Miles From Nowhere v. The Lacuna
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ZOMBIE ROUND
Miles From Nowhere
v. The Lacuna
Judged by Sam Anderson
Sam Anderson is a book critic at New York magazine. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “Nicholson Baker: an early writing hero of mine; I interviewed him once for an hour or so on the phone, had a lovely conversation; but I can still be objective about him. Marlon James: I know and like his editor, Sean McDonald. The Book of Night Women made it onto my year-end top 10 list. Wells Tower: I reviewed his book; I had friendly lunch with him once; I put his book on my 2009 Top 10 list.”
I agonized over this decision. For a couple of days it sent me into a real lost-in-the-wilderness aesthetic-crisis-of-faith tailspin. I went back and forth many times. I actually lost sleep. I started to think that the books had been paired, intentionally, because they would activate totally different regions of my brain and force me to choose, in public, between two rival forms of readerly pleasure. I talked to my wife about it for so long that she literally refused to talk to me about it anymore. So now I’m going to talk to you.
Miles From Nowhere is a total joy. Its voice is bright and smooth and punchy and funny even when it’s narrating the most wretched events—the story of this fundamentally good person thrown into a horrible junkie life. (I kept feeling like I was reading the autobiography of Bubbles from The Wire, if Bubbles had been a Korean girl in the Bronx in the 1980s.) Every story is loaded with great lines, paragraphs, scenes: when Joon calls her estranged dad and just lets Pop Rocks fizz into the receiver, when she lays on “a bench so orange I wanted to drink it,” when she feeds the starving dog some chicken. When her friend Knowledge puts on her gloves, “which were really tube socks with ten finger holes.” Way too many great moments to name here. The book deserves every blurby adjective we can come up with: true, thrilling, hilarious, disturbing, poignant, trenchant, whatever. I recommend it, very highly, to everyone in the whole world.
That said, it also has some fairly obvious weaknesses. Joon’s voice occasionally crosses over from genuine poetry and wisdom into cutesiness. (“God didn’t show that day, but one of his angels did.”) Plots sometimes feel a little forced, even manipulative; I rolled my eyes several times. I wonder if the subject matter was so bitter and gritty that Mun felt like she had to inject some “chicken soup for the junkie soul” sweetness in order to keep the general reader. I wish she hadn’t. And then there’s the perennial problem of the short story cycle: Its parts connect so tangentially that it doesn’t quite give you the final wallop of a good novel. My love for Miles From Nowhere is more about paragraphs than it is the total book. Which is a problem, obviously, in a Tournament loaded with full-on novelistic juggernauts. (Cf. the way Mun got steamrolled by Colum McCann in the Opening Round.)
Kingsolver’s novel was basically the opposite experience. It irritated me immediately, on several fronts. First of all, it subscribes very clearly to the Forrest Gump school of historical fiction: Every private experience has to be tied somehow to the forward march of History. The narrator’s mother can’t just get in a car accident—she has to get into a car accident on her way to see Howard Hughes flying one of his experimental airplanes. The narrator can’t just leave a letter lying around—the letter has to cause a fateful rift between Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky. It can feel a little mechanical.
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One of the great things about The Lacuna is that it’s formally ambitious—it’s cobbled together out of a bunch of different documents, some fictional, some real: diaries, letters, newspaper articles, a H.U.A.C. transcript, editorial notes. But Kingsolver either isn’t a good enough stylist (which I doubt), or just isn’t committed enough, to make all of these voices sound 100 percent plausible. She cheats sometimes. The little boy’s diary is a little too polished, the newspaper articles too transparently stupid, the H.U.A.C. transcript too poetic. In other words, everything smells a little Kingsolvery—you can sense her behind the scenes, tampering, making sure no symbol goes unexplored, no key phrase unrepeated. It’s distracting.
In general, I wish Kingsolver would trust the reader a little more. A character doesn’t have to use slang 43 times every sentence for us to recognize that she is speaking in slang. (“I’m just razzing you. I’d take up with a pinko in two toots, if he was famous and had a wad of tin. That artist’s little girlfriend is one lucky duck.”) We get it. Also, we get that mid-20th-century America was an ugly place: homophobia, internment camps, McCarthyism, tabloid hysteria, etc., etc., etc. But it’s not like any of these are new and difficult targets. Too often The Lacuna crosses the line into flat-out editorializing. I wrote the word “tiresome” in the margins a lot. I wanted to cut, say, 50 pages.
And yet—somehow, in spite of all of these irritations, The Lacuna finally grew on me in a way that Miles From Nowhere didn’t. It may just be a question of genre: The long historical novel, with its macro and micro chronologies of public and private history, has more time to get its hooks into you (and a wider variety of hooks to use) than a relatively brief short-story cycle. Although Kingsolver’s main character is less immediately loveable than Nami Mun’s, I ended up getting addicted to his weird, fussy voice. There’s plenty of beautiful writing here too: an egret walking across a room, “lifting its long legs at the knee like a man riding a bicycle”; a cat walking flattened to the wall “as if pulled sideways by a separate order of gravity”; lines of typed Russian “lined up like rows of little men doing bending exercises.”
In the end, the books probably gave me a similar net pleasure: Mun’s for the immediacy of that voice, the quick and constant pleasure of the style, the dark humor; Kingsolver’s for the formal ambition, the degree of difficulty, the historical weight, the long slow build of the narrator’s life. It came down to a decision between head and heart. I’m going, just barely, with my head. And regretting it almost immediately.
Advancing:
The Lacuna
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin: After readers released the Kraken on the last two judgments, I really don’t think anyone can accuse Sam Anderson of not giving great consideration to his decision. That was as thoughtful a review as we’ve ever had at the ToB. What’s interesting to me about it, though, is that after reading it I definitely want to tackle Mun’s book more. Maybe he was overcompensating with praise because he felt badly about sending Miles From Nowhere to the bench, but I was actually surprised when he chose The Lacuna at the end. Maybe Judge Anderson just has a keen eye for misdirection after watching so many rose ceremonies on The Bachelor.
Or maybe, when forced to choose between two things he valued equally, he blurted out the wrong book at the end.
John: Sam Anderson demonstrates himself to be the kind of reader/book lover that I think populates most of our viewing audience, and as such, my hunch is that this judgment will seem more satisfying, regardless of whether or not we may agree with it, which I pretty emphatically don’t. The Lacuna, for all its ambition and scope, feels constructed to me. Miles From Nowhere feels like it was birthed, and for me, that made all the difference in my enjoyment.
I share much of the audience’s ire over the Semifinal judgments, but as you pointed out, all of these things have plenty of precedent in the grand scheme of Tournament of Books history. We’ve come into some heat for the choice of judges, but that’s pretty easy in hindsight. I figure if people are asked and they say yes, they’re essentially agreeing they’ll do the best job possible; I don’t think any one judge failed to hold to that standard, even if we may find the results lackluster. We are all imperfect. Thanks to our open comment system we get to vent about those imperfections.
But really, you have to wonder if any literary prize doesn’t have more than its share of judging a book by its cover/front matter/name on the spine going on. I note from the press release [pdf] for the recently announced PEN/Faulkner Award that the three-person jury, “considered close to 350 novels and short story collections published by American authors published in the U.S. during the 2009 calendar year.”
I make special note of the word “considered” because obviously they weren’t all, you know, read. Clearly, some kind of potentially arbitrary process allowed for the culling of the herd to something more manageable for deeper consideration. It was probably a lot like the culling process each individual goes through as they decide what to read for themselves. Some significant portion of those almost 350 entries was a waste of time because they were doomed by some (likely subconscious) bias among some member of the three-person panel.
The winning book, Sherman Alexie’s War Dances, never even got on the Tournament of Books radar as far as I recall. It’s definitely not on the longlist of titles. I haven’t read it, but it seems like a bit of a hodgepodge, a collection of loosely thematically linked pieces in different forms, including poetry. I’ve got to wonder if a book this obviously odd would’ve even attracted the notice of the committee if the author hadn’t been someone so accomplished and well known. (Alexie’s name is above the title on the cover, letting us know what the true selling hook for this book is.)
I’d like to see the PEN/Faulkner release some kind of transcript of their deliberations so we can see how almost 350 became one. I don’t mean to impugn the integrity of the contest any more than what I’m saying implies to all contests—it seems that winning is almost a random decision. We could probably do a lottery among those almost 350 entries and announce one winner and four finalists, and no one would really question it because it would seem plausible for just about any of those books to be considered for this award.
What does all that mean? I don’t know, it’s been a long Tournament.
Kevin: The journey a book takes to a book award is kind of similar to the journey it takes to publication. Success has much to do with merit, but a lot to do with luck, as well. Even a very good book has to land on just the right people’s laps—the agent, the editor, the salesperson, the bookseller—and all of those people have to really “get” the book if it is going to be a success, or even make it to the bookstore. The author releases his or her book into the world, then the novel has to run this gauntlet alone. The writer has almost no control over any of it, and the most arbitrary decisions can knock it out for good.
John: One of the more frequent questions I get from my students, or others just getting their feet wet in writing, is how they can know if they have sufficient talent to succeed. I have two answers: 1) you can’t; and 2) it doesn’t matter anyway. The limiting factor to just about any hopeful writer’s career isn’t talent. It’s far more a matter of diligence, and once that diligence has been given its due, as you say, at that point, it’s up to the Fates.
Kevin: So The Lacuna advances to the Championship, an outcome I think surprised us both. Kingsolver’s book really has outlasted all comers. The next question is whether the match will be a Clash of Titans (see how I bring that Kraken thing back?) or a David versus Goliath story. That’s in Julie Powell’s hands now.
(Speaking of Julie Powell, look who’s a judge over at the ToB-inspired Tournament of Cookbooks: Why it’s Nora Ephron, the director of Julie & Julia based on a book by, yes, Julie Powell! That’s some cross-tourney synchronicity for you, I tell you what. Also, having checked out that site, I’m now thinking what our Tournament needs is more recipes. If, in the middle of Tuesday’s judgment, Andrew W.K. had offered readers his recipe for Burnt Tomato Halves, the comments would have been far more forgiving.)
Every win by The Lacuna continues to punish you in our private confidence pool. My lead is extended to 246-229 with just two matches remaining. A Fever Chart win tomorrow would really put you back in the race. But since I have both The Lacuna and Wolf Hall ranked (just barely) higher than you do, a win by Mantel will lock up a wheel of that stinky South Carolina cheese for me.
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