The Biblio File

Of the books I’ve had on my radar for the last couple of months, this has been the one I’ve been most excited to read. Partly for what I knew of the story–it takes place on one Saturday night in Las Vegas, and centers around the disappearance of a 12 year old boy–but also to see just what all the fuss was about. The book was reviewed twice in the New York times (here and here) and the author was the subject of a lengthy profile in the Sunday magazine. All this press for a first book? I think it might be deserved.

Bock’s prose has a precision that doesn’t lose any of it’s poingancy for it’s surgical exactness. At points (and there are many of them) the prose actually hums. The story is told from the point of view of 7 different characters, each one with a voice as different and engaging as their individual back stories. Las Vegas itself might be the 8th character of this book, and, perhaps, one of the most important. And we get all of the seediness, despair, and degradation that we might expect from a story set there. But on every page Bock shows us the humanity that arises from our failings, and how preciously precarious a thing hope is. And, from a craft perspective, I made many many marginal notes here of things I liked.

There are probably things wrong with this book, and if I thought about it I could probably come up with some. (I’m wondering what people will think of the ending, for instance, or how integral Bing’s story really is to the larger narrative.) But, I actually enjoyed this book well enough that I don’t really want to think about it all that hard. I’m sure that will change with future readings of it, and that the next time through I will be taking things apart, reading with a sharper eye. But that is a testament to two things: 1), there’s enough going on here to merit such scrutiny, and 2) I know I will be reading this book again.

I had been looking forward to reading The Abstinence Teacher, given all the press it got: interviews with Perotta on NPR and BBC, a profile article in the NY Times. And, the premise of the story certainly holds the promise of interesting conflict. Ruth, a divorced, suburban sex-ed teacher is being pressured both at work and through her daughter’s soccer team by an evangelical church that is taking root in the town. They challenge her curriculum at the school, and the coach of her daughter’s team, Tim, is a recovering addict and prominent member of this church. After a particularly emotional victory, Tim leads his team of middle school girls, including Ruth’s daughter, in prayer. This causes the worlds of Ruth and Tim to intersect, and causes a crisis of faith, so to speak, in each character. With a plot like this, you can either end up with a book that challenges conventional (even polemic) perceptions of faith, a book that takes the mundane aspects of suburban living and twists them, blows them up until they represent bigger, more universal truths about how we live and choices we make, a story that compels us to identify with people who are different than we are and, in the process, leaves us different than when we were before we started. Or, you can end up with a TV movie of the week. Sadly, this book is much closer to the latter.

The overwhelming feeling I had when reading this book was that I was hearing a writer at work. Or, rather, an imaginer at work. Ruth and Tim felt like what someone would imagine representatives of these two opposing sides would be like, rather than fully formed people. It seems obvious from their first meeting that they will eventually come together (probably romantically) and the plot seems manipulated to make this happen, even in spite of what little character has been established. (In one scene, Tim shows up at Ruth’s door after having lied to her about her daughter, she slaps him across the face, and then with her next motion invites him into her house and serves him coffee.) Half-way through I started to wonder if Perotta was playing with caricature or archetype to some end. If he was, I hadn’t figured it out by the last page, and was not moved enough by the characters to parse through it again.

Last week I finished The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith and was pretty disappointed in it. It’s the first thing I’ve read by her, and I picked it up because I had heard such good things about White Teeth. Briefly, the book is about Alex-Li Tandem, an autograph collector and trader who is at rather loose ends on a number of fronts: his love life, his religion, his career, and his inability to cope with the loss of his father. To point, at the start of the book he has just awoken from a 3 day acid bender (which had been supposed to be part of an enlightenment ceremony) of which he remembers nothing, and discovers he has wrecked his car, that his girlfriend is angry with him, and that he may or may not have forged the holy grail of autographs, a signature from actress Kitty Alexander. Unfortunately, by the end of the book, very few of these issues are resolved, or even dealt with in any direct way, except for the most uninteresting of these–the Kitty Alexander autograph. There is much discussion of his Judaic faith, but it seems forced and out of place, especially since its importance to Alex is never made clear. His relationships are in no better shape at the end than they were at the beginning (while his girlfriend of 10 years is getting a new pacemaker installed he decides to go to an autograph show in New York–seemingly without consequence) and the ceremony he has at the end of the book to commemorate his father seems pointless and hollow, since Alex himself doesn’t believe in it.

There were enough moments of humor and keen observation here that I will eventually pick up White Teeth, but I would not recommend The Autograph Man.