THE LITBLOG CO-OP

Ticknor: On the Pleasures of the Short Novel

It's Ticknor week here at LBC—a five-day dialogue/celebration of Sheila Heti's wonderful novel about a disappointed biographer. Today though Wednesday El Sarvas and I will be talking about what we loved about the book, and inviting your comments. Dan Green may stop by to offer his thoughts as well. Thursday you'll get Dan Wickett's interview with the author, and on Friday, for you loyal Segundonites, Ed Champion will have an audio interview with Ms. Heti. I guess you kids call that a podcast.

Poor Ticknor, with his wilted flowers and his rain-soaked pie! I have friends like that. I am friends like that. But never mind.

If you cast your mind back to October, you may recall an interesting little comment thread on the subject of re-reading novels. In response to my remark about re-reading Maps for Lost Lovers, commenter Mike kindly reminded me that not only did some people not re-read novels, they couldn't understand why anyone else would. I thought of this recently because there's a passage from Ticknor I've read with delight a dozen times already, and probably will read a dozen more.

Here's the set-up: Biographer George Ticknor is on his way to a party, as happens several times in the book, and it's raining, as it always is, and he lacks an umbrella, which he always does, and he's late, which he always is. He's holding the aforementioned pie, which is looking rather sad, and as he walks he thinks about the shame and disapproval he has in store when he arrives at the party "smelling like a wet dog," holding his destroyed pie.

Here's the cool part: for a moment, he has a little flight of fancy, imagining how he might be received in a world where his friends love him and care for him:

I have a pie. It's a little ruined, I laugh, but come—and we hurry into the kitchen together, bumping legs in front of the stove, laughing as she pours me a glass of wine, then back to the large and warm dining room with several people, ten, seven, seventeen, sitting all around it, but two seats reserved for us, me putting my drink at my plate, beside hers, and I return mugging to the kitchen once more with Claire, her shooing me out, then back to the table with Prescott's announcement and how he read the article I published and a toast! The woman's eyes are glowing beside me as I shrug modestly and let it go, shrug it off with one quick line and a wink, and then take half the glass in one gulp robustly, then the roast, then the potatoes passed around—and the sister beside me is bumping her arm into mine, she's left-handed, embarrassed about that, and I show her that I too can eat with my left hand and she laughs, the tears disappearing from her eyes.

Soon, though, he falls back to reality:

You think I'm terrible, but I tried my best. I'm sorry. So sorry. So sorry I am late. Please forgive me. Oh but wasn't it to start at ten? I thought you said ten! I thought you said ten. Put the pie in the flower bed. Leave now.

That just kills me.

One of the things I love about a short novel—Ticknor is 118 pages, around 40,000 words—is that it's possible to hold the entire book in your mind, and remember and revisit passages like this when you've finished the book. In a longer novel, it seems to me, one pleasure is quickly replaced by the next, and you (or at least I) quickly forget little touches like how Mrs. Gamp says "dispoged" instead of "disposed," and the ex-artilleryman Bagnet has named his daughters "Malta" and "Quebec" after military bases where he has been stationed. Long novels work by accumulation of detail; short novels by subtraction. I don't think it's a stretch to say that short novels can achieve a kind of perfection that long novels cannot. It's probably no accident that the book that repeatedly comes up on surveys as the greatest American novel, The Great Gatsby, is only 50,000 words long.

On the other hand, surveys also tell us that readers of fiction favor long novels, and sales figures show that long novels sell better. Maybe people are long-novel lovers or short-novel lovers, just like they're either readers or re-readers. Mark, I think I can guess which side you're on. What about everybody else?

HERE THEY COME by Yannick Murphy

Yannick Murphy’s splendid and boisterous new novel is called Here They Come. At the center of the book is a 13-year-old girl — we never get her name — who lives in a tumbledown New York apartment with her mother, a couple sisters (I think there are just two, but they feel like a multitude: they seem to coalesce around the narrator like cats in the dark), an older brother who plays guitar in clubs at night and smokes pot while lounging around in a blue silk robe by day, several pets including a pack of cats and an amazing dog, as well as other city wildlife: maggots, cockroaches, etc. It’s the ‘70s — the city is electric, hot, brewing — the girl’s father has split and is living uptown with “a short blonde he found on a set, porno or not, we don’t know,” and there is no money in the house.

If you’ve come within my radius in the past couple months, I’ve probably pressed Here They Come upon you. And I was delighted to nominate it here as an opportunity to exponentially extend the radius of who I'm urging to read this odd, chancy novel.

We’ll be discussing the book more fully here next month, but I wanted to mention a thing or two now about its narrator. She is brash and shrewd, she says “fuck” all the time (firing it off at about the same frequency as her French mother says “merde”). She is a little older but for me she fell in a great tradition of characters like Dido Twite, Scout, and Philip Pullman’s Lyra: young girls who are almost feral in their affections and not above pulling a con, who look at what's before them with a level gaze and report on it with a stellar lack of bullshit. (So the narrator of Here They Come has associated herself with a hotdog vendor named John whom she allows to caress her tits in exchange for hotdogs and Hershey kisses. Their relationship is reported in an unflappable deadpan way, and the beauty of the novel is not that we like or dislike John by the end of it but that we get to see him so clearly — an otherwise anonymous hogdog vendor on the corner — through the narrator’s gaze.)

There’s a wonderful description of what it’s like to be a girl around this age — 12, 13ish — in Ali Smith’s The Accidental, when 12-year-old Astrid is viewed by her mother as, “Dark round the eyes. Kicky and impatient, blind as a kitten stupefied by all the knowing and the not-knowing. The animality of it was repulsive.” It’s a right-on description but the narrator of Here They Comegets it said quicker. Five words: “I grow one tit first.”

An excerpt from the novel:

New neighbors have moved in. A fat older woman and a younger skinny red-haired man. We try not to imagine them as lovers.

“It must be accord,” our mother says. We can always hear the fat woman. Our house shakes when she walks across her floor. We can always smell the red-haired man. In the elevator going up or going down, we hold our hands to our noses. Our mother tells us red-haired people smell, they just do and she doesn’t know why.

Their roaches become our roaches when they bomb. Even our cats are annoyed and flick angry tails when they try to sleep and the roaches climb their fur. We send their roaches back with our own bombs. This works for a week and then their roaches are bombed back to us, so many that there are albinos and ones with deformities, two heads and missing legs.

The fat woman welds. She works at night downtown somewhere on the docks. She wears her helmet with the plastic face shield home, saying more than once it has saved her life more than once. Gang boys with nunchucks have flown at her on late subway rides and they’re thrown metal stars so hard they stuck into her plastic face shield and she had to pull them out with pliers. Our dog and cats attack her when she comes to our house. The cats hang from her clothes hissing and the dog dips at her rear. She comes through without knocking on our door. She comes and she sits down on our couch in her dirty coveralls and her mask and we stare at her shoes and wonder how she gets her feet into them and we wonder if the skinny red-haired man helps puts her clothes on and is that what our mother means by their accord?

Join us for a discussion of Here They Come beginning May 22 (after BEA) as well as a Bat Segundo podcast with Yannick Murphy.

MY SISTER'S CONTINENT by Gina Frangello

There is nothing in this world more brutal than family. Nobody can twist the knife like a parent or sibling. The attacks come from all angles, and you never know whether to duck and cover or join in the fray.

I always laugh when women talk about sisterhood like it's a kumbyah thing. It can be, sometimes. And sometimes it's a war. Yet even when you swear you hate each other, the fact of the matter is your sister would do anything to save your life. And that brings us to Gina Frangello's My Sister's Continent, my nomination for Spring 2006.

Two years after her twin sister disappeared, Kirby Braun tries to piece together the truth of her sister's life. Kendra returned home just as Kirby entered therapy to deal with what is apparently a case of serious pre-wedding jitters. Kendra's very presence unleashes chaos, shattering the veneer of the Braun family. Without their glossy All-American surface, this family cannot hold together.

My Sister's Continent is a contemporary reworking of Sigmund Freud's "Dora" case study. As Kirby digs into her sister's journals, she discovers ugly truths about Kendra's world -- and the source of her twin's penchant for multiple types of masochism. Each layer of Kendra's life reveals another secret. While Kirby discovers her true self in her exploration, she learns the secrets that lead to Kendra's ultimate act of self-destruction.

A description of My Sister's Continent cannot do the story, the writing, the raw edges justice. This is a book that requires reading to appreciate the frankness and violence. And what better place to start than with an introduction:

Like most siblings, Kendra and I went to school, took family vacations. We separated when she went away to New York while I remained behind, close to our parents, whose sole attention was finally mine. Had she never moved back to Chicago at all (as was her intent), everything would have turned out differently. She did return, and we welcomed her, a prodigal daughter who, as always, would frighten us a bit but make our lives more interesting. My father, mother, and I, who had always formed a tentative union against her impropriety. Her impropriety. Mild by most standards: she was neither junkie nor criminal—not even prone to interracial dating or homosexuality. We were a tame family, and her small-scale rebellions, such as they had been, were enough to keep us awed and ill at ease. We worshipped her, and resented one another for it. Or do I misremember everything? You had known us, some of us, for a decade. No doubt there were demons to which you became privy that even now I cannot glean.

The storm that had been brewing in my family for that entire decade, though, did not officially hit until the November of my twenty-second year. The world was approaching a millennium. Nuclear weapons were becoming popular again. America had divided along lines of those who believed Bill Clinton the devil, and those who thought the devil to be Kenneth Starr. In a recently gentrified area of Chicago, in a newly constructed loft, I was living with my longtime boyfriend, Aris. Aris and I were getting married. Everyone was happy about the engagement. Everyone likes weddings, particularly when they are expected. My engagement ring was quite big. Aris made a good living considering his age, which was twenty-six, but the ring was a family heirloom, so neither of us was responsible for its grandeur. Since getting the ring, I had taken to polishing my nails. They were short and stubby, but looked reasonably nice if I didn't paint all the way to the sides—just a slash of red to elongate. I'd learned the trick from my mother, who despite her devotion to God, always managed to know such worldly details. Because my sister lived far away, in a universe where the ghost of Balanchine was the only parent a ballerina required, I was often able to receive the full brunt of my mother's considerable wisdom.

Kendra did not approve of my engagement. She found me, I assumed, a pathetic sell-out to some lofty, unspecified goal that marriage at an early age would surely thwart. Luckily, nobody much cared what she thought, since she rarely came home, and the fanatical rigor of her life, with its accompanying dismissal of love as a lower art form, made us squirm. All we required was that, come the following October, she dutifully don a maid of honor's dress that would not outshine my restored, Victorian wedding gown, and give a well-mannered toast before getting sloshed. Then she'd be free to seduce a groomsman or glare at my new husband as she chose.

First, however, before my father would fork over the requisite miniature fortune for my century-old dress, he insisted I make an appointment with his former psychiatrist (that'd be you) about the matter of my diarrhea. Mere vomiting he might have understood: we all have delicate stomachs in my family, and somebody or other was always throwing up in the bathroom, the car, along the side of the road. Even my mother began to suffer from nausea the longer she was exposed to my father's lineage, as if having borne my sister and me was enough to transmit our shortcomings into her purer blood. But diarrhea was another thing entirely. Vomit is bad, but shit transcends all boundaries of good taste.

Come back the week of May 8 to join in the discussion about My Sister's Continent. Gina Frangello will be guest blogging, Ed's put together a great podcast, and we'll be talking about the book. A lot.

THE GIRL IN THE GLASS by Jeff Ford

Pay no attention to the lady behind the curtain; I'm here to unveil my nomination for this quarter, the vastly underrated Jeff Ford's The Girl in the Glass.

The thing about Ford is that he's unpigeonholeable, and yet his work is always recognizable as his work. There's an unmistakeable voice. There's exploration. There's a high literary standard. There's always something unexpected to be had coming to a new piece by Ford. He apparently never heard of same-old, same-old or just sticking to a winning formula, like say, only writing thrillers about long-kept biblical secrets (although I would totally read Jeff Ford's Da Vinci Code) or legal thrillers (I would also completely read Jeff Ford's The Firm).

His short stories are mostly found in speculative fiction magazines and anthologies (or in his spanking new collection, The Empire of Ice Cream). His novels have been categorized or marketed as literary fiction, fantasy and mystery. In reality, they're all of the above. And the sad thing is, this crazy world we live in, it doesn't make things easy for readers or writers who are interested in finding such a wide range of work. It hides things. My great fear is always that there's someone out there who loved The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, but has absolutely no idea that the short stories and The Girl in the Glass exist. Or, perhaps more troubling, someone who thinks they wouldn't like the other stuff because it's published in a different genre. So, that's why I chose this book to nominate -- that and that I loved it and enjoyed it more than any other novel I read in the last year and that I fear it's so successful at what it's doing some people might dismiss it without seeing what's under the surface.

I wrote on my own site about Girl last year and (stealing a trick from Sarvas) I'm going to quote what I said then:

This book is as sweet a read as any magnificent con in action, and isn't all real storytelling a con of some kind anyway? The story is anchored by the relationships between three scammers working together to bilk the wealthy bereaved: aging con man, Thomas Schell; a Mexican teenager adopted from the streets and playing the part of Ondoo the Mystic, Diego; and good-hearted heavy, Antony Cleopatra. During a con, Schell sees a ghostly little girl reflected in glass, which ends up landing the three in the midst of an investigation into the ritual murder of a rich family's young daughter. The book is dedicated to the author's own son, to me tellingly appropriate, as I read this as being very much about fatherhood--and add to that family, in the larger sense of the word. Vonda the Rubber Lady doesn't help out for nothing, nor does Hal Izzle, or Belinda bring her pigeons; likewise, Merlin protects Morgan for reasons that seem instinctive. (Not that those are the only things Girl is about. One of this novel's great virtues is that it manages to be about many things, as all good novels do.)

I hesitate to give away much more, because I don't want to deprive anyone of the pleasure of reading this book. A couple of words though, for the darker side of the novel. The Klan and eugenics figure prominently, as does the mass deportation of Mexicans during the time period, and the backdrop of other people's poverty in contrast to the rich living of our main characters as they live off the obscenely rich. This balances out the novel's humor and prevents it from ever seeming slight. And the ending, the ending is perfect, absolutely right in the way so few endings are--and especially considering that the ending takes place much later than the conclusion of the story's main action, with Diego looking back late in life on these events.

So yeah, read the damn thing. You won't be sorry. Here's a little excerpt to entice you further. From the first chapter:

Ectoplasmic Precipitation

Every time the widow Morrison cried, she farted, long and low like a call from beyond the grave. I almost busted a gut but had to keep it under my turban. There could certainly be no laughter from Ondoo, which was me, the spiritual savant of the subcontinent.

We were sitting in the dark, holding hands in a circle, attempting to contact Garfield Morrison, the widow's long-dead husband, who fittingly enough had succumbed to mustard gas in a trench in France. Thomas Schell, ringmaster of this soiree, sat across from me, looking, in the glow from the candlelight, like a king of corpses himself -- eyes rolled back, possessed of a bloodless pallor, wearing an expression straight from a nightmare of frantic pursuit.

To my right, holding fast to the gloved dummy hand that stuck out of the end of my jacket sleeve, was the widow's sister, Luqueer, a thin, dried-out cornstalk of a crone, decked with diamonds, whose teeth rattled like shaken dice, and next to her was the young, beautiful niece (I forget her name), whom I rather wished was holding my prosthesis.

On my other side was the widow herself, and between her and Schell sat Milton, the niece's fiancé, your typical scoffing unbeliever. He'd told us during our preliminary meeting with the widow that he was skeptical of our abilities; a fast follower of Dunninger and Houdini. Schell had nodded calmly at this news but said nothing.

We didn't have to sit there long before Garfield made his presence known by causing the flame on the candle at the center of the table to gutter and dance.

"Are you there?" called Schell, releasing his hands from those of the participants on either side of him and raising his arms out in front.

He let a few moments pass to up the ante, and then, from just behind Milton's left shoulder, came a mumble, a grumble, a groan. Milton jerked his head around to see who it was and found only air. The niece gave a little yelp and the widow called out, "Garfield, is it you?"

Then Schell opened his mouth wide, gave a sigh of agony, and a huge brown moth flew out. It made a circuit of the table, brushing the lashes of the young lady, causing her to shake her head in disgust. After perching briefly on the widow's dress, just above her heart (where earlier Schell had inconspicuously marked her with a dab of sugar water), it took to circling the flame. The table moved slightly, and there came a rhythmic noise, as if someone was rapping his knuckle against it. Which, in fact, someone was: it was me, from underneath, using the knuckle of my big toe.

Ghostly sobbing filled the dark, which was my cue to slowly move my free arm inside my jacket, reach out at the collar for the pendant on my neck, and flip it around to reveal the back, which held a glass-encased portrait of Garfield. While the assembled family watched the moth orbit closer and closer to fiery destruction, Schell switched on the tiny beacon in his right sleeve while with his left hand he pumped the rubber ball attached to a thin hose beneath his jacket. A fine mist of water vapor shot forth from a hole in the flower on his lapel, creating an invisible screen in the air above the table.

Just as the moth ditched into the flame, which surged with a crackle, sending a thin trail of smoke toward the ceiling, the beam of light from within Schell's sleeve hit my pendant, and I adjusted my position to direct the reflection upward into the vapor.

"I'm here, Margaret," said a booming voice from nowhere and everywhere. Garfield's misty visage materialized above us. He stared hard out of death, his top lip curled back, his nostrils flared, as if even in the afterlife he'd caught wind of his wife's grief. The widow's sister took one look at him, croaked like a frog, and conked out cold onto the table. The widow herself let go of my hand and reached out toward the stern countenance.

"Garfield," she said. "Garfield, I miss you."

"And I you," said the phantom.

"Are you in pain?" she asked. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. All's well here," he said.

"How do I know it's really you?" she asked, holding one hand to her heart.

---------

Come back the week of May 1 for all sorts of fun -- there will be book discussion, Jeff Ford guest blogging, a podcast to remember and other tricks of the light!

TICKNOR by SHEILA HETI

Ticknor arrived unexpectedly on my doorstep, sent to me by Lorin Stein at FSG who knew of my appreciation for all things Hungarian.  (Sheila Heti is of Hungarian descent.)  I took the book away with me on my January Paris trip because, frankly, it was light.  In size, only, as it turned out.

I was immediately captivated by the voice of Heti's disgruntled narrator George Ticknor and by the end I knew I'd found my first LBC nominee.  It was exactly the kind of book I become a litblogger hoping to find. 

I don't know that I can express my thoughts any better than I did in the review I wrote for Boldtype, so I'm going to reproduce that here to serve as your introduction to this slender gem:

When George Ticknor's Life of William Hickling Prescott was published in 1864, it received rapturous notices, and reviewers were quick to point out that the long-standing friendship between Prescott and Ticknor made the latter an ideal Boswell. Sheila Heti, whose debut short story collection, The Middle Stories, was published in this country by McSweeney's, has pulled this obscure leaf from the literary archives and fashioned a mordantly funny anti-history; a pungent and hilarious study of bitterness and promise unfulfilled.

As a fretful Ticknor navigates his way through the rain-soaked streets of Boston to Prescott's house ("But I am not a late man. I hate to be late."), he recalls his decidedly one-sided lifelong friendship with his great subject, a friendship that Heti has estranged from its factual moorings. Unlike the real-life Ticknor, this one is an embittered also-ran, full of plans and intentions never realized — coveting his friend's wife, writing letters that never get answered, working on essays destined to be rejected — always alive to the fashionable whispers behind his back.

Heti seamlessly inhabits Ticknor's fussy 19th-century diction. It's a feat of virtuoso ventriloquism that puts one in mind of Kazuo Ishiguro's self-deluded butler Stephens in The Remains of the Day. It also raises fascinating questions about biographies and biographers (if this is how it was, what are we to make of Ticknor's glowing, laudatory Life?). Heti's Ticknor would be insufferable if he weren't so funny, and in the end, the black humor brings a leavening poignancy to this brief tale. But don't let the size fool you — this 109-page first novel is small but scarcely slight; it is as dense and textured as a truffle. And with George Ticknor, Heti adds an unforgettable new antihero to the Pantheon of the Misbegotten. Surely, Prufrock is smiling.

(The original review includes some cool links in the body of review, but I'm going to send you over to Boldtype to see those.)

And herewith, in the new LBC style, an excerpt from the nominated title:

It was only after having returned from my journey of several months that I found everything changed, his gatherings as much attended by those curious to meet the son of William Hickling Prescott Sr., said to be remarkable, as those who wanted to show themselves off, young men and old from the academy and literary circles. His parents had grown proud of the once solemn young man who overtook the study, then the sitting room and the sleeping quarters of a maid who was no longer needed, and it wasn't long before the whole thing grew established in the mould that had been set by his father, and soon after that he took for himself the house on Beacon Street, not far off. The entire time I was gone my eyes were set on home, and it wasn't until I returned that I discovered what had occurred. While I had acquired nothing, the glory of his name was already all about him. Archbishop Hughes publicly praised him for his judicious treatment of the Catholics, and though two years previous he had been known to only ten people in New York, that number had grown to more than two hundred, and there was not one day on his whole five-day visit to New York to begin work on his Ferdinand that he did not wake after noon, dine after ten, or fall into bed past two, expending all his spirits and energy with his new acquaintances and friends. He had thought, on setting out, that it would be no more than five days of loafing in New York, and clearing up some details with his publisher before returning to Pepperell and plunging into his pages. But five days were soon extended to twelve as the invitations of more than two hundred people assailed him, so that when at last he returned to Boston he was too weary to begin his work straightaway. Too pleased by the cordiality he had known and still feeling the blush of the many gratifying tributes, he was in no way equipped to approach his book, the excitement of the social world having been too great. Five days should be the limit, he put in a letter to Claire. How could I then spend a season in London? I shall not try. He vowed never again to exceed two or at most three days visiting a great American city, and made good this promise the rest of his life.

Returning from my journey I had known none of this, and expected none of this from the solitary boy who had been my friend. I saw him only once before he left for London and Paris for medical advice. Following his return home, many months went by and no note came. At last an envelope arrived. I was invited to visit the following evening, and all day I occupied my mind with errands to distract myself from the approaching fact of the night. I brushed my hair well and found a tie beneath my bed. I put on the tie and buttoned my vest. Then, circling in my mind the little intimacies we two would share, I made my way through the streets. When I arrived, the door opened to reveal not the quietness of Prescott and Claire, but a house filled to bursting with brass buttons, men who could, without effort, best me in every possible way. I moved toward a divan, sat and bent down to adjust the sock that had gathered at the bottom of my foot on the walk over. When I stood up again, I was as lost as a card that has blown from a deck. Not one man turned to face me; no woman smiled my way. I saw there was nothing I could say to Prescott that these men could not put better, and it was not nine o'clock before I moved into the night, avoiding Prescott as I went -- my friend who had chosen upon my return to parade himself before me and display what wealth of stature he had acquired in my absence, shedding the skin we had both worn, that now only I wore. Coming onto the lawn, there was laughter and the ringing of glasses which I could hear from where I stood, and lit up in the window and arranged behind the curtains, a premonition of the whole of Prescott's life was laid clear before me like a carnival poster. Seeing that, there was no hope left in me that things would right themselves, and should any force try to stop these men from gathering and using all of their influence to lift each other into the highest ranks, no fewer than two dozen able-bodied men from that room on Beacon Street would raise their swords against it, preventing any merit from draining from their positions as the heads and treasurers of every society and association in the Union. After that, I still did see him, though not as much. You say you saw him almost as much, but you barely saw him at all, and when you did there was always a group. He would have liked me to sit closer but other people pushed in beside him and he didn't seem to care. Still, he would smile, and it was not as though our friendship was ruined. You claim a friendship. Well, it has been that way since we were boys. Such a recording of events would only be of transient interest to him, so I don't bring it up. No, you have never remarked on it. His disposition fared well; he could have been ruined, but he wasn't.

I hope you'll check out Ticknor and return for the discussions that will begin here Monday.  (It's only 109 pages - you can finish it by then!)

READ THIS! - TELEVISION by JEAN-PHILIPPE TOUSSAINT

The Litblog Co-op is pleased to announce its Spring 2006 READ THIS! Selection: Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated by Jordan Stump (Dalkey Archive, 2004). The weeks ahead will include a chat with the translator and discussion of the novel by members of the LBC.

We will unveil the other four considered titles over the next four days, and having week-long discussions and posts by LBC members taking up the pros and cons of each title. Television will be discussed the week of May 29th, six weeks away (we are taking the week of May 22th off as many of our members will be at BEA), which you gives you plenty of time to find the book, read it, and join the discussion.

Now we present Derik A Badman, who nominated Television, as he explains why you should Read This!

I first discovered the novels of Jean-Philippe Toussaint while looking for a French language novel to follow up my reading of Camus' L'Etranger in the original language. I was not ready for the complicated and playful language of a Queneau or the descriptive vocabulary of a Flaubert. I needed something short, contemporary, and relatively unadorned. As it is my normal method of literary discovery, I turned to other authors I respected, in this case Warren Motte and his Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990 (Dalkey Archive, 2003, a short essay by Motte follows the text in the Dalkey edition of Television), a collection of essays on current French literature. Motte calls Toussaint's work an "epic of the trivial" (179), a perfectly concise way to sum up the novels that have given Toussaint fame in Europe and little notice at all in the U.S. (though Television is the fourth of his eight novels to be translated into English). My library happened to have one Toussaint novel, La Television, the story of an academic who decides to stop watching television.

The narrator of Television is living in Berlin to work on a book about the painter Titian and art's connection to political power. His wife and child have left for a seaside vacation, and he is supposed to be writing. As the book opens he has decided to stop watching television. What follows is more a chunk of everyday life than an example of Freytag's Pyramid. The narrator goes about his days: swimming, meeting friends, "working" (mostly not, because "not writing is at least as important as writing"), washing the windows (likening the spray of washer fluid to the painting of Pollock), watering his vacationing neighbors' plants. Throughout, he seems incapable of avoiding the ever glowing gaze of the television set. The ubiquitous television and the conflicting relationship we have with it provides the thematic structure for the book, which both begins and ends with a renunciation.

The narrative voice is the stylistic star of the novel. The protagonist narrates his own story as if he were telling it to a stranger, not in a literary approximation of colloquial speech but in a casual manner that leaves out details and jumps around into the narrative past. Toussaint is a master of this style that presents us with a narrator who is not necessarily unreliable but not completely forthcoming either. The gap between how the narrator sees himself and how we see the narrator provides a great deal of the humor in the novel, and it is quite a funny novel.

My first reading of Jordan Stump's translation of the novel was my third reading of the book. In switching the language in which one reads a book, one might find the experience of a very different book, but the voice Stump creates in English was familiar to me and just as enjoyable.

Even after three readings, I find the book a funny and joyful read. There is something here that leaves me with a feeling of both the strangeness and banality of life. My hope in nominating this novel for the LBC is to share my interest in the fiction of everyday life, as well as spreading the word on a contemporary translated work and another fine book from Dalkey Archive Press.

Television - An Excerpt

Two paragraphs from Television by Jean Philippe Toussaint as translated by Jordan Stump (Dalkey Archive, 2004):

I went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard under the sink, kneeling down to extract a basin and a sponge, as well as the spray bottle of window cleaner, so beloved of my son (for its "tricker," as he said, doubly wrongly, to refer to the lever that operated the pump), which did not prevent him from displaying a particularly itchy forefinger whenever I authorized him, under my imperturbable surveillance, to moisten the windows or coffee table with a spray of that miraculous liquid, which went ssshhht and turned foamy the moment it touched the glass. It's true that this was a fascinating tool, this transparent plastic bulb, full of a limpid, blue solution with a lovely detergent scent. I threw open one of the living room's two French doors, almost two meters high, with a single unbroken pane of glass extending almost to the ceiling, topped moreover by a little transom, and I climbed onto the radiator, the basin at my feet. Standing on the brink of the void, clasping the French door with one hand while the other peppered the glass with the spray from my pistol, I soon realized that, once the first lighthearted spatterings are over, carefree and slightly silly, the window washer's delight, of which Jackson Pollock surely knew a thing or two, the task quickly turns tiresome, for now there's nothing to do but wipe, like some maniacal housewife, firmly pressing your sponge to the glass--or, even better than a sponge, a page from an old newspaper, for, even where windows are concerned, nothing will ever replace the printed page, in my opinion. I thus held in my hand a crumpled sheet of newsprint, and I was wiping the top of the windowpane, standing on the edge of the sill, sometimes leaning perilously into the emptiness to reach some complicated corner and give it a finishing touch with a sponge, when I saw a taxi rolling down the street before me. I stopped wiping for a minute, my sponge in my hand, to watch its approach. Slowly the car rolled to a stop in front of my building, the engine still running quietly. After a moment, the driver climbed out and raised his head toward me, casting a quick glance over the building's facade. Slightly uncomfortable on my second-floor window ledge, I looked away and began wiping distractedly, doing me best to look occupied. I wiped slowly, almost in place, my eyes downcast. "Hallo," the driver said abruptly, to attract my attention, "did you call for a taxi?" "Me?" I said, cautiously pointing at my breast with the sponge. Me? How could he accuse me? Couldn't he see I was busy, washing the windows? He let it drop there... (68-69)

Now I closed the window again, and, before heading into the kitchen to stow my gear, I did a bit more tidying up in the living room, summarily dusting the couch cushions, holding them up in profile to give them a few good swats with the flat of my hand, then spraying a few bursts of cleaner in the middle of the coffee table and giving it a quick circular wipe with the sponge. Finally, just as I was about to leave the room with my spray bottle and basin under my arm, I cast a quick glance toward the television set. Noticing that it too was dusty, I gave it a carefree little shot from my bottle, and the resulting spray crashed against the top of the screen in a little wad of whitish, effervescent foam; then, feeling a slight giddiness in which the simple childish pleasure of shooting mingled with a subtler sort of delight, symbolic and intellectual, linked to the nature of my chosen target, I kept firing agin and again, draining the spray bottle of almost all its detegent, firing shot after shot straight at the screen, point blank, squeezing the lever then relaxing my finger, squeezing and relaxing, faster and faster, anywhere that struck my fancy, all over the screen, until the entire surface was covered by a coating of mobile, foaming liquid, slowly slipping earthward, intermingled with grime and dust, in sluggish, oleaginous flows, that seemed to ooze from the machine like the residue of programs past, melted and liquefied and rolling in waves over the glass, the livelier ones speeding down in one non-stop swoop, while others sank more slowly and ponderously to the bottom of the screen, then changed course and poured over the floor, like shit, or like blood. (70-1)

JUST A FEW MORE DAYS ...

The Spring 2006 Read This! Selection will be announced Monday, April 17th!

The post announcing the Read This! selection, written by its nominator, will start us off on six weeks of interesting, in-depth discussion about five truly fine titles. One additional post per day will follow from the nominators of the other four titles until all five titles have been announced.

Then we hope you'll join us for one full week spent on each of the titles including interviews, podcasts, conversations about the titles between LBC members, authors blogging, and we hope we’ll see many of you readers jumping in on the conversations too. In fact, over the course of the next six weeks, everybody taking part in the conversations via the comment fields is going to be entered into a random drawing to win a complete set of the five books nominated.

We will once again be saving the discussion of the Read This! Selection for the final week, giving all readers a full five weeks to track down a copy and get familiar with it beforehand.

Some small changes are in store for the LBC:

First, in the future we will be reducing the number of books to be discussed in each quarter to three but we'll do so gradually. The Summer Read This! Quarter will see four books being discussed, and from Autumn 2006 forwards, we’ll discuss three titles.

Second, beginning with the Summer quarter, we will be announcing the nominees for the subsequent quarter prior to beginning discussion on the current one – thus the Autumn titles under consideration will be revealed once Summer titles are announced. We believe this gives those interested in the discussions at the LBC the opportunity to read the books through the quarter, and participate even more fully in the discussion.

Speaking of which, the Summer Nominees are:

Michael Martone by Michael Martone from FC2

White Spirit by Paule Constant (translated by Betsy Wing) from University of Nebraska Press

Skin by Kellie Wells from University of Nebraska Press

Crawl Space by Edie Meidav from FSG

We hope you'll take the time to look into those books and return in June to join discussion. But above all, come back next Monday to see what the Spring Read This! Selection is, and settle down to some great discussions over the next month and a half.