Run v. Shining at the Bottom of the Sea
presented by
ROUND ONE
Run
v. Shining at the Bottom of the Sea
Judged by Kate Schlegel
TMN Managing Editor Kate Schlegel is a native of Columbus, Ohio, and a copy editor by training, though these days she works as a news editor for the web site of the Wall Street Journal. She lives in the neighborhood sometimes known as Brooklyn’s best-kept secret—if you ask nicely, maybe she’ll tell you where exactly that is. Her current favorite author is Eudora Welty, though the last book she finished was The Longest Night, about the Blitz on London in the spring of 1941. Connections to this year’s competitors: None known.
The plot of Run sloshes around in its 24-hour timeframe like a tempest in a teapot: Former Boston mayor Bernard Doyle guilt-trips his two grown sons, both adopted, into accompanying him to a political rally on a cold and snowy night. One of the sons ends up accidentally strolling in front of an oncoming car but is saved by a kind woman, a stranger, who pushes him out of the way at the last moment and ends up in a hospital bed herself. (I’m not giving away anything; this all happens in the first 50 pages.) In the ensuing 22 hours and 250 or so pages, everything, and nothing, becomes clear for this family.
I romped through Run in fewer than six hours. The characters, especially little Kenya Moser, are interesting and full of life. But in the end, it all feels a bit too prettily wrapped up and tied with a bow. I never committed to the characters, never wanted to know more about them or wondered what happened after the book ends. It was so obvious: In this cotton-candy story, nearly everyone lives happily ever after.
On the other hand, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea creates, literally, a place I want to visit. From the opening line of the foreword (“Sanjanians are perhaps the most literary people on earth”), this set of short stories, presented as an anthology of the literature of the (fictional) North Atlantic island of Sanjania, shows what a writer—in this case, Stephen Marche—can do with words. The language Marche summons to stand in as the island’s early and very localized patois in the first story, “The Destruction of Marylebone, the Private King,” has a lilt all its own. To wit, when things first turn bad for the Private King:
Sally Parkman, a Woman Crownagent, grabbed the pirate fleet, and yawled it against the waves of Portuguese Cove, and Marylebone scuppered with his sister Virginia and his good friend Moses Tumbledown overhill byland toward his homecove Restitution, flittering.
Marche then takes us on a thoroughly mesmerizing ride through 18 more stories by authors from Sanjania. The language matures from the early patois but still keeps its lilt, and each story has its own individual style and makes its own unique contribution to the social and political picture of the island nation. “Professor Saintfrancis” is a mystery in the vein of Conan Doyle’s, while “The Master’s Dog” gives readers an idea of the racial tensions that gripped the colony in the last years before its independence. The love story that is “Histories of Aenea” is terrifically sad, and when the narrator of “The End of the Beach” tells the tale of her departure from Sanjania, I want to know how she could ever leave.
In short, lately I’ve been daydreaming about a visit to see Sanjania’s coves and its looming inner mountains, and to visit its many bookshops. Anyone who can make me do that deserves a Rooster. Stephen Marche’s book goes to the next round.
Advancing:
Shining at the Bottom of the Sea
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
JOHN: Following on my little rant about the lack of imagination and innovation when it comes to the book industry finding creative ways of introducing readers to more books, let me pat the Tournament of Books on our own collective back for maybe doing a small bit to help.
Stephen Marche’s book was released last August and currently has zero Amazon reviews. By contrast, Run, released over a month later, has 161. Prior to it showing up in the ToB brackets, I’d never heard of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, but thanks to Kate’s wonderful commentary, in combination with me reading Marche’s thoughtful and persuasive take on the death of Alain Robbe-Grillet, I now have it heading my way thanks to ToB sponsor Powell’s.
I also have my favorite bracket-buster of the Tournament. We’ll see if he can “Marche” to the title.
KEVIN: I confess that, upon hearing of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s death (just now) my first reaction was, “The other original cast members of In Living Color must be so sad.” Marche’s essay about Grillet is terrific, though, even as it confirms my contention that there’s no good reason I should have heard of him. Now that’s good criticism.
All critics are like dog-show judges: The first thing a critic must do is define the thing he’s criticizing. He needs to create a standard for what a perfect novel is and then rate every book he reads by its deviation from the standard. Which is all just an exercise in bullshit. But a good critic, in going through that exercise, tells you something about the way he looks at the world, how the world is perceived through the prisms of the books he reads, and when that’s done well that’s fascinating. I actually enjoy reading James Wood because he’s a terrific writer and an interesting thinker, but it almost never occurs to me that I want to read a book because he or any other critic likes it. Good criticism is interesting and illuminating, but unless you know a critic as well as, for example, I know you, it’s rarely helpful. (Second confession: Until a few months ago when he went to The New Yorker, I thought James Wood was like 85 years old.)
JOHN: Wait, Wood isn’t 85 years old? I thought he was in his 80s, B.R. Myers is 102 and Dale Peck is 12.