Shadow Country v. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
presented by
ROUND 1, MATCH 5 of the DAVID FOSTER WALLACE REGIONAL
Shadow Country
v. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
Judged by Anthony Doerr
TMN Contributing Writer Anthony Doerr lives in Idaho. He’s the author of three books: The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons in Rome. Known connections to this year’s contenders: For a year he had an office across the hall from Toni Morrison’s office, and he once interviewed Marilynne Robinson in front of lots of people.
In the brief, insalubrious history of this notorious contest I’ve been asked to say whether one first novel was better than another, whether a 136-page graphic novel was as worthwhile as an 1,100-page funhouse epic by Pynchon, and whether Cormac McCarthy had been outpitched by a Kansas City phenom named Whitney Terrell.
But no more perplexing matchup has been assigned me than this one. A teen novel about a prank-happy 15-year-old named Frankie meets a 912-page mashup about a legendary killer.
Comparing these two novels is akin to comparing a 777 with a tangerine. Here’s Shadow Country:
“Mister Watson’s queer laugh come all the way up from his boots, and that laugh taught me once and for all this man’s hard lesson, than our human free-for-all on God’s sweet earth never meant no more’n a hatch of insects in the thin smoke of their millions rising and falling in the river twilight.”
Here’s The Disreputable History of Frankie-Landau Banks:
“It just seems so funny to dress up your boobs.”
The word “posse” appears 26 times in Shadow Country. The word “grodie” appears three times in The Disreputable History. (“Grodieness” appears once.)
What the hell? I’m not a seasoned reader of young adult novels, and although I tended to find myself nodding along with parts of Caitlin Flanagan’s essay in December’s Atlantic, I don’t bear any involuntary grudges against the genre. YA, literary, crime, thriller—genres are merely marketing in the end. I want only to be engrossed in something well-made and complicated.
Is The Disreputable History well-made? Pretty much. Is it complicated? Not really. At an uber-privileged boarding school called Alabaster Preparatory Academy, our sophomore heroine gets herself a boat-building-Mini-Cooper-driving boyfriend, then infiltrates a secret society composed of senior boys so she can start puppet-mastering everyone via email.
To be fair, E. Lockhart does have some interesting things to say about the empowerment of young girls. (Or at least the empowerment of young girls operating inside the waspy insularity of savagely exclusive East Coast prep academies.) She has undeniably sharp insights into boarding school psychology, and renders the shrill, all-consuming concerns of a kid grappling with social status in bright, witty sentences. I read the book in a day.
The Disreputable History only fails its reader in one way. I was continually bothered by the fact that the Alabaster employees—the groundskeepers, the golf course workers, the burger cooks—remained invisible for pretty much the entire novel. I blitzed past a reference to “janitors and fix-it people” and had to throw on the brakes and back up a few clauses. Janitors and fix-it-people?
Because nothing in Frankie’s world has any large-scale consequence (for a few pages it appears as though a character may be thrown out of school, but he is not), every character in the book remains almost outrageously secure. Nothing truly fundamental gets shaken up here. In a winter of global violence, child slavery, layoffs, and financial jitters, maybe a forget-the-outside-world-for-a-few-hours book about a smart young woman is the best thing for our young readers.
Or maybe not.
Shadow Country, on the other hand, is large in every way: a large cast of characters, a large reputation, a large amount of pages. It is the result of decades of work and a panoramic ambition. And it engages with pretty much any American issue you might care about: xenophobia, manifest destiny, poverty, storms, politics, native American land rights, the legacy of slavery, and the impact of development on natural habitat.
At the center of Shadow Country’s seething, steaming, muddy tangle of mangroves and crocodiles and “skeeters” is an inscrutable, charming, gun-toting bad-ass named E. J. Watson. Watson is a killer and a rapist and a raiser of (sugar) cane. He’s also almost universally admired by the people who know him.
Shadow Country is a slowly evolving book: rarely do you turn the pages to find out what’s going to happen. Instead you feel the legend of Watson grow and evolve. You hear the voices of the people who knew him. And you watch the sultry Eden of south Florida with its shell mounds and plume birds slowly get fouled by America’s original sinners, its pioneers.
As you may know, Shadow Country was originally three separate books, broken apart and revised and soldered back together, over the course of years, by their author. Clearly Matthiessen doesn’t mind tracing and retracing his steps. Book One features people talking about Watson, Book Two features Watson’s son trying to figure out Watson, and Book Three features Watson talking about himself. As a result, Shadow Country feels a bit over-obsessive. But it remains a burly, violent, muddy, empathetic book. Matthiessen invests all his people with a measure of dignity, the half-bloods and freedmen, the crooks and crackers.
E. Lockhart is a sharp writer and I hope her book finds lots of readers. But for complexity, ambition, and the immersion of the reading experience, this one was no contest.
Advancing:
Shadow Country
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin: Every once in a while we throw a book to the wolves in this Tournament. We don’t do it to be cruel—we actually hope that maybe something unusual and interesting and magical might happen. You never know. When we seeded the teams and then assigned them (more or less randomly) to judges, I had no idea that Anthony Doerr has been that unfortunate wolf three times.
In the match between 2666 and Steer Toward Rock, we talked a little bit about the phenomenon of the “gravitas gap” that inevitably impacts the first-round matches. As much as a person might enjoy a certain book, it is difficult for a judge to put it past a novel with loftier ambitions. But I’m going to say that I enjoyed the hell out of The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. (Is it inappropriate to enjoy the hell out of a YA book?) I’m going to give it to my own kids when they’re older. I’m going to buy it for my nieces and nephews. It’s a terrific novel, and it’s actually kind of about something—self-respect and identity and gender and empowerment—that’s probably as important to teenagers as whatever Shadow Country is about is supposed to be to me.
I didn’t mean to insult Shadow Country there. The truth is I’m still reading it. And I’m enjoying it, as well. I am enjoying it exactly as much as I expected to, which is a lot, and I don’t mean to suggest that I think Anthony made the wrong decision. But Disreputable History really surprised me, and that kind of surprise when you pick up a book is both unusual and exactly why we all love to read. It might appear to be slight at times because, as you pointed out in an email, Lockhart has to lay out her themes in a more obvious way than she would in an adult novel. But that and blowjobs are the only qualitative differences between this novel and Prep, which was once one of the New York Times’s best five novels of the year.
There’s probably only one other book in this tournament that surprised me the way Disreputable History did, but more on that later.
John: Doerr really nails the conundrum of assessing these two books in juxtaposition to each other when he says that it’s “akin to comparing a 777 with a tangerine.” Shadow Country is big in every sense of the word—page count, scope, vision, ambition. It is a major author’s major work and it wears those traits on every one of its 912 pages. The book is literally awe-inspiring.
And yet, for me, I read on more out of duty than pleasure. It’s a book that I admired, but only intermittently enjoyed. Mathiessen’s obsessions and passions that are so thoroughly explored in this book just aren’t mine. Here again is another instance of your “gravitas gap,” that has me recognizing the wisdom of Doerr’s decision, even as I disagree with it.
I really, really enjoyed The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. Like Doerr, I have no particular animus towards young adult literature, but neither do I find myself turning to it often. If many YA books are as good as this one, I’ll be reading much more of it. (I may try my hand at writing it too because it seems like a lot of fun and an interesting challenge.)
I think E. Lockhart deserves more credit for the depth of ideas in Disreputable History than Doerr gives her. Yes, we are in the fairly rarefied territory of the elite prep school, but the exploration of identity and self, particularly as it’s developed in young women struck me as nuanced and plenty deep.
I laughed many times. I eagerly turned the pages toward the end. Plus, any book that name-checks Foucault and has a running metaphor on the Panopticon isn’t spending all its time in the shallow end.
Reader comments
On March 13, 2009 at 10:53 AM S. Weiss said…
If all of Shadow Country reads like that overwrought sample the judge provided, I don't think any amount of gravitas ought to have saved it.
On March 13, 2009 at 11:07 AM Pris said…
My big problem is with the fact that this Matthiessen book, as overwrought as it might be, was even chosen for any awards, including this tournament. To use a Hollywood comparison, when Ridley Scott redid and released Blade Runner, the umpteenth director's cut, nobody thought it should be nominated for the Golden Globes or Academy Awards. Why did the publishing industry treat this rehash differently? I just don't think this book deserves to be here at all.
On March 13, 2009 at 11:21 AM Thomas said…
Pris: surprised, too, that no one went deeper into the fact that it's basically three of Matthiessen's old books tinkered with and cobbled up together. This lazy bastard couldn't even bother to write a new story.
On March 13, 2009 at 11:23 AM Erin said…
I'm glad to see that the commentators weren't as quick, or as seemingly predisposed, as Doerr to dismiss FRANKIE. The depth, the importance, and the pure enjoyability of FRANKIE evidently passed him by, more's the pity.
On March 13, 2009 at 11:29 AM Nathan said…
He's not the one at fault for getting accolades. If organizations liked his reworking enough to honor him with an award then that's their problem not his. He chose to rework a collection of writing into a single volume. His publisher chose to publish it and the National Book Foundation chose to honor him. I don't think calling him lazy is fair because others chose to admire his new retelling.
On March 13, 2009 at 11:30 AM Drew said…
Is it inappropriate to dislike YA novels? Not being a YA?
What Doerr seemed to be saying was that that the experience of reading FRANKIE was disposable and replaceable whereas the experience of reading the Matthiessen wasn't.
As I'm still in pain over the absurd, quick dismissal of NETHERLAND, today's result was healing...
On March 13, 2009 at 11:52 AM Erin said…
It's neither appropriate nor inappropriate for adults to like or dislike YA novels. However, it is both short-sighted and small-minded to dismiss a book out of hand simply because of its genre.
On March 13, 2009 at 12:12 PM Drew said…
But Doerr didn't do that...the book made little impression on him...for reasons that are partially attributable to a the YA genre's obligation to not be SHADOW COUNTRY. He made no bones about that.
There are plenty of people commenting that don't seem to mind the same value-judgment in reverse.
I don't mind YA but I do mind the idea that genre doesn't close doors even as it opens them. There are consequences to these sorts of choices...as I say, few seem to feel badly about giving O'Neill a hard time for his sentences or Bolano a hard time for not writing a character-driven 250 page novel...
This just seems to be the old it's-okay-to-knock-the-highbrow-but-don't-you-dare-suggest-the-lowbrow-lacks-anything-AT-ALL.
Whereas all these genre/mode/tone choices give and take away. You can't write a book that's all things to all people. And if you could, it wouldn't be democratic, it would be pandering.
On March 13, 2009 at 1:15 PM Pris said…
Drew: Netherland is a good, but ultimately flawed book. It's still better than the competition in that match-up. But what I really didn't like was Guilfoile's comment against the hyper-literate crowd for whom Netherland was supposedly tailored. Just who exactly are the kind of non-hyper-literate people judging a tournament of books and the people following it?
On March 13, 2009 at 1:35 PM John Warner said…
To be fair, I'm the one who said "Netherland is essentially porn for hyper-literate New Yorkers, i.e., the sort of people who review books for the New York Times." which in context is a direct reference to Michiko Kakutan. I don't want Kevin smeared with my snark.
On March 13, 2009 at 3:20 PM Drew said…
Pris: No, I'm okay with the idea that Netherland WAS flawed but John: the weird, ill-considered populism of the commentators is hard for me to puzzle out.
Somehow Netherland, a book that found a way to at least divide its time between an immigrant cricket-playing subculture and international investment jet-set types is elitist, whereas a book that concentrates its energies entirely on the identity issues of the denizens of an exclusive prep-school is a blow struck for the common fellow.
And for all the talk of gravitas, no one seems much interested in taking up the part of Doerr's judgment where he castigated the narrow milieu of the novel.
The prep-school: over-represented in slender American novel-writing?
On March 13, 2009 at 5:13 PM John Warner said…
I don't know from "populism" be it ill-considered or otherwise. There's not much to "puzzle-out" because I'm no critic, I'm just trying to tell people my most honest reading experience with these books. I recognize the significance of Shadow Country's achievement, but I wasn't deeply compelled to keep turning the pages. I feel as though I understand the allure of Netherland (even if I cast it in snark), but that scent doesn't play well with these nostrils. Your mileage may vary.
I'm sure my collective comments betray some kind of grand map of my sensibilities and psyche, often not to my own credit, and likely often self-contradictory, but so be it.
I don't evaluate books on their messages or politics or whatever, I evaluate them on the experience they provided while I read them. I'm comfortable with the fact that it says much more about me than the books.
On March 13, 2009 at 11:13 PM Drew said…
As they read, most of the commentaries from the booth seem to have been spent on the elitism of some books and the unassuming fun of others.
That's my experience of reading the commentary on at least three of the five days this week.
There's something else to be said about these books...Netherland, 2666, Shadow Country, and the rest...there are other subjects besides the gravitas factor...as a topic I wouldn't say it has been very fruitful. It's possible that neither of us are at our best discussing it.
2666 comes around again in a few days. Win or lose, I'd be curious to hear about something besides what a willful, irritating book it is. I'm not asking that either you (or Kevin) suddenly like the damn thing, just that you come at it from another angle.
A request, one reader to another.
On March 21, 2009 at 9:10 PM Emily said…
Dislike away. But don't put down books that actually make a difference in some kid's life. FRANKIE had some real deep and meaningful shit in there and as a teenager, I don't consider it disposable or replaceable. Maybe if all y'all old folks would realize that YA books are meant to be aimed at teens, you would better understand how the issues of stuff going on at school, with boyfriends is actually important. Until you make that connection, that teens have different values than adults, I pity your kids.
On March 13, 2009 at 12:24 PM Pris said…
Nathan: Sure, it's not Matthiessen's fault that the book won the National Book Award. I still feel this book is simply a box-set equivalent. His last fiction book was the last volume of this trilogy in 1999. That's 10 years ago. That's enough time to be working on another entire trilogy, if he wanted to. Instead, he dusted off the old stuff. What are we going to see next, Portnoy's Complaint Redux?
And I think Thomas's comment of "lazy" also applies to institutions that threw roses at his feet for this, instead of finding newer works by writers who, shall we say, cooked a fresh meal instead of replating the leftovers.
On March 13, 2009 at 1:57 PM Cat said…
I think this is one of the elements that'll probably eventually pull Shadow Country down in the Tourney - Doerr didn't, but it's probable that a judge along the way will see things as Pris does.
That said, although I haven't read Shadow Country yet, I did read Frankie and didn't think it would make it out of the first round. I personally adore good YA and go out of my way to read it, but I just didn't enjoy this one that much. Maybe it is the Prep overlap. Another book that I just didn't enjoy as much as I'd hoped. Could be that I just don't like boarding school books. (Nope. I've thought about it and I love Madeleine L'Engle's And Both Were Young.)
On March 13, 2009 at 4:59 PM Kimberly said…
Oh, please let's have Diresputable History back in the zombie round. I won't say it should win (although I enjoyed it more than any of the others) since enjoyment isn't everything. Still, I think it's better than a good handful of the books in the tournament.
On March 14, 2009 at 9:35 PM Leesa said…
In this round I only read Disreputable History, but predicted the 777 v. tangerine outcome (with the tangerine losing) just looking at these books. I don't see this one winning against anything else that's advanced so far - it's just too light in all respects - so I don't think it's a great candidate for a zombie.
I have my fingers crossed that Disreputable History will live again in the zombie round. I agree that this judge did not give enough props for all of the philosophy and feminism incorporated into this book, which in my experience, is rare for a YA novel.