women that didn't make me feel like the author just needed an outlet for his own misogyny.
If the art wasn't so strikingly similar, it'd be hard to believe the same guy made this and Maakies. The online comic is so gross and violent and demeIf the art wasn't so strikingly similar, it'd be hard to believe the same guy made this and Maakies. The online comic is so gross and violent and demented and cynically hard-boiled it makes me sort of queasy. But Billy Hazelnuts, while pretty disgusting (it does star a Golem fashioned by vengeful mice out of garbage and houseflies) is also sort of delicate and sweet-natured and gently funny. And there's a really rewarding depth to the dream-logic of the plot. Not bad for a thirty-minute read....more
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