Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is that annoyingly near-perfect book that I admire tremendously for its technical qualities but can’t quite find myself loving because it feels too hermetically sealed. I’m sure you already know about the book: it won a Pulitzer, a National Book Critics Circle award, and lots of other honors. And one chapter of the book is written and presented in PowerPoint form.

A Visit from the Goon Squad strings thirteen stories, one of which is written in PowerPoint form, though you already knew that, into a novel that zigs and zags between characters and times, returning often to two core figures. Bennie is described on the back cover as “an aging former punk rocker and record executive.” Sasha is “the passionate, troubled young woman he employs.” Put in more direct terms: as a kid, Bennie was in a band called The Flaming Dildos, which I take as a name that refers to fakery and imitations of, ah, more real things, and Sasha is a klepto who loves to keep and display what she steals.

During the course of the book, Egan introduces us to those same Flaming Dildos, a bunch of San Francisco teenagers, including Bennie, who want to be punks, and shows us how they and the people around them behave and age, not always very gracefully. Time is the goon squad here and Egan neatly threads this and other motifs, like Sasha’s stolen goods, through the stories. Conformism and its “non” are everywhere, too: Bennie and his friends aren’t much punkier than I was. Sure, I went to see the Dead Kennedys when a friend decided to be a punk promoter one summer but my spikes were really a bracelet, not something dangerous.

“Neatly” is my problem with A Visit from the Goon Squad: I enjoyed reading the book, looked forward to reading it, and think it’s very, very good, but it feels a little too much like how Bennie hears digitized music:

Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead.

The italics are Egan’s. And the voices in Goon Squad were a little digitized for me, not quite gritty or distinct enough to make some of the chapter-stories in Goon Squad feel fully polyphonic or convincing. One of the most interesting chapter-stories was “Selling the General,” which connects less to Bennie and Sasha than most of the other pieces and describes the efforts of Dolly (a.k.a. La Doll), a p.r. specialist attempting to improve the image of a dictator. I don’t think it’s coincidental that the story is less connected and less music-related than most of the others.

The final story-chapter, “Pure Language,” set in a future New York City, imagines even more ubiquitous uses of mobile devices and txt language than we have now (*shudder*) but the hero is the guy without an online presence, “a guy who had lived in the cracks all these years, forgotten and full of rage, in a way that now registered as pure. Untouched.” And there, again, is my misgiving about the book, a misgiving that feels slight and churlish: the book lacks real rage. That may be intentional but I can’t be sure because the book felt so polished, so cleanly written and so careful, even a tiny bit high-flown. In other words, it felt technically perfect but most of the tone and language felt so smooth—too controlled, digitized, and ironic—that they crowded out the book’s messages and characters for me.

Disclosures: I bought my own copy of the book. I met Jennifer Egan, a college classmate I never knew in college, at a reading in Portland several years ago. I’ve read and enjoyed most of her books, particularly Look at Me.

Up Next: Eduardo Halfon’s The Polish Boxer, another book of linked stories.

Cutting Humor: Orly Castel-Bloom’s Dolly City

Dolly City, a wonderfully sick and absurdly humorous novel that I read in Dalya Bilu’s translation from the Hebrew, gets off to a strange start that offers a feel for what’s to come. When Dolly’s goldfish dies, she takes the fish out of the bowl and then does this:

I laid the fish on the black marble counter, took a dagger, and began cutting it up. The little shit kept slipping away from me on the counter, so I had to grip it by the tail and return it to the scene of the crime.

That’s not even the end of the second paragraph! (And no, this isn’t one of those books that’s just one long sentence or one long paragraph.) At this pace, it’s not long before Dolly kills someone and brings home a baby (not her own), a boy she calls Son. Dolly, a supremely unreliable narrator who claims to be a doctor, takes concerned motherhood to extremes, cutting Son open whenever she thinks he might be ailing. She also etches a map of Israel—“Biblical period… just as I remembered it from school”—into his back. Later she takes attachment parenting to extremes and glues him to her back. “Grotesque” can’t begin to describe Dolly and her life.

The doting, controlling mother line of Dolly City was most comprehensible for me, with Dolly becoming the ultimate clingy mother, admitting she uses her own (but not really her own) child as a guinea pig she says she opens and closes like a curtain. Toward the end of the book, she asks, “What kind of a thing is motherhood if you can’t take care of your child nonstop, one hundred percent?” Dolly defends her behavior to the final line of the book, where she says, “I knew that after everything I’d done to him—a bullet or a knife in the back were nothing he couldn’t handle.” Orly Castel-Bloom, by the way, dedicated Dolly City to her daughter.

Along the way, Dolly addresses topics like Holocaust survivors, practices medicine on the street (she offers her elementary school teacher an enema), and describes Dolly City as “the most demented city in the world,” a place with dense fog, impossibly tall-sounding buildings, and rattling trains. Dolly City is one of the more demented books I’ve read—and enjoyed—in a while, with hilariously twisted humor, a cubist feel (from all the tall buildings?), and, in a book where nothing but nothing feels normal, more defamiliarization than Shklovsky could shake a scalpel at. Bilu’s lively translation, with a voice that smoothly conveys the horror and humor of Dolly, gave me the impression she enjoyed working on Dolly City.

Up Next: Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. 

Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas

Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas, which I read in Brian Zumhagen’s translation of the German novel known as Leinwand, is a book where I literally wasn’t always sure which side was up or down: the book is structured, physically, as two books in one, and each book-side is narrated by a main character. The reader is presented with the choice of either reading each story individually or flipping the book, chapter by chapter, and watching the two stories intersect.

I chose the second option and used a magnetic bookmark. I began—randomly, I think—on the side narrated by Jan Wechsler (Europublisher who receives a mysterious bag of stuff he thinks just can’t possibly be his), then switched over to Amnon Zichroni (an Israel-born psychic of sorts who moves around)… and back again, chapter by chapter, until their stories met in the middle. In Israel.

If I had to summarize the wonderfully complex The Canvas in one awkwardly simplistic phrase, I think I’d say something like “existential confusion, nicely rendered.” The Canvas looks at some of my favorite topics—identity, memory, (ir)reality, and how they all fit together—and makes them exponentially more complicated and relevant by placing them within present-day historical memory of the Holocaust and, in particular detail, Jewish identity. Historical memories float to the surface of The Canvas in the person of a shadowy violin restorer and memoirist named Minsky, a character modeled on Binjamin Wilkomirski, a real-life (our life!) writer who fabricated a Holocaust memoir in the 1990s. Meaning we have fact/fiction and fact/fiction in The Canvas. These lines, from Jan Wechsler, concisely sum up a lot about the book, “Cultivating fables is complicated. You need a good memory. Otherwise, you’re sunk.”

I found Amnon Zichroni’s half of the book more interesting than Wechsler’s, though, and not just because Zichroni lives in Portland, Maine, for a while, where he does a residency in psychiatry at Maine Medical Center, a hospital where I used to work as a medical interpreter. Zichroni’s skills include using touch to read into people’s pasts, and his single-day reading of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita is a touchstone in his half of the book. Zichroni refers to chains of events and determinism in one long paragraph that references M&M. Here’s the second half of the paragraph: 

I knew that Annouchka had already spilled the sunflower oil. And it really almost drove me out of my mind that I didn’t have the slightest idea how to save Berlioz from losing his head when he so persistently refused to at least accept that something else was directing people’s lives—namely, the sometimes grim, poetic hand of Hashem.

That’s particularly lovely stuff—Annouchka and that damn sunflower oil all over again!—if you’ve read M&M, another novel, by the way, that blends distinct story lines and questions of faith.

Oddly, I think the physical layout of the book called The Canvas, with its demand that the reader flip back and forth, is one of the reasons the novel works. Though it would be easy to say the flipping felt like a cheap gimmick and annoyed me a reader, I think the flipping reinforces, through the actual physical action of turning the book, physical aspects of identity, location, and, well, which end is up, all of which are important themes in a novel that I read as an existential thriller. The Canvas read smoothly enough in Zumhagen’s translation that the novel could feel like a thriller with consistent voices. The book contains a glossary of Jewish and Yiddish terms, twice, once at the end of each man’s story. It’s very fitting to offer those words at the heart of the novel, back-to-back, facing two ways.

Disclosures: I received a review copy of The Canvas from Open Letter, a publisher with which I always enjoy discussing literature in translation, including a specific piece I’m translating.

Up Next: Orly Castel Bloom’s horribly, hilariously demented Dolly City.

Where There’s Smoke: Thrown into Nature

I realized last week that I never posted this piece, though I wrote it nearly a year ago…

Milen Ruskov’s Thrown into Nature, a contemporary novel translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, tells the story of Nicolás Bautista Monardes, a sixteenth-century Spanish physician who advocates the use of tobacco for medicinal purposes. The novel is a picaresque—generally an entertaining one—narrated by Monardes’s assistant, the hapless, unreliable, and Portuguese Guimarães da Silva.

The reader witnesses all sorts of cures and odd episodes in chapters with titles like “For Long Life,” “Intestinal Worms, Enemas,” and “For Protection Against the Plague and All Manner of Contagions,” and Monardes holds forth on matters of religion, nature (the human is “a pipe, through which nature passes”), and politics.

I especially enjoyed a scene based in England, in which King James I holds a debate called “Whether the frequent use of tobacco is good for healthy men?” Says da Silva, “The question mark here is pure hypocrisy and is intended solely to satisfy the formal requirements of debate.” da Silva’s comments about his seatmates at the debate are, like many other passages in the book, funny in a slapstick way. As da Silva takes notes and draws a Star of David, one of his neighbors “stared bug-eyed at the star on my sheet. I quickly crossed it out and grabbed my quill such that I—ostensibly accidentally—showed him my middle finger.”

Of course part of the fun of all this for me, a twenty first-century reader who used to write quite a bit about drug discovery and development, was reading about political debate around a substance used as a medical treatment. And of course our modern-day vilification of tobacco puts loads of irony into watching Monardes and da Silva advocate its use to cure just about everything, puffing away on cigarillas as a preventive measure. da Silva, however, records this:

“I’ve been sustaining myself with tobacco for twenty years longer than you have,” replied the doctor. “There seems to be something in tobacco which causes such a cough. After many, many years. 

Today is a bad day for tobacco, I thought to myself.

Perhaps even more interesting: Monardes was a real person and, according to the Special Collections Department of the library at the University of Glasgow, “Monardes made tobacco a household remedy throughout Western Europe and his gospel was accepted by the majority of European physicians for more than two centuries.” I don’t know if Ruskov smokes but Bulgaria is apparently a big tobacco-using country: according to data on Wikipedia, Bulgaria ranks fourth in the world in number of cigarettes per adult per year, 2,437.

I would be remiss if I didn’t add that I thought Rodel’s translation read nicely, conveying humor and a stylized voice. 

Disclosures: I received a copy of Thrown into Nature from Open Letter Books, a publisher with which I always enjoy discussing literature in translation, including a specific piece I’m translating.

Up Next: The Canvas, by Benjamin Stein, an Open Letter Book that I’m enjoying very much… fitting since I’ll be going to Rochester, NY, home of Open Letter, for the American Literary Translators Association conference next week. I loved last year’s conference in Kansas City so can’t wait!

Image: Portrait of Monardes, from user Valérie75, via Wikipedia. 

Seven Quick Points about Deon Meyer’s Seven Days

I read Seven Days in K.L. Seegers’s translation of the Afrikaans original 7 Dae, written by Deon Meyer. 

Seven Days is part of a series featuring detective captain Benny Griessel but Seven Days reads just fine on its own; I haven’t read the precursors.

Meyers mixes episodes from Griessel’s personal life—counting his days of sobriety and showing his struggle to start a relationship with a lovely singer—with his investigation of the murder of an ambitious and artificially shapely female attorney.

The case is urgent because a sniper is shooting at policemen, promising to shoot one a day until the attorney’s killer is found.

The novel is well-structured and nicely paced, and I thought Meyer did particularly well populating Seven Days with a varied bunch of investigators and the tensions between them.

Bonus for me: I couldn’t help but enjoy the small Russian subplot!

Disclaimer: I received a copy of Seven Days at the Grove/Atlantic booth at BookExpo America, thank you! -- I always enjoy discussing literature in translation with Grove/Atlantic.