The Lacuna v. Fever Chart
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OPENING ROUND
The Lacuna
v. Fever Chart
Judged by Alexander Chee
Alexander Chee is the author of Edinburgh. He is the Visiting Writer at Amherst College. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I have a conflict with Nami Mun, who I adore and who is a good friend. John Wray and I share an agent, but I don’t know him personally—somehow that seems more personal than sharing a publisher.”
When I first held The Lacuna, and read the jacket copy, I thought of the rule that you should never title a novel after its central metaphor—by drawing too much attention to it, you suck all the air out of it. At the time I thought it seemed like ridiculous advice but it turned out to be true in Kingsolver’s novel—if the title had been something else, I wouldn’t have felt so punched by the meaning of the book.
At first glance, each of these novels seemed so different as to be impossible to compare. How to pit the qualities of a sweeping multi-character historical epic against the small, sure-footed story of a madman trying to just be right with the world and maybe get some? The answer is, it turns out, they’re both, by the end, the story of madmen, albeit very different kinds. One driven mad by the unfairness of the world, I think you could say, in The Lacuna, and the other, in Fever Chart, mad all on his own. Trying to get well, but the world is not on his side, either. One thing both books make clear is that the world isn’t on anyone’s side at all.
Both had something of a “mistake of verisimilitude”—they each tried too hard to hew to the shape of life instead of a novel, even with the aforementioned metaphor issue. I didn’t really love either novel, not the way I wanted to, and I had high hopes for both. I’m a sometime Kingsolver fan, and I’m always on the side of a debut author. When I began Fever Chart, by Bill Cotter, I got excited. I thought, “Wow, this is great prose.” But then a mysterious woman appeared and then vanished from view in what felt like a massive mistake—as in a printer’s error—and by the time she reappeared, I already was editing the book in my mind. And the book then vanished into a sequence of the character’s miseries I was hard pressed to connect together, much less get through—and yet I still loved all the sentences. It is a well-written book, but I wanted more structure to it than I got. Some readers will be more forgiving than me, I’m sure. And I welcome Cotter’s debut—he’s a talented man, and I will definitely pay attention when I see his name again. By all means, zombie round this guy if you feel more strongly than me.
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Kingsolver’s book meanwhile is the great unsung gay novel of last year, maybe, in terms of the life of the man described by the efforts of the woman who could really only love him by preserving everything he wanted to throw away, the record of all his disappointments. I loved seeing how his being gay mattered and yet was not central to the novel’s plot. And I really might have loved The Lacuna more if it had been titled something like Time Cures You First And Then It Kills You, or Feast of the Kings, and I tried to read it as if either was the title (I also wanted to just cut off the first 28 pages). The Lacuna really is an important book—and with it, Kingsolver moves into territory previously held by writers like Dos Passos and Galeano, with his Century of Wind trilogy. Which I loved. It really isn’t like any of her previous novels, or most American novels, for that matter—it’s more like a South American novel about North America, if you will, in terms of the political sensibility and view of the life of a country in the lives of the people—you find yourself looking at American life from a really interesting place.
So, raise Kingsolver’s hand in the air, and advance her to the next round.
Advancing:
The Lacuna
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
John: Judge Chee declares of Fever Chart and its (admittedly) shambling structure that when it comes to assessing its overall quality, “some readers will be more forgiving than me.”
I am that reader. I loved Fever Chart. I thought it was, as the kids were saying back in 1932, “a hoot.” The book had more laughs per line than any I’ve read since Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land, and more entertainingly eccentric characters than the USA Network primetime lineup, without or even with Monk. By the time the middle section of the book arrived with perhaps some extra flab around the waistline story-wise, I didn’t care, because I didn’t have any interest in this particular book ending because I was more than happy to listen to Jerome Coe ad infinitum.
Of course, there’s other factors weighing in Fever Chart’s favor, the kinds of things that make us predisposed to enter into the text with a positive attitude that invariably colors our initial response as we give the book a few pages to see if it’s a love match. The book is published by McSweeney’s, whom I work for, and while I have nothing to do with the products issued by the print arm, for me as a reader, they’ve had an excellent track record in the past. It’s safe to say, I wanted to like the book, and some of that wanting may inevitably have colored my response.
Regardless of all that, the book is awesome.
Kevin: I started reading Fever Chart as a pdf. That was unwieldy, so I went to the bookstore and I was really struck by how my impression of the book changed just by holding it in my hands. McSweeney’s has always put more thought (and money) into the design of its books than almost any other publisher, but Fever Chart is an especially beautiful object, with a wonderful, textured, hardcover binding and a stunning color illustration on the die-cut jacket. You simply can’t argue that reading an electronic version of Fever Chart is equivalent to holding the actual thing. (Whether or not it makes economic sense to produce such a book is another matter, of course.)
When Fever Chart is funny, which is often, I loved it. There are some sequences, which you and Judge Chee have pointed out, where the story seems to lose its comic sensibilities and is more interested in ferrying you (and the characters) to the next set piece, but maintaining a comic sensibility over 300 pages is one of the hardest things a novelist can attempt. You can’t penalize a writer too much for not landing the equivalent of a quintuple toe loop every time. Cotter is a terrific and interesting writer.
John: The Lacuna and me, on the other hand, felt like a bad match, kind of like Mitt Romney and intellectual consistency. I’d read three Kingsolver novels in the past, liked two, loathed one. I admired her desire to make sure her novels have a “point” even as I resented what I saw as the resoluteness with which that point was pursued. My wife had also read the book before me, and when I asked how she’d liked it, she shrugged, not a particularly ringing endorsement. I’d also seen a few reviews that described the novel as “ambitious” which I read as code for “big, and maybe kind of boring.”
The book is also on the long-ish side, and it was 15th out of 16 on my Tournament reading list, meaning I’d had my reading dictated to me for the previous couple of months, and there was a pile of other books that I’d chosen for myself just waiting to be tackled. Reading The Lacuna began to feel like homework and I resented it and those first 28 pages that Alexander Chee says he’d excise defeated me. The Lacuna remains the only book in this year’s tourney I wasn’t able to read to completion and I’m pretty sure it’s mostly my fault.
I just wasn’t in the mood.
Kevin: The Lacuna is one of the books I didn’t get to, which means only that other books were more accessible to me before I ran out of time. I will say that our longlist was especially packed with historical fiction this year. You and I play only a minor role in determining the books that make it into the tourney, but I know that in the mix of arbitrary considerations determining the final 16, there was a “how many historical novels is too many” discussion. I suspect there was a book or two that might have made it in except for the subject matter.
John: Arguably, our first three matchups have pitted historical versus contemporary novels (though maybe Let the Great World Spin is set recently enough to not qualify, I’m not versed on the definitions—help me out commenters) and history has won over the present every time. Tomorrow and Monday we’ve got two more in Burnt Shadows and Wolf Hall, with The Book of Night Women laying in wait for Lorrie Moore next Wednesday. Last year’s Tournament was won by a historical novel, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.
If I was a hack journalist, I’d be polishing my pens in order to write my trend piece.
Kevin: Looking at the rankings in our personal confidence pool, each of us thought Fever Chart might pull off the upset, but I ranked The Lacuna a little bit higher than you did. So after three rounds I extend my lead just slightly, 33-27.
Mmmm. I can already smell the cheese.
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