Review: Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine

Before we get to the excellent Delusions of Gender, which I can’t believe it took me so long to read, a word about my blogging habits. I have been (sing it with me if you know the words) the worst blogger ever. My commute, while not bad for New York, is a time-killer, I’m trying very hard to be as social a butterfly as my introverty brain and publishing job budget will permit me, and recently I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to learn to pronounce Russian personal pronouns. They are harder to pronounce than you’d think. All this has meant that I’ve had even less time to blog than I’ve generally had since moving to New York. I am trying to figure out how to deal with this. I may take a blogging break. I may become like the lovely and wondrous Trapunto, and just be the best commenter you ever saw, all over the blogosphere. Who knows, y’all. If you have any genius suggestions about how to budget blogging time, please tell me. I love you and believe in your wisdom.

And now, Cordelia Fine!

Delusions of Gender is a book you’ve probably heard of if you spend a lot of time reading Nymeth’s blog. As ever when she loves a book, she advocates for it most awesomely, and in the end you give in and get it at the library and then you are like, …Why didn’t I get this sooner? After four years you’d think I’d have learned my lesson on this and that I would just get all the books Nymeth loves, but I have a dumb brain, I guess? And took a year to read Delusions of Gender? Ner.

It is hard to know what to say about Delusions of Gender when Nymeth and, more recently, Proper Jenny have covered it so eloquently and thoroughly! But nevertheless I will try. Delusions of Gender is that irresistible species of thing, an intelligent, thoughtful, occasionally snarky debunking of foolish people who are using bad scientific methods to prop up nonsense stereotypes. I love snarky debunkings of things, but I especially love snarky debunkings of sexism disguised as science. Cordelia Fine starts with studies of social interactions, studies that claim to prove that women are more empathetic, less aggressive, kinder, better at reading your mind with their uncanny woman powers, and what have you. This was all well and good and fun to read about because I love reading about Studies. Prime a woman to think about the stereotype that women are bad at math, and she’ll do worse on a math test. Stereotype threat hurts everyone, y’all.

I read the second third of the book while on a picnic that also featured wine, so it’s possible I’m biased, but it seemed to me that the second third of the book was way the awesomest. In the second third, Cordelia Fine takes on studies of brains and the things they purport to show about gender. Although I think of myself as a slightly cynical person and a fairly critical thinker, I was a little shocked at the shabbiness of the science in these gender experiments. The sample sizes are often tiny (because brain scans are expensive), the results are contradictory and/or do not replicate (but those studies don’t get published because they are boring), and neuroimaging technology and research is still very young, so sometimes researchers get overexcitable about what results are statistically significant and what ones are not.

ALSO. I learned about this excellent (well, very bad. do not do it. but excellent for me to know about) thing called reverse inference. This is a thing, in fact, that I already knew about from life (it’s basically, “Witches burn; wood also burns; therefore witches are made of wood”), but here’s what it is in neuroscience: It’s when you do an experiment, and in the course of the experiment the amygdala lights up, and you know the amygdala also lights up when someone is scared, so you are like, This proves that my experiment causes people to feel fear. Well, no. It just proves that your experiment causes people’s amygdalas to light up. We do not understand brains very well so who even knows what that means? And it turns out that a very lot of neuroscience studies dealing with gender do this reverse inference thing.

My favorite was when Cordelia Fine spent several pages detailing the shocking behavior of one Louann Brizendine (of Yale, Harvard, and Berkeley! Not some fly-by-night nonsense person!), whose book about gender differences cites lots of bad science and — well, look at this:

We kick off with a study of psychotherapists, which found that therapists develop a good rapport with their clients by mirroring their actions. Casually, Brizendine notes, “All of the therapists who showed these responses happen to be women.” For some reason, she fails to mention that this is because only female therapists, selected from phone directories, happened to be recruited for the study.

!!! And this is not a one-off! Brizendine does the same thing again not two pages later, citing another all-women study to prove that women are good at emotional mirroring. She probably does it a lot more times in her book, but Cordelia Fine has other things to do than spend a whole book making fun of Louann Brizendine.

(Fortunately for us all, Mark Libermann does not. Check it out if you want to feel righteously indignant — and who doesn’t want to feel righteously indignant?)

The final third of the book — also very good but not as good as the second part because less neuroscience and I love neuroscience because I LOVE BRAINS — is about how human people are awful at not passing on gender stereotypes to their children. And that is fine! says Cordelia Fine (whoa, I did not do that on purpose, y’all, I swear that just happened), as long as we recognize that this doesn’t suggest that gender stereotypes are hardwired into our brains. It just means gender is super important in the world, and children live in the world, and their brains are made for learning. A good bit:

Once children have personally relevant boxes in which to file what they learn (labeled “Me” versus “Not Me”), this adds an extra oomph to the drive to solve the mysteries of gender. Development psychologists Carol Martin and Diane Ruble suggest that children become “gender detectives,” in search of clues as to the implications of belonging to the male or female tribe. Nor do they wait for formal instruction. The academic literature is scattered with anecdotal reports of preschoolers’ amusingly flawed scientific accounts of gender difference: “One child…dangling his legs with his father in a very cold lake, announced ‘only boys like cold water, right Dad?’ Such examples suggest that children are actively seeking and ‘chewing’ on information about gender, rather than passively absorbing it from the environment.”

Interesting, right? This book is ALL THE INTERESTING THINGS.

Now I feel like reading more books about gender. If only some lovely person, someone who had been complimented extravagantly and often in this blog for her wonderful reading taste and who, say, had read a very lot of books about gender essentialism and other gender issues for her thesis which I’m sure was super fascinating in its own right, if only some person fitting that description would say, “Oh Jenny. Now that you have finished Delusions of Gender, and wish for more awesome gender books, the awesomest if you are in the mood for X is this book, and if you are in the mood for Y it is this book. I will instruct you about all the good gender books.” I don’t know who could possibly do that. I just wish that would happen.

OR if anybody knows of some awesomesauce neuroscience books I would be interested in that too. Whatever you’ve got.

Review: The Defining Decade, Meg Jay, PhD

You know what I’m happy about? I’m happy that before reading The Defining Decade — which was judgmentally delivered to me at my office without any explanation I could discern as to why it was being delivered to me, so I could only conclude that the universe thinks I’m doing my twenties wrong (which I am not) and would like to help me out with it — I saw the second episode of the HBO show Girls, in which Lena Dunham’s character glances at a relationship-rules book and says that she hate-read it in the Detroit airport once. I’m glad that happened so I could have the word “hate-read” in my working memory for writing this post.

Disclaimer: I do not hate Meg Jay, PhD, although I feel awkward when authors put “PhD” on the front of their books because it makes me think that their PhD is in something completely unrelated to the book they’ve written. I instantly suspected Meg Jay of having a PhD in Puppeteering or something, but no, her PhD is in the perfectly reasonable and germane areas of clinical psychology and gender studies. Just FYI.

It is just that The Defining Decade — which I hate-read over the course of four subway rides, because it’s very short and quick — is extremely judgey about things that I don’t need to be judged about. This book is not Varsity Adulthood. It’s barely Junior Varsity Adulthood. It’s basically just, Hey kids, take your lives seriously, time is ticking by, which is a message I have already absorbed. The book clearly wasn’t aimed at me and apart from some next-level retirement planning, which is on my to-do list I swear, I am doing okay in all the relevant areas. I have a job I like that employs skills I developed over my academic career. I do not treat my work life or my romantic life as a rehearsal for the future (that’s what college was for). I did not go into debt in the course of acquiring my bachelor’s degree in English, and thus I am not spending these years paying down thousands of dollars of school debt. I am doing fine.

You see how that last paragraph was sort of self-righteous? That’s me overcompensating for how incredibly judged The Defining Decade made me feel. Because I sort of have that thing where I want all the real grown-ups to approve of me. I wanted to howl “No! Not me, Meg Jay, PhD! I’m doing fine! I’m not aimless, I’m fine, I’m fine!” Whenever new people got on the subway and were near me, I wanted to say, “Excuse me. You may observe that I am reading this book and conclude that I am not doing a good job at my life right now, but in fact I am hate-reading this book and concluding that I am doing just fine. Thank you for your time.” But I did not do either of these things. I am not a crazy person.

What you should take away from this post: I’m fine. I just crave approval.

Some stuff I read on public transportation

Y’all, I wish I could teleport. If I had back the two hours a day I currently spend getting to and from work, I would be the awesomest book blogger instead of the very lamest. I have been going back and forth and forth and back to work and to visit friends-and-relations, and these are good times to read but it is not the funnest reading time because I’m slightly on edge from being in transit (trains are very peaceful and pleasant, but buses and subways are not). And I would like to be using that time to catch up on blog reading and writing because I love you guys.

Anyway, here are some of the books I read on public transportation and forgot to write up as full posts:

Woman, Natalie Angier – Finally. I have tried reading Woman several times and been utterly put off by Natalie Angier’s writing style, which is close to unbearably florid and precious at times. I feel fine about, for instance, my Fallopian tubes. I do not need to see them compared to beautiful beautiful flowers:

The tubes are exquisite, soft and rosy and slim as pens, tipped like a feather duster with a bell of fronds, called fimbriae…To me they look like sea anemones, flowers of flesh, the petals throbbing to the cadence of blood.

Gag. And, throbbing is a word you should use as little as possible because it’s gross.. However, as noted by many other book bloggers, Woman contains lots of good information about women’s biology, sexuality, evolution, and so forth, and it’s worth reading for that reason. You just might have to give yourself some time to adjust to Natalie Angier’s love-letter-to-an-ovary-style writing. I reiterate that I am a sex-positive girl who does not have a problem with any part of her body, but I nevertheless think that Natalie Angier’s imagery can be a trifle overblown. It was distracting. Moar science, less flourishing.

The Uses of Enchantment, Heidi Julavits – As often happens when I want Book B by a certain author and am forced by circumstances to get Book A instead, I was disappointed. (I wanted to read The Vanishers.) The Uses of Enchantment is about a girl called Mary who may or may not have been kidnapped and raped as a teenager and had a book written about how she was indeed not kidnapped and raped but was just a liar, and now many years later, she’s back in town for her mother’s funeral. Eh, it was fine, I guess. I wanted the plot to be twistier, the reveals to be more interesting, the sister relationships to feel more like actual sisters. Heidi Julavits uses one of my favorite literary techniques, an unreliable narrator, to utterly boring effect.

Juliet, Naked, Nick Hornby – Juliet, Naked is about a woman called Annie who breaks up with her boyfriend Duncan who is obsessed with a musician Tucker Crowe who has not produced any new music since 1989 or something; Annie and Tucker Crowe happen to strike up a correspondence, and events proceed from there. Again, fine. If Nick Hornby were a woman no one would give him two seconds of their time, but I suppose that is not Nick Hornby’s fault. As much as I want to like him, his books leave me feeling vaguely unfulfilled, like below-average vegetarian sushi.

Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him, Danielle Ganek – An artist dies on the night of his first big show, a show in which the primary piece is a picture of his niece Lulu as a little girl. That piece, entitled “Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him”, becomes the subject of great interest in the New York art world, and we see all this unfold through the eyes of gallery girl and unsuccessful painter Mia McMurray. The book is interesting in its use of ekphrasis — I love me some ekphrasis — and for its depiction of the New York art world.

Nightingale Wood, Stella Gibbon – Stella Gibbon! Would do business with her again. Cold Comfort Farm never quite altogether does it for me, which I’ve always chalked up to having seen the extremely faithful movie before reading the book. But in fact I think it’s that Stella Gibbon is very close to, but not exactly, the author for me. I enjoyed Nightingale Wood while not taking pure pleasure in it the way I do when reading, say, Elinor Lipman. Matters ended well for everyone, but none of the characters was nice enough for me to be enthusiastic about his or her marital or professional success.

So that’s it! I now consider myself all caught on all the things. Probably by the time this post posts, I’ll be behind again, but what can you do? I am a bad blogger and I have not been good in ages. I wish I didn’t have to commute. If I could teleport I’d never have to commute to work ever again, and that would be amazing.

Elinor Lipman: The Continuing Saga

I have read all but one of the available Elinor Lipman books following my great success with The Family Man. And I am now pleased to report that Elinor Lipman has gone on my Favored Authors list. She is the kind of author you want to have on your shelves for when you wake up at night with terrible nightmares (or even just fretful stress dreams), or when you need an undemanding book to read ten pages of while you’re brushing your teeth at night.

Not all of these books share the feature of The Family Man that the good characters have nice things happen to them, and the bad characters get their comeuppance. However, they do all share the feature that the thrust of the plot is away from isolation and sadness, and towards contentment and love. That is an awesome feature for a book to have, and I am saying that as a girl who loves the sort of ending like The Secret History has, where it’s utterly grim and also a little ambiguous and strange. I love that sort of ending! But there are times in my life when I like to feel that the world trades in happy endings as well as sad ones.

Another good quality of Elinor Lipman is her gift with titles. She is not Tennessee Williams, but the woman has some solid titles. The Dearly Departed is a good title in general and a perfect title for the book, in that it captures both the sadness and the wry bewilderment the two main characters feel about their dead parents. The Pursuit of Alice Thrift is good because that name is perfect for that character, and because it’s a fussily articulated title to go with its fussily articulate protagonist. And! My favorite of the titles! My Latest Grievance. That is an awesome title. I was telling my mother I would make that the title of my memoir if I wrote a memoir. Since I am not going to write a memoir, I’m going to start a series of blog posts called My Latest Grievance, in which I complain about petty things that bother me, like the preponderance of mopey ballads in this year’s Eurovision line-up, and people who just stand there on the subway escalator so that you’re trapped behind them watching your train leave without you because these damn people wouldn’t follow the damn rules and just walk down the damn escalator.

Litlove (Litlove, if I haven’t said it lately, I think you’re great) very rightly says that Elinor Lipman belongs in the intelligent comfort read category, the same category in which I would place someone like Marisa de los Santos. If I tried to describe the plots of any of her books, they would sound predictable, and well, they are in a way, I guess (you know the anti-Semitic lady in The Inn at Lake Devine is going to get called on her bullshit), but they are such a joy to read that it doesn’t matter.

That’s my pitch in brief, I guess: Elinor Lipman is a joy. When I have books of hers in my library bag, I have to exercise great restraint in not pouncing upon them and gobbling them all up. I delay gratification, an activity I enjoy, and it feels like such a treat to finally get to read the books. Her backlist couldn’t be big enough to please me, but I’m delighted that she is still young, shares Oscar Wilde’s birthday, and puts out a new book every couple of years. Elinor Lipman! Make your life happier by reading her books!

Dream-casting the Chaos Walking books

I’ve been meaning to post about this for ages and I kept on forgetting. Now we have discovered that Charlie Kaufman is writing The Knife of Never Letting Go movie, it feels timely for me to talk about my dream cast for these movies. This is going to be a little indulgent, but you know how there are some days when you are an unstoppable good idea machine, and your ideas please you so much that no amount of praise for your genius can ever be enough? Well, that’s what happened to me when my adjunct sister Lil Splotch posted on Facebook about the film of The Knife of Never Letting Go. I considered which characters’ casting would be most important to me and came up with the following seven: Todd and Viola, Aaron, Davy, Mistress Coyle, Ben, and the Mayor.

Feel free to weigh in on who you think should play other characters I haven’t bothered with. Also weigh in on other actors who could play the parts I’ve already cast, because a brain can only hold so many actors in it at once, and it’s perfectly possible I overlooked someone who would be way better in one of these roles. I mean, not the Mayor. I have cast the Mayor perfect already.

Starting from least important/impressive on my part.

For Todd and Viola: Unknowns

Okay, yeah, I punted on this. The pool of child actors isn’t big enough. You would say Chloe Moretz because you wouldn’t be able to think of other options. Broaden the field, say I. Unknowns can be awesome. Remember how Dakota Blue Richards was way the strongest part of The Golden Compass movie? Is all I’m saying. Although I think the chances of their picking someone from the cast of Ender’s Game for either Todd or Viola are….highish.

For Aaron: John Hawkes

What he’s been in: Winter’s Bone; Martha Marcy May Marlene
What we’ve seen him do before: Quiet menace.
What I want him to do in this part: Exactly that. I like casting against type when I can, but sometimes typecasting is best. I have always thought of Aaron as being sort of manic, but once John Hawkes occurred to me, I decided that his angry stillness, punctuated by furious violent attacks, would be way scarier. In addition to having played rather Aarony roles in his past, John Hawkes looks like I picture Aaron looking: wiry, unkillable, possessed of big dark eyes that have seen everything. I’d flee from John Hawkes. Wouldn’t you?

For Davy: Dane Dehaan

What he’s been in: Chronicle. (Also True Blood and In Treatment, but whatever.)
What we’ve seen him do before: [Whatever he did in those two HBO shows I gave up on long before he showed up in them. People said he was good.] Twitchy, vulnerable, and subsequently drunk on power (in Chronicle).
What I want him to do in this part: Exactly that. I originally wanted someone bigger for Davy, as he’s a bully, but it occurred to me that a skinny kid would be better. A skinny kid has something to prove. Dane Dehaan is good at being pitiable while doing terrible things, and that is Davy’s exact quality.

For Mistress Coyle: Robin Wright

What she’s been in: The Princess Bride, and Forrest Gump in her youth; more recently, a bunch of stuff I didn’t see. In my opinion, nobody ever gives Robin Wright enough to do.
What we’ve seen her do before: Not enough, dammit!
What I want her to do in this part: Be awesome. I have always thought Robin Wright had a good face for strong convictions, but I have never seen her in a ruthless part. (Doesn’t mean she hasn’t played one! I just haven’t seen it.) We know she can play appealing so it would make sense why Viola would want to believe in her. And I think her face has the capacity to look awesomely resolved and impassive as it’s lit by the fires of a bomb she set. F*** YEAH ROBIN WRIGHT (is what I’m going to say when this happens).

For Ben: Gbenga Akinnagbe

What he’s been in: The Wire, mostly, and he also had a recurring guest spot on The Good Wife. (I miss him on The Good Wife! I loved the scene where he talked to Grace about Jesus and global warming.)
What we’ve seen him do before: Drug enforcing; spiritual counseling.
What I want him to do in this part: Gbenga Akinnagbe has this air about him of being serene even in the face of really awful things happening, which is just what Ben has. Unyielding serenity. Gbenga Akinnagbe would kill this role. The more I think about it, the more into it I am. I would (spoilers; highlight if you want them) cry a thousand tears to see Gbenga Akinnagbe protecting Todd from the bad guys and being shot by rotten Davy Prentiss, and then I would cry a thousand more tears (but of happiness this time) when he turned out to be ALIVE AFTER ALL and back to be Todd’s father again, oh how I cried when that happened in the book.

For the Mayor: Viggo Mortensen (WAIT. HEAR ME OUT.)

What he’s been in: The Lord of the Rings; Eastern Promises.
What we’ve seen him do before: Inhabit his roles like crazy and be awesome at everything.
What I want him to do in this part: Take all that charisma you remember from when he played Aragorn (my stars he was attractive as Aragorn) and combine it with the restraint and competence he displays in Eastern Promises. The Mayor is a tricky part because he has to be capable of great brutality while seeming plausible, charismatic, and civilized in between. The brutality is easy; the plausibility is hard. I think Viggo Mortensen would have that down cold. You have to be willing to let the Mayor lead your war twenty minutes after he waterboarded your girlfriend in front of you. It’s Viggo Mortensen, people. The man is plausible.
If you think Viggo Mortensen would not be amazing as the Mayor: You are wrong. When the casting people see this blog post and cast Viggo Mortensen and he kicks all manner of ass in the movie, and is so damn plausible–when that happens, you’re going to remember this moment, and you’re going to say, Wow, Jenny, you were right. SO THERE LEGAL SISTER.

I don’t care as much about the other parts, since I’ve decided to cast Todd and Viola as unknowns. Anyone young and cute and determined can play Lee; anyone farmy and fierce-faced can play Cillian; I hate Wilf and I hope they drop him from the movie; Bradley and Simone are not that interesting to me; and until I know what kind of makeup/special effects they’re going to use for the Spackle, I can’t say what needs to happen with the casting of the Return.

You may now praise my genius.

Review: The Family Fang, Kevin Wilson

You know that Philip Larkin poem? You definitely do. Even if you don’t know anything about Philip Larkin you have probably heard:

This Be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do,
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can
And don’t have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin, ladies and gentleman! Have a great National Poetry Month! Don’t forget to tip your waiter!

No, I’m kidding. I brought up the Philip Larkin pome partly because it’s a classic and I like Philip Larkin (more pomes here), and partly because it’s a good poem for The Family Fang, a book about the ways two kids are thoroughly fucked up by their mum and dad.

Annie and Buster Fang spent their childhoods as semi-willing participants in their parents’ never-ending quest for Art. Caleb and Camille Fang, noted performance artists, would engage their children (Child A and Child B, as they called them) in their scenes of public, rehearsed chaos, the fallout of which they would furtively film and display in galleries. Now adults, Annie and Buster find themselves ill-equipped for real life and both end up, wearily, back at home, where they are — less willingly than ever before — caught up in their parents’ dramatic final piece.

A trait I inherited from Mumsy — not a fault! my parents are the actual best parents ever and did not instill me with any faults and that’s why I’m perfect, you’re welcome world! — is that I love a good hoax. I just do. I get a kick out of elaborate hoaxes, the elaborater the better (as long, of course, as they do not have any real importance in my life), and will suspend an unreasonable amount of disbelief out of a desire to believe an impressive fake thing is real. So in that sense I was an excellent audience for this book. Kevin Wilson comes up with increasingly weird and horrifying “performance art pieces” for the Fangs to enact, starting with the merely silly (a pretended jelly bean heist from a crowded mall) and escalating to the near-abusive. Nothing about Buster and Annie’s neuroses as adults seems overblown, but rather the natural results of a childhood in which the family always came second to the Art.

On the other hand, I derive from both parents a gut distaste for observing bad parenting in action. I am not quite as upsettable on this front as Mumsy, I would not say, but I could not help minding that Caleb and Camille never ever showed any genuine affection for their children. And I think — my aversion to bad parenting aside — that this would have made the book stronger. The small, brief moments of sincerity that Camille displayed (I don’t think Caleb ever did) were some of my favorite parts, and more of that would have given the book more emotional heft. It would have made the characters feel more like real people oftener. As it was, they were often just pieces on a board.

I loved, and would have read fifty more of, the chapters that narrated the specific performance art pieces done by the Family Fang over the year. They were such good chapters. The pieces were so inventively horrible — much more so, if I may say it, than the sort of Final Piece (or is it) that forms the crux of the second half of the book. I wanted the Fang’s Final Piece (or is it?) to be something worthy of the rest of their shenanigans, and it just wasn’t, in any way. It was a huge letdown. Not nearly dramatic enough. Not nearly insane enough. Not enough asunder-ripping. And since the characters tugged at my heartstrings only pretty minimally, and the Final Piece did not provide the cymbal crash I wanted, this ended up being a three-star read instead of a four-.

Others read it too, and their views may be found at the Book Blogs Search Engine.

Review: The Gone-Away World, Nick Harkaway

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Here’s what happened. The lovely and beautiful Jeanne, who has probably the best blog name out there and is also just an awesome person, sent me The Gone-Away World for my birthday last year. It came in the mail and was a complete and delightful surprise, and I was so touched, and I started reading The Gone-Away World right away because Jeanne said it was one of her favorite books ever. Immediately had no idea what the hell was happening. There were, like, pigs? And some sort of pipe disaster that maybe had something to do with radiation? And lots of made-up/repurposed words that I didn’t understand? And I was like, Oh hell, not only am I not going to like Jeanne’s favorite book, I’m not going to like the favorite book she sent me as a present. To avert this disaster, I swiftly shelved it on my shelves and did not read it anymore. Because apparently I subscribe to the ostrich school of problem-solving.

PSA: Ostriches don’t really do that. You may continue to use them as a metaphor as I have done above, but do please be aware that they don’t really bury their heads in the sand. I mean, how would that even work? Would they dig it with their beaks? In which case the danger would have definitely already eaten them/passed by the time they dug a hole deep enough to bury their heads in? Would they use preexisting holes? What if they weren’t near a hole?

Anyway, I realized recently that it had been almost a whole year since Jeanne so sweetly sent this book to me and I ungratefully failed to read it, and I was like, Oh screw it, I am the worst gift recipient in the whole world, I am going to read this book already. If I hate it I’ll just say, It was very inventive!

The Gone-Away World is a difficult book to describe. It’s a dystopian novel about a world only made livable by the Jorgmund Pipe, now on fire and threatening the realm of safety that has been carved out in the wake of a war that has left whole chunks of the world missing. As our narrator and his friends set out to repair the Pipe — a dangerous mission from which they know they will not all return — we are sent backward in time to hear the story of the narrator’s life before the war, and his friendship (really his brotherhood) with Gonzo Lubitsch.

Reading Jeanne’s review, I observe that she, too, had a difficult time getting into this book. It’s a difficult book to get into! The first chapter drops you in media res, and you think you know exactly what kind of world you’re in — post-nuclear probably, lots of radiation poison and other unpleasant fallout — but can I just tell you now? That is not the world you’re in. When the book finally reached the point of explaining all the things that had baffled and alienated me in the first chapter, it turned out to be an incredibly inventive sort of dystopia, the sort of thing that has weird and new possibilities that you wouldn’t have thought of and haven’t seen before. So that was excellent. I was completely surprised by how much I liked the parts of the book that dealt with the destruction and rebuilding of the world. It was a new, fascinating, awesome kind of dystopia, and I was sad when the book ended because I wanted to see more of that world.

(I realize I just said the book was inventive, which is what I said I was going to say if I didn’t like the book, but I did like the book. It’s just difficult to talk about it without saying it was inventive.)

The structure of the book, another thing that maddened me because I hate it when a book/movie/TV show is like “APOCALYPTIC SCENE OF CATASTROPHE” and then flashes a scene of bucolic pleasantness with a caption of “Six months previously”, turned out to make much better sense than I initially thought. This is a deliberately vague remark, the purpose of which is to assure readers who, like me, have trouble getting into the book, that there is a method to Nick Harkaway’s madness. Have faith, and he will pay thee all. Is what I’m saying. The sensibleness of flashing back will strike you in time, and you will go “Oh that’s why he wrote it this way.” I promise that will happen.

The writing didn’t charm me as much as it did Jeanne — sometimes it was funny, but sometimes it felt arch and fake. That wasn’t a huge deal, though, because so much insane stuff kept happening. So much insane stuff. All the insanest stuff. Basically,The Gone-Away World does not so much zig when you expect it to zag, as KAPLOOEY when you expect it to zag. And I say that in the best possible sense. As events unfold, there will be points at which you think you know what’s going to happen, but I promise you, you do not know what is going to happen. Like, at all.

Thank you, wonderful Jeanne! I am a dumb bunny for not reading The Gone Away World sooner, and I’ll definitely be trying Nick Harkaway’s new book Angelmaker when my library gets it in.

Lots of other reviews! Check them out here.