April Showers (of Books)

My role in the annual Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest is over. I rated my last manuscript and submitted the review on April 1. Most of what I saw was so-so. About what one would expect from first-time novelists. Promising but not-yet-ready-for primetime. One manuscript was just plain bad. No-hope bad. What-were-they-thinking bad. One was knock-your-socks-off good. It should easily be a Semifinalist. I believe that it deserves to be a Finalist. But, we'll see.

Here's what happens next: On or about April 27, 2010, the top 100 Semifinalists will be announced at www.amazon.com/abna. Editors at Penguin Books, which will publish the winning novels in each category, will then select three Finalists in each category. These will be displayed on the Amazon website on May 25 and Amazon customers will select a winner.
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Before the Amazon contest manuscripts arrived and between my regular reviewing duties for Publishers Weekly, I read a couple of critically acclaimed novels just for fun: David Ebershoff's The Danish Girl and Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin.

The Danish Girl, a NY Times Notable Book, is based loosely on the story of Danish artist Einar Wegener, who in Dresden, Germany, in 1930 underwent the world's first sex change operation.

Einar Wegener's gradual and painful transformation comes as a shock but not a surprise. He appears to have been sexually confused as a child and his devoted artist wife—renamed Greta in Ebershoff's fictionalized account—describes him as physically fragile and pretty. Not handsome. Pretty. It is Greta, in fact, who first coaxes Einar's female alter ego, Lily, into existence when she asks him to sit in for a model who doesn't show up for an appointment. Of course, Einar has to cross-dress for the sitting, and finds that he likes it. Very much. Maybe too much. In time, he becomes convinced that Lily is real and is trapped inside Einar's body.

After she starts painting Lily, Greta's career takes off, and she rather encourages Einar's dual identity. Even when her husband chooses Lily over Einar, Greta supports his decision even though it means the end of their marriage.

This can be read as an intense, if unusual, love story. But, at its core, it's a compelling study of identity—a topic that we all grapple with.

(For more on Einar and Gerta Wegener, including pictures and paintings, check out the author's website: http://www.ebershoff.com/)

QUOTABLE

"'There are still times when I see you, and I think to myself, Not so long ago we were married. You and me, we were married and we lived in that small dark space between two people where a marriage exists.'"
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Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin won the National Book Award for 2009 and charmed lots of critics and readers. Jonathan Mahler in the NY Times called it "An emotional tour de force," "profound," and "deeply affecting." Others called it "brilliant," "stunning," "Joycean," "masterly," "lyrical," and "elegiac." Some of which is true.

What McCann does is certainly interesting. Employing a sort of "six degrees of separation" premise, the author uses an extraordinary real-life event—Frenchman Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center on August 4, 1974—to link the lives of a dozen fictional characters from very different backgrounds. They include an Irish monk who works with the prostitutes and druggies in the Bronx slums, a hippie couple living their own version of Walden Pond in Upstate New York, the wife of a wealthy judge from Park Avenue trying to cope with her son's death in Vietnam, and Tillie Henderson, one of three generations of prostitutes. How the author ties all these disparate lives together through a single remarkable feat of daring is shrewd and memorable.

After reading the novel, you might want to rent Man on Wire, a delightful documentary on Petit's walk.

QUOTABLE

"Hope is nothing more or less than what you can see with your own bare eyes."

"'Pain is what you give, not what you get.'"

"The overexamined life [is] not worth living."

"The only thing you need to know about war, son, is: Don't go."

"There's only one thing that moves at the speed of light and that's cold hard cash."

"At the end of the world they're gonna have cockroaches and Barry Manilow records."

"Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that it was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar."
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Back in January, I wrote about Joyce Carol Oates' novel Blonde—a haunting re-imagining of the short, sad life of Marilyn Monroe. If you missed it, you can find it here: http://www.flyover-culture.blogspot.com/
Recently I came across an Oates' essay--"Going Home Again"—in the March 2010 Smithsonian (74-89). It's a delightful piece of nostalgia at its best.

QUOTABLE

"In America, history never dies—it's reborn as tourism."

"Pride is the lifeblood of family, recompense for hardship, endurance, loss."