'O' - A Presidential Novel

When the novel Primary Colors by 'Anonymous' was released in early 1996 a huge debate raged for months about the identity of the author. The book, like its subject, a fictionalised Bill Clinton, was compelling. Nothing was spared. We were titillated by his numerous affairs and infractions, and got loads of juicy, political tidbits involving barely disguised but utterly recognisable players. Most of all we got exquisite glimpses of Bill and Hillary's stressed, earthy and psychologically tangled relationship. It was great stuff, obviously written by a privileged insider.


Eventually, Joe Klein, Newsweek's senior political columnist, fessed up about his authorship - after being outed by an academic who had carefully compared writing styles. It was all great fun, and the huge six-month run the mystery got in the press rocket fuelled the book's sales. It was a great marketing ploy - one of the most successful ever for a non-fiction title.


So now we get 'O' - a Presidential Novel, by Anonymous, which the publisher, Simon and Schuster, has undoubtedly positioned within the same marketing frame, hoping that the same media dynamic would apply. Except that the author's identity has been discovered virtually on publication - Mark Salter, former advisor and speech writer to John McCain. So in a way the book has been still-born, the public enthusiasm rather tepid. Mark who? A Republican?


But please don't be put off. This is a seriously good and enthralling read. It's for political junkies perhaps - there are no 'revelations' about Obama's private life, no corruption, no guns, no marital dramas, no congressional dirty deals, no scenes of high emotional intensity. What we get instead is an insider's account of the imagined but riveting presidential election campaign of 2012.


It's a totally different beast to Primary Colors, which has obviously thrown a lot of reviewers. Dennis Altman, professor of politics at Latrobe found it dull, uninteresting and disappointing. He was anticipating another Joe Klein, dirty laundry expose. Well, it's just not that sort of book. The reviewer for The New York Times was also unimpressed. He dismissed it as "trite, implausible and decidedly unfunny" with passages of "very bad romance-novel prose".


Well, I beg to differ. Sure, some of the prose is a bit clotted, but I found it a riveting examination, in minute detail, of a political campaign, and the people running it, something we don't very often get to see. We're up close with these people, living with them, feeling the nuances of their emotions and feelings as the campaigns unfold. The main character is Obama's campaign manager, under extraordinary pressure. Key players include some savvy, clever journalists, mainly working for newer, online publications, which the campaign managers, on both sides, fairly obviously detest. Arianna Huffington, for example, is mercilessly shredded! 

Despite his Republican background, the author, Salter, is scrupulously fair to both sides. He's no lover of the Tea Party, and especially of Sarah Palin. He loathes these people. His Republican candidate is an thoroughly orthodox, intelligent and likable human being (which begs the question - is such a person likely to emerge in 2012?). He is obviously a fan of Obama, portraying him, his policies, ideas, competence and gravitas extremely sympathetically.

This is a sensitive and insightful rendering of a political drama obviously yet to unfold. But it rings so true.

So who wins the 2012 election? It's a close race, the polls give it 'too close to call', and the book ends the day prior to polling day!

As I said, for the political junkies!

Wonderful new Boxing Day movies



The King's Speech is well worth seeing, although you sort of have to put up with all the emotional tics of the blue rinse set who mostly make up the audience - all their oohs and aahs as the (later) Queen Mum and the little royals (Elizabeth and Margaret) are played as ever so loving and cutesy. This movie is sentimentality writ large. Nothing is spared to tug at the heart strings of even the most cynical in the audience, let alone the aged and faded monarchists flocking to it. Colin Firth is suberb as George VI, and even Geoffrey Rush, of whom I've never been a great fan, portrays a likeable Aussie without stooping to the cliched Bazza Mackenzie oafishness. Hugely enjoyable. 

I debated with myself whether I'd see Blue Valentine, as I don't relish overripe scenes of domestic strife a la Americain. But this exceptionally good movie rises above the usual cliches of the genre. Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling should both get Oscars for their performances. They manage to convey the rawness and richness of these ordinary working class lives, yet with a subtlety that simply left me speechless. And there is so much going on in this movie, that only occurs to you afterwards, maybe days afterwards. It is simply brilliant. A classic.

Somewhere, the new one from the marvellous Sofia Coppola, is receiving both highly positive and highly negative reviews from a variety of critics. Margaret and David both loved it, but Jim Schembri from The Age hated it, calling it 'cosmically ponderous'! I had to see it! I was fully expecting to agree with Jim, who nailed it on the new Harry Potter after all, and he reminded me how much I disliked Coppola's Marie Antoniette.

Nevertheless, he was wrong. Somewhere is every bit as good as Lost in Translation, if not better. It's a distillation of all Coppola's obsessions, and done with poetry and enormous suggestiveness. Virtually every frame is full of resonance. Lives of quiet desperation, with little meaning or connectedness, a painful emptiness, a constant longing - these are her themes. Here again I've been thinking about this movie for days, relishing it and marvelling at how she managed to convey so much with such economy. Just see it.

For some light relief I thought I'd see the new French romcom Heartbreaker, starring the impossibly handsome Romain Duris and Johnny Depp's lovely French wife Valerie Paradis. I enjoyed it a lot. Three and a half stars.

My Top 10 books 2010

Here, in order, are my Top 10 lists for fiction and non-fiction for 2010. I've posted reviews of most of these titles on this blog previously.

FICTION:

Eva Hornung, Dog Boy
Ian McEwan, Solar
David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Hans Fallada, Alone in Berlin
Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence
Philip Pullman, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
Paul Murray, Skippy Dies
Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones
Jeremy Chambers, The Vintage and the Gleaning

NON-FICTION:

John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Race of a Lifetime
Michael Lewis, The Big Short
Sarah Ellison, War at the Wall Street Journal
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nomad
Tony Blair, The Journey
Geoffrey Robinson, The Case of the Pope

John B Thompson, Merchants of Culture

Timothy Wu, The Master Switch

George Megalogenis, Trivial Pursuit

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

It's been three months since I've posted. I'm sorry. It's not that I haven't read anything. In fact I've read some excellent stuff, mainly non-fiction. For example, Tony Blair's exceptionally interesting memoirs; Geoffrey Robertson's persuasive and damning indictment of Pope Benedict's refusal to radically confront the huge problem of paedophilia in the Catholic priesthood; Paul Berman's Flight of the Intellectuals, which is a fairly savage critique of currently chic Islamic theologian Tariq Ramadan and his liberal stance in regard to Islam and its place in Western societies; and John Thompson's very interesting survey and analysis of today's US and UK book publishing industry - Merchants of Culture (which I'm reviewing in the international publishing journal LOGOS, out in November). 

But my review today is of Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom. I'd read his first novel The Corrections when it came out in 2001 and went on to win the prestigious National Book Award. I enjoyed it, but can't say I loved it. I found it rather dry and frequently tedious, and most of the characters cold and distant. Technically of course it was brilliant. But Freedom, in my humble opinion, is a far more interesting and accomplished work. Without a shadow of a doubt, this book will become a classic of American literature. Put simply, it's spellbinding. It's absolutely enthralling. It's easily the best American novel I've read in years - up there with the classic Middlesex, and probably better.

It's the story of two young people who are attracted to each other in college, and then marry, for better or worse. They have two kids, who, unfortunately but fairly universally, develop personalities of their own. They all grow, develop careers, interact with society and politics. They have wide and varied family networks, and friends supportive and dangerous. Franzen's genius is in the way he creates full, living, breathing, passionate and thoroughly modern human beings. The ripe, combative richness of modern America is here - the passionate liberal versus conservative politics, the anger of middle America, the educated Eastern elites versus the resentful working class. It's Bush and Cheney's America - 9/11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the coming of Obama.

But, in the end, Freedom is not a political book. It's a novel of love and hope - the deep, profound connections between human beings that bind and last, no matter the pain, the wrenching divisions, the awful disappointments. Read this book for the dialogue alone - the arguments, the angry phone calls, the sheer intelligence and emotional intensity of their verbal interactions. It's spellbinding. The writing is magnificent. Witty, alive, ambitious.

The ending, which was absolutely right, had me in tears. I could barely find my way to the scotch bottle. Much American literature has always struck me as overripe. Everything is bigger, larger than life, more intense and dramatic than any ordinary reader has ever experienced. The English are subtle, understated. But Freedom, although thoroughly within the American tradition, has a sureness and credibility that resonates.

Read this book over the Xmas holiday season. It's 562 pages long, so you need the time get involved in its world.

You won't regret it, and you will emerge a far better human being.

Brett Easton Ellis: Imperial Bedrooms

Imperial Bedrooms is a sequel to Brett Easton Ellis' first published novel Less Than Zero (1985). Like Salinger's Catcher in the Rye thirty four years previously, LTZ seemed to define the zeitgeist of a generation, and propelled the 21 year old Ellis to literary superstardom, an exaltation he has struggled with, and indeed creatively mined, ever since.


Many critics seem to think Ellis essentially is this self-referential teller of the one evolving story - the story of his rich Los Angeles friends and their aimless, destructive rituals, and his place as an author at once participating and observing. But I don't think this really defines Ellis at all.


To me he wrote one of the greatest English novels of the post-war age, a true classic - American Psycho. When this was first published in 1991 most countries, including Australia, banned it outright, or only allowed it to go on sale if shrink-wrapped!! I was living in Queensland at the time and simply couldn't get it. A friend sent me a copy from the US (this was pre-Amazon days).


American Psycho was a savage, devastating critique of late 20th century decadence. A searing, powerful, relentless indictment of meaningless, indulgent, voyeuristic lives. Many readers were warned off it because of the violence. Too bad really. They missed the entire point. Your nose had to be rubbed in it - that was the point.


So where does the new novel Imperial Bedrooms fit within the Ellis oeuvre?


It's a disappointment. Nowhere near the power or resonance of American Psycho, and missing the freshness and surprise (perhaps this is to be expected) of Less Than Zero. The same Ellis obsessions are there, however. His young friends from 25 years ago are now power-players in Hollywood, making B-grade movies, attending endless parties, awards nights, launches, etc, but still as vacuous, bored and desperate as ever. They have become the Champagne dregs, with all the appurtenances of material success - BMWs, BlackBerries, fake tans, fake faces - but none of the substantiality of character. There are no wives or kids, just endless, meaningless sex with young, grasping, aspiring actors. The only coinage the women have is their c..t. The main character, Clay, is a sick, perverted, sexual predator. Truly an ugly human being.. 


Ellis is a chronicler of surface glitter. But there is always menace, a sense of being caught up in something larger, an overriding evil. Violence is always happening or threatening, and is as meaningless as the glitter and baubles.

Unlike in Less Than Zero there is an unfolding dramatic narrative in Imperial Bedrooms, but it is less than believable and rather contrived. I thought at one stage I was reading a script for Days of Our Lives! There was dialogue but no communication. But then again, this is quintessentially Ellis.

If you like Ellis you'll like this book. I certainly liked it, although it's far from his best.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

I must admit I approached this new novel from English novelist David Mitchell with a certain amount of trepidation. I hadn't read his widely praised Cloud Atlas, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2004, but I knew it was regarded as a 'difficult read'.

Well, his new novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is absolutely brilliant. This book will be soon regarded as a classic. It is a rich, absorbing, highly dramatic and hugely enjoyable saga of life and society set in a secluded, anti-Western and anti-Christian Japan in 1799. The sea-faring Dutch have managed to negotiate a commercial relationship with the isolationist Japanese authorities, and have been allowed to set up a small piece of 'foreign territory' on a small island in the port of Nagasaki.

The intense relationships between the Dutch themselves and between them and the Japanese provide most of the drama of the book. The dialogue is superb, enlivened by an earthy crudity that is frequently funny and, of course, downright racist in today's terms:

'The jaundiced pygmies'.

'What was that frog-croak?...how I hate a man...who farts in French and expects applause'.

Towards the end of the book the British get involved, and carry on as only the British know how ('So let's give this despotic backwater a taste of the coming century..'). But 'untainted' Japan is an equally flawed and brutal society, with sheer evil and hypocrisy riddled throughout.

'If only, Shiroyama dreams, human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders'. 

The re-creation of that moment in history two centuries ago brings home some basic truths that Mitchell constantly underscores. The ordinary lives of ordinary human beings today are qualitatively better on just about every level and on any measure. There is no romanticising of the past going on here. In terms of medicine (there were no x-rays or antibiotics so people suffered awfully from common complaints we can cure so easily now), communications (replies to letters took three years to arrive), education (superstition and sheer ignorance had awful consequences), social structures (slaves and the lower classes were treated with abject cruelty), law and justice (corruption reigned supreme), and international relations (power and subjugation ruled) - compared to these brutish realities the modern world is a highly civilised place.

We tend to forget this. Mitchell rubs our noses in it.

In the end this book celebrates the value of honorable and courageous men and women, individuals who stand up for what is right, and thus power the progress of liberation for all.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet  is an enormously satisfying novel, and I urge you to read it. You won't be disappointed.

I predict a shortlisting for the Booker, for sure.

Recent Books Worth Reading

David Marr's Quarterly Essay on Kevin Rudd is a fascinating read. It's a sensitive and incisive overview of the driving forces in Rudd's life and career, and the final 20 or so pages (of 86 in all) are simply superb. Buy it for these alone. As a writer Marr has an extraordinary ability to cut through his expertly assembled material with arresting short, sharp jabs that give the narrative a punchiness that keeps it constantly moving and interesting. Many lesser writers would find writing a lengthy piece on someone as intrinsically deadening as Rudd an almighty challenge!

Here's a typical para:

 'Hours aren't the issue. Bureaucrats don't mind working hard, long days. They object to feeding material in when nothing much comes out; demands made at midnight that might be made at midday; wild flurries of activity driven by petty media squalls; calls for detailed briefing on fourth-rank issues that need never go near a prime minister; and urgent requests for material they know to be sitting in Rudd's office already. They mind wasting their time.' (p.72)

You don't have to agree with Marr's conclusion that Rudd is 'a politician with rage at his core, impatient rage.' But you will have to acknowledge that he has painted a truly revealing portrait of a profoundly irritating man.

Young, gay Brisbane writer Benjamin Law has written a truly enjoyable memoir of growing up in a rather eccentric Chinese-Australian family from the Sunshine coast.  His mother, Jenny, is hilarious, a wonderful creature, full of quirks and personality, and the rest of his family - five kids and an absent father - are pretty much the same. It's brilliantly written, with a deceptively light touch, often refreshingly crude, and frequently LOL funny.

Paul Harding's Tinkers won this year's Pulitzer Prize for fiction so I was keen to read it. It is quite a short book of 191 pages, but it is not an easy read. It's highly literary and tightly written as a poem. You need to be in the mood for this. If you feel miserable, profoundly ordinary and insignificant, and prone to wonder if it's all worth it, then you will be in absolutely the right frame of mind to enjoy it. It's a meditation on ordinariness, on little people with little, seemingly unnoticed and barely meaningful lives, as they just go about tinkering.

I can do no better than quote Marilynne Robinson's brilliant prose from the blurb: 'Tinkers is truly remarkable. It achieves and sustains a unique fusion of language and perception. Its fine touch plays over the textured richnesses of very modest lives, evoking again and again a frisson of deep recognition, a sense of primal encounter with the brilliant, elusive world of the senses. It confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls'.

If you read and enjoyed Scott Turow's magnificent bestseller Presumed Innocent, which was published in 1987, then you simply have to read his just published follow-up Innocent. Turow is a (still practicing) criminal lawyer and his fiction is imbued with the law and its players - the court system, the prosecution, the defense, and of course the guilty and the innocent. But what gives the the books their power is his ability to craft believable characters in all their emotional depth and complexity. The drama derives from them and their interaction as much as it does from the inevitable playing out of the legal processes in the courtroom.

Don't read this follow-up until you read the original. Do yourself a favor - take a week off and read them both.

I read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography Infidel when it was published in 2007, and was profoundly moved by it. It was the story of her life as an intelligent girl in a Muslim family in the deeply tribal and war-ravaged African country of Somalia, and how she eventually escaped to the Netherlands and discovered the liberating philosophies and lifestyles of the West. Essentially the book was a relentless assault on Islam, and particularly its treatment of women.

Nomad, just released, tells of her time as a controversial and outspoken parliamentarian in Holland and her eventual migration to America after she received serious death threats from fanatical Muslims. It is a seriously enjoyable book. Ali is a highly intelligent and gifted writer, and like any convert, passionate about the new life of political, religious and intellectual freedom she has discovered. It is impossible not to cheer her on. The obstacles she overcomes are legion.

Yet, Hirsi Ali presents us in the West with an almighty challenge: she is a denouncer of all things Islamic. Not just the so-called Islamofascists, who commit terrorist atrocities; who murder their own wives, daughters and sisters to protect male 'honour'; who mutilate young female genitals as part of a cruel circumcision rite; who force women to cover themselves from head to foot in heavy, hot gowns, devoid of any religious meaning; who proclaim murderous fatwas against Booker prize-winning novelists and Danish cartoonists.

Ali is not just against these. She is against Islam as such. She does not believe there can be any such thing as 'Moderate Islam'. Westernised, moderate, Muslim theologians are 'trapped in confusion...because they want to maintain that the Quran is perfect scripture, and that all of its key injunctions - kill the infidels, ambush them, take their property, convert them by force; kill homosexuals and adulterers; condemn Jews; treat women as chattel - are mysterious errors of translation'.

'Afflicted with similar pangs of white guilt, many prominent Christian theologians have also become accomplices of jihad'.

According to Ali 'Islam is not just a belief;it is a way of life, a violent way of life. Islam is imbued with violence, and it encourages violence.'

She calls on the Christian churches to reactivate their missionary past, to virtually re-create the crusades, and work to free young minds and spirits in Muslim countries from falling prey to the menace of Islam. Too many Muslims are 'seeking God but finding Allah', because they are not being exposed to more enlightened voices'.

It is a radical precept, but a potent one from a crucially important voice. Highly recommended.