Next v. So Much for That

Next v. So Much for That

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OPENING ROUND

Next
v. So Much for That

Judged by Jessica Francis Kane

Jessica Francis Kane is the author of a story collection, Bending Heaven (Counterpoint), and a novel, The Report (Graywolf Press), which was a finalist for the 2010 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize and a Barnes & Noble “Discover” pick. Kane’s writing has appeared in many publications, including VQR, McSweeney’s, and Granta. A new story collection is forthcoming from Graywolf next year. She lives in New York with her husband and their two children. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “Marcy Dermansky and I met on book tour in New Hampshire when the great River Run Bookstore invited us to read together. She impressed me immediately by announcing that she was walking to Maine (easier to do from Portsmouth, N.H., than you might think, but still). We’ve been in touch ever since.”

It falls to me to judge two vivid evocations of contemporary life, and the more I think about that, the harder the task seems. In So Much for That, the main character gets himself to the right place at the right time and lives happily ever after. In Next, the main character gets himself to the wrong place at the wrong time and pays dearly. So Much for That is a novel of work and death. Next is a novel of sex and death. How to decide?

By the time Next’s Kevin Quinn meets the second woman of his daylong reverie around Austin, I thought it possible Hynes intended the book to be a modern version of A Christmas Carol, albeit with a lot more sun and sex. On a mission to interview for a new job (his life in Ann Arbor untenable for a number of reasons), Kevin arrives in Austin with many hours to spare. He tries to settle in at a coffee shop, but a fortuitous sighting of the woman he sat next to on the plane—Kelly—sends him stalking her around the city. “Joy Luck,” as he thinks of her, is his ghost of the past: Everything about her reminds him of past loves. The second visitation is from Claudia, who enters as Kelly disappears. Claudia grounds him in the present, briefly: They eat lunch and share secrets. The last is Melody, and I won’t explain how and where they meet because to do so would ruin one of the most shocking and terrific reading experiences you still have ahead of you if you haven’t read the book yet. But I think it fair to say that she serves as his guide to the future. The last chapter is full of terror and sadness and in the midst of it all, there is a reference to A Christmas Carol. I’d been reading along, thinking about the strange echoes of that classic, wondering if I was crazy, and when it shows up in Kevin’s memory of his grandfather’s death, I felt enormously reassured.

I had a similar moment while reading So Much for That, a novel primarily about Shep and his wife Glynis, who is diagnosed with cancer just as Shep is finally prepared to execute “The Afterlife”—his plan to abandon the disaster of contemporary American life and retreat to a paradise where he can live on a few dollars a day. I was beginning to lose patience, frankly, when I hit this paragraph:

“Remember how sometimes, in the middle, a movie seems to drag? I get restless, and take a leak, or go for popcorn. But sometimes, the last part, it heats up, and then right before the credits one of us starts to cry—well, then you forget about the crummy middle, don’t you? You don’t care about the fact that it started slow, or had some plot twist along the way that didn’t scan. Because it moved you, because it finally pulled together, you think, when you walk out, that it was a good movie, and you’re glad you went. See?” he promised. “We can still end well.”

God help me, I thought, I hope so. Vast stretches of So Much for That feel less like a novel and more like a filibuster. The issues often highjack the story, as if the collective voice of the New York Times editorial board had decided to write fiction. Characters frequently think like this:

Shep was born to a country whose culture had produced the telephone, the flying machine, the assembly line, the Interstate highway, the air-conditioner, and the fiber-optic cable. His people were brilliant with the inanimate—with ions and prions, with titanium and uranium, with plastic that would survive a thousand years.

Is it third-person narration or a treatise? Every character can and does at some point deliver a diatribe on one issue or another with fluid sentences and the right vocabulary, making them really qualified to testify before Congress, but a little less compelling as fictional creations.

But something wonderful happens at the end, just as Shriver hints that it might. Perhaps she intended the sluggish middle in order to make the last chapter, when Shep and Glynis finally engineer a kind of escape, so revelatory. If Shriver can pull off this ending, I thought, what if the whole book is meant as an allegory? The book loses its way, just as Shep and Glynis lose their way trying to fight cancer. The moral of the story: If we wrest ourselves free, a kind of redemption will follow.

Maybe.

In Next, though the evocation of Ann Arbor was like candy to me (it’s my home town and Hynes’s portrait of the place is brilliant; I think the only landmark he missed was Dominick’s; come on, pitchers of sangria in the back garden?), there were moments when the obsessive, wheel-spinning narration of Kevin’s thoughts felt claustrophobic. Just when I thought I couldn’t possibly endure more, a cab driver says to him, “You need to pay attention, man.” Yes! Hynes knows exactly what we’re thinking.


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Compare that to a scene in So Much for That when Glynis is behaving particularly badly. She has sent him back to the kitchen to make a pot of rice she will not eat. An already difficult person, her illness has made her nearly insufferable. We know it, Shep knows it. But what do we get?

He was not sure how to manage this. She was in a very volatile humor. He did not want to make everything worse.

We know! And there is no relief on the page, no space where we can breathe and see that Shriver has anticipated our understanding.

Also, the action is linked to the reflection in Next in a way it’s not in So Much for That. When Glynis is expecting a visit from a friend, the car pulls into the drive, but we have a page-and-a-half of topic-induced reflection before we even get to hello. The story line lurches in general from issue to issue, regardless of what the characters are doing. The callousness of doctors? Check. The cluelessness of friends? Check. The selfishness of capitalism and the expense of healthcare? Check, check. It’s as if action and reflection in the book are not taking place on the same stage.

In Next, the two are woven expertly. “It’s not too late, [Kevin] thinks, I could go back inside, change my ticket, and be back in Ann Arbor by mid-afternoon.

He realizes that he’s stopped walking. Other passengers step around him…

It’s a small moment, but his thinking actually stops his walking, and that pleases me. It makes it easier to believe in a character as more than just a suitcase for an issue.

And finally, some descriptions from Next because I love them so much:

  • An urban park full of “underachieving trees and yellowed grass.”

  • A strip mall with a “wide-open, sun-hammered, nearly empty parking lot.”

  • A public lobby with a “knot of people straining like sunflowers toward the television.”

  • And my favorite: “A Michigander can be every bit as prickly as a New Yorker, just not out loud.”

These thrill me and make my own little writerly heart skip a beat. I do not have such a list from So Much for That, though I did love this line: “Decisions take a split second. It’s not deciding that takes all the time.” It suits both books, actually, and it’s good advice.

Advancing:
Next


Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner

John: A lot of our commenters were expressing a kind of Sophie’s Choice angst over our A Visit From the Goon Squad v. Skippy Dies matchup, but this is my personal caught-between-a-rock-and-the-Situation’s-abs.

James Hynes is a writer I love. I read The Lecturer’s Tale on a yearly basis, if not more often. I was singing the praises of Next as early as last year’s tournament. When my own book went out to publishers I wanted them to think I was the next James Hynes. I could talk about the awesomeness of Next in greater detail than the starting lineup of the 1984 Chicago Cubs, but I’m not going to because Jessica does her usual bang-up job in her judgment, and Next is moving on to the quarterfinals, and I’ve got a lot to say about Lionel Shriver and So Much for That.

Lionel Shriver is, in my opinion, one of our best contemporary novelists. We Need to Talk About Kevin, her take on a Columbine-like incident, is a masterpiece of storytelling. Narrated by one of the most complex and fascinating characters this side of Humbert Humbert, it has a story reveal that sent electricity shooting to the end of my limbs. She writes prickly characters better than anyone around, and her novels tackle big-time social issues while also exploring the complicated nature of families and relationships. They’re also often funny in a rather mordant way.

It’s like Frontline meets Parenthood, as narrated by Lewis Black.

I see a lot of similarities between So Much for That and Freedom, actually. Big themes, multi-character, multi-faceted conflict. There are surprise story turns in both. Both authors even have a reputation for being a little difficult. The central character in each is set up as the most honorable man in America, the difference being we see why Shep Knacker deserves the title.

Jessica Francis Kane is a very fine novelist with a highly developed aesthetic that works to tremendous affect. In fact, the better the novelist, I think the more certain you become over what makes a book work because it’s this kind of focus that’s going to allow you to see your own idea through to the end. Since we often draw from the TMN stable, we’ve always been heavy on writers in our judging panel, and I sometimes wonder what kind of effect this may have on the judging.

Because as I read Jessica’s judgment, I believe that her objections are primarily aesthetic, a preference for Hynes’s melding over Shriver’s stacking. I can’t really take issue with anything in her take. The characters in this book do wax into occasional (maybe more than occasional) speechifying. Shep Knacker’s best friend, Jackson Burdine, seems engineered to deliver perfectly pitched indictments of the American capitalist system.

Judge Kane is clearly bugged by this stuff, and I can’t say that I blame her, because there were times I had the urge to trim some things back myself, but I submit that Shriver’s method is merely different than Jessica Francis Kane’s preferred cup of tea.

And there isn’t anything wrong with that.

I don’t see any reason why So Much for That didn’t get at least some of the same attention as Freedom for its exploration of health care and class and money in America, for its upending of all the clichés of what it means to “die with dignity” in its portrayal of both Shep’s wife, Glynis, and Jackson’s daughter, Flicka. Even though I have some qualms, I just admire the book for its general bravery and “fuck-youness.”

So Much for That is like Charlie Sheen if Charlie Sheen were exactly as smart and funny and dangerous as he imagines himself to be.

In fact, the more I think about it, I can’t see any reason why So Much for That couldn’t have been this year’s candidate for the Great American Novel.

Wait, yes I can. Scroll back to the top. Look at the cover again. I’ll be here, waiting.

Someone at Lionel Shriver’s publisher is doing her a major dirty with the cover designs for her books. Look at those colors. Check out that ripped postcard.

Does this cover say anything other than “beach read?” I have no beef with beach reads, but So Much for That is no beach read. On the cover of the paperback edition, Washington Post book critic Ron Charles says, “If Jodi Picoult has her finger on the zeitgeist, Shriver has her hands around its throat.”

If So Much for That is a beach read, it’s the kind of beach where the sharks come out of the water, walking upright and grow hands that they strangle you with.

From this cover we get, I’m picturing a young professional gal who has it all—great job, kicking friends, slamming body—who flies to a Caribbean rendezvous in order to meet up with the man who she thinks is about to become her fiancé, only to find him in flagrante delicto with a comely mocha-skinned barmaid. She ditches the man and the job (but not the slamming body), takes up scuba diving, and travels the world looking for an egg-bearing coelacanth. She never finds the coelacanth, because it really is extinct, but she does find love, in the form of a stray Jack Russell terrier mix she finds scrounging on the beach.

It’s Eat, Pray, Love meets Jacques Cousteau, with a side order of Marley & Me, smothered with a giant slab of half-melted Velveeta.

Clearly, Lionel Shriver’s publisher is trying to signal that her books are for women, which I suppose is savvy, given that women buy and read all the books, but no such concern seemed to be part of Jonathan Franzen’s cover design. You don’t see it in Eric Puchner’s Model Home either, another family-centric novel.

Kevin: This might be a good time to send readers back to Jennifer Weiner’s judgment, in which she passed Emma Donoghue’s Room on to the quarterfinals over Marcy Dermansky’s Bad Marie. You and I both praised her insight and the quality of her written decision, and while we were sympathetic to her opinions on gender discrimination in publishing, we were a little dismissive of her attempt to bring Room into the discussion, as Donoghue has been one of the year’s most celebrated writers of either gender.

In the comments, however (I love our commenters), several readers (and Andrew Seal in particular) pointed out what they believed to be the real issue with gender bias, that even when female writers are celebrated, they aren’t put in the context of the Great Novels (as Franzen clearly has been this year), but are put in some other, more easily dismissed category of popular fiction or whatever. You can think of some exceptions, of course—Harper Lee and Toni Morrison and Flannery O’Connor, maybe—but it’s hard to build a counterargument on their backs. And I think I hear you making the same point with regard to Lionel Shriver.

I’ll confess I put off reading So Much for That precisely because it sounded preachy, and fiction is just terrible at preaching. Fiction is very good at revealing things and very good at asking questions, but it’s very bad at telling you how to think, no matter how much Alan Greenspan enjoyed Atlas Shrugged.

(Actually, seeing as Alan Greenspan’s enjoyment of Atlas Shrugged was arguably the first cause of the collapse of the global economy, you could make an argument for Ayn Rand as the most important novelist of the 20th century. Take that, gender discriminators!)

Reading the excerpts, I’m still skeptical of So Much for That, I have to admit. But you make a compelling argument. And as you have often pointed out, the one thing the ToB does well is force all of us to examine our biases. I’ll reconsider.

Skippy Dies is first for me, though.

John: I don’t see So Much for That as any more preachy than Freedom, and in some ways it wears its ideas with a little more conviction, less of the ironic wink-wink, nudge-nudge, say no more, than Franzen works with. It has the courage of its own convictions and admire it for that.

Kevin: I read Next specifically in preparation for this tourney and I was all in from the start. It’s a difficult book to talk about without either mischaracterizing it or giving up too much, but the way that Hynes is able to marry the tight human observations that are the slow-burning fuel of the literary novel with the high stakes tension of a thriller is really a show that has to be seen. For me, the ending wasn’t really shocking—I was expecting it, frankly—but as I waited for it to happen I was turning the pages one after another thinking to myself, “Is he really going to do this? Does he really have the balls to do this?” And when it happens, more spectacularly than I imagined, there’s not even a shift in style or tone. It’s all so elegant. I loved this book and I’m glad to see it moving on.

If you need more reasons to pick up Next, consider that it is on the Believer Award shortlist (along with fellow ToB competitor Skippy Dies) and also finished no. 1 on Salon’s list of novels with the best sex scenes of 2011.

John: I’m pleased to see Next move on as well, and look forward to talking about what we can’t really talk about in regards to the book, in the quarterfinals. I hope everyone checks out both of these novels for themselves, as well as Jessica Francis Kane’s The Report, which you can get for 30 percent off from Powell’s for the duration of the tourney.

The left side of the bracket went chalk the whole way through. We’ve already had one 4-1 upset on the right side with Nox getting through. Tomorrow, we’ll see if we can have two Cinderellas in one tourney as Model Home goes up against the James Franco-endorsed Super Sad True Love Story.


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Super Sad True Love Story v. Model Home

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Nox v. Lord of Misrule