rating: 4 of 5 stars

About a month ago, online buzz surrounded a “gender analyzer” tool designed to determine whether a Web site was written by a man or a woman.

I was reminded of the flurry of indignation and amusement caused by the tool (on my personal site: “We guess http://kthread.com is written by a man (58%), however it’s quite gender neutral. Is this correct?”) in the review my friend David posted of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex the other day:

Despite the fact that the author of the book is male – as is the narrator – I often thought of the narration as neither male nor female. As if the writing itself – like Cal – somehow transcended the very concept of gender.

For me, the story’s gender play nestles in poignant details–the unexamined mention that Uncle Pete’s suspect chiropractic practice in a 1959 Detroit wasn’t for clients “to free up their kundalini,” that the narrator’s grandfather chooses Sappho’s glyconic poetry to translate for decades.

Less playfully, the narrator observes restrictive male desire:

Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.

Eugenides channels earlier, Italian postmodernism to write an epic novel that undercuts the epic, grandiose authorial fashion of recent years. Middlesex is, at moments, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius because the reader watches as grandparents Lefty and Desdemona create their genealogical fictions (as the narrator “dutifully [oozes] feminine glue”).

Piscine metaphors stream through the text, schooling Callie/Cal in gender assertion–key scenes include bathing suits, sea anemones in locker rooms, battles between gravity and bodies of water, faked menstrual cycles marked by catacomb fish symbols on a calendar.

While the protagonist’s childhood years are charted by a procession of family Cadillacs (the ‘boys & toys’ model), the novel scolds Dr. Luce (and by extension, the reader) for wanting to read straight toward one event in Callie’s life without the greater familial context.

The future is in bed in Schöneberg, but that’s not the end of the book. There must be a return to the matriarchal line first, a presentation of self in a book about self-presentation. The scratchy intercoms in the Middlesex house without walls reconnect mother and child: outmoded technology delivers comic relief.

And harkening back to the reverberating rustles of her silkworm chorus, the reader joins the vindicated Desdemona in the last spoken word of the text, as she looks at Cal and says, “Bravo.”

View all my GoodReads reviews.

Related posts:

1. kthread reviews: which brings me to you
2. kthread reads: the wonder spot
3. kthread reads: unaccustomed earth

rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think of Malcolm Gladwell books as a sophisticated guilty pleasure.

He Who Must Name Patterns is the darling of airport bookstores (which I think amuses him; there is a part on airplane crashes in Outliers that is difficult to read on a flight, similar to beginning Ian McEwan’s Saturday while in the air), and the chapters are nicely organized for casual reading–each extended anecdote about the length of a New Yorker article, come to think of it.

Gladwell’s books belong in the self-discovery section of a bookstore that I imagine next to the self-help aisles, their cheerful covers in contrast to the signature manilla Gladwell titles with serious serifs and a centered object (Outliers has a colored orb, Blink an asterisk that makes me think of Vonnegut’s infamous doodle in Breakfast of Champions, and Tipping Point a match). Whereas in the previous books you might be able to slot yourself into one of the three special groups of people (Connectors, Mavens, Salespeople) or note your snap judgments, this recent book has fewer lessons that can be easily applied–aside from his 10,000 hours thesis.

Of more interest, Gladwell takes the signature Stewart Smalley line to pull apart specific examples of success; beyond the “smart enough” threshold, social savvy makes key figures (read: connectors) in your life like you enough to bend the norms and let 10,000 opportunity hours bloom.

The epilogue is an explanation of how Gladwell explains the community figures who paved his path to success, and I couldn’t resist marking the page lauding “divergence tests”–an alternative way of measuring intelligence through timed creative responses. In elementary school, I put in a good thousand hours or so solving problems with my Odyssey of the Mind teams, the brainiac Olympics for entitled children (Gladwell mentions entitlement as a key skill for success), and I do want to think those Saturdays spent designing PVC pulley systems and blurting out ten spontaneous uses for pipe cleaners will serve some larger purpose.

After spending years at a top ten U.S. university in a graduate program with disturbingly smart people, I will cite Gladwell’s book in this season of cocktail parties and feel entirely justified in my prediction that the wittiest of my friends are marked for success in that field. Comprehensive knowledge as well as a keen sense of timing in impersonations on John’s part, snarky classroom literary dissections on Ben’s, obscure musical categorization references from art historian/XML geek Dana, appreciation of rap and West coast culture from ascot-wearing Miltonist Eric, and Jordan’s inspired nudges in the Charlottesville underground arts recommend them for future renown.

If success depends on your forbearing community, perhaps the next Gladwell treatise will be on how to sustain the communities you successfully choose later–

View all my goodreads reviews.

Related posts:

1. kthread reads: middlesex
2. kthread reads: unaccustomed earth
3. kthread reads: the wonder spot

Proof: A Play by David Auburn

My review on Goodreads

rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Proof” is ideal for the witching hours of the night, when you cannot sleep, idly flip television channels to idly flip television channels, and then toss the remote / click the laptop shut and wonder if you might be crazy.

Incidentally, that’s where Auburn’s play begins, and we are ushered into what I’d call Second City Gothic (sister to the Southern Gothic subgenre): a big, drafty Chicago house looms, complete with a clanking radiator, absent mother, ghost, tortured heroine wearing a key around her neck, and a supernatural object (the proof itself, which fairly glows).

While ostensibly about mathematics, the tense moments feature Catherine learning kindness—we cringe as she illuminates the shortcomings of her fellow players, but we forgive her impatience when she practices kindness with her father, too far gone to retort.

How far do you trust what you intuitively know?

When prowling our own houses where things go bump in the night, don’t we all grasp for someone who believes in our logic—that inelegant architecture we build to explain who we are?

Related posts:

1. kthread reviews: which brings me to you
2. kthread reads: middlesex
3. kthread reads: the wonder spot

Which Brings Me to You: A Novel in Confessions by Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott

My review on Goodreads

rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have always thought the opening sentence of a book is the author’s best pickup line pitched at the reader.

More so, then, in a book where well-constructed paragraphs hold the explicit promise of intimate relations–that, at least, is the premise of this post-postmodern epistolary novel where the two hyperarticulate protagonists agree to reveal the nasty bits of their romantic pasts in letters before meeting up again in real life.

My former colleague Craig Stoltz put it best, I think, when he reviewed the book for the Washington Post:

This book is full of superb writing, and that is precisely its problem…The trouble is Jane’s letters sound an awful lot as if they’ve been written by an award-winning author and writing instructor with an MFA. So, alas, do John’s. To say this spoils the fun is to understate.

To return to the first line of the book, though, it reads: “I know my own kind.” I can only assume that many of the fine Goodreads members who give such lukewarm reviews below are not sympathetic to this kind. Whether the lack of sympathy for this kind is due to character, snark, or textual framing, the book’s prelude section remains a worthy meditation on a smushed boutonniere and contains a line of sexual absolution on page five that I have taken as a personal motto (curious? I thought so).

Moreover, how can you ignore the serious fun of keeping the conceit of a post-postmodern epistolary novel aloft for the length of a novel? I mean, really, our two protagonists always have stamps on hand?

And when one mails a drunken letter irretrievable from the postal carrier once deposited in the mailbox, a “remix” chapter follows with all the apology that comes after drunkdials and drunken texts/emails and none of the clarifying horror of the “sent messages” outbox (tell me the “sent messages” folder isn’t your favorite, and I will denounce you for the terrible liar that you are).

Perhaps I read this in one sitting because each chapter contains character details I covet. To have our hero admit he is a “marginalia junkie”; to be able to refer to a past lover as “the caramelized one”; to articulate an awareness of destructive tendencies and the wherewithal at seventeen to intuit that “boys were dangerous. Each one was shining, lit from within; their souls were torches.” Seemingly trivial and breathy at times, this is true stuff of the sort flawed, complicated, real relationships are built upon.

It’s worth remembering that epistolary works were originally “penned” by female characters (Aphra Behn, of course, used the form; male authors like Richardson would take pains to insist in the introduction that the female narrator’s story was “true”) when the novel was still crystallizing into a genre. Appropriately, the end of the novel careens a bit like its tipsy characters, and structurally, the multiple peaks within the letters throughout are followed by valleys leading to more peaks.

The very end comes together in that elegant way that always brings me to tears–not because it’s an emotional moment (it is), but because each reveals their understanding of the other’s most significant, sustaining source of pain, and those final admissions seal a narrative that the two characters share voicing–imperfectly, and, ultimately, full of hope.

Related posts:

1. kthread reviews: proof
2. kthread reads: middlesex
3. kthread reads: the wonder spot