There are those of us who have taken our love of reading to a weird level: we read for a living. It’s not easy to get a job like this, there are lot of people who would give up their dignity to work someplace “glamourous” where they can get paid to “read” books. Some of us are lucky, and have achieved this glorious dream. After working at some crappy internships, then some better ones, and after surviving the publishing bootcamp known as “The Columbia Publishing Course” I got the call. I work for a literary agent and love my job. My workload consists of 90% not reading. But the 10% of reading-related work is exciting, and awesome, and like I said, I love my job.
But reading The Passage was a singular experience for me. I read it for work, an issue of familiarity. I probably never would have picked this book up otherwise. I’m just not a long vampire saga type of girl, nothing wrong with that. I actually procrastinated reading The Passage for this reason, I am among the last at my agency to have read it, and I was feeling a little out of the loop at the water cooler, so to speak. I had a long trip, with flights and a long layover, so I brought The Passage with me. And no joke, this book saved my life during the six hours I spent at the Frankfurt airport, since I probably would have fallen asleep and been robbed/quietly murdered or just missed my flight if I hadn’t had this addictive story with me.
The Passage, as established above, is unlike the books I normally pick up, which is exactly why it is perfect “work reading.” Work reading can be educational, it can be tedious, it can be terrible. The Passage was indeed educational, it taught me a lot about thrillers. But unlike some of the manuscripts I’ve been tasked with during my work as a reader, The Passage was incredible. Reading it was like reading a book of instructions for things you should look for in a manuscript, and as someone who is doing the looking I greatly appreciated the quasi-tutorial. Justin Cronin’s intricate plot, detailed and developed characters, and sense of place combine to create a mammoth thriller; at 800 or so pages I even closed the book wanting more. It was fun to isolate the reasons why this books works, to recognize the potential of the book after the fact. I tried to put myself in the mindset of not knowing the success of The Passage, seeing it from a slush pile perspective. And I was immediately swept-away by the story, the writing. A chapter in and I knew I would have called this guy up after a hours of night-blind reading.
Criticizing something good is harder than expressing why something is bad. One of the reasons I started this blog was to improve my skills and writing about why I liked a book. Writing about The Passage is actually hard, an unintelligent “IT’S AWESOME” doesn’t suffice. You can’t gush about something without a reason to, and the things I read that are middle of the road, even in my personal reading, are the most difficult for me. When there’s something to like, but not overwhelmingly, I sit and think over the blank screen, “How do I decide to like or dislike this book?” The Passage taught me how to see this more clearly in books that I’m less expert on, thrillers and commercial fiction in general. It feels good to take those lessons and apply them.
As a total Tina Fey fangirl, I was surprised I hadn’t read Bossypants yet, and when my mother-in-law found out, she bought it and sent it to me right away. She loves Tina Fey too, and we’ve talked about how we both wanted to be her when we grew up. Only neither of us could really explain exactly what this would have sounded like if we had mentioned it back in the day. And now we were just happy someone got to be Tina Fey when they grew up, that someone that awesome and that funny exists.
Reading Bossypants was fun. It was like talking to Tina Fey one-on-one, less the Liz Lemon-isms that you inconciously turn into Tina Fey traits. It shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did, when Tina wrote about her co-workers, and listed their “most valuable jokes.” I realized I assumed Tina wrote them all, that Tina was Liz, and Bossypants showed me where I was wrong. Which was fun. Of course I wanted more about things like her relationship with Amy Poehler, more tidbits about her real life. But I got the feeling that readers of Bossypants (me too) are just happy to have any illusion of hanging out with Tina Fey.
Moondogs, by Alexander Yates, is fantastical and adventurous, but it also contains some truth about human nature within it’s “mystical realist” pages. Even though you’re reading about a seemingly super-powerful rooster, a magical posse of men, and an earthquake-causing lady, you’ll also be witnessing some human emotion that normally does not coexist with such fantasy strewn pages. The character of Efrem, even though not touted in the summary of the book’s amazon page, was the vehicle for all this human suffering for me.
Efrem is a man who can shoot exceptionally well, and he is taken in by Reynato Ocampo to join his own league of extraordinary gentlemen. But Efrem is subtly complex in the midst of the macho, sad, and comic characters in this book (Ocampo, Benny, the rooster) and that endeared him to me. I understood his idealism and confusion, and Yates writes his perspective almost tenderly. I greedily and speedily read through MOONDOGS, but the parts I loved best were about Efrem. His sense of justice, his super ability, and his eagerness to love were elegantly constructed, and his character was vivid and alive, almost effortlessly so.
It’s this effortless construction of character, which is pretty much universal throughout, even though I had a soft spot for Efrem, that makes this novel shine.
“Suppose Salinger completed a dozen books while holed up in Cornish and left them for his heirs to sort through upon his death. If they all consist of “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” then Salinger’s reclusion will be viewed as a selfish act, void or even destructive of creativity, and he will retain his reputation as having been an eccentric recluse.”
“Spreading messages dilutes them. Even understanding them is a compromise. The language kills itself, expires inside its host. Language acts as an acid over its message. If you no longer care for an idea or feeling, then put it into language. That will certainly be the last of it, a fitting end. Language is another name for coffin.”
Ben Marcus, THE FLAME ALPHABET
We are all going to hear a lot about The Flame Alphabet and its author Ben Marcus in the coming months, which in my opinion is very good. Because this is the kind of book that gets hotly debated in bars. I anticipate controversial reviews. Not unlike those of one of the authors whose blurb graced the back cover of the very beautiful jacket, Thomas McCarthy. McCarthy’s Remainder and C spawned the kind of attention, controversy, and excitement that I envision surrounding The Flame Alphabet. In fact, I compare Ben Marcus to McCarthy enthusiastically, they both write vehemently interesting prose in which artistic adventures of diction take the passenger seat to the plot and characters. But Marcus seems to have an ulterior motive, and he seems more serious and intense. He seems to believe wholeheartedly in the worlds he builds; his investments seen in The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, and even more powerfully so, in The Flame Alphabet.
The Flame Alphabet is about an epidemic whose cause is traced to children’s language. Kids can literally kill with their words, and once the link between the rampant illness and their vocalizing is established, they rove the streets in packs and gangs, mercilessly stalking adult prey and assaulting them with sound. They watch the adults wither, powerless. Eventually, a quarantine is enacted, and parents are forced to leave their children behind, or put them on buses. We experience the chaos through Sam. Without Marcus’ unique voice or intensely skilled writing ability, this book would be a good idea and could be turned into an M. Night Shamalyan movie. But Marcus is the ultimate experimental writer of our time, and he never lets The Flame Alphabet surrender to its apocalypse bent. He keeps Sam strange, determined, singular. He keeps Esther’s flaming beauty compelling, her tenderness for her mother a flaw in her own ideal self. Clare’s willfulness and love for her daughter, while killing her, also keep her self-aware. Each paradox makes its owner seem weak and almost hateful. Along with evoking sadness, we experience the most complex feelings that the lowest of humanity inspires, like pity and revulsion.
The triumph of The Flame Alphabet is actually the unquestioning way we witness the unreal events unfolding, the way we trust Sam, his honesty and his ugliness in his struggle to survive. While Marcus is claiming language is poisonous, he’s also showing us the truth of human nature within Sam’s character with the last breaths this reviled language has left. Sam becomes uglier as the book continues. He reverts to a naked animalism, he becomes selfish, violent, and impossible. He does all this because he becomes obsessed with this family, unable to process the idea of their individualism or the possibility of their deaths. Sam fixates on reuniting his sundered, dying, pathetic family, and commits false, disgusting acts in order to do so. Marcus is showing us something twisted and sickening about human character; the poison of words is meanwhile simplifying and purifying the surroundings, making it seem as though Sam’s obstinate refusal to let go of language is a basic betrayal, an almost counter-evoluntionary defect.
Here’s the front cover of the 1984 edition I own. I bought it at a thrift store when I was in high school, which is now like 9 years ago. The copyright page lists the edition as being published 1961 by Signet Classics.
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