Staff Pick: Two Crime Novels

Staff Picks
April 14, 2011 | 2 books mentioned 12 4 min read

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I’ve been thinking lately that I should be reading more crime fiction. I’ve never been against it—in theory I’m in favor of anything good, regardless of genre, although I’ve never taken to werewolves—but I haven’t actively sought it out.

But since my second novel keeps getting categorized as crime fiction, my illiteracy in the genre that I’ve apparently been shoehorned into has become slightly uncomfortable. “What kind of a book have you written?” people ask.

“Um,” I say, “I guess it’s a sort of literary crime novel?” (I know. Awkward. But if you set out to write literary fiction and end up getting reviewed in Spinetingler Magazine, what are you supposed to call it?)

“Oh!” they say. “Have you read [insert name of high-profile crime writer whom I haven’t read but obviously should have if I’m claiming any sort of association with the genre]?”

The most recent books I’ve read in the genre confirm my long-held suspicion that attempting to categorize books by genre does readers a disservice; these books are no less literary than any of the other great books I’ve read this year, they just have crimes and/or guns in them. For your reading pleasure, two books you might consider reading even if you don’t think you like crime fiction very much:

1.
coverSavages by Don Winslow: I think this book is perhaps best described as a Tarantino film crossed with a prose poem. It’s violent, beautifully written, and experimental, and I’ve never read anything like it. Structurally, it’s a dizzyingly intricate 290 chapters, the first one only two words long (1. “Fuck you.”)

Ben is a brilliant botanist who’s partnered up with his best friend, Chon, to produce and distribute the best pot on the West Coast. Chon, a former Navy SEAL who brought unspeakably high-quality marijuana seeds back from Afghanistan, has a girlfriend named O, but she sleeps with Ben too. Everyone’s in their twenties. The trio lead lives of hedonistic ease in Laguna Beach, until a vicious Mexican cartel arrives on the scene to stage a hostile takeover of the business.

The shifts in perspective are interesting; Winslow shifts back and forth within his central trio and then moves outward, until we’re reading short chapters from the viewpoint of practically every thug who populates the pages. The effect is fragmented, but effective. What I found most startling about this book was Winslow’s willingness to abandon conventional form and slip without warning in and out of a sort of loose poetry—

Slicing through SoCal
Cutting through a California night
The freeway (5) is soft and warm and
Welcoming
But for Ben
The green exit signs are like steps climbing up a scaffold
Toward O.

The cartel kidnaps O to speed up the takeover negotiations. The body count is considerable. The book’s practically impossible to put down.

2.
coverSnowdrops by A.D. Miller: Snowdrops is as quiet as Savages is loud. The book opens with the early-spring discovery of a body; a snowdrop, in Moscow slang, a corpse hidden all winter under heavy snows. It appears with the first thaw in front of Nick Platt’s apartment building.

It’s apparent from the first pages that a complicated crime is being played out, something slow and deadly unfolding over weeks and months; evidence of it is all around us even as we can’t see how the pieces fit together—until, of course, the trap snaps shut in the final chapters and the significance of the body in the first chapter falls devastatingly into place.

Nick Platt is a British lawyer who lives and works in Moscow in the early 2000s. One day in the Metro he meets a young woman, Masha, and quickly falls in love. His narration takes the loose form of a confession to his soon-to-be-bride, years later—“You’ve wanted to know why I haven’t talked to you about Russia”—although the deeper he goes into the story, the less certain the wedding seems.

Masha asks for his assistance in helping her aunt, Tatiana, move to a new apartment. The real story here isn’t the crime; it’s the extent to which we’re willing to lie to ourselves, to ignore the obvious, in pursuit of happiness or companionship or love. A lonely man in a foreign city, courted suddenly by a beautiful young girl, is willing to suspend disbelief even when her story begins to crumble and lies start showing through, even when he’s half-aware at every turn that he’s complicit in something dreadful and that everything is wrong. An intriguing debut, suffused with an atmosphere of dread.

is a staff writer for The Millions. Her most recent novel, Station Eleven, was a 2014 National Book Awards finalist. She is married and lives in Brooklyn. www.emilymandel.com.

Staff Picks

Staff Pick: The Patterns of Paper Monsters by Emma Rathbone

Staff Picks
March 31, 2011 | 2 books mentioned 7 3 min read
I've been a slow reader this month.  First, I slogged through The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles; the contemporary, omniscient narrator of this Victorian-age narrative fascinated my nerd-brain, but failed to truly interest my reader-brain.   Then I took my sweet, sweet time gliding through Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, as translated by Lydia Davis.  I hadn't read the novel since high school, and this time around I found myself reading aloud passages that were truly a feat of magic, summarizing with rigorous and well-chosen details whole weeks or months or years at a time.  I loved the way, too, that Flaubert distilled character into a single paragraph, stringing together a distinct list of experiences, memories, habits, and desires in a such a way that I knew that person.  One sentence near the end of the book made me especially happy: "His gaze, keener than his lancet, would descend straight through your soul, past your excuses and your reticence, and disarticulate your every lie."  That word--disarticulate; I savored it for days. But after these two books, I longed for a contemporary novel about contemporary life.  I longed for references to malls, and to boners, and to "intense cell phones" and to a pillow made of denim with an actual jeans pocket on the front, "like it thinks it's Bruce Springsteen."  Enter:  The Patterns of Paper Monsters by Emma Rathbone.  This funny, sad and engaging novel scratched this particular reading itch. I first discussed wanting to read Rathbone's debut novel in my essay about teenage protagonists.   As I wrote in that piece, the novel is narrated by 17-year-old Jake Higgins, who has been sent to a juvenile detention center in Northern Virginia for armed robbery.   The book is composed of Jake's diary entries about his time at the JDC.  With a lesser writer, this conceit might have exhausted me after 50 or so pages in, or at least shown its marionette's strings, but Rathbone is skilled enough to maintain the veracity of her character's  teenage-consciousness while still including electric and surprising descriptions that further my understanding of him.  Jake's a smart kid, but (thankfully) not overly precocious, and Rathbone's talents as a wordsmith easily become Jake's.  The woman who runs the computer room, Mrs. Dandridge, "is a pile of a person who smells like someone's weird house," and David, Jake's partner in a class project, "had this like, air-conditioned aggression that's more state-of-the-art than anyone else's."  On every page there was a line like these two to delight in. I loved the way this book was structured, as each notebook entry led me further into Jake's soul-deadening, suffocating world, with its lack of nutritious food, its too-cold rooms, and its awful inspirational posters.  They also led me further into Jake: his feelings for fellow inmate Andrea, who's been sent to the JDC for selling pot to elementary school kids; his hatred for his abusive, alcoholic stepfather, whom he calls Refrigerator Man; and his conflicted feelings about adults beyond the facility who lead "normal" and "productive" lives. I also loved this structure for how quickly and easily it led me through the story.  These were bite-sized chapters, each one an amuse bouche of clever and/or heartbreaking information.  I read Rathbone's debut in less than 24 hours, and, holy frijoles, was it fun.  The ending felt a touch rushed after such a wonderful build-up, but I didn't mind: I was too pleased to be reading a page-turner, and to be laughing aloud, to be reveling in so many sparkling turns of phrase.  Jake seems like a person who would appreciate the word disarticulate, as does Ms. Rathbone. I look forward to devouring her next book.
Staff Picks
| 2 books mentioned 7 3 min read
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Sport Staff Picks

The Scourge of the Peloton: On Tim Krabbé’s The Rider

Sport Staff Picks
July 10, 2014 | 2 books mentioned 6 min read
The ongoing Tour de France is the most novelistic of sporting events: There is ample character development with riders responding to three weeks of brutal tests; plenty of intrigue with opportunistic alliances and rivalries springing up; masterful set pieces like ascents up the denuded landscape of Mt. Ventoux and group sprints through medieval towns; villains, be they deranged fans sprinkling the road with tire-puncturing tacks or a certain disgraced Texan; some upstairs-downstairs class tensions between aristocratic team leaders and their toiling, water bottle-ferrying domestiques; and finally, a romance between man and exquisitely engineered, custom-fitted and gorgeous machine. Having already belabored the comparison, I’ll simply point out that the joys of watching the Tour and reading, say, a bit of Stendhal every day are not dissimilar, not least because both, however gripping, are inevitably plagued by longueurs. In some ways, the novel is a form about managing downtime, conserving energy to expend it more forcefully later, which strikes me as a good way to describe the riders sheltered in the peloton. By contrast, Tim Krabbé’s revered The Rider is for those who like their drama condensed rather than parceled out over several weeks. The short novella is the autobiographical story of Krabbé’s experience at the one-day Tour of Mont Aigoual, “the sweetest, toughest race of the season.” Among his more colorfully drawn opponents are a muscular rider who “looks like the giant who was always throwing Chaplin out of restaurants”; a lithe climbing specialist (and bank teller) whose favorite opponent is himself; and Krabbé’s arch-nemesis, the “wheel sucker” Reilhan, a promising talent and perpetual drafter (that is, one who conserves energy by sitting in a rider’s slipstream) who finds “the idea of doing anyone even the slightest favor” intolerable. Krabbé despises the “golden boy” Reilhan, but looks upon the few spectators on course with equal scorn. Spying a beautiful young woman, he instantly assigns her to the “generation of emblems” who is merely cheering for the “journalistic cliché” of the rider rather than the rider himself; finely attuned to such distinctions, the tetchy Krabbé gives himself over to a delightfully withering assessment: “Now that I’m five centimeters closer, I can see how pretty she really is. I hate her.” (He prefers the grazing cows who don’t bother to hide their indifference.) “No worse way to follow a road race than to be in it,” notes Krabbé, as if constructing the narrative is as difficult as the race itself. Riders sprint off early and disappear from view, and he cannot be certain how far ahead they are or if he will eventually spy them up ahead with a “feeling of impropriety: like accidentally catching a glimpse of a woman in the nude.” The race takes the leaders approximately four and one half hours, though time in racing is subjective: “Three more minutes. Oh, how easy it will look on paper,” Krabbé wryly notes of the race’s final kilometers, which to him feel like an eternity. The Tour covers 137 kilometers and traverses the Cévennes mountain range in Southern France, a region where as late as 1950, “some of the Catholic inhabitants thought Huguenots had only one eye, in the middle of their forehead...” These secluded high plateaus prove to be a wonderful setting for Krabbé’s depiction of road racing as a kind of anti-Enlightenment reaction, an imitation of life “without the corruptive influence of civilization.” The ordered procession of kilometers around which the narrative is organized fails to stem the race’s frequent illogical elements, how rival riders engage in “mutual self-destruction” and decisions are just as likely to be made through prudence as rashness: “Suddenly I know that I’m going to attack. The decision catches me off guard.” In a wonderful chapter in his book-length study of the bike-obsessed Beckett, Hugh Kenner describes what he calls the “Cartesian Centaur,” more prosaically a man on a bike, a being who “rises clear of the muddle in which Descartes leaves the mind-body relationship. The intelligence guides, the mobile wonder obeys, and there is no mysterious interpenetration of function.” Krabbé steps in to re-muddle things, staging a Cartesian battle between body and mind. Describing one of his fellow riders, he writes: Lebusque is really only a body. In fact, he’s not a good racer. People are made up of two parts: a mind and a body. Of the two, the mind, of course, is the rider. But the rider is a very peculiar kind of mind, at once supremely rational and supremely irrational. Any account of endurance sports must capture the descent into a personal, highly motivated, and masochistic madness, one that derives its impetus from defying, or rather ignoring, logic: “I’m only giving it everything I’ve got because no one says I have to. Only when there are arguments for something can there be arguments against it.” (Krabbé’s most famous novel, The Vanishing, delved into motiveless malignity rather than motiveless exertion.) Krabbé writes that he “started on this sport fifteen years too late,” and one gets the sense that his reputation as the “scourge of the peloton” stems from his desire to make up for lost time. At times he sounds like a Raymond Chandler character: “We straighten up, drift along, fifteen seconds to breathe just for the fun of it.” Indeed, there is something similar about the respective codes of honor among noir private detectives and semi-professional cyclists. Marlowe would doubtless be as disgusted by Reilhan’s free-riding as Krabbé and his fellow races are. Krabbé is also not without that amour-propre defining most athletes, from the biggest stars to weekend warriors: I view my wrists, stretched out in front of me to the bars, straight as ramrods. They’ve become so tanned, almost black in the wrinkles. The little hairs lie next to each other in wet rows, pointing away from me. I find my wrists incredibly beautiful. Vanity of vanities! What does man gain by the toil under which he toils under the sun? Beautiful, tanned wrists apparently. The Rider is often cited as the best book on cycling, its quotes about pain and suffering and endurance and honor quoted admiringly. Certainly, Krabbé’s notions of honor and courage are exhilarating, but they are also a little ridiculous, which only adds to the book’s charm. Krabbé sets the tone early on by proclaiming to be shocked by the emptiness of non-racers’ lives. After an extended paean to suffering in which he has shown his own literary prowess, he concludes: “Suffering you need; literature is baloney.” Debating whether to shift into a lower gear on a mountain becomes a competitive as well as a moral dilemma: “Shifting is a kind of painkiller, and therefore the same as giving up.” And a final piece of bombast: “Being a good loser is a despicable evasion, an insult to the sporting spirit. All good losers should be barred from practicing as port.” Each statement strikes me as being a bit silly while also demonstrating an incontrovertible truth that “strikes to the soul of the rider.” Sports writers often appeal to the chivalric tradition to capture the rare character of  the most accomplished athletes; the best instinctually grasp that Don Quixote furnishes a more fitting model -- noble and absurd -- than those bona fide knights of medieval romances. Of the legendary Jacques Anquetil, who would move his water bottle from his bike to the back of his jersey before climbs in the mistaken view that it lightened his bike, Krabbé, in a Quixotic formulation, notes that “What Anquetil needed was faith. And nothing is better for a firm and solid faith than being in the wrong.” What makes The Rider a particularly appealing sports novel is that for all his seriousness, Krabbé knows how to let the air out of his inflated rhetoric. Lebusque, the courageous but poor racer, makes one last, not-so-vicious “attack” 130 kilometers in: “...he bobs past us like an old, rotten surfboard.” And our noble, long suffering hero who pours his life into the trial? “You sprinted like a jackass,” notes one spectator. The harsh critic makes no mention of the rider’s beautiful wrists.
Sport Staff Picks
| 2 books mentioned 6 min read
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Staff Picks

Staff Picks: Niffenegger, Thewlis, Klam

Staff Picks
July 15, 2008 | 2 books mentioned 2 3 min read
The "staff picks" shelf in any good independent bookstore is a treasure trove of book recommendations. Unmoored from media hype and even timeliness, these books are championed by trusted fellow readers. With many bookselling alums in our ranks, we offer our own "Staff Picks" in a feature appearing irregularly.The Adventuress by Audrey Niffenegger recommended by EmilyIf I was going to attempt to classify Audrey Niffenegger's beautiful, strange, and self-described "novel in pictures," I might put it somewhere in the hinterlands of the graphic novel/comic book genre (that's where it was when I first saw it at Foyles bookshop in London), but it feels to me much more like a children's picture book for adults. It is the book's stunning aquatints that give it its surreal, haunted and haunting quality, rather than the minimal narration provided on facing pages. The titular Adventuress is the creation of an alchemist father, and her dreamlike adventures include a coerced marriage, a metamorphosis into a moth, an affair with Napoleon, and the birth of a cat-child. As in another of her novels in pictures, The Three Incestuous Sisters, Niffenegger explores the fragility of happiness, the psychic costs of freakishness, and the pain and destruction caused by betrayal, and - in spite of these darker interests - the possibility of peace and reconciliation. For those who know Marcel Dzama's work (made famous by a print series in McSweeney's), Niffenegger's is reminiscent but somewhat less intent on disturbing. I also find myself thinking of William Blake's work when I consider Niffenegger's - but perhaps that has only to do with her medium. A startling book, both for its form and for the story it tells.The Late Hector Kipling by David Thewlis recommended by AndrewWhen middle-aged British painter Hector Kipling begins to draw us into his life, that life is a thing to behold. A noted artist, living with the lovely and loving Eleni, doted on by his parents, Hector also enjoys the camaraderie of his closest friends, fellow artists themselves. Then, as Hector's world begins to unravel, there is a disconnect between his narrated thoughts and his actions, and in one gothic twist after another, we descend into darkness.Author David Thewlis is indeed British actor David Thewlis, veteran of Mike Leigh films, including a mesmerizing (and I believe largely improvised) turn in Naked. In his first novel, Thewlis' narration is vibrant, his dialogue caustic, and there's a beating heart beneath the lacerating prose.Please Excuse My Daughter by Julie Klam recommended by EdanI can count the number of memoirs I've read on three fingers, but I'd certainly read more if they were as funny and entertaining as this one. Ostensibly about how Klam's spoiled upbringing didn't prepare her for the harsh realities of the working world, Please Excuse My Daughter actually covers much more than that, from Klam's brief and ill-fated relationship with a Mafioso, to her torturous honeymoon with the delightful if diabetic Paul. This ain't serious reading, but it's heartfelt, and, man, is it hilarious and readable. This a Sunday-afternoon-in-July kind of book.
Staff Picks
| 2 books mentioned 2 3 min read
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12 comments:

  1. i just got into literary mysteries thanks to “Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer” by Wesley Stace. I never knew the genre could be so satisfying. These look great. You make a strong case for “Savages”

  2. Great post. I came across “Savages” thanks to its inclusion in the Tournament of Books this year and also found it hard to put down. I’ve checked out a couple of Winslow’s older books from the library and hope they end up similarly satisfying.

    I used to read a good bit of not-so-literary crime fiction in my teenage years thanks to the sorts of books my dad would read a lot and pass on to me, but I grew away from the genre as my tastes turned a bit more literary the past couple years. Books such as Savages, though, have drawn me a bit back into the genre, and I even find a great deal of entertainment in cozier mystery series such as the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series that aren’t necessarily the brainiest or most challenging, but at the same time don’t patronize the reader.

  4. Thanks for reinforcing my wanting to read Savages, and for putting Snowdrops on my list. I have two thoughts to extend what you said.

    Could much of what is called literary crime fiction be better called literate crime fiction? Literate meaning it doesn’t patronize the reader, insult the language, or strain credibility. It doesn’t have to be on the bleeding edge of what it means to be human, or reconstruct how we tell stories, to justify itself. The literate telling of a good story, about bad people, good people, and some who blur the boundary, is justification enough; calling Rankin, McDermid, Connelly, Mosley, Minna, or Mankell writers of literate crime fiction is sufficient praise for now.

    A useful distinction others have made is between crime fiction and noir fiction. In crime fiction, the crime upsets the moral order; in the end, the crime is solved and the order restored. In noir, no absolute moral order is recognized, and the partial demands of society, family, and the individual will fight for dominance. The Singer’s Gun seems to me to be more noir-ish than crime-ish, but still literary.

  5. Emily,
    Thanks for the heads-up on the latest from Don Winslow. Your mention of the weed-growing botanists reminds me of the only Winslow I’ve read, “California Fire and Life,” which is about sleazebags who set arson fires and the people who try to catch them. Terrific stuff. And it reminded me that the best novels are rarely about people stewing in their juices; they’re almost always about people who do actual work. I’m thinking about wheat-threshing in “Anna Karenina,” bomb de-fusing in “The English Patient,” glove-making in “American Pastoral,” to name just a few.
    Bill Morris

  6. I can’t wait to read Savages. It sounds a bit like the novel Baked, Mark Haskell Smith’s pot-crime-romp through LA, which is a super fun read.

  7. One of the most compelling crime thrillers that I have read is Power of the Dog by Don Winslow. Winslow used to be a DEA guy but left in disgust and then wrote Power of the Dog about the Mexican drug wars. This was in the nineties! When I read it a couple of years ago I thought one of the scenes was a bit too much…but then the next week, in the news, the exact same scenario was reported! This guy has seen it all.

  8. I love crime novels in general – right now I’m finishing Breeders by Barney Rostaing, and I like it a lot. You made “Savages” sound like an absolute must-read, so I think I’ll pick up a copy as soon as I’m done with Breeders!

  9. “The most recent books I’ve read in the genre confirm my long-held suspicion that attempting to categorize books by genre does readers a disservice; these books are no less literary than any of the other great books I’ve read this year, they just have crimes and/or guns in them. ”
    I couldn’t agree more – assigning labels can sometimes have the unintended effect of missing out on a great book or a great experience. Thanks for these two recommendations, I have added them to my summer reading list. Have you read Skylights and Screen Doors by Dean Smart? I would define it as un-categorizable as it is part memoir, part true crime, part just great writing. Another example of how genres can be misleading.

  12. These days crime fiction is the only stuff I read. Thanks for the reccomendations. I will look out for both Snowdrops and savages.

    I have had enouogh of reading the ‘classics’ to impress others and ‘improve myself’.
    I want my daily adrenalin rush and the only way is through crime fiction!

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Staff Picks

Staff Picks: Coen, Beatty, Egan, Gentlemen

Staff Picks
March 10, 2008 | 2 books mentioned 1 4 min read
The "staff picks" shelf in any good independent bookstore is a treasure trove of book recommendations. Unmoored from media hype and even timeliness, these books are championed by trusted fellow readers. With many bookselling alums in our ranks, we offer our own "Staff Picks" in a feature appearing irregularly.Gates of Eden by Ethan Coen recommended by AndrewA treat for fans of the multiple-Oscar-winning Coen brothers, and for anyone who likes to spend some time in that grey area where the darkly comic and the absurdly tragic intersect. Published ten years ago, this collection of prose from the Ethan half of the Coen brothers comes from the same delightfully twisted mind that gave us rapid-fire gangster pastiches like Miller's Crossing, and tough-talking old-time men-of-action like Michael Lerner's studio honcho in Barton Fink.There's a story of a boxer who never manages to lay a punch and who gets caught up in a war between rival gangsters. Another tale takes us back to Minneapolis (the Coen's home town) where the Mafia have decided to set-up shop. There are some plays in this collection too, loaded with savagely funny dialogue. You can almost hear Steve Buscemi or John Goodman or John Turturro or any of the other Coen regulars sinking their chops into these characters.The White-Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty recommended by GarthThis is one of those novels I loved so much circa my senior year of high school that I'm almost afraid to reread it, in case it's not as great as I remembered. Thumbing back through the first few chapters, I'm noticing that Beatty shares a riff-intensive prose style with Colson Whitehead and Jonathan Lethem. Unlike those writers, however, he seems more inclined to pursue satire than high art. Still, Beatty's natural emotional pallette - a kind of pissed-off innocence - and his poet's eye for the absurd, pushes his story beyond the didactic. Narrator Gunnar Kaufman may transform himself from scholarship athlete to celebrity-poet-messiah (see? I said it was satire), but he remains, underneath, someone we know and care about... especially when we ourselves are pissed-off innocents. Is it premature to recommendThe White Boy Shuffle as a graduation present?The Keep by Jennifer Egan recommended by EdanThe Keep by Jennifer Egan manages to be both inventive and readable, character and plot driven, playful with genre conventions but also straightforward in its prose style. Egan draws you into a Gothic tale of an old, creepy castle, and the reunion of two cousins with a vicious secret between them, but it's not long before the narrator announces himself as an outsider to the story (or is he?!), pulling another, wholly different, storyline into the mix. The threads of the various plots converge marvelously at the novel's end, and you can't help but love how fun this book is - fun and smart.The Modern Gentleman: A Guide to Essential Manners, Savvy & Vice by Phineas Mollod and Jason Tesauro recommended by TimothyNot all self-help books are beholden to the latest new-age or pop psychology craze. In The Modern Gentleman: A Guide to Essential Manners, Savvy & Vice, authors Phineas Mollod and Jason Tesauro offer timeless, entertaining tips on how today's man can improve his wardrobe, grooming habits and love of literature, while keeping in mind his affinity for sexual intimacy, a day at the track and alcohol consumption. The book's wit is second only to its practicality, from how to host a memorable dinner party to advice on handling inquiries from a potential mate about past lovers (charts included). The Modern Gentleman also makes for lively conversation when guests spot it casually displayed among coffee table reading material.Some choice excerpts:Honking - When lively conversation in the cabin boils over in delight, give a medium burst to alert the heavens to such joy.Swearing - There's a high degree of cliche among cursers. Mix and match the filthy classics to create a string of fresh phrases that highlight your keen wit and local tongue.Hiccoughing - If at the cinema, suggest the hiccougher overstuff his mouth with buttery popcorn until breathing is labored and then insert one Milk Dud for good measure. While this procedure may prove ineffective, it is delicious.Bow ties - Never divulge to a rogue the bow tie's true ease of knot - let's keep it between us gentlemen, shall we?This book is both a lyrical masterpiece and a cultural gem.
Staff Picks
| 2 books mentioned 1 4 min read
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Staff Picks

Staff Pick: Born to Run by Christopher McDougall

Staff Picks
October 18, 2011 | 2 books mentioned 2 4 min read
Since I became a mother four months ago, my method of choosing reading material has changed.  Firstly, the book in question must be what John Gardner called profluent; that is, readable, one page pushing me to the next and the next, until, in a rush, I'm finished.  A book that I can't put down is a book that I'll want to read even if I haven't slept, even if my nipples are sore and my hair is matted with throw-up.  (Motherhood and college aren't that different, you see.)  Because I'm severely sleep-deprived, the prose of said book can't be too dense.  I need to understand what's happening, okay?   Lastly, the book can't be too heavy.  I don't mean this figuratively, I mean that the book must be light enough to read with one hand, as I will need the other one to hold my son as he nurses.  He nurses a lot.  I tried to read The Art of Fielding and my wrist almost broke. This is how I started reading smart crime novels.  First I went on a Tana French tear, and then I ate up Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin, which added Mississippi and snakes to its tale of dead bodies and a misunderstood outcast. These were well-written, completely manageable Mom Books.  I re-read The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury, which, with its snap-shot scenes and meandering plot, didn't have profluence so much as a poetic realism that kept me in its clutches. And then I decided to try some nonfiction.  I'd recently given up reality television (er, most of it) after Rachel Zoe said "literally" for the zillionth time, and I thought reading a true story would scratch the itch of confessionals, cat fights, and the shock that the drama is all too real. I chose Christopher McDougall's Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen because it was a Word Bookstore Favorite at this year's Brooklyn Book Festival.  I didn't attend the festival, but the store listed it in their e-newsletter as the book "that can change your life." (I see now that the key word is "can"--not "will."  Oh those cagey booksellers!)  Since I'd been considering getting back into running, I figured it might help motivate me. Let me get this out of the way: I hate running.  I did it a few times a week for about six months before I got pregnant, and I was happy to stop.  I never enjoyed it: it hurt, it was boring, and I always worried about getting a sunburn.  I much prefer exercise that requires learning a routine; if there's a mirror to admire and curse myself as I do so, all the better.  However, I liked the idea of reading about running.   A well-written depiction of physical exertion is supremely satisfying; it's like watching The Biggest Loser, bowl of ice cream in hand. Born to Run is about a tribe in Mexico called the Tarahumara who run incredibly long distances with grins on their faces and nary an injury.  Like all good nonfiction, though, it's about far more.  The book seems to simultaneously dilate and contract--its scope becomes bigger as it focuses on smaller, personal stories.  As it progresses it folds in more and more information and background: we're looking for a cadaverous-looking white man who runs with the Indians, known as  Caballo Blanco; we're discovering the lifestyle, diet and outlook of the Tarahumara; we're learning the biographies of some of the best ultra-marathoners in the world, such as the keyed up and loquacious Barefoot Ted, who, you guessed it, runs without shoes; we're meeting scientists who might have figured out why we run in the first place; we're celebrating the beauty and insanity of the human race.  By the last fifty pages I couldn't wait to go to a dinner party to share some of these amazing stories and facts.  Everything I said to my husband began with: "Did you know..." My brain was aglow. I also liked McDougall's own role in the book.  At the story's opening he's a casual jogger with a bum foot, and at the end he's competing in a Tarahumara race.  Much of his struggle reminded me of novel-writing.  His trainer tells him, "Just beat the course.  No one else, just the course," and that advice helps him reach the finish line.  These are also wise words for anyone who's mired in the first (or tenth) draft of a book: put away thoughts of the larger literary world, its capricious machinations, its fellow writers, and focus on the writing itself.  And, most importantly, don't forget to smile.  McDougall argues that the runner who approaches the act with joy, and who faces the world at large with that same open heart, is better runner.  I'd say the same applies to the writer.  It's no coincidence that Anton Chekhov considered compassion a requirement of fiction writing. The fact that I haven't yet returned to running is no fault of this book. I will. I promise.  When I do, I will keep my gait and posture in mind, and I will approach the challenge as a child would--that is, like it's not a challenge at all. Until then, I'd rather be reading.
Staff Picks
| 2 books mentioned 2 4 min read
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