Book Notes - 3 so far

 At the start of the year I had an idea for a book project I have been thinking about for some time. I don't think that I am going to go for it quite yet, but I have been wanting to get back into writing about books on this blog. I am going to keep the project under my hat for the moment in case I do decide to start it up in the near future. 

However, I do want to shake off some of the dust and start posting again, so I thought I would do a few quick notes about the books that I have read so far this year as a way to motivate myself to keep coming back.

 Kill Creek by Scott Thomas was recommended to me by a colleague who shares an interest in gothic and horror novels. This book is a few years old at this point but I had not heard of it or the author. I have been more interested in postmodern horror over the last couple of years and have been working on a couple of scholarly projects involving the genre lately (perhaps more on my conference presentation upcoming?). After reading the synopsis, I was excited to start reading this book.

This starts out as a haunted house story that brings in tech media and internet fame. A young tech bro running a horror fansite -- which he insists is so successful that it is actually just a pop culture site -- invites 4 horror authors to a curated event in this haunted house to livestream a group interview. Each of the authors brings their own personal baggage with them, experiences weird things, and then heads home. The novel takes a turn here in an interesting direction. Upon returning home, each of the authors becomes obsessed with writing a new novel about the house that they were in and, upon checking notes with one another, discover that they are all writing the same novel. 

I won't reveal what happens next here for the sake of anyone interested in reading this novel, but I will say that this was a suspenseful and exciting novel to read. Thomas' work plays with the conventions of the haunted house story, blending in the personal demons that each of the authors in the book contend with. The read is fun and the ending took me by surprise in a way that I have not experienced in a long time. Definitely worth the read.

 Famous is the latest work by Blake Crouch. I have enjoyed Crouch's work for some time. I think Recursion  was the first novel I read and I have worked my way through the Wayward Pines series and several other stand-alone novels. This novel breaks tone and genre from a lot of his prior work. I have come to expect carefully crafted time-travel plots or some other sci-fi adjacent work but Famous strays from this. To be honest, this read more like a Chuck Palahniuk novel than it did a Blake Crouch one. The cover of this novel boasted an A24 movie adaptation which, sorry to say, I won't be watching. This book didn't do it for me. I have read better from Crouch and I hope to see a return to form in future novels.

Finally, I took a recent read through an older book: Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon. I have read a lot of Chabon over the years and have always liked his work for its attention to character and devotion to pop culture fandom. I was blown away by The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay when I first read it in graduate school. This book is not a novel but a collection of essays loosely centering on the topic of a gen X author reaching middle age and reflecting on his life. This topic, as a somewhat younger member of gen X reaching middle age and considering my own relevance, is one that I find sympathetic. Chabon writes about his experience parenting and attempting to expose his children to art and music that he enjoyed, he writes about his first experience carrying a diaper bag while still wanting to appear masculine. One of the essays that hit me the hardest was one in which he describes briefly meeting David Foster Wallace at a Democratic party event. In all, the essays work as an expression of the time. Some have aged better than others but the book was worth a read, overall. It would probably work best for the demographic I fit comfortably into and might have limited returns venturing outside of that.

Academic Fragments, Part 3

What follows is a review and/or the beginning of something that I wrote about Michael Chabon's Fountain City.  I am not charitable to the book and I do not remember it fondly.  I have always tended to like Chabon's novels but haven't found them to stand up particularly well to re-reading.  I loved The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay the first time I read it, but was less enchanted by it the second time around.  I still liked the book well enough, but it just didn't have the same spark that it did the first time around.  I have not edited this at all:

Fountain City, by Michael Chabon

When I was in graduate school, I happened upon this anomaly by Michael Chabon.  It was part of a boxed set from McSweeney’s that was painted to look like a human head.  I still have the box around somewhere, but I don’t remember the remainder of the contents.  I was in the middle of writing my dissertation on the contemporary encyclopedic novel and had set Fountain City  aside because I thought that there was something in it that I could write about after I had completed my degree.  At the time I was very interested in narratology and I thought that there was something interesting about the form of this little book.

I keep avoiding calling Fountain City a novel because that is not an accurate description, by the author’s own words, even.  For him, it was an abandoned project that he picked up years later.  Although, Chabon did not pick the project up to finish it, but to “wreck” it - the word here being used in the sense of salvaging rather than of destroying.  Chabon supplies this definition (along with the more colloquial one) in a note to his text.  

At the time that I read this, I was very interested in the way that a flesh-and-blood author interacts with his or her own work of fiction.  Within narrative theory, there is an idea that there is a sort of divide between the fictional and the real that extends to the author.  An avatar of the author becomes evident in the text, but this is a re-creation of the author by the reader and is, therefore, a part of the fiction.  This idea seems both romantic and downright homey to me.  On one hand, the author gets to participate in the fiction.  There is a shading off from the reality of the world into the presented reality of the novel.  The reader can attempt to interpret where that difference lies but will never be able to know.  On the other hand, it is a book presented as being fiction.  Of course what is in it is fiction.  Just because an author pops up and says “Hi, it’s me!” doesn’t mean we need to believe it.  This is like believing a liar who tells you to just trust him.

Getting back to the form of the novel, Chabon does what I think a lot of writers want to do.  He takes his incomplete project and “completes” it by adding commentary to what is already there instead of finishing the narrative.  At least this is what the author claims in a preface.  But, as noted above, how do we know where the fiction begins and ends?  Should I trust Chabon that he actually wrote this in the past, or do I think that he just recently wrote this and doesn’t know how to end it or what to do with it?  Then I wonder whether this sense of doubt or incompletion is actually real and think that this whole thing was composed as it is supposed to be: a work of seemingly incomplete prose with commentary by a supposed author.  This wouldn’t be the first time a writer has played this trick, check out Pale Fire or a lot of Philip Roth’s work from the 1980s and 90s if you don’t believe me.

This is a very long preface to my very short take on this book.  I set this book aside for what is now 5 years in the hopes of making some hay out of it regarding the implied author, the edge of fiction, and all that stuff I mentioned a bit ago.  But, when I picked this up last week, I couldn’t get into it.  I read back through the preface and reminded myself about what interested me about it those years ago, but couldn’t pick that thread back up.

I don’t know if the idea, even if it were the authentic story that Chabon had attempted to salvage this abandoned work, was too precious or if I just lost my flair for that brand of literary theory.  Whatever the reason, I quit reading pretty quickly and didn’t even make it through the first explanatory note, which happened to be whether or not the author had dreamt up a line from Hawthorne or it was real: fiction or reality.  See?