biolog

Most novels today are just over three-hundred pages. Are three-hundred pages of words and sentences a golden mean, a naturally occurring length any given work of fiction requires to complete itself? Is this only true in my lingua franca? The alternative is less romantic. To paraphrase Wood, the generous length of the average 300 page novel enables the author to accumulate quiddity gradually and persistently, so that we gather a real sense of each of the characters. Another function or aspect of the novel is patterning: repetition on a theme spread across many chapters, sometimes as an extended metaphor, but not necessarily. Patchett patterns the transcending power of love. In Bel Canto, we’re told that love is blind to culture, specifically that of race, age, nationality, social class and especially language. Dear lord, if not love, then what is immune to the effects of globalization?

Bel Canto, a languishing memesis on music, and to a lesser extent food and sex, fails to account for the realities of its own plot. It was as if the author of Eat, Pray, Love liberated herself further from the only rule of the memoir and wrote a consumer-friendly fictional sequel about her trip to a South American backwater. That is to say more intellectual sophistication for the glossily literate. So why didn’t I like it? Put another way, what made me put down my New Yorker, turn off PBS, and dish out cash for this novel? It is because I bought it at a used book store, and used book stores have a lord of the manor effect on me. I can, for once, relax, floating from rack to isle to bin to pile in easy certitude that whatever catches my fancy will be affordable. I’m guilty of judging a book by its cover. In this case, I spotted the shiny gold Faulkner Award seal on the front.

At the outset, Bel Canto has all the trappings and urgency of a le Carre book, economical writing, a revolutionary setting in an undeveloped country, the ruling class and destitute put in chiarascuro, an exotic countryside, and a worldly casting worthy of a UN summit. The Russians smoke and play cards; the French cook and complain about the local vin; the Japanese are softspoken, gentle and intelligent; the American is a famous Opera singer as vain as any American celebrity; the Swiss of all things is employed by the Red Cross; and the generic natives are either incompetent leaders or destitute terrorists. These terrorists in name only quickly befriend their captors, some falling in love. Only those on the outside, the government and media, call them terrorists. However, Patchett tells us nothing about these outsiders save for the disgruntled Red Cross worker who makes for an impotent mediator but effective errand boy for the American celebrity.

There is one significant distinction between what Patchett wrote and what le Carre writes. It’s the same distinction that separates so-called literary fiction from genre fiction: a gaping plot-shaped hole in the middle of the story. (to normalize this deficiency, genre fiction is labeled “plot driven,” and marginalized while Pynchonesque rants, Wallacesque meanderings, and other selfaware struggles with authenticity provide backfill) Over at Books and Bicycles, it was said “What strikes me most about [Bel Canto] is the way a description of its plot captures absolutely nothing of the feeling of reading it.  It’s a book that has hostages and terrorists, and yet that’s not what it’s about at all.” Indeed, Patchett’s plot-staging is like a movie trailer that has little in common with the film it’s designed to sell: a marketing device that goes like this:

In an unnamed Central American country, that is most certainly Lima, a group of elite international businessmen and bureaucrats gather in the vice presidents mansion ostensibly to celebrate the birthday of a Japanese mogul, take in some opera, champagne and caviar. A merry band of underage terrorists, in this case, a completely undeserved title, crash the party after the Soprano’s encore, of course, without killing a single guard, all of whom are outside, by squeezing through ventilation ducts, as any western will surely have a ready-made, hollywood-inspired visulization of this exact scene. That’s it until the last five ten pages. As a side note, let this be a lesson to the have and have-mores the world over: that invitation-only black-tie event in a remote jungle manor belonging to an unpopular vice president of an oppressed country is a crisis-in-waiting not an enchanted evening.

I was drinking liberally from the internet fire hose a few weeks ago and came across a curious post at Critical Mass: A blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors . Someone on the circular board of directors was chatting with her favorite overburdened author mom over tea and crumpets in New York.

When I noted that Groff’s first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, was a finalist for the Orange Prize for New Writers, she pointed out that the Orange Prize is specifically for women, and that sent us off on a riff about the gender gap in literature. Typically, she observed with a certain poetic license, awards go to fiction that is written from the point of view of a man, concerns war, and has very short sentences—Hemingwayesque, as it were. In Groff’s view, this means women will automatically get the short stick in terms of their literary stature. Stature is a hard thing to measure, of course. But consider John Updike and the prominence of his obituary in print and on television when he died. Clearly, Updike was a big gun of the written word to anyone who was halfway paying attention. Would any woman wordsmith (Morrison? Didion?) merit equal media firepower?

By the way, I don’t think she could have found a worse example of Hemingwayeque writing than Updike’s. Also, obviously when Didion reaches the end of her tether there will be much fanfare. For those of us who weren’t around in 1968, Slouching Toward Bethlehem is as close as we get to what Hunter Thompson described as “riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.” But what to make of her larger point–the idea that subject matter, well, matters?

But there are other reasons, too, and Groff’s mention of subject matter may have something to do with it: Fiction that deals with the big topics of the day, not the domestic sphere, is more readily imbued with the gravitas of great literature—pace War and Peace, not to mention Don DeLillo. Sometimes the formula works, just not always.

Ahh yes, lamenting the paucity and low status of the Romance novel, a novel women are “internally wired” to write, no doubt. Forgetting the misogyny and begging the question, does tackling those big-as-Russia topics of the day make your novel somehow more worthy? Is this another way of saying plot matters? I can’t imagine this thought not going through Patchett’s mind at some point in the writing process. Her story was removed from time and place and so are her characters.

Other than being populated with poor brown people, there was no historical or cultural background in her unamed South American country. The majority of the rebel force were children. Even the adults, the generals, had childish half-baked ideas followed by half-assed implementation and a nievete that was largely a matter of inexperience. Their plan reminded me of the Iraq War: We’re here, now what? Let’s not think abou it.

At the same time, however, as a reader investing in this book you make an attempt to empathize with their plight. That brings us to the issue of narrative viewpoint. Patchett chooses 3rd person limited. More typical is 3rd person omniscient, but you can’t call it omniscient when a character’s inner workings are not aired. Additionally, when their action or lack of action deviates from readers’ expectations, we’ll eventually expect justification. To somewhat compensate Patchett has characters play-off one another with natural, well-executed dialogue. However, her limiting access to the psyche of a good many of her characters left them frustratingly enigmatic. I suppose one could understand this has Patchett’s attempt at alienating her readers in the same way her characters were alienated: from celebrity and Fortune 500 status to lumpen spectacles trapped in an ornate Victorian fish bowl.

Her list of characters, all failing in their own way to reckon their plight, are like the musicians on the Titanic, more absurd than tragic. Despite having their world flipped upside-down, the kidnapees are unable to shake free of the trite responsibilities of job and social status. The translator who is loyal to his boss despite compensation, and the opera singer smuggling song-sheets instead of weapons. Noteble is their remarkable failure to even conceive of, much less attempt, an escape.

It doesn’t take too much to see the secluded mansion enlisted as a metaphor for entitlement-induced ennui, a mental gated-community, acting as both fortress and prison. None of the captors come to terms with the danger they’re in, even after it’s too late, as if being kept against their will was not a far remove from the walls already in place. The kidnappers seem to suffer the same naivete, as if they were lulled to complacency by the sound of the Sopranos voice. But I don’t buy it. I don’t buy that this is what Patchett set-out to do, to create undeserving characters who eventually gain freedom not because they fought and suffered for it, but for the mundane fact that they were white and wealthy. That would be a subversive novel, and Bel Canto is a love-prevails-against-all-odds novel, and I still shudder over what has to be the most glarlingly pasted-on happing ending I’ve ever come across in a book.

This is Bel Canto, an unlikely love story–the stuff of the domestic sphere–that flirts with war and terror–the stuff of great literature.

Up next: Roberto BolaÑo’s The Savage Detectives

“Where the Wild Things Are” is a Spike Lee spliff. Here’s the theatrical trailer set to an Arcade Fire song.

The book is short, just a handful of sentences, and has a familiar theme: the power of imagination. What saves it from cliche is the fantastic illustrations. I have a vivid memory of those watercolor and ink monsters warping my own imagination as a child. And as a child, I always blinked. I actually remember it being controversial among parents as too graphic for their impressionable little pups to handle. I say reality is too impressionable, and some fantasies are better for their horns and claws.

I’ve been acused of being too conservative over this, but since Lee’s using the same title in his movie, he ought to tell the same story. Anything less is crass marketing manipulation. As it goes, his success will be determined by an effective translation of this giddy fear to the screen. Do it for the children, Lee.

The following is a rejection letter from the hipster literary rag N+1, based out of New York. The initial flavor is economical and thus slightly aloof, with a notable aftertaste of excuse-making, crafted to soothe the ego.

Dear Tony:

Thank you for sending First Responder to n+1. Unfortunately, we will not be able to publish it. As a biannual, n+1 is only able to publish a small number of fiction selections each year. We do appreciate your submission and wish you the best of luck placing your work elsewhere.

Sincerely,
The Editors

I submitted my short story, “First Responder,” in December.

Firsties!

One impression of the NHGRI sponsored seminar: has the once mighty Drosophila become so blase as to not even get a tip of the hat at a genetics seminar? I would expect as much from a bunch of paleontologists or ecologists, but shame on you geneticists. I wouldn’t interpret this as model bashing, because Mus and Danio had bit rolls in a few of the talks. I think the message is that genomics has moved on. We are now at a stage where researchers are becoming intrepid Victorian specimen collectors, chasing down rare and exotic flora and fauna for their private collection. I thought the smartest point made was that now even humans are a model system, or, rather, everything is a model!

Second: Genetic drift got short shrift. Mutation and random fluctuations in the frequencies of alleles or haplotypes seem like a worthwhile topic when discussing Darwin’s legacy. I would have liked to see more on theory incorporated into the discussion. On a related note, one of the speakers stated that negative mutations were the most common form of mutation. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that he either mispoke or I misheard him.

David Kingsley talked about skeletal genes. He made the point that changes in regulatory regions rather than coding regions allow for dramatic phenotypic variation, while keeping it confined to specific tissues. For example, the same genes involved in embryonic development in sticklebacks also regulate armor plating and melanin. Mutations in the corresponding genes in mice and humans are often lethal. Sticklebacks are probably not a lab animal: being anadromous I doubt they can breed them in the lab yet, so all the work is done in hotel bathrooms in Alaska.

There was a bit of junk DNA bashing from Elaine Ostrander, but that’s what makes these events fun. I’m sure if Larry Moran was there, he’d show her what snarkyness really is:

Total Essential (so far) 4.5%
Total Junk (so far) 54%

David Haussler was the third of six speakers at the Darwin @ 200 seminar. Since I saw at least one phlogenetic twig during the presentation, I would hope that the arborist would tackle Haussler’s talk.

A quick note though, either one of the two Davids or Ajit Varki speculated that humans as a species may be immunizing ourselves against the tooth and claw logic of natural selection. I’m not suggesting that natural selection is a tautology, but by what means they have reason to suspect that “natural” selective forces are quantitatively decreasing across the species from Bangor to Bangladesh is a mystery to me. I imagine that what is being put forward is a semantic rather than a real argument.