THE LITBLOG CO-OP

Another Jackson Brodie Novel from Kate Atkinson

Longtime LBC readers will recall that the Co-op's inaugural pick was a satisfying thriller from British author Kate Atkinson.  That selection ignited controversy and prompted a discussion of the mission of the LBC.  Luckily, Atkinson's well wrought novel wasn't lost in the shuffle.  Readers who enjoyed that book, Case Histories, will be excited to learn that Atkinson has brought back the book's hero, Jackson Brodie, for her next effort, One Good Turn.  However, where Case Histories was dark and brooding, dwelling on and in the troubled pasts of many of the book's characters, One Good Turn is antic and madcap.

It should come as no surprise then that the book's original title was A Jolly Murder Mystery, as Atkinson drops us into the middle of the famously whimsical Edinburgh Fringe Festival, "the world's largest arts festival." The festival, however, is not integral to the murder mystery that unfolds, instead the crowds, actors (Brodie's girlfriend among them), and air of frivolity all serve as a foil to the dour Brodie, who, having inherited a large sum of money, has since the last book moved to France where he seems to do little more than sit around in his pool and wish that he were still a cop.

One Good Turn, of course, gives him a chance to do just that when he first witnesses a road rage incident in the crowded streets of Edinburgh and then later sees (or thinks he sees) the floating body of a girl off nearby Cramond Island. These two incidents thrust us into the book's cast of characters, among them Gloria, the wife of the crooked real estate developer Graham Hatter; Louise, a single mother and hardworking Edinburgh cop; and most memorably Martin Canning (aka Alex Blake), who pseudonymously writes flighty, but popular, novels about a squeaky clean girl detective. Odd Martin steals the show in this novel with his quirky fastidiousness, self-loathing, and dreams of a soft-focus sexless marriage.

Thrown into this mix is a mysterious man with a gun and a house cleaning service named Favors whose pink-clad maids maybe don't just clean houses. Much of this book's mystery is devoted to untangling the story's threads, though what we learn at the end cleverly turns the whole book on its head.

One Good Turn doesn't carry the weight of its predecessor, and seems almost unabashedly a confection, but in this respect it doesn't disappoint. The book is a breeze, and indeed a "jolly good" time.

(This post originally appeared at The Millions)

Looking Forward

Thanks to everybody who made the discussions of Sideshow, Manbug, and Firmin such interesting reads these past four weeks, and congratulations to those of you walking away with signed copies of Firmin.  We hope that everybody has enjoyed themselves reading and discussing this trio of titles.

Now, looking forward to our Winter Read This!, we are happy to announce the three nominees so that readers of the LBC Blog can go out and find copies, and read along with us the next two months, preparing to discuss them with us in January.

Scott McKenzie of Slushpile nominated Demon Theory by Stephen Graham Jones - MacAdam/Cage

Anne Fernald of Fernham nominated Seven Loves by Valerie Trueblood - Little Brown

CAAF of Tingle Alley nominated Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi Wa'Thiong'O - Pantheon

So, wander on out and find your own copies to read, and come back Monday, January 15 to see which one we've selected as the Read This! title!

Firmin Giveaway Winners

It was a tough assignment.  Your responses were witty, creative, and highly exuberant.  Unfortunately, three winners must be selected.  But thank you all for playing.

THE WINNERS:

Mr. Jon Butters, for a succinct and ironic response.  (Mr. Tiffany's evocation of the Bible was a close second.)

Ms. Arethusa, for imputing quite correctly that the notion of masticating upon any book and absorbing its text is possibly hallucinogenic in nature.

Mr. Darby Dixon, for being the only person to compartmentalize a meal and to do so in a fantastically preposterous manner (30 courses!).

I'll be in touch with the winners today by email.

Thank you all for playing!

LBC Podcast #3: Sam Savage

Nominator: Edward Champion

Nominee: Sam Savage

Subjects Discussed: Having a rat as a protagonist, investigating rats, on being a late starter, poetry, exploring consciousness in fiction, the destruction of Scollay Square, collaborating on the illustrations, sentimental first-person narrators, physical signs in Firmin, language, resorting to fiction for meaning, abnormal sexual desires between rats and women, phrenological models, tunnels and reading, gentrification, Savage's background in philosophy, genuine feeling vs. sentimentality, Hallmark cards, misfits, booksellers, William Gaddis, Gilbert Sorrentino, Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," cultural attrition, and letting go of materialistic impulses.

Backup Link: (MP3)

(A co-production of the LBC, Pinky's Paperhaus, and The Bat Segundo Show.)

 

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Savage: Since he doesn't have language -- that is, language is ultimately the longed for object even more than the Lovelies would be.  Words and language.  These words appear as objects, as things in themselves.  FICTION.  RESTROOM.  He sees these and they stand out.  Because this is language and this is what he doesn't have.  And he also sees himself.  Not only sees signs, but he gives titles to his actions.  You know, you put in these phrases, which are in fact titles of books, in which he's thinking -- in which he is the character.  So he is always seeing himself as a protagonist as some story, because what Firmin wants most of all is to be in the story.  And of course I gave him that in the end.  But he didn't know that.

Firmin Book Giveaway

Apologies for interrupting this week's discussion, but, thanks to Coffee House Press, we're giving away three copies of Firmin to the loyal Litblog Co-Op readers.  These copies are signed by author Sam Savage and illustrator Michael Mikolowski.

All you have to do is leave a comment on this post and tell us what book you'd be most likely to eat if you were a rat like Firmin and why.  (Keep in mind that when Firmin eats a book, he is capable of devouring the contents of the book in one sitting.  A helpful condition to place in your mind as you're ruminating upon this most important question.) 

The three most creative responses will received signed copies of the book!  (Of course, if you already have a copy of the book, then we'd still like to hear from you.) 

Speaking for myself, I'd probably eat the collected works of William T. Vollmann, if only because this would allow me to catch up on the man's prodigious output over the course of one meal.

[UPDATE:  Wow, you guys are good.  Okay, I'm going to keep the contest open until 7PM PST, 10PM EST, and shortly thereafter, I will announce the three winners.  Keep the meals coming!]

[UPDATE 2:  The time window has now closed.  I will announce the winners later this afternoon.  Thank you all for participating!]

Is He or Isn't He?

A point Jessica made in a comment below made me stop and think. She said: "The whole story is theoretically being "told" (though I think that's just a narrative construct, since Firmin has no one to tell this to and no way to write it down) as he's finally dying of old age, hallucinating while Scollay Square falls down around him." I hadn't thought of this while I read the book. I accepted the fact that I was reading about a sentient rat as "real" from the outset. It wasn't until later that I looked at the Chuang Tzu quote that I thought maybe he wasn't a rat. But now having thought that and going back and reading the last chapter, I wonder if I read the end incorrectly.

Jessica mentions that Firmin is narrating his life story, but to whom? Who's he telling it to and how if he is a sentient, but non-speaking rat? He doesn't die at the end of the chapter, but you're led to believe he's in the process. But what if he's not a rat? What if he's a man who thinks he's a rat protesting the changes going on around him? Perhaps it's just his rat persona dying. And perhaps he then is free to narrate his life as a rat to someone later on. I'm not saying this is what I believe. I'm saying that the quote made me radically change my perception of the book as a simple story about a rat and that's why I enjoyed the book so much more.

About Firmin

My mother, a most literary woman, would say in high praise of someone, that he or she was A Reader. (She said it in a way that one just knew it was in caps). Over the past few weeks I have visited the sites of all the LBC members; I have read your comments and opinions on all manner of things. I feel deeply honored that this group of Readers has chosen Firmin for discussion.

Jessica is right. To call Firmin a “rodent that speaks” is about as far from the truth as one can get. The incapacity to speak, even more than his rat body, is the defining feature of his condition. In placing him outside the world of language, it makes him the ultimate outsider. (It is interesting, in this connection, that Aristotle defines a “man” as a “speaking animal.” He also defines a “man” as a social animal, a member of a community or polis, and says that anyone living outside a community must be either “a beast or a god.”)

Levi questions whether Firmin really understands the books he rhapsodizes about. This is a good point. It is part of the larger question of whether we are to take at face value Firmin’s claims to genius. The examples of “great first lines” he presents at the beginning suggest that he is more of a hack, more like Jerry Magoon than the writers of the great books he admires. In so far as Firmin is human, he is a human failure, someone who has failed to attain in reality the place in the world that his imagination had carved for him.

A central “theme” of the novel, one that Jessica and Ed both talk about, is the imagination in its dual role as a means of escape from “reality” and as a means of creating “realities.” But an escape from the world that is simultaneously a creation of a world – isn’t that what we call literature, and art in general? What is the difference between imagination and delusion? Is there a hard and fast difference? Toward the end of the novel Firmin confesses that he is not able to distinguish what he remembers from what he has imagined remembering, that he is not really sure of his mother’s name or whether she was fat or skinny. Then what was he talking about all that time? And what is the end result of all that talk, An illusion? Or a book?

Now for the question Ed raises. This is, as Firmin might say, a Big One. Is Firmin “really” a rat or a man. I had hoped to plant just that question in the reader’s mind at the outset by prefacing the novel with the quotation from Chuang Tzu. Is Firmin a rat imagining he is a man? Or is he a man imagining he is a rat? Ed is right, there are clues, not to the answer, but to the presence of the question, at several places in the story. This question, man or rat, does not have an answer in the book, and I certainly don’t know the answer. In lieu of an answer, I would like to pose a few more questions. If I speak to you in the misery, meanness, and solitude of your rat heart and assure you that, after all, you are human, will you be comforted? When Firmin tells Ginger Rogers that he doesn’t believe anything, she replies: “You believe you are a rat.” Do you believe that you are human? Are there times when you stop believing this?

Ed, finally, brings up the question of whether, if Firmin is a human, the rat is not as much a fictive construct as the books are. As I said, I really don’t have any answer to these questions. Indeed, I very much hope they are not answerable in any definitive way, and that Ed and Jessica are both right, the way certain clever figures can morph back and forth between being, say, a picture of a rabbit or a picture of a duck. And though the picture is both things equally, it cannot be both at once. (Anne's post on shifting perspectives hits the mark here.) On the one hand, on the level of narrative, Jessica has to be correct, or we don’t have a story at all. It is, after all, about the adventures of a rat, tail, tunnels, and all. On the other hand, we have to wonder what sort of existence this story has. After all, there really aren’t any literary rats. What happened to the story about a rat that Jerry Magoon was writing and that, after Jerry’s death, Firmin cannot find in his notebooks, where the word rat does not appear even once?

I want to emphasize that I did not write the book with these sorts of questions in mind. With a few notable exceptions (I think of The Unbearable Lightness of Being), I don’t much care for “philosophical” novels. When I go to a desert island, if I don’t have to stay too long, I think I’ll pack The Thirteen Clocks. When I wrote Firmin I had in mind a voice, a character, and a condition (he was a rat). I worked paragraph by paragraph, forcing myself not to look ahead for fear that I might close off possibilities I was not yet aware of. It felt as if the story was telling itself. I would not allow myself to imagine how it might end, or what it might mean. I never thought for an instant about the questions we are discussing. They became evident to me only afterwards, when the novel was finished, and I could approach it with the knowledge and ignorance of any other Reader.

 

Lit Love & Rats

Levi Asher writes:

Before I read Firmin, my favorite literary rat had been Templeton from E. B. White's Charlotte's Web. Templeton, if you remember, was a slob and a complainer, but he came charmingly to life once a year when the State Fair came to town. He waited until dark, when all the people left, then threw himself into a nightly orgy of food scraps. Humans meant nothing to Templeton, except that they brought food.

Like Templeton, Firmin is all rat. The two creatures have little in common and would not have been friends, but both are distinctly non-human, even though Firmin yearns to be human while Templeton just yearns to eat like one. I agree with Jessica that the "goodbye zipper" scene was one of the best moments in Firmin, and this scene shows how lost Firmin is in the world of humans, because he hilariously fails to understand that the phrase "goodbye zipper" (which he chose because it is easy for a rat to sign-speak) does not mean anything and will not help him make friends with strangers in the park.

Likewise, despite the fact that he is in love with books, his understanding of these books seems limited (despite the fact that he rhapsodizes -- sometimes unconvincingly -- about them). He reminds me of Helen, the intelligent computer network in Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2 -- both Helen and Firmin are voracious readers, but they both seem to miss a lot of the meaning of what they read.

All in all, I agree with Jessica that while Sam Savage's rat is a fascinating metaphor for a human, it does not help the book to understand the character as some type of actual human. Maybe the whole equation should be reversed -- in several scenes, such as the tragic incident with the rat poison or the final vision of a destroyed neighborhood in downtown Boston, the question may be whether or not humans are rats.

Edward Champion writes:

To jump from Jessica's point, one thing we haven't talked about is how Savage presents the world of rats. Firmin, for example, is unapologetically scatological about lusting after his sister.  In exploring the vicinity outside of the bookstore, he is quite familiar with the nooks and crevices that have been placed by previous generations of rats.  And he expresses some disgust over how the rats are ignoble scavengers. 

And yet Firmin also makes reference to people he has talked to in bars and presents us with details that often wane as swiftly as Scollay Square: Where, for example, does Firmin's family, featured in the beginning, disappear to?  Why do the items in Jerry Magoon's apartment disappear? 

If we consider the possibility that Firmin himself is not a rat, that this identity is a fictive construct he clings to like a poor man's palliative, then we must consider that the universe around Firmin is also a fictional construct.  And yet, if fiction stems from some kind of inspiration from the real world, what (if we are to accept this "Firmin ain't a rat" hypothesis) is real? 

To jump back to Mr. Asher's observations, is the rat just as much of a triggering point for fantasy as the books are?

Greater Boston Bookstores

Scollay Square was gone before my time, so much—all—of the immediate setting of Firmin is a blank to me. Still, it seems fitting that the bookstore of Firmin is in Boston, for Boston is a great, great city for bookstores.

Maybe it’s just because I spend so many book-browsing years there, but I think there is more to it than that. Reading Firmin has made me think more about the experience of Boston bookstores, so, for Firmin week, I offer up this reminiscence.

I grew up in Seattle but Boston was my goal. My father is from Worcester and lived in Boston for some years. I was raised on a steady diet of Robert McCloskey books, instilling a loving familiarity with Boston and Maine. I lived in the Boston area for eight years (in a college dormitory from 1984-1988, and then again, in my first job out of grad school, 1994-98).

The landscape of bookstores is an ever-changing one. Even bookstores that remain in place change their character, get eaten by chains, and get enlivened or distracted by their espresso machines. Mine is a partial, prejudiced, and ill-remembered account. Given that the plot of Firmin revolves around “urban renewal” and the things—the bookstores—that are lost to gentrification, it is proving impossible for me to write this account without constant recourse to tics and checks noting where things have gone downhill, where things are not what they used to be. But I dislike that habit of nostalgia, so, even in this nostalgically-themed piece, I’m striving to avoid it. I began with the years of my residence as a kind of marker so that you can decide for yourself whether my years represent golden ones or years of pale, sorry book-shopping not like the golden years of Boston bookstores you remember.

What is so Boston about this experience? Certainly the bookstores of Chicago and Seattle are incredible and New York is full of gems. The difficulty of New York book shopping is the lack of a cluster of great stores. For a city with a (rapidly disappearing) flower district, a fashion district, a zone for Brazilian restaurants, areas where light bulbs and fixtures are abundant, it is a bit surprising that there is not a block that you can go to find an abundant collection of bookstores.

Harvard Square is a cluster of bookstores and, for all the changes, good and bad, over the years, including the loss of the still-lamented Tasty, a diner on the corner by the T (where you could get the best French fries ever for eating on the bus back to Wellesley), it seems like a huge outdoor playground dotted with places to buy books and read them. The Harvard Co-op never inspired. And even WordsWorths’s seemed too cramped to me. Still, the fiction and history sections there were amazing and I used to pop in when I would visit the editors at the (now defunct) Boston Book Review. Those offices, tumble-down and modern at the same time, a rented space crammed with desks and bookshelves, were the site of some of my most bookish delights: two or three times, I got to go in and browsing a shelf of review copies in person to see which one I wanted to write up next.

The children’s bookshop always brought on a wave of nostalgia. Not as good as the wonderful balcony children’s section in Seattle’s University Bookstore, it still strove to carry tons of great, great choices and I was always glad of a child’s birth to get to go in, buy a board book of Goodnight, Moon and pass the time among my first old book friends. Having the blessing of Margret Rey to use the Curious George name and drawings made it all the more fun.

There’s a travel bookshop in Harvard Square that always filled me with excitement and intimidation. I didn’t really need the topographical map of New Hampshire for, even if I were going hiking, I planned to stay on marked trails for a brief jaunt. I didn’t really want to go to Burma or even Dordogne. Browsing the Paris books made me feel a little unimaginative in such adventurous company. I felt the same way in the Foreign Language Bookstore. All I speak is French and French books are so relentlessly severe in their design. You cannot really judge French books by their cover and that, for me, is a source of disappointment.

Where there are many, many bookshops, you can afford the luxury of letting your taste become quite specific. When I lived in Lafayette, Indiana, I had to like the (wonderful but not to my taste) independent bookstore just off Purdue’s campus because that was the bookstore in town. But in Cambridge, I let my preferences grow arbitrarily. For example, I liked to walk past the Grolier and would occasionally pop in, but that shop, too was intimidating—so small and so filled by the charisma and vibe of the owner. Then, later, I became friends with the curator at the Lamont Poetry Room who was feuding with the Grolier’s owner. I felt I had to pick sides. And, even though some of the more tumble-down used bookstores had greater authenticity, I chose to spend my used bookstore time in McIntyre and Moore. This well-lit, organized, and enormous used bookstore on the fringes of Harvard Square seems to have been the place where professors would sell off portions of their libraries. You could find well-preserved scholarly books there, old and new, with great reliability. The staff was snobby beyond belief but they were also lazy. It didn’t take long to get the front desk out of ear and eyeshot and then you could browse unimpeded.

For all that was great at McIntyre and Moore, though, it was a little random used bookstore in Somerville where we found both volumes of Lawrence’s Phoenix in great condition. They weren’t cheap, but my boyfriend got them for me as a gift. I married him. Those random stores in Somerville and Arlington and outer-Cambridge were another wonderful feature of the Boston landscape: spot one on a weekend drive and chances were good that the books inside would be exciting and interesting. So many times since I’ve pulled over in another region only to find the used books to be so much junk: moldy and dull, bestsellers that don’t appeal to me, travel and self-help books too new to be curiosities, too old to be of use.

The weather, too, is essential to what makes Boston book shopping so magical. And here is where I think of Boston itself as much as Cambridge. Many, many cold dark nights I would pass an hour—between the movie and dinner, between dinner and home, between a bad date and a stack of papers to grade—warming myself in one of Boston’s bookstores. There used to be a great bookstore and café on Newbury street and, when it went, the Waterstone’s just off Newbury took its place: after browsing the windows of expensive boutiques and watching the Eurotrash smoke and lounge, ducking into a bookstore was the perfect tonic. I could remind myself of myself and of all the things I wanted to be, to read, to do and then, fortified, brace myself against the icy Boston wind.

In the end, for all the many pleasures of book shopping in Greater Boston, there was little to beat an orgy at the Harvard Book Store. I would get their frequent buyer card, fill it up, and get my benefit—a discount or a credit or whatever it was (it changed all the time) and then go on a little spree, spending a hundred dollars or more. The Harvard Book Store is still my favorite: it’s not too big, the staff picks are reliable, and it manages to be thoughtful and interesting without being snobby. So, you can find bestsellers and classics there and all the most thoughtful nonfiction. It is clean and organized like a big chain store but all the junk is edited out. When I go to Barnes and Noble or Borders (as I do—I am a promiscuous book buyer and, I must admit that most of my book dollars go to amazon.com), the new fiction table and shelf are always anticlimactic. At first, it’s so shiny and pretty, but then, of the fifteen books on display, only two or three appeal. The tables at the Harvard Book Store were just the opposite. Everything on display sounded good: exciting, worthy, or, at worst, of good quality but not for me. Even the remainders were appealing and judiciously chosen, so you’d look at them and feel sorry to live in a world where such books would only find homes at deep, deep discounts.

To go to the Harvard Book Store then, and go on a little spree and then take the bag to Café Pamplona, a dinky, stucco, underground café, with a charming, inattentive staff (which always, worryingly, seemed to include an overworked, stooped Spanish woman amongst a bunch of sullen teens) and sip a café con leche while reading the back covers of a bunch of books that are probably still unread—that still seems to me like the height of pleasure.

Firmin Roundtable #1

I'll start off -- I've been looking forward to talking about Firmin for a while, so let me spill my unorganized thoughts out here and hopefully get the conversation going.

It's been a while since I read FIRMIN -- as a bookseller I received an early galley copy, and I devoured it (ha!) right away. But my memory was jogged recently by reading Andrew Friedman's article "The Rodent Is Myself" in the August 2006 issue of The Believer. Friedman admirably traces the history of the rat/mouse in literature, from Dostoyevky's "mousehole" in NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND, to Haruki Murakami's character Rat and Easy Rawlins' fierce sidekick Mouse, through Art Spiegelman's MAUS and even Robert Sullivan's nonfiction RATS. His contention is that these novels and stories posit that either rats-are-like-humans (implying sympathy and even brotherhood with our fellow mammals) or humans-are-like-rats (hiding, furtive, urban survivalists), and that they all play with our fascination and disgust with our likeness to rodents.

But when he gets to FIRMIN, the most recent and the most literal of the literature of rodenthood, I feel Friedman stumbles. He writes "By collapsing the provocative ambiguity that shades MAUS into having a narrator who's simply a precocious rodent that speaks, the novel at times has a congenial, aw-shucks cuteness Firmin himself would loathe." I can't argue with the cuteness (which some of my coworkers found annoying, but which I think is part of Firmin's appeal, and his self-hatred and absurdity.) But the important mistake is:

Firmin doesn't talk.

Nor does he walk on his hind legs. Other than his ability to read, he's a realistic, garden-variety rat. I think the book's otherwise charming illustrations lead to this misapprehension (and the disconnect between image and text seems of a piece with Firmin's fantasies about himself), but the way I read it, nowhere in the text of the novel is it stated or implied that Firmin is a Mickey-style humanoid rat. He's the same kind we see scuttling in subways and basements.

And that's the tragedy that makes him all the more human -- makes him, in fact, an Everyman (or a Fur Man). His mind is full of thoughts, ideas, images, stories, fantasies, desires, but he is utterly unable to communicate them to his fellow rats (who don't care) or humans (to whom he cannot speak). His inability to communicate makes him utterly isolated, alone with his thoughts; no matter how much affection his human friend, Jerry Magoon, has for him, there's no way they can really understand each other. (He attempts desperately to break out of this isolation by communicating, leading to the funniest scene in the novel, when he jumps out of the bushes and frantically signs "goodbye zipper" to passersby, before realizing the futility and ridiculousness of the gesture). Firmin is us, not necessarily in his surreptitious garbage-feeding ways, but in his aching desire to communicate, and in his isolation when he is unable to do so.

But that's just my opinion. Agree, disagree?