Fever Chart v. Wolf Hall
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ZOMBIE ROUND
Fever Chart
v. Wolf Hall
Judged by Julie Powell
Julie Powell is the author of Julie & Julia and Cleaving. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “None.”
I will always root for the underdog, the upstart, and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is anything but. I mean, come on—the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, now the longlist for the Orange Prize—it’s like the team everyone loves to hate. Who wants to throw Mantel yet another bone? Historical fiction isn’t really my thing, besides, and the cover art screams “desperation airport read.” Whereas Bill Cotter’s Fever Chart comes swathed in bright colors and the edgily designed pop McSweeney’s brings to everything it touches, promising crazy hijinx within—it’s a cartoon! He’s bleeding! Fun! Fever Chart is like the Saints—who doesn’t want to see it win?
The book shares with that scrappy team a hometown. As the young Jerome Coe wanders the streets of New Orleans, falling in love, getting in trouble and trying to hold onto his tattered sanity, there are undeniably echoes of John Kennedy Toole—it’s a sort of Confederacy of Dunces-Lite. But instead of the quixotic delusions and crusading of Ignatius J. Reilly, we get in Jerome a hapless loser and helpless romantic, a guilty masturbator and foul-mouthed screw-up who can make a mean grilled-cheese sandwich and not much else. There is, at times, a shambling beauty to Cotter’s prose, as when our boy first encounters the eventual girl of his dreams having a nosebleed in a thrift store. And Jerome is a genial enough companion. But the story, such as it is, relies almost entirely on his inability to take action or care of himself, which is not much to hang a narrative on. It’s a fun and easy and occasionally lovely read, yet I left Fever Chart, which at 305 pages feels like it could use a snipping, feeling both unfulfilled and over-full.
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At first glance, Wolf Hall is the polar opposite of Fever Chart. Where Cotter’s prose is, well, fevered, and sometimes so frantic you want to throw a bottle of Ritalin at his head, Wolf Hall’s poetry is, for all the book’s length, one of calm economy. You may get mired down in the historical detail, the parade of characters that keeps you turning always to the character list at the front of the book, but never will you question Mantel’s choice of word or telegraphed image. Where Cotter shocks with bloody detail—at one point Jerome shaves his face, badly, with a shard of glass while watching his girlfriend receive oral sex from a murderer on the stage of strip club—Mantel gets her terrors in aslant. The loss of three members of one family to the plague in a matter of days horrifies not with its gore, but with its speed.
But the two stories are alike in one respect: They are each in the hands, indubitably and solely, of a single man. One, Jerome, is sweet and self-centered and frustratingly ineffectual. The other, Thomas Cromwell, could not be more different. A man of action, charm, warmth, and extraordinary intelligence, Cromwell is someone whose machinations we find we are happy to watch, sympathetically, from right at his shoulder. (Mantel writes in the third person, but so intimately and sparely that we feel as if we’ve slipped right into his head.) To Jerome’s man-child, Mantel counters with Cromwell’s man, and for me the choice couldn’t be clearer. Perhaps this is unfair; maybe I just have too many man-children in my life. Maybe a lot of us do. But in Wolf Hall I got to spend time with an actual adult; and at the end of its 532 pages, I’d not have snipped anything at all.
I love the upstart. But this time I’m going Establishment—all the way, baby!
Advancing:
Wolf Hall
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
John: Have you ever had a friend that another group of friends had never met, and all this time you’d been talking about this friend to your other group of friends, how great so-and-so is, that you’ll just love so-and-so, that you can’t wait for them to meet so-and-so?
You love so-and-so. You get so-and-so. You see deep things in so-and-so and think that because you’re also friends with these other people they will also see these things and maybe even you’ll be able to join a kind of mutual appreciation society of so-and-so.
But then, when your friends meet so-and-so, they shrug. “He’s all right,” they say. “He’s OK,” they say. It’s not that they hate so-and-so, but neither is so-and-so as special to them as he is to you, and, well, that stings a little.
Fever Chart is my so-and-so of this year’s tourney.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not backing away from my admiration for the book. You won’t read a fresher, funnier novel this year, or next year, and quite possibly the year after. Maybe I’m easily amused. Maybe I’m a sucker for a novel with an ineffectual male, perhaps being one myself.
But just as with Alexander Chee’s assessment of it in the Opening Round, I can’t necessarily disagree with what Julie Powell has to say here. She read the book. She seems to get it. It just didn’t merit much more than an “it was all right” from her. Of course, this is how I feel about Wolf Hall, so I’d say we’re even, except I don’t have a vote.
If I’m not mistaken, this is only the second time that two no. 1 seeds will meet in the Championship, the last time having been the inaugural tourney where Cloud Atlas took out The Plot Against America. Every other occasion it’s been a scrappy underdog versus a heavy-hitting favorite—and quite honestly, I miss that dynamic this year, even though in each other instance, the favorite has walked away with the title.
Kevin: One thing that happens every year at the Tournament of Books is that the book that wins isn’t really the book that wins. Does Toni Morrison even know she won this thing? Cormac McCarthy? Sure, they asked their manservants why the hell there’s a live chicken residing in their kitchens, but they probably didn’t pay attention to the answer. They have weightier things on their minds.
On the other hand, terrific but lesser-known books go down each year in defeat, yet find many new readers as a result. Home Land by Sam Lipsyte and Remainder by Tom McCarthy each finished a surprising second in their respective tourneys. In 2009, there was the runner-up, Tom Piazza’s terrific City of Refuge, but also Mark Sarvas’s Harry Revised and The Dart League King by Keith Lee Morris. This year I think we can add Fever Chart and The Book of Night Women to the list of sleeper books that were introduced to an audience that might not have read them if not for the ToB.
I know you like an underdog in the mix, as do I, and personally neither of us were as excited about these books as others were, at least not compared to our feelings for some of the field’s other titles. But let’s not overlook the historic nature of this thing. Not only do we have two heavyweights lined up against each other—a mammoth work of historical fiction from the New World versus a colossal beast of historical fiction from the Old—but for the first time in Tournament history we have an all-female Championship. On Wednesday, Andrew Seal (who did a terrific job with his statistical analysis this season) identified an overall male bias in all book awards (including the ToB), but on Monday a woman is going to win the Rooster for the third time in six years.
What has also been decided is our side bet. Before the Tournament, you and I ranked the books in the order we thought they would most likely finish. As books advanced, we each received points based on our rankings. Both of us had Let the Great World Spin on top, but there was quite a bit of variation after that. Since I currently have the lead, 298-277, and have both finalists ranked higher than you, I have this thing wrapped up, meaning you should start wrapping my delicious wheel of cheese.
So, on Monday, 17 people will pick one title or the other. Some will pick the one they love best, others will pick the one they hated least, but in the end a champion book will be crowned.
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