One Good Turn v. Against the Day
presented by
SEMIFINALS
One Good Turn
v. Against the Day
Judged by Sasha Frere-Jones
Sasha Frere-Jones is a musician and writer from New York. He currently writes the sex advice column “Oh, Eustace!” for The New Yorker. Connections to authors: None.
I chose Atkinson out of the gate because I am never going to read a novel that is more than 1,000 pages long. A thousand? Sure—I’ve got lifetimes to throw away. But 1,001 is a dealbreaker.
This decision did not involve reading, but a decision to not read during a Tournament of Books seems like a bad precedent to set, especially for TMN’s younger subscribers. I went ahead and read the books. (I only got through 300 pages of Pynchon.)
The Atkinson is satisfying in the manner of a decent genre novel: Things happen, some of them unexpected, and the reader is rewarded for accepting a degree of predictability with the tacit promise that the story will not become stranded in the wilds of an ambitious but underconstructed conceit. In crime novels, specifically, people die, bad guys must be got, and we all go on pleasantly mysterious tangents. One Good Turn hews to the formula of the policier, and then veers above and below its baseline quality requirements. The characters in One Good Turn are unglamorous men and women between the ages of 35 and 60 caught in various stages of regret and disappointment. Among the many (too many) characters: a mystery writer who fears he’s a terminal wuss, an ex-policeman who can’t stop thinking like a policeman, a woman whose boorish husband turns out to be more boorish than she thought, and a single mother/policewoman whose teenage son likes to shoplift. They get tangled up in each other’s business when, in broad daylight on a crowded Edinburgh street, a bad person gives in to road rage and hits another bad person with a baseball bat. The wuss author witnesses this and throws his computer bag at the first bad man, which prevents him from killing the other bad man. This, understandably, enrages the first bad man and sets the story in motion.
Atkinson uses a trope best known to viewers of Lost: Unconnected characters turn out to have crossed paths and be connected. It is Frigyes Karinthy’s “six degrees of separation” meme rendered in narrative. Atkinson also uses the “slow reveal” method from Lost—these connections are not illuminated right away, and some stay hidden for more than half of the book. The problem here is that puzzles don’t produce much tension when they do not present themselves clearly and immediately as puzzles. If you’re not wondering about a loose thread, there is little satisfaction in its tying up. Too many characters are introduced too slowly and with too much background.
I don’t expect every crime novel to be as ruthlessly mobile and vernacular as J.J. Connolly’s Layer Cake, but that book isn’t a bad template for the genre. You want to want to read a crime novel in a single sitting, and I didn’t, though I enjoy Atkinson’s knack for writing pitiful, glum inventories of lives in decline. The best bits of One Good Turn are the character sketches that retard the narrative, a bind. I would rather have read either a more obvious but emotionally resonant novel about middle-aged couples in Edinburgh, or an efficient, less-peopled crime boiler with a single first-person narrator. As I say to my kids: Choose one, just one. Atkinson gets points for setting the novel in the middle of Edinburgh’s Fringe festival; points off, though, for taking shots at the barreled fish of avant-garde theater.
As for Pynchon, there is no number too high for him, whether it’s the number of characters, historical issues, funny names, or pages. I appreciate the rhythm of his sentences, many of which make otherwise clotted pages glow. But that hammering quality I’ve always disliked in Pynchon’s prose hasn’t changed. It’s the Columbine teen in him, the voice saying, “Everyone is a philistine! Nobody understands REAL writing!” and urging him on to all his drastic signification and tortured plotting. I take no pleasure in being defeated by Pynchon, and I don’t think he’s full of hot air; I just think we have very different pleasure principles. I defer here to Luc Sante’s generous review in the New York Review of Books, which allows the book its many conceits and finds the value in them. My own limits (the Russians, for instance, have always had too many goddamn characters with too many names for my taste) may be preventing me from properly juicing this enormous book. I would not give either of these books as gifts.
Advancing:
One Good Turn
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
WARNER: Against the Day claims its second adjudicatory victim, defeating judge Sasha Frere-Jones (at page 300) in the semifinals after giving the beat-down to Sam Lipsyte previously in Round Two. Only this time, Frere-Jones doesn’t give Pynchon a pass into the next round, and a heavyweight in every sense of the word goes down. (Though perhaps to be resurrected by the “Chums of Chance” fan club in the Zombie Round?)
In the spirit of Sasha Frere-Jones’s honesty, I’d like to cop to the really long books that I’ve started, but didn’t or couldn’t finish, either.
A Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust: I did manage to get through four of the seven volumes (in the original French), but lost interest with The Captive.
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace: OK, I skipped some of the footnotes, but I totally read everything else, I swear.
Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce: Needless to say, I re-read Ulysses yearly, but Joyce never managed to hook me with this one. I blame him.
The Holy Bible (original Latin translation): I glazed over during some of the Old Testament’s begats, to be honest.
Oxford English Dictionary: Still working on this one. I’m on “Q.”
GUILFOILE: I would add to that The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker.
I much admire Sasha’s music criticism, but if this were a Tournament of Tunes and he were the commentator and I were a judge and I said something like, “Nas’s I Gave You Power is satisfying in the manner of a decent rap song: The words rhyme, people are shot, and the listener is rewarded for accepting a degree of rhythmic repetition with the tacit promise that you can krump to it,” he would properly take me to task for having to go back more than a decade to find a rap song I could identify and then he would berate me for my condescension, and then finally mock me for not knowing exactly what krumping is.
The perception that genre fiction is never more than a guilty pleasure is common enough in stuffy lit-crit circles, but I’m surprised to hear it coming from Sasha. American popular music, after all, pushed a stake through the undying lie that genre can never rise to art. What exactly are the (presumably lower) “baseline quality requirements” of a mystery novel? And do we necessarily want to read all crime novels in one sitting? I remember well the afternoon I digested The Brothers Karamazov.
Genre is not the short bus that untalented writers take to publishing school. Every book in this competition belongs to a genre with its own set of clichés (although I’ll concede that Against the Day’s genre is probably “Pynchon novel”). A mystery and an apocalypse novel and (to reference a favorite of ours) a novel of manners set among the Manhattan intelligentsia each either succeeds or it doesn’t on its own terms. The best books, whatever their subjects, are the ones that transcend and confound the expectations of their genres, not the ones that conform most faithfully to the standard like a cup-winning Yorkie at Westminster.
Of course, it’s more than half-stupid that I’m complaining about Sasha’s treatment of One Good Turn when he’s just advanced it over a book by one of the towering literary giants of our time. My point isn’t that everyone needs to start liking books about detectives. When they do, however, I wish they wouldn’t act like they’re slumming.
WARNER: Guilty pleasures, right? I’m not sure why something that’s pleasurable without causing harm to others should make us feel guilty. In the spirit of your response, let me confess to enjoying the Tommy Shaw (of Styx and Damn Yankees) and Jack Blades (of Night Ranger and Damn Yankees) album Influences, on which they cover classic songs like “I am a Rock” and “Summer Breeze” completely and totally un-ironically.
If the New Yorker would like me to write a review, my email address is somewhere on this page.
GUILFOILE: But now it’s time for the big announcement. Under a full voodoo moon, two books will rise from the dead overnight to do battle against The Road and One Good Turn. Both were high seeds at the start of the tourney. One took an early exit and the other has only been dead for about half a minute.
Tomorrow’s Zombie Round contest will be a battle of titans. Probably the one match-up every tourney watcher was hoping to see, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road versus Thomas Pynchon’s brain-eating Against the Day. And then on Thursday we will hold our breath as Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn takes on the resurrected Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart.
What does all this mean for the Book Blogger Office Pool? It means Kate Sutherland (who picked Absurdistan to win it all), you’re back in it.