Manhattan Beach/Jennifer Egan: My Chicago Tribune Review

Devastated as we all are by the unending cycle of brutal news, I keep turning back to books—to the very best of books.

The ones with heart and soul, the proof of generous, curious, receiving minds.

Last week I had the opportunity to read Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach, an historical novel of surpassing... everything. My rave review, in the Chicago Tribune, is here.

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A Visit From The Goon Squad/Jennifer Egan: Reflections

Novelists are tasked with leaving readers with the grave and glorious illusion that they have been given access to a world, ushered in. This exists, the novelist says. I’ve seen it. I’ve been there. Let me show you.

Jennifer Egan’s many-prized A Visit From The Goon Squad does not merely render a world. It wends readers through the hallows and hollows of vast geographies, personalities, and zones. Goon Squad is a composite of abutments and abrasions—a savvy, smart, sometimes bitter, often funny suite of thirteen tales about ingeniously interrelated slackers and singers, druggies and parents, inglorious PR mavericks and thieves, people who were young and people who grew old. Time is Egan’s primary character, her first concern. How we hope. How we remember. And how, most devastatingly, we age.

It took me many days to read this book, but I’m not sure why. I would read a few chapters, set the book aside, return—not the smartest approach to a book in which it is necessary to place and remember a stream of characters who are minor, then major, then receding, then right back at you again. You have to work at this book, in other words—not because Egan is trying to be difficult, but because Egan is so very smart, and so frequently sly. She’s postmodern, if I understand the term. A risk taker, a jokester, a woman who (now so famously) can tell a very touching, humane story through the device of power point slides. Oddly, I was perhaps most moved by the tale delivered through those infamous slides.

Egan can also write a hell of a sentence, and in fact she has written an abundance of them here. I close this post with an example, a description of an undone rocker who we’ve also known, in pages elsewhere, as a singing tour de force.

Look at what Egan can do:

Nowadays he was huge—from medications, he claimed, both post-cancer and antidepressant—but a glance into his trash can nearly always revealed an empty gallon box of Dreyer’s Rocky Road ice cream. His red hair had devolved into a stringy gray ponytail. An unsuccessful hip replacement had left him with the lurching, belly-hoisting walk of a refrigerator on a hand truck. Still, he was awake, dressed—even shaven. The blinds of his loft were up and a tinge of shower humidity hung in the air, pleasantly cut by the smell of brewing coffee.

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How do you like reading on the iPad2? they asked

The iPad2 was my husband's gift to me—marketed weeks upon weeks in advance.  "I don't need that," I kept saying.  "It feels indulgent."  But we run a communications business here, we need to know what is up, what can be done, what hasn't been done yet, and besides, he had to talk me into a Blackberry, too, and you don't now find me going out too often without that.  Also besides, I've been saying for a long, miserable time that I need to spend less time in front of the computer and more time in a quiet place, a room or two away, reading and writing.

And so, the iPad2, which arrived a week ago, and which I have put to minimal, but interested use.  I am a New York Times subscriber, for example, and so, by downloading the New York Times app, I can now sit with this glass tablet on my lap in the dark making no disturbing rustling noises while I read the reviews of such great books as Francisco Goldman's Say Her Name.  I find it easier to read this way—my arms don't hurt, my eyes don't squint, and I can turn off the lamp beside my husband while he watches shows about fish, food, and war (sometimes he's lucky and all three things appear on one show at once).  I'm reading my hometown paper this way as well, and when my subscription to the paper version of The New Yorker runs out, I may go iPad with that as well, though I don't know.  I'm rather fond of my stacks of New Yorker stories, torn fresh from the bindings.  Vanity Fair?  Maybe.

I also, as readers of this blog know, downloaded Tina Fey's Bossypants and iPad2'ed it—the perfect book for this medium.  As much as I loved Bossypants, I don't plan to ever teach it, do not need my scribbled marginalia as a guide to my first readerly reactions.  I know that some sort of marginalia can be achieved via the iPad2, don't get me wrong.  I'm just not interested in going there at this moment and rather suspect I'll never be.  There's an art to making notes in books, and I like pen to paper.  I also like, however, the extras the expanded iBook version of Bossypants afforded—more photos, an audio chapter, pretty cool flipping and bookmarking technology.  I've just downloaded Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad as well as a guide to Croatia for my next iPad2 readings.  I want to take Egan to Ithaca over Easter weekend and Croatia to Croatia, some time in June.  I think of these books as traveling companions.

Finally, I've downloaded the PDF app that will allow me to iPad2-read my own manuscripts-in-progress.  I've got two books I'm working on—a novel, nearly complete, and a memoir.  I've worked to give myself enormous distance on the novel and reading it again on a new technology, following a final set of revisions, will, I think (I hope), allow me to see this book as a stranger might.  That, at least, is what I'm going for.

My friend Karen, always so far ahead in matters of technology, does many things with her iPad that I don't know how to do—watch Netflix movies while exercising, say, or reading student papers.  She's the real expert on this (as she is on most things).  I'll become a smarter iPad2 user in time, I hope.  But for now, to answer your questions:

I really like my iPad2.

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