One Good Turn v. Absurdistan
presented by
ZOMBIE ROUND
One Good Turn
v. Absurdistan
Judged by Rosecrans Baldwin
TMN Founding Editor Rosecrans Baldwin lives with his wife in Brooklyn. He has no personal connections to any of the participating authors.
I have an appetite for books Gary Shteyngart hasn’t yet written. I haven’t read his first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, but it was a hit with several family members and friends who promised to give me it for Christmas but never did. Also, he shows excellent taste in his blurbs, which—though ubiquitous on any bookstore’s “staff picks” table—often praise good books; there was an eight-month window when it seemed like Shteyngart and Jonathan Safran Foer were in a race, whipped on by manipulative publishers, for who could blurb the most and the most frothily, and I noticed that Shteyngart usually frothed over better titles. Also, he ran a several-page advertisement for Philip Roth’s career—which I relished—in the New York Times Book Review, and he loves food and drink, and he doesn’t seem pretentious. And on to the writing: He’s good, he has a zippy imagination, there’s a honed skill for teasing out a story. After Absurdistan, I am hungry for novels that are only now microfilaments in Shteyngart’s head. He’s just starting to sharpen the claws. But the problem is, two-thirds of the way through Absurdistan, I flung it across my office, knocking over my tennis racquet.
The last time I threw a book that hard, it was Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. I was in a crappy motel room in Paris, and I tried to throw it out the window from the bed (the window was closed). Like in White Teeth, Shteyngart’s characters either wear too much makeup or not enough; they’re either clowns or ghosts, running around and screaming and jumping out of cars, or simply not there. Which isn’t to say the novel isn’t convincing—its scenery, its characters’ feelings, its passions are worked on and worked on, but for all that sweat, the stakes feel trivial. I wonder if Shteyngart won’t pull a reverse-Roth-awakening soon: Roth wrote the dull Henry James pastiches Letting Go and When She Was Good before getting in touch with Alexander Portnoy. Might Shteyngart soon drop the clowning and hunt bigger game? I’m hungry.
Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn, on the other hand, is ludicrous. Critics hail Atkinson for the depth of her characters, but the diction’s off; her characters are obese. It’s a detective novel for literary folk who don’t like detective novels. Even in the book’s final stages, Atkinson’s digging up new remembrances of things significant, historical tidbits that are meant to add one last shade to this or that character’s profile but instead drove me crazy. The problem is her characters are so laden with backstory they can’t move, and when they’re shifted from one scene to another (Atkinson makes Edinburgh feel like a soundstage), you feel Atkinson throwing them around.
Also, Vinnie Jones appears every 30 pages with a baseball bat to coincidentally alter the plot. And the ending is preposterous.
Absurdistan, though dropped in the first round, was reinserted here as a zombie because The Morning News’s readers loved it dearly. One Good Turn is less well-known and hasn’t wowed the judges, but that’s not important in do-or-die blood sports—it’s survival by any means necessary, including luck, and Atkinson’s ridden it well so far. No longer: Absurdistan isn’t my cup of tea, but it’s good, and I can’t say that for its competition.
Advancing:
Absurdistan
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
WARNER: Wow! Judge Baldwin comes out with some positively Peckian fire in his dual takedown of One Good Turn and Absurdistan in the Zombie Round matchup. I didn’t realize how much I missed the critical curmudgeon until now. Bravo to Rosecrans for taking off the gloves, for bringing the heat, for unleashing the fury, for smelling what the Rock is cooking, for insert indefinite number of clichés here.
Shteyngart is apparently writing the wrong books and Atkinson has written a bad one. As a writer, this is the kind of response from a reviewer that terrifies me. For me, Judge Baldwin expresses dismissal (“ludicrous,” “detective novel for literary folk,” “drop the clowning and hunt bigger game”), which is scarier than outright scorn. It’s a form of scorn I suppose, but it’s scorn that can’t be bothered, that has washed its hands of you. You do not matter. You are inconsequential. It’s like having your wife fall asleep on you while having sex, as opposed to her slapping your hand away as you go for the goodies. (Not that either of these has ever happened to me. Not often anyway.)
I think our Morning News patron is being unduly harsh here, particularly to One Good Turn. Any detective novel is going to have more than its share of coincidences. In the architecture of the story, they aren’t coincidences, but merely events that haven’t yet been revealed to the reader. Perhaps the reveal is not always as well-timed or artful as one would wish, but it seems unfair to fault a detective novel for being a detective novel.
Bully for Absurdistan, particularly since it has been back on campus for weeks, catching up with all the classes it’s been skipping for the tourney and drowning its first-round losing sorrows in keg stands and co-eds. Somehow it got off the mat to scrape by into the finals. For all practical purposes it’s 0 for 2 with our judges, but somehow it still has a shot at the coveted Rooster.
In the end, apparently wrong beats bad.
The Road looks like an unstoppable juggernaut, though. The first two years have had relatively close races for the title. This time I feel like we’re looking at an ‘80s-era Little League World Series face off with The Road playing the part of the Taiwanese squad, which always showed up with a roster-full of six-foot-five pitchers with three-pack-a-day habits to deliver a slaughter-rule beat down to some blond kids from Pennsylvania.
Still, anything can happen. Do you believe in miracles?
GUILFOILE: American literary critics hate coincidence, which, in other countries and at other times, has been called “a good story.” I’m not sure when or where this started but the old timers had no problem with it. Where would Jane Austen be without coincidence? Or Shakespeare? Wait, you’re a sorcerer who’s been banished to a distant island and your brother just happens to float by on a boat? Oh, like that would really happen.
Coincidence is the only reason anyone is bothering to tell you a story at all. No one wants to read Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Extremely Probable Events. A few years ago I was returning my rental car to the Albany airport after visiting my parents, and a car pulled in behind me driven by my long-ago college roommate, who lived in Hawaii and happened to have been running a triathlon that weekend in Lake Placid. When I saw him I didn’t throw up my hands in disgust and say, “Well this seems awfully unlikely” and walk to my gate. I gave him a big man hug and thought to myself, Holy shit! What a great story!
There are, of course, good coincidences and bad coincidences. I once heard Quentin Tarantino say he thought the worst movie ending of all time was Patriot Games, when Harrison Ford is fighting with the IRA terrorist (who’s trying to kill his whole family) on a runaway boat and the bad guy slips backward and is impaled on an anchor, thus allowing Jack Ryan to escape and save his wife and kid but unburdening him of the messy culpability of actually having killed anyone. (The book ends a bit differently, incidentally.)
But the real news here is the resurrection of Absurdistan, and in the Book Bloggers’ Office Pool, that would vault Kate Sutherland from last place all the way to a close third. By my count, an Absurdistan win in the finals will put her in a jam up for first and we’ll have to break out the secret and sealed tiebreaker envelopes to determine the champ. A win by new Oprah fave The Road and Brockman takes the title outright.
By the way, Kate is playing for Rita Kasparek of Oakland and Brockman is playing for Michelle Dreher of San Francisco. So we have McCarthy versus Shteyngart, we have Brockman versus Sutherland, and, in the Battle by the Bay to determine who will win every book in the competition courtesy of Powells.com, we have Kasparek versus Dreher.
Oh, Nellie.