Michael Chabon Takes the High Road

I collect beautiful sentences, and in Gentlemen of the Road, Michael Chabon has given me a bookful of them, a collection so intoxicating that it almost doesn't matter, to a stylist like me, what the story's about.

Luckily, the story's as much fun as the prose. An unlikely pair of "gentlemen"--Amran, an earthy African axe-wielder, and Zelikman, a lonely, high-minded healer--roam the medieval world in search of adventure, wealth, and wrongs to right. They remind me of all the great male duos of literature and film: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, juggling idealism and hard reality; Luke Skywalker and Han Solo one-upping each other with innocence and experience; Butch and Sundance shrugging as they jump off the cliff together. In every chapter the "gentlemen" encounter ambushes, traitors, orphans who need saving, corrupt rulers, savage mercenaries, animals with superhuman powers, torn and bleeding bodies--all the stuff of a Marvel comic book or an Indiana Jones movie. It's no surprise that the boys save the day and get the girls before they ride off into the sunset.

But what is surprising in such a story is the subtlety of characterization, conveyed in short bursts of dialogue. “I don’t save lives,” Zelikman the healer says. “I just prolong their futility.” In one of the few long speeches in the book, Zelikman captures both the melodrama and the nobility of the book when he proclaims: “I am not overly encumbered by principle, as you know. I am a gentleman of the road, an apostate from the faith of my fathers, a renegade, a brigand, a hired blade, a thief, but on this one small principle of economy, damn you, and damn that troublemaking little stripling, and damn every one of those men out there, living men, in full possession, for the most part, of all their limbs and humors, I have to hold firm: if we can only save them one man at a time, then by God we must only kill them one man at a time.”

That long sentence, with its rich vocabulary, skillful repetition, meandering structure, and delayed punchline, is typical of Chabon's writing. I kept wandering away from the plotline to admire the linguistic scenery along the way. In the best passages, and there are many, action, character, emotion, and description intertwine to produce a kind of High-Def prose where the beads of sweat on the faces of the men in the foreground, and the terror drumming in their hearts, are as clear as the invading ships in the distance. Case in point: "He wept silently, after the custom of shamed and angry men, so that when the pursuit party came tumbling, pounding, scrabbling down the trail, past the fold in which he and Hillel [his horse] stood concealed, he could hear the creak and rattle of their leather armor with its scales of horn; and when the Arsiyah returned, just before daybreak, at the very hour when all of creation seemed to fall silent as if fighting off tears, Zelikman could hear the rumbling of the men’s bellies and the grit in their eyelids and the hollowness of failure sounding in their chests."

Chabon pulls out of his bag of tricks two other conventions of old-fashioned storytelling that kept me turning the pages. His chapter titles are elegant and seductive: "On the Seizing of a Low Moment"; "On a Consignment of Flesh" ; and finally, "On Following the Road to One's Destiny, with the Usual Intrusions of Violence and Grace." And in case we're still not having enough fun, sprinkled through the slim book are fifteen pen-and-ink illustrations in the style of the best books I read as a kid in the sixties. They are by Gary Gianni, who, fittingly, draws the never-ending comic strip "Prince Valiant."

So what's a nice Pulitzer Prize-winning author doing in a place like this? In an endearing afterword, Chabon tries to answer that inevitable question. "You catch me in the act of trying, as a writer, to do what many of the characters in my earlier stories...were trying, longing, ready to do: I have gone off in search of a little adventure....Adventures are a logical and reliable result--and have been since the time of Odysseus--of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventure happens in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws, and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had; then you have entered into adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels, and regret. Given a choice, I very much prefer to stay home, where I may safely encounter adventure in the pages of a book, or seek it out, as I have here, in the friendly wilderness of my computer screen."

I'm so thankful that Chabon chose the literary form of adventure and then invited us all along for the ride. And if he gets hooked on the genre (my word, not his; he hates the way books are slotted into discrete categories that carry automatic judgements and misjudgements) and produces the next Lord of the Rings, I'll be first in line at the bookstore.

Octavian Nothing: Really Something

Most adult readers assume that "young adult" fiction consists of smarmy high school romances full of stereotypical teens learning Hallmark life lessons while indulging heavily in sex, booze, drugs, and hip-hop, or whatever's the latest pop-culture flavor-of-the-month. The best YA literature--and I do not use the term loosely--may indeed include such ingredients (just as Shakespeare and Jane Austen did), but it can also transcend the age and cultural limitations of teens to entertain and enlighten readers of any age. M. T. Anderson's The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 1, which won the National Book Award last year, is such a novel.

Set in the Boston area in the early days of the American Revolution, Octavian tells the story of an African boy who was born a prince and then sold into slavery with his mother. His bondage is an unusual one: he is raised in a College of philosophers and scientists who provide him a classical education and a refined life while scrupulously documenting everything from his intellectual achievements to his feces, all as part of an experiment to determine the relative abilities of different races. Octavian's realization of his ironic dilemma comes amidst a minor smallpox epidemic and a major revolution, one in which he gladly participates even though he knows the freedom he is fighting for will never be his.

Anderson manages to suggest just about every issue of the history of race in America in the experiences of this one boy. The tragic facts he portrays and the terrible questions he raises challenge readers of every age to become newly aware of the horrors of both slavery and war. Octavian is disempowered at every turn, and when he is finally shackled and made to wear an iron mask that prevents him from speaking, we understand in our guts why he must cancel out the emperor's name bestowed on him by his "benefactors" with the surname "Nothing."

And then there is the style. Some writers for teens adopt a simple, pared-down style, or resort to the teenspeak of the day--nothing dates a book faster--or pepper their dialogue with "edgy" invective and sarcasm. I suppose a whole novel will soon be written, if it hasn't been already, in the truncated language of texting. Anderson instead chooses to challenge his young readers by adopting the lofty, lengthy, multi-syllabic, formal, abstract, semicolon-sprinkled and sometimes beautiful language of the eighteenth century Rationalists he castigates. It's intimidating to all but the most erudite reader. It almost lost me, and it will, I regret to say, keep the vast majority of young readers from getting very far into his book--just as the YA marketing will keep adult readers who would love the book from finding it. And while I admire both the work it must have required and the results, I wish he had made a different choice. It's as if he brought into a classroom a young man with a moving, intense, life-changing story to tell, but he dressed him up in a powdered wig and silk hose and expected the kids to take him seriously. A few will listen, but most will be too busy giggling at the foppery to hear the message.

And yet I would love to teach this book to kids who could handle the style. There is so much here to think and talk about: the language itself, the values and practices of the time, the questions felt in the revolutionary hearts of all adolescents, the horrors echoed in our own unsettled day. The reader of any age who can stick with it will be hugely rewarded.

From One Extreme to the Other (Our Trip, part 2)

Hoover Dam provided a transition from the wild extremes of nature to those of human nature. It's an amazing engineering feat, explained so that even we non-engineers can begin to understand how difficult it must have been. Yet it came in early and under budget, due in part to the hundreds of workers who died in the process. It's a tribute to what people can do when they set their minds to something seemingly impossible.

And I guess the same can be said of Las Vegas, though with less admiration. On the one hand, the Strip was far from the dirty, tacky place I'd expected. We spent much of our time walking around the grand hotels, and they do take your breath away--in both elegance and mileage! No dime or detail was spared to create The Bellagio, The Venetian, Caesar's Palace, Paris, New York, The Mirage, etc., or should I say to re-create Lake Como, Venice, Rome, etc. The fountain picture, the only one we took in Vegas before the camera died, represents well the grand and beautiful side of this city my Frommer's guide called "Disney World on Steroids." The high point was probably Cirque du Soleil's "Mystere." If you haven't seen a show by this group, put it on your must-do list. Another place well worth the admission was Siegfried and Roy's Secret Garden, a gorgeous zoo and serious research facility with more than a dozen very active white tigers and lions, alpaca sheep, and dolphins. We also saw David Copperfield's show, but he was surprisingly underwhelming. I got the feeling he was both bored and more impressed with himself than we were.

As for the decadent side of Sin City, I found the worst thing to be the hawkers of girlie shows who line the sidewalks clicking their fingers against the ad cards they stick in your face. Watching people gamble can be both exciting and depressing. Other than wasting a few bucks on the slots (actually, Ray won there), we didn't gamble, preferring to spend our money on beautiful expensive food. Not to mention Venetian glass earrings. But hey, I bought the cheapest ones in the store!

Three days in Vegas was enough to say Been there, done that. Next time I want to see Rome or Paris, it will be the real deal. But the rest of the West--well, I'll be back.

From The Land of the Gods

We're in the middle of our long-awaited trip west, where our most frequent utterance is "Wow!" followed shortly by "Double Wow." Beyond that, it will take a better writer than me to do verbal justice to this land, so I'll just summarize our travels and share a few photos.

After a painless flight to Vegas and a half hour lost to congestion there, we (Ray and I with friends Linda and Rich) were finally on our way to Zion Natl Park. As the land opened up and vast vistas spread out before us filled with giant formations I'd never even imagined, I could feel my blood pressure drop and my breathing expand. Even Ray relaxed! He even turns off his crackberry for an hour or two now and then. We spent the first night in lovely Springdale, Utah, at the foot of Zion Park, and the second at the park lodge-both very nice. We walked along the Virgin River or just stood still gaping at the rocks towering above us--and sometimes at the climbers who dared to scale them. The weather was perfect.

Exiting the park via the Mt Carmel Scenic highway, with its hairpin turns, was unforgettable. A few hours later we arrived at Grand Canyon Lodge in rain and fog. I was astonished. Who ever heard of RAIN at the Grand Canyon? isn't this desert country? Soon it stopped and we walked in the fog out one short but sobering path to the end of a promontory, where the clouds lifted enough for a few frustrating glimpses of what lay beyond. We went to bed a bit disappointed, which made the next morning all the more wonderful, when we saw the canyon in all its glory under a brilliant sun. After walking the paths by the lodge, we drove through a gorgeous pine-and-aspen forest to other outposts, marveling at the vastness and variety of the land forms. Then we returned to the lodge, snagged chairs on the porch, put our feet up, and decided what music to put on our ipods for the sunset. (I chose Handel's "Zadok the Priest" performed by The Opera Band, which repeats the word "Rejoice" over and over in a glorious crescendo. It was perfect.) That hour watching the canyon formations glow and darken as the sun descended was one of the most magical and unforgettable of my life.

Today is the first of two days at Bryce Canyon. Each of these parks is so glorious and so completely unique. At Zion you are humbled and awed by the majesty and power of the rock walls rising hundreds of feet over your head; at the Grand Canyon you look out and down at the endless beauty below and the flat emptiness of the South Rim beyond; here at Bryce you are again staring down, now at the tops of "hoodoos" that look like giant sand dribble castles left by giants playing in the dirt. Ray and Rich descended to the canyon bottom, a short walk down and a long steep climb up. Linda and I were content to stroll the path along the rim.

Tonight we'll return to the park from our motel nearby to see the stars. Time for me to get out of the room and take a walk in this glorious place before it gets dark. We'll spend two nights here, then on to vegas. Right now it's hard to imagine enjoying its man-made "beauty," but I'm sure we'll manage to have fun!

To write in a book or not to write, that is the question

Since my blog's title is BookWoman, I thought I better write something about books, my chief passion in life. Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda underreacted recently when an online reader huffed superciliously that one must never write in a book, as every true book lover knows. Sadly, I was too late to enter the chat, but steam was coming out of my ears. Then a few days later, I was horrified when a woman in a book discussion group I was attending said the same thing. I couldn't believe there were two such "book lovers" in the world.

HOW DOES A BOOK LOVER NOT WRITE IN A BOOK? The better the book, the more you need to mark it up. (Except collectibles which you might sell, obviously.) Oh sure, you could use post-its, or keep a notebook with every book you're reading, but then your questions and comments and exclamation points are in one place and the actual words that inspired them are in another. What good is that? One of the things I like about library books and used books is seeing what passages were marked by previous readers. (Exception: highlighting, which should be done only when you have to take a test on the book and then never open it again.) True book lovers of the world, unite, pens in hand!

I just started re-reading Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. If you're like me and can never have enough books (or read all the books you have), it's worth a trip to the library or bookstore to enjoy the first few pages of this one, a catalog of all the types of books that can assault you when you walk into a bookstore. My favorite: The Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down and Really Read Them.

And there I was on the front porch without a pen when I came across this sentence: "Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears." And this was written before the internet! Still, it leads right back to what I wrote yesterday. Don't you love it when that happens?

More joy

The openings to "Sugar Pie Honey Bunch" and "Glory Days."
(click on August to see what this is about.)

Gotten any letters lately?

We had some people over for dinner a few days ago, and yesterday I received a lovely, handwritten, mailed-with-a-stamp thank you note! Imagine—something personal in the postal mail!

Like most people, I rarely use paper mail any more. Electronic communication is a wonderful invention, but like all forms of progress, it giveth and it taketh away. It giveth the power to communicate instantaneously with anyone (or a million anyones) anywhere. It taketh away the joy of the letter.

Unlike a polite thank-you note written in a unique hand on a card decorated with Van Gogh’s sunflowers, every piece of electronic communication looks like every other piece. A business memo looks no different than a letter from a friend. Did I say letter? Who writes letters any more? Everything’s a message, and a message is decidedly not a letter. A message is brief, purposeful, ephemeral, impersonal, and decidedly unpoetic (though I’m sure the creative spelling of text messages will one day be studied by linguists and psychologists). A note is also brief and usually single-minded, but it’s written in someone’s uniquely personal handwriting on carefully chosen paper. The writer’s fingerprints are all over it.

Then there’s that obsolete indulgence the letter, the mainstay of written communication among friends and lovers for more than twenty centuries. Letters can be held in your hand, caressed, folded and unfolded until they’re smeared and torn. Letters can be long, meandering, deep, questioning, anguished, hilarious, wise, loving, sad. Letters can reveal yourself to you. Letters can lift your heart and they can break it. It’s hard to imagine an email—or, god forbid, a text message—with that kind of power. Another thing that made letters powerful is that you could linger over them. You rarely got so many that you didn’t have time to pore over them as many times as you wanted. How can you pore over a message when dozens more are always there demanding your attention?

I’ve been writing letters since I could lift a pen, long, detailed, pour-out-your-heart epistles to everyone from Santa Claus and God to grade-school friends I couldn’t get together with over the summer, high school friends who sat three rows away, far-flung college buddies, a beloved aunt who’d just shared her latest favorite read, a boyfriend in a combat zone. I’d spend hours choosing stationery—did I feel pink or purple that day?—and the right pen, my all-time favorite being the Scripto with turquoise ink that conveyed my deepest thoughts at thirteen. I’d write for hours; fifteen or twenty pages wasn’t unusual. And there was nothing like the joy of getting back a bulging, lilac-scented envelope with my girlfriend’s latest experiments in handwriting, or, later, the single page filled with the almost-illegible thoughts of my husband-to-be in combat, signed “My love.” Does anyone type “My love” at the end of an email? Can electronic files possibly replace a stack of love letters tied with a ribbon and kept for generations?

Not only have letters disappeared; now I hear that cursive writing is no longer taught in some schools. “Digital natives” who play with keyboards from the time they can point their fingers don’t need it. Nor will they ever need to guess at the handwriting on an envelope; the sender’s name is the first thing they see. But they’ll never know the sweet thrill of pulling an envelope out of a box and seeing there the familiar scrawl of a person they’ve been waiting to hear from. (Oh, I forgot, waiting is obsolete too.)

Okay, so I’ve lived long enough to sound like an old granny whose every sentence begins with “In my day.” Au contraire, it’s still my day, and I love the convenience of electronic communication. But I’m going to hold on to my flower-covered note cards and take the time to use them now and then. I’m going to occasionally hand-write a letter on paper to my grandson, even if his mother has to read it to him because he doesn’t understand cursive. And I’m going to hope that The Letter—uniquely personal, thoughtful, and occasionally very long—is not entirely replaced by The Message.

I’m out of town, visiting my mother, and I’m using her car to run errands. I don’t know the radio stations here, so I go through her six presets, passing up the pop noise and political rants until I find PBS. But it’s Pledge Week, with all its highbrow yakety-yak. Where’s the Starbucks Channel? BBC? Oprah and Friends? The Heart? Oh, right, those are XM stations. This is my 84-year-old mother’s twelve-year-old car.

No problem. I reach in my purse for my iPod, but realize that I left the connecting device in my own car. I can’t listen to the latest James Lee Burke mystery or sing along with Bono or feel the majesty of Mozart’s Coronation Mass. It’s going to be a long drive.

I stop at WalMart to pick up a new remote control for Mum, because the one she uses for her little twenty-year-old kitchen TV refuses to channel up or down, and there’s no onscreen digital guide. How does she live without the Guide? Or a DVR? She actually knows the day and time of her favorite shows! This is admirable, but sitting through the commercials!? Puh-leeze! And God forbid the phone should ring during Mystery and I can’t hit the pause button and the whole show is ruined.

Oddly, this lack of Essential Features does not leave my mother feeling deprived.

It also doesn’t bother her to live without Caller ID or Call Waiting. You want to know who’s calling you, she says, you pick up the phone. You get a busy signal? You call back later. And what is so important about email and the mysterious internet that I have to lug my laptop to Panera every day to find a connection? Who would want dozens of email messages every day? Isn’t there enough junk in the mailbox?

Techno-glut isn’t the only difference between our lifestyles. There’s the embarrassing number of bags I unload for my three-day visit. My bulging bathroom travel case contains more stuff than Mum’s entire bathroom. Then there’s my main suitcase; my shoe bag; my book bag; my laptop; my electronics bag (digital camera, charger, iPod, charger/speaker, headphones, phone charger [wall], phone charger [car], laptop mouse, flash drive, power cord, spare batteries and portable GPS). Somehow my mother manages to live happily without all this paraphernalia. She’s also strangely healthy for a woman who doesn’t take any pills, and bewildered by the many I take every day. How on earth has this woman lived to be 84?

Then there’s her coffee pot. Her old Mr. Coffee was acting up, so I bought her a new coffee maker with a carafe so the coffee doesn’t burn. But she didn’t like the way it poured, so I tried another multi-featured pot, but she didn’t like that either. Finally I bought a Mr. Coffee just like the one she had, with all the features she wants: Off, On, and the luxurious Delay Brew. And really, it is a good match for the Maxwell House coffee she buys. Me, I sneak out to Starbucks for a hit of Cinnamon Dolce Latte Skim, one “tall” cup of which costs more than her supply for a week.

Oh the life we live, with its ever-multiplying “necessities,” each with new and improved features and its own 80-page manual to study. Being at Mother's also reminds me of the number of things we now pay for that were once free, or at least cost much less. But I guess it's worth it, since they "improve" our lives so much. XM Radio (I use five of the 170 channels). Hi-Def, flatscreen, five-speaker TVs with premium cable and DVR. Subscriptions for audiobooks and movies. Telephones with CW, CID, talking CID, CWCID, one-touch dialing, digital voice, voice recognition, Call Forwarding.

“Essential” kitchen appliances whose functions are so specific they’re used only once or twice a year. An oven so loaded with features that I need the manual every time I cook. A cabinet full of vitamins and health supplements instead of a healthy diet. Hundreds of dollars worth of exercise equipment, ditto. Bottled water instead of tap. Starbucks instead of Maxwell House. Enough remotes and telephones to open a store. Three computers for two people, all with flat screens and wireless mice and high-speed internet. Our Comcast bill is more than the mortgage payment on our first house.

Oh, for the featureless contentment of my mother.

Moments of Joy

I’ve just lost ten years of my life in a computer crash, and it’s got me down. I’ve tried being grown-up and rational about it, reminding myself that it’s not the end of the world: I could have cancer, or someone I love could have died, and anyway it’s my own stupid fault for not backing things up. But I just end up feeling worse, moping away the days in grief, guilt, and frustration.

Stephen King, of all people, reminded me what I need. In a recent Entertainment Weekly column (Aug 10, 2007, available at ew.com), he describes a YouTube video in which an ordinary middle-aged guy, hearing a few bars of a favorite old song, breaks into a solitary dance in the aisle of Best Buy. This is what the arts are for, King says, “to cause a sudden burst of happy emotion, a sudden rush to the head, the feet, and what may be the truest home of joy: a butt that just has to shake its happy self.”

King’s list of his personal “joy buzzers” inspired me to come up with my own favorites, which range from pop art to classics. I figure it’s as good a way as any to introduce myself to anyone who might happen upon this site. Herewith, in no particular order:

· The twitch of Hugh Grant’s hip to the beat of “Jump” by the Pointer Sisters in “Love, Actually.” This one’s a triple whammy: I get to watch Grant’s Prime Minister have his own buzz of joy; I get to watch Grant unwind; and I get to twitch to a song that’s one of my own buzzers.

· The end of “Grand Canyon,” where the characters, having bridged a few chasms of their own, stand silently gazing out at the canyon. If I made movies, this would be the one I would make, about fear and hope and remembering what’s important. (For its literary equivalent, see Ian McEwan’s Saturday.)

· The entire U2 “Joshua Tree” album. And, less moving but more energizing, singing the OOH-ooh’s in “Elevation” with Bono.

· Hearing “Bridge over Troubled Waters,” especially at a concert where my seat was right over the stage and Simon and Gar, now geezers but no less magical, sang literally at my feet and I still got choked up even though I’ve heard it at least a million times.

· The stunning first paragraph of Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides, which I read on a plane. Several pages later, I closed my eyes and knew that if the plane crashed, I would die in a moment of pure bliss.

· The Amen of the Gloria in Mozart’s “Coronation Mass.”

· Kenneth Branagh giving the St. Crispin’s day speech in “Henry V.” The words (“we few, we happy few, we band of brothers”), the voice, the music, the camera work: absolute chills no matter how many times I replay it.

· Emma Thompson’s one-minute meltdown in “Love, Actually” when she thinks her husband has been unfaithful—OK, definitely amazing but maybe not exactly a joy buzzer, so how about Laura Linney’s hidden dance of joy when she gets the guy she loves home? and Bill Nighy’s twitchy, over-the-hill rocker exhibiting his entire scrawny body on prime time? and the two porn star stand-ins sharing an innocent kiss as the snow falls on Christmas Eve? I guess I’m going to have to conclude that the entire movie is a gigantic joy buzzer.

· Singing along with Neil Diamond, in spite of his often-laughable lyrics, or with Barbra Streisand or the sound track to “Les Miserables.”

· Any and every word spoken by Andre Braugher in “Homicide,” though the joy of witnessing godlike acting is tempered by the always-depressing truths being uttered through gritted teeth.

· “Love Changes Everything,” one of those ever-crescendoing Broadway songs full of lines like “Now I tremble at your name.” Sigh.

· The last scene of “You’ve Got Mail,” when Tom Hanks comes into the park, and their eyes meet, and Meg Ryan says “I really wanted it to be you.”

· And when, in “Sleepless in Seattle,” Tom Hanks’s sister has a meltdown recounting the plot of “An Affair to Remember,” and the guys respond with a mocking rendition of the end of “The Dirty Dozen,” and it could become a nasty Mars-and-Venus moment, but instead everybody laughs, and it’s just so funny, and so real.

· “Lux Aeterna” by Lauridsen. Real art, more of a soother than a joy buzzer. As beautiful and comforting as a hot bath, it’s what I reach for when I can’t sleep.

· Making a list of my favorite things, and not being depressed any more.

Note: If you want some fun, post your own list as a comment. And please add your approximate age or generation with your list.