THE LITBLOG CO-OP

WELCOME TO LBC

If you've arrived here via Forbes Magazine's kind mention, we invite you to take some time and look around.  It's true, you've missed all the fun of the first round but the posts are archived for your reading pleasure.  We'll be announcing our sophomore selection in September, and we do pop in here from time to time with posts, although things will be light here until then - after all, we do have daily blogs keeping us busy.  But we hope you'll enjoy what we have to offer and that you'll participate in the spirited conversation that's unfolding within these precincts.  Welcome!

Spotting the "Struggling"

I can’t speak for anyone else, but if I get one more phone call from Kate Atkinson asking me to add "just one more comment" and quote-unquote "stir the pot," I’m going to have to say, Kate, please: If you value our friendship, you will not ask me again.

I'm joking, of course. I'm happy to help Kate in any way I can. I’m joking again! Kate and I are not even acquainted. In fact, if you believed any of this, please gather your things and don't disturb the others on your way out.

On to other, non-Kate-related, topics. Following is a follow-up to my first post a couple months back, on the theme of how to find books "struggling to be noticed."

Ander Monson’s debut novel, Other Electricities, got a lot of press this past month, with positive mentions on blogs like Bookslut and Conversational Reading, and in major media outlets like National Public Radio and the New York Times. This would be pretty unusual for any first novel. Or any experimental novel. Or any novel from a small press located in, say, a state in the southern US known more for thoroughbreds and sour-mash whiskey than for its contributions to American letters. Other Electricities, published by little Sarabande Books, happens to be all three.

I read Monson’s book a couple days after it came out, fell in love with it immediately, and was one of the earliest to recommend it. How did I find this book out of the hundreds that came out in May? I’d like to say I saw Donna Seaman’s early, glowing account in Booklist. Nope. Or, even better, that I paid attention to the uncommonly astute Chuck Stebelton when he booked Monson for an appearance at Chicago’s Myopic Bookstore way back in December. But I missed that too.

In fact, I found Monson’s book while browsing one night at a local branch of one of the big chain bookstores.

Ordinarily I'd visit one of our better independents, look at their intelligently chosen new-books tables and pester the staff for recommendations. But I'd just gotten back into town from a trip, it was 9:30 at night, and none of the independents were open. I would have waited til the following day except, this time, I just wanted a book now. Maybe you can relate.

I should confess that, before I got mixed up (as we say) with the LBC, "new" or "little known" were rarely among my criteria for selecting a book. To adapt from Auden, I don't want to read more "good" books or more "new" books; I want to read more books that I like. But, you know, it is kind of fun to walk into a big bookstore and think: I want to find a new book I really like, from an author few people know about.

Only: how? On entering the bookstore, you first encounter the many "just released" and "we recommend" displays by which publishing’s Prosperos try to keep us from the rest of the island. Just between you and me and the New York Times, these are often not the books you want to read, but rather, books someone else wants you to read. This is an easy one: as the poet says, cast a cold eye, and pass by.

Now you’re in Literature & Fiction. Here it gets more complicated. You could pick up every book and examine it, but that would take several hours. So you start narrowing down. As their CEOs never tire of telling us, chain bookstores are driven by the profit motive and don’t typically "load up" on titles by authors no one's ever heard of. Which is quite convenient, at least for our present purposes: in your search for "new and struggling to be noticed," any book with more than a two or three copies on the shelf can be safely ignored.

The standard spines for Penguin Classics and similar series will also aid your search—for the purposes of finding unknown authors, you can eliminate those as well. It's also helpful that books in certain popular genres often adopt similar cover designs or colors. So unless you're looking for something new in the popular "Chick-Lit" genre, for example, you can pretty much eliminate anything with a pink cover. And so on.

But even with these measures, you're left with quite a lot of books to peruse. Taking into account the extra time I require for involuntary spells of wonderment and gratitude when encountering a new title from Dalkey Archive Press, it was clear I needed another, further, filter.

Here's what I settled on: Ignore all hardcovers. If you think about it, unknown authors are much more likely to have their books "TPO’d"—that is, published as "trade paperback originals"—than are their better-known peers.

As soon as I had this little brainstorm, my eyes fell upon the Monson.

You might argue that Monson would have crossed my path anyway, given the notice he's subsequently received. But what if, like so many other worthy authors, he hadn’t gotten that attention? A better argument contra is that the increasing appeal of the TPO format for publishers of all kinds may soon render my little shortcut obsolete. (Doug Seibold, President of Agate Publishing, tells us why this is happening in a recent column for the Book Standard.) Still, for the time being, and particularly if your book-buying options are limited to the nearest big chain store, I say: check out those TPOs.

CASE HISTORIES: THE MINORITY OPINION

As has been pointed out, it's extremely unlikely that 21 unruly bloggers will be completely of like mind on our selected titles. The Minority Opinion is an opportunity for bloggers who were less enthusiastic about the final selection to make their case about what they found lacking.  Herewith, their take on Case Histories:

While those of us responsible for this post were not as impressed with Kate Atkinson's Case Histories as those of our colleagues who helped make it the first LBC Read This! selection, we do still affirm the process by which it was selected. A diverse group of literary webloggers worked out a procedure by which eligible books could be considered and a vote on the merits of these books held in a fully democratic way. If the book any one of us might have selected had the decision been ours alone did not prevail this time around, we will be approaching the next selection (when the voters will be if anything even more diverse) with every expectation that our tastes and our judgments will be fairly represented.

Our disappointment with the selection of Case Histories is first and foremost a result of our conclusion that it was not the best of the nominated titles, that it fails to satisfy based purely on literary standards. Although we do not at all object to the consideration of genre fiction for the LBC selection, we do believe that in this case the book teetered awkwardly between "genre fiction" and "literary fiction" without ever really doing justice to the possibilities of either mode. Thus, for example, coincidences that strain credibility abound in this book, but since it is ostensibly a "mystery" such devices are presumably considered to be acceptable--which ultimately seems only a condescending take on the conventions of mystery/detective fiction. On the other hand, Atkinson makes an effort to elevate the conventions of mystery fiction to a higher plane, to use them as a way to explore such things as isolation, loss, missed connections, class issues, and random violence, but the novel never really reaches a point where the writing or approach feels fresh enough to justify the exercise.

Thus, to some extent the detective fiction mold overly constrains Atkinson's ability to treat her themes of loss and family dysfunction in a fully credible way, while her attempt to introduce such subjects into the detective/mystery form distorts the form--and verges dangerously at times on sentimentality--too much to make it really appropriate for the stories she has to tell. We wondered, finally, why these stories needed to be told in what passes for a detective novel in the first place.

More than anything else, however, we found this book disappointing on the most basic level: its language. Although the novel does experiment with shifting points of view and overlapping plots (which we liked), its style remains consistent. Unfortunately it is consistently bland and uninvolving, rarely rising above the merely serviceable and doing little to add some life to a set of stories that fail to transcend their own contrivances or to characters that too often fall back into stereotype. The novel’s private detective, Jackson Brodie, seems especially lackluster, at times merely a bundle of characteristics—divorced ex-cop in a mid-life crisis—that might have been mail-ordered from central casting.

The problems with the novel’s style can be seen on its very first page. Curtains hang “limply,” the sun is “hot and sticky,” the baby Olivia is “reliable as a rooster” and “cute as a button.” (Such lazy phrasing reoccurs throughout the book.) This is followed by several pages of tedious exposition that, to say the least, do little to signal that this is an author who will be contributing something original or compelling to the mystery genre. Perhaps some readers consider Atkinson’s style in Case Histories to be admirably plain and unpretentious. We found it simply dull.

When the Read This! selection was announced, numerous criticisms were made of the choice based on the fact that neither Kate Atkinson nor Case Histories were really "struggling to be noticed in a flooded marketplace." And to be completely honest, we have to say we agree with some of these criticisms. Selecting “a Whitbread Award Book of the Year winner whose latest novel is being published by Little, Brown” and which, compared to the books we might have chosen, has indeed been “very widely reviewed” is to some extent hard to reconcile with our “self-imposed mission.” For a few of us, at least, this choice does come uncomforably close to being “a middlebrow cop out.”

If we had instead chosen a more certifiably “obscure” or neglected book, would we have been criticized as well from a different perspective? Would we have been accused of being “elitist” or too critical of mainstream publishing? It’s hard to know, but the one criticism we probably could have easily anticipated was the one that has been circulated, that we ignored our own declarations of support for less-known books and authors.

However, should those of us in the Litblog Co-op who truly believed Case Histories was a deserving book, indeed the best of those nominated, have let our judgment be affected by these inevitable criticisms? Probably not. Thus, although we do think a choice more appropriate to the LBC’s mission could have been made, we ultimately consider our dissenting view of Case Histories to be mainly a difference of critical opinion with our colleagues, something a project like Read This more or less invites. It will happen again.