The NYRB edition of Elaine Dundy’s Dud Avocado comes out June 5 (with an introduction by Terry Teachout). What you see pictured is a copy of the 1961 Signet edition. I don’t know if you can make out the cover art but it’s pretty marvelous: The girl is sitting atop a giant avocado, wearing what might be a peignoir or a pink frock or kimono pajamas — it’s a fashion Rorschach, that outfit. Inside the avocado is the description, “The blithe and bubbling bestseller about an American girl who goes to Paris to be naughty– and quite often succeeds!”

Arranged around the giant avocado are (clockwise): The Eiffel tower, a striped canopy that says “Bistro”, a typewriter with sheets of paper floating off it, a guy holding aloft a champagne cocktail, and what I take to be the Pont Neuf.

Inside the book smells like used bookstore, and the back cover has a shout out for a forthcoming Signet paperback, The Chapman Report, which is given this thumbnail synopsis: “A three-man team enters a fashionable California suburb to complete its interviews on the Sex Habits of American Wives. This is the story of six of the women who volunteer, exploding the community into excitement, tension, and shocking discovery.”

It’s hard to see but there are two stacks in the picture; the front stack is what we’re taking to Europe. (The travel companion, who often serves as a pack animal on these occasions, has deemed the number “very reasonable.” He may have been being ironic but I’m taking him at his word.) It includes: The Goncourt diaries; The Sot-Weed Factor (I left off reading it earlier as I realized it’s the ideal travel size; small enough to carry in a purse but big enough to sustain if, let’s say, one were to become trapped in a museum for four days due to a hideous chain of events involving a catapult and a giant avocado, and as everyone was freaking out and trying ineffectually to roll the giant avocado from the doorway, one could just sit calmly in a corner reading The Sot-Weed Factor until a giant rescue lever arrived); the second volume of Dance to the Music of Time; the blithe & bubbly adventures of an American girl who goes to Paris to be naughty (and often succeeds!); and Remembrance of Things Past, which I expect to have polished off by the time they’re handing out pretzels.

It’s a stodgy but satisfying reading list. I wish it had Savage Detectives and the Edith Wharton bio on it but they were judged “not reasonable” and “heavy” with the additional point that “Europe has books too.”

• Reading: John Barth’s Sot-weed Factor — because of this. Three days of reading and I’m on page 19 (that is, a couple sodomies and some light lapwork in). It’s been that kind of week.

• Fervently desire: The Dud Avocado and the new Edith Wharton bio

• Arrived in the mail to be packed for Paris: Pages from the Goncourt Journals

• Picked up from library and will read: Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief (recommended by the trustiest)

• Picked up from library and won’t read (because by the time it’s due back I will still have only reached page 43 of The Sot-Weed Factor): Robert Fagles’ (relatively) new translation of The Aeneid

• Strong opinion left over from last week: Leave Franzen out of the whole The Road on Oprah thing. Enough already! One is grizzled & leathery & has enough baked beans stockpiled to take him to the year 2056 without a trip to the grocery store so WTF does he care about a media juggernaut; the other, I sense, has deeply ambivalent moments pouring out cereal. Your time would be better served revisiting this 1992 Times profile of McCarthy (via James Tata).

• Disconcerting non-literary experience of the day: Standing at the kitchen sink, looking out the window while drinking a glass of water, and seeing my parents’ car go rolling by our house. I know it was their car because my pop is older and he drives with his head extended far out over the steering wheel, like a turtle’s, so it’s an unmistakable profile. Also, the car was going about 3 mph. (Friends in Asheville routinely report seeing my parents out driving, with comments like “I noticed this car with its brake lights on for, like, a mile.”)

All of which is to note that my parents recently purchased a home a couple blocks from ours — my father evidently wants to be closer to the doughnuts at the East Asheville Ingles — and it’s hard to dispute their right to ride up and down the street. Still, I think they should hire a couple bugle-players who could trot in front of the car and announce their comings and goings.

Piles of deadlines here, but I have instead devoted the morning to a) trying to get my friend Hortense on the horn for a gossip; and b) attempting to set some sort of land record for how many pretentious activities a person can get up to while still wearing her pajamas. To wit:

• I finally tracked down the print issue of The New Yorker containing the Dana Goodyear poetry article that David Orr responded to (savaged?) in the Book Review. You can read Goodyear’s article online.

• We’re going to Paris in a few weeks, and I’ve been thinking about finally summitting Remembrance of Things Past as an accompaniment to the trip. This has led to an inner twitter about whether to read the Moncrieff translation (advantages: it’s a classic, many seem to consider it rich & definitive, and I already own the first volume; concerns: worry that the style may be overly elaborate and the text Moncrieff used for his translation is said to contain some inaccuracies*) or the new Penguin translations that start off with Lydia Davis’ translation of In Search of Lost Time (advantage: said to be fresher, more direct rendering of Proust’s prose; concerns: will the prose be too thin?, would have to get copy). If you know me personally you know that part of how I manifest excitement about a trip is feverish research & equivocation pre-departure focused on what I will wear/read/eat so the Proust question has occupied an undue amount of brain space all week. This morning I decided to go nuts and order the Davis, so I’ll have both at the ready and can thus equivocate right up till we leave for the airport.

On the trip, I’m also bringing the second movement to Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. I read the first movement when we were in Europe last month and it was a very satisfying trip book.

* Or something like that.

I just finished Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love, about a year she spent living in Rome, an ashram in India, and Bali. I could have done with one or two less meditation scenes and perhaps a little less neat and affirming resolution of life’s troubles — keep in mind, this criticism comes from someone who’s asked that “Still ambivalent” be carved on her gravestone — but otherwise I adored the book. I was already a fan of Gilbert’s The Last American Man, a portrait of a man named Eustace Conway that feels spiritually akin to Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. Eat Pray Love is looser, more freewheeling, and it’s hard to read it and not want to set out immediately on a quest to insist that Gilbert become your friend: She’s that funny and warm.

One thing I appreciate about Gilbert as a memoirist is she lets other people get good lines in. From the acknowledgments:

One last thing—when I asked Richard if it was OK with him if I mentioned in my book that he used to be a junkie and a drunk, he said that would be totally fine.

He said, “I”d been trying to figure out how to get the word out about that, anyhow.”

I’m currently reading Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, my first long James novel (previously, I’ve only read some short stories, The Aspern Papers, Turn of the Screw and Daisy Miller).

I’m finding it completely transporting and pleasing — except for the character of Isabel’s journalist friend Henrietta Stackpole, who is irritating and, in a field of fineness, too bluntly drawn; one is resigned that the Americans will always come off as rubes next to the Europeans, but Henrietta would seem provincial and socially retarded at a dinner party in Des Moines. She’s always striding around and saying things like, “Your lordly English hunting dogs lack the pluck and gumption of our red-blooded American mutts.” I keep hoping someone will stuff her in a fireplace.

Anywho, this was clocking as only a slight irritation, the smallest snag in the midst of splendor, until last night when I was thinking it over and made an (unfortunate) connection between Henrietta and … Pippi Longstocking. Now whenever Henrietta appears I get this unbidden image of Pippi stomping around, in her braids and stripe sockings, sizing up Ormond, lecturing Isabel, and touring the Roman ruins. It’s the most disturbing fictional mash-up.

There are lots of intelligent things that could be written about the involved geopolitics of Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, or about how religion is continuously invoked in the books but serves a largely ceremonial and political purpose (more Elizabeth I, less Rumi), but all this will have to wait because GEORGE, WHAT IS UP WITH ALL THE NIPPLES?

A Feast for Crows has to be the most nippletastic book I’ve read since, oh, Candy. It felt like not a page went by that a pair wasn’t being pinched, suckled, eyed, prized, fondled, lopped off (seriously) or otherwise palpated. Boys’ nipples, girls’ nipples, big brown nipples, fulsome nipples, nipples like black diamonds, lactating nipples, male pepperoni-style nipples. All kinds of nipples. It makes me wonder if a retread of Lord of the Rings isn’t in order, with 100% more detail on the hobbit nipples.

More seriously. I do love this series; there’s something beautifully wintry about Martin’s vision and writing in the first few books (start with A Game of Thrones). And his willingness to maim/sideline/ kill off even beloved characters makes the adventures riveting and suspenseful — there are no 11th hour saves, dude will lop off the head (or nipples) of anyone. But I wasn’t feeling this latest installment, which reads in stretches like a forced march. Too many names, too many family trees and “begat”-style histories provided for even minor characters and settings. The characters don’t seem able to stop at an inn without hearing about the 10 owners who had it before. This is where one of Martin’s strengths — his ability to create a fully realized world, layered with history and complexities — became a liability, the story goes flat and discursive under the weight of all this detail. There are also, to use a toy soldier analogy, probably one or two too many armies on the board.

I am — and how’s this for critical discourse? — not sure what to make of all the nipples, except that they are, like the involved histories, something that begins to read like a perfunctory bit of business. I don’t remember so many of them appearing in the first few books, which have minor interludes of sexy and some blunt physical description but nothing, if I’m remembering correctly, that makes the reader feel like she’s standing in the nursing aisle of Babies R Us (get it? Surrounded by nipples? Alternative joke: standing next to Tara Reid on the red carpet).

I should add that there’s a return to form in the last couple hundred pages of the book — everything gets very, very exciting again, enough so that I’ll probably continue the series for a few more books, but with hopes that George pares it down, moves it forward, and keeps at least some of the nipples stowed away.

A couple weeks ago Tingle Alley revealed wild love for Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica, one of the novels nominated this year for the National Book Awards, which will be awarded this evening. I’ve been meaning to string together more thoughts about the book since, as it deserves more than just a “Holy fuck, what a book!” (even if ardently meant). The reaction here assumes you know the bones of the book’s plot; if not, see Meghan O’Rourke’s perceptive review.

There’s this sentence in Veronica where the book’s narrator, Alison, observes that everyone sitting on the bus with her is connected through their ass to the same bus. It’s a throwaway line, part of a larger reverie about the people Alison’s sitting with, but it encapsulates something important for me about how the novel works.

Veronica is an extravagantly figurative novel — people are continually morphing into animals or fairytale selves, settings distort and stretch and grow lurid, metaphors are involved and extended. At first I was afraid that the elaborateness would topple the novel over, but then I began to see the novel’s language, its charged refiguring of the world, as a form of seeking, of a questing for connections between people and situations that seem on the surface disparate. The continual metamorphosis of one thing into another is a kind of moral seeing, metaphor as Golden Rule; I do well onto you as I become you.

The other fine thing about all this metaphor is that it allows the book to access an animal intelligence about its characters — what Hitch evidently calls “the mammalian underlay of social forces.” Here, for example, is a bit about Alison’s younger sister Sara in high school:

Sara would cut school and come home early, then leave, I’d see her outside, kissing some boy who’d slap her ass when he said good-bye. Or whispering to another chunky girl with saucy goblin eyes, who offered her tits to the world in a sequined T-shirt. In the street, boys rode their bikes in slow swooping curves and called to one another. I’d strain to hear them; I was afraid they were jeering at Sara. But she’d come in like a cat, with an air of adventure about her, inwardly hoarding it.

While Veronica has the allotment of dialogue you expect in a novel, it’s the sort of book that’s more concerned with the ripples around the dialogue, the animal selves of the people speaking, and what they’re communicating beneath the words. It’s a nice subtle thing running through the book that Alison as she is in dialogue is always a weaker, more self-absorbed-sounding person (former model that she is) than the Alison we get in thought. This is not to reveal her as vain; it’s part of the book’s compassion for its characters, its awareness that what we’re able to express aloud is often a poor version of what we’re feeling & thinking.

There’s been a lot made about Gaitskill’s darkness, her interest in scars and ugliness. It’s there, of course — but it’s the kind of observation that can give a false weight to what she does, it makes the darkness sound a little shallow and gratuitous. I’ve always liked her writing because she’s the kind of author who doesn’t turn away from what she’s seeing in order to go for the more comfortable nice. And I think in Veronica that way of unflinching observation becomes a spiritual journeying — and I use the word “spiritual” with great reluctance — to see people whole. I kept being reminded as I was reading of the Renaissance thing of man’s place in the hierarchy between angels and demons and of Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is man” speech: Noble man, monkey man, dust man. They’re all here, asses sticking to the same bus.

Lila The Werewolf was first printed as a chapbook in New York in 1974. (See its beautiful cover here.) I read it as part of the Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories, edited by Tom Shippey. It’s the story of a New Yorker named Farrell who comes to realize that his girlfriend is a werewolf. One thing that’s funny is how casual and urban and early ’70s the story is — as you read it’s impossible not to picture everyone dressed in droopy brown corduroys, moving into each other’s apartments with a suitcase and talking like extras in Sleeper-era Woody Allen. When Farrell first learns about the werewolf thing he’s apathetic and only gradually stirred to action. When he tells a friend about Lila, the guy responds, “I told you about Bronx girls.”

The knockout, though, is the prose, which reminded me a lot of Pynchon, dreamlike but muscular. Here’s a sample, as Farrell chases Lila in werewolf form in the night, attempting to find her before the building super, whose dog she’s killed, does:

Lila’s voice would come sailing to them then, from up in Harlem or away near Lincoln Center, and the little man would whirl and dash down into the earth, disappearing into the crack between two slabs of sidewalk. Farrell understood quite clearly that the superintendent was hunting Lila underground, using the keys that only superintendents have to take elevators down to the black sub-sub-basements, far below the bicycle rooms and the wet, shaking laundry rooms, and below the furnace rooms, below the passages walled with electricity meters and roofed with burly steam pipes; down to the realms where the great dim water mains roll like whales, and the gas lines hump and preen, down where the roots of the apartment houses fade together, and so along under the city, scrabbling through secret ways with silver bullets, and his keys rapping against the piece of wood. He never saw Lila, but he was never very far behind her.

• It’s one of my ongoing endeavors to read everything Maud does about two months after she finishes.* To that end, I just completed Rupert Thomson’s Divided Kingdom (loved and lost by Maud here; notes on the writing of here). Plot gist: In a future Britain, the country is cordoned off into four distinct republics, a move meant to remedy societal disintegration. The republics are based on the ancient Humours, and citizens are assigned to a republic based on whether their temper manifests as Choleric, Sanguine, Melancholic, or Phlegmatic. This system sometimes means separating a family, as happens with the narrator Thomas Perry, who is taken from his parents as a young boy and moved to the Sanguine territory, where we follow him into adulthood.

I have a few reservations about the book, but not about the writer. This was my first Thomson novel (he’s written several others), and it was like hearing a phenomenal musician play — one so gifted and original that even though there’s a wrong note here and there, you still stand up and applaud at the end. (And to carry the analogy too far, it’s not that Thomson hits wrong notes here so much as he hits the right ones too hard. There are a few patches that feel too labored over, and I am suspicious over the ending.)

Even with those reservations, Divided Kingdom is worthy of the same critical attention bestowed on novels like Orhan Pamuk’s Snow and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. I hope it receives it. And I’d like to see it bet on for the Booker too.

RELATED:
— Why aren’t more people talking about Rupert Thomson? Andrew O’ Herir also wants to know.

— Perceptive review of Divided Kingdom in Newsday. (The review is written by my phonic doppelganger, Kerry Fried.)

— Knopf has devised this personality quiz based on the book. I came out Sanguine, which is CAAF as viewed through gauze-covered glasses. Phlegmatic is more like it, with outbreaks of Choler and drizzles of Melancholy every 28 days or so.

*******

• If you had asked me a few days ago, I would have told you that I’ve read everything by Kafka except a few short stories. I once had the nicest conversation about Kafka. It was with an acquaintance who was then in the process of leaving a prestigious Asheville architectural firm to start his own business building houses from environmentally friendly materials like hay bales. We were sitting at the upstairs bar at Barley’s, along with my photographer friend Tim. The acquaintance had a copy of The Trial with him, sitting on the bar, Tim asked him about it, and we started talking The Trial. I was brilliant. And I’m not just saying that: I was. It was one of those rare evenings where one has at one’s disposal both dazzling ideas and the eloquence to carry those ideas off into the world. It was — you will have to take my word here — very, very impressive; Zadie Smith could have gotten at least three operas out of my insights from that night. Sadly, the last time I saw this acquaintance he appeared to have had a nervous breakdown and was walking down the street in the company of two Asheville street characters wearing long green Army jackets, one carrying a lute, another a didgeridoo. I experienced a similar shift in fortune when last night, having finished The Divided Kingdom, and wanting to clarify some thoughts about how different authors handle interiority when expressing dystopic alienation, I picked up The Trial to reread it. I had the strangest feeling by the third page, confirmed by the fifth, and reconfirmed on pages 6,7, 8 and 9: I’ve never read The Trial.

*******

• While I’m rereading The Trial, I’m also reading Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion by Alan Burdick. As the title suggests, the book deals with how species move around the world, and why certain species wreak havoc when introduced into a new environment (think feral cats in Australia, brown snakes in Guam). I’d veered away from the book for a while as lately books about the environment make me have to lie down in a darkened room for a week or two — the modern nature book is saddled with an unfortunate narrative arc: Isn’t this a marvelous complicated interwoven beautiful world we live in?!? Aren’t these animals beautiful? Mmmm. You know, THEY’RE ALL GOING TO DIE — but this one is fascinating enough to make me lift my embargo. Burnick has a nice prose style, fast-paced but with lovely descriptions and good portrayals of the herpetologists and other researchers who are working to stem the invasions, leading to the inevitable question: Why are herpetologists always so cool? Highly recommended, especially for Quammen fans (I’m looking at you).

* Has this interbloggy chattiness with Maud gone on too long? Good. Then I’ll just add that Bookdwarf loved Divided Kingdom too.

We’ve been implementing several new features here at Tingle Alley. One of these is “A Reader’s Diary,” notes on what I’m reading. Not really reviews, just reactions and thoughts of a reader making her way through her teetering TBR stack. The entries may be long, or as simple as “[Such-and-such] rocked.” We make no freaking promises.

The Historian went tits-up after page 120 or so. As you may recall, I was taken with the beginning, with the lure of vampires, musty books and exotic locales. Plot gist: Young girl living abroad comes across stash of letters pointing to her scholarly father’s connection to something spooky and blood-sucking. Even better, young girl has the sort of cool, dispassionate voice that equates with great intelligence and a Grade A ability to brood, that is, the passion is there but submerged. (Think of the narrator of Rebecca.)

The father explains himself, and as he does so we gradually become entwined in three or so stories of tracking Dracula across the decades and across Europe. Letters and recollections are used to alternate between the stories: “Daughter, as we sit at this seaside café, let me tell you of the time I bearded the Count at Chez Maxim’s,” etc. Elizabeth Kostova is an elegant writer with a sharp eye — some of her sentences and descriptions are sumptuous — and she has a winning conceit in this scholarly tracking of Dracula.

It’s the last book I expected to become monotonous, but monotonous it becomes. Here’s an example of why: At one point, we’ve got two characters in a desperate search for the tomb of Dracula, racing against time to find a revered friend who they fear has been snatched by the vampire. Just a note: If I am ever snatched by Dracula, please do not send these two scholars to look for me. Sure, they’ll board a plane, look in the occasional book, and interview the occasional librarian while they’re searching for me. But what they mostly will seem interested in doing is sight-seeing and sampling foreign cuisine. Seriously. I started counting and these two NEVER missed a meal. In Budapest, in Istanbul, in the Hungarian countryside. NEVER. They’re always breaking golden bread, or eating a charred kebab with tender meat inside, or dipping into a warm fragrant stew made by a simple peasant woman. It’s as if the book should have been named The Tourist.

As a lot of the novel’s action was being conveyed through letters, at some point I started to imagine the plot as told through the journal of the poor sod locked up in Dracula’s tomb: Day 3 Light-headed from loss of blood. Still, spent two hours clawing against stone of ancient monastery walls in vain search for some form of escape. I fear I am losing my sanity. I also fear that the MOTHERFUCKERS WHO ARE SUPPOSED TO BE LOOKING FOR ME ARE SMACKING THEIR FINGERS OVER SOME BAKLAVA RIGHT NOW INSTEAD OF HITTING THE GODDAMNED BOOKS.

Tingle Alley’s First Rule of Page Turners: It is a poor sort of adventure when the protagonists manage three squares a day.

There is also a barren stretch, maybe 150 pages or so, where the worst evil we come in contact with is a Bulgarian bureaucrat with a short temper and a condescending attitude toward scholars, which considering the arsenal of potential evil minions that could have been dispersed to harry our protags’ progress, is not scary at all.

I hate to sound so impatient, and I’m making what is, in fact, a very competent book sound worse than it is. I think my impatience comes from frustration — The Historian was nearly a great book and it was so disappointing to feel its greatness begin leaking out the sides in those middle chapters. I feel aggrieved with the book somehow.

More than the leisurely pacing, the largest fault of the book lies in a laziness of characterization. A disappointment as we begin so promisingly with that wonderful young girl character whose voice is so shrewd and observant. She is the sort of narrator one implicitly trusts to notice good things. But then the narration goes soft, perhaps because the baton of the story is passed to one too many speakers: The writing is still lovely, but the reader can’t help but notice that this is a world where every monk is kind and smiling (even if baffled), every landlady has had a hundred grandchildren and is willing to babysit, every elderly scholar is benign and wise, while every villain is cold-faced and short-tempered. Frankly, I’ve seen more variance in human nature working at the front desk of my library.

This is why the book grows so monotonous — no one, after the beginning, has been drawn in such a way as to surprise us. So that when, in one of the later chapters, Dracula first appears in (the Undead) flesh, even the thrilling touch that he is wearing a cape of white fur (so odd, so perfect) couldn’t revive my interest for more than a half-second.

THINKING ABOUT
Reading The Historian made me think fondly of the side characters in other novels: The brusque, athletic, roughly kind sister-in-law in Rebecca, the crewmen on The Covenant in Kidnapped! (this while I was belligerently stewing over how good adventures mean skipped meals), just about any walk-on in Dickens, that sort of thing.

These characters rivet, in part, because they are allowed to exist out of humor and sympathy with the narrator. And that seems in some way to be not just a sign of good writing, but also a moral stance. We become moral beings as we learn that our wishes are not the world’s wishes — that people (with their own jostling, attendant wishes) exist independently of us. Cardboard characters are characters that haven’t broken free of the solipsism of the narrator. They’re not independent. At best, they’re mirrors reflecting the narrator back to herself — cold-faced when things are bad, wise and benign when things are good — at worst, they’re wallpaper.

ALSO READ
It was with relief I slogged to the finish of The Historian on Saturday morning, and picked up Tayari Jones’ The Untelling that afternoon. This post is already too long but it feels appropriate to go on as one of the great strengths of The Untelling is the vividness of the characters — they were so real, so immediate, that I dreamt about them that night. As if I knew them.

The plot gist: As a kid, Aria Jackson’s in the backseat when her family is in a horrible car accident, killing her father and baby sister. Now she is a young woman, still living in Atlanta, and as the story gets going, she discovers she is pregnant by her boyfriend Dwayne.

I loved this book, which is surprising only because — as the panting after vampires above indicates — I’ve been in the mood lately for fairy tales and mysteries and supernatural happenings. And The Untelling is deeply realistic — we follow Aria as she visits the doctor with her mother and older sister (the other survivors of the car crash), watches a movie with Dwayne, talks wedding dresses with her roommate Rochelle. But it is not a narrow book — the novel takes in a wide swathe of Atlanta, especially its black middle-class and poorer neighborhoods. And the characters and their conflicts are so deftly drawn, that I found myself deeply moved as I went along, and I couldn’t do much else till I finished the book Sunday morning.

This review from The Washington Post gets the charms of the book right. Reviewer Carrie Brown writes: “Jones has made Aria a careful witness to her own life and the lives of those around her; her observations, sometimes wry, sometimes poignant, always honest, inflate the novel with hope, sending it soaring over its wasteland of woes.”

Next up is A Dream in Polar Fog by Yuri Rytkheu. It should be nice to read about ice and snow while it’s so muggy out.