Savages v. The Finkler Question
presented by
OPENING ROUND
Savages
v. The Finkler Question
Judged by Rosecrans Baldwin
Rosecrans Baldwin is a founding editor of The Morning News. His first novel, You Lost Me There (Riverhead), was named an editors’ choice by the New York Times Book Review and a Best Book of 2010 by NPR. His next book, Paris I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “TMN published an essay by Teddy Wayne this year, as well as Robert Birnbaum’s interviews with Jennifer Egan and Gary Shteyngart, but I barely interacted with any of them. Same for when Shteyngart judged the ToB in 2008—we exchanged a few emails, but that was it. No other connections to my knowledge.”
I had two long plane flights, two books, Richard Hawley on my iPod, and a credit card.
Perhaps my idea of heaven is different from yours.
Flight one: The Finkler Question, Heineken, ham sandwich.
Flight two: Savages, Jack Daniels, peanut butter Clif Bar.
On both flights, I had the same first impression: Finkler and Savages are white-collar novels. As in, these are executed by professionals. You get that from both books’ first chapters. There’s a song-like variety of sentence structure. Zero false notes, and their diction belongs to a system, a world. Both books smelled of expertise.
My second impression, which I knew from various online and newspaper reading, was that both of these books had been marketed and discussed as genre books, though ones that had exceeded their genres. Finkler Question, a comic novel that won the 2010 Booker Prize. Savages, a thriller that thrilled with style, and one of Janet Maslin’s 10 best books of the year—“boisterously stylish, outrageously brazen… a ferocious, wisecracking, high-wire act.”
It was a contest I was looking forward to.
Savages, by Don Winslow, is the story of two white-hat pot dealers, a former soldier and a do-gooder genius-chemist, who use their profits from selling super-weed to save the world. The trouble is, a Mexican drug cartel wants their turf as part of a northern-expansion scheme. So the boys, and also a girl they both sleep with—her name is “O,” short for orgasm, which she experiences frequently; hard as Winslow tries, however, her character never adds up to much more than that reduction—team up to battle a cartel matriarch and her henchmen for the right to sell weed in San Diego.
And for about 100 pages, Savages is a flamboyant, fun novel. It is “boisterously stylish.” It’s astute in social commentary and erotically terse. The characters are vivid—if not complex, they’re at least complicated. And the writing is extremely quotable, super hip, and written with vigor—and if sometimes the vigor relied a little too much on paragraph breaks and clipped sentences, I forgave it, seeing how much fun I was having. Winslow’s sentences were simply pleasurable to hear and see, and even speak aloud to a plane window.
Especially, I imagine, for readers who enjoy politically-charged surf and weed slang. I made a note on the flyleaf: “If a person enjoys following the in-jokes during a Das Racist song while reading Charles Bowden, this book is for that reader.”
I.e., me.
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In fact, I already admired Winslow. I loved Dawn Patrol and The Power of the Dog. I figured he had this contest sewn up. But then… around page 100, Savages snuffs itself. It quickly becomes predictable, thin and dull. I actually started becoming angry with the book—the plot wasn’t surprising anymore, and tension was dropped out for pace. Dictums and didacticism ate up room that might have been used for drama or complex motives.
As the book closed, except for a sociopathic cartel enforcer who gained dimension, Winslow’s main characters lost life—very disappointing. Because during those first hundred pages, I was thinking, “Maybe this will be the next Friends of Eddie Coyle.”
Those first hundred pages were really very good.
On my second flight, I opened The Finkler Question to find three friends living in London: Julian, Libor, and Sam. Julian’s our lead. Julian is a celebrity double. He has identity problems, envy issues, and a bland, handsome face. Mainly, Julian wants to be Jewish. Or, he wants to figure out what it means to be Jewish. Or, he just wants to be like his friend Sam. Sam is Jewish, rich, impulsive, and famous, and he’s both professionally and sexually successful. Sam’s last name is Finkler, so Julian calls all Jewish people Finklers.
It is not a believable quirk. But more on that later.
First, I should add that Julian also wants to be like his friend Libor, who’s also Jewish. Libor is mourning his dead wife. Sam, I should add, is also in mourning. In fact, when the reader meets Julian, more than anything Julian wishes that he, too, were in mourning. Julian, we’re told, finds nearly-dead women hot.
So that’s the summary: sex, mourning, and Jewish identity—a comedy then.
Which is how Finkler’s billed, as a comic novel. Which, in my opinion, is not at all the same thing as a book of humor, or a humorous book. Because Finkler is not funny. I didn’t laugh once—well, maybe once, when Julian’s seducing yet another pale, gasping girl. But I was talking to a friend of mine who’d read Finkler, and I agreed with her when she said she felt as if she’d been sold the wrong novel by all the Booker hoopla.
Instead, Finkler is a captivating, rambling, repetitive conversation about self and death and anti-Semitism. Powerful at times, beautifully witty and investigative, and surprising. The writing’s gorgeous—the only thing showy about the book is how lightly Jacobson demonstrates deep thought. There are wonderful sentences everywhere.
But Finkler has a big problem in its middle: Julian, the main character, is unbelievable. The book’s almost entirely about Julian, his stereotypes and cravings and how he fits his foot in his mouth. But Julian’s desires and grievances are so ridiculous and happen to be so expedient to the narrative, they’re absurd. They’re not coincidental, they’re convenient. There’s just no tension whenever Julian enters a room. Whereas Julian’s friend Sam, who doesn’t receive nearly as much of Jacobson’s notice, is captivating, and I wanted much more of him. Libor less so, but not insignificantly.
I read novels for plot, but I don’t need it—but in its place I do need life. Perhaps Finkler’s point is that Julian is not the center of the book. Maybe the point of Finkler isn’t to dramatize events or entertain its readers, but to flay, to scrutinize, to attack. If so, Finkler still didn’t score high for me on those criteria.
In this contest, I admired both authors, but I didn’t love either book. So it came down to execution—style, insight, and world-making sustained to the final page. On that count, Finkler wins.
Advancing:
The Finkler Question
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
John: Like Rosecrans Baldwin, I didn’t laugh once while reading The Finkler Question, but unlike him, I hold a grudge. I love comic novels, particularly ones that then whipsaw you with a little old-fashioned pathos, which made Finkler sound like it was right in my wheelhouse. I love them so much I did my best to write one. But when something is billed as a comic novel, call me crazy, I want laughs. To be fair, I only read just over a hundred pages, so maybe there are some yuks deeper into the book, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t account for varieties in taste, but Judge Baldwin’s favorable take despite the absence of LOL-ing maybe indicates that my encounter with The Finkler Question has been foiled by wrong expectations, the same way some people may express disappointment when Freedom doesn’t live up to Greatest Novel of All-Time hype. I was indeed sold the wrong novel.
Kevin: Every year in the ToB there is a book that just defeats me. And there is usually one of those, “Baby it’s not you, it’s me” books, as well. The Finkler Question ended up being both for me. I couldn’t keep the characters straight and I wasn’t sure why I was reading about them. Reading it made me feel like a Kardashian on a date with John Nash. It seemed like it was probably smart but I just couldn’t bring myself to care about what it was saying.
John: Independent of that, for me, Finkler lacks incident, or rather it has one incident, a mugging, that is apparently important because we keep circling back to it, but why it might be important or that I should feel its importance is beyond me. The characters are, again, for me, almost indistinguishable. Long passages of two and three-way conversations glazed right by me. Judge Baldwin calls the writing gorgeous, but I found it strangely inert, like Hugh Hefner in bed.
Maybe if I’d been on a plane with no other reading material, I would’ve kept going, but if I was a judge this round and my choice was between The Finkler Question and Sky Mall, I’d be going with the work that introduced me to the Bigfoot garden yeti sculpture.
Kevin: The other reason I gave up on Finkler was that the pairings came out while I was reading and I saw it was matched up with Savages, and frankly I thought it wasn’t going to be a contest. Savages was one of my favorite books from last year. Because of the kind of novel it is—because genre has a poor record in the ToB, because the pages turn faster than a terrier with a meat tail, because it’s a 302-page novel with 290 chapters—I didn’t really think it would have the muscle to make it through the final round of the tourney. But I thought it would knuckle punch Finkler in the balls and make it eat glass. I was wrong.
John: So Savages became our yearly genre sacrificial lamb, and I’m upset on its behalf, even if lamb is delicious. I was certain it had a better shot than any of our previous genre entries to advance at least a round because Finkler seemed weak, and Savages is a really exciting, funny, violent ride. Savages had me at “hello,” or rather “Fuck you,” which is the entirety of the first chapter. It had Baldwin at “hello” too, but he fell out of love at some point, which I can’t blame him for, but reinforces the arbitrary nature of these things, and how which book gets chosen is perhaps a function of the question the reviewer asks him or herself.
If the question is “which book is better?” that may beget one answer. “Which book did you enjoy more?” could lead to another. I enjoyed the hell out of Savages, Finkler was a chore for the time I spent with it, which for me, also makes it a better book. If the question is “which book do you want on hand if you need to clobber a home invader over the head” then I’m picking Skippy Dies.
Kevin: I won’t deny that the incredible pace of Savages becomes something of a weakness in the final pages—it all wrapped up too quickly for me. But I think both you and Judge Baldwin are underselling the depth of Savages. Not only does the book have terrific characters, each deftly drawn with a minimum of words, but the conflict, between a pair of lovable pot dealers in Southern California and the matriarch of a Mexican drug cartel, is the stuff of classical tragedy. None of them want to resort to violence in this case, but all believe they have no choice. Everyone is compelled to head down a path they know will lead to disaster and neither side can stop it, even though no one wants it to happen. It was, for me, a less ambitious yet far more relevant treatise on contemporary violence than 2666 (not that I’m trying to open that worm-infested can again).
It’s also a pretty good metaphor for the state of Illinois’s finances.
John: 2666, also a great book to clobber someone over the head with.
I’m now wondering if you’ve unintentionally exposed an unfortunate personal bias in how I think, and in turn, talk about books, likely related to a desire to maintain a certain amount of cred (if you will) as a discerning reader of literary fiction. (For the time being, I am employed by an institute of higher learning.) I probably am selling Savages short. Savages is terrific for reasons in addition to the pleasures we expect from a book in the crime/suspense genre. But even that statement has a whiff of pretension since I’m clearly signaling that it’s okay to like it even though it’s a genre book because it’s somehow better than its genre.
These games I’m playing seem kind of silly.
We see so-called genre writers that get to rise above their station all the time, Philip K. Dick, Patricia Highsmith, Elmore Leonard, etc… but it seems as though it’s a kind of lifetime achievement award, a stamp of approval, that makes them safe for non-genre devotees to consume without the requisite nods that while we like these writers, let’s be clear that this doesn’t mean we like the genre as a whole because those books are for other, less discerning people.
When I discuss what literature is with my students, I tell them my own personal definition is writing that seeks to illuminate the world as it is, as opposed to the way we wish it was. I tell them that I see literature as something “non-disposable.” I also tell them that it’s like porn and that I know it when I see it, to which they say, “You watch porn?”
Under this definition, I’m going to have to take someone else’s word that Finkler qualifies, but I’m going to declare that Savages does, whatever label it comes under.
Kevin: As I recover from my first personal disappointment of the tourney, we turn to tomorrow’s match, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad vs. Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies.
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