Alentejo Blue v. Apex Hides the Hurt
presented by
ROUND ONE
Alentejo Blue
v. Apex Hides the Hurt
Judged by Dan Chaon
Dan Chaon is the author of the short story collection Among the Missing and You Remind Me of Me, a novel. Connections to authors: Dan: went to college with Claire Messud; had dinner with Peter Orner once; teaches at Gary Shteyngart’s alma mater, Oberlin College; and visited a class taught by Richard Powers.
Of the two books, Apex Hides the Hurt is clearly the hipster’s choice. It’s full of wonderfully clever observations about race, class, and popular culture, and I can imagine that it would be a fun book to teach in a literary theory class. The writing is always polished and gleaming, full of bon mots and scintillating sentences. It’s all very witty and smart.
Alentejo Blue, on the other hand, does not seem particularly cool. It’s a collection of loosely interconnected stories for one thing, and if that’s not dorky enough, it’s all about a crummy, run-down village in Portugal. The characters are leading lives of quiet desperation and the writing is full of a kind of gentle rue that has more in common with modernist writers like Katherine Mansfield than with contemporary novelists. Especially when Ali is writing from the point of view of her Portuguese characters, her prose sometimes takes on the maladroit earnestness of Steinbeck in The Pearl or something. Her attempt to bring all the characters together in the final chapter is clunky and unsatisfying.
But nevertheless I was genuinely moved and engaged by Alentejo Blue in a way that I wasn’t by Apex Hides the Hurt.
Frankly, I wasn’t expecting this. When the books came in the mail, I thought that the contest was unfairly mismatched. Apex Hides the Hurt is called “brilliant” in no less than four blurbs. Alentejo Blue, on the other hand, got some pretty savage reviews in the American press, even from traditionally kind-hearted reviewers like The Washington Post’s Ron Charles, who described the book as “excruciatingly dreary.” Actually, I’m ashamed to say that having seen a couple of reviews of this sort, I wasn’t even planning to read the book.
So in some ways I guess Alentejo Blue benefits from my lowered expectations. But I have to say that I was really taken with her characters, and even got a little verklemt on a couple of occasions. My favorite characters were the Potts clan, a trashy expatriate British family (drunk, pot-smoking dad; washed-out ex-junkie mum; deaf, slutty daughter; sad, aimless little boy) who are portrayed with great perception, richness, and nuance. I was impressed by Monica Ali’s ability to convincingly inhabit so many different people, and I appreciated the sympathy and generosity she extended to them. She seems genuinely interested in and curious about people.
Whereas Colson Whitehead doesn’t, really. Apex Hides the Hurt is a book that feels like it has everybody figured out to its own satisfaction, in ways that can sometimes seem a little pat. The critique of American commercialism at the heart of the novel is apt and intelligent, but it also strikes me as fairly familiar. When an irritated hotel maid leaves the unnamed consultant-protagonist an angry note: “You THINK you are so smart, smarty-pants. But you ARE NOT,” I kind of agreed with her. A little bit of the narrator’s quipping and deft observation and astute cultural analysis goes a long way. But you know, I find that I much prefer the company of losers, alcoholics, depressed housewives, obsessive fatties, self-deluded teenage girls, etc. Anyone but a consultant. This is obviously a matter of personal taste.
Advancing:
Alentejo Blue
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
WARNER: In this round we have a tough match-up between our second MacArthur Genius grant recipient, (Whitehead) and our second of Granta’s “best young British novelists” (Ali), and the first who is actually British. I’m also going to assume she’s somehow related to Muhammad Ali since it seems like there’s going to be an opportunity for some kind of boxing gag later in the commentary.
GUILFOILE: Ali, Buma Ye! Ali, Buma Ye!
Note: for any tourney fans who happen to speak Lingala (or who have seen When We Were Kings, the classic documentary about the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle) that joke doesn’t mean I literally want Monica Ali to beat Colson Whitehead to death. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be the first time Whitehead was physically assaulted by a competitor in this tournament, and anything is possible in the Zombie Round.
Personally, I’m not sure a C-17 full of ActiveOn could hide the hurt of being spat upon by a National Book Award winner. In 2005 I sat on a Virginia Festival of the Book panel with Kate Walbert and during the Q&A I was grazed with a tiny bit of spittle when she pronounced the word “apostate.” That part of my cheek still burns on very cold days, and she was only an NBA nominee. I can’t imagine the chronic pain that might result from deliberate and malicious Richard Ford expectorate. I suspect that if William Vollman ever spat on me, I would melt like a bespectacled Nazi who looked directly into an unsealed Ark of the Covenant.
WARNER: When I read Colson Whitehead’s first novel, The Intuitionist, I thought that I’d encountered the next great American novelist. It literally stunned me. Partly because it fell from a bookshelf on to my head, but also because it seemed to combine issues of race and identity and status and commerce all in a vaguely postmodern yet still highly accessible, thought-provoking, emotionally involving stew. Then I read his second book, John Henry Days, and I thought I’d read a good, but not great book by the next great American novelist. Then I read the reviews for Apex Hides the Hurt and I figured I’d wait until Whitehead writes a fourth novel before I dive in again.
Dan Chaon’s decision in this bout only reinforces that instinct.
On the other hand, according to Chaon, Ali’s Alentejo Blue floats like a butterfly and stings like a novel with engaging and convincing characters despite a botched ending.
GUILFOILE: I, too, was blown away by The Intuitionist and was less impressed by John Henry Days, although I enjoyed that second book more than you. I liked it least when he started making lists of things, which reminded me too much of my days counting kerosene and tampons and safety razors and Ice-Melt and yo-yos and legal pads and Cabbage Patch Dolls and Styrofoam coolers and bottles of aspirin and cartons of Newports during inventory week at the Farm and Home Bargain Center, a process that consumed four straight Christmas breaks for me in high school. I know it’s fashionable to make long, detailed fictional lists, but all novelists should know that by doing so they risk alienating every reader who ever worked retail.
Which, nowadays, is all of them.
WARNER: Down goes Whitehead! Down goes Whitehead!